cover photo: “big_blue” by max iter (retrieved from www.f lickr.com) copy editing: gabriela marszołek cover preparation for printing: paulina dubiel proofreading: joanna zwierzyńska typesetting: marek zagniński electronic version is the original one. the journal was previously published in printed form with the issn 2450-5455 the journal is distributed free of charge issn 2451-2125 published by wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego ul. bankowa 12b, 40-007 katowice www.wydawnictwo.us.edu.pl e-mail: wydawnictwo@us.edu.pl first impression. printed sheets: 12.25. publishing sheets: 14.5. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ cover photo: “big_blue” by max iter (retrieved from www.f lickr.com) copy-editing and proofreading: gabriela marszołek typesetting: marek zagniński cover preparation for printing: paulina dubiel electronic version is the original one. the journal was previously published in printed form with the issn 2450-5455 the journal is distributed free of charge issn 2451-2125 published by wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego ul. bankowa 12b, 40-007 katowice www.wydawnictwo.us.edu.pl e-mail: wydawnictwo@us.edu.pl first impression. printed sheets: 12.0. publishing sheets: 14.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ cover photo: “big_blue” by max iter (retrieved from www.f lickr.com) copy editing: gabriela marszołek proofreading: joanna zwierzyńska typesetting: marek zagniński electronic version is the original one. the journal was previously published in printed form with the issn 2450-5455 the journal is distributed free of charge issn 2451-2125 published by wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego ul. bankowa 12b, 40-007 katowice www.wydawnictwo.us.edu.pl e-mail: wydawnictwo@us.edu.pl first impression. printed sheets: 11.0. publishing sheets: 13.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 6 (2), 2020 wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego • katowice 2020 editors-in-chief danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia in katowice adam wojtaszek university of silesia in katowice language editor david schauffler university of silesia in katowice editorial board janusz arabski (university of silesia, katowice/vistula university, warsaw) larissa aronin (oranim college of higher education/trinity college, dublin) jasone cenoz iraqui (university of the basque country, donostia – san sebastian) halina chodkiewicz (maria curie-skłodowska university, lublin) gessica de angelis (trinity college, dublin) anna ewert (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) tammy gregersen (university of northern iowa, cedar falls) ulrike jessner schmid (university of innsbruck, innsbruck) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities/university of warsaw) jolanta latkowska (university of silesia, katowice) peter macintyre (cape breton university, sydney) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, cracow) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) miroslaw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz/state school of higher professional education, konin) ewa piechurska-kuciel (university of opole, opole) andrzej porzuczek (university of silesia, katowice) david singleton (trinity college, dublin/university of pannonia, veszprem) eva vetter (university of vienna, vienna) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, łódź) maria wysocka (university of silesia, katowice) this publication is indexed in the following databases: arianta, base (bielefeld academic search engine), bazhum, ceeol, ceon, erih plus, giga, info na, nukat, mla directory of periodicals, most wiedzy, oai-pmb data provider registry, polindex (pbn), public knowledge project index, scopus, worldcat. creative commons attribution-sharealike 4.0 international (cc by-sa 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en contents preface (danuta gabryś-barker, adam wojtaszek) 5 articles sarah cox can an ecological, multilingual approach help us to better support reunited refugee families in scotland with language learning? 11 teresa maria włosowicz the influence of living and working abroad on the identities of researchers and native speaker teachers 35 meihua liu a study of chinese university english majors’ l2 motivational self 67 arkadiusz rojczyk, andrzej porzuczek detection of non-native speaker status from backwards and vocoded contentmasked speech 87 oleksandr kapranov the dynamics of needs in a course in english phonetics for in-service primary school teachers of english 107 katarzyna holewik peer feedback and reflective practice in public service interpreter training 133 reviews annick de houwer and lourdes ortega (eds.) (2019). the cambridge handbook of bilingualism (cambridge: cambridge university press)––by anna ewert 163 contents4 dorota werbińska (2017). the formation of language teacher identity. a phenomenographic-narrative study (słupsk: wydawnictwo akademii pomorskiej)––by joanna rokita-jaśkow 169 style guide for the authors 173 preface theory and practice of second language acquisition has already entered its fourth consecutive year of publication. founded in 2015, when very few journals of a related profile were available in poland, it filled a niche recognized by not only polish, but also international scholars. following the publication of the first issue, it became clear that its scope would attract submissions from many specialists and researchers around the world. thus far, tapsla has featured articles by such renowned scholars in the field as david singleton, larissa aronin, jean-marc dewaele, tammy gregersen, and many others representing innovative movements in sla research worldwide. the journal has become a venue for the exchange of ideas for academics at home and abroad, focusing on often un-researched issues and new currents in sla studies. especially today, when journal publications are seen as the most valued and highly recognized evidence of academic excellence, the perspectives for its rapid and successful development seem to be very promising. a guarantee of the journal’s high standards is tapsla’s editorial board, which includes both polish and foreign experts in the area, representing the wide range of research interests of its members. all updated information on the journal is available on the university of silesia institute of english webpage at www.ija.us.edu.pl (via a special link) and the journal webpage at www.journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/tapsla. the present issue opens with a fascinating insight into the significance of the “love factor” for late l2 proficiency development. in their paper “l2 proficiency as a function of cultural identity in interlingual couples” david singleton and simone pfenninger offer a comprehensive review of a number of qualitative studies which demonstrate how significant the affective dimension can be both for the ultimate success in acquisition of l2 proficiency as well as for the adoption of cultural identity by one of the partners. the facilitative role of out-ofclass immersion activities is presented by jorge pinto in the second article, entitled “immersion learning activities: developing communicative tasks in the 6 preface community.” the author argues for the extension of the learning environment to the beyond-the-classroom sphere which allows for a more extensive development of learners’ communicative skills in l2. although the research results are based on an l2 portuguese course taught at the university of lisbon, the implications seem to be universally applicable. the third paper, “social constraints of aspirations for second language achievement” by joanna rokita-jaśkow, seeks an explanation for the relatively unambitious and vague aspirations of polish vocational school english philology students, adding another perspective to the discussion on the role of learning environments. the perspective is narrowed down to the classroom environment in the fourth paper, “new school, the same old rut? action research of unsuccessful first-year students in a high school” by joanna masoń-budzyń. in order to formulate useful and experience-based suggestions, the author attempts to diagnose the sources of learners’ unsuccessful performance, looking at a number of potential contributing factors. the fifth article, “rethink your old teaching methods: designing a pronunciation course for young teenagers” by dorota lipińska, also focuses on a fl classroom environment, but the author’s interest revolves around the issue of efl pronunciation teaching to 11to 13-year-olds. lamenting the inefficiency of both the teaching resources and the primary school syllabi, the author proposes her own ideas about how pronunciation could be taught, providing some suggestive evidence from speech production and speech perception tests. the subject of pronunciation learning is also the topic of the last paper in the issue, “pronunciation learning environment: efl students’ cognitions of in-class and out-of-class factors affecting pronunciation acquisition” by magdalena szyszka. the author attempts to identify the most significant contributors to the learners’ ultimate pronunciation learning achievement, looking not only at the classroom environment and at teachers’ pronunciation, but also at the patterns encountered by the learners in their daily exposure to entertainment media. if a common denominator were to be noted for the papers included in the present issue, the dimension of various learning environments would be a good candidate. the authors have attempted to show in what way the widely understood context in which learning and acquisition takes place exerts an influence on learners’ ultimate l2 performance and success. we hope that this issue will be of interest to all researchers working in the field of second language acquisition. at the same time, we would like to invite polish and foreign academics to share their scholarly research with us by submitting their work to the journal theory and practice of second language acquisition, published by the prestigious polish academic publisher wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego (university of silesia press). danuta gabryś-barker adam wojtaszek style guide for the authors authors are requested to submit manuscripts formatted in apa style (american psychological association, 6th ed.). all manuscripts must include an abstract in english (maximum of 250 words). after the abstract please provide keywords. main text: 12 times new roman long citations (more than 40 words): 10 times new roman, indent by 1 tab either side, one empty line above and below, no quotation marks. 1.5 spacing apa headings level format 1 centered, boldface, uppercase and lowercase heading 2 left-aligned, boldface, uppercase and lowercase heading 3 indented, boldface, lowercase heading with a period. begin body text after the period. 4 indented, boldface, italicized, lowercase heading with a period. begin body text after the period. 5 indented, italicized, lowercase heading with a period. begin body text after the period. in-text citations (examples): author’s name and date in brackets: the experience of critical incidents and effective ref lection upon them allows teachers to control their classroom actions more consciously and create critical events (ce’s), which were described earlier as intended, planned and controlled (woods, 1993). woods (1993) believes that critical events are structured and occur in well-defined staged of conceptualization . . . two authors: (ballantyne & packer, 1995) as ballantyne and packer (1995) demonstrate … three authors: (barker, callahan, & ferreira, 2009) subsequent use: (barker et al., 2009) six authors or more: lorenz et al. (1998) argued… (lorenz et al., 1998) authors whose last names are the same: (d. francis, 1985; h. francis, 2004) style guide for the authors156 online sources (unpaginated), provide paragraph or section title instead: (peterson & clark, 1978, para. 4) (moss, springer, & dehr, 2008, discussion section, para. 1) no author, provide shortened title: (“primary teachers talking,” 2007) (reflective practice, 2005, pp. 12−25) secondary citations: smith (as cited in maxx & meyer, 2000) noted that “there is . . . .” citation within citation: as it has been noted that “there is no relevance . . . (smith, 2005)” (maxx & meyer, 2000, p. 129). & vs. and: as smithson and stones (1999) demonstrated. . . . . . as has been shown (smithson & stones, 1999) . . . references selected examples (for more consult apa manual): book, one author: goldberg, a. (2006). constructions at work. oxford: oxford university press. book, two authors and more: jarvis, s., & pavlenko, a. (2008). crosslinguistic influence in language cognition. london: routledge. translated book: freud, s. (1960). jokes and their relation to the unconscious. (j. strachey, trans.). london, england: routledge & k. paul. (original work published 1905). edited book: flowerdew, j., brock, m., & hsia, s. (eds.). (1992). second language teacher education. hong kong: city polytechnic of hong kong. chapter in an edited book: goldberg, a., & casenhiser, d. (2008). construction learning and second language acquisition. in p. robinson & n. c. ellis (eds.), handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition (pp. 197–215). new york and london: routledge. article in a journal: hammarberg, b. (2010). the languages of the multilingual. some conceptual and terminological issues. international review of applied linguistics in language teaching, 48, 91–104. article online: tully, k., & bolshakov, v. y. (2010). emotional enhancement of memory: how norepinephrine enables synaptic plasticity. molecular brain, 13 may. retrieved from: http://www.molecularbrain.com/content/ style guide for the authors 157 bakker, a. b., hakanen, j. j., demerouti, e., & xanthopoulou, d. (2007). job resources boost work engagement, particularly when job demands are high. journal of educational psychology, 99(2), 274–284. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.99.2.274 magazines online: miller, g. (2014, september 4). cinematic cuts exploit how your brain edits what you see. wired. retrieved from: http://wired.com/ smith, a. (2007, june 12). dying languages. the western star. retrieved from: http://www. thewesternstar.com/ blog: palmer, p. (2001). now i become myself. yes magazine, blog post, 31 may. retrieved from: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/working-for-life/now-i-become-myself e-books: bolande, v. u. (1981). on the psychology of humor. retrieved from: http://www.uf lib.uf l.edu /ufdc/ufdc.aspx?n=palmm&c=psa1&m=hd2j&i=45367 conference proceedings: souleles, n., & pillar, c. (eds.). (2014). proceedings from the first international conference on the use of ipads in higher education. paphos: cyprus university of technology. doctoral dissertation: churchwell, j. (2005). becoming an academic: factors that inf luence a graduate student’s identity commitment (doctoral dissertation). university of michigan, ann arbor, mi. reachel, l. h. (2001). native languages and toponyms: origins, meaning, and use (doctoral dissertation). available from proquest dissertation and theses database. (document id 1964749161). theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (1), 2023, pp. 1/5 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.13742 schmitt, n., & rodgers, m. p. h. (eds.) an introduction to applied linguistics (3rd ed.) routledge, taylor & francis. 2020. 404 pp. since the term applied linguistics was coined in the 1950s (davies, 1999), various books published henceforth have concurred that applied linguistics can be regarded as the academic discipline that looks at the knowledge about language and how it is used to make decisions in a real-life context (simpson et al., 2019). one of these books is by schmitt and rodgers, a multifarious work divided into 18 chapters that come in three key parts. the book sheds additional light on the various concepts and constructs regarding applied linguistics, considering the recent developments in the subject area. the preface of the book is arguably the most noticeable component, written by marianne celce-murcia and norbert schmitt, and discusses an overview of applied linguistics simplifying the definition of the subject. the preface traces the development of the subject area from the 1700s to the 20th century, and its subsequent application in cultural, social, and psycholinguistic fields. the previous recommends the reader to go through all the chapters of the book for a comprehensive understanding of applied linguistics since the concepts discussed in the chapters are interdependent. the previous also acknowledges that the various questions raised in the book regarding applied linguistics do not have conclusive answers as do those that are raised in psycholinguistics and this is attributed to the complexity that language and human communication present. this preface is therefore important to ground the reader before they can proceed deeper into the book. beyond the preface, the three distinct parts of the book demarcate the major contracts of applied linguistics. the first section covers the description of language and its use; the second section covers the major areas of inquiry regarding applied linguistics and the third section discusses the skills and assessment of language. notably, the third edition of the book is more comprehensive as compared to the two previous editions. apart from the three categories into https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.13742 tapsla.13742 p. 2/5 muhammad fahruddin aziz, herlandri eka jayaputri which the book has been divided, there is an introductory chapter and two new chapters that have been added that cover forensic linguistics and multilingualism. besides, a review of chapters that cover subjects including psycholinguistics, language learning, reading, and assessment repeat that the third edition involves substantial revision by the contributors. the concepts and constructs have been developed and discussed broadly based on credible sources in the subject area. additionally, the chapters come with practical tasks that the reader can adopt, to internalize the concepts and provide a reference list at the end of each chapter to encourage further leadership on each subject covered. the first section of the book covers the description of language and its use. this section is divided into five distinct chapters: the first chapter, written by diane larsen-freeman and jeanette decarrico, examines the meaning of grammar and the description of grammatical rules. in the second chapter, the authors also discuss the modalities involved in the learning and teaching of grammar and salient differences between written and spoken grammar. this chapter also explores various limitations with regard to the grammatical description and also various pedagogical issues associated with teaching and learning grammar. the third chapter is written by paul nation and paul meara and focuses on the subject of vocabulary. the chapter looks at the essence of vocabulary in language and examines the multi-dimensional features of vocabulary. they further delve into the vocabularies that people should learn as they learn a particular language and how they should go about it. they, therefore, provide strategies that could be used to achieve this which include intentional or deliberate vocabulary learning, lexical inferencing, dictionary use, and incidental vocabulary learning. furthermore, the chapter also discusses the process of assessing vocabulary and the challenges involved in the assessment of the scope of vocabulary for various learners. the fourth chapter written by michael mccarthy, diana slade, and christian matthiessen tackles the subject of discourse analysis of language. they comprehensively define discourse analysis with all its concepts; they then examine the intertwined factors involved in the analysis of both written and spoken discourse. these issues include the continuum that ranges between written and spoken discourse. it also involves the disparities between informal and formal spoken discourses. the chapter essentially simplifies the understanding of discourse analysis for the reader and more particularly summarizes the pedagogical implications that arise from discourse analysis processes. the fifth chapter by vladimir žegarac and helen spencer-oatey covers the subject of pragmatics in language. the chapter, therefore, focuses on the methods and paradigms used in conducting language pragmatics research. the reading of this chapter explicitly clarifies the role of pragmatics in language teaching and learning, which is an area that has received limited attention in schmitt, n., & rodgers, m. p. h. (eds.). an introduction… tapsla.13742 p. 3/5 linguistic studies. the chapter, therefore, provides seminal ideas that could be used in conducting language pragmatics studies. the sixth chapter of the book focuses on corpus linguistics. this chapter was written by randi reppen and rita simpson-vlach who provide a clear understanding of what corpus linguistics entails and the various types of corpora available to linguists. the authors explicitly differentiate between the perceived knowledge gaps regarding the functions and importance of corpus linguistics and more particularly with regard to teaching and learning language. the authors also suggest invaluable pedagogical insights on how corpus linguistics can be applied in the classroom context. these insights are both invaluable to language learners and language instructors. the second section of this book looks at the major areas of enquiry related to applied linguistics. this section is made up of six chapters, covering a broad scope of subjects related to enquiry in applied linguistics. this includes a chapter by spada and lightbown on second language acquisition; and another by mech, tabori, kroll, and de bot on psycholinguistics. the next chapters are based on social linguistics by llamas and stockwell; discuss language learners’ learning style, language learning strategy, and motivation by cohen and henry; forensic linguistics by tkacukova; and multilingualism by taylor. notably, the chapter by cohen and henry is arguably one of the most elaborate in this section as it provides complete enthusiastic story narrations of learning styles. it also provides explicit motivations and strategies for this particular learning style. it is also worth noting that the last two chapters in this section are a new edition of the book. this is important considering that the chapter on forensic linguistics responds to the recent concerns and attention given to the subjects which are considered fast-growing sub-areas of applied linguistics. in particular, tkacukova uses this chapter to define forensic linguistics and also discuss the breadth of its scope. she also discusses the pertinent issues associating forensic linguistics with applied linguistics such as courtroom discourses and legal communication. she thereafter concludes the chapter by examining the various pedagogical implications related to the teaching and learning of forensic linguistics. the third and final section of the book focuses on language skills, which is expected of books that are published on this particular subject. the section is made up of four chapters that cover language skills subjects including listening written by lynch and mendelsohn; speaking by burns and seidlhofer; reading by jiang, grabe, and carrell; and writing and assessment by matsuda and silva. one of the most intriguing chapters in this section is that on listening, which discusses the models and theories of listening such as the information processing theory, communication model, situated action model, and the social/contextual theory. the chapter provides insights on how listening as a language learning skill can be enhanced in the process of language acquisition tapsla.13742 p. 4/5 muhammad fahruddin aziz, herlandri eka jayaputri and further development of language competencies. in the chapter on speaking, burns and seidlhofer look at genres of speaking and the issues related to pronunciations. the chapter on reading by jiang, grabe, and carrell discusses the various starting or rather entry points in the learning and teaching of both first and second language. the chapter is therefore instructive in helping understand ways of overcoming the difficulties involved in the earliest stages of teaching and learning both first and second language. besides, the chapter on writing and assessment by matsuda and silva examines the various tasks and strategies that both learners and language instructors can use in learning and testing language competencies. the chapter demonstrates the significance of assessing language development, which is essential in identifying challenges that learners may be facing and helping them to overcome so that they can develop their language skills and competencies. in conclusion, this book provides a comprehensive understanding of applied linguistics considering the breadth of the contributions that include insights from experienced and distinguished researchers in the subject area. the book is an invaluable resource for curriculum developers in applied linguistics and is a must-read for students, language instructors, practitioners, and researchers who are keen on broadening their knowledge base and skills with regard to the subject of applied linguistics. there is, however, room for improvement in subsequent editions which could cover subjects such as the heritage of language education, and language education assessment which is essential applied linguistic components that are absent in the current edition. the edition may also contain any other emergent topics that may be associated with technology use in the learning and teaching of language. it is also recommended for readers of the book to consider reading it along with the journal article paper written by swan (2018), which also covers the subject of applied linguistics albeit from the perspective of consumers. future editions of the book would be enriched with the inclusion of this particular paper, which would then make it a complete and authoritative reference material for the subject of applied linguistics https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5538-8290 muhammad fahruddin aziz sekolah tinggi ilmu hukum biak-papua https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9678-2902 herlandri eka jayaputri akademi perikanan kamasan biak-papua https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5538-8290 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9678-2902 schmitt, n., & rodgers, m. p. h. (eds.). an introduction… tapsla.13742 p. 5/5 references davies, a. (1999). an introduction to applied linguistics: from practice to theory. edinburgh university press. simpson, j., harvey, l., & wright, c. (2019). introduction – diversity in applied linguistics: opportunities, challenges and questions. in voices and practices in applied linguistics: diversifying a discipline (pp. 1–10). white rose university press. swan, m. (2018). applied linguistics: a consumer’s view. language teaching, 51(2), 246–261. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261444818000058 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261444818000058 preface this journal came out for the first time in 2015. it was founded on our belief that although poland has a strong presence among second language acquisition and multilinguality researchers, which is demonstrated by the large number of conferences and also book publications appearing every year, academic journals like this one, concerned with both theoretical issues and the practical concerns of sla, are not that numerous. the initial success of the journal is demonstrated by the fact that despite its short life, it is already indexed in several databases and made its first appearance in scopus in 2018. thanks to this, it is also recognized by the polish ministry of higher education as a scholarly journal in linguistics. it is of importance that the theory and practice of second language acquisition journal is published by the prestigious polish academic publisher, wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego (university of silesia press). we can also ascribe the origins of our journal to the success of the international conference on second/foreign language acquisition (icfsla), an academic event that has been organized for over thirty years by the institute of english at the university of silesia in katowice (the institute of linguistics since 2020). icfsla regularly brings together many polish and foreign academics every may. its focus is on new trends in sla research, but it also prides itself on promoting fairly under-researched and new issues in sla. although the conference always has a leading theme, scholars are also invited to present their research even if it falls outside the scope of the main topic. our journal has become an accepted channel for the publication of selected conference papers of a high academic standard. at the same time, we warmly welcome other contributions, those not connected with the conference itself. in fact, in recent issues most publications were submitted by authors who did not participate in the conference, mainly because in 2020 it had to be cancelled due to the covid-19 pandemic. in addition to theoretical and research-related papers, we also accept for inclusion in each volume reviews of academic books recently theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 7 (1), 2021, pp. 5–8 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11346 6 preface published in poland and abroad, which would be of interest to our readers. it is additionally an important vehicle for promoting sla research carried out by polish academics and published by polish publishers, who maintain high academic standards, but whose work is not easily accessible abroad and so tends not to reach a wider academic audience. the whole process of paper submission is automated via an open journal system (ojs) and this embraces the article submission, referee assignment, and double blind-review processes as well as the revision, copyediting, and production stages. the production process is in the hands of a team of experienced professionals from the university of silesia press, who do their best to make the whole procedure smooth and effective. all the issues of our journal are available free via the ojs for reading and pdf download. the open access policy allows for the availability of the most recent research in the field at zero cost, thus presenting the articles published in its issues to global readerships. we strongly believe that our journal serves an important need in disseminating new and interesting research projects and studies in sla of both polish and foreign scholars in the field. there has been a palpable increase in submissions from all over the world, which is reflected in contributions to the most recent volumes. the journal is published bi-annually and contributions can be uploaded by prospective authors continuously, without any calls for paper. the selection of articles and book reviews for the upcoming volumes is done on the basis of acceptance of the text on completion of the process of reviewing and revising. as mentioned earlier, each text is peer-reviewed in a double-blind reviewing process by referees selected by us from the editorial board, but also by other specialists when needed. the editorial board itself consists of polish scholars and foreign experts in the area and represents the wide range of research interests of its members. all updated information on the journal is available on the journal webpage at www.tapsla.us.edu.pl. the present issue consists of texts which do not share any clear-cut common denominator—they represent various themes and different points on the scale between the theoretical and the applied, although the first two are much broader in the scope of systemic solutions which they propose than the remaining four. the first paper, by maria villalobos-buehner, titled “a habermasian approach to the examination of language teachers’ cognitive interests,” reports on a very interesting qualitative study of nine pre-service teachers of esl, focusing on their beliefs and interests related to language teaching and learning. this kind of perspective fills the gap in the overall picture of young pre-service teachers’ readiness for taking up the profession, since most studies concentrate on their conceptual knowledge and familiarity with recent methods, neglecting the important attitudinal dimension. the study follows jürgen habermas’s theory on cognitive interests as a framework and reflexive essays followed by authentic assessment as data collection tools. 7preface the following paper, contributed by hanna komorowska, takes a much broader and systemic perspective, as suggested by its title “the role of attention in teacher education: a factor in the quality of european schooling.” the author reflects upon plausible reasons for the observable lack of correspondence between the level of effort invested by leading international institutions in the improvement of educational systems and the results visible in their reports. in the author’s opinion, too much emphasis is placed on organizational matters, to the disadvantage of psychological factors. the key variable seems to be learners’ attention, or to be more precise, its deficit and problems with sustaining it. in the contemporary world of information overload, overstimulation and ubiquity of distractors, significantly more consideration should be devoted to ways of arousing and maintaining learners’ attention throughout the lesson. the paper by çağrı tuğrul mart entitled “integrating form and content within classroom discussion of literature” narrows down the focus to the long-standing dispute between the supporters of form-focused instruction and the devotees of content-based teaching. the author proposes a golden mean allowing for reconciliation of the potentially conflicting approaches and for making the best of the advantages of both. the integrating environment is proposed in the form of literature-based classes, which allow for the combination of meaningful language practice with contextualized exposure to frequently applied formal patterns. the author’s recommendations find validation in the results of a small-scale experimental study reported in the paper. the type and role of feedback is taken up in the following paper, by meihua liu, titled “focus and effects of peer and machine feedback on chinese university efl learners’ revisions of english argumentative essays.” rather than recommending one at the cost of the other, the author highlights the advantages of both and points to the areas where each of them might provide useful information for learners, allowing them to improve their written performance in english as a foreign language. the quantitative findings were further confronted with the answers gathered by means of more qualitative data collection tools, such as questionnaires and interviews, allowing for inclusion of the learners’ perspective in the overall results reported in the paper. electronic media of communication are the focal point of the next paper, submitted by daria pańka, “polish-english code-switching in the language of polish facebook users.” the author sees facebook (and social media in general) as an environment in which advanced learners of english can practice their l2 skills, even though their profiles are based in poland. the english language is seen here as an additional resource providing users with a more varied means of communication, a display of in-group membership and an inventive application of humor. on the basis of self-accumulated language material, the author identifies the main types and strategies of code-switching, juxtaposing her findings with the results of other studies of forms of code-switching involving english on facebook. 8 preface the final research paper in the present issue, “jordanian university students’ awareness of the different phonetic alternates of the english plural morpheme,” is authored by hana asaad daana and qadri farid tayeh. the contributors demonstrate the positive impact of exposure to english for the students’ l2 competence and performance, during their study period at the princess alia university college at al-balqa applied university in amman. the strength of l1 transfer was additionally shown to decrease as the students progressed in their english language proficiency. the present issue continues the tradition of presenting two reviews of very recent book publications in sla. the first one, teacher wellbeing (2020), authored by two very well-known experts on applications of positive psychology in language teaching and learning, sarah mercer and tammy gregersen, is reviewed by danuta gabryś-barker. this recent publication is a resource book for language teachers who appreciate the significance of emotions and good relationships in the process of language learning and teaching, that is, those who hold a more open vision of education, catering for the whole person and not just the target skills. the second volume, reviewed by anna mystkowskawiertelak, takes the reader on a reflexive trip through the territory of motivation in language learning. the publication in question is contemporary language motivation theory. 60 years since gardner and lambert (1959), an anthology edited by ali h. al-hoorie and peter macintyre (2020). it contains numerous contributions by followers of gardner and lambert’s seminal work, attesting to the significance and influence of the social psychological framework proposed by the original authors for the study of language learning. we sincerely hope that readers will find the present issue of interest and value for their own research in the field of second language acquisition, foreign language teaching and learning. at the same time, we would also like to ask polish and foreign academics to keep supporting the journal by sharing their scholarly research with us, by submitting their original work and book reviews of recent high level publications for upcoming volumes. danuta gabryś-barker adam wojtaszekhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-0308-4337 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703 theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 8 (1), 2022, pp. 183–187 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12089 mariusz kruk and mark peterson (eds.), new technological applications for foreign and second language learning and teaching hershey, pa: igi global, 2020, isbn 9781799825937, 388 pages new technological applications for foreign and second language learning and teaching published in 2020 is part of the igi global book series advances in educational technologies and instructional design (aetid), which assembles state-of-the-art research in (language) teaching and learning with technologies. the present peer-reviewed volume, edited by mariusz kruk and mark peterson, is dedicated to exploring diverse current practices, research, and implications in technology-enhanced language learning and teaching. in their preface, the editors touch on the role of technology in today’s society and introduce the readers to the aims and contents of the volume. the book is divided into two sections: a theoretical and a practical one. the former, entitled theoretical considerations comprises the first five chapters that look into computer assisted language learning (call) and the research of selected subfields within it. the remaining ten chapters are subsumed under the heading practical applications, covering empirical research into digital tool and technology-enhanced pedagogy integration into the language classroom. each chapter is rounded off by a list of recommended literature and a list of key terminologies (and brief definitions) used in the chapter. john blake commences the theoretical considerations with a contribution entitled “intelligent call: using pattern matching to learn english” (chapter one) which discusses the application of natural language processing for language learning. the author first provides a history of call and intelligent call, and then discusses patterns and their use for language learning through https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12089 caterina hauser184 a discovery learning, data-driven learning (ddl) approach. throughout, contextual factors surrounding efl learners whose l1 is japanese are addressed and two tools developed specifically for japanese university efl learners and pilot studies of their effectiveness are presented. in “pedagogical considerations for successful implementation of virtual reality in the language classroom” (chapter two), ryan lege, euan bonner, erin frazier, and luann pascucci introduce the vr application analysis framework. this framework was designed to help language teachers analyze commercial virtual reality applications in terms of their feasibility for language learning purposes. in addition to the components of the framework, its application in analyzing a selection of vr applications is included in the chapter. in chapter three—“the case for qualitative research into language learning in virtual worlds”—luisa panichi presents an extensive account of research into virtual worlds in call with the aim of “opening up our thinking as a community to wider scrutiny and debate in the interest of the validity of our research on the one hand, and future research decisions and directions on the other” (p. 48). she argues for the continued validity of qualitative approaches within the field which is characterized by the researcher-practitioner configuration and the fluidity of the medium studied, which constantly produces unchartered territory for exploration. mark peterson, jeremy white, maryam sadat mirzaei, and qiao wang devote chapter four to “a review of research on the application of digital games in foreign language education.” the authors first consider features of digital games which are attributed educational merit form a general educational, a cognitive and social linguistic perspective. these features are then supplied with evidence through the synthesis of the 26 research studies reviewed. in addition to a valuable overview, the chapter uncovers numerous avenues for future investigation. in “gamification for technology-enhanced language teaching and learning” (chapter five), joan-tomàs pujolà and christine appel draw the readers’ attention to different terminology which is often used interchangeably despite significant conceptual differences (e.g., game-based learning vs. gamification) and explain how these approaches differ. an overview of the dearth of research into gamification of language learning experiences is followed by useful design recommendations, tools and resources for gamifying language learning through technologies. the chapter closes by suggesting that future research in this domain should draw on replication studies and design-based research to study innovative design and attempt generalizations of findings. section two, which assembles practical applications of technologies in language learning and teaching, begins with farhana ahmed’s contribution on “investigating learner autonomy and 21st century skills in blended tech-enhanced language learning” (chapter six). in the context of a blended mariusz kruk and mark peterson (eds.), new technological applications… 185 learning eap course which employs products of the google suite for communication and collaboration, learner autonomy is explored using benson’s (2011) learner autonomy framework. a discussion of the implications of the findings for practitioners including “the need for educating students about the specific technologies that are being used by the teacher” (p. 129) conclude the chapter. chapter seven, authored by alberto andujar and fidel çakmak, uncovers the potentials of “foreign language learning through instagram: a flipped learning approach.” this mixed-methods case study in secondary education examines how leaners perceived the use of teacher recorded instructional videos uploaded to instagram for instruction outside the classroom prior to inclass practice. although the platform was chosen due to its responsive design (e.g., layout adapts to screen size) and its popularity among adolescents, the log data revealed that fewer than half of the students accessed the videos. chapter eight, “using digital storytelling to handle second language writing anxiety and attitudes: a longitudinal experiment,” by seyit ahmet çapan, describes a quasi-experimental design to measure and compare language mistakes, writing anxiety and attitudes towards writing of two groups of university students with elementary l2 skills. while the one group produced stories using pen and paper, the other one created digital stories. findings suggest that the latter perceived writing in a more positive light. juan francisco coll-garcía reports “students’ perceptions toward an international telecollaboration project through an engineering-themed online simulation in a language-learning setting” in chapter nine. the findings highlight the pedagogical need for learners to understand the rationale behind such projects, the different aims pursued by all involved parties and how they connect to the curriculum. chapter ten by hiroshi hasegawa, julian chen, and teagan collopy also investigates learner perceptions: “first-year japanese learners’ perceptions of computerised vs. face-to-face oral testing: challenges and implications.” the computerized oral testing mode is described as learners voice-recording their answers to questions posed in the form of pre-recorded teacher videos achieved through a computer program. while this chapter indicates that it focuses on a first analysis of a larger data set and on student experience, the reader is left curious as to how the computer-based oral tests are assessed and how assessment affects the time reduction reported as one of the main benefits of this examination mode for teachers. ferit kiliçkaya focuses on “using a chatbot, replika, to practice writing through conversations in l2 english: a case study” in chapter eleven. the qualitative case study explores learner perceptions of practicing writing in the l2 through instant messaging with a chatbot which through this interaction increasingly replicates the human participant. the discussion concludes by caterina hauser186 stressing the need to “consider course objectives and pedagogical uses” (p. 231) of technology integration into the language classroom. in chapter twelve, “considerations for future technology development based on efl teachers’ integration of technology,” tim kochem, ananda astrini muhammad, yasin karatay, haeyun jin, and volker hegelheimer present the global online course which trains english language teachers in employing tools and digital resources for teaching the four skills, grammar and vocabulary. on the basis of naturalistic inquiry, the team of researchers explore language teachers’ interaction with the course content and their set of ideas of technology integration. this chapter includes preliminary findings and discusses how these and the course can contribute to spreading knowledge of technology-enhanced teaching, providing an overview of useful tools, and in contributing to what they term “usable technology” development (p. 254). lina lee addresses intercultural and interpersonal learning through virtual language exchanges in chapter thirteen (“promoting interpersonal and intercultural communication with flipgrid: design, implementation, and outcomes”). using the video response platform flipgrid, an l2 spanish class consisting of l1 english-speakers interacted with an l2 english class whose l1 is spanish through short videos they recorded of themselves in the respective l2. the discussion includes insights into tasks, pedagogical considerations and shortcomings of (employing) the video platform. in chapter fourteen, hsien-chin liou and tzu-wei yang focus on “datadriven learning at the english drafting stage.” this mixed methods, action research study examines asian efl university students’ use of monolingual (coca) as well as bilingual (tango and totalrecall) corpora in data-driven learning (ddl) while composing the draft version of an essay; screencasts of students’ activity on the computer served as one source of data. the findings suggest that the students primarily employed corpora to define patterns but can nonetheless be described as “emergent pattern hunters” (p. 293). ddl also constitutes the research interest of chapter fifteen, the final chapter, by nina vyatkina. in “corpus-informed pedagogy in a language course: design, implementation and evaluation” the researcher proposes a pedagogical framework for incorporating ddl into l2 teaching practice. following a design-based research approach, the development, implementation and evaluation of a ddl university course for german as an l2 are described using the addie model as adapted by colpaert (2006) as a descriptive framework. this volume provides detailed insights in the scope and breadth of practice in and research into the intersection between language learning and technology. the definitions, keywords, and suggestions of further reading make the volume accessible to novices and non-specialists, yet the scope of topics and applications make it an interesting resource for researchers and practitioners mariusz kruk and mark peterson (eds.), new technological applications… 187 as well. the latter will appreciate the large number of specific tools discussed, investigated and evaluated. throughout the volume, the important role of language learning pedagogy and instructional design are either stressed from the outset or emergent through the findings of practical applications. areas which seem to have been largely neglected are data protection, privacy and further context specific ethical considerations of practical applications in general and specific technologies discussed in particular (e.g., google suite, replika, flipgrid, etc.). especially when commercial applications or applications which collect (sensitive/personal) data of learners are involved, implications and possible consequences should be discussed and considered critically. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9140-7110 caterina hauser university of graz, austria references benson, p. (2011). teaching and researching: autonomy in language learning. pearson education limited. colpaert, j. (2006). pedagogy-driven design for online language teaching and learning. calico journal, 23(3), 477–497. https://doi.org/10.1558/cj.v23i3.477-497 preface the purpose of the preface to this new issue of theory and practice of second language acquisition is twofold. firstly, it offers a short introduction for new readers to familiarize them with the origins of the journal (a permanent element of the preface). secondly, the text provides a fairly detailed comment on the contents of the present issue. theory and practice of second language acquisition was founded as a forum of discussion for both polish and foreign scholars and seems to have fulfilled its mission as a journal on the rise. the present volume marks the eighth year of its presence in the scholarly world. the journal has become quite popular and we receive more and more qualified submissions from polish and foreign researchers. indeed, since its foundation, every consecutive issue of the journal has welcomed contributions from many renowned researchers, including peter macintyre, david singleton, larissa aronin, sarah mercer, tammy gregersen, and jean-marc dewaele, among others. also, the fast growing number of oa uploads testifies to the journal’s increasing popularity, as does the queue of articles already accepted and awaiting their turn to be included in the next volumes to be published. this is why we have decided to increase the number of research papers published in a single volume for the second time: in the first years of the journal’s existence there were six, last year seven, and starting with issue 8(1), tapsla includes eight research contributions, followed by two book reviews. it is the journal’s ambition to demonstrate new trends and hitherto unknown venues for research in sla, focusing both on theoretical discussions and the practical solutions to problems that are based upon them. we aim not only to publish and share with our readers contributions from well-known and respected scholars but also to promote young researchers from all over the world, who often present fresh and innovative ideas or open up new perspectives on issues already under discussion. in other words, the journal hopes to become a venue for the exchange theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 8 (2), 2022, pp. 1–5 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.13253 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.13253 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en 2 preface of ideas between well-established academics and those inspired by them. in terms of its content, the journal presents contributions on issues ranging from purely linguistic and cognitively-oriented research on language acquisition processes to psychoand sociolinguistic studies, always trying to feature the most recent developments in terms both of topic choice and of the methodology of research. we publish our journal through an open access system, where the entire production process is executed online and the final product is available to everyone, thus offering an opportunity to share ideas through a broad, effective and economical mode of dissemination. we aim at keeping high stan dards and quality, which are guaranteed by the international editorial board of tapsla, whose members are well-known polish and foreign experts on a wide range of second language acquisition issues. the journal is indexed in numerous databases, including scopus. the journal is published by the prestigious polish academic publisher, wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego (university of silesia press in katowice), which provides an experienced team of editors to oversee the copyediting and technical side of the production. updated information and all the issues published so far are available on the journal webpage at www.tapsla.us.edu.pl. the present volume 8(2) offers a wide variety of interesting topics wellgrounded in theoretical considerations and literature overviews, but importantly, also reporting on empirical projects carried out by researchers, some of them well-known scholars, others young aspiring academics. the articles selected also offer a variety of contexts in which the studies were conducted, ranging from that of our local polish research to iranian university studies, which are quite well-represented here. the opening text by liliana piasecka, entitled “when “grass was greener”: longplay album covers and learning english. a retrospection,” at first sight looks like a sentimental journey into the world of music (which it is in part). the author’s aim is to demonstrate the power of experiential learning which combines elements of material culture that are meaningful to a learner and thus, that motivate him or her to learn a fl. the account is based on the author’s own reflections on her learning experiences and the impact of longplay album (lp) covers of the 1960s on her learning success. the text also offers some practical ideas for a fl classroom. in the next text, “the development of language skills in speakers of english as an additional language. what matters more, daily use or age of onset?”, luca cilibrasi and daniela marková once again question the importance of age of onset, which was assumed in earlier research, compared to daily exposure and language use in terms of vocabulary and overall proficiency in this language. the study, which is based on a large number of public datasets and analyzed statistically, shows that language use is a better predictor of language proficiency than age of onset. another text focusing on the age factor in a fl context, authored by anna borkowska and entitled “the relationship between age-advanced www.tapsla.us.edu.pl 3preface learners’ in-class willingness to communicate in english, intrinsic motivation, classroom environment and teacher immediacy—a pilot study,” looks at third age learners of foreign languages (seniors). the main objective of this questionnaire study was to establish the relationship between willingness to communicate (wtc), intrinsic motivation, classroom environment, and teacher immediacy. the analysis of the data leads the author to the conclusion that senior fl learners are more eager to use meaning-focused activities (such as dyadic interaction tasks) than form-focused ones, emphasising that practical communication is for them the main purpose of fl learning. these seniors’ motivation to learn a fl is defined as communication both in a natural environment (abroad) and in the classroom in a non-threatening climate established by a professional, patient, and empathetic language teacher. the next three articles in this issue introduce readers to themes investigated in the fl instructional settings at the authors’ academic institutions in iran and korea. the topic of fl learning motivation is taken up in the text by yahya ghelichli, seyyed hassan seyyedrezaei, and zari sadat seyyedrezaei, “improving student engagement and motivation: perspectives of iranian efl learners.” the authors state that intensive language engagement increases motivation to learn a language, which has been the topic of many quantitative studies but fewer qualitative ones. the study presented in this article uses the qualitative paradigm of a semi-structure interview, in which a group of iranian male learners of english reflected upon the determinants of and relation between their engagement and motivation to learn. it seems that, among other factors, it is teacher behavior that impacts their engagement most, whereas both teachers and parents are important in the development of their motivation to learn. the next article, by hyang-il kim and entitled “investigating the roles of the four sources of self-efficacy beliefs in an efl listening context,” demonstrates the importance of self-efficacy beliefs in fl learning. it reports on an empirical study conducted with korean learners of english. the author aimed to verify the self-efficacy hypothesis proposed by bandura (1997), this time in the context of listening tasks. the four sources of efficacy proposed by bandura were confirmed by the data collected in the study, which demonstrated that they all affect basic self-efficacy, while emotional states are evidenced in advanced-skill efficacy. in their text “effects of adjunct model of instruction on eap learners’ reading comprehension skill,” mahzad karimi and elahe ghorbanchian investigate the possibilities and effectiveness of new methodologies of online teaching employed in the conditions of pandemic restrictions in a course of english for academic purposes (eap). the effectiveness of developing reading comprehension by means of the adjunct model was measured in an experiment conducted among university architecture students. the statistical analysis (anova) established the effectiveness of the adjunct model compared with more traditional teaching. the text by danial babajani azizi, nourollah 4 preface gharanjik, and mahmood dehqan entitled “the effects of mobile-mediated explicit and implicit feedback on efl learners’ use of english prepositions” also takes up the theme of technology used as a tool in language instruction. in this paper, the authors focus on use of the whatsapp application in giving corrective feedback. their experiment aimed at comparing the effects of mobile-mediated explicit and implicit corrective feedback on learner perfor mance in a selected area of grammar. the results of tests administered at various stages of instruction (pre-test, post-test, delayed post-test) demonstrated that the groups improved significantly on the immediate post-test but also maintained higher scores on the delayed post-test. the closing article, by aleksandra szymańska-tworek and entitled “mentoring as professional development for mentors,” moves away from the issue of language instruction as such and focuses on fl teacher professional development. the author offers an innovative view on the importance of being a school-based mentor to pre-service efl teachers. the process of mentoring is seen by the author as an important element of teacher professional development and growth. on the basis of the data collected from a web-based questionnaire for teacher-mentors, the author concludes that mentoring practice develops teachers’ capacity for reflection and leadership skills as well as fostering cooperation and inspiration in the trainees. the two book reviews published in this issue are of two works that have appeared as part of a series. they both offer the latest findings of theoretical and empirical research on the fairly new concept of dominant language constellation (dlc) and its application in multilingualism research and multilingual language education, the first book review, by bessie dendrinos of dominant language constellations: a new perspective on multilingualism (2020, edited by joseph lo bianco and larissa aronin), points out the merits of the book as offering a comprehensible and complete explanation of the construct of dlc as defined by larissa aronin and its application in developing our understanding of the phenomenon of multilingualism. the reviewer also sees this volume as having value as an inspiration for different and innovative multilingualism studies, provided by the examples it contains of studies conducted in a variety of cultural contexts around the world. the second review, by lisa marie brinkmann, is of a companion book on dlc, dominant language constellations approach in education and language acquisition (2021, edited by larissa aronin and eva vetter), and goes back to defining and redefining the concept of dlc, but its specific focus is on demonstrating how this concept applies to language education and educational policies. apart from theoretical considerations on dlc in language education policy and school practice, the concept is presented in action in empirical studies that focus on teacher training and on researching the language identities of multilingual language users and learners by means of qualitative methods (narratives, visualizations). the appearance of these two 5preface volumes on dlc does not exhaust all the possibilities the concept offers in multilingualism research, as a third volume is now in preparation. we would like to emphasize that although the articles contained in this issue offer mainly reports on empirical research, they are also grounded in solid theoretical bases and overviews of literature in a given area. additionally, the research presented here has a strong potential for language practitioners and the practical ideas proposed by some of the authors can be adapted for many other teaching and learning contexts. the texts cover a whole array of topics focusing on fl learners and teachers in their different capacities and show empirical work that is being done in various contexts of biand multilingualism in different parts of the world. this diversity of contexts is a valuable asset as it allows us to compare research interests and the research methodologies applied. publishing in our journal, which is available online in open access, our contributors are all able to reach a wide readership around the world. we believe that researchers, teachers, and students can all benefit from this issue of tapsla and will find the articles published here not only useful but also inspirational. in this place, we would like to thank all the authors in this issue and, as is our usual practice, extend our invitation to all polish and foreign researchers and academics to share their work with us by submitting it to the journal. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703 danuta gabryś-barker https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0308-4337 adam wojtaszek https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0308-4337 katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia, personality and emotional intelligence in second language learning. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing, 2018, isbn: 978-1-5275-0915-3, 146 pages the monographic volume authored by katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia and entitled personality and emotional intelligence in second language learning consists of two parts, a theoretical and an empirical one, each of which fulfils the aims set by the author. according to ożańska-ponikwia, the book has two objectives: to give an overview of second language acquisition (sla) studies focusing on personality traits and emotional intelligence and to present the results of an empirical study measuring the influence of personality traits and emotional intelligence on learning a second language in the context of formal instruction. the monograph consists of six chapters covering 121 pages of text, a bibliography of over two hundred entries and, additionally, it contains two indexes: a three-page author index including the author sources quoted in the publication and a subject index listing the main constructs discussed and studied empirically in the project presented. however, what might be considered missing are appendices, which could for example contain the questionnaires used as instruments of data collection in the present study. the book opens with chapter 1—the concept of personality, followed by chapter 2—personality in the context of second language learning and use, chapter 3—methodology, chapter 4—quantitative data analysis, chapter 5—open question data analysis and is completed with chapter 6 discussion and conclusions. chapter 1—the concept of personality (pp. 1–13) offers a comprehensive review of approaches to personality and emotional intelligence, firstly by defining these terms. the construct of personality is discussed here from a diachronic perspective. comments are made on the earliest approaches and models of personality, for example, eysenck’s model of “big three” (1947) and a more contemporary treatment of personality structures in the “big five” models of costa and mccrae, with their most recent developments (1985–1992). here the discussion focuses on the individual components of the higher-order personaltheory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 4 (2), 2018, pp. 131–135 danuta gabryś-barker132 ity traits of costa and mccrae, that is, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. these are illustrated with an in-depth description of the neo-ffi inventory of costa and mccrae (1992). next, the lower-order personality traits of emotional intelligence (ei) are commented on with reference to the most comprehensive presentation of the concept of trait emotional intelligence by petrides and furnham (2001). it is illustrated with a data collection instrument, the trait emotional intelligence questionnaire (teique, petrides & furnham 2001) measuring the ei of informants. again something is missing here; i think it might have been interesting if the author had traced back emotional intelligence as a personality trait not only to howard gardner, in his theory of multiple intelligences, but also more comprehensively to daniel goleman, the classic exponent of ei theory. also here, the author introduces the reader to the research instruments mentioned above, which were used as the main data collection tools in her study—(chapter 4–6). the theoretical considerations of chapter 1 are illustrated with examples of studies in second language learning. chapter 2—personality in the context of second language learning and use (pp. 15–42) offers a fairly comprehensive overview of both older and more recent research in the area and so it can serve as a point of reference for those interested in this area of research, especially since it covers a whole range of language learning contexts (formal instruction, immersion of immigrant language learners and users, study abroad). after a general introduction to the relation between personality and learning, the author presents studies focusing on each personality trait of the higher-order, in the context of sla, as well as a lower-order trait of personality, emotional intelligence in immersion (immigration) and study abroad environments. here the reader will find references to such distinguished scholars as susan gass, zolan dörnyei, peter macintyre, aneta pavlenko, and importantly jean-marc dewaele, whose contribution to this area of research (especially in relation to emotions) needs no further acknowledgement. the author also refers to the contribution of some, but perhaps too few, polish scholars investigating the issues of personality in sla (adrianna biedroń, ewa piechurska-kuciel, joanna bielska). charter 3—methodology (pp. 43–52) presents the research questions and hypotheses as well as the design of the empirical project, its participants and data collection instruments. the author poses seven questions and formulates seven hypotheses all related to correlations between individual personality traits of higher-order (e.g., extraversion, openness to experience) and emotional intelligence, and written and oral scores on the examination, grades in grammar, writing and integrated skills, also self-reported preferences in skills, l2 acquisition and self-perceived l2 proficiency. the sample selection of 140 participants in the study was chosen from an english department of a tertiary education institution. the group consisted of students from the first and second years of b.a. studies, a fairly homogenous group in terms of their learning katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia, personality and emotional intelligence… 133 histories and language competence level. the research instruments employed for data collection were a questionnaire focusing on the personal background of the subjects, their self-perceptions of learning preferences and difficulties, their grades, a personality trait test (neo-ffl) and the teique of emotional intelligence (described earlier in chapter two). the author also adds a reliability analysis for each of the instruments to demonstrate that they are indeed appropriate and thus can be used in the study. the following chapters, four and five, constitute the empirical part of the book. in chapter 4—quantitative data analysis (pp. 53–80), the author focuses solely on the presentation and analysis of the data analysed by means of statistical instruments (correlations, multiple stepwise regression and t-test). for readers not familiar with statistical measures, this may be a bit of a mine-field, as the author does not offer an explanation of how these statistics are applied and assumes a general knowledge of these, in fact, pretty basic statistical measures. at the same time, this knowledge is not absolutely essential to understanding the findings as they are commented upon by the author. in the concluding part of the analysis, the author states that “the relationship between personality traits and sla is quite complex and nuanced” (p. 79). at the same time, certain correlations appear as stable, among them a general belief that extraversion will be conducive to the development of speaking and conscientiousness to grammatical accuracy, and were confirmed by these statistical data. also, as is widely believed, emotional intelligence appeared to have a significant influence on speaking abilities and pronunciation scores. the chapter offers many new and interesting findings as well as confirms generally held beliefs concerning foreign language learning and personality traits. chapter 5—open question data analysis (pp. 81–109) constitutes the qualitative part of the study. first, it looks at the subjects’ responses to the question: “what, from your point of view, is the most difficult thing in foreign language learning? explain why.” the top aspects enumerated are: vocabulary, lack of fluency, being afraid of making mistakes and stress, among many others. each of them is illustrated with a short narrative comment by the subjects to explain their choice of a particular difficulty. secondly, the author analyses the data from personality and emotional intelligence tests and compares them with the questionnaire results in relation to high-order and low-order personality traits. in the concluding section of these analyses, the author points to a certain uniformity of all the informants in rating speaking as the most difficult aspect of fl learning. however, she observes that different types of difficulties are pointed out and these are related to individual personality traits (profiles) of the subjects. the closing chapter 6—discussion and conclusions (pp.111–121) sums up the purpose of this study and juxtaposes it with previous research, emphasising both continuity and novelty of the project. it focuses on giving answers to the research questions and confirmation/partial confirmation of the hypothdanuta gabryś-barker134 eses formulated. at the same time, the author recommends that more research should be done to further isolate the complexity of the role personality (itself a complex construct) plays in second/foreign language learning. i believe that some didactic implications for teachers of foreign languages, not included here, should have been proposed. having presented briefly the content of individual chapters, i would like to point out the strengths of this publication as well as some areas of weaknesses. first of all, as to the formal aspects of the book, it is written in correct academic english, it is well-structured and reader-friendly. each chapter starts with an introduction briefly presenting the contents and concludes with a short summary of the content. as to the content, i applaud the choice of topic and the extent to which the author has managed to present the most up-to-date research on personality as a psychological construct (both its theoretical underpinnings and models) and especially emotional intelligence as a significant trait in the affective functioning of a person, at the same time locating it all in the context of second/foreign language learning and use. the sources used and the discussion provided present the issues in a very clear and concise manner. perhaps for the psychologist reader, the text might be considered a bit summary, however, for a second language researcher there is no need for a more elaborate discussion of the psychological constructs of personality and emotional intelligence. the author thereafter makes her own choices as to adopting certain theoretical models and consequently (and consistently) using the research instruments required by them. despite the fact that personality (and especially affectivity) has long been known to be of primary importance, not much research has been systematically carried out on it so far. in other words, despite some general (folk) beliefs as to how personality traits affect learning and performance in a foreign language, researchers have come up only with sample studies that cannot substantially confirm or at least only partly confirm the above belief. the author of this publication poses research questions that could perhaps be answered intuitively. for example, the role of extraversion in language achievement has always been considered facilitative in the development of speaking skills, whereas introversion has always been seen as more conducive to grammar accuracy and learning preferences in this area. of course, the research questions posed by the author are much more intricate and demonstrate the author’s understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of the problems investigated. following the most recent personality models and understandings of the construct of emotional intelligence, ożańska-ponikwia looks at personality as a complex construct of intertwined traits, interacting with each other. thanks to meticulous statistical analysis, the author was able to point out the correlations between the individual traits and their effects on different areas of language development in the learning process (speaking, grammar, integrated skills, etc.). the mixed methods katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia, personality and emotional intelligence… 135 study presented by the author also offers some qualitative data derived from the subjects’ responses to the questionnaire. these responses were analysed by means of the qualitative content analysis (qca), a model offered by philip mayring (2000, 2001). it is a pity that the author did not make it clearer how the model works and did not offer a more detailed description of the procedures. it is a relatively under-used model in english studies and so explaining it would have been an additional advantage of this publication. although the answers given to the research questions provide a fairly thorough discussion and summary in the findings, it is a pity that the author did not try to construct profiles of fl learners/users based on her results, which was at a certain point suggested by the author herself as the aim of the conducted study. thus, the concluding comments in the last chapter may leave the reader with a feeling of incompleteness. additionally, although the author did not intend to present any implications of her findings for the fl learning and teaching context, it would perhaps have been of value as an addition to a quite short concluding section. one general point i would also like to make is that the author, like some other sla researchers, deploys the term “a second language,” instead of “a foreign language” (or uses them interchangeably). the context of the study refers exclusively to that of formal instruction and not to immersion or acquisition in the natural context of language use (l2). so, for example, the qualitative data express learners/users perceptions and beliefs in relation to a language learnt by means of formal instruction and not in the target language environment. the latter might create a different picture the impact of personality traits on language acquisition would have, for example, in relation to the lower-order trait of emotional intelligence. these critical remarks above do not have any serious consequences for the value of this publication. i can sincerely recommend it—as one of not very many in this research area—to anyone interested in studying personality and the affective dimensions of language acquisition and learning processes, as well as in second/foreign language use. this monograph is also valuable for any bilingual language learner/user as it demonstrates very visibly that one’s personality plays a key role in language learning/communication success and suggests how we could perhaps learn to control and to some extent manage emotions (emotion labour). i also believe that this book is a reference source that may be of great help to second/foreign language teachers in developing their awareness of how their students’ personalities (and indeed, their own) impact their language performance and achievement, as well as the wellbeing of the learners and the teacher. this book demonstrates these things very clearly. danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia in katowice, poland anna borowska, avialinguistics. the study of language for aviation purposes. frankfurt am main: peter lang 2017, isbn 978-3-631-72138-4, 334 pages anna borowska’s monograph is the first comprehensive coverage of the specialized language used in aviation communication. the term avialinguistics, coined by the author, is used for the first time in this very book to refer to “the interdisciplinary science that covers the linguistic study of aviation language in use” (p. 19). although the bulk of the book is devoted to the delineation of the new field of research and building foundation for a new discipline, it provides a rich assortment of practical implications, related mainly to the training of professionals whose careers will be connected with civil aeronautics. as the author puts it, “the applied objective aims to support and advocate the improvement of the training process and the quality of aeronautical communication in order to enhance global safety” (p. 20). the book consists of seven major chapters, introduction, bibliography, appendix, subject index, list of abbreviations, and list of illustrations, extending over 334 pages. the bibliography is impressive—it contains as many as 470 items, covering almost all relevant literature on the subject. the index, however, constitutes a negative counterbalance, encompassing only 37 headwords, which do not offer much help in searching for information within the book. the appendix contains the questionnaire which was used by the author in the study reported in chapter 7. all in all, the book makes an impression of a neat and orderly elaboration, characterized by clear and detailed structure (although not balanced between particular chapters), very rich in content, both in its theoretical and practical dimension. it is very well prepared when it comes to the general layout and consistency of highlighting conventions, but there are a few (fortunately infrequent) editorial faults, mainly in form of grammatical mistakes: “having attending thematic conferences” (p. 19), “256 respondents (81%) did not observed any…” (p. 276), “i will present those that seems to be…” (p. 280) or “aviation language which use is strictly connected with…” (p. 283). theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 4 (2), 2018, pp. 137–143 138 adam wojtaszek the introduction to the book serves a typical organizational-rationalizing function, it is very well written and provides a clear statement of the most important objectives. the first chapter (pp. 25–43), in turn, is devoted to the historical perspective and delineating the origins of the specialized language known today as aviation english. in a convincing, interesting, and relatively concise manner, the author presents the civilizational, cultural, and professional circumstances which led to the emergence of the language of aviation and provides explanation for the fact that the english language assumed the role of a commonly accepted medium of communication in aeronautical contexts. in addition, we also find there the account of the origins and the description of the procedures introduced by the international civil aviation organization (icao) pertaining to the language competence level of the candidates for intenational aviation service. this is one of the most important issues, as it turns out later on, because the author points out the discrepancy between the criteria applied for native and non-native speakers of english. this factor, reiterated in the following chapters as a potential source of various problems brought up and discussed by the author, is one of the major incentives for the modifications in the training procedures put forward in the concluding parts of the book. the second chapter (pp. 45–100) is much longer and performs the constitutive role for avialinguistics, where the author takes up an ambitious challenge of defining it as a new and independent area of investigation. positioning herself as a pioneer, first of all she had to point out the shortcomings and problems inherent in the existing approaches and accounts. it must be admitted that the argumentation presented in the initial parts of the chapter is quite convincing, especially when it comes to the shortage of literature on such contexts of specialized aviation communication as the aircraft maintenance service or passenger service (interestingly, the author herself does not analyze such contexts in the practical part of the book, either). additionally, it is claimed that the majority of scholars place aviation language alongside other types of specialized languages under the common banner of language/english for specific purposes, ignoring the specificity and the interdisciplinary character of aviation english. the originality of borowska’s proposition lies in the attempt to define avialinguistics as an inherently different, interdisciplinary field, requiring a novel approach recognizing the mutual contribution of the three disciplines: applied linguistics, specialized languages and aviation. avialinguistics is thus defined as “the study of aviation language in all its professional aspects in relation to practical problems” (p. 55). the following subsections attempt to sketch the range of avialinguistic research, its object, aims, and purposes. here the discussion becomes a bit less clear and is burdened with a number of problems. for example, the author emphasizes the necessity of focus on individual users of aviation english in concrete situations, but in the schematic representation in page 57 this indi139anna borowska, avialinguistics. the study of language… vidual perspective is missing, unless the whole diagram refers only to such individualized instances. it is also a bit unclear where the border between pure avialinguistics and applied avialinguistics lies, because some elements described by borowska as belonging to the former, such as the study of aviation language instruction, seem to belong to the applied branch. another problematic issue is the model of language assumed as the linguistic foundation of the new discipline, because the only thing which the author explicitly states is that she understands language “not [as] an artificial product created by a researcher on purpose in order to use it for substituting a real analyzed phenomenon, but rather an aviation language in use, in real life” (p. 59). i cannot say if this entails rejection of any theoretical model of language, or only those which rely on more formalized representations; no positively formulated references are made to any of the existing models. significant improvement can be found in the final subchapter (2.5), outlining aviation language and its aeronautical variant. of particular value is the way in which borowska uncovers the inconsistencies and inaccuracies identified in the way various authors define such terms as aviation language, aviation english or aeronautical english, as well as their relation to general english. a natural consequence is the new definition of aviation language (p. 64), and delineation of aeronautical english as a concrete sub-register, encompassing radio communication employing standard phraseology (sp) and plain aeronautical language (pal). thus defined sub-register emerges as the major area of interest for the author in the remaining part of the book. an extremely important move is placing aeronautical english outside the boundaries of general (standard) english, due to frequent occurrence of phonetic, morphological, and syntactic forms not found in the standard variation of english (richly exemplified in pages 78–92). the author also points to a unique specificity of aviation english used as lingua franca, manifested in its remarkable regularity and stability, subjected to many limitations and standardizing tendencies, which is not found in other contexts related to the use of english in international and intercultural communication. such a high level of standardization and prescriptive norms make it a variation which even native speakers of english must be taught in order to be able to communicate effectively and faultlessly with all other professionals in aviation industry, irrespective of their linguistic and cultural background. the third chapter of the monograph (pp. 101–136) focuses on the communicational aspects of aviation language and presents it from the perspective of the participants of aeronautical communication, attempting at the same time to present the phenomenon within the discourse analytic perspective. however, apart from a few references to short works by cook (2011) and schiffrin (1994), no explicit links are made to the more important and more voluminous elaborations by such authors as, for example, teun van dijk. thus, it turns out that 140 adam wojtaszek the efforts to place avialinguistics within the framework of discourse analysis in fact boil down to elaboration on those contextual factors which have to be taken into consideration in the analysis. furthermore, it has to be mentioned that the relationship between aviation discourse and aeronautical discourse outlined by borowska, where the latter term is seen both as a lower rank, more specific, but at the same time exclusive from the former, is far from clear, especially that aeronautical english is presented on page 67 as an inclusive variant of aviation english. if such a relationship holds on the level of english, why doesn’t it hold on the level of discourse? in the middle of the chapter borowska puts forward a new approach to the description of texts connected with aeronautics, but what initially looks like an announcement of a presentation of her own typology of such texts turns out to be a discussion of the criteria which need to be taken into consideration in the process of its compilation. towards the end the author shifts the focus to the spoken mode of aeronautical communication, although the possibility of text channel exploitation is also mentioned. such factors as sequential nature of discourse, taking advantage of technological solutions, the rights ascribed to particular roles performed by speakers, and acceptable forms and functions of particular messages are highlighted as the most important factors influencing this type of communication. in my opinion those remarks prepare the ground for the following chapter, where a detailed discussion of aeronautical discourse segmentation is offered. what i found problematic in this section was the reference to a couple of pragmatic theories (searle, grice) and theoretical accounts of conversation analysis (schegloff and sacks), which made an impression of a bit forced and unnecessary, as if the author wanted to demonstrate that she is familiar with these theoretical conceptions. what is the point, for example, of discussing grice’s maxims of conversation, which were proposed as a part of the theoretical account of implicature formation? the aeronautical discourse is meant to involve mostly unambiguous, clear, and ostensive communication, without any necessity of relying on implied senses, which could even be potentially dangerous and definitely unwelcome. chapter four (pp. 137–181) is a very detailed survey of important linguistic features and elements of aeronautical english, divided into two major parts. the first one is devoted to standard phraseology (sp), the basic register used in aeronautical communication, whereas the second one to plain aeronautical english (pae), which constitutes a certain extension of the former in situations which are untypical and non-standard. sp constitutes a system of communication which is almost completely regulated and pre-scribed in official documentation. the norms and rules pertain to controlled exploitation of prosody (especially intonation and pauses), specific syntax, lexis, grammatical features and even pronunciation, which in some cases should be different from standard english. pae is regulated to a lesser extent, but it still imposes the use of such 141anna borowska, avialinguistics. the study of language… constructions and lexis which guarantee easy and problem-free understanding. the discussion is very detailed and well-organized, and it very convincingly and strongly exposes the uniqueness and exceptionality of this form of communication. the only thing which is not very clearly stated in this part of the book is where all the examples come from, whether they were borrowed from icao manuals or individually collected by the author from authentically occurring conversations. it is only on page 285, in the final chapter of the book, where borowska unambiguously identifies the source of her examples: it turns out that they were recorded and transcribed from authentic dialogues broadcast on www.liveatc.net page. the fifth chapter (pp. 183–217) is a very illustrative overview of communication errors which in majority of cases led to fatal accidents, involving loss of many lives. most of those examples had already been described in the literature, but borowska’s compilation is organized according to a typology of errors based on their moment of occurrence in the communicational sequence of speech events. her discussion is very detailed and exhaustive, richly illustrated with interesting examples. borowska also highlights the differences between native and non-native speakers of english when it comes to the genesis of misunderstandings, which is later used as a basis for divergent paths of training proposed for the former and the latter in chapter six. of particular interest is here also a survey of those forms and immanent features of the english language which are likely to generate communication problems: the author argues for their exclusion from aeronautical english in favor of those which are not burdened with potential ambiguity, vagueness or hazardous similarity to other items with which they could easily be confused. this is yet another methodological postulate which lies at the basis of borowska’s concept of training presented in the subsequent chapter. chapter six (pp. 219–249), as mentioned above, is devoted mainly to the presentation of borowska’s ideas regarding the system of training in civil aviation, stemming from the most important objective of avialinguistics; improvement of communication. on the basis of all considerations presented earlier and the official recommendations pertaining to the use of language in aviation-related radio communication, the author formulates detailed instructions vis-à-vis the organization and implementation of language training of candidates for civil aviation service. exploiting the general framework of esp course development the author points to all factors which must be taken into consideration in preparing courses for future pilots and atc staff. such issues as needs analysis, participants, expected skills to be developed, teaching staff requirements and the methods of teaching are discussed in a detailed manner. the focal point is the divergent treatment of native and non-native speakers of english and the extensive use of simulations in order to develop the skills necessary for effective communication in the future situations when human 142 adam wojtaszek life can be at stake. all these methodological postulates stem from borowska’s invaluable expertise in the field of aeronautical communication and are well grounded in the literature on the subject. further support for the postulates included in chapter six is provided in chapter seven (pp. 251–282), where the results of borowska’s survey on aeronautical communication practice are presented. the author constructed a detailed questionnaire (to be found in the appendix) and managed to receive responses from as many as 290 civil aviation professionals (pilots and atc staff) from 59 countries. it is the first survey in which native and non-native speakers of english communicating with the use of aeronautical english were evaluated separately. in spite of the fact that the way in which some of the questions were asked could result in a certain bias in the answers provided, borowska managed to collect impressive material for analysis. especially the examples quoted by the respondents turned out to be very valuable in the context of aviation english course development. for example, one of the air traffic controllers pointed to the tendency of asian (especially chinese) pilots to confirm comprehension of atc tower commands in situations when the message was not properly understood—the evidence for miscomprehension was the behavior of the pilots. this might stem from the culture-specific strategy of face loss avoidance: the chinese pilots fear that admitting lack of comprehension disqualifies them as competent professionals. such remarks and examples, extensively quoted in chapter seven, are very helpful in the formulation of concrete methodological postulates related to the content and focus of training. it seems that many of the postulates presented in chapter six were in fact based on the results of the survey, although the author does not admit it directly. such ordering of the chapters might disturb the perception of the book content a little, but the connections are easily traceable and clear. the book as a whole constitutes an interesting piece of reading both for linguists interested in specialized registers and for people responsible for course development and esp training. most importantly, however, it should be recommended to those icao experts who are in charge of the organization of training for future pilots and atc staff, because implementation of borowska’s recommendations is, in my opinion, bound to bring significant improvement in the effectiveness of aeronautical communication. a direct consequence of such improvement is higher safety of aircraft passengers, which means our safety, because it would be hard to find nowadays someone who has never been in such a role. 143anna borowska, avialinguistics. the study of language… references cook, g. (2011). discourse analysis. in j. simpson (ed.), the routledge handbook of applied linguistics (pp. 431–444). abingdon: routledge. schiffrin, d. (1994). approaches to discourse. cambridge, ma: blackwell. adam wojtaszek university of silesia in katowice, poland theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 8 (2), 2022, pp. 1–8 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12445 joseph lo bianco and larissa aronin (eds.), dominant language constellations: a new perspective on multilingualism springer 2020, 301 pp. the term ‘dominant language’ evokes negative connotations and conjures up thoughts of linguistic imperialism and hegemony. yet, by adding just the single word ‘constellations,’ which refers to a group of similar items or qualities, we are presented with a construct that inverts the concept of dominance into a notion that has nothing to do with oppression or imposition of linguistic power to the individual or the community. quite the contrary, in fact, since the dominant language constellations (dlc) perspective, vigorously making its way into multilingualism studies, refers to “a group of one’s most important (vehicle) languages, functioning as an entire unit, and enabling an individual to meet all his or her needs in a multilingual environment” (aronin, 2016, p. 146). the aim of the first of two interconnected volumes on dlc, under the general supervision of the eminent scholar joseph lo bianco, is to provide a comprehensive definition of this new valuable construct, along with the qualities assigned to it by its architects. it also aspires to position dlc in the current discussions of multilingualism studies and to explain how dlc, in its own targeted way, can contribute to understanding the nature of multilingualism. notably, it also provides academically fertile ground for studies guided by the dlc, which aronin (2020) views as an approach to studying multilingual practices, with a variety of applications from scholars of different disciplines carrying out research in diverse cultural contexts across the globe. those which contribute substantially to understanding of why and how to use dlc as perspective for researching multilingualism will be briefly discussed in the last part of this review. its first and major part will be concerned with how, in the chapters authored by the volume editors, lo bianco and aronin, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12445 bessie dendrinos2 the dlc is built as a paradigm of its own accord—a perspective for the study of individual and social multilingualism and a “research model,” but also in relation to two other notions—translanguaging and language repertoire—both of which have been gaining growing attention and increasingly surfacing in discussions concerning multilingualism and plurilingualism, particularly in the field of language and literacy education. let us start with the comparison between dlc and translanguaging, a concept that recently has been dominating academic discussions about pedagogy in bilingual and second language (l2) immersion programs, as well as pedagogy for multilingual and immigrant-background students taught through the official school language (for example, see: leung & valdés, 2019; paulsrud et al., 2017). the authors explain that, whereas dlc involves multilingual agents in an act of selection of two or more languages from their total repertoire to use them purposefully at any one time, in different contexts, the latter, constitutes a process. the process of translanguaging involves bilingual speakers (or multilinguals) in enacting their language assets. furthermore, they note that translanguaging involves “complex language practices,” while dlc constitutes a “set of selected languages and skills” and is “a model of language practices.” in making this distinction, one wonders if the authors wish to downplay the complexity of language practices that dlc involves, when compared to those of translanguaging, and if so, why. does this have anything to do with multilinguals often selecting from among their dominant languages, one at a time to communicate in different situations with different people in different environments? one also may perhaps question the characterization of dlc as a “set of language skills” and express certain reservations about the use of a term, which in popular foreign language teaching literature is associated with “the four skills,” namely, listening, reading, writing, and speaking. is dlc “a set of language skills” or would it be fair to say that dlc refers to a multilingual individual who has the “plurilingual competence”1 to use the “languages which stand out as being of prime importance as the vehicle of the communicative practices of that person’s daily life, business, career and identity expression” (aronin 2016, 2019; aronin & singleton, 2012, pp. 59–75). finally, one may also feel the need to understand better what the authors mean when they state that dlc may serve as “a model of language practices” so as not to think that what they are implying is that dlc is some type of prototype or archetype of language practices, that it is some mechanism to be used as an example or a procedure to imitate. finally, it is worth noting that what has not been highlighted adequately but is quite important in the comparison between the two constructs is that dlc concerns different languages 1 plurilingual competence—a concept which to be revisited shortly in this review—roughly refers to the ability to use, in different ways and forms of communication, the different languages a person knows. joseph lo bianco and larissa aronin (eds.), dominant language constellations… 3 spoken in societies and used by individual speakers, whereas translanguaging, as theorized by some of its most important proponents (garcía, 2013; garcía & li wei, 2014; otheguy et al., 2015) puts on the table the question of the discreteness of languages. as a matter of fact, building on the claim by makoni and pennycook (2007) that languages do not exist as real entities in the world but rather are inventions of social, cultural, and political movements, translanguaging scholars refer to the distinctness of language being non-existent. garcia (2009), for example, claims that the multilingual’s linguistic system is internally undifferentiated and unitary reflecting the fact that languages have no linguistic or cognitive reality. moreover, in the same documents she claims that additive bilingualism is an illegitimate monoglossic construct because it similarly assumes the existence of two separate languages that are added together in bilingual individuals. otheguy et al. (2015), on the other hand, state that codeswitching is an illegitimate monoglossic construct because it assumes the existence of two separate linguistic systems. this is a bit different than what is suggested in the intro of this volume that “[b]oth translanguaging and the dlc approach, demonstrate that the pattern of using several languages more or less concomitantly, and this overrides the previously sufficient pattern of employing one language at a time.” despite statements by the authors that dlc (like translanguaging and language repertoire) at individual and communal level may involve more than one language, it does not question the existence of languages alone or in combination with one another. translanguaging scholars actually do question the existence of language (cf. cummins, 2021), while focusing on “the fluid and dynamic practices that transcend the boundaries between named languages, language varieties, and language and other semiotic systems” (li wei, 2018, 9). this brings us to another concept which is discussed by the lo bianco and aronin as a cognate yet as a distinct perspective from that of dlc: that is, language or linguistic repertoire.2 the notion comprises elements of the different levels of description of language—including phonetic-graphical, lexical-grammatical, notional-functional and discursive-textual) but also of language use. as such, an individual’s repertoire forms the basis of every language learner’s plurilingual competence (either current or possible). according to lo bianco and aronin (p. 5), while “linguistic repertoire aims to include the totality of an individual’s, or a community’s linguistic skills,” dlc is “the active part of 2 the term was coined in the context of language sociology, for the set of language varieties—including registers and dialects—“exhibited in the speaking and writing patterns of a speech community” (fishman, 1972, p. 48). the concept is applied both to multilingual and monolingual repertoires: “just as a multilingual linguistic repertoire allocates different language varieties to different speech situations, so does a monolingual repertoire. for all speakers— monolingual and multilingual—there is marked variation in the forms of language used for different activities, addressees, topics, and settings” (finegan, 2004, p. 319). bessie dendrinos4 one’s language repertoire” as it “includes only the most expedient languages or language skills that relate to a person or a group in their communication functioning at a given time and in a given environment.” they further explain that linguistic repertoire includes “all languages used by speakers/writers and potentially available to them for use, those identified with but not active and those which are passive yet still present,” whereas dlc, as mentioned earlier, is concerned only with the active languages.” one more point that the authors make is that dlc “operates as a coherent whole, and therefore is the account of what an individual or wider grouping’s specific repertoire of used languages is in a given time and setting.” does this mean that “linguistic repertoire” is not and does not operate as a coherent whole? yes and no. because the concept of repertoire includes all the assets or resources a social agent has for communication, but these assets are not homologous in the sense that they are not just languages. social agents have other semiotic resources, given that communication nowadays is not simply multilingual but also multimodal—the five modes of communication being linguistic, visual, aural, gestural, and spatial (dendrinos, 2020). on the basis of the above, though not only, it might be preferable to compare dlc not to the concept of linguistic repertoire, which admittedly is used frequently when discussing or examining multilingual communication because, unlike dlc, it is a component of an approach not the approach itself. that is, (a) one has a repertory of languages and uses the dominant one(s) at any one time (dlc approach); (b) bi/multilingual individuals regularly draw on the totality of their linguistic resources in communicative interactions and classroom instruction should support students to use the languages or elements of the languages they know in flexible and strategic ways as a tool for cognitive and academic learning (translanguaging pedagogy); (c) just as effective com municators draw on the totality of their semiotic resources to participate constructively in discursive practices, language learners should develop their plurilingual and pluricultural competence—the ability to put to productive use these resources in combination in order to construct (and negotiate) meaning (dendrinos, forthcoming). actually, the idea of learners developing plurilingual and pluricultural competence, so as to use the repertoire of (a) the languages in which they have developed greater or lesser proficiency, (b) the languages around them, and (c) the languages they are learning began being discussed in the language teaching community and language education scholarship after the publication of the council of europe’s common european framework of reference for languages (cefr) (council of europe 2001)—a policy document translated in over forty languages that over time became very influential for language teaching, learning, and assessment across european school systems but now only. it is there where it was first suggested that learners’ linguistic repertoire joseph lo bianco and larissa aronin (eds.), dominant language constellations… 5 is the base upon which their learning can progress (cefr: 3) and stated that “the aim [of education in a language] is to develop a linguistic repertory, in which all linguistic abilities have a place.” it also noted that “a single, richer repertoire of this kind thus allows choice concerning strategies for task accomplishment, drawing where appropriate on an interlinguistic variation and language switching” (cefr: 132). the idea of language learners developing plurilingual and pluricultural competence has recently further built up and expanded in the council of europe’s cefr companion volume (council of europe 2018/2020), which describes what plurilingual and pluricultural competence entails and clearly states from the first pages that “[i]n the reality of today’s increasingly diverse societies, the construction of meaning may take place across languages and draw upon user/learners’ repertoires” (cefr-cv) and provides a long list of levelled descriptors for mediation across languages (cross-linguistic mediation) but also within the same language (intra-linguistic mediation), since a learner’s repertory includes not only languages or ele ments of different languages but also linguistic varieties, including registers, dia lects, styles, and accents that exist in a community or within an individual. as we come to the last part of this review, let us turn attention to notable studies guided by and using the dlc approach by authors of different disciplines who “introduce a variety of applications and interpretations of the dlc model leading to important insights,” “from a wide variety of perspectives.” studies in highly complicated multilingual contexts such as those in africa are always fascinating because the languages which must be managed are the many indigenous languages, some of which have official status nationally or regionally, and non-african languages with a colonial past and post-colonial present. two interesting african-setting studies included in this volume are one by felix banda, and the second by susan coetzee-van rooy. the former, by banda, explores the notion of dlcs in zambia where 72 indigenous languages are spoken, plus english which is the main language of education, national government business and socioeconomic mobility—one of the main remnants of colonialism. using data from various sources, the author illustrates “the multilayered dlcs operating across individual/household, community, regional and national boundaries” and shows how to the complex situation created by how the multilingualism is managed and how it exists in the zambian context adding to the and dynamism of dlcs. the latter, by coetzee-van rooy, applies the dlc concept to language-repertoire survey work done on urban present-day south african multilingualism, who finds that the size of a typical dlc is three languages—a finding that holds implications for language in education practices for urban multilingual students in south africa. two well-written and documented studies by three authors concerned with languages in the educational context discuss of the usefulness of dlc as a tool for capturing multilingual language patterns. one of the two studies, written bessie dendrinos6 by björklund, björklund, and sjöholm, shows how dlc can be used as a tool to describe the domains and functions of different languages at individual and societal levels in finland and to promote multilingual awareness among student teachers. the second study, by slavkov, concerns the use of dlc as a tool for the crucial issue of language background profiling of students in educational institutions. he examines a rich array of interesting data and situates his findings within the context of other multilingual perspectives but then focuses specifically on the notion of dlc discussing how this perspective can prove beneficial for the conceptualization of language background profiling. τhe studies on “personal dominant language constellations based on the amount of usage of the languages” are also quite interesting because they describe and analyse the learning and real life experiences of multilinguals with their dlcs in very different contexts starting with a paper by kannangara which sheds but also shed light on multilingualism in sri lanka and convincingly argues that the uniqueness of one’s dlc varies depending on its linguistic, societal, political, or geographical context and that these variations can be observed in interrelated factors, such as the prominence of the language, its level of proficiency, and the functions allocated to each language. next in line is a study by karpava which examines the dlcs of russian speakers in cyprus. the analysis of the author’s qualitative data interestingly revealed that the female adults in her sample have either russian or mixed (russian and cypriot greek) cultural and linguistic identity, whereas students have mainly mixed (russian and english) identity concluding that immigration, social milieu, integrative and instrumental motivation affect the constitution, configuration, and dynamics of their dlcs. the third study in this part of the volume is by krevelj, who examines the potential of the dlc approach for studying the under-researched area of crosslinguistic influence (cli) in multilinguals by looking at previously collected data and outcomes of a research project, which investigated simultaneous interaction of languages used by multilingual participants from the same community in croatia, with a common dlc (involving croatian and italian as official languages and english as a foreign language). in looking at her data from the dlc perspective, the author finds some novel insights, and discusses the benefits of dlc, both as a concept and as a research tool. finally, the last study in this part of the volume, authored by nightingale, presents “a case study focusing on the dlc of a moroccan-born man living in spain, specifically on how his most expedient languages are reconfigured according to the multilingual environment and how they relate to his emo tions, language attitudes, and identity construct.” the author makes no generalizations based on this one case study; however, he does point out the studies such as this one, with ample qualitative data helps us understand better multilingual practices realized in concrete social and cultural contexts. joseph lo bianco and larissa aronin (eds.), dominant language constellations… 7 the concluding chapter, by lo bianco, argues that the dlc concept makes a vital contribution to understanding language questions today, and purposefully sets the agenda for future directions of the concept of the dlc and its role in/for multilingualism studies, as these figure in areas such as public policy, education, grammatical exploration, sociology of multilingualism, intercultural relations, and personal and group identity. references aronin, l. (2016). multicompetence and dominant language constellation. in v. cook & l. wei (eds.), the cambridge handbook of linguistic multicompetence (pp. 142–163). cambridge university press. aronin, l. (2019). dominant language constellation as a method of research. in e. vetter & u. jessner (eds.), international research on multilingualism: breaking with the monolingual perspective (pp. 13–26). springer. aronin, l. (2020). language constellations as an approach for studying multilingual practices. in j. lo bianco & l. aronin (eds.), dominant language constellations: a new perspective on multilingualism (pp. 19–33). springer. aronin, l., & singleton, d. (2012). multilingualism. john benjamins. council of europe (2001). common european framework for languages: learning, teaching, assessment. cambridge university press. council of europe (2018/2020). common european framework for languages: learning, teaching, assessment. companion volume with new descriptors. cummins, j. (in press). translanguaging: a critical analysis of theoretical claims. translanguaging: a critical analysis of theoretical claims. in p. juvonen & m. källkvist (eds.), pedagogical translanguaging: theoretical, methodological and empirical perspectives. multilingual matters. dendrinos, β. (2020). the magic of language & language teaching. in t. tinnefeld (ed.), with the collaboration of martin east & ronald kresta, the magic of language— productivity in linguistics and language teaching. saarbrücker schriften zu linguistik und fremdsprachendidaktik (sslf). https://sites.google.com/site/linguistikunddidaktik/home/bsammelb%c3%a4nde-band-11-b-collected-volumes-volume-11 dendrinos, b. (ed.) (forthcoming). introduction. mediation as linguistic and cultural negotiation of meanings and plurilingualism. routledge. finegan, e. (2004). language: its structure and use. thomson wadsworth. fishman, j. a. (1972). the sociology of language. de gruyter mouton. garcia, o. (2009). bilingual education in the 21st century: a global perspective. basil/blackwell. garcía, o. (2013. from disglossia to transglossia: bilingual and multilingual classrooms in the 21st century. in c. abello-contesse, p. m. chandler, m. d. lópez-jiménez, & r. chacón-beltrán (eds.), bilingual and multilingual education in the 21st century: building on experience (pp. 155–175). multilingual matters. garcía, o., & li wei. 2014. translanguaging: language, bilingualism and education. palgrave macmillan. https://sites.google.com/site/linguistikunddidaktik/home/b-sammelb%c3%a4nde-band-11-b-collected-volumes-volume-11 https://sites.google.com/site/linguistikunddidaktik/home/b-sammelb%c3%a4nde-band-11-b-collected-volumes-volume-11 bessie dendrinos8 leung, c. & valdés, g. (2019). translanguaging and the transdisciplinary framework for language teaching and learning in a multilingual world. the modern language journal, 103(2), 348–370. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12568 li wei. (2018). translanguaging as a practical theory of language. applied linguistics, 39(1), 9–30. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amx039 maconi, s. and penycook, a. (eds.) (2007). disinventing and reconstituting languages. multilingual matters. otheguy, r., garcía, o., & reid, w. (2015). clarifying translanguaging and deconstructing named languages: a perspective from linguistics. applied linguistics review, 6(3), 281–307. paulsrud, b. a., rosén, j. straszer, b., & wedin, å. (2017). new perspectives on translanguaging in education. multilingual matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781783097821-003 bessie dendrinos emerita professor at the national and kapodistiran university of athens https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12568 https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amx039 cover photo: “big_blue” by max iter (retrieved from www.f lickr.com) copy editing: gabriela marszołek cover preparation for printing: paulina dubiel proofreading: joanna zwierzyńska typesetting: marek zagniński electronic version is the original one. the journal was previously published in printed form with the issn 2450-5455 the journal is distributed free of charge issn 2451-2125 published by wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego ul. bankowa 12b, 40-007 katowice www.wydawnictwo.us.edu.pl e-mail: wydawnictwo@us.edu.pl first impression. printed sheets: 10.0. publishing sheets: 11.5. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ style guide for the authors authors are requested to submit manuscripts formatted in apa style (american psychological association, 6th ed.). all manuscripts must include an abstract in english (maximum of 250 words). after the abstract please provide keywords. main text: 12 times new roman long citations (more than 40 words): 10 times new roman, indent by 1 tab either side, one empty line above and below, no quotation marks. 1.5 spacing apa headings level format 1 centered, boldface, uppercase and lowercase heading 2 left-aligned, boldface, uppercase and lowercase heading 3 indented, boldface, lowercase heading with a period. begin body text after the period. 4 indented, boldface, italicized, lowercase heading with a period. begin body text after the period. 5 indented, italicized, lowercase heading with a period. begin body text after the period. in-text citations (examples): author’s name and date in brackets: the experience of critical incidents and effective ref lection upon them allows teachers to control their classroom actions more consciously and create critical events (ce’s), which were described earlier as intended, planned and controlled (woods, 1993). woods (1993) believes that critical events are structured and occur in well-defined staged of conceptualization . . . two authors: (ballantyne & packer, 1995) as ballantyne and packer (1995) demonstrate … three authors: (barker, callahan, & ferreira, 2009) subsequent use: (barker et al., 2009) six authors or more: lorenz et al. (1998) argued… (lorenz et al., 1998) authors whose last names are the same: (d. francis, 1985; h. francis, 2004) style guide for the authors174 online sources (unpaginated), provide paragraph or section title instead: (peterson & clark, 1978, para. 4) (moss, springer, & dehr, 2008, discussion section, para. 1) no author, provide shortened title: (“primary teachers talking,” 2007) (reflective practice, 2005, pp. 12−25) secondary citations: smith (as cited in maxx & meyer, 2000) noted that “there is . . . .” citation within citation: as it has been noted that “there is no relevance . . . (smith, 2005)” (maxx & meyer, 2000, p. 129). & vs. and: as smithson and stones (1999) demonstrated. . . . . . as has been shown (smithson & stones, 1999) . . . references selected examples (for more consult apa manual): book, one author: goldberg, a. (2006). constructions at work. oxford: oxford university press. book, two authors and more: jarvis, s., & pavlenko, a. (2008). crosslinguistic influence in language cognition. london: routledge. translated book: freud, s. (1960). jokes and their relation to the unconscious. (j. strachey, trans.). london, england: routledge & k. paul. (original work published 1905). edited book: flowerdew, j., brock, m., & hsia, s. (eds.). (1992). second language teacher education. hong kong: city polytechnic of hong kong. chapter in an edited book: goldberg, a., & casenhiser, d. (2008). construction learning and second language acquisition. in p. robinson & n. c. ellis (eds.), handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition (pp. 197–215). new york and london: routledge. article in a journal: hammarberg, b. (2010). the languages of the multilingual. some conceptual and terminological issues international review of applied linguistics in language teaching, 48, 91–104. article online: tully, k., & bolshakov, v. y. (2010). emotional enhancement of memory: how norepinephrine enables synaptic plasticity. molecular brain, 13 may. retrieved from: http://www.molecularbrain.com/content/ style guide for the authors 175 bakker, a. b., hakanen, j. j., demerouti, e., & xanthopoulou, d. (2007). job resources boost work engagement, particularly when job demands are high. journal of educational psychology, 99(2), 274–284. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.99.2.274 magazines online: miller, g. (2014, september 4). cinematic cuts exploit how your brain edits what you see. wired. retrieved from: http://wired.com/ smith, a. (2007, june 12). dying languages. the western star. retrieved from: http://www. thewesternstar.com/ blog: palmer, p. (2001). now i become myself. yes magazine, blog post, 31 may. retrieved from: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/working-for-life/now-i-become-myself e-books: bolande, v. u. (1981). on the psychology of humor. retrieved from: http://www.uf lib.uf l.edu /ufdc/ufdc.aspx?n=palmm&c=psa1&m=hd2j&i=45367 conference proceedings: souleles, n., & pillar, c. (eds.). (2014). proceedings from the first international conference on the use of ipads in higher education. paphos: cyprus university of technology. doctoral dissertation: churchwell, j. (2005). becoming an academic: factors that inf luence a graduate student’s identity commitment (doctoral dissertation). university of michigan, ann arbor, mi. reachel, l. h. (2001). native languages and toponyms: origins, meaning, and use (doctoral dissertation). available from proquest dissertation and theses database. (document id 1964749161). preface theory and practice of second language acquisition was founded as a forum of discussion for polish as well as foreign scholars and seems to have fulfilled its mission as a journal on the rise. the present volume marks the beginning of the eighth year of its presence in the scholarly world. the journal has become more and more popular as we get more and more interesting submissions from both polish and foreign researchers. indeed, since its foundation, every consecutive issue of the journal has welcomed contributions from many renowned researchers, such as peter macintyre, david singleton, larissa aronin, sarah mercer, tammy gregersen, and jean-marc dewaele, to name just a few. also, a fast growing number of oa uploads has been observed as an indication of the journal’s popularity, as is the queue of the articles already accepted and awaiting their turn to be included in the next volumes to be published. this is why we have decided to increase the number of research papers published in a single volume for the second time: in the first years of the journal’s existence there were six, last year seven, and starting with issue 8(1) tapsla is going to include eight research contributions, followed by two book reviews. it is the journal’s ambition to demonstrate new trends and unknown venues for research in sla, focusing both on theoretical discussion and the practical solutions to problems based upon them. we aim not only to publish and share with our readers contributions from well-known and respected scholars but would like to promote young researchers from all over the world, who often present fresh and innovative ideas or open up new perspectives on issues already researched. in other words, the journal hopes to become a venue for the exchange of ideas between well-established academics and those inspired by them. in terms of its content, the journal presents contributions on issues ranging from purely linguistic and cognitively-oriented research on language acquisition processes to psychoand sociolinguistic studies, always trying to feature the most recent developments in terms of topic choice, as well as in theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 8 (1), 2022, pp. 5–8 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12376 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en 6 preface the methodology of research they employ. we publish our journal through an open access system, where the entire production process is executed online and the final product is available to everyone, thus offering an opportunity to share ideas through a broad, effective, and economical mode of dissemination. we aim at keeping high standards and quality, which are guaranteed by the international editorial board of tapsla, whose members are well-known polish and foreign experts on a wide range of second language acquisition issues. the journal is indexed in numerous databases, including scopus. as the journal is published by the prestigious polish academic publisher, wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego (university of silesia press), the copyediting and technical side of the production are done by an experienced team of editors at the university of silesia press. updated information and all the issues published so far are available on the journal webpage at www.tapsla.us.edu.pl. the topics of the present volume extend between focus on selected language skills influenced by a range of psycholinguistic variables, learning environments and instruction types, issues related to teacher wellbeing, and textbook analysis. the opening text “language teacher wellbeing in the workplace: balancing needs” by sonja babic, sarah mercer, astrid mairitsch, johanna gruber, and kirsten hempkin is the only one in the volume concentrating on teachers. since it has been proven that teachers’ wellbeing correlates positively with the quality of teaching and overall learners’ success, the authors decided to investigate the factors which contribute to the construct. the study is especially valuable for its diversified and multinational perspective and inclusion of not only psychological and individual variables, but also influences of wider educational and sociological environments. the second paper, by xavier martin-rubió and irati diert-boté, titled “catalan law and business students in italy: the impact of a stay abroad on fluency and accuracy,” shifts the perspective towards the learners. the author applies a qualitative perspective and investigates the factors responsible for diverse values of fluency and accuracy measures among three subjects participating in the study, in an attempt to provide some useful tips for both teachers and learners on how to make the most of an organized mobility abroad. the third text in the present volume, “the impact of individual interest and proficiency on self-efficacy beliefs in foreign language listening” by hyang-il kim, presents a dynamic picture of how individual interest is linked to basic and advanced skill self-efficacy against the background of listening activities aimed to expand learners’ language proficiency. statistical tests applied by the author reveal the links which were largely uninvestigated so far and offer very useful recommendations for both language teachers and learners. the topic of self-efficacy is further expanded by bogusława maria gosiewska-turek in her paper “dyslexia, self-efficacy, and language instruction in foreign language learning—a mixed quantitative-qualitative study,” this time bringing into the picture the variables of the language-related 7preface impairment of dyslexia and the style of language instruction. the results show that properly organized teaching can offer at least partial compensation for the inefficiencies stemming from neuropsychological limitations of the learners. the next paper in the present volume, by agnieszka ślęzak-świat, titled “development of digital literacy—translanguaging and transmedia note taking formats for academic reading,” can be best described as a diagnostic study attempting to identify the major difficulties which the students may have with efficient note taking. the author focuses on two selected note taking techniques—translanguaging and transmedia formats—revealing the potential areas for improvement in this respect. the study shows that there is much room for raising learners’ awareness and competence in dealing with summarizing notes and that there is a visible need for explicit instruction related to such skills. the sixth paper, “investigating effects of integrated reading and writing skills instruction in enhancing students’ critical thinking skills in efl classroom,” written by ayalew tilahun, berhanu simegn, and mulugeta teka, concentrates on the potential of a selected language instruction procedure on the development of learners’ critical thinking abilities. the author attempted to challenge the traditional separation of language skills, which is still a common practice in ethiopia, in order to find support for a modification of teaching practices. the results of the carefully constructed quasi-experimental study reported in the paper demonstrate that there is a statistically significant positive influence of skill integration on learners’ critical thinking, which in turn is very likely to translate into better achievement in foreign language development. the seventh contribution to the present volume, “turkish efl learners’ acquisition of psych verbs and unaccusative verbs: a replication study on underpassivization and overpassivization” by seray tanyer and samet deniz, reports on an investigation of a peculiar aspect of grammar among turkish learners of english. the authors wanted to find out whether processability constraints influence the acquisition of two types of verbs, focusing on the passive rather than active learners’ skills. a statistically significant difference between unaccusative and psych verbs was noted, but no clearly interpretable correlations were found. the last research paper in the present volume, also placed in the turkish context, is the study by tan arda gedik and yağmur su kolsal titled “a corpus-based analysis of high school english textbooks and english university entrance exams in turkey.” this time, however, the focus is shifted towards the potential incompatibility between the content of english national level university entrance exams and the content of high school textbooks which should prepare the student for them. the authors employ corpus linguistics tools to demonstrate the inefficiency of the textbooks which are commonly used in turkey. traditionally, the volume concludes with two book reviews. the first one, contributed by pilar safont, evaluates twelve lectures on multilingualism 8 preface edited by david singleton and larissa aronin in 2019. the reviewer speaks very highly of the up-to-date and much needed content, pointing to the fact that we now live in a multilingual world where multilingual contacts have become an everyday practice and a norm. given the state-of-the-art relevance of the topics covered in the volume and the excellent choice of contributors—the top names in the research on multilingualism—the reviewer describes the book as “a must-read” in any graduate or postgraduate course on languages in contact, multilingual education or third language acquisition.” the second review, by caterina hauser, presents a book focusing on another very important face of the present times in language education: new technological applications for foreign and second language learning and teaching (2020), edited by mariusz kruk and mark peterson. the reviewer applauds the relevance of the topics covered in the book, pointing to the necessity and inevitability of efficient exploitation of technological development in the area of language instruction and learning. the younger brothers of call—virtual reality, social media and even chatbots—are more and more often successfully introduced into the classroom by language teachers and eagerly utilized by language learners, so a volume focusing on their applicability is undoubtedly another must-read. the reviewer stresses yet another advantage of the book: its coverage of not only practical applications of new devices and software, but also of ethical considerations related to personal data protection, privacy and potential threats stemming from their use. the papers published in the present issue, although offering mainly empirical accounts, do not neglect solid theoretical foundations and overviews. they encompass a very broad range of individual researcher’s empirical work in varied teaching contexts, presented from a variety of perspectives. we hope that this innovative and creative research, especially in the context of its potential for practical applications, will be of interest to other scholars. the practical solutions to problems proposed by some of the authors can be adapted for many other teaching and learning contexts. we hope that all types of readers—researchers, teachers and students—will find the articles not only useful but also inspirational. more than anything else, we would like to thank all the authors in this volume and, as is our usual practice, to extend our invitation to all polish and foreign researchers and academics to share their work with us by submitting it to our journal. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703 danuta gabryś-barker https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0308-4337 adam wojtaszek preface the present issue of theory and practice of second language acquisition completes the fourth year of publishing this journal. it was founded in 2015, at a time when not many journals in applied linguistics (and specifically those focusing on second language acquisition) were available. it was established as a forum of discussion for polish as well as foreign scholars. indeed since then, every consecutive issue of the journal has welcomed contributions from many renowned researchers, such as peter macintyre, david singleton, larissa aronin, and jean-marc dewaele, to name just a few. it is the journal’s ambition to demonstrate new trends in sla research, broadly understood, both worldwide and in poland, focusing on theoretical discussion and practical solutions to problems based upon them. it is our aim not only to publish contributions from well-known and respected authors but also from young researches presenting fresh and innovative ideas. thus, the journal hopes to become a venue for the exchange of ideas between well-established academics and those inspired by them. the journal presents issues ranging from purely linguistic and cognitively-oriented research on language acquisition processes to psychoand sociolinguistic studies, always trying to feature the most recent developments in terms of topic choice as well as in the methodology of research they employ. it is crucial for the development of academic research that we offer this opportunity to share ideas in an effective and disseminated manner via journal publication, especially that we publish using an open access system and where the entire production process is executed online and the final product is available to everyone. the journal’s standards and quality are guaranteed by the international editorial board of tapsla composed of well-known polish and foreign experts on a wide range of second language acquisition problems. updated information on the journal is available on the university of silesia in katowice institute of english webpage at www.ija.us.edu.pl (via a special link) and on the journal webpage at www.journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/tapsla. 6 preface the present issue continues the topic from the previous one, which is that of language learning environment, broadly interpreted. it opens with an article by sarah mercer, peter macintyre, tammy gregersen, and kyle talbot entitled “positive language education: combining positive education and language education,” which is written from a positive psychology perspective as applied to education and discusses the notion of positive language education (ple). here, the authors promote the idea that 21st-century education should not only focus on developing linguistic skills but also those which are more fundamental to our lives, that is, the skills of wellbeing, a major area in positive psychology. the model presented integrates the aims and development of linguistic and non-linguistic skills in the educational context as “the foundation for effective learning and a good life more generally.” the article makes a considerable contribution to fast-growing research on positive psychology in sla. the article is theoretical, but it makes a very strong claim for an empirically-based model of language education in different educational contexts. the following article by katarzyna budzińska “positive institutions: a case study” elaborates on a positive educational example in a practical way by presenting a profile of a language school which can be viewed as an enabling institution (a concept proposed by positive psychology). it follows the lines of mercer et al.’s thinking on ple presented in the earlier text. the author rightly emphasizes that out of the three major areas of interest in positive psychology studies: positive emotions, positive character traits, and positive/enabling institutions, it is the final one that has attracted the least attention so far. thus, in her article, the main focus is on the analysis of a representative language school as the best example of its kind. as the author puts it, it is an institution “enabling success and promoting positive language learning environments or student well-being.” in the next text, “the classroom learning environment and its influence on selected aspects of foreign language attainment—insights from students,” anna michońskastadnik takes a different perspective on a foreign language learning context by focusing on students’ perceptions of their environment. expressing the belief that a modern language classroom has a facilitative role in developing autonomy, learner self-regulation and cooperation-enhanced motivation, the author discusses their views on the influences of some aspects of the classroom environment on their language learning process (“motivation, ability to self-assess, self-confidence, and attitudes to the target language and culture”) expressed by learners in guided interviews. she concludes, on the basis of the interview data, that it is still the teacher that plays the most fundamental role in the above. the next article by ana aldekoa, “gure ikastola en tres languages: the teaching and learning of trilingual oral expository skills by means of a didactic sequence,” takes the reader into the world of multilingual classrooms, where the development of trilingual oral expository skills in spanish l1, basque l2, and english l3 students is presented in a trilingual didactic sequence. the analysis clearly 7preface demonstrates that language alternation and integration during a lesson can result in the beneficial development of the three languages and thus, enhances students’ multilingual competence. the article by beata webb and alicia vallero entitled “developing learning environments for blended and online learning” takes the reader to a modern language classroom where second language instruction makes use of modern technology by combining both the traditional face-to-face classroom teaching and possibilities online instruction offers. it presents the theoretical concepts, an innovative framework necessary for a successful implementation of language instruction at the university level as well as the students’ assessment of this type of pedagogy. the authors demonstrate how such teaching is done at one of australian universities, the leading center for blended, online, and distance learning. the last article in this issue by achilleas kostoulas and sarah mercer is entitled “reflections on complexity: tesol researchers reflect on their experiences.” it presents the complex dynamic systems theory (cdst), a fairly new theoretical framework in applied linguistics and demonstrates how researchers implement it in their practice of language teaching. the authors not only discuss the tenets of cdst but, more importantly, point out the challenges and promises of this new approach, as expressed in the narrative texts of researchers, experienced in implementing cdst in their work. they are fully aware of its benefits as well as of the difficulties that still need to be overcome. nevertheless, they generally express an optimistic view to this new framework. the issue concludes with two book reviews. one of them is the review of the monograph by katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia personality and emotional intelligence in second language learning (cambridge scholars publishing, 2018), a must-read for all those interested in the affectivity dimension of language acquisition/learning processes (reviewed by danuta gabryś-barker). the other review is of the book by anna borowska avialinguistics. the study of language for aviation purposes (peter lang 2017), which presents a fairly new area of english for specific purpose (esp) (reviewed by adam wojtaszek). this issue offers theoretical reflections on positive psychology in education and complexity theory in teaching. it also proposes practical solutions to problems to be implemented in the foreign language classroom (positive institutions, translanguaging in language didactics). we hope that all types of readers— theorists and practical teachers—will find the articles inspirational. we would like to thank all the contributors to this volume and to invite other polish and foreign academics to share their scholarly research with us by submitting their work to our journal, which is published by the prestigious polish academic publisher, wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego (university of silesia press). danuta gabryś-barker adam wojtaszek theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 8 (2), 2022, pp. 1–22 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11716 aleksandra szymańska-tworek https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2436-1551 university of silesia in katowice mentoring as professional development for mentors a b s t r a c t the present paper concerns the topic of mentoring in the context of pre-service teacher education. mentoring refers here to assistance or guidance provided by a school-based teacher who agrees to mentor a student teacher during her or his practicum. more specifically, the paper examines if mentoring can be recognized as a form of professional development for mentor teachers. while a great deal of literature has looked at the benefits student teachers gain from mentoring, an ongoing line of research has acknowledged that teachers in their roles as mentors also can benefit professionally from the experience of mentoring. however, the bulk of this research comes from the anglo-saxon context and it cannot be assumed that the experiences of british, american or australian teachers are shared by teachers in poland. the aim of the present study then was to identify the ways in which polish teachers of english who have undertaken the role of a mentor develop professionally through mentoring. the instrument used was a web-based questionnaire. the main findings show that mentor teachers gain professionally primarily through the process of mentoring—being a mentor enhances their capacity for self-ref lection and positively impacts their leadership skills, confidence as a teacher, willingness to self-develop, as well as their enthusiasm and commitment to teaching. on the other hand, mentors do not feel they learn directly from student teachers, although, in general, they recognize cooperation with student teachers as an inspirational and positive experience. keywords: teachers of english, mentoring, professional development for mentors, student teaching introduction: terms explained mentoring is “one-to-one support of a novice or less experienced practitioner (mentee) by a more experienced practitioner (mentor), designed primarily to assist the development of the mentee’s expertise and to facilitate their https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11716 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2436-1551 aleksandra szymańska-tworek2 induction into the culture of the profession […]” (hobson, ashby, malderez & tomlinson, 2009, p. 207). a different definition presents mentoring as “an intentional pairing of an inexperienced person with an experienced partner to guide and nurture his or her development” (pitton, 2006, p. 1, cited in beutel & spooner-lane, 2009, p. 351). in the context of pre-service teacher education, mentoring refers to assistance provided to a student completing the student teaching portion of their education program by a more experienced teacher in her or his classroom. teachers in their roles as mentors have been labelled a number of terms across the research literature. le cornu (2015, p. 3, cited in mcdonough, 2018, p. 99) identified the following: supervising teachers, mentor teachers, associate teachers, co-operating teachers and school-based teacher educators, with the first two being most commonly used in recent research. although the distinction between mentor and supervisor is not always acknowledged and some studies use these terms interchangeably, the current literature offers a more nuanced definition of both concepts. while supervision bases mostly on technical procedures, such as explaining, providing feedback, and generally modelling one’s protégés according to certain standards, mentoring is a much deeper process that involves interpersonal and psychosocial development of the mentee and is intended to foster the formation of her or his identity as a professional teacher (walkington, 2005, p. 63). although both mentoring and supervision can be hierarchical in nature, mentoring implies greater collegiality between the classroom teacher and student teacher, which means their relationship is more likely to be based on dialogue and reciprocity (ambrosetti, 2014, p. 31, carruthers, 1993, cited in walkington, 2005, p. 56). as the current research literature has consistently presented the intended role of a school-based teacher as a guide (mentor) rather than a technician (supervisor) and the terms mentoring and mentor have become more pervasive, for the purpose of the present paper this terminology is adopted.1 1 mentor, mentor teacher, and mentoring teacher are used throughout this paper to denote a classroom-based teacher who has undertaken the role of a mentor. university student completing the student teaching portion of her or his education program is referred to as mentee and student teacher. student teaching is also termed practicum. the term pupils is used to denote learners in school settings. mentoring as professional development for mentors 3 literature review mentoring as professional development for mentees and mentors the benefits that student teachers derive from effective mentoring are varied and many, and have been exhaustively described in a spate of publications. it has been reported that mentoring and mentors: provide student teachers with emotional and psychological support (hobson et al., 2009), exert an important effect on mentees’ beliefs and their future practices (evertson & smithey, 2000), promote student teachers’ teaching competence (yuan, 2016), play a key role in the socialization of early-career teachers (hobson et al., 2009; yuan, 2016) and generally support the initial preparation, induction and early professional development of beginning teachers (hobson et al., 2009; lindgren, 2006; marable & raimondi, 2007). while a great deal of literature has looked at the benefits student teachers derive from mentoring, an ongoing line of research has acknowledged that undertaking the role of a mentor brings numerous benefits for the mentor herself or himself. that student teachers can be used as a resource is presented, for example, in a study by jaspers, meijer, prins, and wubbels (2014, p. 112), where mentor teachers refer to mentees as a colleague, an additional value, and describe their presence as “having two more hands, eyes and ears in the class.” the study reports that having student teacher in the classroom allows for the possibility of working with pupils in smaller groups and give teachers freedom to undertake other work in the school. other possible benefits of working with mentees include: removing the isolation many teachers feel and creating a more collaborative environment (gilles & wilson, 2004, p. 91) and preventing teachers from feeling bored (jaspers et al., 2014, p. 110). however, the process of mentoring is said to have a much deeper impact on mentors—it has been demonstrated that mentoring is a powerful and cost-effective learning opportunity that promotes growth in both mentees and mentors. as reflected in the following citation by lopez-real and kwan (2005, p. 16): […] there is no doubt that the major focus of mentoring is on the mentee. after all, the verb is a transitive one and implies that one is mentoring somebody […] that somebody is the student teacher and the whole emphasis of mentoring is on helping the student teacher become a competent professional. nevertheless, there is some evidence in the literature that suggests the mentors themselves can also gain professionally from the process of mentoring. aleksandra szymańska-tworek4 this sentiment is echoed by walkington (2005, p. 54) and worded as follows: […] each mentoring relationship with a pre-service teacher is unique and has learning opportunities for both parties. it is not a one-way transfer of skills and knowledge from expert to novice, but an opportunity for challenging those things that create personal philosophies and modes of operation. the experience of mentoring provides teachers with benefits, rewards, and opportunities that help them develop their own teaching potential (gilles & wilson, 2004, p. 91). the following sections of the paper discuss different ways in which mentoring can enhance professional development of mentoring teachers. the paper is organized as follows: first, it is described how teachers in their roles as mentors benefit from the very process of mentoring, then it is presented what mentors can learn directly from mentees. learning from the mentoring process it is recognized in the literature that mentoring is an opportunity for mentors to enhance their capacity for critical reflection and self-reflection (ambrosetti, 2014; jaspers et al., 2014; gilles & wilson, 2004; smith & nadelson, 2016; lopez-real & kwan, 2005). the development of reflective abilities comes about via two avenues, as discussed by lopez-real and kwan (2005, pp. 22–23). first, because mentors see themselves to be in the position of a role model, they decide to verify their teaching practices, attitudes or beliefs in order to set a good example for student teachers, which is likely to involve them in meaningful reflection. as put by one of the respondents in a study by lopez-real and kwan (2005, p. 19): it makes you reflect on your own teaching when you know someone is trying to learn from what you are doing. so you put a lot of effort into the structure and what you are doing because you want it to be good. you don’t want to give someone a bad example of how to teach. second, mentors who observe student teachers’ lessons and provide them with post-lesson feedback tend to analyze the differences between their own and student teachers’ performance, which, again, is likely to trigger reflection. as reported by lopez-real and kwan (2005), mentors who get involved in reflective thinking during the practicum, are likely to continue practicing reflection after the mentee had finished their student teaching. apart from the development of reflective skills, other documented benefits that mentors derive from mentoring are a renewed enthusiasm for teaching mentoring as professional development for mentors 5 (ambrosetti 2014; hobson et al., 2009), increased confidence in their own teaching (hobson et al., 2009) and the development of communication skills and leadership roles (hudson, 2013a; hudson, 2013b). as discussed in jaspers et al. (2014, p. 110), mentors reported that mentoring “kept them fresh and sharp and prevented them from teaching too automatically and routinely and from getting bored.” gilles and wilson (2004, p. 91) point out that through contacts with student teachers mentors often get reenergized in their profession. mentoring teachers in a study by jaspers et al. (2014, p. 110) have also reported that mentoring made them more confident in their own teaching because they realized they could help student teachers more than they had expected. learning from student teachers that mentors can actually learn from mentees may seem somewhat ironic. after all, student teachers are explicitly in a learning situation and teachers in their roles as mentors epitomize wisdom and experience (lopez-real & kwan, 2005, p. 20). nonetheless, the studies adduced in this section give evidence that interaction with student teachers can be instructive and inspirational even for teachers with many years of experience. mentoring may be an opportunity for teachers to get inspired by student teachers’ innovative ideas and points of view (hobson et al., 2009; jaspers et al., 2014; rajuan, beijaard & verloop, 2007; ulvik & langørgen, 2012; gilles & wilson, 2004; lopez-real & kwan, 2005; hudson, 2013b). student teachers may offer a fresh perspective because they view the classroom from an outsider’s perspective that allows them to challenge what is considered ‘the truth’ in the classroom culture (ulvik & langørgen, 2012, p. 48). they are not tied to old habits, they view matters from a different angle and may offer new perspectives, for example, alternative practices, creative lesson ideas, new methods, teaching styles and strategies. even expert veteran teachers are likely to gain new insights and benefit from innovative ideas that student teachers may have to offer. this practice is illustrated in the following comment by a mentor in a study by hudson (2013b, p. 778): “the preservice teacher brings back all those great ideas, brings a little bit more creativity back into my teaching, and that made me think about maybe i need to do a bit more of that in my teaching.” a further contribution student teachers can make follows from their status as university students. due to their current engagement with tertiary education, students are more updated as to current trends in teacher education, political trends in education, recent literature and recently recommended teaching methods (lindgren, 2006; hudson, 2013a; gilles & wilson, 2004). teachers undertaking the role of a mentor can embrace this opportunity to get knowledge aleksandra szymańska-tworek6 about the latest educational theories, or to re-inform their teaching routine with theoretical, “bookish” knowledge that students are likely to have. ulvik and langørgen (2012, p. 52) point out that because of their young age, student teachers are likely to be highly skilled in information and communication technology and know more about youth culture than older teachers. student teachers’ digital competence could be a valuable resource especially for teachers who are less it-skilled and an opportunity to liven up traditional class instruction with some creative ict usage. a further contribution student teachers can make, because of their familiarity with youth culture, is facilitating communication between the teacher and pupils and perhaps even acting as a mediator between the two parties. in this way, mentoring could serve as an opportunity for mentors to try to understand her or his pupils better. summing up, the research overview presented in this part of the paper discusses different benefits that teachers can derive from being a mentor. it has been pointed out that mentors can develop professionally by (1) benefitting from the process of mentoring and by (2) learning directly from student teachers. the former includes the development of reflective skills, as well as a boost in enthusiasm, confidence, communication and leadership skills. the latter involves getting inspired by new ideas, learning about current trends in education, improving one’s digital competence and getting to know one’s pupils better. apart from this, mentors can make mentoring work to their advantage by treating student teachers as a resource. for instance, having student teacher in the classroom gives teachers a possibility to work with individual pupils or to undertake other work outside of the classroom. the study the aim of the study and research question the aim of the study presented in this paper is to identify the ways in which teachers of english who have undertaken the role of a mentor develop professionally through mentoring. the secondary aim is to examine if teachers make mentoring work to their advantage by using student teachers’ help and treating them as a resource. in this study, we are interested in the polish context because although the literature on mentoring among polish teachers of foreign languages is vast (for english, e.g., siek-piskozub & jankowska, 2015; for french, e.g., grabowska, 2019; for german, e.g., mihułka, 2016; for mentoring as professional development for mentors 7 russian, e.g., karolczuk, 2013), there are no studies (at least to the best of my knowledge) that deal specifically with this aspect of mentoring experience. the research cited in the theoretical part of this paper comes primarily from the anglo-saxon context, where mentoring has a long tradition, and where some teachers are given a possibility to attend mentor training programs (a course or a series of workshops designed to prepare teachers for the role as mentors). it cannot be assumed then that the experiences of british, american or australian teachers are shared by teachers in poland. the present study aims to answer the following research question: in what ways (if any) mentors develop professionally through mentoring? participants respondents selected for the study are teachers of english. as argued by werbińska (2005), teachers of english tend to work more than teachers of other foreign languages because they have more opportunities for additional earnings. this is the result of the role of english as a lingua franca and its privileged position on the job market. it is teachers of english then that were selected for the present study because it is interesting to examine if this group of respondents is able to use mentoring as a learning opportunity, despite all the other responsibilities and roles they need to embrace as teachers, learners, and users of english. the questionnaire was filled out by 36 teachers of english who have mentored at least one student teacher in the course of the last six years. thirty-five respondents were female and one was male. of these, 21 currently work in a primary school, 13 in a secondary school (liceum) and eight in a technical secondary school (technikum) – the sum exceeds the number of respondents because some of them work in more than one place. as far as work experience is concerned, two thirds of the respondents have between ten to 19 years of teaching experience, while the most numerous group of respondents (41.7%) have the teaching experience between 15 to 19 years. the detailed breakdown of the responses is provided in table 1. table 1 respondents’ teaching experience years of experience 0–4 5–9 10–14 15–19 20–24 25–29 30–34 35–39 >40 number of respondents 0 2 9 15 6 3 1 0 0 the respondents were asked about the number of student teachers they mentored in the last six years. more specifically, this question was divided into three parts: aleksandra szymańska-tworek8 how many student teachers did you have in your classroom in the last six years? – who were only observing? – who were only teaching? – who were both observing and teaching? the responses are summarized in the following tables 2–4. table 2 the number of respondents who mentored student teachers who were both observing and teaching number of student teachers 0 1–2 3–4 5–6 7–8 9–10 > 10 number of respondents 0 28 6 0 2 0 0 table 3 the number of respondents who mentored student teachers who were only observing number of student teachers 0 1–2 3–4 5–6 7–8 9–10 > 10 number of respondents 12 13 6 1 2 0 2 table 4 the number of respondents who mentored student teachers who were only teaching number of student teachers 0 1–2 3–4 5–6 7–8 9–10 > 10 number of respondents 28 7 1 0 0 0 0 as can be seen from table 2, all the respondents mentored at least one student teacher whose practicum included both elements: student teacher observed the lessons and carried out lessons on her or his own. apart from this, as presented in tables 3 and 4, most teachers also have experience mentoring student teachers whose practicum included only observation or only teaching component. asked if they feel successful in their role of mentor, 20 respondents (55.6%) gave a positive answer, while 15 teachers (41.7%) had no opinion. only one respondent (2.8%) indicated that she felt unsuccessful in her role as a mentor. the instrument the instrument used for collecting data was a web-based questionnaire consisting of three parts followed by demographics questions (see appendix). the three parts of the questionnaire include statements to which participants mentoring as professional development for mentors 9 were asked to respond using a 5-point likert scale (1—i strongly disagree, 2—i somewhat disagree, 3—i have no opinion, 4—i somewhat agree, 5—i strongly agree). the first part of the questionnaire, entitled “learning from the mentoring process,” includes ten statements that ask respondents if being a mentor increased their reflective skills, enthusiasm for teaching, confidence as a teacher, commitment to teaching, motivation to improve their english, willingness to self-develop, communication skills and leadership skills. the second part of the questionnaire, entitled “learning from student teachers,” encompasses seven statements that ask teachers if mentees inspired them with new ideas or teaching methods and, more generally, if cooperation with student teacher was instructive and inspirational for them. the statements also inquire whether respondents managed to learn something from student teachers and whether the presence of student teacher contributed to better relations between the teacher and pupils. the third part of the questionnaire, entitled “student teacher as a resource,” includes five statements that ask respondents if mentees shared teaching materials with them and if the presence of student teacher allowed for the possibility to work with individual pupils or to undertake other tasks in the school. the last two statements are of a more general nature and inquire if respondents feel that cooperation with student teacher was a positive experience and if it constituted a welcome diversion from the classroom routine. the statements in this part of the questionnaire were intended to examine whether respondents used student teachers as a resource—as described in the theoretical part of this paper, student teachers are perceived by some teachers as “an additional value” (jaspers et al., 2014, p. 112) that relieves teachers from some duties and prevents them from feeling isolated and bored. the three parts of the questionnaire are followed by demographics questions that inquire about respondents’ sex, teaching experience, the number of student teachers they mentored in the course of the last six years, the type(s) of school they currently work in and about whether they feel successful as mentor teachers. additionally, as all of the questions in the main part of the questionnaire are close-ended, three open-ended, non-obligatory questions were added. these questions ask teachers if there are any other mentoring-related experiences they want to share and encourage them to leave any comment related to mentoring or the questionnaire they feel like. the language of the questionnaire is english, with the exception of the last question that inquires about the type of school respondents work in. as polish, british, and american educational systems differ considerably and there is no clear one-to-one correspondence of the names of different school types, this question was worded in polish for the sake of simplicity. aleksandra szymańska-tworek10 procedures the questionnaire was distributed through a social networking service, namely facebook, by being placed on the pages of three groups created for and run by in-service teachers of english. these groups serve as a forum for teachers to share ideas, ask and answer questions and, generally, talk about all teaching-related topics. they were chosen for the purpose of this study because they provide access to many teachers of english of different backgrounds from across poland, some of whom may have experience as mentors. the questionnaire was accompanied by a short note which spelled out the criteria that teachers taking part in the study need to meet. these included: 1. being a teacher of english; 2. having at least one student teacher for practicum in the course of the last six years; 3. the practicum included both elements: student teacher observed the lessons and conducted solo teaching. as far as criterion (2) is concerned, it was decided not to collect responses from those teachers who served as mentors more than six years ago because it can be argued that the memories after such a long period of time are less likely to be accurate. teachers who had experience mentoring more than one student teacher were asked to think about the most recent one when answering the questions. the respondents were briefly informed about the aim of the study and assured of their anonymity. results and discussion the results are discussed separately for the three parts of the questionnaire. the statistics for each of these groups of questions are presented in tables 5–7. the original 5-point likert scale, with “i strongly disagree” and “i strongly agree” at the extremes, has been collated into three categories and presented as percentages. cronbach’s alpha calculated for the whole questionnaire (the three groups of questions) amounts to 0.92, which renders the questionnaire internally consistent. although the questionnaire included some open-ended questions, these were not obligatory and no relevant responses were recorded. mentoring as professional development for mentors 11 learning from the mentoring process the first part of the questionnaire, presented in table 5, was designed to inquire whether mentoring teachers develop professionally through the process of mentoring. table 5 percentages, mean and standard deviation for statements concerning development from mentoring learning from the mentoring process 1 2 3 4 5 mean sd 1. i feel that being a mentor has increased my reflective skills. 2.8% 0.0% 8.3% 44.4% 44.4% 4.28 0.84 2. having a student teacher observe my classes has made me reflect on whether what i do in the classroom is right. 8.3% 5.6% 8.3% 33.3% 44.4% 4.00 1.22 3. observing the lessons run by a student teacher has made me reflect on my own teaching. 5.6% 5.6% 11.1% 30.6% 47.2% 4.08 1.14 4. i feel that being a mentor has increased my enthusiasm for teaching. 8.3% 5.6% 22.2% 38.9% 25.0% 3.67 1.15 5. i feel that being a mentor has increased my confidence as a teacher. 11.1% 5.6% 13.9% 27.8% 41.7% 3.83 1.32 6. i feel that being a mentor has increased my commitment to teaching. 11.1% 5.6% 19.4% 33.3% 30.6% 3.67 1.27 7. i feel that being a mentor has increased my motivation to improve my english. 27.8% 22.2% 33.3% 8.3% 8.3% 2.47 1.21 8. i feel that being a mentor has increased my willingness to selfdevelop. 8.3% 5.6% 19.4% 38.9% 27.8% 3.72 1.17 9. i feel that being a mentor has improved my communication skills. 11.1% 11.1% 36.1% 27.8% 13.9% 3.22 1.16 10. i feel that being a mentor has improved my leadership skills. 8.3% 2.8% 13.9% 36.1% 38.9% 3.94 1.18 total 3.69 1.17 as many as 88.8% of the teachers stated that being a mentor increased their reflective skills, while 2.8% expressed the opposite view (m = 4.28). 77.7% of the respondents declared that being observed by the student teacher made them reflect on whether what they do in the classroom is right and 13.9% did not agree (m = 4.00). 77.8% of the respondents stated that observing the lessons run by a student teacher made them reflect on their own teaching; 11.2% provided aleksandra szymańska-tworek12 a negative answer (m = 4.08). these results show that the teachers feel very strongly that being a mentor enhanced their reflective abilities. interestingly, it is both, observing and being observed while teaching that seem to involve mentors in reflective thought. 63.9% of the respondents claimed that being a mentor increased their enthusiasm for teaching, while 13.9% did not agree (m = 3.67). 69.5% of the informants felt that being a mentor increased their confidence as a teacher; 16.7% articulated the opposite view (m = 3.83). 63.9% of the informants felt that being a mentor increased their commitment to teaching; 16.7% provided a negative answer (m = 3.67). 66.7% of the respondents stated that being a mentor increased their willingness to self-develop, with 13.9% taking the opposite point of view (m = 3.72). 75% of the respondents declared that being a mentor improved their leadership skills; 11.1% did not agree (m = 3.94). a statement that obtained a relatively moderate response inquired if being a mentor helped the respondents improve their communication skills—41.7% of the respondents answered affirmatively, 22.2% did not agree, while 36.1% had no opinion (m = 3.22). the responses to the above statements indicate that most respondents feel that being a mentor helped them gain professionally by improving their leadership skills, as well as increasing their confidence, willingness to self-develop, enthusiasm for teaching and commitment to teaching. the statement that was assigned a relatively low mean rating asked if respondents feel that being a mentor increased their motivation to improve their english, to which only 16.6% answered affirmatively, 50% responded negatively and 33.3% had no opinion (m = 2.47). respondents do not feel that being a mentor had any impact on their motivation to improve their english language skills. summing up the results of this part of the questionnaire, mentor teachers do seem to develop through the process of mentoring. the statements that inquire about reflection were assigned mean ratings that equal to or are higher than 4.00. it can be stated then that the development of reflective skills is one of the most considerable benefits that teachers derive from their roles as mentors. the experience of mentoring also seems to contribute to the enhancement of teachers’ leadership skills, confidence, willingness to self-develop, enthusiasm for teaching, commitment to teaching and communication skills (the last one to a lesser extent though). what seems to be unaffected by the presence of student teacher is teachers’ motivation to improve their english. mentoring as professional development for mentors 13 learning from student teachers the second part of the questionnaire, presented in table 6, was intended to examine if mentor teachers develop by learning directly from mentees. table 6 percentages, mean and standard deviation for statements concerning learning from student teachers learning from student teachers 1 2 3 4 5 mean sd 1. student teacher inspired me with some new lesson ideas or interesting teaching methods. 8.3% 13.9% 22.2% 33.3% 22.2% 3.47 1.21 2. i learnt from the student teacher about current trends in education, recent literature or recently recommended teaching methods. 36.1% 30.6% 13.9% 16.7% 2.8% 2.19 1.17 3. i learnt some english from the student teacher (words, phrases, pronunciation of some words, grammar point, etc). 47.2% 22.2% 22.2% 8.3% 0.0% 1.92 1.01 4. i learnt something from student teacher’s it skills. 19.4% 16.7% 11.1% 25.0% 27.8% 3.25 1.50 5. having a student teacher was instructive and/or inspirational for me. 11.1% 11.1% 19.4% 33.3% 25.0% 3.50 1.28 6. having a student teacher has made me get to know/understand my pupils better. 36.1% 27.8% 19.4% 13.9% 2.8% 2.19 1.15 7. having a student teacher has helped me have better rapport with my pupils. 41.7% 19.4% 33.3% 5.6% 0.0% 2.03 0.99 total 2.65 1.19 only three statements were assigned a mean rating higher than 3.00 and these are as follows. 58.3% of the respondents stated that having a student teacher in the classroom was instructive and/or inspirational for them, while 22.2% did not agree (m = 3.50). 55.5% of the informants declared that the student teacher inspired them with some new lesson ideas or teaching methods, with 22.2% taking the opposite point of view (m = 3.47). 52.8% of the teachers declared that they learnt something from the student teacher’s it skills and 36.1% articulated the opposite view (m = 3.25). these results show that most of the respondents appreciate student teachers’ digital literacy and recognize cooperation with student teacher as inspirational. the remaining questions were assigned relatively low mean ratings. 19.5% of the respondents stated that they learnt from the student teacher about curaleksandra szymańska-tworek14 rent trends in education, recent literature or recently recommended teaching methods, while 66.7% provided a negative answer (m = 2.19). 16.7% of the informants felt that cooperation with the student teacher let them understand/ get to know their pupils better, while 63.9% were of the opposite opinion (m = 2.19). 5.6% of the respondents declared that the presence of the student teacher helped them have better rapport with their pupils and 61.1% did not agree (m = 2.03). most of the respondents do not feel they made use of the student teachers’ knowledge of current trends in education. it also seems that the presence of the mentee is of little consequence to the rapport between the teacher and pupils. the statement that was assigned the lowest mean rating asked respondents whether they learnt some english (words, phrases, pronunciation of some words, grammar points, etc.) from student teacher—8.3% of the respondents answered this question affirmatively and as many as 69.4% responded negatively (m = 1.92). the teachers decisively reject the idea that their english improved thanks to student teachers. this corresponds to one of the statements in the previous group of questions that asked whether being a mentor increased the teachers’ motivation to improve their english—the respondents declared it did not. summing up the results of this part of the questionnaire, the respondents do not feel they learn directly from the student teachers. mentoring teachers do not relate to questions that asked whether cooperation with the student teachers improved their english language skills or increased their knowledge of trends in education. an important exception is digital competence—most respondents state that their computer skills improved thanks to student teachers’ advanced digital literacy. having a student teacher in the classroom seems to hold no significance for the relations between the teacher and pupils. however, most of the respondents acknowledge that interaction with student teacher was inspirational and/or instructive for them. student teacher as a resource the third part of the questionnaire, presented in table 7, was designed to examine if teachers make the most of mentoring by treating student teachers as a “helping hand.” mentoring as professional development for mentors 15 table 7 percentages, mean and standard deviation for statements concerning using student teachers as a resource student teacher as a resource 1 2 3 4 5 mean sd 1. student teacher shared with me some teaching materials or internet websites. 16.7% 30.6% 25.0% 16.7% 11.1% 2.75 1.23 2. the presence of a student teacher made it possible to work with small groups of pupils or individual pupils. 11.1% 25.0% 44.4% 13.9% 5.6% 2.78 1.00 3. having a student teacher made it possible for me to undertake other tasks in the school. 30.6% 33.3% 16.7% 13.9% 5.6% 2.31 1.20 4. for me, having a student teacher was a positive experience. 8.3% 0.0% 8.3% 36.1% 47.2% 4.14 1.13 5. for me, having a student teacher was a nice diversion from the classroom routine. 5.6% 2.8% 2.8% 44.4% 44.4% 4.19 1.02 total 3.23 1.12 27.8% of the respondents admitted that the student teachers shared with them some teaching materials or internet websites, while 47.3% responded to this statement negatively (m = 2.75). 19.5% of the mentoring teachers stated that the presence of the student teacher allowed for the possibility to work with individual pupils or small groups, 36.1% answered this question negatively, while 44.4% had no opinion (m = 2.78). 19.5% of the mentoring teachers declared that the presence of the student teacher made it possible for them to undertake other tasks in the school, while as many as 63.9% expressed the opposite view (m = 2.31). the last two questions were of a more general nature and inquired whether teachers feel that cooperation with a student teacher was a positive experience for them and if it constituted a welcome diversion from the classroom routine. as many as 83.3% of the respondents stated that for them cooperation with student teacher was a positive experience; only 8.3% responded negatively (m = 4.14). the last question of the questionnaire received an even more positive response—88.8% of the participants declared that the presence of the student teacher was a nice diversion from the classroom routine, while only 8.4% articulated the opposite view (m = 4.19). summing up the results of this part of the questionnaire, the respondents do not perceive the presence of the student teacher as “having two more hands, eyes and ears in the class” (jaspers et al., 2014, p. 112), or, in other words, they do not feel that student teachers relieve them from classroom duties. optimistic results were, however, obtained in response to the last two aleksandra szymańska-tworek16 statements—cooperation with a student teacher is recognized as a positive experience and a break from the class routine. this may suggest that although teachers do not treat student teachers as a resource, they appreciate their presence as a source of company and diversion. limitations of the study several limitations of the study should be noted. first, data were gathered from a small number of participants (n = 36), which partly resulted from the fact that the criteria the respondents had to meet to fill out the questionnaire were quite stringent (see section procedures). second, due to the self-selecting nature of the sample, caution needs to be taken in interpreting the data. inviting people to participate in the study may be open to bias as a given topic may draw attention of a particular group of respondents. third, the perceptional and attitudinal nature of this study means that the data only reflect self-reported perceptions of mentoring teachers rather than hard facts. further, the study provides only quantitative data. integrating both quantitative and qualitative methods based on interviews, narratives, and classroom observations could greatly enhance the trustworthiness and reliability of the findings. taking all of the above into account, it can be stated that the study may lack universal validity and should therefore be considered as suggestive rather than conclusive. that said, it is also believed the results are still interesting in the sense that certain patterns emerged regardless of the limitations. it is hoped that the findings may serve as pointers for future research. conclusion the aim of the study presented in this paper was to identify the ways in which mentors develop professionally through mentoring. the results show that they gain professionally primarily through the process of mentoring—being a mentor enhances their capacity for self-reflection and positively impacts their leadership skills, confidence as a teacher, willingness to self-develop, enthusiasm for teaching and commitment to teaching. mentor teachers do not seem to benefit professionally through direct interaction with student teachers, with the exception of digital competence—most of the respondents state that their computer-related skills improved thanks to the student teachers’ advanced mentoring as professional development for mentors 17 digital literacy. not insignificantly though, teachers recognize the presence of the mentee as inspirational and instructive. the secondary aim of the study was to examine whether teachers make mentoring work to their advantage by using student teachers as a resource. it seems that the respondents do not perceive student teachers as a “helping hand” and do not feel that student teachers relieve them from classroom duties. however, having a student teacher in the classroom is recognized as a positive experience and a break from the class routine. looking forward, future research could revisit these findings and probe further into teachers’ minds. for example, it would be interesting to examine if mentor teachers actually recognize mentoring as a form of professional development and whether they entertain the possibility that student teachers may be in a position to teach them something. as observed by ulvik and langørgen (2012, p. 53), experienced teachers often “do not believe they have anything to learn from teachers who lack experience and knowledge of the context,” although there is evidence (as discussed in the theoretical part of this paper) that student teachers may have a lot to offer. also, it would be interesting to examine the attitudes towards mentoring held by teachers who have taken part in a mentor training program (a type of formal training for in-service teachers designed to prepare them for the role of a mentor). programs of this kind are offered to teachers in some countries (e.g., the uk, the usa, australia, the netherlands) and as many as 80% of the teacher respondents in a study by siek-piskozub and jankowska (2015, p. 217) declared to be interested in such training. it can be speculated that raising teachers’ awareness of how they might use mentoring as a learning opportunity could help them approach their role as mentors more consciously. references ambrosetti, a. 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(2016). the dark side of mentoring on pre-service language teachers’ identity formation. teaching and teacher education, 55, 188–197. mentoring as professional development for mentors 19 appendix questionnaire learning from the mentoring process 1. i feel that being a mentor has increased my ref lective skills. i strongly disagree 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 i strongly agree 2. having a student teacher observe my classes has made me ref lect on whether what i do in the classroom is right. i strongly disagree 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 i strongly agree 3. observing the lessons run by a student teacher has made me ref lect on my own teaching. i strongly disagree 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 i strongly agree 4. i feel that being a mentor has increased my enthusiasm for teaching. i strongly disagree 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 i strongly agree 5. i feel that being a mentor has increased my confidence as a teacher. i strongly disagree 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 i strongly agree 6. i feel that being a mentor has increased my commitment to teaching. i strongly disagree 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 i strongly agree 7. i feel that being a mentor has increased my motivation to improve my english. i strongly disagree 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 i strongly agree 8. i feel that being a mentor has increased my willingness to self-develop. i strongly disagree 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 i strongly agree 9. i feel that being a mentor has improved my communication skills. i strongly disagree 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 i strongly agree 10. i feel that being a mentor has improved my leadership skills. i strongly disagree 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 i strongly agree learning from student teachers 1. student teacher inspired me with some new lesson ideas or interesting teaching methods. i strongly disagree 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 i strongly agree 2. i learnt from the student teacher about current trends in education, recent literature or recently recommended teaching methods. i strongly disagree 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 i strongly agree 3. i learnt some english from the student teacher (words, phrases, pronunciation of some words, grammar point, etc.). i strongly disagree 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 i strongly agree aleksandra szymańska-tworek20 4. i learnt something from student teacher’s it skills. i strongly disagree 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 i strongly agree 5. having a student teacher was instructive and/or inspirational for me. i strongly disagree 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 i strongly agree 6. having a student teacher has made me get to know/understand my pupils better. i strongly disagree 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 i strongly agree 7. having a student teacher has helped me have better rapport with my pupils. i strongly disagree 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 i strongly agree student teacher as a resource 1. student teacher shared with me some teaching materials or internet websites. i strongly disagree 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 i strongly agree 2. the presence of a student teacher made it possible to work with small groups of pupils or individual pupils. i strongly disagree 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 i strongly agree 3. having a student teacher made it possible for me to undertake other tasks in the school. i strongly disagree 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 i strongly agree 4. for me, having a student teacher was a positive experience. i strongly disagree 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 i strongly agree 5. for me, having a student teacher was a nice diversion from the classroom routine. i strongly disagree 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 i strongly agree if there are any other things that you learnt in the course of mentoring, please, name them here. if there are any other things student teacher helped you with, please, name them here. do you feel successful in your role of a mentor? a) yes b) no c) i don’t know/it’s difficult to say if you have any comments, please, leave them here. what is your sex? a) female b) male what is your teaching experience? – less than 5 years – 5–9 years mentoring as professional development for mentors 21 – 10–14 years – 15–19 years – 20–24 years – 25–29 years – 30–34 years – 35–39 years – 40 or more how many student teachers did you have in your classroom in the last 6 years? who were only observing: – 0 – 1–2 – 3–4 – 5–6 – 7–8 – 9–10 – more than 10 who were only teaching: – 0 – 1–2 – 3–4 – 5–6 – 7–8 – 9-10 – more than 10 who were both observing and teaching: – 0 – 1–2 – 3–4 – 5–6 – 7–8 – 9–10 – more than 10 w jakiej szkole pani/pan pracuje? (można wybrać więcej niż jedną odpowiedź) a) szkoła podstawowa b) liceum ogólnokształcące c) technikum d) szkoła branżowa e) inne___________ aleksandra szymańska-tworek22 aleksandra szymańska-tworek berufliche entwicklung des lehrpraktikumsbetreuers z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g der vorliegende beitrag befasst sich mit dem lehrpraktikum in der schule und im einzelnen mit der betreuung eines praktikanten durch den lehrer (auch lehrpraktikumsbetreuer bzw. mentor genannt). es wurde eine reihe von studien veröffentlicht, die sich der entwicklung des praktikanten widmen, der sich während des lehrpraktikums ein strukturiertes wissen über die schulische realität, neue fähigkeiten und eine neue perspektive auf den lehrprozess aneignet. die in dem vorliegenden beitrag aufgeführten untersuchungen zeigen jedoch, dass die praktikumserfahrung nicht nur die entwicklung des praktikanten, sondern auch die seines betreuers-mentors beeinf lusst. der artikel befasst sich hauptsächlich mit der frage, ob und inwiefern die mentorenfunktion dem praktikumsbetreuer zu seiner eigenen beruf lichen entwicklung verhelfen kann. die meisten untersuchungen zu diesem thema wurden in angelsächsischen ländern durchgeführt. es mangelt allerdings an entsprechenden untersuchungen unter den polnischen lehrern. die im beitrag besprochene untersuchung stellt einen versuch dar, diese lücke zu schließen. die probanden sind polnische englischlehrer, die in den letzten sechs jahren als praktikumsbetreuer für mindestens einen praktikanten fungiert haben. es wurden zwei aspekte behandelt: (1) ob sich die praktikumsbetreuer durch die mentorenfunktion weiterentwickeln, sowie (2) ob die praktikumsbetreuer von den praktikanten lernen können. als untersuchungsinstrument wurde ein fragebogen gewählt. die ergebnisse der umfrage zeigten, dass sich die praktikumsbetreuer vor allem durch die mentorenfunktion weiterentwickeln – die betreuung eines praktikanten erhöht ihre fähigkeit zur (selbst-)ref lexion und wirkt sich positiv auf ihre führungsqualitäten, selbstvertrauen, motivation zur weiterentwicklung, enthusiasmus für das unterrichten und berufsidentität aus. die befragten erklären jedoch, dass sie nicht direkt von den praktikanten lernen, obwohl sie die möglichkeit der zusammenarbeit mit einem praktikanten als eine positive und inspirierende erfahrung betrachten. schlüsselwörter: englischlehrer, lehrpraktikumsbetreuer, mentor, beruf liche entwicklung des mentors theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (1), 2023, pp. 1/23 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11512 zuzana nováková https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1475-6987 university of prešov in prešov, slovakia making students responsible for grammar learning: a report on a learner-centered technique aimed at accuracy a b s t r a c t learner-centered approaches to learning and teaching alongside education for sustainable development (esd) emphasize the education of engaged and active global citizens (unesco, 2017). the development of students’ ref lective skills and metacognitive strategies is the center of this study that aims at investigating the learner language of a group of adult learners at an upper-intermediate level. it sets out to investigate to what extent learners are able to notice and correct their errors after ref lecting on their spoken production. moreover, it seeks to examine the students’ perception of their self-ref lection and their attitude towards using speaking tasks for grammar learning. comparative error analysis showed that the participants were able to amend 34.6% of total errors. these were made mainly in noun phrases (30% of total errors in task 1 and 31% in task 3) and verb phrases (40% of total errors in both tasks). although no general conclusions could be drawn, the results seem to suggest that after critical, evidence-based ref lection, the participants were able to notice and correct some errors, namely, in determination and the use of the past simple. the results of the survey analysis showed that all participants reported on an improved awareness of the gaps in their interlanguage, and all of them considered speaking tasks beneficial to grammar development. the study indicates that carefully planned, repeated speaking tasks might be helpful for learners’ language processing, consolidation of their grammatical knowledge and the improvement of their ref lection skills and metacognitive strategies. keywords: grammar, error analysis, repeated speaking tasks, learner autonomy, metacognitive strategies, learner-centered approach https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11512 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1475-6987 learner-centered approach to teaching “at the core of present-day thinking on language teaching lies the idea of learner-centeredness, which is broadly understood […] as a focus on learners and learning in language and teaching, as opposed to a focus on language and instruction” (benson, 2012, p. 30). the idea of making students actively involved in the learning process and be responsible for their own learning is not new. it started in the 1970s and 1980s (nunan, as cited in benson, 2012, p. 31) and was influenced by the development of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics (ellis, as cited in benson 2012, p. 31). benson (2012) points out that the term learner-centered approach to teaching covers “humanistic education and communicative language teaching” (p. 31). the latter approach with its focus on learners and their communicative competence is considered a norm in the field of language teaching (straková, 2013). educators are well aware of the fact that learners with different learning styles, educational needs, beliefs about and attitudes towards learning grasp concepts most effectively if they are actively engaged in a learning process. thus, teachers try to combine different methods to create favorable conditions for learning and teaching. taking into consideration individual learning styles and also a local and broad socio-cultural context, they make an effort to select the most optimal method of teaching, usually by applying an eclectic approach. in addition to that, they make an effort to help learners develop their autonomy, which will help them function independently in real-life situations. the task is by no means easy and requires a teacher’s mastery, knowledge, experience and continuous professional development, but it is definitely worth the effort. the significance of autonomous learners who actively participate in the learning process is also emphasized and broadly discussed by unesco (2017) within its agenda for sustainable education supporting and promoting learnercentered approaches that “require learners to reflect on their knowledge and learning processes to manage and monitor them” (p. 55). alongside modern pedagogy, education for sustainable development highlights the development of knowledge and competencies that would enhance learners’ development as responsible individuals, able to make informed choices and decisions in favor of sustainable progress (unesco, 2017). teachers can encourage learners’ autonomy and the development of transferable skills also in the context of english language learning and teaching. one way of doing it is to promote the development of learners’ strategies, that is, “specific actions taken by the learner to make learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self-directed, more effective, and more transferable to new situations” (oxford, 1990, p. 8). influenced by the development in cognitive psychology, self-regulated theory and autonomy concept (oxford, 2011, tapsla.11512 p. 2/23 z. nováková pp. 168–169), strategy theory and research started to influence the pedagogy of language teaching in the 1990s (pp. 168–169) and they have been continuing ever since then. although strategy theory and research are still in progress and widely debated by experts (griffiths & oxford, 2013), their impact on language pedagogy seems undeniable. teachers worldwide appear to be encouraged to enhance students’ strategy development (oxford, 2017) for the achievement of learners’ goals and success in language learning. among other strategies, metacognitive strategies play a significant role in the learner-centered method. they help learners arrange and plan their learning as well as evaluate it (oxford, 2017; straková, 2013). these strategies can be developed by creating opportunities and tasks to practice them. they are part of higher-order thinking skills (centre for excellence in learning and teaching (celt, n.d.) that are necessary for building up critical thinking competency and for promoting learner autonomy. this paper reports on a technique promoting the development of students’ metacognitive strategies in a grammar course. it has always been the author’s passion to promote deep learning, learners’ self-regulation and autonomy in her teaching practice. a grammar course created an opportunity for the enhancement of self-monitoring and self-correction within the context of grammar learning and teaching. the development of these strategies as well as students’ self-reflection was encouraged in the task focused on language use because such a task enabled learners to apply learnt grammar rules and concepts in a situation simulating a real-life scenario. a grammar teaching technique the role of grammar instruction in english language teaching has been extensively discussed for decades (thornbury, 2005; brown, 2007). currently, researchers and teachers are aware of the significance of explicit and implicit instruction (thornbury, 2005; fotos & ellis, as cited in brown, 2007; ellis, 2009; oxford, 2017). practitioners tend to select and combine various methods lying on the continuum between the explicit and implicit focus on form, taking into consideration learners’ styles and broader situational and cultural contexts (thornbury, 2005; ellis, 2006; oxford, 2017). based on current research (thornbury, 2019; ellis, 2006) and the author’s personal experience in teaching grammar to adults, the combination of explicit and implicit instruction seems to be an effective way of developing students’ grammar. an intensive grammar course with prevailing explicit instruction (both deductive and inductive) and controlled or semi-controlled practice was enriched with short communicative tasks. these were performed in class and outside it and thus provided the learners with more opportunities for productive language practice. communicative speaking tasks enabled them to use language in a new making students responsible for grammar learning:… tapsla.11512 p. 3/23 situation. moreover, they created space for promoting the development of the students’ metacognitive strategies. short speaking tasks were designed to induce the linguistic forms attended to in class, and they were done during the lessons. however, one major speaking activity, a repeated task, was performed outside class. it was selected because of being cognitively less demanding and enabling learners to focus more on the structures used (bygate, 1998; thornbury, 2005; kim & tracy-ventura, 2012). the students did not need to go over the formulation process again (levelt, 1995). the students’ output served as input since they reflected on their production and noticed appropriate and inappropriate use of grammatical forms. this conscious attention to the input activating the students’ explicit knowledge of grammar made them compare their performance with their interlanguage (truman, 2008). the cognitive comparison helped them notice the gaps in their performance, and they were encouraged to make necessary modifications to it. needless to say, learners can notice only those mistakes that are “within their ability” (truman, 2008, p. 265); and their ability to self-correct is determined by their knowledge and ability to self-monitor and self-regulate their learning (truman, 2008). during the repeated speaking task, self-monitoring and self-reflection were encouraged. reflection enabled the learners to think about their previous experiences and search for insights about themselves, “their behaviours, values or knowledge gained” (desjarlais & smith, n.d., p. 3). it also helped them become more aware of their interlanguage and the gaps in it. to account for the mistakes beyond the learner’s knowledge (truman, 2008), individualized feedback was provided to the students by their instructor. the analysis of the students’ language made it possible for the instructor to identify students’ errors and focus on the most problematic areas more effectively. it also enabled the instructor to suggest treatment tailored to a particular student’s needs. being inspired to incorporate this kind of task into grammar lessons by the cambridge assessment english webinar (cambridge english, 2018), i was interested in investigating to what extent the students are able to correct and self-assess their oral production in terms of accuracy. moreover, i sought to examine the students’ perception of self-reflection and their opinion on using speaking tasks for grammar development. the purpose of the study the purpose of the study was to find out to what extent the students were able to self-correct their oral production in terms of accuracy. it also examined the learners’ perception of self-reflection and their opinion on using speaking tasks for grammar development. tapsla.11512 p. 4/23 z. nováková based on the primary and secondary aim, the following research questions were formulated: question 1: to what extent are students able to self-correct errors in their oral production? question 2: what is the students’ perception of self-reflection and self-correction? question 3: what is the students’ attitude towards speaking tasks used for grammar development? methodology to answer the research questions, qualitative and quantitative methods were employed. a method of error analysis (ellis & burkhuizen, 2005) was used to address the primary research question. it was employed to identify and categorize the students’ errors in a repeated speaking task. the repeated speaking task consisted of three parts. part 1 (task 1) was a short student’s talk that was recorded and submitted following the instructions specified in the procedure section. the second part (task 2) was a short reflection task in which the students were asked to listen to their talks, evaluate them in terms of accuracy as well as other aspect of speaking skills they themselves considered important and to set personal goals for the improvement of their talks. the students’ reflective tasks were also recorded and submitted. the last part (task 3) was a recording of an improved talk. task 3 differed from task 1 in that it included the students’ improvements of their talks. the identified and categorized errors in task 1 and task 3 were quantified and compared. the comparative analysis was used to determine the percentage of the errors the students were able to notice and self-correct. following the procedure proposed by corder (1975) and elaborated by ellis and burkhuizen (2005), several steps were taken to analyze learner language. first, the recorded talks task 1 (the first narrative) and task 3 (an improved narrative) were transcribed. an as-unit (analysis of speech unit) proposed by foster et al. (2000) was used as a basic unit for analyzing students’ output. foster et al. (2000, p. 365) define an as-unit “as a single speaker’s utterance consisting of an independent clause or sub-clausal unit, together with any subordinate clause(s) associated with either.” then students’ errors were identified and reconstructed, and a record of them was kept. in the third stage, they were categorized based on linguistic and surface structure taxonomy proposed by ellis and burkhuizen (2005). the linguistic description of errors was based on grammatical categories elaborated by quirk et al. (1985). the surface structure taxonomy comprised the following categories: omission, selection, addition, and misordering (corder, 1975). it is based on the four kinds of errors that learners making students responsible for grammar learning:… tapsla.11512 p. 5/23 tend to make when producing target forms (ellis & burkhuizen, 2005). they may add an unnecessary form, omit a certain element, select an inappropriate form or put words into incorrect order (ellis & burkhuizen, 2005). although it is beyond the scope of grammar, the category of a mispronounced word was also used to identify pronunciation inaccuracies. these were included in the analysis due to their significance for comprehensibility of the students’ short talks and due to the fact that students themselves regarded them to be of great importance. table 1 shows a sample account of an error identified in the excerpt from the narrative produced by s8: 2 |since there are not direct flights from slovakia :: we had to fly from vienna to amsterdam and from there to st. petersburg. | 3 |on the way back to amsterdam after spending 11 days there :: beautiful city by the way, :: there was a terrible storm| table 1 a sample record of an error error reconstruction surface structure description linguistic description …beautiful city… …a beautiful city … omission noun phrase: determiners, the indefinite article – a to measure the length of learners’ narratives, the number of words and as-units was calculated using ms word functions and a manual calculation. the results and findings of the qualitative and quantitative error analysis are presented, interpreted and discussed in the respective sections of this paper. a non-standardized questionnaire was employed to tackle the secondary research questions. to examine the students’ perception of speaking tasks used for consolidating their grammar, an anonymous end-of-the term survey was conducted at the last lesson. the survey consisted of 14 questions, the first five of which aimed at the general evaluation of the course and the remaining nine focused on the assessment of the technique employed at grammar lessons, namely, the use of a repeated speaking task promoting self-reflection and self-monitoring (see appendix 1). questions 6 and 7 paid attention to the usefulness of the speaking tasks for improving grammar. questions 8–11 investigated students’ perception of reflection, and questions 12–14 concentrated on students’ opinions on using productive skills for developing their grammar. all nine questions in the second part of the survey were closed ones. questions 7, 11, 12, and 14 required respondents to choose from likert-scale items while questions 8, 9, 10, and 13 were yes/no questions. question 6 was a yes/no question requiring a short explanation. the results of the quantitative analysis tapsla.11512 p. 6/23 z. nováková of the survey are presented in graphs and discussed in the section below. for the purpose of this study, only the selected items were analyzed. participants the participants of the study were first-year undergraduates undertaking an english language teacher-training program. the study group was multinational with slovak and ukrainian students and one polish participant. nineteen students in the group had different linguistic backgrounds and various language levels (ranging from a lower to higher upper-intermediate level). the talks of two students were excluded from the analysis because one student’s repeated task was completely different, and the other learner was a student with special educational needs. seventeen samples of learner language were analyzed. however, 18 learners submitted the questionnaire. procedure the study was carried out at a higher education institution during one term. as a compulsory part of their study program, the students took a grammar course. they had a ninety-minute class once a week. during 13 weeks, they received explicit instruction that was combined with short speaking tasks. the practice of target language structures proceeded from traditional, controlled exercises to free productive tasks. doing the tasks, the students had the opportunity to test their hypotheses about language structures (ellis, 2004). mini speaking tasks were performed in class, except for one task that was done outside of class. the tasks in class were monitored and corrective feedback was provided to the students depending on the teacher’s capacity. the repeated speaking task performed at home was an extensive task consisting of several stages. it was done outside of class to engage the students in the process of reflection and self-evaluation without the instructor’s intervention. at the very beginning of the course, the students and the teacher agreed on the components of a speaking performance that they considered crucial for successful communication. among them, the following components were identified: accuracy (grammar and vocabulary), pronunciation, and organization. the repeated speaking task was administered in moodle, an educational platform widely used at a given institution. the task itself consisted of three parts. firstly, the students were asked to tell an anecdote that was either invented or true. they could choose from a list of topics or they could come up with their own story. the speaking task targeted the usage of past tenses. the instructions included a simple story plan to be elaborated on by the learners. making students responsible for grammar learning:… tapsla.11512 p. 7/23 the first stage was set in the third week of the course and the learners had a week to submit the story. they were instructed to plan a short talk (maximum two minutes), record it using their mobile phones and upload it to moodle. during the planning stage, they could make notes but they were asked not to write down the whole sentences. nonetheless, it was beyond the researcher’s control how they fulfilled the task. after a two-week break, they moved through stages 2 and 3. in the second stage, they were asked to listen to their story, reflect on it and make notes about how it went. they were supposed to focus mainly on the accuracy in their output as well as on any other components of the speaking production they chose to focus on. after that, they were asked to set their personal goals for improvement. their reflection was also recorded and uploaded to moodle. in the final stage of the task, the learners were instructed to record their improved talks paying attention to accuracy and the selected component of the speaking production. the second and third stages were completed in the course of two weeks. the submitted assignments were listened to, and the students were provided with explicit feedback on inaccuracies that occurred in their improved talk as well as on the completion of their personal goals. in addition to that, the analysis of students’ language performance in terms of errors was carried out. the analysis with individualized feedback served pedagogical purposes and was meant to help students raise awareness of their interlanguage. self-reflection helped learners critically evaluate their short speeches based on evidence (provided by audio recordings) and gave them opportunities to get to know their strengths and weaknesses in speaking english. it also made them responsible for their learning and empowered them to set their own personal goals for improving their speaking performance. the samples of learner language were produced by upper-intermediate learners of english not sharing the same first language. they had the form of an oral planned narrative. the two samples are referred to as task 1 and task 3 in this paper. task 1 was performed first and task 3, an improved talk, was performed after the students’ reflection (task 2). results of the error analysis the following part of the paper describes the results of the error analysis. it begins with looking at the measures of length, and it goes on to present the analysis results based on the surface structure and linguistic description. as table 2 shows, the length of the students’ talks varied. the two narratives produced by two different speakers (s15 and s8) contained 24 as-units. the shortest narrative comprised 5 as-units, and it was produced by one speaker (s16). on average, the learners’ spoken turns consisted of 14 as-units tapsla.11512 p. 8/23 z. nováková and 221 words in task 1. while in task 3, they were more concise (on average 13 as-units and 213 words). in the first task, 44% of total as-units were erroneous, while in the repeated task 40% contained errors. it seems that the learners’ conscious effort to attend to inaccuracies in their talks and to think about their own speaking performance relying on the clear evidence of their speech (in the reflection task) as well as reduced pressure of a repeated task helped them improve their accuracy only to a small extent. table 2 task 1 and task 3 – number of as-units id words t 1 as-units t 1 as-units with errors t 1 words t 3 as-units t 3 as-units with errors t3 total 3217 221 98 3156 213 86 average 201 14 6 197 13 5 the total number of errors identified and reconstructed in task 1 and 3 is displayed in figure 1. as can be seen from it, the number of identified errors has fallen by almost 40%. the reduction might have been caused by a combination of factors. doing the repeated task, the students slightly reformulated their narratives and made them shorter. moreover, they were able to notice and to correct some of their inaccuracies. figure 1. total number of errors as far as error categories are concerned, as given above, errors were analyzed according to the surface structure and linguistic description. during the process of coding, a wider context of errors was taken into consideration, which making students responsible for grammar learning:… tapsla.11512 p. 9/23 helped the researcher reconstruct utterances. an account of errors identified according to the surface structure and their breakdown is shown in figure 2 which compares task 1 and task 3. figure 2. surface structure description of errors it can be seen from the data in the graph that students most frequently modified a target form by selecting an inappropriate structure. this type of error accounts for 56.2% of total errors in task 1 and 62.4% of total errors in task 3. on the other hand, they seemed to have the least difficulty with appropriate word order. such a classification of errors is superficial and does not reveal much about the nature of errors (corder, 1975); however, a more detailed linguistic description of errors revealed the problematic areas discussed in the section below. within the context of the narrative, the following broad categories of errors were identified: an adjective phrase, an adverb phrase, a noun phrase, a verb phrase, a prepositional phrase; a simple, complex, compound sentence; a nonfinite clause and irregular sentences. these categories were further broken down according to grammatical categories that learners failed to produce appropriately. due to the complexity of errors made, certain broader categories will be dealt with separately and more detailed attention will be paid to the most frequent errors. figure 3 compares the frequency of errors in task 1 and task 3 according to the linguistic description. it can be seen from the graph below that erroneous noun phrases and verb phrases were the most frequent in both tasks. inaccurate verb phrases accounted for over 40% of total errors in task 1 and 3 and inaccurate noun phrases accounted for over 30% of total errors in task 1 and 31% in task 3. another area that seemed problematic for the students was tapsla.11512 p. 10/23 z. nováková related to complex sentences and wrongly used prepositions. given the nature of the speaking task, it seems natural that students made errors in noun and verb phrases bearing the main meaning of utterances. figure 3. breakdown of errors according to linguistic description if we now turn to errors in noun phrases, we can see from table 3 that students made the most errors in determination in both tasks. table 3 linguistic description of errors – noun phrases linguistic description of errors – noun phrase task 1 task 3 noun phrase: determiner (which) 1 noun phrase: determiners, the definite article – the 17 8 noun phrase: determiners, the indefinite article – a 12 8 noun phrase: determiners, the indefinite article – an 1 noun phrase: determiners, the zero article 7 4 noun phrase: determiner (possessive) 1 noun phrase: head (noun) 5 3 noun phrase: head (pronoun) 3 2 noun phrase: modifier (adjective) 2 1 noun phrase: postmodifier 1 grand total 48 28 making students responsible for grammar learning:… tapsla.11512 p. 11/23 a more detailed account of errors (table 3a) revealed that the participants either omitted articles (the definite or the indefinite one), or they selected an inappropriate one. in four cases, they added the definite or indefinite article in a noun phrase where the zero one should have been used. the comparison of task 1 and task 3 indicates that the number of errors in task 3 decreased. the account of corrected errors showed that the learners were able to identify and to correct some wrong usage of articles. table 3a errors in noun phrases – a detailed account linguistic description of errors – noun phrase task 1 task 3 noun phrase: determiner (which) 1 selection 1 noun phrase: determiners, the definite article – the 17 8 omission 15 7 selection 2 1 noun phrase: determiners, the indefinite article – a 12 8 omission 11 7 selection 1 1 noun phrase: determiners, the indefinite article – an 1 selection 1 noun phrase: determiners, the zero article 7 4 addition 4 1 omission 1 selection 3 2 concerning verb phrases, the types of errors are shown in table 4. among the most common errors were errors in tense usage, more precisely in the past simple. there were some incorrect past perfect forms too, but these were much less frequent. the second area that appeared to be problematic was the use of inappropriate verbs to express a particular idea. this means that the learners used an appropriate verb form of an inappropriate verb, or they failed to express their idea fully by omitting the object of a transitive verb. among other errors were faulty uses of infinitives, non-finite verb phrases, modal verbs, and phrasal verbs. tapsla.11512 p. 12/23 z. nováková table 4 linguistic description of errors – verb phrases verb phrase task 1 task 3 verb phrase: tense, future seen from the past 1 verb phrase: infinitive 1 1 verb phrase: non-finite verb form, infinitive 1 verb phrase: non-finite verb form, infinitive (transitive verb) 1 2 verb phrase: non-finite verb form, negative infinitive 1 verb phrase: non-finite, infinitive 1 1 verb phrase: non-finite, the -ing participle 1 verb phrase: non-finite, compound, the past participle 1 1 verb phrase: past simple, modal verb (ability) 1 2 verb phrase: past simple, modal verb (duty) 1 verb phrase: past simple, regular verb 4 2 verb phrase: phrasal verb 2 verb phrase: tense, past perfect, irregular verb 1 verb phrase: tense, past perfect, regular verb 1 1 verb phrase: tense, past simple, irregular verb 15 14 verb phrase: tense, past simple, modal verb 1 verb phrase: tense, past simple, regular verb 16 7 verb phrase: tense, present simple 2 1 verb phrase: transitive verb 3 3 verb phrase: irregular verb 9 4 total 64 39 the last category to be dealt with in this paper is errors that learners made when producing complex sentences. the errors are summarized in table 5. the data below show that errors related to indirect questions and speech were the most frequent ones. these were followed by adverbial if-clauses (conditional clauses) as well as clauses of purpose and wh-clauses. table 5 linguistic description – errors in complex sentences linguistic description task 1 task 3 complex sentence: adverbial if-clauses, present tense 1 1 complex sentence: pseudo-cleft sentence 1 complex sentence: reporting, indirect question 4 2 complex sentence: reporting, indirect speech, backshifting 1 complex sentence: subordinate clause (purpose) 1 1 complex sentence: subordinate clause (wh-clause) 1 complex sentence: subordinator (condition) 1 making students responsible for grammar learning:… tapsla.11512 p. 13/23 comparing task 1 and task 3, data seem to suggest that the students were able to notice and amend some of their own errors. table 6 shows the account of the errors corrected in the repeated task. in total, the participants self-corrected 53 faulty forms (34.6 % of total errors in task 1). they seemed to be well aware of the determination of noun phrases as their self-corrected use of articles accounted for 34% of total corrected errors. they were also able to modify some faulty verb phrases. more precisely, they noticed and modified inappropriately used tenses, namely, the past simple tense. total corrected verb phrases accounted for 20.8% of total corrected errors. table 6 overview of corrected errors in task 3 according to linguistic description results of the quantitative analysis of students’ perception of speaking the results of the survey analysis showed that only 83% of the participants considered the speaking tasks helpful for improving their grammar. three participants did not think that the tasks could be beneficial to their grammar. as figure 4 illustrates, over half of the learners considered the speaking tasks to be either useful (56%) or very useful (11%). one participant thought they were not useful at all, and two participants considered them to be only slightly useful. seventeen percent of the learners took a neutral stance. tapsla.11512 p. 14/23 z. nováková figure 4. question 7 to what extent do you think the speaking tasks were useful? in terms of students’ opinions on self-reflection, figure 5 displays that the majority of them (83%) thought self-reflection helped them become more aware of the language structures they used. seventeen percent did not consider it to be the case. figure 5. question 9 did the reflection on your speaking performance help you become more aware of the grammar structures you use? making students responsible for grammar learning:… tapsla.11512 p. 15/23 nevertheless, all the participants thought that self-reflection made them more aware of the grammar mistakes they make. as figure 6 displays, the majority of them (77%) considered the reflection to be either useful (44%) or very useful (33%). eleven percent of the participants believed that it was only slightly useful, and 11% took a neutral stance. figure 6. question 9 to what extent do you think the reflection task was useful? as for the students’ opinion on using productive skills for developing grammar, all the learners believed that they were beneficial. as can be seen from figure 7.83% regarded them to be useful or very useful. eleven percent of the learners thought they were somewhat useful, and one participant considered them slightly useful. figure 7. question 14 to what extent are speaking and writing tasks useful in developing your grammar? tapsla.11512 p. 16/23 z. nováková discussion as ellis and burkhuizen (2005) highlight, samples of learner language are influenced by many factors, namely, the learner, language, and production. being aware of the multinational character of the group of learners whose samples of language were collected and analyzed, no general conclusions could be drawn. the error analysis served mainly pedagogic purposes and aimed at the identification of structures mastered by the students. the study was designed to determine to what extent the students were able to self-correct their oral production in terms of accuracy. it also investigated the learners’ perception of self-correction and their opinion on the use of speaking tasks for grammar development. although the overall results and findings were not encouraging, the study showed that the learners were able to amend 34.6% of the total errors they made in task 1. within their ability (truman, 2008), they were able to activate the explicit knowledge of some grammar rules and to deal with problems with determination and narrative tenses. nonetheless, more practice and language use are required before their explicit knowledge becomes fully automatized. in addition to that, the participants were provided with the opportunity to reflect on the accuracy of their speaking performance and assess it. the reflection task played a crucial role in the whole process as it helped the students gain insights into their speaking skills. furthermore, it enabled them to think about the content as well as the structure and form of their talk relying on the evidence provided by audio recordings. this experience in self-monitoring and self-correction facilitated the development of the students’ metacognitive strategies. the students’ selection of a speech component they wanted to improve affected their engagement, created a sense of ownership of their learning process and made them responsible for their goal setting. such active involvement of the students in the learning process, activation of their higher-order thinking skills and the shift of responsibility created a unique opportunity for the promotion of the students’ autonomy. autonomous, self-directed and critically thinking learners might apply their skills not only to their grammar and language competence development but also to other areas of their lives. it is believed that more training and experience in developing learner autonomy might enhance the education of actively engaged and responsible citizens of our global world. with respect to the questions related to the students’ perception of reflection and self-correction and their attitude towards speaking tasks used for grammar development, the results seem to be ambiguous. although all of the participants seem to believe that productive tasks are beneficial to the improvement of their grammar, one of them does not consider speaking tasks to be useful at all. further research might shed more light and bring more clarity to this issue. more discussions with students and more experience in self-monitoring and selfmaking students responsible for grammar learning:… tapsla.11512 p. 17/23 evaluating might also help students gain more confidence in these strategies. in addition, improved grammar knowledge could develop the students’ ability to track their mistakes and to deal with them. one of the most encouraging results was that all the participants reported on the improved awareness of their strengths and weaknesses in english language production. this is a crucial step on the journey of improvement. although it is just a small step, regular engagement in a reflective cycle might lead to improved achievement as well as the development of critical thinking that can be applied to other contexts. however, regular practice in a reflection and self-evaluation process is necessary (straková & cimermanová, 2018, p. 4). the results of the analysis also seem to indicate that some students need more practice before mastering narrative tenses. there is also a need for further practice regarding the use of articles in english. and last but not least, more attention should be paid to more complex language structures. different causes of errors, whether they are developmental processes or l1 interference or other ones (ellis & burkhuizen, 2005), and their various levels of significance made the author more confident in the inclusion of productive speaking tasks in grammar lessons. the analysis has also given the author some insight into the learner language of slovak and ukrainian students. speaking tasks intended to help learners notice the gaps in their interlanguage and to promote learner autonomy were also meant to develop their english grammar competence. it appears that the tasks together with provided feedback and students’ own reflection might have an effect on the learners’ grammar. the number of corrected errors seems to suggest that not all learners were able to recognize and correct their errors. the more form-focused instruction and practice is required. nevertheless, speaking tasks including self-reflection will be used by the researcher to provide more opportunities for students’ output and more experience in reflective practice. limitations the major limitation of the study was the size and the multilingual character of the group, which did not allow for drawing general conclusions. the students came from various linguistic backgrounds and did not share the same l1. this affected their performance because, as current research (thornbury, 2019; ortega, 2015) argues, mother tongue affects learners’ second language acquisition, and some mistakes tend to be typical for speakers of specific languages. another weakness of the study is that it was conducted in a mixed-ability class, which might have affected the results of the error analysis. furthermore, the study should have paid more attention to the causes of errors and their evaluation. finally, the employment of other methods aimed at investigating tapsla.11512 p. 18/23 z. nováková students’ attitudes towards speaking tasks and their perception of reflection for grammar development could reveal students’ deeper beliefs and reasons for their responses. conclusion in summary, these findings seem to indicate that learners are able to recognize and correct some of the errors they make. more precisely, they are able to deal with the errors within the scope of their explicit knowledge. a student’s retrieval of a particular grammar rule and its application to a new situation consolidates his or her knowledge and enhances its automatization. in the study, the learners were able to correct the errors related to determination, which operates differently in the students’ l1 languages and the ones in the past simple tense. the results of the study cannot be generalized, however. they appear to show that repeated speaking tasks with reflection and feedback combined with explicit grammar instruction facilitate learners’ awareness of their language as well as appropriate structural forms. moreover, it is the teacher’s belief that such practices could be beneficial for individual language processing and consolidation of the learners’ grammatical knowledge as well as reflective skills and metacognitive strategies. furthermore, the students’ examination of recorded speech provided a perfect opportunity for gaining insight into their own interlanguage. it also enabled them to get to know themselves as foreign language speakers. their engagement in setting goals for improvement made them active participants in the learning process, and the experience they gained strengthened their ability for self-reflection, which is a significant component of key competencies necessary for life. it is believed that with appropriate training, students will be able to transfer the required skills and strategies to other areas of their lives, which might help them become engaged and active global citizens. thus, reflective tasks will be implemented in grammar teaching practice by the researcher. further research could cast more light on the area of learner accuracy development and the role of reflection in it, but it is beyond the scope of this paper. making students responsible for grammar learning:… tapsla.11512 p. 19/23 a p p e n d i x 1 end-of-term questionnaire practical grammar date: dear student, i would like to thank you for your participation in our seminars. thank you for all your input and your presence. i am interested in your opinion about this course as well as your attitude towards the speaking tasks. please answer the questions below, so that i can assess this course. this is an anonymous survey. your feedback is highly appreciated. 1. do you think this course helped you improve your grammar? yes. explain why. no. explain why not. 2. what do you do to improve your grammar? write your answers below: 3. do you think grammar exercises can help you improve your grammar (accuracy)? yes. explain why. no. explain why not. 4. what approach to grammar presentation do you prefer? indicate your preference below: 1. inductive approach (students discover (induce) the grammar rules themselves, based on the examples of new language); 2. deductive approach (a teacher explains rules, and then we practise new language structures); 3. the combination of both approaches; 4. other. specify. 5. would you like to suggest any changes for this course? please write your ideas below: 6. during the course, you were asked to do three speaking tasks. do you think speaking tasks can help you improve your grammar? 1. yes. explain why. 2. no. explain why not. 7. to what extent do you think the speaking tasks were useful? 1. not at all useful 2. slightly useful 3. somewhat useful 4. useful 5. very useful 8. was it easy to listen to your spoken performance and evaluate it in terms of grammatical structures? 1. yes. 2. no. 9. did the reflection on your speaking performance help you become more aware of the grammar structures you use? 1. yes. 2. no. 10. did the reflection on your speaking performance help you become more aware of the grammar mistakes you tend to make? 1. yes. 2. no. 11. to what extent do you think the reflection task was useful? 1. not at all useful 2. slightly useful 3. somewhat useful 4. useful 5. very useful 12. to what extent do you think you improved your speaking performance in terms of grammar structures in your repeated task? 1. not at all 2. slightly 3. moderately 4. very 5. extremely 13. do you think that speaking and writing tasks are useful in developing your grammar? 1. yes. 2. no. tapsla.11512 p. 20/23 z. nováková 14. to what extent are they useful? 1. not at all useful 2. slightly useful 3. somewhat useful 4. useful 5. very 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(2017). education for sustainable development goals learning objectives. https://www.iau-hesd.net/sites/ default/files/documents/247444e.pdf zuzana nováková lernende für das grammatiklernen verantwortlich machen: ein bericht über eine lernerzentrierte technik, die auf fehlerfreiheit abzielt z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g lernerzentrierte ansätze für das lernen und lehren im rahmen der bildung für nachhaltige entwicklung (bne) betonen die rolle der bildung von engagierten und aktiven weltbürgern (unesco, 2017). die entwicklung von ref lexionsfähigkeiten und metakognitiven strategien bei den lernenden steht im mittelpunkt der vorliegenden studie, deren ziel ist es, die lernersprache einer gruppe erwachsener lernender der oberen mittelstufe zu analysieren. dabei soll untersucht werden, inwieweit die lernenden in der lage sind, ihre fehler zu bemerken und zu korrigieren, nachdem sie über ihre sprachproduktion ref lektiert haben. darüber hinaus wird versucht zu erforschen, wie die lernenden ihre selbstref lexion wahrnehmen und welche einstellung sie zum einsatz von sprechaufgaben beim grammatiklernen haben. die vergleichende fehleranalyse ergab, dass die teilnehmer 34,6 % aller fehler korrigieren konnten. diese betrafen hauptsächlich nominalphrasen (30 % aller fehler in aufgabe 1 und 31 % in aufgabe 3) und verbalphrasen (40 % aller fehler in den beiden aufga ben). obwohl keine allgemeinen schlussfolgerungen gezogen werden konnten, scheinen die ergebnisse darauf hinzudeuten, dass die studienteilnehmer nach einer kritischen, evidenzbasierten ref lexion imstande waren, einige fehler zu bemerken und zu korrigieren, insbesondere hinsichtlich der bestimmung und verwendung von simple past. die ergebnisse der tapsla.11512 p. 22/23 z. nováková https://www.cambridge.org/us/files/7815/8106/3284/cambridgepapersinelt_teachgrammar adults_2019_online.pdf https://www.cambridge.org/us/files/7815/8106/3284/cambridgepapersinelt_teachgrammar adults_2019_online.pdf https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/5987our-common-future.pdf https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/5987our-common-future.pdf https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/topics/education http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=a/res/70/1&lang=e https://www.iau-hesd.net/sites/default/files/documents/247444e.pdf https://www.iau-hesd.net/sites/default/files/documents/247444e.pdf umfrageanalyse zeigen, dass alle studienteilnehmer über ein verbessertes bewusstsein für mängel in ihrer interimssprache berichteten sowie dass sie sprechaufgaben für förderlich in bezug auf die grammatikentwicklung hielten. aus der studie geht hervor, dass sorgfältig geplante, wiederholte sprechaufgaben für sprachproduktion der lernenden, konsolidierung ihres grammatikalischen wissens sowie für verbesserung ihrer ref lexionsfähigkeiten und metakognitiven strategien hilfreich sein können. schlüsselwörter: grammatik, fehleranalyse, wiederholte sprechaufgaben, lernerautonomie, metakognitive strategien, lernerzentrierter ansatz making students responsible for grammar learning:… tapsla.11512 p. 23/23 achilleas i. kostoulas, sarah mercer university of graz, austria reflections on complexity: tesol researchers reflect on their experiences a b s t r a c t complex dynamic systems theory (cdst), or complexity, is increasingly being used as a theoretical framework in applied linguistics. in this article, we present the ref lections of researchers in teaching english to speakers of other languages (tesol) about how they have made use of complexity in their work. the aim of this article is to take stock of how it is being used in the field, the challenges and benefits it provides, as well as inspiration for future work from this theoretical perspective. in the first part of the article, we present a concise overview of cdst, focusing specifically on three salient features: its holistic lens, its non-linear perspective on causality, and its focus on emergence and self-organization. we also outline how complexity perspectives have been used to inform research in a variety of applied linguistics topics. we then move on to present narratives provided by nine academics who have employed cdst in their work, which we synthesize with a view to showing how the theory has gradually developed in tesol. early encounters of the field with cdst were usually serendipitous, but the theory has so far proved to be useful, both on account of its descriptive power and because of its phenomenological validity. a common theme in the narratives of these experiences of complexity researchers is that complexity is associated with a steep learning curve, compounded by terminological opacity, and conceptual challenges. however, their responses also indicate optimism regarding the potential of the theory to inform research in tesol and applied linguistics more generally. keywords: language education, tesol, complex dynamics systems theory introduction recent research in language and language learning has increasingly made use of complex dynamics systems theory (cdst), or complexity, as a theoretical lens to understand phenomena that cannot be meaningfully fragmented theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 4 (2), 2018, pp. 109–127 110 achilleas i. kostoulas, sarah mercer or whose behavior cannot be reduced to a singular cause, which display internal organization but are not centrally co-ordinated, and which behave in somewhat unpredictable but not random ways. this theoretical frame has allowed researchers in applied linguistics in general, and the field of teaching english to speakers of other languages (tesol) in particular, to account for the processes of language acquisition, classroom learning, and the psychologies of learners and teachers in ways that highlight the intricate interconnectedness of diverse psychological elements, interpersonal interactions and micro/macrosocietal structures. it has also provided insights into the ways in which similar phenomena are manifest at different timescales, and challenged our understanding of constructs such as agency and structure. a key milestone in the adoption of cdst in the study of language and language learning was the publication of complex systems and applied linguistics by diane larsen-freeman and lynne cameron (2008). in this monograph, larsen-freeman and cameron outline cdst, provide multiple examples of how it can be used to study different linguistic phenomena, and put forward a set of guidelines for complexity-informed research. the impact of this monograph has been such that subsequent years saw a dramatic increase in the number of empirical studies and theoretical treatises in which complexity was explicitly invoked or present in the background. to name but a few examples, cdst has been used as a model for the description of language (e.g., beckner et al., 2009), first language acquisition (e.g., hohenberger & peltzer-karpf, 2009) and second language acquisition (e.g., spoelman & verspoor, 2010; verspoor, de bot & lowie, 2011). it has also been used to describe processes in language education (e.g., king, 2015; kostoulas, 2018; mercer, 2016; stelma et al., 2015), classroom interaction (e.g., kostoulas & stelma, 2016) and lack whereof (king, 2013). moreover, it has been usefully brought to bear on the description of a range of psychological constructs related to language learning, such as the self-constructs of language learners (mercer, 2011a) and teachers (henry, 2016), agency (mercer, 2011b), learner motivation (sampson, 2016), and cognition (feryok, 2010). prompted by the upcoming ten-year anniversary of larsen-freeman and cameron’s (2008) landmark publication, we decided it is an appropriate time to take stock of how we—the key authors of this paper—and other scholars working in the field of teaching english to speakers of other languages (tesol) have been using complexity in our academic work. to do this, we reflected on the ways we have been using complexity, and also invited a number of colleagues to share their reflections around four key questions: what attracted us to this perspective in the first place, what we find useful about working from this perspective, the challenges we face in doing so, and the future directions we feel could be explored. in this paper, we present our collective understandings of complexity, which we have brought together in a deliberately more informal 111ref lections on complexity: tesol researchers ref lect on their experiences way. our intention, as authors, is not to systematically map out the field, or to provide definitive answers about how cdst is to be best used; rather, we view this paper as an opening move in a conversation, and as an invitation to readers—whether they are engaged in research or in language teaching—to reflect on how complexity might be of similar value to their own work or not. what is complex dynamic systems theory? before we present our own evaluations of the merits and challenges involved in working with complexity perspectives, we will briefly outline complex dynamic systems theory (cdst) for the benefit of those readers less familiar with it. such a discussion does not aim to offer a comprehensive account of cdst; for that, interested readers are referred to overviews by byrne and callaghan (2013), larsen-freeman and cameron (2008), and kostoulas (2018). instead, we will limit ourselves to presenting three core assumptions around which the theory is built: its holistic lens, its non-linear perspective on causality, and its focus on emergence and self-organization. complex dynamic systems theory challenges the assumption that problems can be solved by breaking down entities into ever-smaller researchable units. instead, complexity theorists view the social world as a network of interrelations between entities, which can be best understood when viewed as a whole. holistic perspectives are preferred in cdst because fragmentary approaches would break the connections between the components of the system, and these connections are central to understanding the phenomena that interest us (cilliers, 2001). in linguistics, for instance, a complexity-informed study of a discourse event might account for the interrelationships between discourse elements, but it would also seek to explain how the mental processes associated with individual language use connect to linguistic structures that have a social presence (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008). similarly, in tesol, such an outlook might help us to trace connections between classroom events and the emergence of classroom routines or professional cultures (kostoulas & stelma, 2016). secondly, cdst calls into question linear causality as a way of interpreting phenomena in language and language learning. as language teachers, we intuitively know that the same teaching approaches rarely lead to the exact same outcomes. we also see that sometimes substantial effects on learning can be traced back to disproportionately small events, which were not significant enough to be noticed or reliably measured at the time they occurred. given the tight interconnections between components that make up complex systems, 112 achilleas i. kostoulas, sarah mercer changes in one part of the system can have various effects on other parts of the system and the system as a whole. the effects are not entirely predictable, although they are not completely random either. this perspective on cause and effect helps us to better understand processes such as language acquisition that are typified by both regularity and unpredictability, progression, and regression. thirdly, cdst attempts to account for how order and structure is created in the absence of central design and coordination. key to this is the notion of emergence; a process through which complex dynamic systems produce activity that is qualitatively different from the activity of their components. similar processes can be observed in the evolution of languages, where the activity of multiple people engaged in communication leads to the creation of new discourses, and even novel linguistic patterns. for example, recent research in english as a lingua franca, which seeks to understand how such patterns come into being, has increasingly used insights from cdst as an explanatory frame (e.g., mauranen, 2012; seidlhofer, 2011). the state of complexity theory in the field is now very different from what it was when larsen-freeman and cameron published their seminal 2008 monograph, as the scope of its use in the study of language, language acquisition, and language education is broadening, and a community of researchers is emerging, who may differ in their research agendas and priorities, but who share the common epistemological perspective and the common discourse of complexity. it is this development that has motivated us to write this article and bring together the reflections of some of that community of researchers. we do not do so in order to systematically map out the field, but rather reflect critically on our shared trajectories, past and future, in the hope of inspiring others wishing to embrace this theoretical frame. our reflections on complexity and tesol in this article, our focus is on outlining how complexity-inspired work has been employed in tesol. we want to bring center stage the personal reflections and evaluations of individuals who have chosen to work from a complexity perspective in tesol, our own area of specialization within applied linguistics. to that end, we reached out to multiple tesol academics who have employed a complexity lens in their recent publications, and asked them to provide us with written narratives, using the following questions as prompts: 1. how did you become interested in complexity theories? 2. what do you find useful about working with this perspective? what types of questions do you think it can best address, compared to other perspectives? 113ref lections on complexity: tesol researchers ref lect on their experiences 3. what challenges do you think it poses? 4. what directions would you like to take with it in the future? in the sections that follow, we present our synthesis of the responses provided by eight scholars (including ourselves) who responded to our invitation. we approached these texts holistically, using methods loosely informed by narrative inquiry (earthy & cronin, 2008). specifically, we preserved the original spelling and structure of responses and the voice of the participants, so as to prevent the fragmentation and de-contextualization of their responses. however, we have reassembled and regrouped some responses according to our questions for reasons of readability, and we also shortened some responses for length. first encounters while some of us were exposed to complexity in the context of our studies and research in language education, for most of us, our initial interest in complexity came from engaging with ideas that were being developed outside the field. i first encountered complexity theory (ct) some time ago quite by accident. a stranger in a bookstore thrust a copy of james gleick’s chaos: making a new science [(1987)] into my hands, along with the comment, “you will enjoy reading this.” i bought the book. i found that gleick’s book had nothing to do with language, but as i was reading it, it was easy to make connections with language. after all, perhaps nothing is as complex, nonlinear, and dynamic as language. these thoughts led to my early foray (larsen-freeman, 1997), speculating on the application of ct to applied linguistics issues. (diane larsen freeman) i was initially intrigued by chaos theory when i first encountered it in the 1980s, but i didn’t then see its applicability outside mathematics and the natural sciences. (agneta svalberg) my first encounter with the complexity theory literature was james gleick’s book chaos, which i picked up from a used book stall around the university. that was useful history, and affectively it left me with the feeling that i was learning something new—which was my reason for doing a phd in the first place. (juup stelma) 114 achilleas i. kostoulas, sarah mercer perhaps influenced by my father who was a geography teacher, in my secondary school days i had been fascinated by the interactions between earth systems and the way that everything seemed connected. however, it was not until my postgraduate studies that i re-encountered similar ideas in the form of dynamic systems theory applied to language learning. (richard samson) even among those of us whose first encounters with complexity were more closely related to our work in language and language learning, this first contact was often serendipitous. in the 1st year of doing my phd i went along to a research presentation by my supervisor in which he talked about complexity and used dynamic systems theory to interpret some results from his study. i remember at the time thinking, “this complexity business sounds terribly difficult. i really hope he doesn’t ask me to adopt it in my own work.” sure enough, he did! (jim king). i had been working on the self in sla and had taken a grounded approach to exploring how it functioned and was structured as part of my phd. i came across the ground-breaking book by larsen-freeman and cameron later and was amazed to discover the incredible resonance with what i had found. all the same characteristics were there, but i just did not have the theoretical frame or language to talk about it that way. this was interesting in that i found complexity without the formal theoretical lens. (sarah mercer) it was like a shot of ritalin to the system when in 2009 i was introduced almost by accident in an email exchange with a senior academic to a book about complexity theory. i had suddenly found a way to think, talk, and write about things in a way that spoke to the core of what i felt and who i was as a teacher. as i’ve continued to explore complexity more deeply the resonances have only strengthened; there is no going back for me. (phil hiver) it seems that the reasons why our first encounters with complexity were as productive as they proved to be was because of the intuitive appeal of the theory, particularly for those of us who had a practical background in language teaching. as a classroom teacher, it just made sense, a lot more sense than much research that i was reading, of what i experienced day-in day-out of being part of language learning class groups. (richard) 115ref lections on complexity: tesol researchers ref lect on their experiences it was and has a tight connection with the phenomenological reality of the language classroom that resonates so strongly and thus makes it such a convincing frame for me to work with. (sarah) i came to academia/research from a background in language teaching. being a teacher meant that the daily realities of the language classroom were the filter i used in approaching new information or theories. i knew intuitively and even experientially that my success, and the success of my students, involved the coming together of many elements and was contingent on various things over time, but i didn’t yet have a way of articulating this reality or reasoning about how and why this might be the case. (phil) coupled to this intuitive appeal, some of us felt that there was a definite zeitgeist that helped the new theory to take hold in our field: …had i read the book [gleick, 1987] a decade earlier, i might not have made the connection to our field as readily. over the years, though, i had grown increasingly dissatisfied with what i perceived to be a piecemeal approach to understanding second language acquisition. i felt that we would benefit from a relational systems approach, although i might not have called it that then. (diane) i remember [zoltán] dörnyei speaking about the need for a complexityinformed understanding of motivation—i think it was 2003 or thereabouts—and martin hammersley (ethnography of education)—and david byrne—and paul meara—and more. but whilst everyone seemed to suggest the need for complexity theory, no one had anything concrete to offer—i guess it was early days. (juup) whatever the pathways and motivations that led us into complexity, this encounter almost invariably involved a fundamental shift in the way we perceive reality: i think “complexity” is a threshold concept in the sense that it changes how you see the world irreversibly. (agneta) [complexity] developed within me a new way of seeing the world around me. this did not happen overnight […] it took time to purge linear and reductive thinking from my mind. […] as complexity theory started to take hold in mind, this affected and continues to affect how i approach more and more tasks in my life, both academic, professional and personal. 116 achilleas i. kostoulas, sarah mercer i guess it has made me more secure both personally and as an academic. i can understand a wider range of problems, situations and theories. in short, complexity theory has been empowering and emancipating, and this feeling extends to the present. (juup) in the absence of a better way of describing it, it just makes sense, and once you are sensitised to complexity, you begin seeing it everywhere. (achilleas kostoulas) now several years later, new scholars exploring complexity will find more readily available. working in tesol means they are likely to also recognize its real-world applicability and also find it representing somewhat of a paradigm shift. attractions and affordances as hinted by some of the responses above, one of the reasons cdst has appealed to many is that this change of perspective enables us to describe the phenomena that interest us in ways that are not reductive, and also to see interconnections between what diane described as ‘the big picture’ (original emphasis) and more situated phenomena. i have always thought that complexity lends itself well to questions of a grand scope (e.g., “what does the future of language learning look like?” or “how will multilingualism change societies in centuries to come?”) that attempt to get at something big about the real world and the role of language and learning within it. complexity theory is equally well suited to descriptive-level work and explanatory work in this sense. conversely, because it prioritizes a fractal view of life and its phenomena, smaller events and timescales are also just as important. this makes it a rigorous and flexible way of approaching questions will be of real significance for many players. (phil) i would like to better understand how change on different timescales interact and affect each other but this is in itself complex and requires time in order to longitudinally explore trajectories in an ongoing dynamic sense […] it also sensitises me to the bigger picture even if i am zooming in on one fragment of a larger whole. it cautions me to avoid over-simplistic and decontextualised perspectives. essentially, it makes me humble. (sarah) 117ref lections on complexity: tesol researchers ref lect on their experiences concepts within complexity theories such as ‘interdependence,’ ‘affordance,’ ‘mutuality,’ ‘emergence,’ ‘nesting’ (of systems within systems) are tools which enable me to deal with reality without over-simplifying it. (agneta) another appeal of complexity, which seems particularly relevant to working in tesol, is that helps us to develop nuanced understandings of human psychology and human behavior, which go beyond mechanistic descriptions. it is ideally suited for questions about human processes, and about states which are not totally stable. i would think that any social system (e.g. language, language learning, engagement with language, and also economic, political, family and other social systems) is more complex than natural systems such as the weather or systems in physics. the presence of human agents, and volition in particular adds enormously to the complexity. […] so, it seems to me we need to take a complexity view when we ask questions related to attitudes, beliefs, motivation, self-concept… (agneta) i think it is especially well suited to understanding human complexity. people, their psychologies and interactions with others are naturally complex and simplistic views will always fall short of capturing the essence of what it means to be human… (sarah) many of us noted that we recognize our lived realities in the theoretical descriptions that complexity helps us to generate. in other words, the mental representations that complexity affords us seem to have a certain validity, which we variously labeled as phenomenological, ecological or ontological. i had never liked post-modern thinking, which is a path many travel on away from reductionism. (juup) fundamentally, the joy is in being better able to represent the real-life complexity as i phenomenologically perceive it without losing too much of its authenticity. (sarah) there is genuinely a sense of working with people and phenomena in a way that is authentic—in ways some refer to as “ecologically valid.” there is no need to shy away from the inherent messiness, interconnectedness, and complex dependency of so much of what we do as l2 researchers and practitioners. (phil) complexity theories […] provide me with a way of understanding the social world which i find ontologically comfortable. (achilleas) 118 achilleas i. kostoulas, sarah mercer interestingly, several of us perceive cdst as having potential to connect with other useful theoretical perspectives and even function as connective tissue between them: [complexity] is compatible with so many ways of thinking and doing things (socio-cultural and critical perspectives of teaching and learning), it has the potential for even wider appeal. (phil) [complexity] helps me to make links between the somewhat diverse elements that make up my professional field (applied linguistics, educational psychology and the sociology of education)—i am not sure exactly how to make this work, but i think that complexity can provide a unifying metanarrative for the field. (achilleas) for me one of the key benefits of […] complex dynamic systems theory is that i can use it as a kind of supra-theory which allows for other apposite theories and frameworks to be adopted in my work. i really like the theoretical flexibility that complexity affords. (jim) my understanding of complexity theory gave me a head start on understanding and using ecological theory, and i was quickly up and running. also, my interpretation of ecological theory was probably more dynamic as a result. […] i think this is how i see complexity theory going forward in our field … it may well work as an informing theory, feeding into the dominant tesol discourses. […] in fact, complexity theory works as a ‘background theory’ for me, making my ecological account of process and context in tesol more convincing and coherent. (juup) challenges to overcome a common theme in our shared reflections was that engaging with complexity involves a steep learning curve, which is compounded by the fact that the conceptual toolkits of complexity are often used in different ways by different authors. similar sentiments were echoed by many of us: my supervisor suggested a number of books, like davis and sumara (2006) and byrne (1998), both of which i hated because they challenged my powers of understanding rather too much. (achilleas) 119ref lections on complexity: tesol researchers ref lect on their experiences i think complexity is also difficult to understand well. indeed, i have spent several years studying it and am not yet convinced i have fully grasped its implications and potential. (sarah) at the same time as being hugely liberating, complexity research is also very challenging. (agneta) however, as phil reminds us, “those who are patient enough and persevere in exploring what complexity means and how it may be useful for our field never regret doing so” and that “nothing this worthwhile comes without at least some struggle.” while this difficulty arguably “adds to its attraction” (agneta), it can also mean that “sometimes people use or, indeed, dismiss it without fully appreciating what it is” (sarah). most visibly, many of the challenges associated with understanding complexity relate to its challenging technical vocabulary. as is the case with every discipline, technical language is sometimes necessary in order to designate constructs and processes that are specific to cdst. however, there was a shared feeling that the language of complexity-informed accounts has often acted as a barrier to understanding: another key concern i have is the use of jargon. in our field, i feel that […] frameworks need to be widely comprehensible to be properly useful. whilst we maybe need to engage with new language to describe new phenomena, we must not use overly complex language merely to obfuscate or inflate academic egos. (sarah) [another problem is] an unnecessary fascination with impressive-sounding technical terms. for instance, the idea that systems have a usual or preferred state is fairly unchallenging but it is rendered less accessible by the obscure term ‘attractor.’ (achilleas) one of the biggest challenges i find […] is that complex dynamic systems theory can seem impenetrable to many students and fellow researchers because it is so jargon-heavy. there’s no doubt that the lexicon of complex systems turns many people off… (jim) i doubt, then, that the full vocabulary of complexity theory will ever become mainstream. (juup) another, somewhat deeper problem is that complexity involves the challenge of perceiving reality as a mesh of systems, which overlap and interconnect 120 achilleas i. kostoulas, sarah mercer inextricably, but also need to be bounded if they are to become conceptually and empirically manageable. you have to set boundaries to work with it and what we define as a system is merely a perception. i think sometimes it is easy to forget that and imagine the system is something real and tangible as opposed to something we perceive. we must remain conscious of the bigger picture and the system’s position within that larger frame of perception. (sarah) it is sometimes difficult to decide where the borders of an open system are. one is forced, for practical reasons if nothing else, to impose borders on the system and to make what sometimes feels like arbitrary decisions on which factors to consider. (agneta) a corollary to the epistemological move associated with developing a complexity outlook is that this change of perspective also requires changes in the ways in which we make sense of the world. one of the main challenges i have encountered first hand is that thinking and acting from a complexity perspective does not come naturally to most people. there is a tendency to slip back into other more habitual modes of thought and of action. with time, however this does become easier… (phil) part of this difficulty is, i think, unavoidable as it concerns challenging some of the core ideas of our ontology, such as linear causality, i.e., the belief that events can be linked to causes in a straightforward way. (achilleas) added to these concerns, disseminating the insights that complexity inspires is not always unproblematic. in part, this challenge connects to the reluctance in some quarters of the scientific community to accept complexity as a legitimate and fruitful way of making sense of language and language learning. in juup’s words: i did finally complete my phd, and it made overt use of complexity theory […] however, i only scraped a pass (or such was my feeling). what stuck in my mind is how the examiners competed in who could be more critical of my approach […] and i started to see another side of what i was getting into. complexity theory was taking me away from the mainstream research approaches and community of tesol. this impression was reinforced subsequent to the phd, when i struggled to publish much (in hindsight, there were other reasons for this as well as me doing complexity theory). […] i did work with lynne cameron on other things, and although complexity 121ref lections on complexity: tesol researchers ref lect on their experiences theory was always there for us, it did not overtly appear in what we published. there is also a concern that existing academic conventions do not always help to make the best use of what complexity has to offer. in most current representative forms for the dissemination of academic work (papers, monographs, presentations) the dynamism and interactive nature of the development of interpretations is nullified. let me be more specific: even as i’m writing this, the act of writing and seeing my thoughts come up as text on a screen is altering my thinking. i can (and no doubt will) go back over what i’ve written a number of times, but at some point this text will become a set artefact (if it becomes a published form). but my thinking and interpretations do not stop there. they are continually evolving such that the words on this paper (or screen, as the case may be) form part of the history of my thinking, but may not be representative of my ideas after this has been published. this lack of dynamicity is all the more troublesome considering the (necessarily) protracted nature of academic publishing. (richard) there is also a sense of a need to engage with the potential concern, among more practically-oriented audiences, that complexity cannot directly inform teaching and learning. agneta notes that “complexity research cannot on its own answer questions about learning effects […] on the contrary, it throws up many more questions” and although for her (and arguably all of us) “it puts you on a different path” towards understanding research problems, this is not a perspective that everybody is comfortable with. in a classroom, a practitioner’s understanding that learning is a complex and dynamic process is not easily distilled down to a toolbox of response options—which is often the short cut and easy way out many look for. instead they will need to develop an adaptivity of thought and action for the large number of potential situations they may come up against. this necessitates being comfortable with not always having the right answers, or even that there may not be one per se. (phil) while the insights that complexity can afford are not always directly translatable into practical prescriptions for teaching, it is unlikely that the teaching profession will benefit from yet another set of theory-driven prescriptions. rather, one of the values of complexity perspectives stems perhaps from their function “as a foil whereby teachers can clarify their own principles and beliefs,” or 122 achilleas i. kostoulas, sarah mercer as heuristic devices that “challenge teachers to think in new ways” (larsenfreeman & cameron, 2008, p. 197). finally, a problem noted in some of the narratives was the fact that complexity can be, and at times has been employed in gratuitous ways that can damage its legitimacy. there is at times a somewhat shallow application and understanding […]. these applications draw on metaphors, images, properties or processes in dynamic or complex systems to conduct research without being based on the understandings upon which these tools are founded. (richard) a complexity framework needs to be used only when the theory is appreciated in terms of its nuances, is helpful to the task at hand and is utilised in a way that contributes positively to understandings more broadly and not merely for perfunctory academic prowess. […] it is important to remember that not everything can be a complex dynamic system but rather it must fulfil certain criteria to be classified as such. and there are no simplistic ways of working with the framework. it must only be used if it adds to our understanding. (sarah) all these challenges notwithstanding, complexity can be beneficial to research and practice in tesol, and, in the final section of this paper, we turn our attention to possible ways in which it can inform our field. looking ahead the thoughts about the future directions complexity can take reflect our diverse specific research interests, but they also reveal a shared confidence that complexity can help to advance our understanding in respect to a number of research agendas. i would like to see links explicitly made between complexity and how languages are taught and learned successfully, between complexity and research methodology, between complexity and the big questions or issues in our field (sla/tesol). for me the first of these (classroom practice) is a current area of interest, and this ties into my interest in the psychology of language learning. (phil) 123ref lections on complexity: tesol researchers ref lect on their experiences an area that i feel offers great potential […] is to consider the language learning classroom as a complex system […] as learners interact with materials and the other humans in these educational spaces they form the classroom context, which in turn feeds back to adapt their own behaviours. (richard) my particular interest is in the conscious language learning process, but also what happens before and outside this process to facilitate or hinder it. (agneta) echoing views also advanced by de bot, lowie, thorne, and verspoor (2013), it was also suggested that cdst could serve to connect different disciplines, and possibly help to bridge the perceived dichotomy between teaching practice and research in language and learning. on the other hand, teams of researchers could approach the same central topic from different angles, depending on their individual research interests and expertise. one could envisage a team (perhaps international) all working with the same data set, or overlapping data sets but approaching the analysis of the data with different, interlinked, research questions in mind to produce a really in-depth, holistic understanding of a particular issue. (agneta) one direction of future research that has a lot of appeal to me personally involves exploring how complexity can help to generate more cohesion in the theoretical foundations of the field. i am thinking now of stern (1983) who argued that the field needs a solid foundation which includes a theory of language teaching, a theory of linguistics, a theory of sociology, a theory of psychology and a theory of education […] i would like to argue that the field also needs a meta-theory that brings all of the above together, and to me at least complexity is the only theory that can fulfil this role. (achilleas) for myself, i would also like to see the practical contributions of this framework strengthened. as i think this intuitively resonates so strongly with practitioners, i would be keen to explore links between practitioners and academics working together with this shared frame. it has the potential to serve as a shared frame of reference and could foster dialogue when used appropriately. (sarah) the potential of cdst to function as connective tissue between the disciplines that inform tesol and also with teaching practice, is an idea that we began to tentatively explore in the manchester roundtable on complexity theory and 124 achilleas i. kostoulas, sarah mercer english language teaching, held at the university of manchester in april 2015, which was attended by many of the participants whose views are recorded in this paper. this was further developed in a conceptual paper that came out of the event, where the argument was put forward that cdst can provide a shared discourse space, “defined by a shared vocabulary and common ways of thinking, which can be used by practitioners and researchers in tesol together, in our joint quest to develop new ways of understanding and improving our language learning and teaching experiences” (kostoulas et al., 2018, p. 256). looking towards the future, we expect to see these synergies becoming more common, stronger, and even more useful. concluding remarks these narratives reveal these researchers’ belief in the potential of cdst to generate understandings of language and language learning that are intuitively convincing, phenomenologically valid, analytically powerful, theoretically generative, and, hopefully, ultimately useful for practice. what is even more encouraging is that, despite the challenges outlined, there is a sense of a growing awareness and appreciation of what complexity can offer. then, in 2014, when i attended the pll conference in graz, austria, and then later the 2014 leeds baal sig event, i realised that there was a renewed interest in complexity theory in tesol. looking back, it was almost as if complexity theory had gone underground for a number of years, and then after this period of gestation it had re-emerged. and, of course, i met others who were passionate about complexity theory. in some ways, it resembled the ‘buzz’ around this theory that i had seen when i was a phd student, but with one difference. there were now a number of leading figures in tesol who are writing and using complexity theory in more concrete ways, and with more authority than in that earlier period. (juup) as a community of people who are interested in complexity, i think we are now at a time where a ‘critical mass’ is developing that can make such work possible. we are at an exciting time when discourse spaces are being created, where we can exchange insights about complexity (the exchange of narratives in this article is just one example), and while being aware of the scepticism that is voiced, i am also optimistic that our shared understandings are becoming more robust. (achilleas) 125ref lections on complexity: tesol researchers ref lect on their experiences however, as sarah cautions: we must remain grounded in working with this lens and exploit the realworld potential and phenomenological authenticity it offers, avoiding the risk of becoming academically remote and convoluted. we must also ensure it has something to offer so that we do not get trapped in an academic endeavour which leaves practitioners saying, so what? tell me something i don’t already know. when describing language development, peltzer-karpf and hohenberger noted that it “does not take a linear path but comes in phases of intermittent turbulence, fluctuation, and stability, along a ‘chaotic itinerary’” (2009, p. 481). we believe that the ways in which tesol has engaged with complexity have been very similar: as the reflections outlined above show, our encounters with complexity also followed a chaotic itinerary punctuated by false starts, bursts of optimistic growth, stability, and turbulence. in this article, we have tried to show some of this dynamism, as seen from the perspective of a growing community of tesol scholars with a shared interest in cdst. we are aware that ours is a partial account, both because of our enthusiasm about the potential of complexity, and because of limitations inherent in our deliberately informal approach. however, we hope to have been able to share what complexity means for us, as a community of researchers, and how an increasing corpus of research has began to shape expectations about the explanatory and practical potential of complexity. whether these expectations will be fulfilled remains to be seen in the future. it is our hope that readers will take up our invitation to reflect on what complexity can mean for them and their work and perhaps take inspiration from the narratives of those already engaging with this perspective. references beckner, c., blythe, r., bybee, j., christiansen, m. h., croft, w., ellis, n. c., … & schoenemann, t. (2009). language is a complex adaptive system: position paper. language learning, 59(s1), 1–26. byrne, d. (1998). complexity theory and the social sciences: an introduction. london: routledge. byrne, d., & callaghan, g. (2013). complexity theory and the social sciences: the state of the art. london: routledge. cilliers, p. (2001). boundaries, hierarchies and networks in complex systems. international journal of innovation management, 5(2), 135–147. 126 achilleas i. kostoulas, sarah mercer de bot, k., lowie, w., thorne, s. l., & verspoor, m. (2013). dynamic system theory as a comprehensive theory of second language development. in m. d. p. g. mayo, m. j. g. mangado, & m. m. adrián (eds.), contemporary approaches to second language acquisition (pp. 199–220). amsterdam: john benjamins publishing. davis, b., & sumara, d. j. (2006). complexity and education: inquiries into learning, teaching, and research. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates. earthy, s., & cronin, a. (2008). narrative analysis. in n. fielding (ed.), researching social life (3rd edn., pp. 420–439). thousand oaks, ca: sage. feryok, a. (2010). language teacher cognitions: complex dynamic systems? system, 38(2), 272–279. gleick, j. (1987). chaos: making a new science. new york: viking. henry, a. (2016). conceptualizing teacher identity as a complex dynamic system: the inner dynamics of transformations during a practicum. journal of teacher education, 67(4), 291–305. hohenberger, a., & peltzer-karpf, a. (2009). language learning from the perspective of nonlinear dynamic systems. linguistics, 47(2), 481–511. kostoulas, a. (2018). a language school as a complex system. berlin: peter lang. kostoulas, a., & stelma, j. (2016). intentionality and complex systems theory: a new direction for language learning psychology. in c. gkonou, d. tatzl, & s. mercer (eds.), new directions in language learning psychology (pp. 7–23). cham: springer. kostoulas, a., stelma, j., mercer, s., cameron, l., & dawson, s. (2018). complex systems theory as a shared discourse space for tesol. tesol journal, 9(2), 246–260. king, j. (2013). silence in the second language classroom. basingstoke: palgrave-macmillan. king, j. (ed.). (2015). the dynamic interplay between context and the language learner. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. larsen-freeman, d. (1997). chaos/complexity science and second language acquisition. applied linguistics, 18(2), 141–165. larsen-freeman, d., & cameron, l. (2008). complex systems and applied linguistics. oxford: oxford university press. mauranen, a. (2012). exploring elf: academic english shaped by non­native speakers. cambridge: cambridge university press. mercer, s. (2011a). language learner self-concept: complexity, continuity and change. system, 39(3), 335–346. mercer, s. (2011b). understanding learner agency as a complex dynamic system. system, 39(4), 427–436. mercer, s. (2016). complexity and language teaching. in g. hall (ed.), the routledge handbook of english language teaching (pp. 473–485). london: routledge. peltzer-karpf, a. (2012). the dynamic matching of neural and cognitive growth cycles. nonlinear dynamics – psychology and life sciences, 16(1), 61–78. sampson, r. j. (2015). tracing motivational emergence in a classroom language learning project. system, 50, 10–20. seidlhofer, b. (2011). understanding english as a lingua franca. oxford: oxford university press. spoelman, m., & verspoor, m. (2010). dynamic patterns in development of accuracy and complexity: a longitudinal case study in the acquisition of finnish. applied linguistics, 31(4), 532–553. stelma, j., onat-stelma, z., lee, w.-j., & kostoulas, a. (2015). intentional dynamics in tesol: an ecological perspective. teachers college, columbia university working papers in tesol & applied linguistics, 15(1), 14–32. 127ref lections on complexity: tesol researchers ref lect on their experiences stern, h. h. (1983). fundamental concepts of language teaching: historical and interdiscipli­ nary perspectives on applied linguistic research. oxford: oxford university press. verspoor, m., de bot, k., & lowie, w. (eds.). (2011). a dynamic approach to second language development: methods and techniques. amsterdam: john benjamins publishing. achilleas i. kostoulas, sarah mercer reflexionen über komplexität: erfahrungen der tesol-forscher z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g theorie komplexer dynamischer systeme (cdst von complex dynamic systems theory) ist eine immer häufige verwendete theoretische grundlage in angewandter linguistik. der vorliegende beitrag schildert erfahrungen der tesol-forscher, die nach dem modell gearbeitet haben. besprechen werden dabei nutzen und herausforderungen für lehrerarbeit und potenzielle anwendung des modells in zukunft. der erste teil des beitrags handelt von cdst-grundlagen, deren drei bedeutende merkmale besonders berücksichtigt werden: holistische einstellung, nichtlineare perspektive der kausalität, fokussieren auf auftreten und selbstorganisation. zum forschungsmaterial wurden die von neun wissenschaftlichen mitarbeitern verfassten abhandlungen zur cdst-anwendung in ihrer arbeit. die ergebnisse zeigen, dass die zunächst mit zurückhaltung aufgenommene cdst-theorie mit der zeit ihr wirkliches potential offenbarte. die befragten waren zu künftiger anwendung der theorie in forschungen zur erlernung des englischen und im bereich der angewandten linguistik optimistisch eingestellt. schlüsselwörter: zweitspracheunterricht, fremdsprachenunterricht, theorie komplexer dynamischer systeme style guide for the authors please note that we are changing from apa 6th edition to newer 7th edition. authors are requested to submit manuscripts formatted in apa style (american psychological association, 7th ed.). all manuscripts must include an abstract in english (maximum of 250 words). after the abstract please provide keywords. main text: 12 times new roman long citations (more than 40 words): 10 times new roman, indent by 1 tab either side, one empty line above and below, no quotation marks. 1.5 spacing format of headings the following table demonstrates how to format headings in apa style. level format 1 centered, bold, title case headingtext begins as a new paragraph. 2 flush left, bold, title case headingtext begins as a new paragraph. 3 flush left, bold italic, title case headingtext begins as a new paragraph. 4 indented, bold, title case heading, ending with a period. text begins on the same line and continues as a regular paragraph. 5 indented, bold italic, title case heading, ending with a period. text begins on the same line and continues as a regular paragraph. note. in title case, most words are capitalized. in-text citations (examples): author’s name and date in brackets: the experience of critical incidents and effective ref lection upon them allows teachers to control their classroom actions more consciously and create critical events (ce’s), which were described earlier as intended, planned and controlled (woods, 1993). woods (1993) believes that critical events are structured and occur in well-defined staged of conceptualization . . . two authors: (ballantyne & packer, 1995) as ballantyne and packer (1995) demonstrate … three authors: (barker, callahan, & ferreira, 2009) subsequent use: (barker et al., 2009) style guide for the authors2 six authors or more: lorenz et al. (1998) argued… (lorenz et al., 1998) authors whose last names are the same: (d. francis, 1985; h. francis, 2004) online sources (unpaginated), provide paragraph or section title instead: (peterson & clark, 1978, para. 4) (moss, springer, & dehr, 2008, discussion section, para. 1) no author, provide shortened title: (“primary teachers talking,” 2007) (reflective practice, 2005, pp. 12−25) secondary citations: smith (as cited in maxx & meyer, 2000) noted that “there is . . . .” citation within citation: as it has been noted that “there is no relevance . . . (smith, 2005)” (maxx & meyer, 2000, p. 129). & vs. and: as smithson and stones (1999) demonstrated. . . . . . as has been shown (smithson & stones, 1999) . . . references selected examples (for more consult apa manual 7th ed.): book, one author: goldberg, a. (2006). constructions at work. oxford university press. book, two authors and more: jarvis, s., & pavlenko, a. (2008). crosslinguistic influence in language cognition. routledge. translated book: freud, s. (1960). jokes and their relation to the unconscious. (j. strachey, trans.). routledge & k. paul. (original work published 1905). edited book: flowerdew, j., brock, m., & hsia, s. (eds.). (1992). second language teacher education. city polytechnic of hong kong. chapter in an edited book: goldberg, a., & casenhiser, d. (2008). construction learning and second language acquisition. in p. robinson & n. c. ellis (eds.), handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition (pp. 197–215). routledge. article in a journal: hammarberg, b. (2010). the languages of the multilingual. some conceptual and terminological issues. international review of applied linguistics in language teaching, 48, 91–104. style guide for the authors 3 article online: tully, k., & bolshakov, v. y. (2010). emotional enhancement of memory: how norepinephrine enables synaptic plasticity. molecular brain, 13 may. retrieved from: http://www.molecularbrain.com/content/ bakker, a. b., hakanen, j. j., demerouti, e., & xanthopoulou, d. (2007). job resources boost work engagement, particularly when job demands are high. journal of educational psychology, 99(2), 274–284. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.99.2.274 magazines online: miller, g. (2014, september 4). cinematic cuts exploit how your brain edits what you see. wired. retrieved from: http://wired.com/ smith, a. (2007, june 12). dying languages. the western star. retrieved from: http://www. thewesternstar.com/ blog: palmer, p. (2001). now i become myself. yes magazine, blog post, 31 may. retrieved from: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/working-for-life/now-i-become-myself e-books: bolande, v. u. (1981). on the psychology of humor. retrieved from: http://www.uf lib.uf l.edu /ufdc/ufdc.aspx?n=palmm&c=psa1&m=hd2j&i=45367 conference proceedings: souleles, n., & pillar, c. (eds.). (2014). proceedings from the first international conference on the use of ipads in higher education. paphos: cyprus university of technology. doctoral dissertation: churchwell, j. (2005). becoming an academic: factors that inf luence a graduate student’s identity commitment (doctoral dissertation). university of michigan, ann arbor, mi. reachel, l. h. (2001). native languages and toponyms: origins, meaning, and use (doctoral dissertation). available from proquest dissertation and theses database. (document id 1964749161). http://www.thewesternstar.com/ http://www.thewesternstar.com/ http://www.uflib.ufl.edu /ufdc/ufdc.aspx?n=palmm&c=psa1&m=hd2j&i=45367 http://www.uflib.ufl.edu /ufdc/ufdc.aspx?n=palmm&c=psa1&m=hd2j&i=45367 theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 8 (2), 2022, pp. 1–20 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.10432 mahzad karimi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1166-5118 islamic azad university of isfahan (khorasgan) branch, english department elahe ghorbanchian https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7285-0192 university of isfahan, english department effects of adjunct model of instruction on eap learners’ reading comprehension skill a b s t r a c t with the quick transition to online teaching during the covid-19 pandemic, it is vital to take the recent development in language teaching methodology into consideration, especially the pedagogical utility of new models of english for academic purposes (eap). accordingly, the main objective of the present study was to investigate the efficacy of the adjunct model in improving the overall reading comprehension skills of iranian architecture students in online eap courses. to this end, from the population of students studying architecture at the isfahan university of art, three intact classes, each with 35 sophomore students were selected. while the first class was taught by a language teacher (the language-driven group) and the second class received instruction from a content teacher (the content-driven group), the third class was taught by applying the adjunct model involving both content and language teachers. at the end of the semester, a reading comprehension test was administrated to all students. the analysis of the data through running a one-way anova and post hoc analysis revealed that the students in the adjunct class outperformed their peers in the other two classes on the reading comprehension test. keywords: adjunct model, eap classes, online courses, reading comprehension covid-19 has resulted in a dramatic change in education, with the distinctive rise of e-learning. in iran, like in other parts of the globe, universities offer an online module for their students including learners of english for academic purposes (eap). eap courses focus on teaching english specifically to facilitate learners academic achievements through the medium of english (flowerdew & peacock, 2001). it is reasonable to view eap as an eclectic and pragmatic discipline in which a wide range of linguistics, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.10432 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1166-5118 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7285-0192 mahzad karimi, elahe ghorbanchian2 applied linguistics, and educational topics are integrated into coursework (hamp-lyons, 2001). some linguists (brinton & snow, 1988; richards & rodgers, 2001) postulated the adjunct model as two coordinated courses: a content/subject course and a language course. in this model, the content/subject instructors stress academic topics and the language teachers emphasize language skills such as reading and writing (brinton & snow, 1988). the model can compensate for the lack of collaboration between content and language teachers and provide an explicit reflexive relationship between content, language, and learning (barwell, 2013; tan, 2011). integration of a foreign language as a tool in the learning of a non-language subject in which both language and the subject have a joint role could facilitate the reading comprehension skill. the ability to read english efficiently in eap courses is a critical skill. reading comprehension involves abilities to recognize words, process sentences to build comprehension, engage a range of strategic processes, interpret meaning in relation to schematic knowledge, evaluate texts, and process texts over an extended period of time (grabe, 2009). successful reading comprehension is an interaction among various variables, including background knowledge, lexical repertoire, knowledge of syntax, and metacognitive awareness (chuang, joshi, & dixon, 2012). the need analysis as a major stage of eap (kumaravadivelu, 2012; tomlinson, 2011) can reveal students’ various needs. for instance, the reading comprehension of iranian undergraduate students is widely echoed through their need assessment (tahriran & sadri, 2013; zarifi & asadpour, 2017). in order to satisfy eap learners’ needs, instructors mostly read the texts aloud and translate them into persian in a hasty manner (zarifi & asadpour, 2017) and this is due to their poor pedagogic content knowledge that ultimately hinders comprehensibility of texts. despite an ever-growing eap as a branch of efl in iran, there is confusion with respect to the actual implementation of eap courses. many iranian eap instructors implement the course as presupposed by the curriculum developers who have no consideration and concern for collaboration between elt and subject-matter departments. in the absence of this collaboration, the whole process places a considerable burden on the teachers involved in eap classes because they should possess the necessary educational and professional background. haphazard instructions by unqualified teachers who are in favor of uniform choices of materials based on unverified assumptions might ultimately lead to dissatisfaction amongst the learners (tavakoli & tavakol, 2018). moreover, eap learners often experience difficulties in the skill of reading comprehension. although implementing an adjunct model of instruction requires a willing interaction among teachers and it may be difficult to arrange, the rise of oneffects of adjunct model of instruction… 3 line learning during the covid-19 pandemic paves the way for a cooperative atmosphere in which professionals experience togetherness. in sum, the study might offer some insights into online collaborative teamwork of efl teachers and content instructors for eap courses. it also contributes to employing the adjunct model to enable eap architecture students to access academic knowledge while they are acquiring english proficiency. in fact, the integration of language and content help students develop the reading strategies needed to comprehend academic texts. literature review eap courses hutchinson and waters (1987) consider english for specific purposes (esp) as a generic name encompassing many other types of english teaching that can be broken down into three types: (a) english for science and technology (est), (b) english for business and economics (ebe), and (c) english for social studies (ess) which is further divided into two subcategories: english for academic purposes (eap) and english for occupational purposes (eop). accordingly, eap is a subcategory of esp and its major aim is equipping students with english in their professional and academic lives (gillet, 2016). according to diane (2009), eap must be tailored to the needs of the learners, which means eap courses should begin with an analysis of the students’ linguistic background, what they already know and what they desire to know. various scholars (diane, 2009; dudley-evans & st. john, 1998; robinson, 1991) recommend the following procedures for eap courses: (a) recognizing what learners’ needs are, (b) developing or adapting materials tailored to the student’s needs, and (c) acquiring knowledgeable instructors teaching according to their learners’ needs. eap is an indispensable part of some university curricula designed for all disciplines and majors. eap courses are usually restricted to only one or two of the four skills (wette, 2018), specifically acquainting learners with academic readings and technical vocabularies have been highlighted. eap instructors direct their learners’ attention to the text structure, reading skills like skimming and scanning, deducing meanings of words and structures, distinguishing between major and minor ideas, and the functions of discourse markers and cohesive ties (sharndama, samaila, & tsojon, 2014). in the early 1960s, eap courses started in iran as a result of a collaboration between iranian universities and western academic centers (cowan, 1974). mahzad karimi, elahe ghorbanchian4 since then, a large number of university students have enrolled in eap as a compulsory course, and many course books published by samt, one of the most popular publications. despite a prolific number of eap books, there is a consensus among eap researchers (atai, 2002; shahmirzadi, 2018 tayebipour, 2005) that no significant improvement has been observed in eap classes. the lack of salient improvement can be attributed to the textbooks following rigid structures, focusing on reading comprehension skills, micro-linguistic aspects of reading skills. iranian eap practitioners can hardly find any published documents on the current patterns of methodological preferences. hence, poorly designed materials lead to little or no cooperation between elt and subject matter instructors (atai, babaii, & tahekhani, 2017). having unsystematic plans, lack of authenticity, and too much emphasis on translation rather than communication are some other challenges. it is worth mentioning that most iranian eap learners are taught only by one general language teacher who does not have the chance to cooperate and consult with major specialists. in other words, there is no situation that two or more professionals jointly deliver substantive instruction (khales haghighi & abdolahi, 2014). l2 reading comprehension reading is an important skill for language learners, specifically eap students. it is the process of “constructing meaning by coordinating a number of complex processes including word reading, word and world knowledge, and fluency” (klinger, vaughn, & boardman, 2007, p. 2). according to bos and vaugh (2009), l2 readers activate their background knowledge in three ways: (a) the first approach belongs to what is textually explicit. hence, comprehen sion is facilitated by some explicit information presented in the text and readers do not need to deeply rely on their background knowledge; (b) the second one refers to textually implicit texts. in this reading type, readers partially make use of their background knowledge to find out the information of the text, and (c) the last type refers to scripturally implicit texts. the high levels of complexity in this type make learners deeply activate their background knowledge. academic reading demands the readers’ considerable and deep engagement with the text and author. in other words, learners need to be critical readers to find out what the text is about, what the author’s message is, and realize which part of the text is useful for reflecting upon the text (martiarini, 2018). therefore, an eap reading curriculum should account for multiple purposes, including searching information, comprehending general ideas, learning new information, and synthesizing and evaluating information. the complicated nature of academic readings is highlighted by various researchers (lei, rhinehart, howard, & cho, 2010; perin, 2013). the challenges effects of adjunct model of instruction… 5 that learners may have are related to vocabulary knowledge, choosing an appropriate reading approach, becoming aware of the main aim of the author, and determining the global idea of the text. they have to learn not only a foreign language but also develop their scientific knowledge. to cope efficiently with these challenges, an adjunct model of instruction can be employed. adjunct model of instruction and its rationale the rationale for eap courses is content-based instruction (cbi) which is traced to mohan’s (1986) language and content. mohan believes that language should not be taught in isolation from the content. in the light of cbi’s theories, brinton, snow, and wesche (2003) proposed three models of cbi as follows: (a) theme-based instruction whose goal is l2 competence within specific topic areas. in this model, each theme is elaborated over several weeks to provide adequate input, and learners are assessed primarily by their l2 skills; (b) sheltered instruction whose aim is mastery of content and students are evaluated on content mastery; (c) adjunct instruction is primarily based on an interplay between content and language and collaborative teamwork of two separate instructors. in other words, there is collaboration combined with the content and language integrated learning (clil) approach (carrio pastor, 2009). the theoretical assumption underlying the adjunct model of instruction is clil which is commonly described as an additional language which is used for learning and teaching of both language and content (coyle, hood, & marsh, 2010). clil should be distinguished from other forms of bilingual education, such as immersion education or content-based instruction (kampen, admiraal, & berry, 2018). dalton-puffer (2011) mentions the distinguished features of clil as follows: clil refers to using a foreign language that is not regularly used outside the classroom; learners receive clil teaching when they have already acquired their mother tongue; clil teachers are mostly subject specialists who are not competent at the target language; and clil subjects are usually timetabled within the institutions’ curriculums. mahzad karimi, elahe ghorbanchian6 experimental studies the collaboration between subject experts and language specialists might be challenging because of established boundaries or “jurisdiction” (abbott, 1999) existing among the members of a professional society. in other words, collaboration across disciplines is hard work and demands interdisciplinary programs that are difficult to sustain over long periods (wilkinson, 2018). however, regarding the adjunct model, some researchers have proven its efficacy by its implementation for teaching biology in the middle east (flowerdew, 1993) and history and sociology at george fox university (iancu, 1997). in the same vein, many researchers (coyle, 2005; marsh, 2008; morton, 2019; wolff, 2009) believe that an academic subject should be taught as a single subject with close cooperation between content teachers and language teachers. in their view, both content and language teachers should have equal importance and allow different aspects of a subject to be focused on. in an experimental study conducted by cario pastor and perry (2010), an adjunct model of instruction was implemented at the universidad politecnica de valencia. their main purpose was to facilitate the teaching of pilot domainspecific materials to students of industrial engineering. through an online forum, content and language teachers collaboratively worked to teach the materials. in doing so, content teachers proposed vocabularies and content questions while the language teachers designed groups for writing activities, listening and oral tasks, and some grammar exercises. they concluded that the integration stimulated interpersonal communication, motivated students, and took into accounts the needs of students. khales haghghi and abdollahi (2014) recruited 52 students from ilam university, iran, aged from 20 to 28 years old, majoring in business management. they employed a quasi-experimental, pre-test–post-test design and compared students’ achievements in two experimental and a control group. the experimental groups were taught by two types of adjunct model of teaching: team teaching and station teaching. the students of the first group were taught by a couple of teachers delivering instruction to the learners simultaneously. the students of the second group were also taught by two teachers; however, they received instructions at three different stages or stations. their findings revealed that both experimental groups outperformed their peers in the control group regarding the reading comprehension skill. vosoughi, ghahremani ghajar, and navarchi’s study (2019) mentioned that although iranian elt practitioners believed in collaborative practice, they found it so burdensome to create such a situation due to some reasons related to mismatching psychological characteristics of content and language instructors as well as some flawed educational arrangements in the country. effects of adjunct model of instruction… 7 conversely, mehrabi, and boshrabadi (2016) posit that scaffolding iranian law students through team teaching has a considerable impact on their reading comprehension. although a large and growing body of literature has been published on the efficacy of the adjunct model of instruction on eap learners’ improvement, there have been few controlled studies that accentuate the significance of cooperation, collaboration, and team-teaching simultaneously in the age of online learning during the pandemic. moreover, many studies (huang, 2006; phakiti, 2006; pritchard & nasr, 2004) reveal difficulties of reading comprehension, but too little attention has been paid to the possible impacts of the adjunct model on eap learners’ reading comprehension. this lack is the main objective of the present study which aims to investigate how the application of the adjunct model can improve iranian architecture students’ reading comprehension skill. thus the study sought to answer the following question: what is the effect of the adjunct model of instruction on iranian eap learners’ reading comprehension skill? method research design and context since it was not possible to randomize individuals or groups to treatment and control groups, the quasi-experimental, nonequivalent control group posttest only design was utilized. to be more precise, the researchers attempted to measure the effects of the adjunct model of instruction on reading comprehension of online eap learners majoring in architecture in the experimental group and compared that measure with two non-equivalent/comparison groups that did not receive the treatment by a post-test implementation. the covid-19 pandemic has affected iran like other parts of the globe and led to the closure of face-to-face courses. therefore, the study was conducted within the context of virtual synchronized online settings through which the instructors and students could interact in a specific virtual space at a set time. active discussion, immediate feedback, and personal interactions with peers and instructors were some of the advantages of online synchronous learning. mahzad karimi, elahe ghorbanchian8 participants in winter 2020, when the pandemic made all classes held in an online module, from the population of sophomore undergraduate students studying architectural engineering at isfahan university of art (iua), three intact classes were assigned to two control groups and an experimental group. their age ranged from 18 to 24. to equalize the samples, the first class was taken as a reference and the additional subjects in other classes were randomly excluded so that the number of participants in each class was considered to be the same and equal to 35. the three classes reflected homogenous groups in terms of their proficiency in english as the department offered the eap course to those pupils who could pass the general english exam with scores ranging from 16–20 in the first semester. however, to ensure homogeneity of the participants’ language proficiency level, oxford quick placement test (oqpt, 2001) was assigned. based on their scores, five participants were discarded from the study because their scores were sharply (–2 sds) lower than other students’ scores. also, the participants passed the same basic courses, such as history and theory of architecture, descriptive geometry, land development, and structural engineering in their first semesters. this meant they learned almost the same content knowledge while attending their eap classes. furthermore, the involvement of three university professors paved the way for an adjunct model of instruction. the researchers who were university lecturers in tefl (teaching english as a foreign language) and an associate professor in architectural engineering were assigned co-teaching roles. instruments the oqpt (version 1) was used to measure the proficiency level of the students. the test, designed by the oxford university press, is comprised of 60 questions in vocabulary, grammar, reading, and cloze test. geranpayeh (2006) pretested the test on 6,000 participants and validated it in 60 countries. according to allen (2004), the oqpt has been calibrated against the proficiency levels based on the common european framework of reference for languages (cef), the cambridge tesol examinations, and other international tests such as toefl. moreover, according to various researchers (allen, 2004; jabbari, 2014; tahriri & yamini, 2010), the cut-off points considered for proficiency levels are reliable indicators. the scoring criteria are as follows: effects of adjunct model of instruction… 9 table 1 scoring criteria for proficiency levels proficiency levels cut-off points beginner 0–29 breakthrough 30–39 elementary 40–49 lower-intermediate 50–59 upper-intermediate 60–69 advanced 70–79 very advanced 80–100 the main teaching resource was the english for students of architecture, volume two, written by rastegarpour (2012). the book has been designed for the iranian architecture students who have to take the specialized english course in the second or third semester. it consists of 15 lessons with specialized content in the field of architecture, including: the purpose of architecture, cultural origins of architecture, architectural planning, the art of building, form in architecture, architectural methods, materials, energy and building, natural elements, concepts in architecture, types of concepts, building economics, islamic architecture, and muslim architectures. at the end of each text, standard exercises were provided to consolidate the learning of the essential concepts related to the same text. since the pandemic has forced in-person teaching to shut over the globe, many universities and institutions mandated the teachers to shift to virtual classrooms. among the available software, adobe connect was the virtual platform used in this study. it enabled the instructors to interactively work together and provide an immersive experience to their students. at the end of the semester, the researchers developed a reading comprehension test (rct) with five reading passages and ten questions for each passage (n = 50). while the first eight questions were in multiple-choice format, the last two questions required the participants to make an overall evaluation of the text and to complete diagrams with matching items. designing questions were facilitated by using the comprehension framework proposed by day and park (2005). accordingly, the questions assessed six types of comprehension: (a) literal comprehension: involving understanding explicit information presented in the reading, such as vocabularies, dates, and facts; (b) reorganization: comprehending the text beyond literal understanding; (c) inference: requiring learners to identify meanings that are not explicitly stated; (d) prediction: involving students using both their understanding of the passage and their own knowledge of the topic, (e) evaluation: requiring the learners to give mahzad karimi, elahe ghorbanchian10 a comprehensive opinion about various aspects of the text, and (f) personal response: requiring readers to respond with relying on their own feelings for the text and subject. the validity of the test was measured based on two efl associate professors’ opinions. its reliability was also checked through a pilot study on 100 sophomore students of engineering studying at the iau. the reliability of the test was .86 (α = .86), which can be considered satisfactory. data collection procedure first, following obtaining an ethical approval from the head of two faculties, architecture and foreign languages, and the university’s vice-chancellor, a letter of information and consent form (see appendix a) was emailed to three associate professors of architecture. they were requested to approve of collaborating with two english instructors. one of the professors showed a tendency and was chosen as the co-teacher in the study. then, in order to make sampling fairly homogenous, the researchers selected those sophomore students who passed their general english with a score range of 16–20. also, the oqpt was run at the outset of the study to ensure the level of homogeneity. next, 105 homogeneous students were divided into three groups: • the adjunct group (experimental group) received an adjunct model of instruction through a collaboration among the language teachers and a subject-matter instructor. • the language-driven group (control group) was taught by the language instructors whose priority was language teaching. • the content-driven group (control group) was taught by a subjectmatter specialist whose priority was content teaching. all the three groups were required to take sixteen 90-minute sessions of an online eap course. two main administrative problems that could impede the experiment were the timetabling and lack of consistency needed for successful cooperation. however, to tackle these problems, two instructors who were ph.d. holders of tefl (teaching english for foreign languages) and a subject-matter professor who was a full-time faculty member of the architecture department of the isfahan university of art arranged a preteaching discussion to achieve two goals: (a) designing a curriculum and lesson plan that specified the lessons’ objectives, classroom activities, and the role of each instructor, and (b) designing a collaborative teaching strategy through which each lesson was taught in a balanced way. tale 2 and 3 summarize the syllabi employed in the study. effects of adjunct model of instruction… 11 table 2 language-driven syllabus goal understanding key ideas and details objectives students will be able to: • skim and scan texts for main ideas; • summarizing and paraphrasing texts; • using contextual clues to facilitate comprehension; • demonstrating comprehension of texts; • understanding vocabulary items, including general, semi-technical, and technical terms embedded in the texts; • understanding grammatical structures embedded in the texts, including tenses, modal verbs, tag questions, clauses, reflexive pronouns, reported speech, and quantifiers). strategies reading comprehension the bottom-up approach • recognizing words and decoding meanings; • recognizing structures of phrases and sentences. the top-down approach • activating background knowledge; • stimulating making predictions about new information. general words and technical terms • giving definition or synonyms; • asking students for the definitions; • discussing the underlying meaning of the words; • drawing or displaying the picture of the words; • looking up the word in an online dictionary. grammar structures • raising students’ consciousness about the structure; • combination of explicit and implicit teaching. the subject-matter instructor had the duty to provide a rigorous comprehensive explanation about the lesson topics, including architectural design, architectural environmental design, interior architecture, and landscape architecture in persian. table 3 content-driven syllabus goal assisting students in being critical of knowledge itself objectives students will be able to: • master the subject matter; • increase self-interest and familiarity with the content areas; • follow the lesson content with more confidence and enhance their background knowledge about the topic. strategies reading comprehension • teaching the subject matter in simplified english tailored to students’ levels; • using students’ l1 to cope with comprehension difficulties; • using english not to talk about the language itself but to accelerate students’ understanding of the subject matter; • evaluating students on their content mastery rather than l2. mahzad karimi, elahe ghorbanchian12 the most outstanding feature which made the adjunct group different from the other groups was team-teaching. through collaborative work, the language and content teachers took the initiative to prepare the students for particular target goals. the english teachers handled the skills associated with the common core aspects of the language. by contrast, the subject teacher focused mainly on the technicalities of the course by clarifying the content which was unfamiliar to the language teacher. at the end of the treatment, which was a full semester, all groups participated in a reading comprehension test (rct) as their final exam. data analysis procedure the research question in this study asked whether the adjunct model of instruction that fosters cooperation, collaboration, and teamwork between language and content teachers was effective for improving the reading comprehension skill of the iranian architectural engineering students. to answer the question, the scores on the final exam served as the data in this study. the related data analysis was carried out by the spss software. first, to provide descriptions of the population, descriptive analysis was used. then, levene’s test was used to test the assumption of homogeneity of variance. next, in order to determine whether there are any statistically significant differences between the means of the three groups, the one-way anova was administered. since the differences among groups were significant, a post hoc test was run to locate those specific differences. the one-way anova which compared the means of reading comprehension test scores indicated that the groups were significantly different from each other. post hoc tests and pairwise multiple comparisons also determined the learners in the experimental group who received the adjunct model of instruction significantly outperformed their peers in the other two classes. results table 4 provides simple summaries about the data collected on the posttest. it shows that the students in the adjunct class outperformed the other two groups taught by the independent teachers. in fact, the average perfor mance profile of students in the adjunct group was remarkably higher than their peers. effects of adjunct model of instruction… 13 table 4 descriptive statistics groups n mean std. deviation std. error 95% confidence interval for mean minimum maximumlower bound upper bound content-driven 35 14.1143 1.64086 .27736 13.5506 14.6779 10.00 18.00 languagedriven 35 15.6000 1.26491 .21381 15.1655 16.0345 13.00 18.00 adjunct 35 17.4286 1.57715 .26659 16.8868 17.9703 15.00 20.00 total 105 15.7143 2.01778 .19691 15.3238 16.1048 10.00 20.00 as table 4 shows, the mean of the content-driven group (m = 14.11, sd = .27) and language-driven group (m = 15.6, sd = .21) were close to each other. however, the total differences in mean scores of three groups indicate that the highest level of performance is observed in the adjunct group (m = 17.42, sd = .26). in order to determine whether there were statistically significant differences among the means of post-test, the one-way anova was run. before it, the homogeneity assumption needed for the one-way anova was assessed through levene’s test. table 5 presents the results. table 5 levene’s test levene’s statistic df1 df2 sig. mark based on mean 1.196 2 102 .307 based on median .569 2 102 .568 based on median and with adjusted df .569 2 100.701 .568 based on trimmed mean 1.201 2 102 .305 according to the results of the levene’s test, the groups were homogenous in terms of variances ( p > .05). hence, there is no violation of the assumption needed for running the one-way anova. table 6 the one-way analysis of variance (anova) sum of squares df mean square f sig. between groups 192.914 2 96.457 42.681 .000 within groups 230.514 102 2.260 total 423.429 104 mahzad karimi, elahe ghorbanchian14 as can be seen in table 6, there exists a significant difference among three groups. in fact, the f value is remarkably higher than the critical f value and we can safely conclude that the adjunct method was more effective. to ensure the credibility of the results, a post hoc analysis was applied. table 7 illustrates the multiple comparisons of pairs of means. it is seen that pairwise comparisons of means statistically substantiated the meaningful variation existing between the adjunct, content-driven, and language driven groups. table 7 multiple comparison of measure for control and experimental groups (i) class (j) class mean difference (i–j) std. error sig. 95% confidence interval lower bound upper bound contentdriven languagedriven –1.48571* .35936 .000 –2.1985 –.7729 adjunct –3.31429* .35936 .000 –4.0271 –2.6015 languagedriven contentdriven 1.48571* .35936 .000 .7729 2.1985 adjunct –1.82857* .35936 .000 –2.5414 –1.1158 adjunct contentdriven 3.31429* .35936 .000 2.6015 4.0271 languagedriven 1.82857* .35936 .000 1.1158 2.5414 the findings presented in table 7 revealed that the differences in the learners’ reading comprehension skills were significant among three groups ( p < .05). as we can see in table 7, there is a significant difference between the language and content, language and adjunct, as well as adjunct and content groups. it can be concluded that both of the language and adjunct groups have made greater improvements in the participants’ post-test scores. diagram 1 depicts the average performance profile of group differences by illustrating the superior performance of students receiving instruction through teamwork and collaboration. figure 1. mean analysis of post-test scores of three groups. effects of adjunct model of instruction… 15 the line graph depicts the mean scores of two groups, the content-driven and language-driven, are lower than the mean scores of the adjunct group that received the blended model of instruction. in other words, the adjunct group performed better in terms of the reading comprehension skill. discussion through analyzing the data obtained from the reading comprehension test administrated as the final exam and comparing outcomes of the control and experimental groups, it was found that the adjunct model was pedagogically considered a superior way of teaching eap courses because it produced certain meritorious features. the finding of this study is consistent with the results of the study done by cario pastor and perry (2010). they used an adjunct model of instruction at the universidad politecnica de valencia and concluded that the collaborat ion between the content and language teachers enhanced interpersonal communication, encouraged students, and took into accounts the needs of the learners. it also accords with the earlier observations of flowerdew (1993), iancu (1997), coyle (2005), marsh (2009), morton (2009), and wolff (2009) who all believe that an academic subject should be taught as a single subject with close cooperation between content teachers and language teachers. in their view, both content and language teachers should have equal importance and allow different aspects of a subject to be focused on. it also further supports the idea of mehrabi and boshrabdi (2016) who insist on scaffolding iranian eap learners through team teaching to improve their reading comprehension. the results of this study are also in accordance with khales haghghi and abdollahi’s (2014) research that was conducted on 52 students by employing a quasi-experimental, pre-test–post-test design. the experimental groups were taught by two types of adjunct model of teaching: team teaching and station teaching. their findings revealed that both experimental groups outperformed their peers in the control group in terms of the reading comprehension skill. however, the study does not support the findings of vosoughi, ghahremani ghajar, and navarchi’s research (2019) that demonstrated that collaborative instruction is so complicated due to some reasons related to mismatching psychological characteristics of content and language instructors as well as some flawed educational arrangements in the country. mahzad karimi, elahe ghorbanchian16 conclusion evidently, the paper has tried to prove the efficacy of the adjunct model of instruction in eap learners’ reading comprehension skill. the main conclusions from our study can be summarized as follows: – the reading comprehension skill of l2 learners who receive content-driven instruction cannot significantly improve in comparison with the reading skill of those learners who are provided with the language-driven and adjunct model of instruction. – language-driven instruction that mainly uses english for teaching the language itself with the secondary emphasis on the content could lead to better results in terms of reading comprehension in comparison with content-driven instruction. – the adjunct model of instruction as a dual-focused educational approach in which english is used for teaching and learning the content and language can considerably enhance eap learners’ reading comprehension skill. the finding could enhance our understanding of the unique nature of english for academic purposes (eap) courses which require a somewhat different pedagogical approach compared with traditional approaches used for general english courses. various eap classes taught either the language teacher or the content teacher perform poorly on the final exam which is mainly composed of reading comprehension questions. it seems that the pedagogical efficacy of collaboration and teamwork between language and content teachers in eap courses may bring the linguistic input closer to the required needs of the eap learners. in other words, the complimentary role of language and content teaches provides extra motivation because the subject concepts are described along with language skills. the pedagogical implications from this research are hoped to be practical to the practitioners involved in eap, in particular to those dealing with the teaching of the reading comprehension skill. theoreticians may also find the results useful to implement further research. more specifically, the findings of this research can contribute to a better curricula planning for eap courses. finally, some limitations need to be considered. first, due to the strict policies and rigid timetable of the university, we were not allowed to administer a pretest prior to the treatment. in addition, the study lacked the multiple qualitative instruments for data collection. for instance, an online attitude survey could reflect more about the participants’ opinions on the adjunct model of instruction. such studies should elicit opinions of instructors as well as the participants. effects of adjunct model of instruction… 17 based on the mentioned limitations, further investigation is needed to assess the efficacy of team 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(2017). exploring reading comprehension needs of yasouj eap students of persian literature. the journal of applied linguistics and applied literature, 5(1), 89–98. mahzad karimi, elahe ghorbanchian zum einfluss des förderorientierten unterrichts auf leseverständnisfähigkeiten der eap-lernenden z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g angesichts eines raschen übergangs zum online-unterricht während der covid-19pandemie scheint es angebracht, die neueste entwicklung in die methodik des sprachunterrichts mahzad karimi, elahe ghorbanchian20 miteinzubeziehen, insbesondere den pädagogischen nutzen der neuen modelle von english für akademische zwecke (eap). dementsprechend bestand das hauptziel der vorliegenden studie darin, die wirksamkeit des im unterricht eingesetzten fördermodells hinsichtlich der verbesserung von allgemeinen leseverständnisfähigkeiten iranischer architekturstudenten in online-eap-kursen zu untersuchen. als probanden wurden die architekturstudenten der isfahan university of art – drei komplette gruppen mit jeweils 35 studierenden im zweiten studienjahr – ausgewählt. die erste gruppe wurde von einem sprachlehrer (sprachorientierte gruppe), die zweite von einem fachlehrer (fachorientierte gruppe) und die dritte nach dem fördermodell, an dem sowohl fachals auch sprachlehrer beteiligt waren, unterrichtet. am ende des semesters wurde ein leseverständnistest für alle studierenden durchgeführt. die analyse der ergebnisse mittels einer einseitigen anova sowie die post-hoc-analyse zeigten, dass die studenten der nach dem fördermodell unterrichteten gruppe bei dem test besser abgeschnitten hatten als die der anderen beiden gruppen. schlüsselwörter: fördermodell, eap-unterricht, online-unterricht, leseverständnis appendix a letter of information dear professor… our names are mahzad karimi and elahe ghorbanchian. we are english instructors, working at the foreign language department. we are currently conducting research on the impact of the adjunct model of instruction on iranian eap learners’ reading comprehension. we would like to invite you to participate in the study because your mastery of architectural subjects will be required. we truly believe that an online team-teaching during the covid-19 pandemic when there are no in-person classes could assist engineering students to learn english. if you agree to participate in this research study: 1. you may be contacted to patriciate in a debriefing session remotely through a telephone or virtual communication. it will take approximately 90 minutes to design a collaborative curriculum. 2. this semester will be scheduled in 90-minute sessions held in 16 weeks. the time and length of the instruction can be negotiated. however, ideally, each session should be split in half, halftime spent on teaching architectural subjects and the other half on teaching language-related topics, such as grammar and vocabularies. risks & benefits there are no known or anticipated risks or discomfort associated with participating in this study. you may benefit from the results of the study in terms of how engineering students can develop their l2 knowledge as well as the contents embedded in their course books. theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 8 (2), 2022, pp. 1–18 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11788 liliana piasecka https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3474-3235 institute of linguistics, opole university, poland when “grass was greener”*: longplay album covers and learning english. a retrospection a b s t r a c t this paper brings together several important threads accounting for learning english as a foreign language, that is, language learning experience, material culture as an element of this experience as well as a component of the learning environment, motivation and music. material culture has recently attracted the attention of researchers interested in foreign/second language learning and multilingualism because it provides a rich context for many multilingual practices. longplay album covers are an excellent example of artefacts that combine the verbal with the material. music and songs, pop songs in particular, are an important motivating factor in learning languages. the aim of this paper is to share with the reader the author and her generation’s encounters with pop music of the 1960s, focusing on language learning experience based on the material aspects of these encounters, that is, longplay record covers. the paper, then, is the author’s personal ref lection based on her own experience as well as on the multiple discussions she has had with friends and colleagues whose teenage years spanned the 1960s. also connections between music and language learning are discussed along with suggestions of activities capitalizing on learners’ interest in music in the teaching process. keywords: foreign language learning experience, material culture, longplay album covers, pop music, motivation l2 learning experience and material culture l2 learning experience is an important component of l2 motivational self system (dörnyei, 2005), but it has been largely underresearched. it may * the quote comes from the song “high hopes” from the pink floyd’s album division bell (1994): “the grass was greener / the light was brighter / with friends surrounded / the nights of wonder” (http://www.pink-f loyd-lyrics.com/html/high-hopes-lyrics-division-bell.html). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11788 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3474-3235 liliana piasecka2 be conceptualized as language input and immediate learning environment (dörnyei, 2009) but also, more broadly, as “situated classroom experiences as well as experiences beyond the classroom comprising cognitive and emotional processes” (csizér & kálmán, 2019, p. 227). outside the classroom experiences with language input and use provide an intriguing source of information about the tangled pathways to foreign language proficiency. in addition, the experiences addressed in this paper are also related to material culture that has been an inseparable component of various learning environments and which has taken various forms. although material culture is a relatively recent research trend in the area of foreign/second language learning and multilingualism as it allows for many multilingual practices by providing “the physical, historical, and emotional background for communication” (aronin, 2012, p. 180), it has been used in foreign/second language learning contexts for some time quite frequently. in communicative language teaching, for example, the use of realia understood as “real objects, specimens or artifacts—not copies, models, or representations—from a particular culture” (berwald, 1987, p. 3) is encouraged exactly for these reasons. real objects along with authentic texts used in a foreign language classroom bring to the learners a taste of reality and let them personally experience real life situations for which realia have been designed and prepared (berwald, 1987; richards & rodgers, 2001, p. 170). they are also a rich and varied source of information related to the culture(s) of the target language community which they derive from. the term “material culture” refers to a wide range of “artefacts and cultural landscapes” that “objectively represent a group’s subjective vision of custom and order” (marshall, 1981, p. 17). societies and language communities produce and create large numbers of artefacts, many of which are relevant in multilingual contexts. the objects that are essential from the multilingual perspective “have inscriptions or language signs on them, and meaningfully relate to an individual’s identity and surrounding social reality” (aronin, 2012, p. 181), thus connecting the material and the verbal. bringing out the importance of studies in material culture for multilingualism, aronin (2012) argues that “such studies can help us to understand how materialities create and modify multilingual reality, being instrumental in shaping and reshaping identities of both individuals and communities” (p. 181). songs and music, recorded on various media, not only allow for authentic interactions with the target language culture but also have a strong motivating power for learning the target language. music and songs, pop songs in particular, are an important motivating factor in learning languages. listening to music has been identified as one of the main reasons for using the internet (e.g., piasecka, 2012; szyszka, 2015). music and songs, recorded on vinyl records, tapes, cassettes, cds or mp3s, and thus given permanence, are a manifestation of material culture combining materiality and when “grass was greener”… 3 language. the records have always come packaged in covers of various designs that have seduced people into buying them and finding pleasure in using them. however, what was easily available in some cultures, was an extravagance and a rarity in others. longplay records with music and songs have been produced worldwide, but in the “golden sixties” the circulation of records with western pop music was limited behind the iron curtain. in the 1960s and 1970s, for people living behind the iron curtain, access to western music was neither simple nor cheap. possessing a record of the beatles, the rolling stones, or another popular music band, was considered as a mark of identity—the owner was someone to make friends with if people wanted to listen to the records. despite the difficulties, teenagers could listen to the music on the radio (radio luxemburg, for example) or, if there was such an opportunity, to original recordings of the most popular singers and music bands of the day. the post-second world war period to understand the role of pop music in the lives of young people, it it necessary to consider the political, social and cultural climate of the post-second world war period. the united states enjoyed “economic growth and affluence that were unprecedented in the history of the world” (patterson, 1998, p. 164). the production of consumer goods made people’s lives comfortable and easy. at the same time, expectations were high with respect to the quality of living as well as personal and civil rights. though generally optimistic, the 1950s also wittnessed the black americans’ protests against racial discrimination and segregation, especially in the south. yet it was not until the mid-1960s when the laws abolishing discrimination and segregation in public and political life were passed (civil rights act of 1964 and voting rights act of 1965, patterson, 1998). the turbulent 1960s in the u.s. were also marked by american involvement in the vietnam war. since the u.s. was a supporter of a “democratic and non-communist world order” (patterson, 1998, p. 164), the war was waged to protect these important values. yet, the escalation of the war, the growing number of casualties, the information about the atrocities of the war and the senseless bloodshed resulted in a strong opposition to it. the society, misled by the johnson administration about the military and political situation in vietnam, responded with fierce anti-war protests and demonstrations. the anti-war protest was also associated with american counterculture and its music. not all the americans were under the spell of the economic prosperity of the 1950s, and towards the end of the decade the representatives of the beat generation “were deliberately rejecting what they considered the crass materililiana piasecka4 alism and conformity of american society” (patterson, 1998, p. 170). women were no longer satisfied with ideal housewives’ roles prescribed by the conser vative society. a birth-control pill triggered the sexual revolution. college and university students voiced their dissatisfaction not only with curricula but also with rules that regulated female and male social relations. a well-established social order was crumbling. while the post-war u.s. enjoyed economic prosperity and was a scene of social unrest, post-war europe was gradually rising from the ashes and ruins. divided by the iron curtain—“the political, military, and ideological barrier erected by the soviet union after world war ii to seal off itself and its dependent eastern and central european allies from open contact with the west and other noncommunist areas” (http://britannica.com)—into open and democratic west and communist-dominated center and east, it took different routes of post-war reconstruction. the recovery of the west was supported by the marshall plan which was not accepted by the countries behind the iron curtain. instead, the council of mutual economic assistance was founded to provide for the reconstruction, to encourage co-operation among the countries and link them strongly to the soviet model of economy. at the same time, by limiting the access of these countries to the technologies, products and markets of the west, it accounted for inefficient economic systems dependent on soviet subsidies and growing disillusionment with the system. this discontent resulted in a number of upheavals in the eastern block (bideleux & jeffries, 2007). the upheavals were suppressed by friendly armies. in poland, the poznań riots of june 1956 resulted in a change in leadership of the communist party and in some reforms that were implemented, though only temporarily. as a consequence, the 1960s “saw an actual diminution of political and cultural freedom; but […] even so, by 1965 it was still ‘much ahead of most, if not all, of the members of the soviet block in political liberalism’” (brus, as cited in fowkes, 2000, p. 65). life behind the iron curtain in this decade was marked by a kind of stability but also by a shortage of many commodities. the post-war period in western europe is also associated with the growing popularity of jazz and dance music, broadcast by american military radio stations. this music was characterised by freedom of expression both in the musical arrangement and song lyrics. fretted by conservative society for its association with improper sexual behaviour, it was appreciated by the younger generation which rebelled against the established social system and was ready for changes in life style, reflected by fashion and music (lipoński, 2004). in addition, the young generation became an important audience for pop music. so far, adults composed songs for adults but the presence of a teenage audience changed the sitation—teenagers not only listened to music but they also wrote it (gołębiowski, 2004). these factors set the scene for the outburst of popular music in the 1960s. as hayes (2002, p. 5) comments, “young people of the u.s. http://britannica.com when “grass was greener”… 5 and many western europen countries rebelled against the social convention of the time, adapting new ways of both thinking and living.” the “golden sixties” the 1960s in western europe and the united states, then, witnessed dramatic changes in many spheres of life. people enjoyed relative prosperity, they could purchase more goods for the money they earned. life became less formal and more casual, which affected people’s attitudes to other people, politics, fashion, and music. new fashion trends emanated from carnaby street in london. music in particular was important to young people worldwide, regardless of the political systems they lived in. the “golden sixties” was a decade of the rapid development of various music bands and genres of music that changed the understanding of popular music. that variety was represented by the “british invasion,” associated mostly with the american and worldwide success of the beatles, the rolling stones, but also such singers as tom jones. the beatles’ appearance on the ed sullivan show attracted an enormous television audience of about 74 million viewers. it was “the first successful invasion of the united states since british troops burned washington 150 years earlier” (hall, 2014, p. 69). it evoked enthusiasm from teenagers and hatred from the establishment. the young felt the magic of the band while their parents were terrified by their children’s response (slon, 2014). the popularity of the beatles struck the british isles like a storm and then impacted the rest of the world. crowds of teenage fans accompanied the band wherever it appeared. the phenomenon, referred to as beatlemania, started in 1963 and stopped by 1967. the fans were described as “hysterical teenagers of every class and colour, shouting uncontrollably […] each of them emotinally, mentally, or sexually excited, foaming at the mouth, bursting into tears, hurling themselves like lemmings in the direction of the beatles, or just simply fainting” (davies, 1996, p. 176). while davis perceives the teenagers’ fascination with the beatles as hysteria, lahr (1981) argues that “beatlemania” is a misnomer because the fans were not hysterical but spellbound by the fab four. their “music was a form of sympathetic magic, and the beatles were local divinities who could change the mood and the look of their times by a song, a style, a word” (p. 22) which they did. analysing the phenomenon, lynskey (2013) notes that the fans participated in some kind of a ritual, their screaming was an expression of themselves, their youth, freedom and power. moreover, by screaming and losing control, teenage girls who were then supposed to be “paragons of purity,” protested against “the sexual repressiveness, the rigid double standard liliana piasecka6 of female teen culture” (ehrenreich, as cited in lynskey, 2013). for ehrenreich, this phenomenon “was the first and most dramatic uprising of women’s sexual revolution” (ehrenreich, as cited in lynskey, 2013). though the beatles were the kings on the stage of pop music, other musical forms also gained popularity. rock music was represented by surf rock (e.g., the beach boys), psychedelic rock (e.g., jimmi hendrix), roots rock (e.g., bob dylan), hard rock (e.g., deep purple), folk rock and protest music (e.g., bob dylan, pete seeger, simon and garfunkel). protest music was inspired by social disobedience and the anti-war movement and showed the artists’ and their generation’s reaction to social injustice, as well as their appreciation of freedom, love, and peace, a clear influence of the hippie movement. also african-american bands and singers became popular and recognised. on the one hand, “black music” that had previously been performed by white musicians got back to the “legitimate” african-american performers. on the other hand, african-americans helped to break down the barriers of racial segregation (http://www.thepeoplehistory.com). the generation of the 1960s spoke and sang in many voices. the “time of progress and protest” (hayes, 2002, p. 5) that had such a strong impact on the ways of thinking and living in western societies, had also influenced the lives and culture of people behind the iron curtain. the youth living there were also fond of music and new bands, both local and foreign. while records of polish bands, though not cheap, were relatively easy to buy, records of the bands from the west were hard to obtain and exorbitantly expensive. yet, western music came through the radio, on pirate sound postcards, and from family living abroad. sometimes it was brought by people who travelled abroad. a person who had a geniune beatles’ record, for example, enjoyed a high status in a peer group and everybody wanted to make friends with him or her. this way the ones who did not have a record could listen to it and have a look at the cover. the appearance of tape recorders made access to the songs, but not covers, much easier. listening to pop songs in english, teenagers behind the iron curtain were determined to find out what they were about. they tried to write down the lyrics from what they heard and thus incidentally practiced listening comprehension along with sound and word discrimination. although the product was often hilarious, incomprehensible and far from the original, they kept trying. looking at and touching a vinyl record cover was also a valuable experience. the covers had song titles that might have been used as clues to understanding the lyrics. they also contained pictures and graphics that told their stories. the enormous popularity of the beatles crossed the physical and ideological borders. davis observes that “young russians no longer perceived the western http://www.thepeoplehistory.com when “grass was greener”… 7 culture as decadent and hostile; they liked listening to the beatles’ songs as much as other youngsters” (1996, p. xi). not only musical tastes of young people from the eastern block were affected, but also a life style represented, among other things, by fashion. miniskirts and minidresses, floral shirts, hippie furs, hair styles and make up showed the young generation’s fascination with colour and freedom (yapp, 2005). in the mid-1960s, beatle-like shoes (polish bitelsówki) for males became fashionable in poland. state shoe factories did not produce them but the need for this kind of shoes was satisfied by private shoemakers. not all of them made the shoes, but the ones who did, enjoyed a high status among artisans. custom-made beatle-like shoes were in high regard (szewczyk & szabłowska, 2013). this is another piece of evidence that shows how the music of the days shaped the material culture. stories told by longplay album covers album covers have several functions, that is, they protect the records, they advertise them, they accompany the music, and they are a commodity (inglis, 2001, p. 84). the 1950s and early 1960s did not change the traditional design of album covers but evolved into the so-called personality covers showing an attractive image of the performer(s), their names and the title of the album (thorgerson, 1989, p. 10). it was only with the release of the beatles’ album revolver, released in august 1966 (https://www.thebeatles.com/revolver), designed by klaus voorman, which won the grammy award for best album cover of 1966 (inglis, 2008, p. 92), that a new thinking about possible designs of record covers emerged. the cover of revolver shows “a remarkable visual-musical correspondence” (inglis, 2001, p. 87) implying that innovations in music are supported by innovations in the visual design of the cover. a combination of line drawings of the beatles’ heads and small photographs of them reflects “the varieties and innovations of the music” (inglis, 2001, p. 87) on the record. when the band started recording sgt pepper’s lonely hearts’ club band, their intention was to have a cover that would be an integral element of the album. they wanted “to create a record whose musical impact would be complemented by its visual impact” (inglis, 2008, p. 91). according to paul mccartney, this album was a big production, and we wanted the album sleeve to be really interesting. everyone agreed. when we were kids, we’d take a halfhour bus ride […] to buy an album, and then we’d come back on the bus, liliana piasecka8 take it out of the brown paper bag and read it cover to cover […] you read them and you studied them. we liked the idea of reaching out to the recordbuyer, because of our memories of spending our own hard-earned cash and really loving anyone who gave us value for money. (inglis 2008, p. 91) peter blake and jann haworth, the designers of the cover, took the challenge and successfully brought together fine art and popular culture (inglis, 2001). the beatles drew a list of characters who they liked and who influenced their lives. for the cover they chose movie stars, artists, sportsmen, comedians, gurus, singers, philosophers and scientists thus blowing up the traditional distinctions between “high” and “low” culture and contributing to “the shifting intellectual climate of the 1960s” (inglis, 2008, p. 93). cardboard figures that surround the beatles wearing colourful satin uniforms and holding musical instruments in their hands (www.thebeatles.com/sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band-0) represent people who promote the ideas of other possible worlds or who offer literary or cinematic trips to exotic places […] the cover suggests that the beatles to some extent live the past in the present, live in the shadows of their own as well as of other people’s past accomplishments. (poirier, 1969, pp. 178–179) the cover tells an interesting story about the journey that the band had taken and how it affected their identities. they started as nice working class lads from liverpool, “clean-shaven, look alike ‘mop-tops’” (inglis, 2008, p. 97) and achieved enormous popularity and commercial success but also became independent to follow their own artistic fascinations. they changed from musicians into magicians who have supernatural powers and who have multiple identities. inglis (2008) writes that “in the world favoured by the beatles, all of us have the ability to be magically transformed into whomever and whatever we may choose, whenever and wherever we may desire” (p. 94). while the front cover showed the tableau-like image of a variety of characters who had some importance for the beatles, the back cover was also innovative—it had the printed lyrics of all the songs from the album. this feature was greatly appreciated by music lovers. gross (http://manhattman.com/2012/ it-was-45-years-ago-today) recalls: [o]n that first friday in june [1967], i ran down to my local music shop, anticipating the release of the new beatles’ album that day. […] wow! what a cover! it was so different than anything i had ever seen at the time. i turned it over to discover rows and rows of song lyrics (italics mine). that was new too. i don’t think it had ever been done before. www.thebeatles.com/sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band-0 http://manhattman.com/2012/it-was-45-years-ago-today http://manhattman.com/2012/it-was-45-years-ago-today when “grass was greener”… 9 song lyrics were presented as poetic texts and as such they could be studied, evaluated, and reflected on. using song lyrics in this way, “the beatles had shifted the function of popular music from music-as-entertainment to musicas-communication” (inglis, 2008, p. 96). sgt pepper’s cover, like the cover of revolver before, won the grammy award for best album cover in 1967. it has also been recognised as one of the twenty masterpieces of british 20th century art and design (inglis, 2001, p. 94). the front cover was a challenge and a gift for learners of english as a foreign language. not only did they listen to songs but they also tried to recognise as many famous people on the cover as possible (an interactive version of the sgt. pepper who’s who can be found at https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/ whos-who-on-the-beatles-sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band-album-cover/), they could talk about them, they could follow the lyrics, develop their own interpretations of what they were listening to, and travel to imagined places they had never visited. in a way, their experience with the cover was much similar to that of peter saville, a graphic designer, who says: “when i was 15, in the north-west of england…. the record cover to me was like a picture window to another world” (http://www.gigwise.com/news/45430/designer-peter-saville-the album-cover-is-dead). in fact, record covers were picture windows to many different worlds and they meant different things to different people. they took the teenagers from the familiar surroundings to the new lands of imagination and creativity. they developed and sharpened their aesthetic sensitivity, with respect to both music and visual arts. they ushered them into a certain system of values and developed the feeling of belonging. they also inspired thinking about one’s own identity: who am i? where do i belong? what matters in life? what matters in my personal life? almost all album covers of the beatles were exceptional, they have been seen as groundbreaking in their visual and aesthetic properties, have been congratulated for their innovative and imaginative designs, have been credited with providing an early impetus for the expansion of the graphic design industry into the imagery of popular music, and have been seen as largely responsible for allowing the connections between art and pop to be made explicit. (inglis, 2001, p. 83) then more covers with records inside became available. there was leonard cohen with his poetic texts, joan baez with her protest songs, simon and garfunkel, bob dylan, the doors, and so on. from “some notes on the songs” (the best of leonard cohen) one could learn that “chelsea hotel” was written “for an american singer who died a while ago. she used to stay at the chelsea hotel, too.” the lives of people who used to live in the famous chelsea hotel https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/whos-who-on-the-beatles-sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band-album-cover/ https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/whos-who-on-the-beatles-sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band-album-cover/ http://www.gigwise.com/news/45430/designer-peter-saville-thealbum-cover-is-dead http://www.gigwise.com/news/45430/designer-peter-saville-thealbum-cover-is-dead liliana piasecka10 in the late 1960s and 1970s are referred to in an interesting memoir by patti smith (2010). from the foreign language learner’s perspective the covers—excellent examples of material culture and a telling evidence of the impact of pop culture on the lives of young people—aroused interest in art, music and, consequently, language. they were rich in cultural information and aesthetically stimulating. very often they were designed by well-known artists. they came with the records inside and song lyrics on the back covers or inside. song lyrics themselves were not only samples of authentic language use and varieties of native speaker pronunciation, but they also appealed to themes and problems that were important to youngsters of those days. as a matter of fact, many of them still appeal to young people. in addition, the combination of music and language made many language forms memorable. many of the author’s friends and collegues still remember the lyrics of the songs they once listened to, sang, and learned. last but not least, they invited reflection on the contemporary world and evoked a wide range of emotions. connections between music and foreign language learning music and language connections have been observed and discussed since ancient times and have been studied from various perspectives. music and language represent special abilities of a human brain and both are “human universal[s] in which perceptually discrete elements are organized into hierar chically structured sequences according to syntactic principles” (patel, 2003, p. 674). this implies that linguistic and musical processing overlap in the brain. neuropsychologists have found out that musical structure is processed in the area of the brain that has been associated with the processing of spoken and sign language structure (levitin & menon, 2003). music has always played an important role in the development of children and the development of language. chen-hafteck (1997) observes that “music and language are the two ways that humans communicate and express themselves through sound. since birth, babies start to listen and produce sound without distinguishing between music and language, singing and speech” (p. 85). in the early years of their life children learn to sing simple songs that integrate language and music. when words and songs share stress and accent patterns, they support comprehension of word stress and extend attention span. children learn to anticipate new information and their memory is enhanced (palmer & kelly, 1992). when fourand five-year-old children were tested on music tasks, phonological awareness tasks, and early reading development tasks, it when “grass was greener”… 11 appeared that musical ability and phonological awareness are strongly related. music perception was found to be a predictor of reading ability (anvari, trainor, woodside, & levy, 2002). also the recreational use of music with children helps them to develop their intellectual and memory abilities, expression of feelings and emotions, and social skill of getting along with others. children enjoy the music and share this enjoyment with others (campbell, 2003). while the research briefly referred to above concerns the context of first language acquisition, similar effects have also been found in second/foreign language learning situations. learners who can accurately analyse, discriminate, and remember musical stimuli have stronger l2 phonological skills. this means that musical ability is a predictor of l2 phonological ability at the receptive and productive levels (sleve & miyake, 2006, p. 679). from the pedagogical perspective, music performs important functions in foreign language classrooms. it introduces a relaxed state of mind, so strongly recommended by suggestopedia (richards & rodgers, 2001, p. 102), and lowers the affective filter, thus reducing tension and negative emotions in learners and creating a friendly learning environment in which memory and attention are enhanced (brewer & campbell, 1991). the relaxing and creative nature of music is also stressed by adkins (1997) who perceives it as the foundation of multisensory pedagogy. moreover, music-based language learning activities provide an “acquisition-rich” environment in which learners can also rely on musical intelligence, a component of multiple intelligencies model (gardner, 1983). music-based activities that create the learning environment may involve both high and pop culture. learners become familiar with the culture(s) of the target language through its music and songs. singing songs along with native singers is particularly useful for the development of foreign language skills. learners imitate the sounds and the rhythm of the language, they also learn to speak quickly (speh & ahramjian, 2009). setia et al. (2012) report that the use of english songs with primary school learners helps to increase their vocabulary and improve pronunciation. the learners are more interested in learning, enjoy the tasks, and report higher levels of confidence. all these enhance motivation for learning and using the foreign language which, thus, becomes less foreign. lake (2002–2003), a seasoned teacher of english as a second language, convincingly argues for the use of songs and music in language classrooms highlighting that they encourage whole brain and whole language learning, improve pronunciation and memory. not only does he offer useful tips for using songs in the process of language teaching, but he also gives examples of songs that can be used, and shares his own teaching experiences with the readers. he sees english songs as a useful means of acculturation but they are also important as carriers of cultural information. in a similar vein, shayakhmetova et al. (2017) argue that songs can be successfully used for the development of intercultural competence. they carried liliana piasecka12 out a year-long experiment durning which efl learners were studying eigh teen topics related to british culture and everyday life, using five to six songs interwoven with other activities. after the experiment a test on the knowledge of british life was carried out and it appeared that the experimental group outperformed the control one and the difference was statistically significant. moreover, the researchers also administered a survey to teachers to find out how english song lyrics are used in english teaching. this was accompanied by a learners’ questionnaire to identify their attitude to using songs in english classes. the results reveal teachers’ and students’ positive attitude to the use of songs. the teachers recognise linguistic benefits of using songs that are manifested in the phonetic, lexical, grammatical, and communicative development along with the development of socio-cultural competence and tolerance of other cultures. needless to say, also increased motivation for learning english is underscored. although such an important contribution of songs to foreign language learning and teaching has been recognised, their use in the classroom is “episodic” (shayakhmetova et al., 2017, p. 644) and their potential for the growth of linguistic and socio-cultural knowledge is definitely unexplored. since pop music and song lyrics play such an important role in young people’s lives, they can be used to as a springboard for variuos language learning activities (werner, 2019). song lyrics include authentic language put in a specific text genre that can enhance learning motivation and reduce language anxiety. although linguistic and socio-cultural gains from using pop song in the process of learning efl are indisputable, “pop lyrics still seem to be underexploited” (werner, 2019, p. 6). werner (2019, p. 9) is particularly interested in non-standard grammatical forms that can be found in song lyrics as a means for developing efl leaners’ language awareness. a qualitative corpus study of pop lyrics allowed werner to idenfity the non-standard forms that can be exploited in teaching to make efl learners aware of register which accounts for pragmatic and stylistic appropriateness. apart from register variation, these non-standard forms also show social and regional variation which are related to identity and linguistic capital as well. while werner is concerned with the potential of pop lyrics for the development of language awareness, tegge (2017) focuses on the lexical knowledge and the opportunities for language learning that song lyrics offer. assuming that both written and spoken text comprehension requires the lexical coverage of 95% to 98%, tegge (2017) analysed two song corpora to find out how many words learners of english need to know to understand song lyrics. it appeared that to understand song lyrics taken from charts (the so-called chart corpus including pop songs from the top 100 end-of-year u.s. billboard charts, www.billboard.com), learners need to know “3,000 word families plus proper nouns, transparent compounds and marginal words” (tegge, 2017) for 95% when “grass was greener”… 13 lexical coverage. however, to reach 98% coverage, the knowledge of 6,000 word families is necessary. the 95% coverage is within the vocabulary range of learners of english (cf. laufer 1998, 2001). the analysis of the other corpus (the so-called pedagogical corpus including songs selected by teachers and materials writers to be used in class) revealed that the knowledge of 2,000 word families plus proper nouns, transparent compounds and marginal words is needed for 95% lexical coverage while 98% coverage requires the knowledge of 4,000 word families. these findings have clear pedagogical implications. song lyrics defined as “a special case of written-to-be-spoken (or, rather, written-to-be-sung) genre” (kreyer & mukherjee, 2007, p. 37) are authentic and similar to oral and written spoken genres but are less lexically demanding than other written texts to be comfortably comprehended. in addition, teacher-selected songs are usually shorter, involve high frequency words and their lexical demand is lower than that of chart songs. even so, they still may be demanding for efl learners. yet, because of their shortness they may be used during lessons for repeated listening, reading-while-listening as well as for identifying familiar and unfamiliar vocabulary. to sum up, music and language can be perceived as “supportive sisters” (stansell, 2005, p. 3). music and songs support the intellectual, social, and emotional development of children, stimulate memory, bring relaxation, enjoyment, comfort, confidence, and motivation. they positively affect pronunciation and contribute to the development of reading skills. they contribute to the development of language awareness, lexical and sociolinguistic sensitivity as well as to the intercultural competence. these correspondences between music and language may explain why people, including foreign language learners, have always shown such a strong liking of music. conclusions interest in music is one of the most authentic and natural interests of people, especially of the younger ones (cf. piasecka, 2012, p. 9; szyszka, 2015, p. 9). many members of the author’s generation were motivated to learn english by the pop music of the 1960s. although original records of the most popular bands of that time from western europe and the united states were difficult to obtain behind the iron curtain, the ones that were available brought the music packaged in attractively designed covers. these covers carried the language and images which stimulated the listeners’-learners’ imagination, inhabited their memory, and exposed them to a rich multimodal cultural context. they opened liliana piasecka14 windows to new experience, new sensitivity, and new perceptions of the world. moreover, they were the witnesses of the times when young people around the globe were getting their own voice to speak about the critical problems of their generation. taking the perspective of learner autonomy it may be concluded that adolescents from the 1960s fully practised their independence—they listened to what they wanted to (and to what was available) and they used pop songs as a resource and a motivator for language learning. most interesting—they did all these marvelous things outside the classroom, in their free time, and they enjoyed it immensely. the vinyl records of the 1960s and 1970s were gradually replaced by cassettes, which were gradually replaced by cds. then music and songs became available in the form of mp3s and now they can be easily found in many channels on the internet. this does not mean, however, that vinyl records have disappeared from the phonographic market. hasted (2012) notes that “[t]he ongoing upswing in sales of vinyl records, as cd sales collapse, has been heartening for all who still value their warm analogue sound and substantial, striking packaging.” as a matter of fact, quite a number of young people are interested in vinyl records, they purchase and collect them. the statistics concerning the sales of vinyl records show a steady increase in their sales. caulfield (2018) reports that in 2017 vinyl lp sales accounted for 14 percent of all physical album sales with the beatles’ sgt. pepper’s lonely hearts club band as the top selling vinyl record. english language teachers may capitalize on their learners’ love of music and ask them to share their musical fascinations with other learners, which can be done in a variety of ways (cf. lake 2002–2003). they can also use the potential of record covers by drawing their learners’ attention to the design, the meaning of the design, and the possible connections that covers have with the music they advertise. encourging the talk about visual art represented by the covers develops the learners’ language skills along with their artistic sensitivity. the teachers may also invite learners to design their own covers for the records with their favourite musical pieces. the learners can model their own covers on the ones they appreciate. when they discover the story behind sgt pepper’s cover, for example, they may be willing to make a list of characters who have influenced their lives so far and produce a tableau similar to sgt pepper’s cover. moreover, sharing the songs and music they like, learners build their own communities of practice, develop emotional sensitivity and—hopefully— reflectivity. using record covers, music and language, the learners engage many senses, which supports memorisation and makes learning an interesting and engaging adventure. song lyrics—an underexploited genre in foreign language education—can be used to develop grammatical sensitivity, register awareness, the sense of when “grass was greener”… 15 identity and the awareness of other cultures that the songs represent. needless to say, song lyrics that represent authentic language have a great potential for language learners’ lexical growth and sensitivity. music matters if nothing else does. and so does language. references adkins, s. 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(1992). linguistic prosody and musical meter in song. journal of memory and language, 31(4), 525–541. patel, a. (2003). language, music, syntax and the brain. nature neuroscience, 6(7), 674–681. patterson, j. (1998). the united states since 1945. in m. howard and wm. r. louis (eds.), the oxford history of the twentieth century (pp. 164–175). oxford university press. piasecka, l. (2012). efl students’ use of the internet. what is communicated? presentation at tal conference, opole, november 12–14, 2012. poirier, r. (1969). learning from the beatles. in j. eisen (ed.), the age of rock: sounds of the american cultural revolution (pp. 160–79). random house. richards, j. c., & rodgers, t. s. (2001). approaches and methods in language teaching (2nd ed.). cambridge university press. setia, r., rahim, r., nair, g., mohd adam, a., husin, n., sabapathy, e., & … seman, n. (2012). english songs as means of aiding students’ proficiency development. asian social science, 8(7), 270–274. https://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ass/article/view/17633 shayakhmetova, l., shayakhmetova, l., ashrapova, a., & zhuravleva, y. (2017). using songs in developing intercultural competence. journal of history culture and art research, 6(4), 639–646. https://doi.org/10.7596/taksad.v6i4.1157 sleve, r., & miyake, a. (2006). individual differences in second-language proficiency—does musical ability matter? psychological science, 17(8), 675–681. slon, s. (2014). beatles ’64. editor’s letter. saturday evening post. january/february 2014, 10. smith, p. (2010). just kids. harper collins publishers. http://doi.org/10.1515/angl.2007.31 http://doi.org/10.1515/angl.2007.31 http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/sep/29/beatlemania-screamers-fandom-teenagers-hysteria http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/sep/29/beatlemania-screamers-fandom-teenagers-hysteria https://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ass/article/view/17633 https://doi.org/10.7596/taksad.v6i4.1157 when “grass was greener”… 17 speh, a. j., & s. d. ahramjian. (2009). teaching without a common language: synchronicities between the pedagogies of music and second language acquisition. bulletin of the transilvania university of braşov, 2(51), 53–58. stansell, j. w. (2005). the use of music for learning languages: a review of the literature. http://writingthetrueself.com/pdfs/jon_stansell_the_use_of_music_for_learning_languages. pdf szewczyk, k., & szabłowska, m. (2013). ludzkie gadanie. życie, rock-and-roll i inne nałogi [people’s chatting. life, rock-and-roll, and other addictions]. znak. szyszka, m. (2015). multimedia in learning english as a foreign language as preferred by german, spanish and polish teenagers. in l. piasecka, m. adams-tukiendorf, & p. wilk (eds.), new media and perennial problems in foreign language learning and teaching (pp. 3–19). springer. tegge, f. (2017). the lexical coverage of popular songs in english language teaching. system, 67, 87–98. thorgerson, s. (1989). classic album covers of the 60s. paper tiger. werner, v. (2019). lyrics and language awareness. nordic journal of modern language methodology, 7(1), 4–28. yapp, n. (2005). decades of the 20th century. the sixties. könemann/getty images. www.billboard.com. accessed january 22, 2021. http://www.britannica.com. accessed january 22, 2021. http://www.gigwise.com/news/45430/designer-peter-saville-the-album-cover-is-dead. accessed january 22, 2021. http://manhattman.com/2012/it-was-45-years-ago-today. accessed january 22, 2021. http://www.pink-floyd-lyrics.com/html/high-hopes-lyrics-division-bell.html. accessed january 22, 2021. http://www.thepeoplehistory.com. accessed january 22, 2021. https://www.thebeatles.com/revolver. accessed january 22, 2021. https://www.thebeatles.com/sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band-0. accessed january 22, 2021. https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/whos-who-on-the-beatles-sgt-peppers-lonely-heartsclub-band-album-cover/. accessed january 22, 2021. liliana piasecka als „das gras noch grüner war“: schallplattenhüllen und englischlernen eine retrospektive z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g das erlernen des englischen als fremdsprache ist ein komplexer prozess, der unter anderem solche aspekte wie lernerfahrung, kultur und materielle kultur als bestandteil der lernerfahrung bzw. des lernumfelds sowie motivation und musik miteinbezieht. in der modernen forschung wird das augenmerk insbesondere auf die materielle kultur im kontext von fremdsprachenerwerb und mehrsprachigkeit gerichtet, weil sie eine reiche fundgrube für verschiedene fremdund mehrsprachige aktivitäten ist. schallplattenhüllen sind ein hervorragendes beispiel für artefakte, die das verbale mit dem materiellen verbinden. musik und lieder, insbesondere popsongs, sind wichtige motivatoren für das fremdsprachenlernen. im http://writingthetrueself.com/pdfs/jon_stansell_the_use_of_music_for_learning_languages.pdf http://writingthetrueself.com/pdfs/jon_stansell_the_use_of_music_for_learning_languages.pdf https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/whos-who-on-the-beatles-sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band-album-cover/ https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/whos-who-on-the-beatles-sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band-album-cover/ liliana piasecka18 vorliegenden beitrag berichtet die autorin über die erfahrungen ihrer generation mit der popmusik in den 1960er jahren. der fokus liegt dabei auf dem fremdsprachenerwerb durch kontakt mit materiellen formen der kultur, nämlich schallplattenhüllen. in dieser hinsicht stellt der text eine persönliche ref lexion dar, die sich auf eigene erfahrungen der autorin sowie auf ihre zahlreichen gespräche mit freunden und bekannten, welche in den 1960er jahren jugendliche waren, stützt. darüber hinaus wird im artikel auf das verhältnis zwischen musik und fremdsprachenlernen eingegangen. hingewiesen wird unter anderem auf die rolle von songtexten bei der entwicklung von sprachkenntnissen bzw. -bewusstsein und interkultureller kompetenz. es werden vorschläge gemacht, wie das musikinteresse der schüler im fremdsprachenunterricht gebraucht werden kann. schlüsselwörter: fremdsprachenerwerb, materielle kultur, schallplattenhüllen, popmusik, motivation theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 8 (2), 2022, pp. 1–20 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11943 danial babajani azizi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7205-4417 department of english language khazar institute of higher education mahmoudabad, iran nourollah gharanjik https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8957-8009 department of english language and literature ilam university, ilam, iran mahmood dehqan https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4344-7307 department of english language and literature university of mazandaran, babolsar, iran the effects of mobile-mediated explicit and implicit feedback on efl learners’ use of english prepositions a b s t r a c t making mistakes is a natural part of learning process requiring correction; accordingly, corrective feedback is indispensable. on this ground, the present study compared the effects of mobile-mediated explicit and implicit corrective feedback on iranian efl learners’ use of english prepositions of manner and movement. to this end, the participants including 60 learners were randomly assigned to three groups of 20 individuals on whatsapp application. these three groups included two experimental and one control groups. the treatment groups sat for a pre-test, received instruction on the errors under study, and practiced correcting them in response to the corrective feedback condition. next, participants took immediate post-test and delayed post-test. the statistical analysis revealed that although the control group was more proficient than its experimental counterparts on the pre-test, their performance did not improve on immediate and delayed post-tests. however, both of the experimental groups significantly improved on immediate post-test and retained their gains on the delayed post-test. the pedagogical implication is provided for both teachers and learners. keywords: mobile-mediated corrective feedback, explicit corrective feedback, implicit corrective feedback, prepositions https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11943 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7205-4417 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8957-8009 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4344-7307 danial babajani azizi, nourollah gharanjik, mahmood dehqan2 mobile-assisted language learning (mall) has drastically drawn both theoretical and empirical attention over the past few decades. this spread is testified around the globe as a result of progress in the amalgamation of technologies into educational curricula and syllabi. integration of technologies into educational contexts has brought about changes in classrooms; the digital transformation and usage in the classrooms is one example. according to o’bannon and thomas (2014), the principle of “bring your own device” has been promoted by the popularity of mobile phones in classrooms. it is worth noting that some scholars have found that mall has positive effects on learning processes (kim et al., 2013). furthermore, some scholars have argued for/ against the efficiency of mall (baleghizadeh & oladrostam, 2011; darani & golestan, 2017; lu, 2008; stockwell, 2011; zhang et al., 2011). written corrective feedback (wcf) is considered an essential component of efl/esl writing classrooms all across the world and it is even assumed to be an indispensable part of writing classes by most l2 writing teachers and sla researchers alike. besides, according to rassaei (2019), although the importance of corrective feedback (cf) for l2 development is well documented in sla research as evidenced by several of meta-analyses (li, 2010; miller, 2003; yousefi & nassaji, 2019), the affordances that technology-based l2 instruction and in particular mall create concerning cf are not well understood. more specifically, as mobile technology provides ubiquitous opportunities for language learning, the effectiveness of teachers’ cf provided during mobile-mediated audio and video communication is less understood and merits further attention. even though truscott (1996) argued in his article against the effectiveness of wcf, in a series of debates and dialogues, many articles attempted to argue for the effectiveness of wcf (e.g., bitchener & knoch, 2008a; bitchener & knoch, 2009a, b; bitchener, young & cameron, 2005; chandler, 2003; ellis et al., 2008; ferris, 2002; sheen, 2007), claiming that wcf indeed assists efl learners to promote grammatical accuracy. cf can be explicit or implicit (zhao & ellis, 2020, p. 2). implicit corrective feedback (icf) does not lead to realizing correction by learners. on the contrary, explicit corrective feedback (ecf) leads to realizing so. according to zhao and ellis (2020) cognitive theories differ in terms of their support for ecf and icf. the vivid rationale that cognitive theory presents is long’s (1996) interaction theory. long argues that the negotiation of meaning occurs while communication provides opportunity to fill the void of learners’ interlanguage once problems arise through pushing them to modify their utterance. on the flip side, noticing hypothesis (shmidt, 2001) claims that learners learn once they consciously pay heed to the input; as such, ecf is more effective because it boosts the probability of noticing and correction. although most researchers are unanimous regarding the efficiency of cf on language acquisition (nassaji, 2015), there are differences in the value that these theories the effects of mobile-mediated explicit and implicit feedback… 3 lay on ecf and icf and the kind of learning that yields. hence, as karim and endley (2019) argued, it seems that researchers have obtained mixed results in their findings and it is still not obviously clear-cut which type of wcf is more beneficial and efficient in improving efl learners’ grammatical accuracy. moreover, according to liu and brown (2015), methodological limitations of ‘one-session-long treatment’ need to be taken into consideration because such short-term treatments question pedagogical validity. similarly, with respect to this problem, storch (2010) also asserts that “learning requires extensive and sustained meaningful exposure and practice” (p. 42). additionally, regarding the length of the studies, bitchener and storch (2016) also noted that in order to find answers to questions such as why learners fail to benefit from wcf and more importantly why they cannot promote their accuracy over time, further studies containing more longitudinal investigations will be needed. it is worth noting that prepositions of time and place were largely subject of the previous volumes on wcf (e.g., beşkardeşler & kocaman, 2019; jusa & kuang, 2016; karim & endley, 2019) and the other such prepositions as movement and manner through mobile-assisted cf have not been undertaken to the best of the authors’ knowledge. therefore, this quasi-experimental study was designed to address the aforementioned limitations of previous studies by involving multiple feedback sessions on multiple pieces of writing by scrutinizing the effects of ecf (by providing the correct form above the underlined error), and icf (by simply underlying the observed error). next, it exami ned which of these two types of wcf promoted long-term retention of the target structures and also their learning effects on subsequent writings over time. literature review mobile-assisted language learning mall has become an attractive area of inquiry from the outset of the 21st century. the common employment of mobiles in educational contexts is upheld by such movements as “bring your own device,” a large supply of mobiles among learners, and the prevalent satisfactoriness of mobile in filling the void between social and educational functioning of persons (o’bannon & thomas, 2014). mobile learning is an evolutionary movement in technology in its expansive conceptualization providing opportunities, experiences, and emphasizing on supplying mobiles (mcquiggan et al., 2015). mall is defined by using various technologies such as mobile phones, tablets, and similar computerized advancements (hsu, 2016). moreover, teachers do not deliver cf individually in danial babajani azizi, nourollah gharanjik, mahmood dehqan4 the classroom setting because of time constraints; the whole class is addressed to when providing cf (li, 2010). sheen (2008) found that learners were unable to process teacher feedback in classroom settings, which undermines the effectiveness of cf because learners nowadays are more engaged in mobile phones; as such, their learning processes occur on mobile applications. this might be eventuated in emaciation of classroom cf and the learners’ proclivity to receive cf via mobile. mobile devices provide convenience due to transformation without time and space constraints. additionally, learners can flexibly communicate with each other with the arrival of new apps which provide them with opportunities to establish communication via voice, text, and video chats. actually, these are the personal perspectives turning this technology striking in educational sites and allowing the users to transform language education. hence, the benefits of mobile use are widely known in various aspects of language education involving learners’ perceptions (e.g., hsu, 2013; kohnke, 2020), assessment purposes (e.g., garcıa laborda et al., 2014; tarighat & khodabakhsh, 2016), learning strategies (qian, owen, & bax, 2018), and feedback (ko, 2019). furthermore, some recent studies have addressed the effectiveness of mall in language education (e.g., braine, 2001; ebrahimpour, 2016; ghorbani & ebadi; 2020; xodabandeh, 2017; xu & peng, 2017). however, these studies have not addressed cf in the form of mall. written corrective feedback although the effect of cf on l1 is not dubious, researchers have concerted its effectiveness in foreign/second language betterment (nassaji, 2008). in this vein, a substantial body of studies confirmed the effectiveness of cf on interlanguage development (han, 2002; ishoda, 2004; iwashita, 2003; leeman, 2003; li, 2010; lyster, saito, & sato, 2013; mackey & goo, 2007; mcdonough & mackey, 2006). according to nelson and schunn (2009), cf has two features; cognitive and affective. nelson and schunn (2009) stated that although cognitive and affective feedback were amalgamated, most studies have worked on the cognitive aspect, which is called cognitive feedback. cognitive feedback comprises an evaluative perspective (verification, identification of problem, and statement of summary), an informative perspective (the source or site of the problem, explanation, hint, solution), and a metacognitive perspective (utilizing strategies, progress toward a desired goal) (nelson & schunn, 2009; shute, 2008). nelson and schunn (2009) added that performance and understanding are intensely influenced via cognitive feedback. corrective feedback is necessarily an instructional strategy contributing language learners to improve their written channels (ferris, 2010). corrective feedback, according to nassaji (2018, p. 3), “refers to utterances that indicate to the learner implicitly or more explicthe effects of mobile-mediated explicit and implicit feedback… 5 itly that his or her output has an error in some way. thus, it is a kind of negative evidence.” vigil and oller (1976) classified cf into cognitive and affective. ellis (2009) identified seven types of wcf such as direct, indirect, metalinguistic, focused and unfocused, electronic, and reformulation. one crucial issue which has drawn l2 researchers’ attention over the last three decades is wcf and according to ellis (1991), cf is regarded as a cardinal educational instrument in communicative approaches. hence, the objective of providing learners with cf is to help them correct their mistakes and boost their accuracy as well as fluency. researchers attempted to establish the efficiency of wcf in different aspects of foreign language learning. schmidt (2001) proposed a noticing hypothesis as an indispensable model to include the efficiency of cf in oral and written language production. he further underscored the importance of noticing different linguistic forms in the process of learning. gass and lewis (2007) maintain that learners notice the gap between correct and incorrect form upon cf provision. positive and negative evidence provision through various forms is imputed to cf efficacy (swain & suzuki, 2008). the majority of studies on wcf examined assessing learner revisions through feedback and provided accounts that its impact on learners’ grammatical accuracy in terms of original errors was both significant and positive (ashwell, 2000; ferris, 2006; ferris & roberts, 2001; truscott & hsu, 2008). albeit positive effects of feedback on revisions have been indicated, these studies have been critiqued because learners’ ability is not assured through succeeding in revisions on initial drafts as it does not betoken accurate production of target structures in new writings (truscott, 1996). hence, some studies have investigated the effects of text revision to enunciate if learning can occur through wcf (bitchener, 2008; bitchener & knoch, 2009a, 2009b, 2010; ellis et al., 2008; farrokhi & sattarpour, 2012; frear & chiu, 2015; stenfanou & revesz, 2015). for example, although sheen (2007) found that direct feedback and metalinguistic feedback did not significantly differ in the immediate post-test, metalinguistic feedback was favorable to direct feedback in the delayed post-test. bitchener (2008) assessed the acquisition of english articles by immediate and delayed post-tests through different wcf. the results revealed that performance on delayed post-test by direct corrective feedback (dcf) plus written and oral metalinguistic explanation group and the dcf only group were better than control group’s performance. van beuningen, de jong, and kuiken (2012) scrutinized 268 learners of high and low language proficiency in dutch as l2 on revision and new writing tasks through direct and indirect unfocused wcf. these learners were divided into four groups exposing to dcf, indirect corrective feedback (icf), self-correction, and practice. they have then been administered pre-test, post-test, and delayed post-test. the study indicated that danial babajani azizi, nourollah gharanjik, mahmood dehqan6 linguistic accuracy during revision and new writing improved through wcf on the delayed post-test. the concentration of the majority of research scrutiny has moved from which sorts of corrective feedback are efficacious to probing what elements intercede their impact on their l2 learning because of the variability in research results. the most cardinal parameter which is in the limelight of the current study is the type of feedback focusing on prepositions of movement and manner as target structures. the effect of wcf on prepositions the effectiveness of wcf is mediated by some elements albeit its effects are demonstrated to be positive. for example, bitchener, young, and cameron (2005) investigated the impact of dcf on prepositions, simple past tense, and definite articles among fifty-three learners who were assigned to dcf plus oral conference group, dcf only group, and the control group who were asked to write four compositions. the results revealed that the first group outperformed the last two ones on the simple past tense and definite article but there were no significant differences in prepositions. in another study, al ajmi (2014) studied the impact of wcf provision on ten uses of english prepositions among arab learners. the two groups whom the researcher randomly assigned were divided into experimental and control groups. they were administered pre-test, post-test, and delayed post-test and the last two tests showed the outperformance of the experimental group via running statistical analysis. the questionnaire analysis also indicated the profits of wcf. in a similar study, beşkardeşler and kocaman (2019) probed into studying the impact of wcf on the accuracy of prepositions of place and time among efl students in l2 writing via administering pre-test, post-test, and delayed post-test to compare the effects of direct (un)focused wcf. the direct correction was dedicated to the focused wcf group which aimed at treating target structure only, while the unfocused wcf group was directly corrected on all of their errors plus the target structure errors. the intervention group outperformed the control one on the post-test and delayed post-test plus no significant difference was found between the two experimental groups in the short and long term which led to concluding the usefulness of (un)focused wcf. in order to discover if the efficaciousness of wcf differs on a specific number of prepositions, the present study focuses on different prepositions (i.e., prepositions of movement and manner). albeit the above studies have demonstrated to be efficient on some specific type of prepositions, no study has been undertaken to assess preposition of movement and manner through wcf to the best of the researchers’ knowledge. the effects of mobile-mediated explicit and implicit feedback… 7 the following questions guided this study: 1. does mobile-mediated explicit corrective feedback influence iranian efl learners’ use of prepositions? 2. does mobile-mediated implicit corrective feedback influence iranian efl learners’ use of prepositions? methodology participants the participants were selected through a non-random convenience sampling method. ninety participants constituted the original pool but 60 ones were sifted on the basis of oxford placement test (opt). the proficiency level of the participants of the current study was ascertained via administering opt. hence, 60 pre-intermediate iranian students aged 17–20, studying english as a foreign language at a language institute were recruited as participants in this study. they were randomly assigned to three different chat rooms on whatsapp application to receive explicit corrective feedback, implicit corrective feedback, and no cf provision. instruments oxford placement test to check the homogeneity of the participants, opt was utilized. it is a flexible test of english language proficiency developed by oxford university press and cambridge esol that gives teachers a reliable and time-saving tool to learn about student’s level of english (hill & taylor, 2004). it is easy to administer and ideal for placement testing and examination screening. the test has two parallel versions and takes approximately 30 minutes to administer. all the questions of the test are in multiple-choice format; answers are recorded directly on the answer sheet, and the answer sheets can be quickly marked using the overlays provided. the test assesses the knowledge of english structure, and is considered as a global measure of ability in a language or other content areas. the test has high reliability (α = .91) based on cronbach’s alpha (berthold, 2011, p. 674) and high construct validity (motallebzadeh & nematizadeh, 2011; wistner, sakai, & abe, 2009). danial babajani azizi, nourollah gharanjik, mahmood dehqan8 writing task in the current study, picture prompts were employed to elicit the target structures. the participants were requested to describe the picture prompts representing a scene and to revise the descriptions over two weeks. they were asked to write a minimum of 20 sentences for each writing task in 30 minutes. besides, a sample sentence was given to them as a model. on day 2, having received the cf on their writings, participants revised the descriptions. the same procedure was continued in week 2. each student was asked to produce two new sentences in weeks 3 and 4 in order to investigate the delayed effects of cf on their writing practices. accuracy measure (scoring procedure) grammatical accuracy was the scoring target of every text. the texts were measured on a quantitative variable as conducted in the previous studies on the effectiveness of wcf (e.g., bitchener et al., 2005). the percentage of incorrect use for each specific preposition was defined as a criterion of accuracy calculation. for instance, an error rate of 30% would indicate six inaccurate uses of a specific preposition from ten obligatory occasions. the intra-rater and interrater reliability level of the marks were also identified. in order to ascertain the intra-rater reliability, 50% of the texts were double marked by one of the researchers of the current study two months after the first marks were given and all the data were analyzed. pearson correlation coefficients for the scores at two times for the four writing tasks were: 0.95 (writing 1), 0.94 (writing 2), 0.96 (writing 3), and 0.93 (writing 4). the pearson correlation coefficients for the scores at two times for the two revision tasks were: 0.94 (revision 1) and 0.95 (revision 2). to check the inter-rater reliability, two efl teachers scored 20% of the writings individually. pearson correlation coefficients for the two scores in the four writing tasks were: 0.95 (writing 1), 0.94 (writing 2), 0.93 (writing 3), and 0.94 (writing 4). the pearson correlation coefficients for the two scores in the two revision tasks were: 0.97 (revision 1) and 0.98 (revision 2). target structure the target structures of the current study were prepositions of manner and movement. bitchener et al. (2005) studied and categorized some linguistic structures but prepositions were more problematic than other types of prepositions because of their similarity leading learners to confusion, for example, ‘up’ and the effects of mobile-mediated explicit and implicit feedback… 9 ‘over’ and the interlanguage interference between persian and english languages, which gives rise to prator’s split as the sixth level of difficulty (as cited in brown, 2007), for example, با split into ‘by’ and ‘with.’ further studies need to be carried out on the use of more than two structures to measure learners’ retention to ensure the reliability of findings. therefore, this study utilized prepositions of manner and movement which, to the best of our knowledge, have not been analyzed through written cf yet. procedure the errors related to the abovementioned linguistic features in students’ writings were corrected by one of the researchers. this syntactic structure was selected because as nassaji and swain (2010) pointed out, english prepositions are syntactic features that are less stressed in input than that of output. this means that students can better notice prepositions in their output rather than their input. in other words, learners find it relatively problematic to choose and use the appropriate preposition while producing language. however, they realize how important syntactic features are when they have to use them in the language production stage (output). by reading a text or even by listening to something in english, they do not encounter such a challenge. additionally, efl learners from different proficiency levels are always concerned about their accurate usage of prepositions in their oral and written productions lest they use prepositions incorrectly (rassaei, 2019). the researchers selected 90 learners based on convenience sampling as a population and administered opt to guarantee their homogeneity; hence, 60 participants were sifted as a sample of the study. the sample was randomly assigned to two experimental and one control groups on whatsapp application. having been assigned to three groups of 20 individuals, they were given a pretest writing task. experimental groups received different wcf via whatsapp as follows: group a received explicit corrective feedback on their errors. ecf is explicitly reminding the student what the problem is through such techniques as an error code, a rule reminder, or a brief explanation (bitchener, 2012) but only the last technique was utilized as well as the correct form provision. group b received implicit corrective feedback. for group b, incorrect prepositions were simply underlined to make the student aware of an unspecified error via an underlined or highlighted text portion or a check-mark in the margin (bitchener, 2012, p. 116). group c, the control group, completed the writing tasks without any type of cf delivery. two treatment options including ecf and icf were formed and each of the participants was assigned to one of the two error correction methods, randomly. consider the following instances for ecf and icf: danial babajani azizi, nourollah gharanjik, mahmood dehqan10 ecf s: this movie is inspired from a book. t: the preposition follows ‘inspire’ is ‘by.’ it does not take ‘from.’ icf s: this movie is inspired from a book. the teacher underlined the preposition produced wrongly. the present study was carried out in five sessions of thirty minutes. considering the interval between the sessions, the treatment procedure lasted about four weeks. writing topics were given during the sessions for the three groups, taking learners’ english level and linguistic competence into consideration. the participants produced new sentences in each session. they were given new picture prompts each session to ensure they can write accurately. group a received ecf on their errors, that is, incorrect prepositions were underlined with a red color and the correct forms were written in their place. group b received icf on their errors; phrases containing incorrect prepositions were underlined to indicate an error had been committed but no further information was supplied, and the last group received no treatment. then, an immediate post-test was administered to the three groups. eventually, both the control group and its experimental counterparts took a delayed post-test after two weeks of the immediate post-test. results to examine the effects of ecf and icf on prepositions of manner and movement, one-way anova is run to see the gain scores. descriptive statistics for pre-test, immediate post-test, and delayed post-test regarding the two cf conditions and control group displayed total mean and standard deviation (sd) of 34.16 and 19.68 on pretest, 66.16 and 13.75 on immediate post-test, 66.66 and 13.58 on delayed post-test, respectively. before testing the research questions, the researchers performed tests of normality to ratify their homogeneity. the effects of mobile-mediated explicit and implicit feedback… 11 table 1 test of normality on three test group kolmogorov-smirnov shapiro-wilk statistic df sig. statistic df sig. pretest explicit cf .151 20 .20 .960 20 .542 implicit cf .184 20 .07 .925 20 .123 control .115 20 .20 .969 20 .730 post-test explicit cf .116 20 .20 .943 20 .278 implicit cf .138 20 .20 .932 20 .169 control .126 20 .20 .968 20 .703 delayed explicit cf .117 20 .20 .950 20 .361 post-test implicit cf .150 20 .20 .922 20 .110 control .133 20 .20 .965 20 .650 as table 1 shows, the data are normally distributed on three tests (p ˃ .05). therefore, the proper test to compare each group on the tests is one-way anova. table 2 one-way anova for accuracy gains on three tests sum of squares df mean square sig. pre-test between groups 16735.8 within groups 6122.5 total 22858.3 post-test between groups 2010.8 within groups 9157.5 total 11168.3 delayed post-test between groups 2130.8 within groups 8752.5 total 10883.3 2 8367.9 57 107.412 5 9 2 1005.4 57 160.6 5 9 2 1065.4 5 7 5 9 .00 .03 .02 one-way anova tests were carried out individually for each condition to find out which feedback type was more effective on each test. the table evinces that both cf condition groups were statistically more significant on immediate post-test and delayed post-test than pretest. to determine where the significant differences in accuracy gains lay between groups, post-hoc multiple comparisons were conducted using scheffe. danial babajani azizi, nourollah gharanjik, mahmood dehqan12 table 3 anova: comparing error rates of writings on immediate post-test and delayed post-test groups mean difference std. error sig. 95% confidence interval lower upper bound bound explicit implicit 1.000 4.008 .96 control 12.750 4.008 .00 implicit explicit –1.000 4.00 .96 control 11.750 4.008 .01 control explicit –12.750 4.008 .00 implicit –11.750 4.008 .01 explicit implicit –.750 3.918 .09 control 12.250 3.918 .01 implicit explicit .750 3.918 .9 control 13.00 3.918 .01 control explicit –12.250 3.918 .01 implicit –13.000 3.918 .00 –9.07 2.67 –11.07 1.67 –22.82 –21.82 –10.59 2.40 –10.59 2.40 –22.09 –22.84 11.07 22.82 9.07 21.82 –2.67 –1.67 9.09 22.09 9.09 22.09 –2.40 –3.15 post-hoc pairwise comparison using scheffe tests revealed there is a statistically significant difference between the experimental and control groups. to put it differently, ecf and icf groups outperformed on immediate post-test and delayed post-test concerning control group. however, the control group did not show progress from pretest through immediate post-test to delayed post-test. in addition, the differences in mean error rate scores corroborate this point. post-hoc pairwise comparison of the mean error rate scores using scheffe also demonstrates that the two experimental groups were successful in error reduction. discussion this experimental study attempted to investigate the impact of explicit and implicit corrective feedback provided by whatsapp application on iranian efl learners’ use of prepositions of manner and movement. ecf and icf had a statistically significant effect on iranian efl learners’ use of prepositions, p < .05. the result of this research question is in congruity with beşkardeşler and kocaman’s (2019) study. they examined the effect of wcf on prepositions of time and place which evinced that the two experimental groups outperformed the control group. likewise, bitchener, young, and cameron (2005) studied the effect of different types of cf on esl student writing. they emphasized on direct cf, explicit wcf only which led to the outperformance of experimental groups. the control group of the current study the effects of mobile-mediated explicit and implicit feedback… 13 were more proficient than its experimental counterparts on the pre-test but the experimental groups significantly improved on the immediate post-tests and the delayed post-tests; however, the control group did not improve on these tests, namely, their scores on the immediate post-tests and the delayed post-tests were almost unchanged in comparison to the pre-test. technology inherently motivates the learners (stockwell, 2013) which we believe the use of mall contributed to improve the target structure of the present research as teaching via technologies will enhance learner motivation. as the participants took part in this study eagerly through getting them apprised of the purpose and procedure of the study as well as their rights to voluntary participation and confidentiality, this perspective of the motivational capacity of new technologies might led to a better outcome. furthermore, it can be said that mall explicit and implicit focus on these two target structures were effective and led to the participants’ significant gains which are incongruent with corlet, sharples, bull, and chan’s (2005) study which found mall to be ineffective in foreign/second language learning. this study also indicates the void between mall and the work being performed on cf on language writing. in addition to mall contribution to the learners’ gains, the students in iran are mostly acquainted with traditional assessment and are less allowed to voice their thoughts, to comment on their peers’ assignments, and evaluate their learning and these are the teachers’ responsibility; as such, the experimental groups significantly improved in learning the target structures that delivered on the part of the teachers. some other studies also represent concerns towards mall contending face-to-face mode of teaching leads to a better outcome than mall classrooms (e.g., lindblom-ylanne & pihlajamaki, 2003; braine, 2001). both ecf and icf were effective in promoting prepositions of manner and movement on subsequent writing tasks in case they are repeated because feedback repetition eventuates in recalling the mistakes they made. interestingly, both cf conditions maintained the accuracy and error reduction after two weeks of immediate post-test. the error reduction was noticed as each session moved forward which is not following truscott and hsu’s (2008) and liu’s (2008) findings because cf was delivered only one time, unlike the present study which provided cf multiple times. it can be repeatedly argued that cf provision is efficacious if it occurs in multiple sessions. additionally, no variation between the two cf is observed, that is, both experimental groups were successful in the use of prepositions of manner and movement on pre-test and immediate post-test. danial babajani azizi, nourollah gharanjik, mahmood dehqan14 conclusions the current study was an attempt to compare the effect of mobile-mediated ecf and icf on iranian efl learners’ use of manner and movement prepositions through a quasi-experimental study. data analysis revealed that the two experimental groups outperformed the control group on the target structures. furthermore, although the control group’s gain scores were higher than its experimental counterparts’, they have not progressed on immediate post-test and delayed post-test; however, the experimental groups showed significant improvement on immediate post-test and retained their progress on delayed post-test as well. the results of the study imply that as ecf and icf were beneficial tools that resulted in betterment, teachers can give the learners opportunities to revise and edit their earlier drafts to gain the final correct draft which according to loewen (2004) can lead to automatization from control. finally, it is suggested that language teachers employ mobile apps for cf provision and other language activities. the study has some limitations which should be acknowledged. a comparatively small sample was included in this study. moreover, it was restricted to ecf and icf. further research is required to replicate this study using a larger sample with moderating role of gender, cognitive and perceptual style. additionally, future researchers can take other proficiency levels into account. another study can be carried out comparing ecf and icf in mall and face-to-face mode. another limitation would be the lack of self-reported data from participants (questionnaire/interviews) to know their experiences and perceptions regarding the use of mobile phones to receive feedback, and the extent to which they were more motivated because of this. conflict of interest statement on behalf of all authors, the corresponding author declares that there is no conflict of interest. the effects of mobile-mediated explicit and implicit feedback… 15 references al ajmi, a. a. s. 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(2017). the effectiveness of social media network telegram in teaching english language pronunciation to iranian efl learners. cogent education, 4(1), 1–14. https://doi. org/10.1080/2331186x.2017.1347081 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2014.01.006 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2014.01.006 https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12212 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9922.2011.00674.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-1770.1976.tb00278.x https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186x.2017.1347081 https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186x.2017.1347081 the effects of mobile-mediated explicit and implicit feedback… 19 xu, q., & peng, h. (2017). investigating mobile-assisted oral feedback in teaching chinese as a second language. computer assisted language learning, 30(3–4), 173–182. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2017.1297836 yousefi, m. & nassaji, h. (2019). a meta-analysis of the effects of instruction and corrective feedback on l2 pragmatics and the role of moderator variables. international journal of applied linguistics, 170(2), 278–309. https://doi.org/10.1075/itl.19012.you zhao, y., & ellis, r. (2020). the relative effects of implicit and explicit corrective feedback on the acquisition of 3rd person -s by chinese university students: a classroom-based study. language teaching research, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168820903343 danial babajani azizi, nourollah gharanjik, mahmood dehqan zum einfluss des mobil vermittelten, expliziten und impliziten feedbacks auf die verwendung englischer präpositionen durch efl-lernende z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g fehler zu machen ist ein natürlicher bestandteil des lernprozesses. dementsprechend ist es erforderlich, ein korrigierendes feedback zu geben. in diesem zusammenhang wurde in der vorliegenden studie der einf luss des mobil vermittelten, expliziten und impliziten korrigierenden feedbacks auf die verwendung englischer modaler und lokaler präpositionen durch iranische efl-lernende analysiert. zu diesem zweck wurden insgesamt 60 probanden nach dem zufallsprinzip in drei whatsapp-gruppen zu je 20 personen eingeteilt – zwei versuchsund eine kontrollgruppe. die probandengruppen nahmen an einem prätest teil, erhielten anweisungen zu den untersuchten fehlern und korrigierten sie in anlehnung an korrigierendes feedback. anschließend wurde ein postund ein follow-up-test durchgeführt. die statistische analyse ergab, dass obwohl die probanden in der kontrollgruppe im prätest besser als die in den versuchsgruppen abgeschnitten hatten, konnten sie ihre leistungen im postund im follow-up-test nicht verbessern. die teilnehmer der beiden versuchsgruppen verbesserten hingegen ihre ergebnisse im posttest und konnten die erzielten fortschritte im follow-up-test beibehalten. abschließend wurden die pädagogischen implikationen sowohl für lehrkräfte als auch für lernende abgeleitet. schlüsselwörter: mobil vermitteltes korrigierendes feedback, explizites korrigierendes feedback, implizites korrigierendes feedback, präpositionen https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2017.1297836 theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 4 (1) 2018, pp. 121–139 magdalena szyszka the university opole, poland pronunciation learning environment: efl students’ cognitions of in-class and out-of-class factors affecting pronunciation acquisition a b s t r a c t the way a foreign language (l2) learner perceives his or her educational environment may affect their processes of l2 acquisition. the aim of the study presented in this paper is to explore english as a foreign language (efl) students’ perceptions of their teachers’ pronunciation, in-class and outside-class factors regarding pronunciation acquisition, such as pronunciation activities, recordings, focus on form, peer pronunciation, listening to music, to mention a few. a group of 89 participants responded to a survey, via which the data necessary to respond to the following three research questions was collected. how do efl learners perceive their teachers’ pronunciation? what is the relationship between efl learners’ perceived level of their l2 teachers’ pronunciation and perceived l2 teachers’ classroom language use? what factors, in the view of l2 learners, contribute to their pronunciation acquisition? the results indicate that there are significant differences in the perception of teachers’ pronunciation at different educational levels. also, in l2 pronunciation learning the efl students report the following factors as moderately important: l2 teachers’ pronunciation, in-class l2 use, pronunciation error correction, and in-class and out-of-class exposure to multimedia that provide access to a broad range of l2 pronunciation varieties. keywords: educational environment, efl learners’ perceptions/cognitions, efl teachers’ pronunciation, in-class and out-of-class factors affecting pronunciation acquisition introduction the way a learner perceives his or her proximal educational environment may shape the learning paths (dörnyei, 2005) and foreign language (l2) learning outcomes (williams & burden, 1997). more specifically, if a language magdalena szyszka122 learner is exposed to such factors, for instance, as an appropriate model of a language, clear instructions and effective error correction, and if these factors are compatible with the individual’s expectations, the learning processes may accelerate. however, the reverse situation may transpire if a learning environment does not fulfill the anticipated standards. therefore, it is of paramount importance to attend to students’ cognitions regarding their learning environment in order to establish the best possible conditions for learning. the aim of this paper is to place in the limelight these environmental factors that students of english as a foreign language (efl) perceive as conducive to their l2 pronunciation learning. for this purpose, the outcomes of research into l2 learners’ perceptions of a number of inand out-of-class factors regarding pronunciation acquisition are presented and discussed below. these results may provide an insight into a better understanding of the perceived environmental factors affecting pronunciation acquisition. they may also tap into the design of student-oriented pronunciation teaching approaches. a foreign language learning environment may be understood as a formal and informal setting which is beneficial to learning a foreign language, entailing material and non-material resources as well as “the relationships created […] in the course of interaction among all learning process participants” (stukalina, 2010, p. 347). this definition comprises socio-psychological, socio-cultural, pedagogical, and physical dimensions (saglam & sali, 2013). the first aspect involves all types of in-class student-student and student-teacher interactions and out-of-class student-interlocutor communications that are shaped by individuals’ personalities and learner differences. the second one focuses on culture factors that moderate l2 learning processes (entwistle et al., 2003). pedagogical dimension comprises, among other factors, the role of a teacher and learners’ perceptions of a teaching performance. finally, the physical dimensions embrace, for instance, lecture rooms, classrooms, curricula, teaching materials, equipment, and aids (stukalina, 2010). the educational environment, therefore, is a complex system of diverse constituents interplaying dynamically with one another and affecting the efficiency of an l2 learning process. learners are good witnesses of their own learning, and they are able to deliver reliable and valid feedback concerning their perceived efficiency of various components of an educational environment (centra, 2003). as culver (2010) indicates “given their role as participant observers in classrooms, students are in an excellent position to provide feedback regarding classroom teaching and overall performance of an instructor” (p. 334). therefore, although l2 pronunciation acquisition has been thoroughly researched from a number of perspectives, such as age (cf. birdsong & molis, 2001; colatoni, steele, & escudero, 2015; johnson & newport, 1989), cross-linguistic influence (cf. święciński, 2013), motivation (cf. bongaerts et al., 1997; moyer, 1999), exposure to a target language (cf. rogerson-revell, 2011), explicit instruction pronunciation learning environment… 123 (cf. celce-murcia et al., 2010; wrembel, 2004), to mention a few, scholars’ interest in learners’ cognitions of pronunciation learning processes has recently gained more popularity (e.g., aufderhaar, 2004; derwing & rossiter, 2002; ma, 2012). this paper aims to augment the trend of exploiting learners’ perspectives associated with foreign language (l2) pronunciation learning, taking place in their educational environments. selected factors affecting l2 pronunciation learning there have been many attempts to categorize factors affecting l2 pronunciation (cf. celce-murcia et al., 2010). following zhang’s (2009) taxonomy, these factors may be roughly divided into internal and external. the former derives from learners’ characteristics that entail biological (age), cognitive (aptitude, leaning style, strategies), and psychological (motivation, identity, beliefs, affective factors) aspects. the external factors are those that are influenced by the educational environment, and they are conditioned by sociocultural (amount of exposure) and pedagogical (instruction, teacher’s competence) dimensions. these factors play a major role in the research described below. therefore, there is a need to scrutinize them more thoroughly. first, more attention is given to the role of the amount of exposure to l2 in pronunciation learning. next, the focus is shifted towards the value of a classroom instruction and a teacher. the more the learner is exposed to l2, the better his or her l2 pronunciation attainment. this claim is shared, for instance, by rogerson-revell (2011), who asserts that the amount of exposure to the target language is one of the critical factors in l2 pronunciation acquisition. be it in the target language country or not, the exposure entails an l2 learner’s contact with native and non-native target language speakers, as well as a range of multimedia channels. however, a mere exposure without noticing and discriminating subtle contrasts between l1 and l2 sound systems might lead to unsatisfactory results. additionally, age seems to be a moderating variable, because the older the learners are, the more automatized their articulatory movements for producing l1 sounds become. in consequence, “even advanced speakers find it difficult to acquire new gestural scores for l2 phonemes” (kormos, 2006, p. xxvi). therefore, several scholars, for instance celce-murcia et al. (2010), opt for early immersion instructional programs as optimal instances of an l2 exposure. in other words, because of their greater articulatory plasticity, and perhaps many other socio-psychological factors (cf. dalton & seildhofer, 1994), children may benefit most from an optimal exposure to l2 pronunciation in their educational environments. magdalena szyszka124 the second external factor affecting pronunciation learning selected for the present analysis is pronunciation instruction. since the beginning of the new millennium, there has been an increase in research investigating the effectiveness of explicit pronunciation teaching (cf. saito, 2012), entailing focused instruction, the application of metalinguistic training (macdonald, yule, & powers, 1994; stasiak & szpyra-kozłowska, 2003; wrembel, 2004), and various focus on form (fonf) teaching techniques, such as and focus tasks with or without corrective feedback (lan & wu, 2013; saito, 2011). this movement has been a reaction to meaning-focused instruction dominant in the communicative language teaching approach that disregarded the formal aspect of language learning (celce-murcia et al., 2010). lan and wu (2013) explain that fonf instruction is a method of l2 instruction focusing on both linguistic forms and communication. it is an alternative to focus on meaning instruction of the school of natural approach […], which prohibits direct grammar teaching and promotes natural input of l2 texts and listening materials only. (p. 30) there is a bulk of empirical studies providing evidence for positive effects of explicit pronunciation instruction in the acquisition of various pronunciation aspects. for example, wrembel (2004) conducted a quasi-experiment, in which she measured the relationship between l2 pronunciation attainment and phonological training. the experimental group outperformed the control group in such production tests as reading lists of words and reading a dialogue. in another quasi-experiment, stasiak and szpyra-kozłowska (2003) aimed to determine the effectiveness of two different approaches to pronunciation teaching: pronunciation taught through imitation/drilling and pronunciation taught through phonetic instruction. although the authors did not find significant differences in the pronunciation attainment between these two groups, they noticed improvements in the participants’ pronunciation of several segmental features, for instance word-final velar nasal, dental fricatives and the pronunciation of individual words, compared with the control group that had not received any pronunciation treatment. similarly, saito’s (2011) research results confirmed the effectiveness of pronunciation instruction. in his quasi-experiment only the participants assigned to the group taught through explicit phonetic instruction and repetitive practice improved their pronunciation performance in the sentence reading tasks. the classroom application of explicit pronunciation teaching, following fonf instruction, however, has not gained its momentum yet. the role of a language teacher in an l2 learner’s pronunciation acquisition cannot be overlooked, particularly, in the foreign language educational environment where the exposure to the target language is limited. in these contexts, l2 teachers function as major pronunciation models and sources of input for their pronunciation learning environment… 125 students (celce-murcia et al., 2010). their behaviors, including their language and instruction, tap into learners’ motivation which may subsequently empower learners’ pronunciation (celce-murcia et al., 2010) and overall language learning processes (sutcliff, 2011; rockoff, 2004). this has been confirmed in several studies investigating learners’ perceptions. for example, teachers’ command of the target language, including l2 pronunciation, was the most important factor for l2 high school students in korea (park & lee, 2006), israel (brosh, 1996), and iran (moradi & sabeti, 2014). teachers’ language proficiency was the second most important factor for l2 university students in korea (barnes & lock, 2013). also for arabic speakers their teachers’ knowledge and experiences associated with l2 language acquisition were perceived as crucial (sakurai, 2012). these research results should be sufficient enough for l2 teachers to attribute proper prominence to their l2 pronunciation because “ignoring students’ pronunciation needs is an abrogation of professional responsibility” (morley, 1991, p. 489). the external environmental factors discussed above—that is, exposure to l2 pronunciation, elements of pronunciation instruction and l2 teachers’ pronunciation—may be encountered either inside or outside the classroom. exposure to l2 pronunciation is operationalized in the present study as efl teachers’ classroom use, peers’ pronunciation, in-class listening to the recordings, out-ofclass contacts with the target language native speakers, extracurricular classes, visiting english speaking countries, listening and watching authentic texts outside the classroom. the elements of pronunciation instruction have been limited here to pronunciation error correction and general in-class pronunciation practice. in the study, teachers’ pronunciation has been approached from the global perspective, in which l2 learners apply holistic evaluation “invaluable in assessing the overall impression” (szpyra-kozłowska et al., 2004, p. 139). generally, the aforementioned environmental factors, interplaying with pronunciation acquisition, form the core structure of the current study, in which the participants are requested to respond to how they perceive and evaluate several aspects occurring in their pronunciation learning processes. although these judgments are subjective, they generate the data reflecting individuals’ cognitions which constitute a preliminary diagnosis of the educational environment associated with pronunciation learning. method the aim of the empirical study is to investigate efl students’ perceptions of their teachers’ pronunciation, teaching behaviors and other inand out-ofmagdalena szyszka126 class factors contributing to their pronunciation attainment. for this purpose, the following three research questions have been formulated: 1. how do l2 learners perceive their teachers’ pronunciation? 2. what is the relationship between the l2 learners’ perceived level of their l2 teachers’ pronunciation and perceived l2 teachers’ classroom language use? 3. what factors, in the view of l2 learners, contribute to their pronunciation acquisition? participants the participants were 89 individuals in their first year of english philology and english in public communication at opole university, poland. there were more female (f = 69) than male (m = 20) students. their age ranged between 18 and 25, with the mean of 20. they declared 12 years as the average length of english language learning experience. as many as 33 participants reported at least one week of stay in english-speaking countries. more precisely, one respondent spent ten years in scotland; five students lived in english-speaking countries between six months and two years; 16 individuals declared a sixmonth stay in the target language environment, and 11 of them reported a visit of up to three weeks. as the exposure to the target language is a crucial factor in pronunciation attainment, as discussed above, the respondents were asked to declare how many english language lessons they had weekly either at school or in extra-curricular activities. only 64 of them marked that they had attended out-of-school courses with an average of 1.05 hour per week for 2.9 years. the mean values for the number of lessons at school differed, depending on an educational stage: 2.2 hours per week in the lower primary school, 3.06 hours in the upper primary school, 3.7 hours in junior high school, and 4.2 hours in high school. instrument the instrument used in the study was a survey consisting of three parts (appendix 1). the first one provided biodata, including age, gender, average length of english language learning experience, length of stay in english speaking countries, extracurricular classes (frequency, length in years), and the number of hours of english at school (lower primary, upper primary, junior high pronunciation learning environment… 127 school, high school). the second part referred to the respondents’ perception of their english language teachers’ pronunciation (items 13–18), for example, how do you evaluate your primary school teachers’ english pronunciation? the answers were supposed to be marked on a 5-point likert scale from 1–very poor english pronunciation to 5–excellent, almost native-like english pronunciation. there was an option to evaluate separately the pronunciation of three different primary school teachers, three junior high school and three high school teachers. this part of the survey also contained the question regarding teachers’ use of english in the classroom: how much time on average did the teacher speak english in your english lesson at primary school? the responses were also provided on a 5-point likert scale (from 1–a teacher always or almost always used l1, 2–a teacher used mostly l1 but introduced single expressions and words in l2, 3–a teacher used both l1 and l2 in a more or less balanced manner, 4–a teacher used mostly l2 but occasionally explained difficulties in l1, 5–a teacher used always or almost always l2). finally, the third part included items referring to inand out-of-class factors affecting english pronunciation. the first group comprised of teachers’ pronunciation, pronunciation practice in class, teacher error correction, listening to recordings in class, peers’ pronunciation and one open item other in-class factors, which provided the respondents an opportunity to add their own in-class aspect perceived as important for l2 pronunciation acquisition. the following items designated the out-of-class factors: extracurricular classes, contact with native speakers of english, stay in an english-speaking country, listening to music outside the classroom, watching original films/tv outside the classroom, listening to other recordings (e.g., audiobooks) outside the classroom, and other out-ofclass factors. the last item was an open question created for the participants to complete with the aspect or aspects that had not been enumerated earlier though perceived as important for their pronunciation learning. in this part, the individuals were to report the extent to which these factors had affected their english pronunciation on a 5-point likert scale from 1–not at all to 5–to a large extent. procedure the study was conducted through a pen-and-paper survey distributed and collected in december 2016. at that time, the participants had already been familiarized with some basic phonetic and phonological concepts regarding pronunciation resulting from their participation in the obligatory university courses. however, the content of the survey, formulated in polish for a greater clarity, magdalena szyszka128 was general enough and did not require specialized knowledge. the average amount of time spent on completing the survey was 30 minutes. although the respondents were encouraged to ask for clarification if necessary, there were no instances thereof. the data was later analyzed with basic descriptive statistics. a t-test for dependent samples and the pearson-product moment correlation were used for further calculations. results for the purposes of finding the answer to the first research question regarding the evaluation of efl teachers’ pronunciation, first, the mean values (mean) and the standard deviations (sd) were computed for three groups of teachers: primary school, junior high school, and high school. later a t-test was applied in order to determine any significant differences in the participants’ evaluations between three pairs of teacher types: primary and junior high school teachers, junior high and high school teachers, and primary and high school teachers. as table 1 shows, primary school teachers’ pronunciation viewed by efl individuals reached the lowest mean value (mean = 3.15, sd = 1.05) in the three groups of teachers. junior high school teachers’ pronunciation was evaluated slightly higher (mean = 3.63, sd = 1.04), and high school teachers’ pronunciation was perceived as the best, with the mean value of 3.8 (sd = 1.03). the results of a t-test displayed statistically significant differences in the perception of primary and junior high school teachers’ pronunciation, as well as in the pronunciation of primary and high school teachers. in other words, the participants perceived primary school teachers’ pronunciation as significantly worse than that of both junior high and high school teachers. table 1. perceived efl teachers’ pronunciation efl teachers’ pronunciation mean sd t df p 1st pair of teachers primary school 3.15 1.05 −4.16 88 .000junior high school 3.63 1.04 2nd pair of teachers junior high school 3.63 1.04 −1.17 88 .243high school 3.80 1.03 3rd pair of teachers primary school 3.15 1.05 −4.66 88 .000high school 3.80 1.03 pronunciation learning environment… 129 perceived teachers’ in-class use of english was measured as a factor contributing to the target language exposure. the results of basic descriptive statistics showed an interesting tendency of the perceived efl teachers’ use of the target language. on average, primary school teachers were reported to use mostly l1 during their lessons (mean = 2.12, sd = 1.02). junior high school teachers (mean = 2.96, sd = 1.01) used more l2 than primary school teachers, whereas high school teachers belonged to the group that scored the highest mean value (mean = 3.62, sd = .98) for the target language use in class. the correlation between teachers’ l2 use in the classroom and perceived teachers’ pronunciation was computed in order to provide the answer to the second research question on the relationship between the l2 learners’ perceived levels of l2 teachers’ pronunciation and teachers’ classroom language use. the values of correlation coefficients indicated strong positive relationships, presented in table 2. interestingly, the higher the level of the perceived teacher’s pronunciation was detected, the more l2, in the view of the participants, the teacher used in the classroom. moreover, the strength of this relationship reflected the tendency observed earlier in the case of the scores for teachers’ pronunciation that increased with educational levels represented by those teachers. the correlation coefficients reached higher and higher values for every consecutive educational stage, so that in the group of high school teachers the relationship between pronunciation and l2 use was the strongest. this might indicate that the participant’s responses were fairly consistent. table 2. correlation coefficients (r) between the perceived levels of teachers’ pronunciation and l2 teachers’ classroom language use correlation coefficient r teachers’ classroom language use primary school junior high school high school te ac he rs ’ pr on un ci at io n primary school .41* junior high school .44* high school .52* *p < .05 the analysis of the data regarding the perception of factors affecting pronunciation acquisition refers to the third research question. as presented in table 3, out of six in-class factors included in the instrument, three were perceived as moderately affecting the target language pronunciation learning: pronunciation error correction (mean = 3.3, sd = 1.26), teacher’s pronunciation (mean = 3.18, sd = 1.25) and in-class listening to the recordings (mean = 3.11, sd = 1.09). their values were slightly above the average. the means calculated magdalena szyszka130 for peers’ pronunciation (mean = 2.18, sd = 1.04) and in-class pronunciation practice (mean = 2.84, sd = 1.27) were below the average, which means that neither of them was perceived as important or very important for pronunciation acquisition. other in-class factors enumerated by the respondents, such as reading, pronunciation games, paying attention to pronunciation, repetition after a teacher, were perceived as marginally important for l2 pronunciation learning. table 3. means and standard deviations (sd) for the perception of in-class and outof-class factors affecting pronunciation acquisition in-class factors mean sd pronunciation error correction 3.30 1.26 teachers’ pronunciation 3.18 1.25 in-class listening to the recordings 3.11 1.09 in-class pronunciation practice 2.84 1.27 peers’ pronunciation 2.18 1.04 other in-class factors 1.32 .93 out-of-class factors watching films/tv in english 4.27 1.01 listening to music 4.19 .91 listening to recordings (e.g., audiobooks) 3.69 1.28 contacts with native speakers 3.28 1.57 extracurricular activities 3.04 1.61 visiting/staying in english speaking countries 3.01 1.66 other out-of-class factors 1.71 1.44 higher values were obtained in the analysis of the out-of-class factors. efl learners declare that watching films or tv in english (mean = 4.27, sd = 1.01) and listening to music (mean = 4.19, sd = .91) are two most influential factors affecting their pronunciation learning. listening to the recordings (mean = 3.69, sd = 1.28), contact with native english speakers (mean = 3.28, sd = 1.57), extracurricular activities (mean = 3.04, sd = 1.61) and visits to english speaking countries (mean = 3.01, sd = 1.66) were also perceived as valuable, but not as much as the previous factors. in an open-ended item regarding other out-of-class factors, the individuals enumerated online chatting, computer games, l2 speaking and using l2 for fun. none of those items though were perceived as highly influential in pronunciation learning. generally, the out-ofpronunciation learning environment… 131 class factors were perceived as affecting the individuals’ pronunciation more than the in-class items. discussion the investigation into the cognition of selected inand out-of-class aspects of pronunciation learning environment revealed a few interesting issues. firstly, the findings confirmed the significant role of an efl teacher as a model for a target language pronunciation. secondly, a strong relationship was found between the perceived teachers’ pronunciation and their l2 use. finally, several factors affecting l2 pronunciation acquisition were inspected from the perspective of a learner, and the outcomes indicated clear hierarchy of the factors perceived as conducive to pronunciation learning. in a foreign language learning context, where contacts with an authentic language and interactions with native l2 speakers are limited, a teacher usually performs a crucial role in the process of acquiring all aspects of an l2. the instructor is often the first foreign language model to the learners. therefore, in order to serve this purpose his or her psychological, social, and linguistic, including phonological, expertise is most desirable. for instance, the way a teacher pronounces l2 sounds and how he or she organizes pronunciation practice may have an impact on learners’ pronunciation, particularly at an initial stage of their l2 learning when the individuals are still unable to exploit the language in an autonomous manner, and their l2 learning environment is restricted to in-class learning. moreover, an l2 teacher, being a vital element of an educational environment, undergoes the processes of students’ evaluation (brosh, 1996; moradi & sabeti, 2014; park & lee, 2006). in the present study, focusing on teachers’ one characteristic feature—pronunciation, the efl learners perceived primary school teachers’ enunciation as significantly worse than that of junior high and high school teachers. this phenomenon might have at least two directions of interpretation. the first refers to efl school teachers’ level of l2 proficiency used for professional purposes. it may be speculated that higher educational stages are more linguistically demanding, so that non-native efl teachers conducting lessons at those stages constantly need to either improve or sustain their l2 proficiency level, including pronunciation abilities. primary school teachers, however, may be tempted to adjust their l2 language to the age of pupils by excessive simplification of linguistic and phonetic forms. the second interpretation is less optimistic because it implies a deficient state of primary school teachers’ pronunciation level that calls for urgent and immediate improvement. if this is the case, inmagdalena szyszka132 adequate teachers’ pronunciation may cause inadvertent, difficult to eradicate pronunciation inaccuracies among young learners exposed to a distorted model of l2 pronunciation. needless to say, being exposed to correct pronunciation is particularly important for young learners because they primarily acquire l2 through listening and speaking (szpotowicz & szulc-kurpaska, 2009). however, research into the perceived pronunciation competence conducted among teachers (e.g., henderson et al., 2012; szyszka, 2016) did not confirm the outcomes generated from the students. regardless of educational level, teachers evaluated their pronunciation as good. these dissimilar cognitions on l2 teachers’ pronunciation deriving from students’ and teachers’ perspectives constitute an interesting area for further investigations. nevertheless, the results of the present study refer to the perceived, not actual, teachers’ pronunciation, and they need to be supported with further research before generalizable conclusions are proposed. definitely, in the opinions of efl learners, primary school teachers’ pronunciation is significantly worse than that of other teachers. the findings regarding the perceived in-class target language exposure, in this study an efl teacher’s use of l2, indicates an interesting relationship. as viewed by the participants, the higher the level of teacher pronunciation, the more the teacher exposes learners to the target language in the classroom. this strong significant positive correlation refers to teachers working in all types of schools. this may imply that teachers who are more confident about their l2 pronunciation use more l2 in the classroom. however, the directionality of this relationship cannot be stated. therefore, the results may also be understood as meaning that more frequent l2 classroom use may result in better pronunciation. intriguing as it is, this relationship requires more in-depth scrutiny. out-of-class environmental factors were perceived to exert more influence on pronunciation acquisition than the in-class aspects. particularly, the exposure to the target language audio and audio-visual media was valuable for the efl learners’ pronunciation acquisition. this may direct teachers’ attention to the gravity of the in-class actions encouraging learners to exploit the target language outside the classroom. in the new millennium, the ubiquitous access to multimedia provides unprecedented opportunities for l2 teachers to motivate their learners and to activate out-of-class exposure to various models of pronunciation through multimedia, which may result in greater sensitivity and awareness of this language aspect. never before has an l2 learner been exposed to so many accents and pronunciation varieties provided through so many types of audio, audio-visual, and social media with the use of such little effort. this is an l2 teacher’s responsibility to guide his or her student to use this opportunity. although the access to multimedia is mostly inexpensive and easy to reach for an l2 learner, visits to a target language country may occur costly and unaffordable to an average l2 learner. this may explain the responses of pronunciation learning environment… 133 the participants who, on average, indicated contacts with native speakers and visiting the target language countries as averagely important for their pronunciation acquisition. however, the interpretation of these data should consider high standard deviations, indicating large distribution of the responses within a group. for example, on the one hand, if students do not have access to the target language native speakers, they may not perceive this factor as significant for their l2 pronunciation, and they select a low value for this item. on the other hand, those who have an opportunity to interact with people from english-speaking countries may distinguish this factor as important for l2 pronunciation acquisition. in the study, from among the in-class factors affecting l2 pronunciation, three attract the attention: pronunciation error correction, teachers’ pronunciation and in-class listening to recordings. they are placed on top of the list of most influential in-class factors perceived by the individuals taking part in the research. the first—error correction—and its role in second and foreign language learning have been the subject of interest of several scholars, who generally confirm that both l2 learners and teachers perceive error correction as valuable (cf. pawlak, 2014, p. 80). the findings of the present study, which go in line with the previous research, should only encourage teachers to approach in-class pronunciation corrective feedback more enthusiastically. the second aspect—teachers’ pronunciation—was reported to be somewhat influential in l2 pronunciation acquisition. this outcome, however, should not discourage teachers from using intelligible pronunciation while teaching. on the contrary, even if this factor had been perceived as minimally important, it is the responsibility of the teacher to provide a good model and follow the maxim: primum non nocere. finally, the last selected factor—in-class listening to recordings–is appreciated by l2 learners probably because it functions as an opportunity to be exposed to a number of native-speaker pronunciation varieties. conclusion the main aim of the study was to investigate efl learners’ perceptions regarding selected educational environmental factors associated with the target language pronunciation acquisition. the findings direct the attention towards the value of l2 teachers’ pronunciation, in-class l2 use, error correction, and in-class and out-of-class exposure to multimedia that provide access to a broad range of l2 pronunciation varieties. firstly, teachers need to be aware of the impact of their pronunciation on l2 learners, and of the factors that l2 learners find influential on their pronunciation, such as pronunciation error correction magdalena szyszka134 and native-speaker pronunciation accessed through a variety of multimedia. secondly and interestingly enough, the results revealed that students perceive teachers’ pronunciation in relationship with the amount of l2 they use in the classroom: the better pronunciation, the more l2 a teacher uses in a lesson. thirdly, bearing in mind that a pronunciation learning process can be limited by many factors, sometimes very distant from an individual’s ability or motivation, for instance, an economic strain preventing visits to l2 speaking countries, an l2 teacher should promote pronunciation learning through available, motivating and easily accessed multimedia. the outcomes, however, need to be viewed with caution because of some weaknesses of the study. the participants were asked to report their perceptions based on the recalling of past memories that are easily affected by the factor of time (craik, 2017). therefore, their responses regarding their school teachers’ pronunciation based on their past impressions might be far from accurate. apart from the shortcomings of human memory, the individuals might have been tempted to deploy face-saving strategies when providing the answers because they all attended the courses conducted by the researcher. nevertheless, the participants were informed of the purpose and confidentiality of the study. obviously, a larger sample might generate more generalizable data. therefore, this study should be treated as a preliminary stage leading to a more in-depth analysis of the educational environment entailing pronunciation learning. references aufderhaar, c. 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(2004). pronunciation testing – atomistic or holistic? zeszyty naukowe pwsz w koninie, 1(4), 133–140. szyszka, m. (2016). english pronunciation teaching at different educational levels: insights into teachers’ perceptions and actions. research in language, 14(2), 165–180. święciński, r. (2013) an ema study of articulatory settings in polish speakers of english. in e. waniek-klimczak & l. shockey (eds.), teaching and researching english accents in native and non-native speakers (pp. 73–82). heidelberg: springer publications. williams, m., & burden, r. (1997). psychology for language teachers. a social constructivist approach. cambridge: cambridge university press. wrembel, m. (2004). phonological ‘know that’ or ‘know how’? – in pursuit of determinants of second language pronunciation attainments. in w. sobkowiak & e. waniek-klimczak (eds.), zeszyt naukowy instytutu neofilologii (3). materiały z konferencji „dydaktyka fonetyki języka obcego w polsce” mikorzyn k. konina 10–12 maja 2004r (pp. 163–170). konin: wydawnictwo państwowej wyższej szkoły zawodowej w koninie. zhang, q. m. (2009). affecting factors of native-like pronunciation: a literature review. korea education & research institute, 27(2), 33–52. magdalena szyszka das milieu für aussprachelernen: die wahrnehmung vom einfluss der schulischen und außerschulischen faktoren auf die ausspracheerwerbung bei den englisch als zweitsprache lernenden z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die art und weise auf welche das bildungsmilieu von einem eine fremdsprache lernenden schüler wahrgenommen wird, kann den ganzen prozess der fremdspracherwerbung beeinf lussen. im gegenwärtigen aufsatz wollte die verfasserin erforschen, wie die englisch als zweitsprache lernenden schüler die aussprache der englischlehrer und die ihre aussprache pronunciation learning environment… 137 bewirkenden schulischen und außerschulischen faktoren (wie z.b.: ausspracheübungen in der klasse, aufnahmen, formbeachtung, aussprache der anderen schüler, musikhören) betrachten. die 89 schüler zählende gruppe sollte einen fragebogen ausfüllen und drei forschungsfragen beantworten: wie betrachten die schüler die aussprache ihrer englischlehrer? was für ein zusammenhang, wennschon, besteht zwischen der wahrgenommenen beurteilung der aussprache der lehrer und deren fremdsprachgebrauch im unterricht? welche faktoren (den schülermeinungen zufolge) beeinf lussen ihre ausspracheerwerbung? die forschungsergebnisse lassen statistisch relevante unterschiede in der wahrnehmung der aussprache bei den auf unterschiedlichen bildungsstufen unterrichtenden lehrern erkennen. die beurteilung der lehreraussprache korreliert positiv mit dem fremdsprachgebrauch des lehrers im unterricht. ansonsten messen die schüler den folgenden faktoren gewicht bei, welche ihrer meinung nach nur in geringem maße den ausspracheerwerb beeinf lussen: aussprache des lehrers, fremdsprachgebrauch im unterricht, berichtigung der aussprachefehler, kontakt mit der sprache und verschiedenen aussprachearten über die sowohl in der schule als auch außerhalb der schule ausgenutzten medien. schlüsselwörter: bildungsmilieu, perzeption der schüler, aussprache des lehrers, die ausspracheerwerbung begünstigende schulische und außerschulische faktoren magdalena szyszka138 a p p e n d i x 1 pronunciation learning environment: in-class and out-of-class factors affecting pronunciation acquisition the main aim of this survey is to investigate your perceptions of some selected in-class and out-of-class factors related to pronunciation learning. your anonymous responses will be used only for the purposes of the study, and they will not affect your course mark. therefore, please, provide sincere and credible answers. if you find any of the survey items unclear, please, report it immediately. • biodata. complete or mark the correct answer. • age: … • gender: … • how long have you been learning english? … (in years) • how long did you stay in (an) english-speaking country/ies? … (in weeks, months or years) • which country? … • have you attended extracurricular english activities (outside your regular school)? yes no • what type of activities were there? a. group b. individual c. other: … • how many times in a week did you attend them? … • how long did you attend them? … (in years) • what was the mother tongue of your teacher? a. polish b. american c. other: … • how many english lessons per week did you have in your regular school? • primary school: grades i–iii a. 1–2 hours b. 3–4 hours c. more than 4 hours • primary school: grades iv–vi a. 1–2 hours b. 3–4 hours c. more than 4 hours • junior high school: grades i–iii a. 1–2 hours b. 3–4 hours c. more than 4 hours • high school: grades i–iii a. 1–2 hours b. 3–4 hours c. more than 4 hours • efl teacher pronunciation. circle the correct answers. • how do you perceive your primary school (ps) efl teacher’s pronunciation? pronunciation competence scale: 1—very poor, almost unintelligible, 2—poor, with strong l1 features, 3—average, but generally intelligible, 4—good, intelligible, with few l1 and a lot of l2 features, 5—very good, almost native-like or native-like. ps teacher 1: 1 2 3 4 5 ps teacher 2: 1 2 3 4 5 ps teacher 3: 1 2 3 4 5 • how do you perceive your junior high school (jhs) efl teacher’s pronunciation? jhs teacher 1: 1 2 3 4 5 jhs teacher 2: 1 2 3 4 5 jhs teacher 3: 1 2 3 4 5 pronunciation learning environment… 139 • how do you perceive your high school (hs) efl teacher’s pronunciation? hs teacher 1: 1 2 3 4 5 hs teacher 2: 1 2 3 4 5 hs teacher 3: 1 2 3 4 5 • how much time in a 45-minute lesson did your teachers use english (l2)? mark on the scale: 1—never, 2—rarely, 3—sometimes, 4—very often, 5—always or almost always. ps teacher 1: 1 2 3 4 5 ps teacher 2: 1 2 3 4 5 ps teacher 3: 1 2 3 4 5 jhs teacher 1: 1 2 3 4 5 jhs teacher 2: 1 2 3 4 5 jhs teacher 3: 1 2 3 4 5 hs teacher 1: 1 2 3 4 5 hs teacher 2: 1 2 3 4 5 hs teacher 3: 1 2 3 4 5 • in-class and out-of-class factors regarding english pronunciation acquisition. to what extent have the following factors affected your english pronunciation? mark on the scale: 1—not at all, 2—slightly, 3—moderately, 4—very, 5—extremely • teachers’ pronunciation 1 2 3 4 5 • practicing pronunciation in the classroom 1 2 3 4 5 • pronunciation error correction by the teacher 1 2 3 4 5 • listening to the recordings in the classroom 1 2 3 4 5 • peers’ pronunciation 1 2 3 4 5 • other in-class factors: … 1 2 3 4 5 • extracurricular activities 1 2 3 4 5 • out-of-class contacts with native speakers 1 2 3 4 5 • visiting an english-speaking country 1 2 3 4 5 • listening to music outside the classroom 1 2 3 4 5 • listening to audiobooks outside the classroom 1 2 3 4 5 • watching films/tv outside the classroom 1 2 3 4 5 • other out-of-class factors: … 1 2 3 4 5 style guide for authors140 style guide for authors authors are requested to submit manuscripts formatted in apa style (american psychological association, 6th ed.). all manuscripts must include an abstract in english (maximum of 250 words). after the abstract please provide keywords. main text: 12 times new roman long citations (more than 40 words): 10 times new roman, indent by 1 tab either side, one empty line above and below, no quotation marks. 1.5 spacing apa headings level format 1 centered, boldface, uppercase and lowercase headings 2 left-aligned, boldface, uppercase and lowercase heading 3 indented, boldface, lowercase heading with a period. begin body text after the period. 4 indented, boldface, italicized, lowercase heading with a period. begin body text after the period. 5 indented, italicized, lowercase heading with a period. begin body text after theperiod. in-text citations (examples): author’s name and date in brackets: the experience of critical incidents and effective ref lection upon them allows teachers to control their classroom actions more consciously and create critical events (ce’s), which were described earlier as intended, planned and controlled (woods, 1993). woods (1993) believes that critical events are structured and occur in well-defined staged of conceptualization . . . two authors: (ballantyne & packer, 1995) as ballantyne and packer (1995) demonstrate … three authors: (barker, callahan, & ferreira, 2009) subsequent use: (barker et al., 2009) six authors or more: lorenz et al. (1998) argued… (lorenz et al., 1998) authors whose last names are the same: (d. francis, 1985; h. francis, 2004) style guide for authors 141 online sources (unpaginated), provide paragraph or section title instead: (peterson & clark, 1978, para. 4) (moss, springer, & dehr, 2008, discussion section, para. 1) no author, provide shortened title: (“primary teachers talking”, 2007) (reflective practice, 2005, pp. 12−25) secondary citations: smith (as cited in maxx & meyer, 2000) noted that “there is . . . .” citation within citation: as it has been noted that “there is no relevance . . . (smith, 2005)” (maxx & meyer, 2000, p. 129). & vs. and: as smithson and stones (1999) demonstrated. . . . . . as has been shown (smithson & stones, 1999) . . . references selected examples (for more consult apa manual): book, one author: goldberg, a. (2006). constructions at work. oxford: oxford university press. book, two authors and more: jarvis, s., & pavlenko, a. (2008). crosslinguistic influence in language cognition. london: routledge. translated book: freud, s. (1960). jokes and their relation to the unconscious. (j. strachey, trans.). london, england: routledge & k. paul. (original work published 1905). edited book: flowerdew, j., brock, m., & hsia, s. (eds.). (1992). second language teacher education. hong kong: city polytechnic of hong kong. chapter in an edited book: goldberg, a., & casenhiser, d. (2008). construction learning and second language acquisition. in robinson, p., & ellis, n. c. (eds.), handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition (pp. 197–215). new york and london: routledge. article in a journal: hammarberg, b. (2010). the languages of the multilingual. some conceptual and terminological issues. international review of applied linguistics in language teaching, 48, 91–104. article online: tully, k., & bolshakov, v. y. (2010). emotional enhancement of memory: how norepinephrine enables synaptic plasticity. molecular brain, 13 may. retrieved from http://www.molecularbrain.com/content/. style guide for authors142 bakker, a. b., hakanen, j. j., demerouti, e., & xanthopoulou, d. (2007). job resources boost work engagement, particularly when job demands are high. journal of educational psychology, 99(2), 274–284. doi:10.1037/0022-0663.99.2.274. magazines online: miller, g. (2014, september 4). cinematic cuts exploit how your brain edits what you see. wired. retrieved from http://wired.com/. smith, a. (2007, june 12). dying languages. the western star. retrieved from http://www. thewesternstar.com/. blog: palmer, p. (2001). now i become myself. yes magazine, blog post, 31 may. retrieved from http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/working-for-life/now-i-become-myself. e-books: bolande, v. u. (1981). on the psychology of humor. retrieved from http://www.uf lib.uf l.edu /ufdc/ufdc.aspx?n=palmm&c=psa1&m=hd2j&i=45367. conference proceedings: souleles, n., & pillar, c. (eds.). (2014). proceedings from the first international conference on the use of ipads in higher education. paphos: cyprus university of technology. doctoral dissertation: churchwell, j. (2005). becoming an academic: factors that inf luence a graduate student’s identity commitment (doctoral dissertation). university of michigan, ann arbor, mi. reachel, l. h. (2001). native languages and toponyms: origins, meaning, and use (doctoral dissertation). available from proquest dissertation and theses database. (document id 1964749161). katarzyna budzińska łódź university of technology positive institutions: a case study a b s t r a c t positive psychology was founded on three main pillars: positive emotions, positive character traits associated with good living and positive institutions that create conditions for students to f lourish (seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000). nevertheless, the research in psychology so far has been concentrating on positive emotions and character strengths. enabling institutions have been the least well studied of the three pillars. a salient additional perspective, as macintyre and mercer (2014) propound, would be to concentrate on the context in which students can experience enjoyment and f lourish in foreign language learning. i try to fill the niche by analyzing a language school in the further education context in poland which seems to be a positive institution. i base my study around the two criteria: enabling success and promoting positive language learning environments or student wellbeing. the language school is analyzed from three different angles: physical, pedagogical and psychological by means of an ethnographical research method and participant observation. the study is carried out in order to answer the research question: can the school be labeled as a positive institution? the results demonstrate that the institution enables success as well as provides a positive learning environment and thus could be regarded as positive. the study is hoped to have contributed to positive psychology research by demonstrating what it means to be a positive institution in practice. keywords: sla; positive psychology; wellbeing; positive institutions; further education introduction positive institutions have been defined as “enabling institutions,” “organizational structures that enable success and promote positive language learning environments,” as well as “institutions that enable people to flourish” (macintyre & mercer, 2014, pp. 154, 165). investigating positive institutions reflects the current interest of second language acquisition (sla) researchers theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 4 (2), 2018, pp. 33–54 34 katarzyna budzińska in positive psychology (pp). as macintyre and mercer (2014, p. 154) state, pp is “the empirical study of how people thrive and flourish; it is the study of the ordinary human strengths and virtues that make life good.” in short, positive psychology aims to improve the quality of people’s lives by helping them to experience positive emotions, become more engaged, and appreciate the value of life and its moments. in addition, the goal of pp is to increase virtues such as resilience, happiness or optimism. positive institutions are one of the three main pillars of positive psychology together with positive emotions and positive individual characteristics. compared with the other two pillars there has been little research carried out in this field so far. the present study of an institution is hoped to have filled this gap. the author investigates a language school in the further education context in poland from the physical, pedagogical, and psychological angle. the study aims at answering the following research question: can the institution studied be labelled as a positive one? literature review positive psychology is relevant to second language acquisition owing to the practical, human, and social aspects of language learning. recently, lake (2013) applied pp concepts in his study of japanese students. his research results showed a correlation between positive psychology inspired actions and increased effort, self-efficacy, and exam scores. nevertheless, the recognition of the affective aspects of language learning and the assumption that affect is as important as cognition goes back to the humanistic movement in language teaching of the 1970s and 1980s. the importance of enhancing individual students experiences of language learning and its beneficial effect on second language (l2) acquisition has been highlighted, for example, by stevick (1990) before modern positive psychology originated, or more recently by macintyre and gregersen (2012). this has been primarily achieved by helping learners develop and sustain their motivation, perseverance, resilience, and most of all positive emotions, which are essential in the long process of attainment of a foreign language. researchers have also been emphasizing the significance of positive classroom atmosphere and the rapport between the teacher and the learners as well as among the learners (gabryś-barker, 2016; budzińska, 2015; arnold, 2011; turula, 2006; dörnyei & murphey, 2003). the studies of classroom climate (byrne, hattie, & fraser, 1986; gillen, wright, & spink, 2011; gabryś-barker, 2016) have demonstrated that the physical aspect of school en35positive institutions: a case study vironment contributes to learning and achievement as well as peer or instructor/ student relationship. nevertheless, it seems that the most prominent contribution from positive psychology to sla has been fredrickson’s (2001, 2013) broaden-and-build theory looking at the nature and function of positive and negative emotions (macintyre, 2016). fredrickson (2001) notices that action tendencies triggered by negative emotions are strikingly different from those produced by positive emotions such as joy, interest, contentment, pride or love. while negative emotions tend to narrow an individual’s field of attention and predispose specific actions (e.g., anxiety often leads to avoidance behavior), the function of positive emotions is to broaden and build. broadening is related to a wider field of vision, being able to absorb more information or notice more things. building means that the role of positive emotions is to create personal or intellectual resources that can help people cope with negative events or emotions which an individual may encounter in the future. the broaden and build theory also suggests that positive emotions can contribute to an upward spiral toward improved subsequent, emotional wellbeing or a virtuous cycle in other words (mercer, 2015). as fredrickson (2013, p. 3) recently stated, “feeling good does not simply sit side by side with optimal functioning as an indicator of flourishing; feeling good drives optimal function by building the enduring personal resources upon which people draw to navigate life’s journey with greater success.” positive psychology was founded on three main pillars: (1) positive emotions, (2) positive character traits associated with good living and (3) positive institutions that create conditions for students to flourish (seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000). nonetheless, the research in psychology so far has been concentrating on positive emotions and character strengths. enabling institutions have been the least well studied of the three pillars. a salient additional perspective, as macintyre and mercer (2014) propound, would be to concentrate on the context in which students can experience enjoyment and flourish in foreign language learning. the social turn in sla means that the field is taking seriously the contexts in which language learning takes place. macintyre and mercer (2014) observe that conducting studies of positive institutions has been the weakest link for pp. in a similar vein, gabryś-barker (2015, p. 156) emphasizes that “studying school as an enabling institution becomes one of important dimensions of present-day research, especially with the advent of positive psychology in a language learning and teaching context.” even though positive institutions as such have not been sufficiently studied so far, there is some literature regarding positive education based on positive psychology (green, oades, & robinson, 2011). what is more, a number of educational institutions worldwide follow this new pedagogical approach. positive education, defined as “education for both traditional skills and for happiness” 36 katarzyna budzińska (seligman, gillham, reivich, linkins, & ernst 2009, p. 293), or “applied positive psychology in education” (green et al., 2011, p. 1) aims to “promote flourishing and positive mental health within the school community” (norrish, williams, o’connor, & robinson, 2013, p. 148). in australia, positive psychology principles have been applied to many schools curricula as a reaction to overwhelming statistics concerning mental health problems in young people as well as a high suicide rate (malczewskawebb, 2016, pp. 196–197). in 2008, professor martin seligman designed a whole school positive education program for geelong grammar school (ggs) in victoria, which has proved successful in combating anxiety and depression. the program objective was to promote psychological wellbeing of students since the sole focus on academic excellence has been found to insufficiently prepare young people for real life (green et al., 2011). the present article can be seen as contributing to the existing research in conducting a pioneer study in the positive institutions area where the research is scarce. not only does the present work explore the unexplored pillar of positive psychology but it also looks into its realisation in the field of sla. the author of this paper investigates a language school, and assesses whether it can be labeled as positive. further education context versus state schools in poland languages are generally taught in two types of context: state schools and further education. the present study looks at a private language school, which represents a further education context, which plays a very important role in polish foreign language education. owing to the general belief that state school tuition is not at a satisfactory level, further education typically serves as complementation of state schools. a salient difference between the two contexts is the estimated student progress. according to the core curriculum students achieve level b1 (common european framework of reference for languages) after 12 years of state school foreign language (fl) education, whereas in the further education context, they can achieve the same level in three or four years. mixed level classes seem to be another significant weakness. what is more, state school pedagogical approaches tend to be less effective mainly due to the lack of teacher development program. consequently, further education instructors are usually more professional, that is, enhancing the quality of service (evans, 2008; hoyle, 1974, 2001). in addition, studying in state schools is obligatory, while in further education it is voluntary, which is likely to increase student motivation. as deci 37positive institutions: a case study and ryan (1980) observe, evaluations, competition, deadlines, social pressure, surveillance and other motivators popular at schools diminish intrinsic motivation, whereas when people experience choice about acting and no external pressure, they can maintain it. in a similar vein, chaffee, noels, and mceown (2014, p. 356) point out: factors that cause students to feel controlled have been shown to negatively affect motivation (e.g., deci, eghrari, patrick, & leone, 1994). in light of this finding, the fact that language study is often compulsory at north american and european schools, as is the study of english as a foreign language efl) in many asian countries, is potentially problematic. what is more, students in the further education context may find their learning experience more enjoyable thanks to customer treatment caused by tuition fees. additionally, lack of examinations in this context results in a more relaxed attitude to grades. the institution studied the institution is one of 23 language schools accredited by pase which is the main accreditation body in poland. schools accredited by pase have to meet high standards in such facets as teacher qualifications, quality of teaching, teacher training, professionalism of management, studying conditions, teaching resources and the credibility of advertising materials. the institution offers courses at ten levels of advancement from beginner to post-proficiency. learners are placed on the basis of a written and oral test in order to tailor the tuition to the student proficiency level. the school has a professional development program: yearly lesson observations conducted by professional teacher trainers, regular peer observations as well as teacher-training sessions. moreover, teachers are supposed to attend at least one conference or external teacher training event every year. consequently, the instructors are up to date with the current methodology and are able to use a variety of appealing teaching techniques, many of which include interactive exercises involving technology. furthermore, the members of staff are highly qualified and either hold an ma degree in english or a certificate or a diploma in english language teaching to adults (cambridge celta or delta). in addition, among the instructors there are teacher trainers, cambridge english for speakers of other languages (esol) examiners and course book writers. 38 katarzyna budzińska as far as the physical aspect is concerned, the building is relatively new, well kept, with all necessary facilities, a library and a self-study area in the lobby. the classrooms are attractive, spacious without being too big, equipped with comfortable furniture, computers, smart boards and overhead projectors. what is of particular importance is that a circular seating arrangement is used in every classroom. as falout (2014, p. 287) states, this kind of seating arrangement helps to create a sense of belonging within the classroom community, which in turn facilitates learning, has a positive effect on student emotions and wellbeing. small student number per class seems to be another characteristic of the institution. according to the school policy the number must not exceed 12 learners. in practice, many classes consist of five to seven students, which is likely to lead to greater learner engagement as well as to create a friendlier, homely atmosphere, which may also have an impact on student feeling of contentment. the current research since i was an instructor in the institution i was analysing i used an ethnographical research method and participant observation. in this type of method “a researcher takes part in the daily activities, rituals, interactions, and events of a group of people as one of the means of learning the explicit and tacit aspects of their life routines and their culture” (dewalt & dewalt, 2001, p. 1). the study was of qualitative nature, looking at both teachers and students. an analysis of an educational institution cannot be complete without the instructors’ voice. as mercer, oberdorfer, and saleem (2016, p. 224) have observed, “the well-being of both teachers and learners are intricately connected.” similarly, day and gu (2010, p. 36) propound that teacher professional wellbeing is essential in their ability to teach. as teachers’ positive feelings about an institution they are working for seem to have a positive effect on student contentment, it is absolutely vital that a study of an educational institution includes both learner and instructor insight. participants the participants were studying english at an intermediate level. the total number was forty-one: eighteen males and twenty-three females. most of the students were polish, however, three of them were foreigners: from ukraine, moldova, and china. the average age was twenty-three. fifteen participants 39positive institutions: a case study were teenagers under eighteen. nevertheless, middle school students were not mixed with adults since the school divides students into groups according to age as well as levels. there were four groups altogether. the class size ranged from eight to twelve learners. in addition to the students, all the fifteen teachers took part in the study. instruments in order to obtain the data two main research instruments were utilized: student journals and teacher narratives. on top of that i used naturalistic observation of the students and teachers and my own judgment to verify the data. student journals, also referred to as diaries or learner autobiographies (mackey & gass, 2005, p. 176) were the instrument for obtaining data from the learners. according to mackey and gass, since carefully tailored questions can elicit learners’ reports about their internal processes and thoughts, journals are often used to gather data for qualitative studies. the journals, which examined various issues related to the institution where the participants were studying english, were the key instrument used in the study. apart from expressing their opinions on the context where the language tuition took place, the students compared this institution to state schools, where the respondents have also studied english or other foreign languages. moreover, the participants were asked whether they considered themselves anxious fl learners and if so whether their anxiety level decreased as the course progressed. journal writing was divided into five entries. each time the respondents received two or three open questions and were asked to write a narrative of up to one paragraph in answer to each question. the questions were both in polish and english and the students had the choice of using either polish or english to answer them. this way the participants were able to practise their english while they were providing data for the research. this also proved useful for the informants who were not native speakers of polish. when presenting excerpts from student narratives in the results section, those written in english and containing errors are marked with an asterisk (*). the following questions were included in the journals: 1. why did you decide to study at this school? 2. do you find studying at this school any different from studying at a state school? if so, what is the difference? 3. which school do you prefer? why? 4. where do you think you can achieve better results? why? 5 do you feel less anxious now than you did at the beginning of the course? why?/why not? 40 katarzyna budzińska 6. are there any aspects of the class that make you feel anxious (e.g., classroom atmosphere, your relationship with the teacher or other students, the pace of the lesson)? 7. is studying at this school less stressful than at a state school? why? 8. do you think there are differences between this school and state schools as far as the following aspects are concerned? can you describe them? a) the premises, classrooms, furniture, equipment, technology, b) the teachers and teaching (professionalism, attitude to students, requirements, stress level, severity, helpfulness, preparation, lesson quality, etc.), c) school policy (grades, tests, promotion to a higher level, evaluation for public speaking), d) lesson/course enjoyment/satisfaction. 10. are you satisfied with the course? teacher narratives had a similar form to student journals with the difference that the teachers only wrote them once in response to the following questions: 1. do you think the school is a positive place for teachers to work for? why? 2. when you teach do you try to reduce student language anxiety? how? 3. do you use positive evaluation? 4. do you attempt to create a friendly atmosphere in the classroom? if yes, how? 5. what do you think of the physical aspect of the institution? is it positive? why? 6. do teachers at this institution ensure studying results in learning and if so how? analysis after the data had been gathered, the content analysis was carried out. to analyse the data, a grounded theory approach was taken (charmaz, 2006). as charmaz (2006, p. 181) explains, the approach allows systematic but flexible data analysis to formulate theories “grounded in the data themselves.” according to grounded theory, data collected is analysed for repeated ideas that are tagged with codes. codes are subsequently grouped into categories that may give rise to new theories. i read the narratives looking for themes or categories (norton, 2009. p. 124), which in this study were the positive features of the institution. once all of the categories were identified, i went over the journals again, assigning units of analysis to categories, that is, coding. norton (2009, p. 124) defines a unit as “a single discrete concept, thought or idea, which might be expressed in a single word, a phrase, sentence or even a paragraph or two.” in the present study units of analysis were students’ answers to the questions i prepared for the journal. while coding i transferred participant names together 41positive institutions: a case study with units of analysis, which subsequently i changed into numbers to protect informant confidentiality. results the data analysis has enabled me to identify three main themes: physical aspect of the institution, pedagogical approaches, and psychological consequences. under the physical aspect theme, there are three categories: the premises, the classrooms, and the equipment. pedagogical approaches include numerous categories such as: perceived progress, teaching techniques, lesson content, clarity, activation of a new language, revision, opportunities to speak, language of instruction, evaluation, atmosphere nurturing and an individual approach to learners. the psychological consequences theme comprises enjoyment and language anxiety level. the results are presented in accordance with the themes and categories that have emerged. extracts from student narratives are included to illustrate each theme. the examples of what the learners said are selected samples of reoccurring opinions. despite giving a wide range of illustrations of their feeling, the overall impression seems to be shared by all of the informants. there does not appear to be a difference of opinions resulting from student age. there have not been any negative journal entries, however, three participants are equally satisfied with state schools and this institution and feel they benefit from attending their english classes in both contexts. physical structure of the institution most of the participants consider the physical aspect of the institution superior to state schools and highlight the fact that it looks more attractive, is cleaner and more modern. the students also point out that classrooms are smaller and cozier, the furniture is more comfortable, the technology is more advanced and better applied. they particularly praise interactive smart boards and the fact that they are utilized in various, appealing ways. in addition, the participants believe they benefit greatly from the educational platform where they can find each lesson materials, information about homework or vocabulary items. thanks to this facility they can also easily contact the instructor. the student impressions of the physical aspect of the institution are reflected in the following quotations: 42 katarzyna budzińska the main difference between the physical structure of this school and state schools is that this one is better equipped and the technology is better utilized. (s. 12) at this school, the classrooms are way nicer than in state schools. they are cleaner and more modern. what’s more, the equipment and technology is much better. (s. 10) the classrooms at this school are smaller and cosier than in state schools. the furniture is more comfortable. another difference is technology – interactive boards and the overhead projectors are used very often, a lot more than at state schools. besides, moodle platform is used – the educational platform with all lesson materials. it is very helpful. (s. 8) positive pedagogical approaches the participants reflect extremely approvingly on the institution pedagogical approaches. they value the fact that the institution enables successful language learning and cares about student wellbeing at the same time, which would suggest that the school meets positive institution criteria. pedagogical approaches that facilitate learning. all of the participants feel they are making progress in their english studies, which indicates that pedagogical approaches employed by its instructors are conducive to learning. the following responses were given in answer to the question: where do you think you can achieve better results? why? definitely at this school. i have learnt more here than i did in my previous years at state school. (s. 11) i prefer this school. as i remember my english lessons at a state school were quite boring and rather participating in private lessons/ courses help me in learning english.* (s. 9) the participants give numerous examples of pedagogical approaches adopted by the institution that may be conducive to fl acquisition. firstly, the students believe that activating new language and regular revision contribute greatly to learning. secondly, they find the lessons appealing thanks to a wide range of activities, techniques and materials as well as relevant topics. the students also praise the institution for the clarity of instruction and explanations, which are a much better standard than at state schools. the respondents frequently point out that the teachers are professional and better prepared than at state schools. 43positive institutions: a case study we learn vocabulary through revision. at state schools we memorized lists of words. i can achieve better results here because i practise the new language. grammar rules are explained in a clear way. (s. 25) this school is different because at state school lessons were boring and mostly only grammar, and here we have conversations, also grammar but not so often, short video films, so the lessons are interesting.* (s. 15) at this school there are different methods of learning, more practice, more possibilities to use language. i prefer it. (s. 9) studying at this school is better than at state schools because the lessons are clear and the topics are more interesting. (s. 4) a considerable amount of speaking practice and employing l2 as the language of instruction also seem to be highly appreciated. the participants recurrently highlight that the classes allow them to develop fluency thanks to numerous games and other speaking activities. i definitely prefer studying a foreign language in the further education context because i have more opportunities to talk. (s. 13) i prefer further education context. one can achieve better results here owing to the fact that the classes are conducted in english. (s. 2) pedagogical approaches promoting student wellbeing. apart from enabling success, a positive institution should promote student happiness. participant narratives demonstrate that the teachers at this institution use pedagogical approaches that contribute to student wellbeing. the respondents point out that they feel more relaxed here than at state schools because of positive evaluation. primarily, there seems to be very little anxiety related to passing a year, since it is based on coursework as well as the final test and all tests including the final one can be retaken. the participants also feel more relaxed because the grades are given less importance. another difference between the two contexts is that the learners are not evaluated for speaking in front of others. the following excerpts from the student narratives illustrate the participant favourable views of the evaluation approaches used by the institution. we have regular tests, but without major consequences in the event of an unsatisfactory result. (s. 8) 44 katarzyna budzińska studying in the further education context is less stressful than studying at a state school. if i don’t pass the final test, nothing will happen, i will not have to repeat a year. i will just have to roll up my sleeves and revise material. (s. 1) studying in the further education context i don’t feel the constant pressure of grades. (s. 32) what is more, student narratives indicate that the pedagogical approaches aim at reducing test anxiety. the most important one is thorough test preparation realized through regular revision, familiarizing learners with test types and informing them precisely what material will be tested. what is more, unlike in state schools, all of the tests are announced. tests reflect what we have done in class. (s. 12) tests at this school are less stressful than in state schools. (s. 1) at this school there is a friendly approach to all methods of testing, which improves their quality. (s. 13) positive classroom atmosphere is an essential facet contributing to student wellbeing. the participants emphasize the stress-free atmosphere of the institution, which they feel is conducive to learning. they also say that the instructors put more weight on creating a positive learning environment than state school teachers. one of the informants described the atmosphere at the institution as “family.” she highlighted the fact that during lessons it is possible to talk about personal matters, student life, etc. the respondents also value the opportunity to express their thoughts. moreover, humor was indicated as an aspect leading to student contentment. in addition, the sample point out that unlike in many state schools, the learning environment is supportive, there is no criticism, ridicule or competition among learners. the atmosphere is really cool! everybody can express their opinions. (s. 32) i prefer the further education context, where the atmosphere is pleasant. i don’t mean that at state schools there’s some kind of terror – no! the point is that here we don’t just stick to the lesson topic but we also talk about how we feel and our ‘problems.’ i think one can achieve better results studying in a language school where there’s ‘ family’ atmosphere. we talk about different stories from our life and we laugh at them. (s. 14) 45positive institutions: a case study at this institution – more friendly atmosphere. a good atmosphere is important, because it makes our learning easier.* (s. 9) positive teacher-student relations have been brought up as another aspect constituting a positive atmosphere at the institution. the instructors are perceived as partners or facilitators, while in state schools they appear to be less approachable. at this institution there aren’t teacher-student relations (as with school).* (s. 17) at this school the attitude towards students is more positive and friendly (s. 14) additionally, the participants seem contented because they feel they are treated as individuals rather than a mass and their needs are addressed. the sample highlights the fact that the content of the course is tailored to their expectations and that teachers are always willing to explain points not understood by students, which is not always the case in state schools. the respondents also point out that the instructors are interested in them as individuals and remember facts about their personal lives. studying here differs greatly from studying in state schools. one of the main differences is that the course reflects student interests (for example more listening and less grammar). (s. 11) studying here is different in many aspects from state schools, but mostly adapting form of lesson with personal needs of students and (if there is something that is not clear) not rushing the material. at this school there is no pressure to understand everything right away – there is always a revision and more time on lessons to explain everything.* (s. 39) the difference between this school and state schools is that the instructor is very involved in the classes and pays a lot of attention to each individual student. one can definitely achieve better results in the further education context because of the instructor’s individual approach to learners. (s. 35) 46 katarzyna budzińska positive psychological consequences the fact that the institution promotes student wellbeing has been manifested by the participant positive psychological consequences of studying in this context such as low level language anxiety and enjoyment. low level language anxiety. low level language anxiety seems to be a common feature of the participants, which is a salient factor contributing to their wellbeing. most of the sample reveal that they feel at ease, are not afraid to speak and willingly come to classes. what is more, they believe that lack of stress helps them to benefit more from the instruction. i can’t act under stress. i believe that thanks to a lack of anxiety i can learn more. this school is far less stress-provoking than state ones. (s. 32) here the stress level is low. we can laugh and joke. (s. 19) studying at this school is far less stressful than at state schools. at state schools, there are students who try to draw everybody’s attention by commenting on other people’s mistakes aloud. (s. 14) the learners are not usually very anxious when they come to study at this school largely because it is their own decision. it is vitally important, however, that the instruction does not seem to increase their apprehension. in contrast, the institution appears to put students at ease. i feel much better than at the beginning. the classroom atmosphere is great and i think it is because the teacher is friendly and helpfull.* (s. 17) now i know the teacher and the colleges from the group, and i feel more relax than at the beginning. i know that i can talk everything even when i’m telling wrong ☺* (s. 15) i feel better than i began of the course, because i am better student. i like learning english and i feel really good at the lessons.* (s. 14) enjoyment. enjoyment seems to be another psychological consequence of studying at the institution. in order to assess it the participants were requested to answer the question: are you satisfied with the course? in answer to the question they either said they were highly satisfied or satisfied with their english instruction. some of their comments are presented below: 47positive institutions: a case study i’m very satisfied with all the courses i’ve been attending at this institution. (s. 9) 10/10. (s. 28) my level of satisfaction is high due to the enhanced quality of instruction, in particular the interactive and friendly approach of teachers. (s. 13) i’m pleased with the course. the level is high and the lessons are not boring. (s. 2) apart from answering this specific question about the course satisfaction, enjoyment is generally apparent in all of the student narratives. teacher narratives results all of the teachers seem to be satisfied with working for the institution regardless of their nationality. their narratives clearly reflect what the students think of the school’s pedagogical approaches. the instructors believe that the fact that teaching results in learning is not a coincidence, but their conscious effort. when planning their lessons, they include ample target language activation and revision in order to ensure that learning takes place in the classroom. to ensure that my teaching results in learning we all do peer testing and other forms of informal testing to find out what students really know. we also do a lot of recycling and revision, formative assessment—(at least some aspects—to get students reflect on their progress and aspects that need improving). (t. 5) i always want to make sure that my teaching results in learning. i believe that a lot of learning happens in the classroom. i use a lot of activation and revision. (t. 1) not only do the instructors focus on student language acquisition but also on creating a positive learning environment. the teachers aim at reducing student language anxiety through encouragement, praise, using learners’ first names, smiling, including small talk, humor, treating learners as individuals, demonstrating genuine interest in student comments and referring to them in the future. what is more, they avoid nominating students to speak in front of the whole class without preparation. the instructors also make sure that the learners work with different partners all the time, which enables them to get to 48 katarzyna budzińska know one another and consequently facilitates community building and creating a positive learning environment. i create positive learning environment by humour and smiles. i encourage students as much as possible and put failure in a nice way. (t. 9) i try to work on the rapport between the students right from the beginning of the course. i make sure that students get to know one another by using ice-breaking, mingling activities. it is important that everybody gets the chance to speak to everybody. (t. 12) i try to make the atmosphere relaxed and fun. i chat with my students before and after classes. i offer help as much as i can. (t. 5) i use pairwork activities for students to practise what they are going to say in public, i try to show them that they know more than they think they do. i praise my students a lot. i use a lot of scaffolding to help them succeed. (t. 6) low-stress evaluation seems to be another positive feature of the institution. the teachers believe that their evaluation is done in a student-friendly manner. firstly, in their opinion results given as a percentage, not as grades, always appear more positive. moreover, peer testing is commonly used at the institution, which is far less stressful than conventional testing. additionally, the instructors think that the fact that students can retake every element of coursework makes the evaluation more positive. another method is treating errors as a developmental tool rather than failure. what is more, some teachers reveal that they pay a lot of attention to reducing test anxiety: i try to make testing conditions as stress-free as possible by behaving in a reassuring manner, monitoring and helping with task understanding, speaking with a soft voice and even playing some background music. i also allow students as much time as they need to complete their test in order to minimise pressure. moreover, in order to reduce test anxiety, the learners are familiarised with the test format and contents and provided with ample opportunities for revision. i also make sure that my tests find out what students know and not what they don’t know. (t. 3) i reduce my student test anxiety by explaining precisely the contents of the test, so everybody knows what to expect. i also give my student extra time, if necessary. besides, i give my students lots of advice on self-study 49positive institutions: a case study methods, which i believe has a positive effect on reducing their language anxiety. (t. 15) i think my evaluation is positive: i praise my students a lot, i think i am enthusiastic about their language achievements, i get my students to set individual goals they want to achieve. (t. 5) i often repeat that mistakes are important/milestones in learning, that mistakes are inevitable, that we learn when we make mistakes. (t. 6) in addition, the teachers unanimously state that the school is a positive workplace. several respondents say that this institution is the best in their experience so far. they highly praise the atmosphere, which is both supportive and conducive to self-development. a good relationship with the director of studies has also been brought up in the teacher narratives. what is more, the instructors say they benefit greatly from working with experienced, motivated colleagues as well as high quality teacher-training sessions and regular teacher and peer-observations. moreover, they find it pleasurable to work with small groups of motivated students, since small class size makes it easier for the instructors to put innovative techniques into practice. in addition, the teachers speak highly of the constantly updated resources and seem satisfied with their salaries. the instructors generally say that the physical aspect of the institution is adequate. they praise the fact that the school is a small, professional looking building equipped with up-to-date technology. for me, this is the best working environment i’ve ever worked in – my personal space is respected and my preferences as for selecting the level of teaching considered prior to giving me classes before each academic year begins. the building is by and large ok. other teachers are competent, friendly and helpful when there’s an emergency. (t. 2) the school is definitely a positive place for teachers to work for. you can develop yourself thanks to contact with experienced teachers, workshops, training. we have a wide range of supplementary materials available. besides, there’s peer-motivation here. everybody makes an effort, takes the job very seriously. (t. 13) the institution is certainly a positive place for teachers to work for. the atmosphere is very friendly. the place is promoting self-development. i really like peer-motivation and training. i benefit a lot from it. i am very impressed with our constantly updated resource library and the fact that 50 katarzyna budzińska everything is bought when requested. i enjoy working with small groups of highly motivated students. (t. 10) yes, this is a positive workplace thanks to a friendly atmosphere, a good rapport between the management and teachers. there is a lot of scope for professional development, well equipped classrooms and adequate salaries. it’s the best place i’ve worked in. (t. 5) discussion the present study looks into the under-researched positive psychology pillar, that is, positive institutions, which makes it pioneer research in the field. as macintyre and mercer (2014) propose, after exploring positive emotions and individual characteristics, the next step is to focus on the institutions in which students can experience enjoyment and flourish in foreign language learning. the aim of the research was to explore the understudied field and investigate a language school in a further education context in order to assess whether its students experience enjoyment and are given opportunities for success and thus, the institution could be labeled as positive (macintyre & mercer, 2014). looking at the institution from three different angles: physical, pedagogical and psychological as well as from both the students’ and the instructors’ point of view has presented us with a comprehensive picture which demonstrates that the institution could be referred to as positive. the study results reveal positive psychological consequences of being educated in the institution, which, as stevick (1990) and other representatives of the humanistic movement in language teaching propound, is likely to be conducive to l2 acquisition. additionally, the participants positive emotions contribute to language learning owing to broadening the students’ perspective and “opening” them “to absorb the language” (macintyre & gregersen (2012, p. 193). what is more, their positive emotions will be invaluable in the long process of l2 attainment. in addition, a positive classroom climate seems to be a salient feature of the institution, which, as gabryś-barker (2016, p. 156) states, “plays a role not only in fostering foreign language learning, but also in personal development and the well-being of teachers and learners.” the classroom atmosphere and the rapport between the teacher and the learners as well as the learners are perceived by the participants as positive, which enhances their educational experiences and facilitates flourishing in language learning. 51positive institutions: a case study what is more, the most prominent contribution from positive psychology to sla, that is, broaden-and-build theory is realized at the institution. even though the physical aspect of the institution is just adequate, the school is extraordinary thanks to contented, professional, dedicated teachers who obviously care about students success as language learners as well as their emotional wellbeing. consequently, the institution generates an upward spiral. the learners coming to study at the school tend to be motivated and do not normally suffer from anxiety. thus, the institution does not reduce negativity, but focuses on expanding positivity. learners entering the school with a positive attitude enter a positive virtuous cycle (fredrickson, 2013, p. 3; mercer, 2015), which in turn, may help them build intellectual resources. although the findings are insightful, the study is not free from limitations. first of all, the results could have been slightly affected by the fact that the diaries were not anonymous. there is a possibility that the learners might have wanted to please their instructor by providing answers they thought were expected of them. another potential consequence of the journals’ not being anonymous was fear of losing face and therefore not revealing the details the learners regarded as embarrassing. some of the informants may not have wanted to admit being anxious, which they could have considered a weakness. in addition, the fact that the participants reported on themselves could be considered a limitation due to a possible lack of objectivity. moreover, some of the respondents were very young, 13 years old. at this age, with relatively little life experience, people may not be accurate judges of themselves. in addition, some of the answers may not have been reliable due to the fact that some informants might have reported what they believed should have been reported (mckay, 2006, p. 36). nevertheless, as a participant observer i verified this possible lack of objectivity by looking at the student classroom performance on a regular basis. the value of the selected type of research, however, greatly outweighs this limitation. thanks to adopting an ethnographical approach and participant observation, the process of teaching remained almost uninterrupted, the study was conducted in natural classroom conditions, without the intrusion of using extra stressors, for example, video cameras, special equipment such as halter heart monitors, or visitors handing out questionnaires. therefore, the learners did not go through unpleasant or abnormal experiences for the sake of data collection. what is more, the participant comments helped me to understand which of my pedagogical approaches are perceived as positive by students. consequently, i was able to tailor my way of teaching to my students’ needs. in other words, students’ thoughts, feelings and impressions showed me how to improve their wellbeing, which, as oxford (2016, p. 21) states is what the positive psychology is all about. 52 katarzyna budzińska conclusion the present study has demonstrated what it means in practice to be a positive institution in the sla field and how the criterion of enabling success in foreign language acquisition while promoting student wellbeing can be realized. it is hoped that other foreign language teaching contexts that lack some of the positive aspects incorporate the positive institution features described in the present article, which would contribute to the growth in number of contexts where foreign languages can be acquired in line with positive psychology. references arnold, j. 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(2000). positive psychology: an introduction. american psychologist, 55, 5–14. seligman, m. e. p., gillham, j., reivich, k., linkins, m., & ernst, r. (2009). positive education oxford review of education, 35, 293–311. 54 katarzyna budzińska stevick, e. w. (1990). humanism in language teaching: a critical perspective. oxford: oxford university press. turula, a. (2006). language anxiety and classroom dynamics. a study of the adult beginner. bielsko-biała: wydawnictwo akademii techniczno-humanistycznej. katarzyna budzińska positive institutionen – fallstudie z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g positive psychologie stützt sich auf drei hauptelementen: positiven emotionen, positiven charakterzügen und positiven institutionen. untersuchungen auf dem gebiet waren bisher auf positive emotionen und positive charakterzüge fokussiert. institutionen, in denen die schüler freude und zudem erfolge haben waren kaum erforscht. um diese lücke zu erfüllen untersucht die verfasserin die tätigkeit der im außerschulischen system fungierenden sprachschule in polen. bei der untersuchung wurden zwei kriterien angewandt: den schülern einen erfolg beim fremdsprachenunterricht zu ermöglichen und positive, das wohlbefinden der schüler begünstigende atmosphäre zu schaffen. die sprachschule wurde unter physischem, methodischem und psychologischem blickwinkel mittels ethnografischer methode und teilnehmender beobachtung untersucht. die untersuchung sollte die frage beantworten, ob diese schule den bedingungen einer positiven institution entspricht. den forschungsergebnissen zufolge ermöglicht die zu untersuchte einrichtung den schülern erfolg im fremdsprachenunterricht und schafft bildungsfreundliches umfeld, so dass sie als eine positive institution betrachtet werden kann. hoffentlich wird diese studie dazu beitragen, die genannte lücke auf dem gebiet der positiven psychologie zu erfüllen und praktische bedeutung positiver institution aufzuzeigen. schlüsselwörter: zweitspracherwerb, positive psychologie, wohlbefinden, positive institutionen, außerschulischer unterricht theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 4 (1) 2018, pp. 23–48 jorge pinto university of lisbon, portugal immersion learning activities: developing communicative tasks in the community a b s t r a c t this paper examines some out-of-class portuguese language teaching activities for foreign students learning portuguese at the faculty of arts of the university of lisbon and their results in the learners’ output. even in contexts of immersion, students tend to focus only on class activities and not on community activities that involve face-to-face contact with native speakers. to change this situation, we have created a new subject, built on task-based language teaching, called immersion activities for the portuguese foreign language annual course. we present the preliminary results of a study carried out with eighty students and twelve teachers, whose objective is to verify up to what extent this subject translates into a more effective learning of the language and if students’ perceptions, at the end of the semester, regarding the learning outcomes, coincide or not with those of the teachers. from the results, it is possible to observe that the students’ and teachers’ opinions converge in the same sense: immersion activities provide a better development of students’ communicative competence in portuguese. keywords: immersion learning environment, out-of-class activities, task-based language teaching, portuguese foreign language introduction the goal of language teaching was always to prepare students for outof-class uses of language, but the focus in language teaching is usually on classroom-based language learning. however, recent studies emphasize the importance of language learning outside the classroom, in different contexts, such as at home and in the community (e.g., guo, 2011; hyland, 2004; pearson, 2004; richards, 2015). it is important to consider the context in which the jorge pinto24 language is used (willis & willis, 2007), and that students should be exposed to the characteristics of spontaneous speech since they have to be prepared for the real world: people who speak quickly, use abbreviations, vague language, that is, aspects that are often not addressed to in classroom situations. task-based language teaching (tblt) provides language learning in real contexts of communication (nunan, 2004). thus, students understand that language varies according to the social context, purposes, and circumstances in which it is used. this approach proposes the use of tasks as the main component of language teaching as they create better situations to activate students’ acquisition processes to promote the learning of an l2. richards and rogers (2001, p. 228) also suggest this since “tasks are believed to foster processes of negotiation, modification, rephrasing, and experimentation that are at the heart of second language learning.” on the one hand, the tblt seeks to provide students with language learning from real contexts; the tasks have a clear pedagogical relationship with the communicative needs of the real world (long & crookes, 1992). therefore, it is important to consider the social context in which the language is used and to make students aware of this social dimension. at the same time, it is also important to raise students’ awareness of how language is used in these contexts. on the other hand, the tblt leads students to work together to complete a task and gives them the opportunity to interact. it is thought that such interaction facilitates language acquisition as students have to strive to talk clearly and to make themselves understood (larsen-freeman, 1986). based on these assumptions, and to promote foreign students’ contact with native speakers, we have created a subject called immersion activities for the portuguese foreign language annual course. the tasks that students perform in this new subject take into account the social environment in which the language is used as they are placed in direct contact with native speakers, in the community. learning is done through action. it is suggested that students acquire a communicative competence, which integrates different competences as language is conceived in terms of performance and appropriate behaviors, in the context of an interaction between individuals with a social purpose. in this sense, we present the partial results of a study carried out with four a1 and four a2 level classes, in a total of eighty students and twelve teachers, in which a tblt approach was adopted and out-of-class activities were performed as a complement to the usual classroom activities. at the end of the semester, we consider fundamental to verify in what way the students’ beliefs coincide with those of the teachers, regarding the learning outcomes. therefore, students and teachers answered a questionnaire, whose results allowed us to perceive that their opinions are similar: this subject helps students to develop communicative competence in portuguese. immersion learning activities: developing communicative tasks in the community 25 immersion learning activities (out-of-class learning) we can define the immersion teaching mode as the delivery of a second language curriculum in an immersed foreign language learning environment to learners who have different mother tongues. in this mode, learners are completely immersed in the target language environment and they are stimulated to use it exclusively during the learning process and the social time. in this context of immersion, learners contact with the language in two ways: an informal one (they learn some structures and lexicon without formal teaching, only from the exposure to the language), and another more formal in-classroom situation way (learners are focused on the functioning of the target language, such as on syntax rules, for instance). using portuguese for social interaction in immersion learning activities provides many opportunities for learners to maintain and extend their proficiency in portuguese. the objectives of these out-of-class activities, guided by a teacher, may be acquiring specific knowledge, developing language skills or consolidating and systematizing previous learned knowledge in the classroom. learners need to develop the ability to acquire information that is available in the two contexts: in the outand in-classroom ones (field, 2007). therefore, to enhance students learning, teachers should motivate them to devote more of their time outside the classroom to language learning purposeful activities. the immersion learning activities give students the possibility to work with the target language in different contexts of use, in the community, interacting with native speakers to solve different tasks. there is evidence that exposure to authentic language and opportunities to use the target language in real situations of communication are fundamental to language learning that forms part of an immersion language learning experience (in-country where the language is spoken). as hyland (2004, p. 180) says, “language learning is not limited to the classroom, but can take place at any time and in any place, including the home and the community.” out-of-class learning has been defined as any kind of learning that takes place outside the classroom and involves self-instruction (where learners deliberately plan to improve the target language and search for resources to help them do this), naturalistic learning (where students learn mainly unintentionally through communication and interaction with the target language group) or self-directed naturalistic learning (where learners create or seek out a language learning situation, but may not focus directly on learning the language while they are in that situation) (benson, 2001, p. 62). cortina-pérez and solano-tenorio (2013, p. 168) distinguish two main modalities of out-of-class language learning: oriented (where the teacher provides the learners with opportunities to improve their communicative skills out of the jorge pinto26 classroom) and autonomous (where the learner himself decides which activities to be involved with to improve his communicative skills in the target language). for this study, we have considered a definition that includes all the activities students perform out of the classroom with the goal of improving their language skills, including those which are prepared with the teacher and guided by him. every functional out-of-class activity and exposure to the target language is decisive for developing fluency in language skills (bialystok, 1981). we are convinced that guided out-of-class activities help learners to: – develop general linguistic skills; – develop specifically speaking and writing skills; – improve their cultural competence; – challenge learners to interact more with the native speakers in their daily life. previous research on out-of-class language learning until 2000, only a few studies of out-of-class learning activities have been carried out. bialystok (1978) was one of the first researchers to underline the importance of out-of-class strategies in language learning. she concluded that the exposure of the learners to the target language in out-of-class communicative situations helped them develop all their language skills. pickard (1996) interviewed a group of german students learning english in germany about the out-of-class learning strategies that they used. he found that the students were most frequently involved in leisure activities connected to receptive skills, like watching tv, reading newspapers, etc., mainly because they were interested in them and they were easier to access than activities involving productive skills. hyland (2004) conducted a study with students in hong kong, analyzing their out-of-class english language learning activities. she found out that many students devoted considerable time studying and practicing english outside the classroom, but were more involved in receptive activities than productive ones. more recently, cortina-pérez and solano-tenorio (2013) carried out a study with a group of native-spanish students from colombia to observe the effect of out-of-class language learning in communicative competence in english within a special english foreign language program. it showed that the participants in the program improved their communicative competence, mainly fluency. other studies have been undertaken with second language learners studying in the target language environment, such as the ones conducted by suh, wasanasomsithi, short, and majid (1999) and brooks (1992), which investigated their out-of-class learning strategies, and identified watching television, going to the cinema, listening to music and inter-acting with native speakers as their major out-of-class activities. in the same learning context, schmidt and frota (1986) carried out a journal of schmidt’s learning of portuguese which showed immersion learning activities: developing communicative tasks in the community 27 how he used the social environment to practice what he had learnt in class. another example is the diary study kept by campbell (1996), where she registered her attempts to learn spanish and made the point that socializing with the teachers was crucial in her language development. task-based language teaching (tblt) students learn in different ways: by watching and listening; by reflecting and acting; by reasoning logically and intuitively; by learning by heart and by visualizing. as a result, teaching methodologies also vary. the tblt has been developed through a better understanding of how languages are learned. this is an approach based on a series of ideas coming from the philosophy of education, theories of second or foreign language acquisition, empirical studies on effective educational strategies, and requirements from language learning process in a contemporary society. this tblt engages students in learning the language they use to perform tasks, to get information, to reflect and give their opinion. it proposes the use of tasks as the main component of language courses, because they present better conditions for activating acquisition processes and promoting language learning. another reason is that the task “fournit un contexte, une raison ‘sociale’ pour acquérir une langue” (van thienen, 2009, p. 60). thus, a task can be characterized as a learning activity (or set of activities), whose goal is that students express meanings in a given situational context, which implies that they must learn, manipulate, produce or interact with the target language. it is the task that advances the student’s system by activating the acquisition processes (long & crookes, 1993). there are several types of tasks, but the purpose of each one of them is to solve a communicative situation through a spontaneous exchange of meanings, which has a relation with real life and the students’ experience, arousing their interest and their involvement in learning (willis, 1996; bygate, skehan, & swain, 2001; ellis, 2003; nunan, 2004). the council of europe (2001, p. 218), in the common european framework of reference for languages, specifies this contextualization of tasks, this real communication situation that works as a motivating factor: communicative pedagogic tasks (as opposed to exercises focusing specifically on decontextualised practice of forms) aim to actively involve learners in meaningful communication, are relevant (here and now in the formal learning context), are challenging but feasible (with task manipulation where appropriate), and have identifiable (and possibly less immediately evident) outcomes. such tasks may involve ‘metacommunicative’ jorge pinto28 (sub)tasks, i.e. communication around task implementation and the language used in carrying out the task. in performing a task, students focus on meaning; its communication is motivated by a purpose, which must approximate the real use of the language (pinto, 2011). “by engaging in meaningful activities, such as problem-solving, discussions, or narratives, the learner’s interlanguage system is stretched and encouraged to develop” (foster, 1999, p. 69). during the task, students engage in a communicative activity that closely reflects the language used outside the classroom or, as in the case of this study, that uses the language in real contexts of communication. in this sense, the task implies an activity in which the student is involved in order to be able to fulfill a non-linguistic objective but for which he or she needs linguistic resources. therefore, the tblt offers some alternatives for teachers. according to skehan (1994), there are three main learning objectives for this approach: fluency (accuracy and correction in target language production), complexity (range of available and reproduced structures) and fluidity (capacity of production). teachers must therefore use tasks that enable students to enrich their interlanguage in a natural and balanced way. however, since the eighties, when the tblt attracted increasing attention from researchers and teacher educators, this approach has been subjected to criticism by some authors, defenders of the structural syllabus and traditional approaches, such as bruton (2002a, 2002b), seedhouse (1999, 2005), sheen (1994), swan (2005), and widdowson (2003). the critics argue against the definition of task considering that “the criteria that are proposed as defining features of tasks are […] so loosely formulated […] that they do not distinguish tasks from other more traditional classroom activities” (widdowson, 2003, p. 126) or that it is impossible to predict the “activity” that results from the performance of a “task” and, therefore, tasks cannot serve as units for planning a language course (seedhouse, 2005). however, the criteria defined by ellis (2009, p. 223) for a language-teaching activity to be a “task” are very clear and contradict the position of widdowson: 1. the primary focus should be on “meaning” (by which is meant that learners should be mainly concerned with processing the semantic and pragmatic meaning of utterances). 2. there should be some kind of “gap” (i.e., a need to convey information, to express an opinion or to infer meaning). 3. learners should largely have to rely on their own resources (linguistic and non-linguistic) in order to complete the activity. 4. there is a clearly defined outcome other than the use of language (i.e., the language serves as the means for achieving the outcome, not as an end in its own right). immersion learning activities: developing communicative tasks in the community 29 so, the main goal of a task is to achieve a communicative outcome, but the goal of an exercise is to display correct use of a target feature (ellis, 2014). in reply to the critic of seedhouse, ellis (2014, p. 107) argues that “[i]f the aim is to create contexts for natural language and incidental acquisition, then, arguably, prediction is not necessary.” the prediction only matters if the teacher’s intension is to use tasks to teach a structural syllabus. widdowson also criticizes the idea of the authenticity of the tasks, arguing that the tblt overemphasizes authentic language use, because “the classroom contexts within which language has usually to be learnt are totally different from those within which the language is used” (widdowson, 2003, p. 112). however, we agree with long (2016, p. 6), when he says that “work on approximations to real world tasks can be very realistic in genuine task-based lt classrooms or other instructional environments.” in fact, tasks have a clear pedagogical relationship with the communicative needs of the real world. another criticism against the tlbt is about the grammar teaching. sheen (2003) and swan (2005) argued that in task-based language teaching there is “no grammar syllabus.” in fact, what happens is just the opposite. as ellis (2014, p. 109) claimed, “[a]ttention to grammar can be achieved in all the phases of task-based lesson.” in this approach, “linguistic items are dealt with, and dealt with in a more scientifically defensible manner than by the traditional synthetic syllabus” (long, 2016, p. 17). one of the methodological principles of the tblt is the focus on form, in which, according to long (1991), communication remains the central goal of the instruction and the main difference is the attempt to solve problems that arise in the interaction, focusing the attention briefly on linguistic aspects. focusing on form allows students to make a pause in the focus on the meaning to pay attention to certain grammatical forms that usually pose a problem for them. focus on form (that includes notions such as consciousness-raising, form-focused instruction, or form-focused intervention) can also incorporate modified conversational interactions to make the message understandable by drawing students’ attention to the relationships of form, meaning and function of the l2 (pica, 2002). in sum, despite all the criticism against the tblt, this approach does worry about the development of the students’ communicative competence and about the focus on linguistic competence contextualized in the communicative purposes of the structure in question, which is suggested by the focus on form. the tblt enables students to share information in the target language with other colleagues, to interact by recreating real situations. thus, the association of this approach with out-of-class activities can promote an enhancement of students’ language skills. jorge pinto30 the study methodology the present study intends to investigate the effect of the out-of-class activities, developed in the context of the curriculum subject immersion activities, on the students’ language learning in a portuguese language environment. the study considered the following research questions: (1) what perceptions did students and teachers have about using and practicing portuguese outside the classroom, within the community, with native speakers? (2) did these perceptions affect the performing of the out-of-class activities? (3) what is the effect of participating in out-of-class learning activities on portuguese learners’ communicative competence? (4) in what sense can the immersion activities favor the teaching and learning in the articulation between language and culture? during the semester, students participated in out-of-class activities (32 hours/semester—2 hours per week), supervised and guided by a teacher. in this curriculum subject students performed activities such as: visiting traditional markets (interaction with sellers), visiting museums (interaction with guides; contact with different aspects of portuguese culture), in town peddypapers with specific goals, going to the shopping center (interaction with sellers in the different sectors of trade—clothing, bookstores, etc.), interacting with other students at the university (doing surveys about students’ routines, for instance), and going to a tourist office (asking for places, directions, public transports, etc.). the main goal of each activity was always to develop receptive and productive language skills as well as acquire cultural knowledge—contents they had previously learnt in class. every activity has a tab with all the information about it, as in the example shown in figure 1. in order for a communicative task to succeed, it is necessary to select, balance, activate, and coordinate the appropriate components of all skills needed for planning, execution, control/evaluation and remediation of the task in order to successfully carry out the communicative purposes (council of europe, 2001, p. 159). in this sense, every activity is previously prepared in the classroom. teachers here have a crucial role, too. the way they act is determinant for students’ motivation, interest, and implication in the activity. therefore, teachers should maximize learning opportunities and provide the maximum opportunities for students’ participation, as well as foster cooperation among them (richards & rodgers, 2001; brown, 2000). however, there are still other factors to take into account, such as language learning directed to its uses in social immersion learning activities: developing communicative tasks in the community 31 context, control of learning, interaction, promotion of communicative activities, student autonomy, the integration of new skills and knowledge (wajnryb, 1992), and well-defined objectives (scrivener, 2005) of the activity being prepared. figure 1. example of a tab of an out-of-class activity. at the end of the semester, we applied a survey to all students (n = 80) who participated in the study (a1 and a2 levels) and their teachers (n = 12). a convenience sampling was adopted in this study. the survey consisted of 20 sentences to be classified in a likert scale and it investigated several different domains including information on the students’ perceptions regarding the learning outcomes, attitude during the tasks (collaboration, interaction, etc.), use of languages (mother tongue, portuguese, other foreign languages), and perceptions regarding task-based learning in out-of-class activities. this methodology allowed us to obtain data from students’ performance during these out-of-class activities, to compare them with teachers’ perceptions, and, consequently, to do a reflection on the effectiveness of these activities. findings and discussion students’ and teachers’ perceptions regarding the learning outcomes. first, we aim to find out the students’ and teachers’ perceptions about the effectiveness of using out-of-class activities, involving interaction and negotiation of meaning with native speakers, in the improvement of their communicative competence. jorge pinto32 [%] 100 80 60 40 20 agreestrongly agree 0 undecided disagree strongly disagree teachers students 46 23 77 26 00 0 20 8 1 figure 2. improvement of communicative competence in interaction with native speakers. as we can see in figure 2, students and teachers agree and strongly agree that the out-of-class activities and the consequent direct contact with native speakers globally help students improve their communicative competence. this is because students interact by seeking mutual understanding, making questions of clarification or confirmation of what the native speaker said, or even verifying their own understanding. nevertheless, teachers are more confident in this improvement than students are, since 20% are undecided and 8% disagree. we think that this difference in results lies in the fact that students are not used to these more naturalistic ways of learning, which involves face-to-face contacts (see wu man-fat, 2012), and, therefore, they see the work developed in the classroom as more effective for language learning. however, during the out-of-class activities, students, contact with different situations of communication developed their ability to learn the portuguese language in these varied contexts. in this point, we fully agree with cortina-pérez and solano-tenorio (2013), considering that students’ communicative competence would develop more deeply if they had more opportunities for interaction in a variety of out-of-classroom contexts, thus having more opportunities for natural exposure to the target language (ellis, 1994). immersion learning activities: developing communicative tasks in the community 33 [%] 100 80 60 40 20 agreestrongly agree 0 undecided disagree strongly disagree teachers students 41 61 31 38 0 8 0 16 4 1 figure 3. students develop the ability to effectively learn the uses of language in different situations of communication. figure 3 shows us that students’ and teachers’ perceptions are once more in the same line, but, again, teachers are more aware of students’ abilities to learn the language in specific contexts of communication. these interaction activities expose students to different input provided by native speakers and their colleagues, as well as foster output production during the interactive act. we agree therefore with swain (2000) when she states that input and output together play a significant role in the l2 acquisition process. we verified that among the roles provided by the interaction, one is used to give students the input while the other fosters the use and practice of the l2 through the production of output. that is why students develop their ability to effectively learn the uses of language in different situations of communication for the l2 is introduced in a holistic way with the purpose of communicating meaning constantly. studies show us (see luan & guo, 2011) that through the immersion learning context, the students’ language ability, especially their ability to use the language, can be greatly improved. linked to the previous question, we wanted to know how students and teachers perceive the ability of the formers to use the language in these different contexts, applying all the linguistic knowledge learnt in-class. jorge pinto34 [%] 100 80 60 40 20 agreestrongly agree 0 undecided disagree strongly disagree teachers students 4046 38 41 88 0 15 4 0 figure 4. students are able to apply the knowledge acquired in the classroom in this case, there is proximity in the answers given by students and teachers, as we can see in figure 4. most of them consider that, during the out-of-class activities, students use the specific structures and lexicon for each situation that they acquired in the classroom. these results show us that the guided out-of-class activities are more effective in the language learning than the self-instruction outside the classroom, as shown by benson’s study (2001), where learners report a sense of discontinuity between what is learning within the classroom and the experience of expanding it outside. in fact, “what they are doing in these activities is activating and applying what they know already” (field, 2007, p. 34). in the same sense, data show that teachers and students believe that these activities help students to improve their levels of correction and fluency. the percentage of answers is very similar to those of the previous question (see figure 5), which confirm that the participants in the study are aware of the positive learning outcomes that they achieve by participating in the out-of-class activities. this leads us precisely to the study presented by knight (2007), in which the author demonstrates a relationship between using the language out-of-class and learner proficiency in the l2, which confirms the influence of out-of-class activities in the student’s language proficiency. immersion learning activities: developing communicative tasks in the community 35 [%] 100 80 60 40 20 agreestrongly agree 0 undecided disagree strongly disagree teachers students 39 54 38 41 0 8 0 14 5 1 figure 5. students visibly improve their levels of correction and fluency. tasks that students perform consider the social environment in which the language is used and its culture as they are placed in direct contact with native speakers and are guided in the discovery of portuguese culture. learning is done through action, through the use of language in real contexts of communicative interaction and through the exploration of diverse cultural aspects. [%] 100 80 60 40 20 agreestrongly agree 0 undecided disagree strongly disagree teachers students 34 38 54 39 0 8 0 15 10 2 figure 6. students develop their sociocultural knowledge of portuguese society. jorge pinto36 the data show that, in this particular aspect, the majority of teachers and students “strongly agree” and “agree” that the out-of-class activities allow students to develop their sociocultural knowledge, too (see figure 6). we consider that these activities lead students to understand that the language is used with a social purpose, in which language and culture are inseparable. therefore, we think it is essential to focus on alternative methodologies to traditional teaching that take into account the social and cultural context in which the language is spoken. many studies carried out cover the teaching of language-culture and intercultural issues as an important perspective in the teaching of foreign languages (kramsch, 1993, 1998; moran, 2001; mcconachy, 2017). one of the goals of the activities is to get the students to know more about the world they come from and the world and the culture of the target language, developing their intercultural awareness. it is not only a matter of guaranteeing students the ability to master the language, but rather to help them form their linguistic and cultural identity, based on the principle of otherness; to develop their capacities through these diverse experiences, using other language and knowing another culture. as culture is a complex concept, several approaches are being used to seek to better integrate this topic in the classes of portuguese as a foreign language, trying to value all the cultures present in class and compare them with the portuguese. the students’ and teachers’ perceptions in this matter are pretty much the same as is the percentage obtained in the two groups (see figure 7). so, we can deduce that these activities also promote the development of students’ intercultural awareness. [%] 100 80 60 40 20 agreestrongly agree 0 undecided disagree strongly disagree teachers students 3938 38 41 0 24 0 14 5 1 figure 7. students develop their intercultural awareness. immersion learning activities: developing communicative tasks in the community 37 currently, language teaching should generally enable students to intervene in both linguistic and intercultural terms so that they become social agents in continuous interaction with their colleagues and all the community. students’ and teachers’ perceptions regarding students’ attitudes during the tasks. the perceptions change when participants are asked about the willingness and spontaneity to communicate in portuguese. again, teachers think students become more spontaneous and willing since the majority strongly agree (46%) and agree (46%). however, students are more divided in the answers, as we can see in figure 8. as for most of the students, this kind of activities is new, so they do not feel so comfortable speaking in a public context with native speakers. this can be due to individual and social factors (hyland, 2004) as well to the exposure to different methodologies of teaching and learning. so, teachers in this case have a crucial role in helping them, they “should further foster the positive beliefs such as a high level of motivation and implementation of popular activities” (wu man-fat, 2012, p. 47). furthermore, immersing students in the target language helps them use it more independently and more spontaneously. [%] 100 80 60 40 20 agreestrongly agree 0 undecided disagree strongly disagree teachers students 26 46 46 28 00 8 21 25 0 figure 8. students acquire a greater willingness and spontaneity to communicate in portuguese. related to this topic, but with different results, is the question about the interaction with native speakers while doing the tasks. these activities promote the interaction of students with native speakers, giving them the opportunity to learn portuguese through a social use of the language, since this approach provides students with the necessary skills to perform tasks in a real context jorge pinto38 of communication. even students who do not feel comfortable to interact with strangers in public seem to strive for it (see figure 9). [%] 100 80 60 40 20 agreestrongly agree 0 undecided disagree strongly disagree teachers students 4446 31 41 0 8 16 9 6 0 figure 9. students strive to interact with native speakers while doing the tasks. in this case, the majority of students and teachers consider that students do make an effort to interact with native speakers during the accomplishment of the tasks. as the activities are followed by teachers, students feel more guided by them during the tasks and the interaction is mainly controlled. it is in spontaneous situations of communication that they reveal greater difficulties. some previous studies reveal that students prefer receptive activities than productive ones (yap, 1998; littlewood & liu, 1996). however, in these particular out-of-class activities, as they have to interact with native speakers to accomplish the tasks, they strive for it, even if they need the teacher support. with this type of activity, we also want to help students feel more comfortable when they communicate in portuguese with native speakers, which is not always evident, and to improve their ability to communicate effectively, in or out of the classroom. students’ and teachers’ perceptions regarding the use of languages. as there are many students of the same country attending the language courses, we consider it important to understand up to what extent they use languages other than portuguese, including their mother tongue, in the performing of tasks, as this may affect the desired development of their competence in portuguese. immersion learning activities: developing communicative tasks in the community 39 [%] 100 80 60 40 20 agreestrongly agree 0 undecided disagree strongly disagree teachers students 7 38 46 38 0 8 8 15 15 25 figure 10. students often use their mother tongue to interact with colleagues from the same country. [%] 100 80 60 40 20 agreestrongly agree 0 undecided disagree strongly disagree teachers students 2323 54 35 0 8 1618 16 9 figure 11. students often use other foreign languages (e.g., english) to communicate with their colleagues. the results show us that students and teachers have different perceptions regarding the use of other languages during the tasks (see figures 10 and 11). teachers consider that students often use their mother tongue to interact with colleagues from the same country or with the same mother tongue and also use another foreign language to talk with other colleagues. one of the reasons jorge pinto40 could be related to the origin of the majority of our students: 60% are chinese. their interaction in the mother tongue is a reality. however, students in their responses seem not to agree with the teachers’ position—only 7% strongly agree and 38% agree. and for the first time, there is a high percentage of students that strongly disagree with the question. students do not have the perception that they often use their mother tongue, or they hardly assume it, as they know that the language they should be using during the activities is portuguese. another possibility is advanced by hyland (2004). she suggests that it would be embarrassing for chinese students to talk to each other in other language than chinese. we have similar results with the use of other foreign languages; however, in this case, students are more aware of using it than the mother tongue. probably, they see the other foreign language, mainly english, as a language they often use to communicate with teachers and colleagues when there are gaps in portuguese that need to be filled. in these situations, english establishes bridges with portuguese. [%] 100 80 60 40 20 agreestrongly agree 0 undecided disagree strongly disagree teachers students 61 38 46 31 0 8 8 0 8 0 figure 12. students speak mainly in portuguese with their colleagues during the tasks. comparing the use of other languages and of portuguese during the tasks, data confirm the students’ perceptions regarding the use of the latter as the main language during the tasks (see figure 12). there is a significant difference between teachers and students if we see the first category, “strongly agree,” that registers a gap of 23% between the two groups. even the majority of teachers who “strongly agree” and “agree” in this question are not as peremptory in their evaluation as students are. we can infer from the data that, according to immersion learning activities: developing communicative tasks in the community 41 both groups, portuguese is in fact the main language that students use with their colleagues during the tasks, not excluding, however, other languages that can help support the communication between them. students’ and teachers’ perceptions regarding task-based learning in out-of-class activities. group tasks involve a constant share of ideas and knowledge to be satisfactorily completed. that is why one of the questions of the survey was about the students’ collaboration during the tasks. we wanted to know if the students collaborated with the other members of the group in the performing of the tasks, that is, if in addition to the sharing of ideas and knowledge they had effectively collaborated in the resolution of the different stages that led to the accomplishment of the objectives of each task. figure 13 allows us to verify that students collaborated with their colleagues during the activities, as they and their teachers mostly “strongly agree” and “agree” in this question. as we can observe from the data, this kind of learning was very enjoyable to the students, since it enabled them to interact with their colleagues in order to collaborate in different learning situations, in the construction of their knowledge. students, as a team, working in a collaborative system, will improve their communicative competence and will be able to reproduce this knowledge later in other real situations of communication (long, 2016). [%] 100 80 60 40 20 agreestrongly agree 0 undecided disagree strongly disagree teachers students 40 46 46 44 0 8 0 10 6 0 figure 13. students collaborate effectively in workgroup. one of the characteristics of this type of tasks is to involve students more actively in their accomplishment. therefore, we want to see if they actually jorge pinto42 had a dynamic participation and felt motivated during their performances. analyzing figure 14, we can observe that teachers and students have different perceptions. teachers are more convinced of the dynamism and motivations of their students, as all of them respond “strongly agree” (23%) and “agree” (77%). [%] 100 80 60 40 20 agreestrongly agree 0 undecided disagree strongly disagree teachers students 36 23 77 44 00 0 15 3 2 figure 14. students are motivated and dynamic in the accomplishment of the tasks. motivation is intrinsic to the student, but sometimes it must be triggered by the teacher, through interesting, stimulating strategies and, above all, it has to be compatible with the students’ culture. factors such as inhibition, selfesteem, accepting risks, tolerance of differences, are some of the characteristics that teachers must consider in order to help students overcome problems that are an impediment to their language learning in a different context. however, most students (36% responded “strongly agree” and 44%—“agree”) felt motivated and dynamic in the accomplishment of the tasks. the diversity of the tasks that the students had to perform was also a motivating element, because it broke some of the monotony and repetition of the activities to which they were exposed in the classroom. any student needs to be motivated to learn, because monotony eventually leads to dissatisfaction, and so change and diversity are necessary. effectively, task-based language learning allows students to become more motivated, more active, and more responsible for building their knowledge, contrary to the passive tendency to which they are usually submitted in some classroom contexts. as nunan (2004, p. 15) says: immersion learning activities: developing communicative tasks in the community 43 [b]y using “task” as a basic unit of learning, and by incorporating a focus on strategies, we open to the students the possibility of planning and monitoring their own learning, and begin to break down some of the traditional hierarchies. the development of communicative competence is related to the ability of students to be able to interpret and use a greater number of linguistic resources, either in written or oral form, in an appropriate way in diverse situations of interaction, being them formal or informal. for a better use of the language, students should be able to reflect on aspects of the language in real situations of communication, namely using knowledge acquired through practice and linguistic analysis to expand their capacity for reflection and increase their ability to use the language in its different possibilities of use. [%] 100 80 60 40 20 agreestrongly agree 0 undecided disagree strongly disagree teachers students 43 15 54 37 0 23 8 14 0 5 figure 15. students become more aware of the evolution of their language learning. in this sense, we would like to understand if students, with the out-of-class activities, would be more aware of their language knowledge and their learning evolution, and what the perspective of their teachers might be, too. the data show (see figure 15) that in this particular case the majority of the students think they can evaluate the development of their language learning better, with 43% of them ticking “strongly agree” and 31% “agree.” teachers are not so optimist, as 23% are “undecided” and 8% “disagree.” however, we found a majority (53%) agreeing with the question and 15% strongly agreeing, which reveals in some way that they also believe that these activities help students be more aware of the evolution of their language learning. jorge pinto44 therefore, we believe that these activities more focused on students make them more active and more aware of their own learning, which will be even more significant if the activities are related directly to their experiences, interests, and needs. we consider that learning a foreign language must be adapted to different contexts, to the potentialities and the communicative needs of the students, allowing them to consciously interact in the construction of their knowledge, inside and outside of the classroom, in a collaborative way, which will foster their autonomy and spirit of reflection (woodward, 2001). conclusions the results suggest that teachers and students agree that task-based learning offers the ideal conditions for the development of interaction and cooperative learning in out-of-class activities even though the students’ linguistic competence is not high (a1 and a2 levels). students feel motivated to participate and interact, and they do not feel uncomfortable during the accomplishment of the tasks. the results show that the participation of the students is in fact stimulated and that they feel more motivated and interested in using portuguese during the tasks. with out-of-class activities portuguese is learnt in a variety of contexts and the meanings attached to the use of portuguese outside the classroom vary within these contexts. the present study demonstrates that these activities encourage students to expand their language experience to the outside of the classroom. an out-of-class activity can increase students’ exposure to portuguese in existing and familiar contexts. their conscious attention to portuguese use in the real world can also increase students’ language ability and knowledge about portuguese culture and society. it is worthwhile for educators in similar pfl environments to implement these purposeful out-of-class activities as a means of promoting portuguese language awareness and enhancing the learning of portuguese in its local contexts. it is also important to note that this part of the research evaluates the perceptions of teachers and students regarding task-based learning in out-of-class activities, and in some way the students’ performance. however, further investigation would be necessary to provide “evidence of the language outcomes and of the subject matter achievements” (zydatib, 2012, p. 28). immersion learning activities: developing communicative tasks in the community 45 references benson, p. 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(2012). linguistic thresholds in the clil classroom: the threshold hypothesis revisited. international clil research journal, 1(4), 16–28. jorge pinto immersiver sprachunterricht: entwicklung der kommunikationsaufgaben im natürlichen sprachmilieu z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g in dem beitrag werden verschiedene methoden der ausnutzung von den lehrveranstaltungen außerhalb des unterrichts beim erlernen der portugiesischen sprache von ausländischen studenten der humanistischen fakultät der lisabonner universität dargestellt und deren einf luss auf sprachliche aussagen der studenten untersucht. es wurde folgendes festgestellt: sogar beim spracheintauchen (immersion) neigen ausländische studenten dazu, sich eher auf die lehrveranstaltungen an der universität zu konzentrieren, statt einen direkten kontakt mit den muttersprachlern in ihrem natürlichen milieu (außerhalb der universität) aufzunehmen. um diese erscheinung zu verhindern, ließ man ein neues fach – immersionslehrveranstaltungen entstehen, die auf einer aufgabeorientierten herangehensweise beruhen und ein teil des einjährigen lehrgangs „portugiesisch als fremdsprache“ sind. in seinem beitrag präsentiert der verfasser vorläufige ergebnisse der an 80 studenten und 12 lehrern durchgeführten forschung. die forschung sollte überprüfen, inwiefern die neuen lehrveranstaltungen zu effizienterer sprachlehre beitragen. das andere ziel war, zu vergleichen, ob die bemerkungen der studenten zu ihren lernerfolgen am ende des semesters mit den der lehrer übereinstimmen. jorge pinto48 anhand der forschungsergebnisse konnte man erkennen, dass die von studenten und lehrern vertretenen ansichten in einem punkt konvergent sind: die auf dem spracheintauchen beruhenden lehrveranstaltungen tragen zu besserer entwicklung der kommunikationskompetenz in der portugiesischen sprache bei ausländischen studenten bei. schlüsselwörter: immersives bildungsmilieu, außeruniversitäre lehrveranstaltungen, portugiesisch theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (2), 2023, pp. 1/24 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12573 katarzyna nosidlak https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8315-2525 pedagogical university of krakow, poland hopeless cases or just hard nuts to crack? stories of “difficult” foreign language learners a b s t r a c t in accordance with the assumptions of the sociologically grounded labelling theory, an individual’s self-perception and, consequently, their actions, might be inf luenced by words used to describe them. also, in the context of education, including the field of foreign language learning, such a process of defining learners in a simplified way, has been proven to have profound consequences of psychological nature. the main purpose of the article is to outline the results of a study in which 37 teachers of english shared the stories of their most “difficult” students. the qualitative analysis of the gathered descriptions allowed the identification of some common features characteristic of, so-called, hopeless cases, among which motivation-related problems are the most often enumerated ones. additionally, many teachers wrote about their struggles while teaching students with special educational needs. the views expressed by the participants of the study might help understand the way in which opinions about students are formulated as well as point to the need for significant changes to be made in the area of foreign language teacher education and training. keywords: difficult/problematic student, foreign language learner, formal labelling, informal labelling, labelling theory, teacher training while reading posts published on different forums and online groups for foreign language teachers, on numerous occasions one might notice hashtags labelling students in a negative way. for example, the tags “problematic student,” “difficult student,” and “hopeless case” have occurred in 53 posts written since 2014 on one of the biggest groups for polish teachers of english. such hashtags are usually accompanied by more or less detailed descriptions of specific students who constitute some kind of a pedagogical challenge for their teachers. the teachers finish their posts with requests for help and advice. it is important to note here that such groups can be easily accessed by students and their parents and, what is more, the teachers publish these posts under their own names, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12573 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2451-7242 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2451-7242 tapsla.12573 p. 2/24 katarzyna nosidlak and they provide a lot of details about a particular case, so a given individual can easily identify himself or herself. this may be potentially problematic for those students. psychologists underline the importance of messages we receive about ourselves from people around us and point to their crucial role in the process of self-construction. the aim of this paper is exploring the reasons behind such choices of words to describe students. to do that, the paper outlines the results of a study in which 37 teachers of english decided to share the stories of their most “difficult” students. in terms of structure, in the first section of this paper, the notion of a label is defined and the main assumption of the labelling theory in relation to the educational context are presented. then, the study design and its methodology are described, followed by a section discussing the obtained results and suggesting further directions of research on the topic of labelling in the field of foreign language education. the paper closes with an appendix containing the translated version of a questionnaire for polish teachers of english used in the presented study. labelling in education the belief that our self-concept is created in the process of recognising how other people perceive us has been reflected in the sociologically-grounded labelling theory, developed and popularised in the 1960s and 1970s. as pointed out by matsueda (2014), the initial statements reflected in this theory include the ideas of george herbert mead, frank tannenbaum, edwin lemert, émile durkheim, kai erikson, and howard becker, who is recognised as the main creator of the labelling theory. from the sociological point of view, a label might be defined as a particular word choice used to describe, or define, a given person. a label is not neutral, as it “contains an evaluation of the person to whom it is applied,” as pointed out by haralambos and heald (1985, p. 430). thompson (2017) underlines that in the process of labelling, a given person or a group is defined in a simplified way. through such categorisation, often based on first impressions, the complexity of the whole person is ignored, and individuals are simply assigned into broad categories. in education, the labelling theory may be applied to situations when teachers choose to (or are obliged to) use particular labels for their students in relation to their behaviour, ability and intellectual potential. the application of labels might lead to the occurrence of new problems that result from the reactions of others and the individual themselves to negative hopeless cases or just hard nuts to crack?… tapsla.12573 p. 3/24 stereotypes (stigma) attached to a given negative label (becker, 1963; lemert, 1967; bernburg 2009). although in his paper, bernburg (2009) focuses on the issue of labelling in the context of criminal behaviours, he underlines the importance of the distinction between “formal” and “informal” labelling, significant also from the educational perspective. as the name suggests, formal labels come from various officially regulated institutions, such as courts, police, corrections, etc., and usually involve some kind of legal consequences imposed on an individual and/or their surroundings. in turn, informally assigned labels are attached to a given person in an unofficial way, usually by parents, peers, educators, etc. in education, formal labelling would mostly involve the application of different medical/diagnostic labels (“dyslexic,” “hyperactive,” etc.), whereas informal one might actually come from very different sources, including one’s teachers, classmates or parents, commenting, for example, on the intellectual abilities of a given student (cf. boyle, 2020). both risks and values of diagnostic labelling in education are extensively discussed by lauchlan and boyle (2020). they underline that the educational system makes it necessary to diagnose students and, consequently, attach some formal labels to them, in order to get official support for the learner (for example, the help of a teacher assistant or additional hours of classes). moreover, for some students, teachers, and parents, identification of a problem in the form of a medical label might come as a relief—from now on they know what to do and where to look for help. still, diagnostic labels might also bring a number of negative consequences, including: (1) the risk of misdiagnosis or incorrect, subjective interpretation of a label; (2) inability to recognise variability within individuals sharing the same label; (3) inadequate lowering of the expectations by educators, sometimes in the areas not requiring special treatment; (4) influencing teachers’ sense of competence concerning their perceived lack of (sufficient) qualifications to teach a diagnosed child; (5) attachment of a lifelong label, in some cases, incorrect one (cf. lauchlan & boyle, 2020). as already hinted, the concept of informal labelling may be applied to situations when teachers choose to use particular labels for their students in relation to their behaviour, ability, and intellectual potential. teachers tend to make judgements about their students over a period of time, and, as pointed out by thomson (2017), they base their opinions on students’ behaviour in class, their attitudes to learning, previous school reports, interactions with them, and even encounters with their parents. unfortunately, the labels given to students in the educational context are sometimes grounded in stereotypes, as some educators base their opinions not on students’ behaviour and performance but on a number of preconceived ideas developed on an individual’s ethnicity, gender or social class background. browne (2005) states that even children’s way of dressing or speaking might be taken into account in this process. as a result tapsla.12573 p. 4/24 katarzyna nosidlak of these more or less correct observations, students are eventually classified as high or low ability, hard working or lazy, naughty or well-behaved, bright or slow, promising or hopeless, etc. still, as underlined by thompson (2017), it is debatable whether contemporary, highly trained and competent teachers still label students along the same criteria—for example, whether they assume the existence of the correlation between students’ social backgrounds and their intelligence. both browne (2005) and thompson (2017) highlight that the labelling procedure might exert adverse effects of psychological nature because, as several studies show (cf. rosenthal & jacobson, 1968; rist, 1970; hargreaves et al., 1975), if a teacher labels a student a certain way, there are chances that they will accept this label as true and will act in accordance with the prediction. the labels, which might be treated by students as sources of valid self-knowledge, can influence the construction and development of their identities by shaping their self-concepts. informal labels attached by teachers may influence not only the way how students see and define themselves but also the dynamics and nature of interactions with others (cf. triplett & jarjoura, 1994; sampson & laub, 1997). this, in turn, can affect their attitudes towards school, their in-class behaviour, and eventually might be reflected in their general level of educational achievement (cf. thompson, 2017). interestingly enough, as suggested by baudson and preckel (2016), also the positive label of giftedness might prove harmful, as it puts students under excessive pressure. the process of labelling resulting in a situation when a given student behaves and performs in the particular way that was predicted by the teacher constitutes an example of the self-fulfilling prophecy. as defined by nomi and pong (2010, p. 531), “the self-fulfilling prophecy is the process by which one’s expectations of other people lead those people to behave in ways that confirm those expectations.” this phenomenon is also known as the pygmalion effect after the title of the publication by rosenthal and jacobson (1968). the mechanisms behind the self-fulfilling prophecy are outlined by thompson (2017), who explains that teachers tend to expect more from students they think are more intelligent, and do not expect as much from the ones seen as less gifted. consequently, a student with a positive label is more likely to be placed in a higher band, and the opposite is true for a student pre-judged to be less able. thus, it should not be surprising that students labelled in a positive way are more likely to adopt a favourable vision of studying, whereas their negatively labelled peers might even develop an anti-school attitude. on top of that, these mechanisms can be further reinforced by peer-group identification. therefore, accepting the assumptions proposed in the labelling theory, it might be stated after thompson (2017) that “the students attainment level is, at least to some degree, a result of the interaction between the teacher and the student, rather than just being about their ability.” hopeless cases or just hard nuts to crack?… tapsla.12573 p. 5/24 interestingly, negative labelling can sometimes have the opposite effect, which was proven, for example, in fuller’s (1984) research conducted in a london comprehensive school on black girls labelled as low-achievers. fuller (1984) found out that, although the girls were labelled as less gifted, their response to this negative label was to work diligently on their educational success to prove their teachers and the school wrong (cf. thompson, 2017). therefore, it may be hypothesised that the nature of the influence of a particular label on an individual or group will depend on a number of different factors, including, for example, teaching contexts, group dynamics, and students’ personalities. as any other theory, also the labelling theory has been questioned and criticised. for example, as stated by thompson (2017), it has been suggested that it attributes too much importance to teacher agency, defined by biesta et al. (2015) as active contribution of teachers to shape their work and its conditions. what is more, as pointed out by thompson (2017), structural sociologists emphasise that schools themselves make teachers label students—in many cases students are obliged to write entry tests, over which teachers have no control. the results of such tests influence grouping of students and assigning them into ability groups. additionally, acting in good faith and striving to assist students in need, the school requires teachers to provide some extra support for those labelled as “low ability,” even before such a need occurs. the school system of separating students into groups in accordance with their previous attainment or predicted ability is referred to as binding or streaming and, as underlined by browne (2005, p. 292), it has been proven “to be unfair and harmful to the self-esteem and educational performance of bottomstream pupils, as teachers expect less from children in lower streams and give them less encouragement than those in higher streams.” nowadays, the procedure of streaming seems to be especially common in the field of foreign language education, as big classes are often divided into smaller language groups. for example, in the polish educational context, secondary school and university students are often grouped accordingly to their expected level. in some cases, placement tests are implemented for this particular purpose. to sum up, despite the criticism, mechanisms similar to the ones described in the labelling theory have been identified by psychologists and sociologists. related phenomena include, for example, the already described pygmalion effect or the golem effect, which refers to a situation in which low expectations placed upon an individual lead to their poor performance (cf. rowe & o’brien, 2002). tapsla.12573 p. 6/24 katarzyna nosidlak method recognising the potentially harmful effect negative labels might have on students, i decided to analyse the reasons behind the procedure of labelling in the context of foreign language teaching. special emphasis has been placed on the hashtag “hopeless case,” as it indirectly suggests the existence of individuals incapable of acquiring a given foreign language and, consequently, seems to be especially stigmatising. research aim and questions striving to explore the issue of negative labelling in the context of foreign language education, the following research questions have been posed: 1. do foreign language teachers label their students as “hopeless cases”? — what is their perception of “a hopeless case”? — are there any characteristics shared by the students described by them as “hopeless cases? 2. what are the teachers’ recommendations for those working with such students? 3. what gaps in teachers’ knowledge and training might be indicated by the application of such a label in relation to their students? research tool, data collection, and participants in order to answer the above questions, a link to a questionnaire (in polish) was published on two facebook groups for foreign language teachers (cf. appendix). the questionnaire consisted of 11 questions. the first set concerned the issue of teachers’ background, then the teachers were inquired about their perception of the hopeless case, their experience when it comes to working with students described in this way and, finally, they were asked to describe one such case in more detail. the data was collected at the turn of 2019 and 2020. although i used voluntary sampling method, the teachers who participated in the study represented a variety of backgrounds and were characterised by different personal variables and professional experiences. in total, 37 answers were submitted—36 from female teachers and one from a male teacher. this unequal gender distribution seems to be the result of the dominance of female teachers in the polish educational system. all study participants were teachers of english as a foreign language, but some also taught other languages, including german hopeless cases or just hard nuts to crack?… tapsla.12573 p. 7/24 (one person), spanish (two people), and italian (one person). as one can see in figure 1, they constituted quite a diversified sample when it comes to their teaching experience. their length of service ranged from less than a year to over 20 years in two cases. figure 1 the length of teaching experience of the study participants the teachers conducted classes for students of different ages (from toddlers—seven people, to adults—12 respondents; with the biggest number of teachers (28) working with younger teenagers, that is, students aged from 11 to 15), worked in a variety of places and taught both larger groups and individuals. most of them worked in the private sector, including 26 respondents tutoring individual students and 16 declaring experience of teaching in private schools. the details concerning the workplace of the study participants are presented in figure 2. tapsla.12573 p. 8/24 katarzyna nosidlak figure 2 the place of work declared by the respondents (multiple answers accepted) analysis after collecting background information, the respondents were asked a number of open-ended questions related directly to the topic of the “hopeless cases” in the context of foreign language education (cf. appendix). in order to specify the frequency of occurrence of such students, the participants were questioned about the precise number of the ones they could recall. then, to better understand the reasons for nicknaming a student as “hopeless,” i asked the respondents to write detailed descriptions of students with whom they had worked and who, in their opinion, constituted a perfect example of such a case. in other words, the purpose of the next query was to identify points of similarity between the labelled learners: imagine that you are writing an essay entitled “my #hopeless case.” please describe the student whom you consider to be the best illustration for the hashtag “hopeless case” in the context of teaching/learning a foreign language (do not include personal details—still, you can use the first name, specify age/gender/language level and learning context). why does this person deserve such a “tag”? hopeless cases or just hard nuts to crack?… tapsla.12573 p. 9/24 when interpreting the teachers’ descriptions, content analysis was carried out, as it allows for the identification of prevailing themes in given qualitative data (cf. david & sutton, 2004). the collected answers were analysed with the help of the nvivo software in order to identify some patterns or, in other words, some features shared by those described as “hopeless cases.” the provided answers were carefully read in order to identify key codes, which corresponded to the main themes emerging from the students’ descriptions. the coded fragments of answers (single words, phrases, or sentences) could be assigned to more than one theme. coding consistency was ensured by the fact that the whole process was conducted by one person only (the author herself). in the process of data analysis, eight codes emerged. the codes corresponding to the main areas (or themes) in which problems of the described “hopeless” cases were reported include: (1) motivation-related problems, (2) special educational needs/mental disfunctions, (3) disruptive behaviours, (4) lack of cooperation with the teacher, (5) family/parent-related issues, (6) student’s emotional issues, (7) problems with the choice/application of learning strategies, (8) negative attitude towards the subject/teacher. finally, the teachers were also asked about their ways of dealing with “hopeless cases” and were invited to share some practical tips for those who will face a similar didactic challenge in the future. the collected suggestions were analysed and grouped in accordance with their prevailing didactic overtones, leading to the identification of the following categories of hints: (1) general teaching methods and techniques, (2) general learning philosophy, (3) ways of approaching the individual student, (4) teacher training and wellbeing. results the purpose of the following section is to present the results of the conducted qualitative analysis, described in accordance with the defined codes corresponding to the problematic areas linked to the perception of “hopeless” students. then, the study participants’ recommendations stemming from their experience of working with problematic students will be outlined. teachers’ perceptions of “hopeless” cases as stated above, this subsection describes the identified categories of “hopeless” language learners. in order to better illustrate the identified issues, tapsla.12573 p. 10/24 katarzyna nosidlak some of the descriptions provided by the respondents and translated from polish are also presented. motivation-related problems [13 references described by eight teachers] the most often repeated characteristic was students’ unwillingness to learn a given foreign language, mentioned 13 times by eight respondents. in this context, teachers talked about students being forced to study by their parents or educational system and about students who do not understand the importance of foreign language knowledge. the descriptions provided by the study participants and quoted below clearly illustrate the importance of one’s motivation, especially the inner one: teacher 19: during each quiz or test, he marked his own paper as failed and gave back an empty page, as “english is of no use to him.” each attempt to motivate the student was unsuccessful. teacher 29: the boy has no interest in learning english, because, as he says, he will never go abroad. then, the case described by teacher 14 further illustrates the importance of attitude and motivation. there is also a visible clash in the perception of this boy—his mother considers him to be especially gifted, whereas the teacher seems to have a different opinion: teacher 14: the student, described by his mum as a “genius reading books till 4 am,” demonstrates a totally disrespectful approach to the process of english learning and the teacher. his average grade in english doesn’t exceed 2.5… still, when asked why hasn’t even had a glance at the material from previous classes […], he responds that it is of no use to him. special educational needs or presumed mental disfunctions [11 references provided by 11 teachers] the second most often reported source of teachers’ problems (11 references by 11 participants) is the need to work with students with special educational needs (sens) of various natures. in this context, the respondents mentioned both diagnosed and presumed disfunctions, for example, dyslexia, aphasia, asperger’s syndrome, or concentration problems. here are some quotes illustrating the broad range of issues in this area: hopeless cases or just hard nuts to crack?… tapsla.12573 p. 11/24 teacher 2: i’ll describe an 8th grade student with “opinion” and learning difficulties in each and every subject… teacher 4: i have a student who can’t concentrate on the lesson, she prefers drawing instead […]. even her parents can’t help her focus. teacher 7: he has tremendous problems with concentration. teacher 9: currently, i’m teaching a boy who is dyslexic and who believes he can make mistakes freely—his mum states that teachers have no right to evaluate him negatively, as they are obliged to follow the recommendations [of the psychological-pedagogic clinic]. so, he has adopted the attitude of his mother… he is so unambitious and insecure that he does nothing to get better results. […] unfortunately, he constitutes another example of a student who does not study, does not revise at home and, at the same time, does not have any support from parents, who can’t help and boost his self-esteem. teacher 20: julia suffers from aphasia; she has huge problems with language learning—even with tasks requiring matching a picture with a description. teacher 32: he was a high-school student with dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dysorthographia. teacher 33: the boy, fourth grade, primary school, dyslexic. my work, additional materials, strategy training—all these didn’t influence his language level. he was really motivated and hard-working, but he had “a tag” attached—“i’m dyslexic, i can’t learn new words.” an especially complex case was described by teacher 9. as can be concluded from her description, there is a clash in the perception of dyslexia by the teacher herself and by the student’s parents. she suggests that the problem may be tracked down to the parents’ understanding of this learning difficulty, and, at the same time, their lack of support. the student is categorised as unambitious, insecure, and not doing anything. while reading this description, one might be a bit confused about the excerpt concerning the recommendations of the psychological-pedagogical clinic—the criticising tone (of the phrase “as they are obliged to follow the recommendations”) can be interpreted as a suggestion that these recommendations should not be followed, and/or that they are excessive. currently, a lot of people, including even teachers and specialists, tapsla.12573 p. 12/24 katarzyna nosidlak talk about different learning difficulties as a way of avoiding effort by lazy students (cf. suchecka, 2013). out of the descriptions provided above, the one presented by teacher 33 seems to fully illustrate potentially harmful influence of labels used to describe students. in this case the label, which is in fact a medical diagnosis, paired with the lack of knowledge concerning this learning difficulty, clipped the student’s wings, and/or gave him an excuse not to make an effort. disruptive behaviours of students [nine references by eight teachers] another didactic challenge which prompted teachers to apply the “hopeless” label was related to cases of students manifesting disruptive behaviours during classes: teacher 8: the student sits during the classes doing nothing and disturbing everyone else for 45 minutes. teacher 16: out of 60-minute lesson, 45 minutes is wasted on pointless discussions, reprimanding, and looking for xerox copies or books. teacher 17: the student does everything, except for studying. teacher 37: s., 23 years old (he hadn’t been promoted a few times), 4th grade of technical secondary school. during our first lesson, after my short introduction in english, he said [in polish]: “common, ania, cut the crap!”—and it was of course a reason for joy for the rest of the group. at times when i wore a skirt to work, he used to throw a pen under my desk and used it as an excuse to go under it. he didn’t participate even in a single lesson; he never did his homework… when he failed the semester, the headmaster came to me and said: “just give him the lowest grade to pass and to get rid of him from the school. after all, he won’t pass the matura [high school] exam anyway.” i didn’t teach him anything during the whole year. as illustrated in the quotations provided by teacher 8 and 37, such disruptive behaviours are especially problematic when happening in the context of group teaching, as in such cases misbehaving students ruin the learning opportunity not only for themselves, but also for their peers. then, the description given by teacher 37 is especially alarming as it illustrates two examples of pathology, that is, the behaviour of the student, which can be classified as verbal or even sexual harassment of the teacher, and the comment (or even order) hopeless cases or just hard nuts to crack?… tapsla.12573 p. 13/24 by the headmaster, which prompted the teacher to give the difficult student an inadequate grade, just to get rid of the problem. unwillingness to cooperate with the teacher [seven references by seven teachers] the next category of “hopeless” students encompasses individuals who are not willing to cooperate. in contrast to the misbehaving students described above, these individuals do not actively disturb the flow of the lesson for others. instead, due to their inaction, they seem to waste their time and the time of their teachers trying to encourage such students to cooperate: teacher 5: i ask him to open his notebook, note things down, focus on the exercise in the book. usually, he doesn’t reply. he never has his homework. teacher 10: the student doesn’t react in any way to my instructions, neither to gestures nor to verbal commands in a foreign language. teacher 15: the boy refuses to cooperate in any way. family-/parent-related issues [seven references by four teachers] this subgroup of problems involves, apart from teachers and students, the third party, that is, the family of a given learner. in some of the cases, the teacher is just aware of the difficult situation of a given learner (teachers 7 and 8); in others, there are more open clashes between teachers and parents (teacher 33). teacher 7: he has some emotional problems resulting from his personal situation […] he seems to look for attention. teacher 8: in my opinion, this is one of the cases of individuals who don’t revise, don’t study at home, but also don’t receive any support from parents who would be able to help and build a child’s self-esteem. teacher 33: the father of the girl didn’t allow her to attend additional classes, although he is aware of her dramatic situation. the case mentioned by teacher 33 illustrates the issue of the parents’ lack of cooperation and his (probably unintentional) acting to the detriment of the child. tapsla.12573 p. 14/24 katarzyna nosidlak other emotional problems of the student [five references by five teachers] another established code relates to students manifesting emotional problems of unidentified origin. especially striking case was described by teacher 3, who mentioned an adult language learner characterised, in the teacher’s opinion, by a low self-esteem: teacher 3: despite the fact of having a wide array of vocabulary and good comprehension skills, the lady was so stressed about speaking, resulting from a really low self-esteem that she resigned overnight. in turn, teacher 15 described a boy vividly enacting his emotions and negative attitude towards the learning situation: teacher 15: sometimes when i ask him to do something, he reacts in an aggressive way, or he cries. it looks as if his parents forced him to enrol at our language school “as a punishment,” despite his intense resentment. problems with the choice and/or application of learning strategies [five references by five teachers] the problem of inadequate (or even lack of) learning strategies, mentioned by five respondents, concerns different aspects of foreign language education. for example, teacher 14 describes a simple case of an eight-year-old boy who regularly does not do his homework: teacher 14: he copies homework from his classmates—and even this, he does it only when he feels like doing it. still, the issue is usually more complex and related to other categories of identified problems. the eight-year-old described above is also an example of a student unwilling to cooperate, who “shows no initiative.” in turn, teacher 17 mentions another inactive learner, unwilling to apply any language learning strategies, even the high-technology-related ones: teacher 17: in his case, there is no progress, but it results from his lack of work on the development of skills, his lack of willingness to listen or read in a foreign language. he even doesn’t want to use computer applications at home. hopeless cases or just hard nuts to crack?… tapsla.12573 p. 15/24 a completely different case of a “hopeless” student was provided by teacher 24. here, the girl seems to concentrate on less relevant aspects of the educational process, that is, colourful entries in her notebook, and tries to distract the teacher’s attention from her general lack of competence by her excessive focus on vocabulary acquisition: teacher 24: her attention is brought to a beautiful notebook with topics underlined with a glitter pen and highlighted new vocabulary. most often, however, it is surprising that the selection of these “new” words is, to put it mildly, random. anyway, words are like a lifeline for her—after a few lessons on a given unit, she asks about a textbook glossary and wants to know when she’ll write the vocabulary quiz. there is nothing wrong with that, but... it soon turns out that with this student, learning vocabulary is not a medium for effective use of language, but an end in itself. the beginning and the end. a mask that is supposed to cover the lack of competence. negative attitude towards the subject and/or the teacher [four references by three teachers] finally, the last category of problems encompasses cases of students characterised by their negative attitude, either towards the teacher or the subject itself. the student described by teacher 5 manifest his dissatisfaction in an open and emotional way: teacher 5: the moment he hears the word “english,” some kind of resistance appears, and he starts acting as he wants to escape. he cries when i sit down and try to study with him. then, teacher 6 mentioned a case of an unmotivated boy for whom english classes are just a burden and painful obligation: teacher 6: english classes are a waste of time for him—he even perceives them as a punishment. finally, from the description provided by teacher 10, it might be assumed that there was a teacher-student type of a problem, probably involving communication issues: teacher 10: he just doesn’t know what this “mean woman” wants from him. tapsla.12573 p. 16/24 katarzyna nosidlak a mixture of different problems as can be concluded from the above quotes, most of the teachers described cases of students with multiple potentially challenging features. for example, teacher 5 mentions both the student’s negative attitude towards the subject and his unwillingness to cooperate. the description provided by teacher 6 points, next to the students’ bad attitude, to the issue of lack of motivation. teacher 8 describes a boy who simply does not study but, at the same time, he does not receive any support from his parents and might be characterised by low self-esteem. teacher 15 refers to a boy with emotional problems, who seems to dislike english and struggles to communicate with his parents. in turn, teacher 7 describes an especially complex example: teacher 7: this boy is a first-year high school student. he has tremendous problems with concentration and motivation. he also has some emotional problems related to his family situation… there is no progress because of his lack of abilities to work, lack of interest (to listen, read or use some applications to study the language outside the classroom). during classes, he acts against himself, probably looking for attention. teacher 7 mentions here a number of different behaviourand performancerelated issues which influenced her perception of this individual. precisely, the teacher points here to some alleged mental limitations of the person (“tremendous problems with concentration”), emotional problems and behaviours related to them and, on top of that, motivational issues. this description additionally highlights the influence of the student’s family environment on his performance at school, but also on the teacher’s opinion about this boy. teachers’ recommendations finally, the teachers who completed the questionnaire were asked about their recommendations for ways of working with a “difficult” student. the gathered suggestions were analysed and grouped into four main categories, including pieces of advice concerning: (1) teaching methods and techniques, (2) general learning philosophy, (3) ways of approaching the individual student, (4) teacher training and wellbeing. some of recommendations given by the respondents are general in nature, whereas others constitute examples of precise teaching techniques and/or strategies. the first group of tips encompasses very specific methodological instructions, such as dividing the teaching content into smaller units; focusing on the minimum needed, for example, to pass an obligatory exam; presenting learnhopeless cases or just hard nuts to crack?… tapsla.12573 p. 17/24 ing strategies to the student; finding common interests shared by the teacher and student and using them while preparing classroom materials; allowing the student to prepare before performing in front of others. when it comes to the second area of suggestions, that is, the ones related to teaching philosophy (understood here as some general statements about the nature of the teachinglearning processes), the participants recommended that, when working with “difficult” students, even the tiniest progress should be highlighted, and such students should be aware of the fact that it is natural to make mistakes. the third category involves pieces of advice related to the ways in which one should approach a “difficult student”—here the following hints were given: try to boost the student’s self-esteem, self-confidence, and motivation; pay attention, show that you care; make the student feel safe around you; adopt individual approach; express empathy, patience, and kindness. finally, the last set of recommendation refers to the topics of teacher training and wellbeing—the respondents believe that in order to work effectively with “problematic” students, it is important for a teacher to develop one’s psychological knowledge and look for the causes of the problem; additionally, teachers should not take such situations personally and, if needed, they should not hesitate to ask other professionals for help and advice. there were also voices advocating resignation from further cooperation and recommending another teacher for a particular learner. in the light of the presented theoretical background, i believe that it is important to finish the presentation of the study results by underlining here that only one participant stated that “there are no hopeless cases.” another one has also doubts concerning the usage of such a phrase to describe a student. interestingly enough, the length of teaching service did not translate itself into a bigger number of recalled “problematic” students—the biggest number of “hopeless” learners were given by two novice teachers, including a lady who had been teaching for three months and claimed to have three such cases and the second teacher who stated that 70% of the students in general are actually “hopeless cases.” this particular teacher defines “hopeless cases” as those who do not want to study and are forced by their parents to attend classes. what is especially interesting in this case is the fact that this is an opinion expressed by the only one male respondent who had worked as an english teacher only for 20 months and, at the time of the survey, was not an active teacher. what is more, five teachers with different length of teaching experience (ranging from three to 25 years) stated that they had never had such a student, but most of the respondents could recall at least a few such cases. tapsla.12573 p. 18/24 katarzyna nosidlak discussion the conclusions stemming from the above literature review and the qualitative analysis of the collected data have been divided in accordance with the research questions posed. do foreign language teachers label their students as “hopeless cases”? as hinted by liberman, woodward, and kinzler (2017), categorising the elements of reality around us is a part of human nature—in the contemporary world this tendency is also visible in the procedure of hash-tagging. the online posts by foreign language teachers who describe the cases of students perceived by them as difficult, or even hopeless, show that negative labelling in education is a permanently vivid problem. as might be also concluded from the data presented in this article, on their professional way many teachers, regardless of the length of their teaching experience, meet students who constitute some kind of a pedagogic challenge for them, including even individuals who, in their opinion, can be labelled as “hopeless.” the discrepancy in the number of “hopeless” language learners recalled by the participants of the study might result from different perceptions of such cases or, in other words, subjective understanding of the label, or from the teachers’ different work-related experiences. it is also important to note here that the vast majority of the respondents expressed the belief that such students existed and were able to provide their descriptions. what is the teachers’ perception of “a hopeless case”? are there any characteristics shared by the students described by them as “hopeless cases? the reasons behind the procedure of informal labelling a given language learner as “hopeless” differ. the students perceived in this way usually manifest insufficient levels of intrinsic motivation. what is more, extrinsic pressure supposed to encourage such individuals to learn a foreign language seems to bring counterproductive results. other features often recognised as those characterising students described as “hopeless” include: being labelled, both formally and presumably, as a student with learning difficulties and/or special educational needs; having family-related and/or overall emotional problems; manifesting disruptive behaviours, inaction or lack of cooperation; inability hopeless cases or just hard nuts to crack?… tapsla.12573 p. 19/24 to choose and apply appropriate learning strategies; noticeable aversion to the subject, learning situation and/or the teacher. as pointed out by becker (1963), lemert (1967), and bernburg (2009), labelling a student in an unfavourable way might lead to occurrence of other problems. this dependence seems also to be reflected in the provided descriptions, as most of the mentioned students were sources of multiple didactic challenges for their teachers. for example, formally labelled learners seem to constitute as especially challenging group to be taught, as they were often enumerated among individuals further labelled as “hopeless cases.” what are the teachers’ recommendations for those working with such students? although most of the teachers who participated in the study expressed the belief that there are some hopeless cases when it comes to foreign language learning, they were also ready to share some pieces of advice for those who struggle with problematic students. i believe that this fact gives some room for optimism—if the teachers continue to make an effort, maybe the label “hopeless case” is just a hashtag reflecting their struggles and drawing the attention of those who can help them with their challenges. the recommendations provided by the study participants illustrate the complexity of the teacher’s work. when dealing with “difficult” students, one needs to start with adjusting their philosophy of teaching, as with such learners, special adapted didactic methods and techniques might be needed. apart from the constant control of the teaching-learning processes, teachers should also take care of teacher-student-parent relationships. finally, as working with “problematic” students is mentally burdensome, educators need to take care of their own mental health and wellbeing. on top of that, in some cases, resignation from further cooperation might be the only solution—still, such a comfort is usually granted to teachers working in private schools or the ones dealing with individual learners. this final piece of advice shows teachers’ understanding of the importance of teacher-student relationships and seems to suggest that the “hopelessness” of a given language learner can be unique to a given learning context. what gaps in teachers’ knowledge and training might be indicated by the application of such a label in relation to their students? i would like to underline here that the descriptions provided by the teachers, including the ones presented in this article, might help us understand the way tapsla.12573 p. 20/24 katarzyna nosidlak in which opinions about students are formulated, but also point to the areas in which teachers may need assistance and training. the areas identified in the study as the ones in which teachers seem to struggle highlight the need of more extensive psychological and pedagogic training. consequently, as also suggested by rymarz (2004) and lauchlan and boyle (2020), teacher training courses, including the ones for foreign language teachers, should also focus on the selected issues from the fields of developmental psychology (in order to know how to motivate students of different ages, to know how the self-concept and identity are formed); social/socio-educational psychology (to know how to deal with students’ emotions, disruptive behaviours or aggression; to be able to communicate with parents and supervisors) and special pedagogy (in order to pre-diagnose students and work with the already diagnosed ones). to sum up, it is important to underline after guichard and dumora (2008) that the role of teachers in the process of students’ self-construction cannot be undervalued. constituting an important source of self-knowledge for their students, educators not only shape the educational process itself, but also influence students’ growth and the development of their individual dispositions and self-perceptions. therefore, in the light of the assumptions of the labelling theory, teachers should be particularly careful when making and expressing judgements about their students’ intellectual abilities and potential. i believe that this study can serve as an inspiration for further research on the issue of labelling in the context of foreign language education, especially the one conducted on the boundaries of discourse analysis, applied linguistics and psychology. as pointed out by bernburg (2009), there is a pressing need to investigate the phenomenon of informal labelling—the issues worth addressing include, for example, the exploration of the potential link between informal labelling in the school context and life chances; or the experience of being labelled from the student’s perspective. simultaneously, i am aware of the study’s shortcomings resulting, among others, from my inability to analyse greater number of cases, which would allow for taking into consideration such individual variables as students’ gender, age or even length of contact with a foreign language. references baudson, t. g., & preckel, f. (2016). teachers’ conceptions of gifted and average-ability students on achievement-relevant dimensions. gifted child quarterly, 60(3), 212–225. becker, h. s. (1963). outsiders: studies in the sociology of deviance. free press of glencoe. bernburg, j. g. (2009). labeling theory. in m. d. krohn, n. hendrix, g. p. hall, & a. j. lizotte (eds.), handbook in crime and deviance (pp. 187–209). springer. hopeless cases or just hard nuts to crack?… tapsla.12573 p. 21/24 biesta, g., priestley, m., & robinson, s. (2015). the role of beliefs in teacher agency. teachers and teaching. theory and practice, 21(6), 624–640. browne, k. (2005). an introduction to sociology. (3rd ed.). polity press. cooley, c. h. (1902). human nature and the social order. c. scribner’s sons. david, m. & sutton, c. d. (2004). social research: the basics. sage. dumora, b. (2000). les intentions d’orientation. aspects développementaux et psychosociaux [future intentions: developmental and psycho-social approaches]. hdr; laboratoire de psychologie de l’orientation, cnam, inetop. guichard, j., & dumora, b. (2008). a constructivist approach to ethically grounded vocational development interventions for young people. in j. a. athanasou & r. van esbroeck (eds.), international handbook of career guidance (pp. 187–208). springer. haralambos, m., & heald, r. (1985). sociology: themes and perspectives. bell & hyman. hargreaves, d. h., hester, s., & mellor, f. j. (1975). deviance in classrooms. routledge and kegan paul. lauchlan, f., & boyle, c. (2020). labelling and inclusive education. in u. sharma (ed.), oxford research encyclopedia of education. oxford university press. retrieved from: https://oxfordre.com/education/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.001.0001/acrefore9780190264093-e-1021 lemert, e. (1967). human deviance, social problems and social control. prentice-hall. liberman, z., woodward, a. l. & kinzler, k. d. (2017). the origins of social categorisation. trends in cognitive sciences, 21(7), 556–568. matsueda, r. l. (2014). the natural history of labelling theory in farrington. in p. david & j. murray (eds.), labelling theory: empirical tests (pp. 13–44). trans-action publishers. nomi, t., & pong, s.-l. (2010). self-fulfilling prophecy. in g. ritzer & j. m. ryan (eds.), the concise encyclopedia of sociology (p. 531). wiley-blackwell. rist, r. (1970). student social class and teacher expectations: the self-fulfilling prophecy in ghetto education. harvard educational review, 40(3), 411–451. rosenthal, r. & jacobson, l. (1968). pygmalion in the classroom. the urban review, 3, 16–20. rowe, w.g., & o’brien, j. (2002). the role of golem, pygmalion, and galatea effects on opportunistic behavior in the classroom. journal of management education, 26(6), 612–628. sampson, r. j., & laub, j. h. (1993). crime in the making: pathways and turning points through life. harvard university press. suchacka, j. (2013). epidemia dysleksji w dużych miastach [an epidemic of dyslexia in big cities]. wyborcza.pl, 25 april. retrieved from: https://wyborcza.pl/7,75398,13801495,epidemiadysleksji-w-duzych-miastach.html thompson, k. (2017). teacher labelling and the self-fulfilling prophecy. revisesociology, november 1. retrieved from: https://revisesociology.com/2017/11/01/labelling-self-fulfillingprophecy-education/ triplett, r. a., & jarjoura, g. r. (1994). theoretical and empirical specification of a model of informal labeling. journal of quantitative criminology, 10, 241–276. van lier, l. (2004). the ecology and semiotics of language learning. kluwer academic publishers. https://wyborcza.pl/7,75398,13801495,epidemia-dysleksji-w-duzych-miastach.html https://wyborcza.pl/7,75398,13801495,epidemia-dysleksji-w-duzych-miastach.html tapsla.12573 p. 22/24 katarzyna nosidlak katarzyna nosidlak ein hoffnungsloser fall oder eine harte nuss zum knacken? über „schwierige“ schüler im fremdsprachenunterricht z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g nach der etikettierungstheorie kann die verbale etikettierung einer person erhebliche auswirkungen auf ihr selbstwertgefühl haben, was wiederum häufig das menschliche verhalten bestimmt. auch im bildungskontext kann ein solcher prozess der vereinfachenden etikettierung von schülern tiefgreifende konsequenzen psychologischer natur haben. im vorliegenden artikel werden in erster linie die ergebnisse einer studie dargestellt, in der 37 englischlehrer über schüler berichteten, welche sie als die schwierigsten fälle in ihrer bisherigen lauf bahn bezeichneten. eine qualitative analyse der gesammelten berichte ermöglichte es, einige gemeinsame merkmale der so genannten hoffnungslosen fälle zu identifizieren. die schüler wurden häufig als personen ohne lernmotivation charakterisiert. außerdem hielten die studienteilnehmer in vielen fällen schüler mit sonderpädagogischem förderbedarf für besonders „schwierig“. die berichte der studienteilnehmer können dabei behilf lich sein nachzuvollziehen, wie meinungen über schüler gebildet werden, und weisen auf die notwendigkeit wesentlicher änderungen im bereich der ausund weiterbildung von sprachlehrern hin. schlüsselwörter: lehrerbildung, etikettierung, fremdsprachenunterricht, bildungssoziologie, etikettierungstheorie, schwierige schüler a p p e n d i x the hopeless case—translated version of the questionnaire for polish teachers of foreign languages 1. i am… – female – male – not listed – prefer not to answer 2. i teach… (you can mark more than one answer) – english – german – french – spanish – russian – other(s): ………………… hopeless cases or just hard nuts to crack?… tapsla.12573 p. 23/24 3. how long have you been working as a foreign language teacher? …………………………………………………………………………….. 4. where are you working currently? (you can mark more than one answer) – at a nursery or kindergarten – at a state primary school – at a state secondary school – at a private language school – at a university/college – with individual students – other(s): ………………………… 5. how old are your students? (you can mark more than one answer) – 0–3 years old – 4–6 years old – 7–10 years old – 11–15 years old – 16–19 years old – i work with university/college students – i work with adults (i.e., those who finished their education) – other(s): …………………………. 6. how do you understand the phrase “hopeless case” in the context of foreign language education? …………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………… 7. how often do you deal with such cases? how many “hopeless cases” can you recall? …………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………… 8. imagine that you are writing an essay entitled “my hopeless case.” please describe the student whom you consider to be the best illustration for the hashtag “hopeless case” in the context of teaching/learning a foreign language (do not include personal details – still, you can use the first name, specify age/gender/language level and learning context). why does this person deserve such a “tag”? tapsla.12573 p. 24/24 katarzyna nosidlak ps. you can also write—“i have not had such a case.” …………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………… 9. have you finally found a way to work with your “hopeless case”? how did your cooperation end? or is it still going on? …………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………….... 10. in the context of the topic under discussion, do you have any pieces of advice for teachers who are currently working with “hopeless cases”? …………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………… 11. have you noticed any individual traits (personality, character) common for “hopeless cases”? …………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………… write your comments, remarks, or reflections here: …………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………… theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 4 (1) 2018, pp. 97–120 dorota lipińska university of silesia in katowice, poland rethink your old teaching methods: designing a pronunciation course for adolescent polish learners of english a b s t r a c t numerous studies (e.g., lipińska, 2014; majer, 2002; nowacka, 2003; sobkowiak, 2002; szpyra-kozłowska et al., 2002; szpyra-kozłowska, 2008; waniek-klimczak, 2002; wrembel, 2002) have shown that although teaching l2 pronunciation is included in university curricula, it is at the same time virtually absent at lower stages of education. moreover, it has been noticed that teaching phonetics to younger learners is advisable and may be really effective (e.g., lipińska, 2017c; nixon & tomlinson, 2005). undoubtedly, there are a lot of books and courses written by and for polish learners of english, but they are dedicated to adults (e.g., porzuczek et al., 2013; sawala et al., 2011) or dedicated to international users (e.g., baker, 2006; hancock, 2008; hewings, 2010). but the materials and methods used while working with adult learners and university students are no longer applicable if one wants to teach phonetics in a different environment and create an attractive and efficient course for children or young teenagers, since, as for example komorowska (2011) notices, each foreign language course has to be characterized by realistic goals and appropriate methods and components. the aim of this paper is to present various methods and materials which can be successfully applied while teaching english pronunciation to 11–13-year-olds. they have been implemented in three groups consisting of such l2 learners, and their usefulness and effectiveness have been proven by studies on both speech production and perception (e.g., lipińska, 2017d). keywords: foreign language learning, pronunciation teaching, teaching materials introduction gilbert and levis (2001, p. 506) once remarked that pronunciation is “a field that has been notoriously data poor and anecdote rich.” and even though it may dorota lipińska98 seem to be a slight exaggeration, one has to be aware of the fact that teaching and researching l2 pronunciation has been neglected and underestimated for many years, and the situation has not changed until recent decades when a growing number of studies devoted to this topic could finally be observed. however, despite this noticeable growth in research, numerous scholars continue finding some areas of phonetic studies which require further and more detailed exploration (see, e.g., schwartz et al., 2014). it may turn out to be crucial in the case of education, as well as foreign language teaching and learning, where results obtained from various studies are surprisingly seldom applied in practice. teaching l2 pronunciation in polish schools undoubtedly, the status of l2 pronunciation teaching in polish schools illustrates the aforementioned problem best. the interest in it started to grow in the early 1990s when more and more researchers from various academic institutions in poland began to examine this matter. the studies have continued until now and their results have never been too optimistic. what has been proven is the fact that any pronunciation training is still virtually non-existent during foreign/ second language classes at all educational levels lower than the academic one, and if any elements of phonetics are incorporated into language classes, they are of doubtful quality (e.g., porzuczek, 2002; szpyra-kozłowska et al., 2002; majer, 2002; wysocka, 2003). what is also important, most l2 learners frequently claim to be dissatisfied with their own pronunciation skills and they are even more critical while assessing their current and former l2 teachers’ pronunciation in english (for details see, e.g., lipińska, 2014; lipińska, 2017a; majer, 2002; szpyra-kozłowska, 2003; szpyra-kozłowska, 2008; szpyra-kozłowska et al., 2002). exactly the same situation has been observed for other languages, such as french (e.g., deprez, 2008; kotuła, 2015). it is especially worrying in the case of l2 teachers who (theoretically) should speak a given foreign language fluently since they serve as models for their students, also (or even above all) with regard to pronunciation (waniek-klimczak, 2006). some interesting information could be found in szpyra-kozłowska’s (2008) study. in her paper, she replicated and also contrasted her two previous pieces of research in which she first had analyzed a level of english classes in numerous polish high schools, and second—assessed the level of the competence of english teachers from the same schools. the results of both studies demonstrated that in all schools where the research had taken place, there was no single class devoted to english pronunciation. furthermore, only very few lessons contained single rethink your old teaching methods… 99 elements of any pronunciation training. besides, students from those schools highlighted that their teachers did not pay any attention to learners’ pronunciation in l2, rarely corrected it, claimed that pronunciation was not an important part of language learning and frequently used a faulty pseudo-phonetic transcription (e.g., transcribing the word a nurse by teachers as “e ners”). what is more, also the teachers’ pronunciation was described by their students as “full of errors” (for instance, it included incorrect vowel length, final devoicing of obstruents and similar easily detectable errors). hence, one can easily draw a conclusion that low phonetic competence of foreign language teachers, as well as the lack of any classes devoted to second language pronunciation training do contribute to l2 learners’ low phonetic competence in their target language. the question arises as to what causes this reluctance towards phonetic training. for instance, baran-łucarz (2006) attempted to find the explanation as to why pronunciation is neglected in foreign language teaching in poland. having interviewed numerous l2 teachers, the researcher noticed that they offer a lot of excuses. for example, they state that there are no resources that could be used in teaching l2 phonetics, that learners are not interested in it at all (a few researchers have been provided with quite the opposite opinions—see, e.g., kotuła, 2015; lipińska, 2015), that teaching pronunciation is fatiguing and that there are other, more important aspects of language that need to be taught. the last opinion seems to be shared by many foreign language teachers and has been proven in szpyra-kozłowska’s (2008) study in which the author found out that most teachers find teaching grammar and vocabulary much more vital than phonodydactics. some researchers attribute this situation to the more and more popular approach of “being just communicative” in an l2. this kind of attitude towards using an l2 has recently become favored by many language learners (and teachers). it has been suggested that l2 teachers ought to focus a lot on conversation skills, and avoid too much instruction in any other skills such as grammar, as they will be learnt anyway and by the way. moreover, this attitude might be perceived as a consequence of a relatively low priority of pronunciation skills in various language examinations such as polish matura (the uppersecondary school leaving exam), american toefl and cambridge esol examinations (waniek-klimczak & dłutek, 2003; szpyra-kozłowska, 2003). it has to be noticed that general communication skills are regarded as the most significant and desirable ones in all of the exams mentioned above (szpyrakozłowska, 2008). dorota lipińska100 correct l2 pronunciation: still necessary although the situation described in the previous section has continued for many years, it seems rather peculiar since it is very easy to notice that if anyone wants to communicate successfully in any language (native or foreign), they simply have to acquire (or learn) correct pronunciation patterns of this particular tongue (e.g., komorowska, 2011). among the most vital abilities here one ought to highlight understanding other speakers and being understood by other language users. to put it simple, in order to communicate successfully, an individual must develop speech which is intelligible enough to convey the intended message (see, e.g., littlewood, 1994; tarone, 1978; beebe, 1984). it has been explained clearly by gajewska (2011), who pointed out that inability to distinguish between foreign phonemes and incapability of reading and pronouncing newly acquired foreign words influence negatively the whole process of second/foreign language learning. moreover, the author was even more intransigent in her opinion and claimed that a language learner with fossilized incorrect pronunciation is a learner to whom a lot of harm had been done by teachers. what is especially important according to her and what cannot ever be ignored is the learners’ ability to perceive and produce those segmental contrasts which do not appear in one’s mother tongue. kotuła (2015) stated further that proper phonetic training should not be difficult to design and apply in practice because researchers, teachers, and instructors are mostly familiar with the most recurrent and persistent pronunciation difficulties encountered by l2 learners from particular countries. on the other hand, language learners relatively often present the opinion that they do not really need correct pronunciation in their target language as they are not going to communicate with any native speakers of this language, but only with other non-native users because, for example, english is an international language. here some polemics is needed indeed as, like a lot of scholars have remarked, the ability to speak a language correctly is crucial not only in the communication with native speakers of it, but also with those prospective other non-native users. the explanation for this claim is not surprising. since most non-native users of a particular language do not come from the same country and do not share the same language background, that is, their mother tongues and their phonetic systems are different, their pronunciation must be in consequence influenced by completely unlike interlingual factors that create an impression of a so-called foreign accent which often makes the utterances unintelligible and thus hinders successful communication (littlewood, 1994; setter & jenkins, 2005). but what is worth noticing is the fact that even those scholars who advocate teaching and learning english as lingua franca and who claim that some degree of foreign-accentedness does not impair communicarethink your old teaching methods… 101 tion still find some features of l2 pronunciation which have to be taught (such as some phoneme contrasts) and some l1-influences (e.g., l1 stress patterns) which need to be removed from l2 learners’ speech in order to preserve effective communication and comfortable intelligibility (see, e.g., jenkins, 2000). this is why no foreign/second language classes can be devoid of at least some pronunciation training. factors to be considered while teaching l2 pronunciation there are a lot of teachers who claim that intensive language training should start as early as possible (nikolov & curtain, 2000). this view is usually connected with the critical period hypothesis proposed by lennenberg in 1967. it has to be mentioned that at the beginning, lennenberg’s theory was developed only with regard to the process of first language acquisition. the author claimed that there is a critical period when humans are sensitive enough to acquire a language which starts around the age of two and lasts until a child reaches the age of puberty. according to the theory, after this period the acquisition of one’s mother tongue becomes basically impossible. another matter which lennenberg pointed out was the opinion that language function is gradually lateralized in the left brain hemisphere. he highlighted that it was this process that explained the existence of a critical/sensitive period for the emergence and establishment of a language (e.g., lennenberg, 1967; puppel, 1996). with the gradual growth of the popularity of the critical period hypothesis, some scholars decided to extend the theories included in it to the process of second language acquisition. and thus the central hypothesis for l2 appeared. it stated that if the critical period is a real phenomenon, learning the second language after puberty must in consequence be much more demanding and complicated than before it (cf. puppel, 1996). a number of researchers decided to test this hypothesis, but what was striking, the results obtained in those studies showed that the measurable differences between various aspects of l2 acquisition before and after the age of puberty were not as significant as they had been expected to be. nonetheless, one aspect was crucial: in not all, but quite a few cases, the earlier the subjects started learning an l2, the better pronunciation in it they achieved (see, e.g., krashen, 1975; ervin-tripp, 1974; klein, 1986; millington, 2011; oh et al., 2011). this situation certainly needs some explanation. the reasons for such results may be different. to start with, the situation might have resulted from the process of fossilization of interlanguage phonology. some scholars and researchers even state that fossilization of l2 phonology is preordained when dorota lipińska102 older learners, that is, adolescents and adults, start to learn an l2 (e.g., wysocka, 2007). sometimes one may have an impression that there are as many opinions on this matter as many researchers. while some of them (e.g., scovel, 1969; demirezen, 2010; gumbaridze, 2012) still claim that no adult will ever be able to achieve native-like pronunciation in their l2, others state that although it may not be easy, it is still possible for adult language users to learn it, and there were cases when adults did achieve perfect pronunciation in their target language (tl; tarone, 1978). especially recent, acoustic research provides the evidence that correct pronunciation in an l2 is perfectly achievable if appropriate training is applied (see, e.g., rojczyk, 2010a; rojczyk, 2010b; lipińska, 2013a; lipińska, 2013b). what is more, porzuczek and rojczyk (2010) remarked that the latest studies (e.g., burns et al., 2007; hoonhorst et al., 2009; riveragaxiola et al., 2005) suggest that the contrary to the critical period hypothesis and its assumptions, human capability of learning new, foreign sounds is not limited, impaired or lost after the age of puberty and that language learners are able to master l2 pronunciation at an advanced level even as adults. quite a few recent studies also showed that incorrect fossilized pronunciation can be rehabilitated and improved (e.g., acton, 1984; demirezen, 2009). this is why one may ask the following question here: what is then the most probable reason for phonological fossilization still observed in some language learners? there are several plausible explanations for this situation. to begin with, there is a highly physiological approach to the aforementioned process. it is widely known that some human muscles and nerves practice the same set of pronunciation habits and movements for years and thus undergo a process of atrophy while they get older. this kind of a situation results in purely physiological problems in acquiring new pronunciation patterns as the articulators are “stiff” to a large extent (tarone, 1978). other proposed interpretations are of more psychological nature. for instance, guiora et al. (1972) and neufeld (1978) are in favor of the affective argument and highlight the adult learners’ potential lack of empathy with the native speakers and the culture of their tl or even possible negative attitude towards the language, speakers and culture. krashen (1977), on the other hand, maintains that fossilization is tightly connected with the critical period in sla, which is the one after puberty, when an individual tends to begin to learn language consciously rather than acquire it as children usually do. having taken the aforementioned arguments into consideration, more and more foreign language teachers are in favor of the “the earlier, the better” rule. they know that although teaching an l2 and its phonetic system at any age is possible, it is much easier and faster to teach correct pronunciation from the very beginning of l2 instruction than to correct fossilized pronunciation errors at later stages (e.g., baker, 1996; nixon & tomlinson, 2005). over a hundred years ago, otto jespersen was probably the first to officially state that rethink your old teaching methods… 103 “the very first lesson in a foreign language ought to be devoted to initiating pupils into the world of sounds […]” (jespersen, 1904, p. 145). what he added was the fact that no technical vocabulary or boring theory must be included in that first lesson and that pronunciation training can be interesting to young learners as it “contains nothing that they cannot understand, and nothing that is not useful for them […] so that this dreadful phonetical science is not so terribly far beyond the horizon of ordinary children after all” (jespersen, 1904, pp. 152–153). also gonet (2004) shares the same opinion. he criticized the fact that young l2 teachers from poland frequently claim that teaching foreign pronunciation ought to start no sooner than at the secondary school. he highlighted that such thinking is wrong in the light of the physiological, psychological, and social constraints, as well as learners’ abilities and this kind of training ought to start much earlier. it also needs to be added that while young children are simply able to acquire correct pronunciation in their l2 thanks to the appropriate input—for example by listening to stories, songs, nursery rhymes or by playing games, teenage learners who are above thirteen years of age are already much more conscious learners (nixon & tomlinson, 2005) and they are really able to start learning pronunciation in the same way like they are instructed in l2 grammar or vocabulary. the issues relevant to teaching materials applied in l2 pronunciation training as has already been mentioned, baran-łucarz (2006) noticed that language teachers have numerous excuses for not teaching l2 pronunciation and, for instance, they claim that there are no resources that could be used to teach phonetics. actually, a lot of studies have proven something just the opposite. moreover, there are quite a few manuals how to teach pronunciation which provide l2 teachers not only with the necessary know-how, but also with numerous ready-to-use full scenarios of classes and copious activities and exercises (e.g., kelly, 2000; laroy, 2004; nixon & tomlinson, 2005; porzuczek & rojczyk, in press). with regard to pronunciation courses and manuals, they can be divided into two categories. first of all, there are copious publications written by native speakers of english and designed for international language learners (e.g., baker, 2006; gilbert, 2012; hancock, 2008; hewings, 2010; marks, 2013; ponsonby, 1988; roach, 2013). on the other hand, one can find volumes and programs written by and for non-native users/learners of english (e.g., arabski, 1987; bałutowa, 1965; porzuczek et al., 2013; reszkiewicz, 1981; sawala et al., 2011 for polish learners of english). both these categories have dorota lipińska104 their advantages and drawbacks. while many teachers prefer courses written by native speakers of english justifying their choice on the grounds that native speakers of a particular language know it and its nuances best, they have to agree that it is impossible for one course to take into consideration all possible difficulties encountered by all potential learners who come from various countries and represent various l1s. and as kotuła (2015) notices, language teachers are usually familiar with the most frequent pronunciation difficulties and mistakes displayed by l2 learners from their own countries. this is why textbooks and programs written and designed by non-native speakers of english can be tailor-made for particular groups of language learners and they may include appropriate l1-vs.-l2 comparisons, more exercises on problematic areas of phonetics and phonology, as well as lucid explanations regarding l2 production. however, even the best course designed for a particular group of language users and based on requirements connected to learners’ l1 may sometimes be insufficient. learning and teaching practical phonetics necessitates patience, regular practice and a really individual approach to a learner. having done exercises from a chosen textbook, it is worth turning to additional methods and resources which can help improve one’s perception and production in an l2 (porzuczek & rojczyk, 2010). numerous scholars provide copious solutions to the aforementioned problem and nowadays, more and more new attractive methods of teaching l2 pronunciation are suggested. apart from countless textbooks and courses which are designed to teach either british or american english pronunciation to learners form all over the world, one can find additional resource books with interesting pronunciation activities, games or quizzes (e.g., nixon & tomlinson, 2005; vaughan-rees, 2011). also numerous technological aids are widely available and make phonetics classes more interesting to learners who could be bored by only traditional listen-and-repeat activities. among the new, helpful devices one can mention, for example, the use of the learner response system, so-called clickers (baran-łucarz et al., 2015; cardoso, 2011). the studies showed that l2 learners were more relaxed during the classes where the clickers were used, they participated in the tasks actively and were very positive towards the new system. nowacka (2015) advocates using authentic materials retrieved from the internet. following sobkowiak’s (2003) remark that the use of original recordings can boost l2 learners’ metaphonetic competence, in her paper she presented a variety of resources available online, grouped in five categories (designed for training segmental features, suprasegmental features, prosody, the spelling-to-sound correspondence and other accent-related issues). the results of the practical examination proved that a course in english phonetics and phonology supplemented with those materials was much more interesting rethink your old teaching methods… 105 and convincing for the learners, enabled discussing numerous phonetic issues, stimulated phonetic discussion and pronunciation awareness. also other researchers (e.g., celce-murcia et al., 1996; rashtchi, 2011; steinbrich, 2014; szpyra-kozłowska, 2015) suggested using authentic resources such as podcasts, cartoons, slogans or billboards in order to make pronunciation courses more realistic and appealing, as well as to make language learners more responsible for their own pronunciation and to enhance their receptive and productive skills. sundberg and cardoso (2015) described another useful tool—a mobile application helping l2 learners improve their pronunciation in a target language with the use of pop music. as, according to murphey (1992), the speech rate in english pop songs is approximately half of the rate in regular speech and because the music and lyrics are repetitive, pop music gets stuck in listeners’ heads, which may be useful in language learning. the application itself is a base of various songs chosen according to particular criteria, such as vocabulary, genre, country of origin, etc., and divided into proficiency levels (basing on vocabulary level). thanks to that, language learners can choose appropriate songs for their language fluency. the application allows for listening to music, following the lyrics, singing along and repetition of particular phrases that might be problematic for the users. the application needs now more testing, but the authors are optimistic and foresee that potential users should like it and the game-like approach to learning it offers. kotuła (2015) advocates using various free online programs and tools to improve virtually all aspects of l2 pronunciation, especially because they can be used not only in the classroom but also at home. in his study he focused on resources improving learners’ pronunciation in french, but their equivalents can be found and applied for other languages as well. he described programs which concentrate on learning spelling-pronunciation relation, ipa, orthoepic competence, connected speech, elision, stress and intonation, segmental phonetics, tongue-twisters and many more. this suggests that the options of practicing l2 pronunciation are countless. moreover, the researcher recommends watching short films available online and prepared by french teachers in which they explain complexities of french pronunciation. also porzuczek and rojczyk (2010) discuss numerous programs available on the internet which help improve learners’ pronunciation—this time in l2english. they include exercises on sentence stress, tonic, intonation contours, nuclear syllables, phonemic transcription, vowel recognition, and acoustic properties of vowels. what is more, the researchers advise language teachers to use the praat speech analysis software (boersma, 2001) in order to assess and analyze learners’ speech in an l2. both segmental and suprasegmental features of a speech signal can be analyzed this way and compared to model speech. a teacher may thus explain learners’ pronunciation errors and suggest solutions. dorota lipińska106 rojczyk (2011) suggests using speech analysis software to help improve the vot parameter produced by polish learners of english. vot is completely different in the two languages and polish users of english find it particularly problematic to produce sufficient aspiration in english voiceless plosives and to refrain from pre-voicing in voiced plosives. those aspects need to be extensively trained but learners often do not know whether their production is moving towards the native model. this is why the researcher describes how the praat package (boersma, 2001) and the spectrographic analysis can be practically applied in self-controlled foreign pronunciation training. how to design a pronunciation course for young teenagers? as for example komorowska (2011) notices, each foreign language course has to be characterized by realistic goals, as well as appropriate methods and components. this is why teaching materials which are suitable for adults and young adults are completely inapt for young teenagers who have different learning capabilities, interests, etc. many studies show that l2 pronunciation is not taught at schools at all (e.g., kotuła, 2015; lipińska, 2014; szpyra-kozłowska, 2003; szpyra-kozłowska, 2008) and that foreign language teachers claim that textbooks designed to teach english to teenagers do not include any elements of phonetic training (e.g., lipińska, 2017b). actually, it turns out not to be true as for example lipińska (2017b) analyzed in her paper ten textbooks designed to teach english to 4th, 5th, and 6th grades of primary school in poland and all of them included exercises on pronunciation training, in five out of ten titles the international phonetic alphabet was used and all the phonetic exercises were accompanied by audio recordings. what is more, the author described additional materials that could be used to teach english pronunciation to 10–14-year-olds. nevertheless, a pronunciation course for young teenagers needs to be redesigned and cannot be copied from the academic one. classes design classes designed for young teenagers have to be mainly determined by the age of such learners. 11–14-year-olds enter the age of puberty and hence share a lot of characteristics with both children and older teenagers. their speech organs are still very adaptable and thus they are able to acquire correct pronunciation in their l2 at a native-like level, but they actually start to learn rethink your old teaching methods… 107 skills rather than acquire them. it has both advantages and disadvantages as a lot can be now explained to those learners but the foreign language learning process becomes less natural and less similar to l1 acquisition. what is more, their spontaneity decreases slowly and since teenagers are very imageconscious, they develop anxiety to speak a foreign language when they know that they may make a mistake and their peers may laugh at them. finally, their concentration spans are still relatively short in comparison to adult learners, which makes carrying longer classes (especially focused on one topic or skill) virtually impossible (e.g., arabski, 1996; harmer, 2006; komorowska, 2011; scrivener, 2011). having taken the aforementioned facts into consideration, pronunciation classes for young teenagers have to be well thought-off. to begin with, they cannot last as long as similar classes for adults. not only academic 90 minutes, but even bare 45 minutes (like at school) of pronunciation exercises may be tiresome. it is better to incorporate shorter tasks more regularly, into practically every meeting with those learners. one or two interesting exercises can be really effective and will not put the teenagers off learning and practicing phonetics. secondly, the topic and the range of vocabulary practiced during such pronunciation modules must be compatible with the material used to develop other skills, as well as interesting and accessible for adolescent learners. thirdly, pronunciation classes for young teenagers have to be varied, dynamic, and interactive. various tools ought to be used not only to enable both production and perception development, but also to engage different senses, to activate various parts of a brain and to provide teenage learners with entertainment necessary both to facilitate the process of learning and to create a positive association between phonetics and having fun. last but not least, one cannot forget about the appropriate and varied teaching materials which can be used to teach l2 pronunciation young teenagers. materials and resources in contrast with popular opinions that there are very few phonetic recourses for children and teenagers available, one can find abundance of books, websites, and tools. those suitable for 11–14-year-olds will be described briefly below. general english textbooks. as lipińska (2017b) notices, nowadays practically all textbooks written for young teenagers include some elements of pronunciation training. naturally, the amount of such training and the types of exercises vary greatly from one book to another. in some cases they are just listen-and-repeat tasks, in other cases they are more creative. one can find rhymes, chants, tongue twisters or poems, but also simple lists of words or dorota lipińska108 short sentences to repeat. in most books only segmental features are exercised (i.e., vowels and consonants), but there are also titles which comprise practice on suprasegmetal phonetics (for instance sentence stress or intonation). the latter option is much better as it helps adolescent learners acquire natural, non-accented speech in their l2. unfortunately, very few textbooks include the ipa symbols in either explanations or exercises. it is rather unprofitable as children and young teenagers can easily learn the ipa (e.g., in the form of games, encrypted messages, etc.) and the ability to read phonetic transcription is very useful in language learning (e.g., even while looking up new words in a dictionary). what is very helpful is the fact that in all cases pronunciation exercises are accompanied by audio recordings. they are sometimes included only in a class cd used by a teacher, but can also be found on a learner’s cd or cd-rom. this solution provides teenage learners with a correct, native model of l2 pronunciation. what is more, it is very convenient for language teachers since they do not have to read stimuli themselves, especially if they are not sure if their own pronunciation is perfectly correct. this is why it is advisable to use pronunciation exercises included in ge textbooks for young teenagers during l2 phonetics classes. one can use such exercises included not only in the leading textbook, but also use some elements from similar publications. they are usually funny, accessible for the target group of learners, ready for use and accompanied by appropriate audio files. they can also serve as a good introduction to the topic and can be extended by some similar tasks either copied from books or prepared by the teachers themselves. primary pronunciation box. designed for children and younger teenagers, this photocopiable resource book by caroline nixon and michael tomlinson provides a teacher with over sixty various activities and exercises (rhymes, chants, poems, puzzles, and games) which can be used in the classroom. the character and variability of activities make learning (and teaching) pronunciation really enjoyable. what is important is the fact that the book is divided into parts, according to learners’ age, so teachers do not need to be afraid that some activities or exercises might be too difficult for a particular group of pupils. another advantage is that each section/activity is accompanied by a clear, stepby-step lesson plan. it aims at explaining how to set the activity up and carry it out in the classroom, which is particularly useful for teachers who are not phoneticians or who are not very experienced but still would like to include some elements of phonetic training in their school curriculum. an audio cd is also included and it provides learners with correct, model pronunciation, as well as enables doing the exercises and activities. it is very convenient for a teacher as they do not have to read anything on their own, especially if they are not sure whether their own pronunciation in english is entirely correct. what is important for younger learners is the fact that all the worksheets are rethink your old teaching methods… 109 accompanied by pictures which make learning more enjoyable and may be for instance colored later. the greatest advantage of the book is the fact that the activities can be slotted into any course since the book itself is not designed as a component of any particular course or series. “phonetics focus.” available at http://cambridgeenglishonline.com /phonetics_focus/, this website is full of not only various and attractive activities which can be done individually or team-vs.-team, but it also contains printable flashcards with ipa symbols accompanied by simple pictures. thanks to it, materials downloaded from phonetics focus may be first used to explain the theory, present a discussed sound in isolation, provide examples of use and later they can be used during revisions, quizzes, and games. the interactive activities are best done with the use of an interactive whiteboard. it enables playing games together, dividing learners into competing teams, etc. this kind of training is really enjoyed by younger teenagers, especially if they can win a game and earn positive grades or small prizes. figure 1. sample pronunciation games from http://cambridgeenglishonline.com /phonetics_focus/. dorota lipińska110 figure 2. a sample printable pronunciation flashcard from http://cambridgeenglishonline.com/phonetics_focus/. “esl tower: pronunciation.” another website containing plenty of pronunciation games is esl tower, available at http://eslgamesworld.com/members /games/pronunciation/index.html. it can be mainly used for group activities and team-vs.-team games. one of the most popular games on this webpage is phonetic vowel quiz where the subjects are presented with the ipa version of a word and are asked to write an orthographic form of it. for each correctly spelled word a teacher can award a point and after a 10-word round the scores may be compared and one of the teams should win and get a small prize. the attractive form of a game helps young teenagers quickly learn and memorize the ipa symbols, as well as revise vocabulary. interactive voice recorders. while such tools as for example praat (boersma, 2001) are very useful, professional, and effective (e.g., rojczyk, 2011), they are more suitable for adult learners than for young teenagers. recording such learners in laboratory conditions would be too stressful and thus virtually impossible. moreover, praat’s interface is too difficult and old-fashioned for teenagers. modern downloadable or online voice recorders based on easy, familiar words seem to be a much better solution for younger learners. students can use them not only in the classroom, but also at home. recording one’s own voice is advisable in order to control one’s pronunciation, check the potential rethink your old teaching methods… 111 figure 3. phonetic vowel quiz for a diphthong /ei/ from http://eslgamesworld. com/members/games/pronunciation/index.html. figure 4. an interactive downloadable voice recorder with a listen-and-repeat function, retrieved from http://cambridgeenglishonline.com/phonetics_focus/. dorota lipińska112 mistakes and correct them. the obtained recordings are also very helpful to the teacher who can observe their students’ gradual progress. however, the possibility to use those tools at home has an undeniable advantage—learners can try recording their utterances when no-one disturbs them and when no-one laughs if they happen to make a mistake. this is why a teacher should not only use voice recorders in a classroom, but also encourage their students to work with them at home. teachers’ own resources. finally, as most teachers prepare a lot of materials, handouts, and exercises on their own, it is relatively easy to create such attractions for young teenagers learning l2 pronunciation. they may develop speech perception, production or the ability to use the ipa. those handouts can be not only educational but they might also provide students with a lot of entertainment. it is possible to create mazes, crosswords, puzzles or labyrinths. below one can find a couple of proposals tested by the author and her students. “encrypted messages” constitute the first category of the aforementioned exercises. having taught the basics of the ipa, the teacher can prepare simple (and gradually—more and more complicated) messages. it is enough to print them in the phonetic transcription form on small pieces of paper. they may be used as hints in such games as “detectives,” “treasure hunt,” etc. they can also be used as commands that have to be carried out by the students in the classroom (they may draw such commands hidden in plastic shells for themselves or for their group mates). naturally, before they perform any activities, l2 learners have to read the encrypted message out loud. figure 5. “an encrypted message”—the author’s own pronunciation task for young teenagers. “secret coding” is more complicated and requires more work and a better command of the ipa. this kind of activity is widely used in textbooks and activity books for children and teenagers. however, there is only a simplest version of it. every task is accompanied by a key/legend which provides language learners with the symbol-letter relation. in the phonetic version of secret coding, the legend consists of the symbol-ipa relation. teenage learners need to use the symbols to transcribe the message first, then read the transcription and finally write the text in the orthographic form. such task may be used just for fun, or it can be treated as a sort of competition—for example, the first team to transcribe and write the spelling of the text wins. rethink your old teaching methods… 113 figure 6. “secret coding”—the author’s own pronunciation task for young teenagers. the final proposal here is the “maze.” there may be various versions of this task; however, one of the simplest and most educational at the same time is presented below. in one table a teacher puts numerous words containing the same letter, but realized by various sounds. a group of words has to share that sound. the learners have to find the way out through the “maze.” first of all, they learn correct pronunciation of a few words. moreover, this tasks raises their awareness that the same letter may be read differently and that there is no simple spelling-pronunciation relation. figures 7 and 8 show a maze where language learners are asked to find words in which the letter “a” corresponds to the “ash” vowel (figure 7–an empty “maze” and figure 8– a solved task). figure 7. “the maze”—the author’s own pronunciation task for young teenagers. dorota lipińska114 figure 8. “the maze”—the author’s own pronunciation task for young teenagers (solved). naturally, the possibilities of preparing creative and attractive pronunciation tasks for teenage learners are practically countless and every teacher can invent something interesting. the proposals described above are just examples and ought to be treated as inspiration, not a completed list. summary in conclusion, there are multiple ways of teaching l2 pronunciation to young teenagers efficiently. since they are still braver and more open to novelties than adults, as well as they love playing and having fun, pronunciation training can be slipped into their classes in the form of games, quizzes, and competitions. moreover, it can be also taught just like any other skill since young teenagers are old enough to start learning a language consciously. what must not be forgotten is the fact that a course in phonetics designed for young teenagers must be different than the one created for late teenagers and young adults. first of all, the materials, methods, and vocabulary used must be adjusted to the target learners so that they are attractive and comprehensible. what is more, pronunciation classes cannot be too long and ought to be connected with the topics discussed during other (e.g., grammar or vocabulary) modules being taught at a particular moment during the foreign language course. finally, rethink your old teaching methods… 115 the teacher should apply a global approach to the training and concentrate on speech production, perception, and spelling-sound correspondence at the same time. references acton, w. 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(2007). symptoms of fossilization in advanced learners and users of english. in j. arabski, d. gabryś-barker, & a. łyda (eds.), pase papers 2007: studies in language and methodology of teaching foreign languages (pp. 96–105). katowice: para. dorota lipińska120 dorota lipińska überlegen wir unsere bisherige lehrmethoden. die entwicklung des aussprachelehrgangs für englisch lernende polnische teenager z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g zahlreiche forschungen (z.b.: lipińska, 2014; majer, 2002; nowacka, 2003; szpyrakołowska u.a., 2002; szpyra-kozłowska, 2008; waniek-klimczak, 2002; wrembel, 2002) haben folgendes nachgewiesen: obwohl die aussprache in universitären lehrplänen berücksichtigt ist, wird sie auf niedrigeren bildungsstufen immer noch nicht unterrichtet. es ließ sich erkennen, dass nicht nur die phonetik den jüngeren schülern beigebracht werden soll, sondern dass dieser unterricht äußerst effektiv sein kann (z.b.: lipińska, 2017; nixon u. tomlinson, 2005). die buchhandlungen haben ohne zweifel im angebot mehrere lehrwerke für fremde aussprache oder auch ganze aussprachelehrgänge in der zweitsprache, die von polen für polen geschaffen wurden (z.b.: porzuczek u.a., 2013; sawala u.a., 2011) als auch die für internationale sprachbenutzer geschriebenen lehrwerke (z.b.: baker, 2006; hancock, 2008; hewings, 2010), die aber den eine fremdsprache lernenden erwachsenen gewidmet sind. wie man weiß, eignen sich die bei der arbeit mit erwachsenen oder studenten gebrauchten lehrmaterialien und methoden nicht zur arbeit mit kindern und teenager. die letztgenannten brauchen zwar verlockende und altersgemäße lehrmethoden und übungen, denn jeder fremdsprachelehrgang muss, so komorowska (2011), durch realistische zwecke und richtig angepasste methoden und bildungselemente gekennzeichnet sein. der vorliegende beitrag bezweckt, verschiedene methoden und lehrmaterialien darzustellen, die bei der didaktik der aussprache im englischen als zweitsprache in den gruppen von 11-13 jährigen schülern verwendet werden können. diese wurden schon in drei solchen gruppen getestet und deren effizienz wurde sowohl hinsichtlich der sprachproduktion als auch sprachperzeption in den gruppen von jüngeren teenager nachgewiesen (z.b.: lipińska, 2017). schlüsselwörter: fremdsprachenunterricht, ausspracheunterricht, lehrmaterialien für fremdsprachenunterricht sarah mercer university of graz, austria peter macintyre cape breton university, canada tammy gregersen american university of sharjah, uae kyle talbot university of graz, austria positive language education: combining positive education and language education a b s t r a c t in this paper, we discuss the notion of positive language education (ple), which stems from a combination of positive education and language education. we suggest that there are good reasons for language educators to engage in enhancing 21st-century skills alongside the promotion of linguistic skills. one key set of 21st-century competences that would have academic and non-academic benefits are those which promote wellbeing. wellbeing is indeed the foundation for effective learning and a good life more generally. drawing on ideas from content and integrated language learning and positive education, ple involves integrating non-linguistic and linguistic aims in sustainable ways which do not compromise the development of either skill set, or overburden educators. we believe that there are strong foundations on which to build a framework of ple. firstly, many language teachers already promote many wellbeing competences, in order to facilitate language learning. there is also a growing body of research on positive psychology (pp) in second language acquisition on which further empirical work with ple interventions can be developed. building on the theoretical arguments put forward in this paper, we call for an empirically validated framework of ple, which can be implemented in diverse cultural and linguistic settings. keywords: positive psychology, language education, wellbeing, perma theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 4 (2), 2018, pp. 11–31 12 sarah mercer, peter macintyre, tammy gregersen, kyle talbot introduction in many ways, the purpose, aims, and processes of language education already stretch beyond narrowly defined linguistic competences. most communicative competence models include some expression of socio-cultural competence in using the language appropriately to interact and promote positive relationships with others through the use of language. in order to do this, learners need to have some self-awareness, openness to others and tolerance. very often students are expected to collaborate and work with others in order to complete various communicative tasks in language classrooms. in bilingual and multilingual contexts around the world, learners are encouraged to use their incipient skills in the community, to speak with others for authentic communicative purposes. it is widely acknowledged that language learning also essentially involves core issues of self and identity (de costa & norton, 2017; dörnyei & ushioda, 2009). but have we thought, as a discipline, what effect all this might have on the learners’ wellbeing? cook (2013, p. 51) stresses that a multicompetence model of language teaching highlights that learning to use an l2 has numerous additional “internal mental side effects.” in this paper, we propose that language educators consider the degree to which they may contribute to, and possible detract from, learners’ sense of wellbeing through their practices and pedagogical goals. background albert einstein once said that “education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.” this negativity toward schooling was reiterated in the responses of hundreds of parents in a 2009 study (seligman, ersnst, gillham, reivich, & linkins, 2009) in which they were asked what it is they want for their children in life. unsurprisingly, they typically reported qualities such as happiness, confidence, contentment, health, satisfaction, etc. in short, these are notions that would usually be considered components of wellbeing. when asked what they thought schools taught, they reported on accomplishment-related concepts such as achievement, thinking skills, literacy, maths, discipline, etc. while traditional subjects being taught in schools certainly have their value, the gap between the two lists and an examination of what is not being taught in schools suggest an over-emphasis in some education systems on making students suitable for the workplace and their future careers with little to no attention to their lives and wellbeing beyond this. interestingly, there is positive language education… 13 good reason to believe that attending to these socio-emotional dimensions of the whole person would in fact improve and enhance learning in traditional subjects and academic success (caprara, barbaranelli, steca, & malone, 2006; sammons et al., 2007) as well as promote positive competences in the future workplace (judge & bono, 2001; judge, thoresen, bono, & patton, 2001). in other words, wellbeing and positive psychology skills and traits are not only useful for people’s lives outside of work but also in work and school (white, 2011). in this paper, we discuss the notion of positive language education. we put forward three main arguments as to why wellbeing should be an approach and an outcome of education more broadly and language learning specifically. we argue that wellbeing is a key 21st-century life skill that should be promoted to help people of all ages manage contemporary life. secondly, we believe that education should per se be a positive learning experience. finally, we show how developing wellbeing skills and traits lead to positive learning outcomes. focusing on language learning specifically, we suggest that the nature of language learning makes it ideally suited for integrating positive education values alongside linguistic competences. we consider how insights from clil could serve as a useful lens for reflecting on how wellbeing aims could be integrated with language learning aims in a range of forms from strong to weak in a sustainable way without leading to additional strain for language educators. we discuss existing challenges and consider the future direction for ple as a potentially powerful positive force in the field of language learning and intercultural competence. twenty-first century life skills throughout the history of education, debates have raged over the focus and purpose of education, and it is nothing new to find ourselves today critically questioning the purpose of education, and more specifically, the purpose of language education. in the title of his book, guy claxton (2008) asked the pertinent and fundamental question: what’s the point of school? he outlines the stress epidemic facing young people and argues this is exacerbated by schooling systems as they currently exist with their emphasis on standardized tests and mass education treating all learners the same. he suggests that, “in the thrall to content and qualifications, we have forgotten the deeper purpose of education. in the rush to make young people into successful exam passers, we have overlooked their deeper need to become successful people” (claxton, 2008, p. ix. italics in original). instead, he goes on to explain that young people need to be equipped with skills to cope with life more generally. sarah mercer, peter macintyre, tammy gregersen, kyle talbot14 but, what are such skills? therein lies a fundamental question about what skills people need to be taught in school, the purpose of education, and what makes for a ‘good’ life. in the current educational debate, it is fashionable to discuss 21st-century skills. there are a diffuse number of definitions of what exactly is meant by such skills and which sub-competences each supposed skill has. indeed, a range of frameworks and terms exist (see, e.g., atc21s; partnership for 21st-century skills (p21); oecd pisa global competence framework; project zero; unesco four pillars of learning). perhaps one key distinction across the frameworks is the extent to which the emphasis is on skills needed for the future workplace (typically digital literacies, creativity, critical thinking skills and collaboration skills) or on ways of living in society and as an individual (typically personal wellbeing, citizenship and social awareness). more typically, it is those skills associated with being successful workers in the future marketplace that tend to be the focus of many 21st-century skill frameworks. in contemporary language education, many of these 21st-century skills are increasingly being considered in course book design (see, e.g., open mind/ mind series by macmillan; think! by cambridge university press; together by oxford university press). gradually and very recently, 21st-century skills are beginning to appear alongside language education goals (see, e.g., cambridge framework for life competences). wellbeing as a key life skill one of the core life skills that has received comparatively little attention is teaching for wellbeing. however, we argue that in the 21st century, this is perhaps one of the main skills people need to manage their lives successfully. in education circles, concerns are growing about students’ mental welfare, not only in schools, but also in other educational settings, especially at tertiary level. there is widespread acknowledgement in industrialised countries that large numbers of children and adolescents are reporting depression and anxiety, although scholars’ explanations for the increase differ (see, e.g., hidaka, 2012; jane costello, erklani, & angold, 2006; mojtabai, olfson, & han, 2016; skrove, romundstad, & indredavik, 2013). university students are recognised as being especially at risk (see, e.g., eisenberg, gollust, golberstein, & herner, 2007; zivin, eisenberg, gollust, & golberstein, 2009) with a tripling number of students dropping out of higher education due to mental health issues in recent years (hesa report 2017 in guardian). according to the world health organisation report (2017), around 322 million people worldwide suffer from some form of depressive disorder and 264 million from some form of anxiety positive language education… 15 disorder—and figures for both are increasing. in the uk alone, mcmanus, bebbington, jenkins, and brugha (2014) report that one in six adults has some form of mental disorder. in his review of the prevalence of depression in industrialised countries, hidaka (2012, p. 205) concludes with the alarming summary: modern populations are increasingly overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, and socially-isolated. these changes in lifestyle each contribute to poor physical health and affect the incidence and treatment of depression. in measuring the success of a country, diener and seligman (2004) argued that a country’s policy decisions are based heavily on economic indicators yet, as they show, wealthy nations with high gdp are not necessarily happy nations (see also adler & seligman, 2016). this means that what makes a happy, successful society cannot only be measured in economic terms. instead, diener and seligman (2004) argue that a country’s success indicators should include a wellbeing index measuring key variables such as relative positive and negative emotions, purpose, meaning, optimism and trust, among others. indeed, there are signs that international organisations and some countries are beginning to take note of the importance of non-economic factors as indicators for the state of a nation. in 2017, the world’s first happiness report was published and presented at the un (helliwell, layard, & sachs, 2017). it highlighted the personal and social nature of wellbeing, the variation in wellbeing within countries, and the fact that work is a major factor affecting happiness. concurring with a growing recognition of the importance of wellbeing for the functioning of societies, an oecd report in june 2016 (oecd, p. 3) states explicitly that one of its top priorities is to “[c]ontinue our efforts to build a new growth narrative that focuses on the well-being of people.” similarly, a uk government initiative has given equal weight to both physical and mental health (aked, marks, cordon, & thompson, 2008, p. 4). in the uk government white paper, no health without mental health, it states: the government recognises that our mental health is central to our quality of life, central to our economic success and interdependent with our success in improving education, training and employment outcomes and tackling some of the persistent problems that scar our society, from homelessness, violence and abuse, to drug use and crime. (p. 2) importantly, these developments also recognise that taking a reactive deficit approach alone to dealing with mental health is insufficient. rather, there is also a need to proactively prevent problems arising and promote positive mental health as a way of being day-to-day, not just in response to crises. it sarah mercer, peter macintyre, tammy gregersen, kyle talbot16 is clear that education has a potentially key role to play in such preventative approaches. interestingly, this development reflects moves in the field of psychology to switch from a deficit position to one which acknowledges the need to understand, appreciate and support flourishing in people’s lives (seligman, 2011). as such, recent years have seen the emergence of positive psychology (pp) as one branch of the broader field. pp is concerned with the scientific study of the positive aspects of life, areas of growth, and characteristics of “optimal human functioning” (seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000). it is not meant to replace traditional areas of research but to complement them, ensuring more balanced coverage of human psychology. one of its main stated aims is to understand what makes people flourish and what contributes to the ‘good life’ (seligman, 2011). it represents the academic foundation for investigating and promoting wellbeing as an educational goal and life skill. as waters (2011, p. 76) states, “the emphasis of positive psychology on wellbeing, flourishing, character, meaning and virtue aligns strongly with the ethos of whole-student learning in 21st-century schooling.” defining wellbeing so, what is meant by wellbeing? leiter and cooper (2017, p. 1) note how difficult it is to define, given the research community cannot even agree on whether to write the term with a hyphen or not. however, most scholars tend to agree that it is a multifaceted construct that includes an emotional dimension, attitudes, perceptions, and, in some cases, physical and mental health. one of the most widely used definitions is the term “subjective well-being” (swb). diener, oishi, and lucas (2009, p. 187) explain that swb is a broad construct that refers essentially to “a person’s cognitive and affective evaluations of his or her life as a whole.” it is typically described as being comprised of life satisfaction, a relative lack of negative emotions and the presence of positive emotions (kahneman, diener & schwartz, 1999). it is important to note here that this definition does not exclude negative emotions, which also have a key role to play in wellbeing, but, ideally, the ratio should be more positive than negative emotions overall. the assumption underlying definitions of swb is that for the ‘good life,’ a person needs to like themselves and their lives (diener et al., 2009). as a construct, this term has been utilised in a broad range of studies and has strong reliable measures and tools based on this definition (diener et al., 2010; eid & diener, 2004; goodman, disabato, kashdan, & kauffman, 2017). another commonly used definition of wellbeing as a component of the ‘good life’ is offered by seligman (2011) in his perma model. perma positive language education… 17 refers to positive emotion, engagement, positive relationships, meaning and accomplishment. it is interesting and perhaps important to note that seligman made the deliberate decision to move from “authentic happiness theory” to “wellbeing theory” as a model and construct, in order to avoid the simplistic misapprehensions that are encumbered in the connotations of the word “happiness.” as an approach, perma emphasises more the eudaimonic notion of wellbeing, which contrasts with the somewhat more hedonic notion of swb. that said, a study by goodman et al. (2017) comparing swb and perma suggests the two constructs are capturing similar kinds of wellbeing. a strength of the perma model is its foregrounding of the social nature of wellbeing and how it is not merely situated in the perceptive frame of an individual but involves others in social communities and relationships. although there are relatively few empirical tools designed explicitly to test the perma model, one example that has good reliability scores is the perma profiler—short form, which is a 15-item measure of all the core elements: positive emotion, engagement, positive relationships, meaning, and achievement (butler & kern, 2016). more recently, a sixth dimension has theoretically been added to the perma model to create the perma-v model (zhivotovskaya at the flourishing centre). “v” stands for “vitality” in the sense of physical wellbeing and makes an essential addition to the model uniting body and mind and highlighting the link between physical and mental wellbeing (diener & chan, 2011; veenhoven, 2008; xu & roberts, 2010). however, there is an absence of empirical research incorporating this additional sixth element at present although the perma profiler does include some items on health (see, e.g., butler & kern, 2016). for our purposes, the presence of these theoretical models of wellbeing and related empirical tools (see adler & seligman, 2016) suggest that the field is in a position to measure wellbeing as an educational outcome and, therefore, measure, evaluate and assess the effectiveness of any interventions. can wellbeing be enhanced through interventions? if wellbeing is proposed as a goal of education and we can define and measure this reliably, we also need to be sure that wellbeing is malleable and can be specifically targeted and enhanced in interventions in education. in fact, layous and lyubomirsky (2014) argue that the question is no longer whether wellbeing activities and interventions work, but rather how such interventions work and to what degree. positive psychology interventions (ppis) are defined by sin and lyubomirsky (2009, p. 467) as intentional programs, practices, treatment methods or activities “aimed at cultivating positive feelings, positive sarah mercer, peter macintyre, tammy gregersen, kyle talbot18 behaviours, or positive cognitions.” duckworth, steen, and seligman (2005, p. 641) argue that ppis are worthwhile for two reasons. firstly, because they, by definition, “build pleasure, engagement, and meaning,” and hence are defensible on their own. second, they contend that “building positive emotion, engagement, and meaning may actually counter disorder itself.” however, views on the second claim vary (see, e.g., mongrain & anselmo-matthews, 2012). in their meta-analysis of 49 studies investigating positive psychology interventions (ppis), sin and lyubomirsky (2009) conclude that: (t)he combined results of 49 studies revealed that ppis do, in fact, significantly enhance wb [wellbeing], and the combined results of 25 studies showed that ppis are also effective for treating depressive symptoms. the magnitude of these effects is medium-sized (mean r = .29 for wb, mean r = .31 for depression), indicating that not only do ppis work, they work well. (p. 482) in another meta-analysis of ppis in 39 studies, bolier et al. (2013, p. 1) also found that ppis “can be effective in the enhancement of subjective well-being and psychological well-being, as well as in helping to reduce depressive symptoms.” they also found that these effects were significant over time showing that effects are sustainable. however, there are some notable mediating variables. lyubomirsky and layous (2013) developed a model based on their analysis of theoretical and empirical studies to show that the effects of ppis are mediated by features of the activities themselves (such as duration, dosage, and variety), the characteristics of the person (such as their motivation and effort), and how well the person and activity suit each other, known as ‘person-activity fit.’ a key factor affecting this is the cultural context of the individual as different cultures value different things (lu & gilmour, 2004). naturally, the cultural appropriacy of any intervention is especially important to consider in the context of language education. there are a wide range of possible ppis that exist and duckworth et al. (2005) suggest that there are at least over 100 possible suggested activities. however, not all have been empirically tested and/or found to have robust findings in affecting change. yet, there are clear indications about the positive effects of specific interventions and these would seem to be the ones to build on initially for any planned intervention or series of activities to be integrated in language education (see appendix a for a referenced list of empirically validated interventions). positive language education… 19 positive education positive education (pe) is defined as “the bringing together of the science of positive psychology with best practices teaching, to encourage and support schools and individuals to flourish” (norrish, 2015, p. xxvii). rather than addressing only negative factors in education, the pe approach is designed to actively build on positive factors to promote flourishing. as an educational approach, pe seeks to put wellbeing at the core of education alongside academic subjects without either being compromised by the other. it has its roots in humanistic educational approaches and connections to a range of other approaches including social and emotional learning (sel), holistic education, etc. fundamentally, pe focuses on supporting academic growth through and alongside the promotion of learner wellbeing, and deliberately integrates good teaching principles with specific empirically validated approaches from positive psychology. the international positive education network (ipen) uses the double helix metaphor to explain how the dna of education needs to have two intertwined strands of equal importance: academics (fulfilment of intellectual potential) and character and wellbeing (development of character strengths and wellbeing). ipen emphasizes that the “character plus academics” combination are complementary and mutually reinforcing, with character strengths and wellbeing contributing positively to academic achievement and vice versa. indeed, research suggests this is the case. noble, wyatt, mcgrath, carbines, and leone (2008, p. 14) conclude their wide-ranging evaluation and report on wellbeing initiatives in schools in australia by concluding that, “efforts to improve the wellbeing of young people in schools are therefore important for maximising the likelihood that young people can benefit from their participation in schooling.” specifically, positive wellbeing is associated with an impressive range of psychological, social, and academic benefits (gilman & huebner, 2006; quinn & duckworth, 2007; verkuyten & thijs, 2002). further, research into positive emotions shows how this can broaden attention (fredrickson, 1998; fredrickson & branigan, 2005; rowe, hirsh, & anderson, 2007), lead to more creative thinking (isen, daubman, & nowicki, 1987; estrada, isen, & young, 1994), and foster more trusting relationships with people from other cultural groups (cohn & fredrickson, 2009; fredrickson & cohn, 2008; fredrickson, 2013). in educational contexts, research shows specifically how students who experience positive emotions tend to earn higher grades (pekrun, goetz, frenzel, barchfeld, & perry, 2011; villavicencio & bernardo, 2013), use learning strategies more effectively (king & areepattamannil, 2014), and are more active participants in class activities (king, mcinerney, ganotice, & villarosa, 2015; pekrun et al., 2011). as waters (2011, p. 77) explains, “positive education also works on the precept that the skills and mindsets that promote positive emotions, posisarah mercer, peter macintyre, tammy gregersen, kyle talbot20 tive relationships and character strengths also promote learning and academic success (bernard & walton, 2011).” seligman et al. (2009, p. 295) conclude that wellbeing should be taught in schools, “as an antidote to depression, as a vehicle for increasing life satisfaction, and as an aid to better learning and more creative thinking.” integrating wellbeing into educational approaches can be carried out along a continuum from strong to weak forms. in its weakest form, it could be doing an explicit individual task or a smaller project explicitly or simply raising awareness of the wellbeing impact of the approaches taken. at the other end of the spectrum, others discuss the potential of teaching wellbeing as a specific separate school subject (white, 2016), although there are concerns about how sustainable that is and what message about the significance of this it sends to learners if it separated from the core curriculum. the strongest forms would be whole school reform or nationwide curricular changes. for those who wish to introduce pe in some form, there are growing numbers of education-based interventions available as well as established wellbeing models on which to base programmes. one such example is the positive educational practices (pep) framework proposed by noble and mcgrath (2008). it centres on five foundations that are closely linked to seligman’s perma model but also draws on other areas of psychology. the foundations are: social and emotional competency, positive emotions, positive relationships, engagement through strengths, and a sense of meaning and purpose. which form of pe is most appropriate for any given setting will depend on the contextual constraints, attitudes, and resources available. as such, how pe could be integrated cannot be prescribed and at this relatively early stage of our educational experiences with this approach, a number of questions remain to be clarified. for example, concerns which need to be addressed include the strength and/or limitations of empirical evidence for the lasting effectiveness of such programmes (spence & shortt, 2007), debates around the moral, political and interpretative discourse of wellbeing (ecclestone, 2012; ecclestone & hayes, 2009a, b), and concerns that a focus on wellbeing distracts attention from the academic subjects at the heart of traditional educational approaches (benninga, berkowitz, kuehn, & smith, 2006). essentially, for teachers to work with pe in their teaching, they must feel it is worthwhile, feel capable to incorporate it and have the sense that this is something they can integrate into their teaching in a sustainable way, rather than it being a burden as yet another additional add-on responsibility for the educator to find time and become responsible for. all of these are legitimate concerns which must be solved for wellbeing to earn its place alongside academics in all educational levels and teacher development programmes would have a key role to play. positive language education… 21 positive language education we believe that wellbeing is not only a justifiable and legitimate aim for education alongside academics, but a highly necessary aim in the context of 21st-century life skills. now we consider why we think language education specifically is an ideal context within which to develop wellbeing competences. as stated at the outset, language education typically aims for more than narrowly defined linguistic competence and it often involves many aspects of the individual and their psychologies. indeed, learning a language can be thought of as a way in itself of enhancing wellbeing (see also notions of the ‘healthy linguistic diet,’ bak & mehmedbegovic, 2017). a specific population worth mentioning in this regard are refugees and migrants who are learning a language. there is an expectation that such populations are likely to be at greater risk of psychological problems and difficulties (fazel, wheeler, & danesh, 2005; nielsen et al., 2008). as such, it is possible they would benefit even more from a dual strand approach to language learning that incorporates a wellbeing life skills perspective when approached in culturally sensitive ways. in a study by the british council and unhcr, capstick and delaney (2016) show how languages used by the refugees helped them build resilience at individual, family and community levels. they suggest that language is a factor in strengthening resilience and is a factor in preventing conflict and strengthening communities. they argue that the use of languages has “a central role to play in helping refugees to address the effects of loss, displacement and trauma” (capstick & delaney, 2016, p. 7) by providing them with a voice to share their stories. they suggest that through various activities and forms of play and storytelling using the “safe space of a second or third language” (capstick & delaney, 2016, p. 7), people can be supported in making sense of their experiences and expressing their feelings. very much in line with what is being proposed in this article, they suggest that “psychosocial interventions do not always need to be seen as separate interventions to language learning” (capstick & delaney, 2016, p. 7). an obvious model for the dual strand approach proposed by ipen can be found in the areas of content and language integrated learning (clil). the definition of clil offered by coyle, hood, and marsh (2010) explains the dual focus aims of the approach: content and language integrated learning (clil) is a dual-focused educational approach in which an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of both content and language. that is, in the teaching and learning process, there is a focus not only on content, and not only on language. sarah mercer, peter macintyre, tammy gregersen, kyle talbot22 each is interwoven, even if the emphasis is greater on one or the other at a given time. (p. 1) in this way, a clil framework could offer a useful lens for reflecting on how to work through the language with a content focus on wellbeing and elements of pp in ways stretching from strong to weak forms, as with clil. at present, the key difference is that the content of wellbeing is rarely, if ever, part of the curriculum—in contrast to clil which is traditionally used for content subjects already anchored in the curriculum. typically, language educators use language to reflect on and discuss various topic areas and themes. by working on those topics and issues, language skills are developed and further promoted. language-in-use is in fact the key tenet of the communicative approach. this suggests that language could also be used to teach competences at the heart of pe such as hope, gratitude, growth, positivity, kindness, optimism, tolerance, empathy, meaning, etc. alongside the development of language skills. it is worth noting that nobody is suggesting that language teachers become “surrogate psychologists” (craig, 2009, p. 1), and some teachers may feel that promoting wellbeing does not fall in their remit, responsibilities, or range of competences. however, many language educators already work on promoting positive individual and social characteristics (such as motivation, positive identities, sense of confidence, growth mindsets, empathy, positive relationships, etc.), in order to facilitate and promote language learning, thereby supporting learners in their broader lives. yet, even in countries where wellbeing and health are considered within the professional remit of teachers, there is evidence that their training in this regard is at best patchy with reasons given such as a lack of time and a prevailing belief that wellbeing and health are low priorities in education (see, e.g., dewhirst et al., 2014). however, for language educators to incorporate language and wellbeing aims consciously and effectively, they would need proper support and training. foundations for ple in sla to date to date, there are very few explicit programmes which exist to combine language learning and wellbeing aims. one that we are aware of is a project by strambi, luzeckyj, and rubino (2017) at two universities in australia to develop a curriculum incorporating pp, transition pedagogy, and clil principles to promote wellbeing in students transitioning to university and the teaching of italian. there are also several course book series aiming at combining language learning with the development of 21st-century life skills although they positive language education… 23 differ in their conceptualisations and where the relative emphasis lies (see, e.g., open mind/mind series by macmillan; think! by cambridge university press; together by oxford university press). however, the field has seen an explosion of interest in positive psychology (pp), which forms the foundations of pe in line with the contemporary zeitgeist of language education where there is an increasing focus on the learner as a whole person (macintyre, 2016). humanistic work in sla is being revisited from a contemporary lens (arnold & murphey, 2013; macintyre & mercer, 2014) with emotions no longer being ‘shunned’ as the poor cousin of cognition (dörnyei & ryan, 2015). in terms of pp interventions specifically in sla, work has begun with students and pre-service teachers to integrate language or pedagogical learning alongside wellbeing development. although the focus of this article has been on language education, the same arguments can equally be applied to language teacher development. language teachers too have a critical need for wellbeing. this is especially important given the high rates of burnout among teachers (hakanen, bakker, & schaufeli, 2006; skaalvik & skaalvik, 2010) and the fact that we know that teachers with high levels of wellbeing are simply better, more effective teachers (duckworth, quinn, & seligman 2009; sammons et al., 2007). importantly, it suggests that there may be potential for ppis in the context of teacher development (pre-service and in-service) explicitly incorporating wellbeing aims alongside other professional development goals to prepare language teachers for the rest of their careers. for example, gregersen, macintyre, and meza (2016) have examined individualized ppis, integrated into a conversation partners program and report evidence of increased wellbeing scores over-and-above the benefits of participating in the regular programme. hiver (2016) also focused on the wellbeing of the language teacher. his investigation on novice teacher resiliency generated data that suggested that the early career teachers who were prepared for the variability of the emotional peaks and valleys that are naturally inherent in classroom practice ended up with greater hope and hardiness than those who were ill-prepared in this regard. similar to ppis focused on language teachers, second language researchers have also been actively pursuing empirical data on ppis with language learners. for example, working from the position of “self” studies, lake (2016) offered pedagogically applicable findings suggesting that positive l2 learner identities are important for learners to flourish. flourishing in the language classroom may also be partly achieved through flow which is best achieved, according to czimmermann and piniel (2016), when there exists an advantageous blend of task difficulty and focused engagement. this combination, according to their quantitative evidence, is more likely to result in greater l2 learner control. also with a focus on the impact of ppis in learner development, gregersen, macintyre, finegan, talbot, and claman (2014) gathered evidence suggesting that emotional intelligence plays an important role in the success of specific sarah mercer, peter macintyre, tammy gregersen, kyle talbot24 ppis like “three good things,” “savoring,” and “learned optimism.” furthermore, using music as a ppi, murphey (2014; 2016) followed learners’ advancement of wellbeing as a process (rather than an end-state) and demonstrated that learnersas-teachers can also spread positivity to others outside the classroom in their own social networks. these examples of just some of the ways in which pp is gaining a place in sla research provide promising foundations within sla on which to build an integrated approach of ple substantiated with empirical evidence. while wellbeing aims may vary according to age as well as cultural contexts, the development of a coherent framework of competences and curricular designed with an integration of wellbeing competences alongside language education goals for both learners and teachers would seem to be vital next steps. conclusions in this paper, we have suggested there are good reasons for language educators to engage in enhancing 21st-century skills alongside the promotion of linguistic skills. we suggest that one key 21st-century skill that would have academic and non-academic benefits would be to focus on developing the competences, which promote wellbeing. following the double helix metaphor, the non-linguistic and linguistic aims can be interwoven in practice in sustainable ways which do not compromise the development of either skill set, or overburden educators. we have suggested that many language teachers already promote many of these competences in order to facilitate language learning. however, a concern is that this is often done in an ad hoc way with no training or explicit support, guidelines or practical frameworks. as such, training is needed at in-service and pre-service levels to support teachers in understanding what wellbeing is and how it can be fostered for both themselves and their learners. we need to work towards a framework of positive language education that can be empirically validated and further developed, and which can be practically implemented in diverse cultural and linguistic settings without prescriptivism and in sustainable ways. the wellbeing of learners and teachers should not be considered an optional extra but is a fundamental foundation of the skill sets both need to cope in their personal and professional lives in the future. the language learning context is ideally positioned to facilitate the learning of wellbeing through language use and learning. the question is whether this is especially ‘positive’ language education, or simply what good language education ought to be anyway. positive language education… 25 references adler, a., & seligman, m. e. p. 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(2009). persistence of mental health problems and needs in a college student population. journal of affective disorders, 117(3), 180–185. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2009.01.001 positive language education… 31 sarah mercer, peter macintyre, tammy gregersen, kyle talbot positiver sprachunterricht: kombination von positiver einstellung zum unterricht mit sprachunterricht z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g der beitrag schildert die methode der positiven einstellung zum sprachunterricht (ple von engl. positive language education), die auf einer kombination von positivem unterricht mit sprachunterricht beruht. seine verfasser argumentieren, dass sich die sprachlehrerinnen für entfaltung gegenwärtiger kompetenzen, darunter auch sprachkompetenzen, einsetzen sollen. eine solcher kompetenzen ist das dem effektiven fremdsprachenunterricht zugrunde liegende wohlbefinden. sich die ideen positiven und integrierten unterrichts zunutze machend integriert ple auf ausgewogene weise sprachliche und außersprachliche zwecke. den verfassern zufolge gibt es relevante grundlagen, ple auszubauen. zum einen sind schon heutzutage zahlreiche fremdsprachenlehrerinnen im stande, verschiedene außersprachliche kompetenzen bei ihren schülerninnen zu entwickeln. zum anderen befassen sich wissenschaftliche forschungen immer häufiger mit dem thema positiver psychologie beim fremdspracherwerben. im vorliegenden beitrag werden theoretische argumente dafür angeführt, dass es notwendig wäre, empirische forschungen im plemodell zu verschiedenen sprachen und deren spezifischen kulturmerkmalen durchzuführen. schlüsselwörter: positive psychologie, unterricht, wohlbefinden, perma, gegenwärtige kompetenzen theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (1), 2023, pp. 1/22 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12097 babak mahdavy https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2944-0942 department of english, qaemshahr branch, islamic azad university, iran masoomeh mousavi namavar https://orcid.org/0009-0002-4333-8864 department of english, qaemshahr branch, islamic azad university, iran listening strategies and l2 listening comprehension: does the test method matter? a b s t r a c t many studies have so far tried to examine the relationship between listening strategies and listening comprehension. however, it seems that none of them have focused on the effect of the test method on the findings. the present study has investigated the issue by having 55 english language learners respond to pictorial and non-pictorial listening test items with different response formats. the listening section of the preliminary english test (pet) and a 36-item listening strategies questionnaire were administered in the first session and after a week’s interval, the participants took a modified version of pet listening. the data were collected in a language laboratory. several correlation and regression tests were run to investigate the relationships between listening comprehension as measured by the original and modified pet listening tests and metacognitive, cognitive and socio-affective listening strategies. the results showed that l2 learners’ use of metacognitive listening strategies is the strongest predictor of listening performance. in addition, the findings indicated that the relationship between the use of listening strategies and listening performance is mediated by the kind of test method which is used for measuring l2 listening. directions for future research and implications for practice are presented. keywords: listening comprehension, listening strategies, test method https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12097 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2944-0942 https://orcid.org/0009-0002-4333-8864 tapsla.12097 p. 2/22 babak mahdavy, masoomeh mousavi namavar introduction various studies have shown that the use of strategies is associated with higher levels of l2 listening comprehension (chien & wei, 1998; smidt & hegelheimer, 2004), learners with higher listening abilities use metacognitive and cognitive strategies more effectively (goh, 2002) and use of metacognitive and cognitive strategies significantly correlates with l2 listening proficiency (kök, 2018). in addition, it has been claimed that language learners can greatly benefit from metacognitive instruction. for example, vandergrift and tafaghodtari (2010) examined the effects of a metacognitive, processbased method of teaching listening on learners’ comprehension and concluded that the less skilled listeners benefit most from this process-based instruction. maftoon and fakhri alamdari (2020) who also used a process-based approach to explore the effects of metacognitive listening instruction on l2 listening comprehension pointed out that the intervention can significantly improve listening performance. the research studies which investigated the role of listening strategies in listening comprehension, however, neglected the fact that comprehension is a dynamic process and continuously evolves in response to variations in the test methods (bachman, 1990). in 1996, bachman and palmer posited that methods of testing affect test performance, and kobayashi (2002) provided empirical support for the effect of response format on l2 learners’ reading performance. in a meta-analysis of test format effects on listening and reading, in’nami and koizumi (2009) showed that in l2 listening multiple-choice (mc) formats are easier than open-ended formats. these results are in line with the findings which revealed that the type of listening item affects l2 listeners’ performance (becker, 2016) and the type of listening test format (mc listening vs. integrated listening-to-summarize tasks) impacts listeners’ use of different listening strategies (rukthong, 2021). despite all the empirical evidence which supports the role of item/task characteristics in l2 listening comprehension, research studies which have examined the contribution of various listening strategies to listening comprehension (bozorgian, 2014; kök, 2018; maftoon & fakhri alamdari, 2020) have not tried to triangulate the findings by employing multiple forms of assessment. therefore, the present study aimed to fill in these research gaps by answering the following questions: 1. are listening strategies significantly related to english language learners’ listening comprehension as measured by listening tests with different test methods? 2. is l2 listeners’ use of metacognitive strategies a significant predictor of listening strategies as measured by listening tests with different methods? listening strategies and l2 listening comprehension:… tapsla.12097 p. 3/22 literature review second language learners utilize a variety of strategies in the process of language learning. results of different research studies have indicated that use of these strategies is context-dependent (huang, 2018) and is related to gender (liyanage & bartlett, 2012), learning style (sahragard, khajavi, & abbasian, 2016), age (tragant & victori, 2012), shyness, anxiety, and ambiguity of tolerance (sadeghi & soleimani, 2016). many studies have tried to identify these strategies and discussed the complexities involved in the use of them. oxford (1990), for example, distinguished between direct and indirect strategies and noted that direct strategies consist of memory, cognitive and compensation strategies and indirect strategies comprise metacognitive, social, and affective strategies. oxford (1990) also devised strategy inventory for language learning (sill) for measuring language learners’ strategy use. o’malley and chamot (1990) proposed another taxonomy of language learning strategies by making a three-way distinction to introduce metacognitive, cognitive, and socio-affective strategies. the models were later used to investigate language learners’ use of strategies in listening, speaking, reading, and writing performance. for example, vandergrift (1997) and goh (2002) drew on o’malley and chamot’s (1990) classification to present a list of listening strategies under the three broad categories of metacognitive, cognitive, and socio-affective strategies. metacognitive strategies have been conceptualized as part of metacognition. flavell (1979) pointed out that metacognitive monitoring includes metacognitive knowledge or beliefs, metacognitive experiences, tasks or goals and strategies. later conceptualizations of metacognition also included similar components (paris & winograd, 1990; wenden, 1991, 1998). according to iwai (2011), metacognition has two dimensions. the first dimension is identified with the knowledge of cognition consisting of declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, and conditional knowledge. and the second dimension is concerned with the regulation of cognition which includes strategies associated with planning, monitoring, testing, revising, and evaluating. chamot and o’malley (1987) suggested that metacognition is an essential aspect of cognitive processes which are related to the comprehension and production of language and involves planning for learning, monitoring linguistic behaviour, and evaluating achievement. research findings have shown that the use of metacognitive strategies is significantly correlated with l2 proficiency (khezrlou, 2012) and metacognitive instruction (cross, 2015) has positive effects on language learners’ performance in listening (maftoon & fakhri alamdari, 2020; vandergrift & tafaghodtari, 2010). in addition, metacognitive strategy instruction has been found to affect reading comprehension (teng, 2020) and writing performance (forbes & fisher, 2020). tapsla.12097 p. 4/22 babak mahdavy, masoomeh mousavi namavar cognitive strategies have been defined as learners’ mental interactions with the input and manipulation of the materials to facilitate comprehension and learning (chamot & o’malley, 1987). examples of such interactions are repetition, note-taking, analyzing, generalizing, associating words, outlining, summarizing, and using imagery (chamot & o’malley, 1987; oxford, 1989; oxford, 1990). it has been shown that cognitive strategies are significantly related to l2 proficiency (e.g., oxford & ehrman, 1995). in a more recent attempt, kök (2018) provided empirical evidence that indicates use of cognitive strategies significantly contributes to listening proficiency. social and affective strategies have been also included in various models of language learning. o’malley and chamot (1990) argued that behaviours associated with this type of strategy are concerned with a person’s interaction with other individuals or regulation of one’s own affection. according to the authors, when learners cooperate to solve a problem or use mental techniques to diminish anxiety, they are involved in the process of using socio-affective strategies to accomplish goals in a learning task. dreyer and oxford (1996) reported that use of social strategies was positively linked to l2 proficiency. they also suggested that affective strategies and l2 proficiency were significantly related (dreyer & oxford, 1996). however, mullins’s (1992) study contradicted some of their findings as in this study it was shown that affective strategies were negatively related to some measures of l2 proficiency. similarly, kök (2018) concluded that the correlation between socio-affective strategies and listening proficiency was not statistically significant. goh and kwah (1997) reported that language learners utilize socio-affective strategies less frequently and cognitive and metacognitive strategies are used more often. results of studies which explored the role of different strategies in listening comprehension revealed that more proficient listeners employ a wider variety of listening strategies more effectively (e.g., chien & wei, 1998; smidt & hegelheimer, 2004). the studies have also demonstrated that metacognitive, cognitive, and socio-affective strategies directly contribute to successful listening comprehension. vandergrift and tafaghodtari (2010), for example, reported that learners who were given metacognitive instruction and learned how to use prediction, planning, monitoring, evaluating, and problem-solving through a process-based approach to teaching second language listening outperformed the participants in the control group. o’malley, chamot, and kupper (1989) found that listeners who were less successful in listening comprehension easily lost their concentration whereas more successful listeners used inferencing, self-monitoring, and elaboration. more recently, empirical evidence in support of metacognitive instruction has been provided and it has been shown that it can enhance l2 learners’ listening performance (bozorgian, 2014; maftoon & fakhri alamdari, 2020; rahimirad & shams, 2014). listening strategies and l2 listening comprehension:… tapsla.12097 p. 5/22 in many studies conducted to investigate the role of listening strategies in listening comprehension, a listening test was mostly used to assess the participants’ comprehension. however, it seems that the issue needs to be reexamined as various research studies have provided evidence concerning the impact of the test method on test performance (bachman & palmer, 1996). bachman (1990) indicated that test tasks are concerned with the attributes of methods used for eliciting test performance and test performance can be impacted by personal attributes, communicative language ability, random elements which are unpredictable and temporary, and test method facets which cover five aspects including input, testing condition, test rubric, expected response, and the relationship between input and response. bachman and palmer (1996) stated that test methods are among the most significant variables attracting language measurement specialists’ and instructors’ attention. to investigate the issue empirically, several research studies examined the role of test methods in language learners’ test performance. yi’an (1998), for instance, conducted a retrospective study to see what listening comprehension tests measure and came to the following conclusion: mc method posed threats to the construct validity of the test in two ways: it favoured the more advanced listeners, but put the less able at a disadvantage, and it allowed much uninformed guessing and resulted in the subjects giving the correct answers for the wrong reasons. (p. 40) in another study in’nami and koizumi (2009) performed a meta-analysis of the effects of open-ended and mc formats on test takers’ performance. the results indicated that with a format effect of small to large open-ended tests of l1 reading and l2 listening are more difficult than l1 reading and l2 listening mc tests. in this study, the authors emphasized the role of contextual factors in the usefulness of a test and noted that there is no flawless test format that functions well in all circumstances. rukthong (2021) also showed that the test method (mc questions vs. integrated listening-to-summarize) influences l2 learners’ listening comprehension performance. according to the results of this study, integrated listening-to-summarize tasks measure listening abilities in real-life situations and l2 listeners can complete these listening tasks successfully if they depend on cognitive processing at a higher level. the results of different research studies, therefore, suggest that the characteristics of a language test including the kind of test method affect l2 learners’ listening comprehension performance (bachman, 1990; in’nami & koizumi, 2009). however, research studies exploring the role of strategies in listening comprehension (e.g., kök, 2018; maftoon & fakhri alamdari, 2020) did not utilize listening tests with a variety of test methods. as it was argued by rukthong (2021), different listening abilities can be assessed by the use tapsla.12097 p. 6/22 babak mahdavy, masoomeh mousavi namavar of different test formats and learners may rely on different kinds of listening strategies in different listening environments. method participants the study sample consisted of 101 female and male undergraduate students who had completed high school and were enrolled in the first year of a bachelor’s program in english translator training. they were in the age range of 19 to 22 and volunteered to take part in the study after completing a consent form. convenience sampling was used to recruit the participants. those who did not respond to all the items in the questionnaire and/or listening tests were excluded from the study. boxplot method was used to identify and remove the outliers, which are data points that do not follow the usual pattern within the data (riazi, 2016). results of preliminary data analysis also showed that the relationships between strategies and listening comprehension could become statistically significant when learners who performed below the mean, 15, were removed. this might mean that the use of strategies is not significantly related to listening comprehension among learners at the lower levels of listening (e.g., goh, 2002). weaker relationships might also indicate that the listening test items which were relatively more difficult for the examinees with lower levels of proficiency displayed more unusual patterns of responses and were less valid for this population of test takers (reynolds, perkins, & brutten, 1995). therefore, 55 more proficient listeners who were able to answer at least 15, out of 25, listening questions correctly were finally included in the study. instrumentation several instruments were employed to measure listening comprehension and language learners’ ability to use listening strategies. the listening section of pet was utilized to assess listening and the same test was adapted to see if there were any changes in the relationships between use of listening strategies and listening comprehension when the test method changed. learners’ use of listening strategies was assessed by a questionnaire adapted by chen (2009) (appendix a, appendix b). listening strategies and l2 listening comprehension:… tapsla.12097 p. 7/22 the preliminary english test (pet) pet or b1 preliminary is a standardized english test prepared by cambridge english language assessment. the two versions of the test are pet and pet for school. according to the information made available through the website (see http://www.cambridgeenglish.org/exams/preliminary/), pet results show to what degree the learner has acquired the basics of english and to what extent they can use english for every day purposes. the test measures learners’ comprehension of spoken materials including announcements and discussions. the listening section of the test contains 25 items which are presented in four sections. in the first part, the participants listened to a short recording and responded to seven questions by choosing one of the three pictures. in the second section of the test, they listened to an interview with a writer and selected one of the three options which appeared before the stem. there were six questions in this part. in the third section, which contained six items, students were supposed to listen to an announcement and fill in the blanks. finally, in the last section, they listened to a discussion and showed their comprehension by choosing ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ they were supposed to answer six questions in this part. in the present study, students’ answers to the listening comprehension questions were first entered into spss. then, cronbach’s alpha value was computed for the 25 listening items and a reliability score of .70 was obtained from the data collected from 94 participants who responded to all the items in the pilot stage. the listening test was, therefore, reliable (dörnyei, 2007). modified listening tests since the purpose of the study was to investigate the role of listening strategies in listening comprehension as measured by listening tests with different formats, attempts were made to modify them. therefore, the pictures which appeared in the first part of listening were replaced with words or short phrases describing the pictures. the choices were removed in the second section and, as a result, the participants responded to essay-type items after listening to an interview. with the addition of these two modified parts, six listening tests with different formats were included in the study: (1) listening section of pet as a whole (25 items), (2) mc pictorial pet (original/seven items), (3) mc non-pictorial pet (modified/seven items), (4) mc pet (original/six items), (5) essay-type pet (modified/six items), and (6) fill-in-the-blank pet (original/six items). in figure 1, sample test items have been presented. http://www.cambridgeenglish.org/exams/preliminary/ tapsla.12097 p. 8/22 babak mahdavy, masoomeh mousavi namavar figure 1. sample test items a. a multiple choice pictorial item where are they at the moment? a b c b. a multiple choice non-pictorial item where are they at the moment? a: swimming pool b: park c: supermarket c. a multiple choice item what problem did peter have in the desert? a. his vehicle broke down b. he didn’t have enough water c. he was frightened by an animal d. an essay-type item what problem did peter have in the desert? …………………………….. e. fill-in-the-blank items plaza cinema – 2.30 p.m. a programme of....................films for all the family cycle race this year’s route is through the.................... after examining skewness and kurtosis tests for normality (see table 2), pearson correlation tests were run to measure the relationships between the tests. as it is displayed in table 1, there are statistically significant correlations between performance on each subtest and the total listening score obtained through the listening section of pet ( p < .01). listening strategies and l2 listening comprehension:… tapsla.12097 p. 9/22 table 1 correlations between listening section of pet, mc pictorial pet, mc nonpictorial pet, mc pet, essay-type pet and fill in the blank pet test types n of items listening section of pet mc pictorial pet 7 .55** mc non-pictorial pet 7 .55** mc pet 6 .67** essay-type pet 6 .30* fill in the blank pet 6 .56** * correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). ** correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). according to table 1, except for the essay-type listening scores, which have a weak relationship with the performance on the listening section of pet, correlations between other listening scores and performance on the listening section of pet fall within the acceptable range. as it has been suggested, when “two tests correlate with each other in the order of 0.60, we can say that they measure more or less the same thing” (dörnyei, 2007, p. 223). the correlation results reported in table 1 are based on the data obtained from 55 participants who were able to answer at least 15 out of 25 listening comprehension questions correctly. the data were also entered into spss to compute cronbach’s alpha reliability. it was found that the value for each listening test was above .60, and therefore it was concluded that the listening tests were reliable (dörnyei, 2007). listening strategy questionnaire the instrument utilized to collect information about listening strategies that the learners used was adapted from vandergrift (1997) and goh (2002) by chen (2009), who developed a listening strategies questionnaire. vandergrift (1997) and goh (2002), who were inspired by o’malley and chamot (1990), presented a collection of metacognitive, cognitive, and socio-affective strategies in l2 listening. the questionnaire contains 36 questions and the participants can report their use of various strategies on a five-point scale: (1) almost never, (2) seldom, (3) sometimes, (4) usually, and (5) almost always. the first 16 items of the questionnaire assess metacognitive strategy use and items 17 through 32 are intended to measure cognitive strategy use preferences. the other four items are associated with learners’ use of socio-affective strategies (appendix a, appendix b). the questionnaire was translated into learners’ mother tongue considering the guidelines proposed by dörnyei (2003). the answers provided by 55 participants in the main phase of the study were submitted to spss and the reliability of the data for each scale was separately calculated. the results tapsla.12097 p. 10/22 babak mahdavy, masoomeh mousavi namavar showed that cronbach’s alpha for metacognitive, cognitive, and socio-affective strategy use was .85, .80, and .45, respectively. the values indicate that metacognitive and cognitive data were quite reliable. however, the results associated with socio-affective strategies should be interpreted with caution as cronbach’s alpha fell below .60 (dörnyei, 2007). relatively lower reliability values of socioaffective listening strategies were also reported in other studies (e.g., kök, 2018). data collection procedure before initiating the process of data collection, arrangements were made with the instructor who undertook the responsibility of administering the listening tests and the questionnaire and explanations about the study and process of collecting data were provided. the students who showed their agreement to participate in the study by completing a consent form were included in the study and were first asked to take the listening proficiency test. the listening strategy questionnaire was next distributed among them in the same session. the participants took 35 minutes to answer the listening comprehension questions. after the answer sheets were collected, the questionnaire was administered. they took 15 minutes to complete it. finally, the modified listening test which consisted of mc non-pictorial (seven items) and essay-type (six items) subtests was administered after a week’s interval. the test contained 13 (seven non-pictorial and six essay-type) listening comprehension questions which the participants answered in 20 minutes. the tests and questionnaire were administered in a language laboratory during class time. students were wearing headphones while answering the questions in the listening tests. the listening scores were later shared with the students as the majority of them felt eager to know how well they performed on the tests. results in the first stage of analysis the data were examined to identify the outliers and check normality of the distributions. table 2 indicates skewness and kurtosis values fell within the acceptable ranges, and therefore it was concluded that normality was not violated. the table also reports the mean and standard deviation associated with each variable in the study. the mean score associated with the participants’ performance on the listening section of pet was 17.96. by comparing the means associated with the essay-type pet and mc pet, it can be suggested that the participants performed less satisfactorily on the essay-type pet. in other words, essay-type pet seems to have been more difficult than mc listening pet. listening strategies and l2 listening comprehension:… tapsla.12097 p. 11/22 in addition, table 1 provides information about learners’ use of cognitive, metacognitive, and socio-affective strategies. it is evident that compared with cognitive and socio-affective strategies, metacognitive strategies were used more frequently. table 2 descriptive statistics of listening tests and listening strategies test types and strategies n minimum maximum mean std. deviation skewness kurtosis listening section of pet 55 15 22 17.96 2.11 .18 –.92 mc pictorial pet 55 2 7 4.27 1.09 .30 –.52 mc non-pictorial pet 55 1 7 4.98 1.29 –.44 .34 mc pet 55 2 6 4.54 .93 –.20 –.15 essay-type pet 55 0 6 4.14 1.37 –.71 .26 fill in the blank 55 2 6 4.72 1.07 –.52 –.59 cognitive strategies 55 39 70 51.72 7.80 .14 –.73 metacognitive strategies 55 40 72 57.85 8.21 –.14 –.88 socio-affective strategies 55 7 19 12.98 2.99 –.05 –.80 the first research question probed the relationships between listening strategies and l2 listening performance. the scores were analyzed through several correlation tests and, as table 3 shows, there are variations in the magnitude of positive correlations between different types of strategies and performance on the listening tests. according to the results, use of cognitive strategies significantly correlated with performance on mc non-pictorial pet (r = .29, p < .001). the highest correlations could be found between listeners’ use of metacognitive strategies and performance on different listening tests. metacognitive strategies and the listening section of pet significantly correlated (r = .38, p < .001) and use of these strategies was also significantly related to performance on mc nonpictorial pet (r = .38, p < .001) and mc pet (r = .27, p < .001). table 3 correlation tests between cognitive, metacognitive and socio-affective strategies and listening performances strategy listening section of pet mc pictorial pet mc non pictorial pet mc pet essay-type pet fill in the blank pet cognitive .13 .24 .29* –.05 .24 .16 metacognitive .38** .27* .38** .27* .12 .26 socio-affective .07 .04 .13 .08 .03 .22 *. correlation is significant at the .05 level (2-tailed). **. correlation is significant at the .01 level (2-tailed). tapsla.12097 p. 12/22 babak mahdavy, masoomeh mousavi namavar the r-squared value was also calculated for the weakest (.03) and strongest (.38) correlation using the information displayed in table 3. the value is the square of correlation and measures the proportions of variation in the dependent variable which can be attributed to the independent variable. as it can be seen in table 3, the r-squared values range between .09 (.03×.03) and .14 (.38×.38). the results showed that cognitive and socio-affective strategies did not account for a large percentage of the variance in listening comprehension. use of metacognitive strategies, however, could explain a much larger percentage of variation in the performance on most of the listening tests. the second research question was answered by running several stepwise and hierarchical regression tests to see to what extent different kinds of listening strategies can contribute to performance on different listening tests. linear regression which is a form of predictive modelling technique is used to identify the strength of the relationship between one or more predictor variable(s) and one dependent variable. in the present study, the results of stepwise linear regression tests revealed that use of metacognitive strategies was the only variable which could predict performance on the listening section of pet (r2 = .14, f (1, 53) = 9.06, p < .01), mc non-pictorial pet (r2 = .14, f (1, 53) = 9.14, p < .01) and mc pictorial pet (r2 = .07, f (1, 53) = 4.22, p < .05). however, the results showed the regression model which could significantly predict performance on mcpet consisted of both metacognitive and cognitive strategies. metacognitive strategies accounted for .07 of the variance (r2 = .07, f (1, 53) = 4.23, p < .05) and since cognitive strategy was not excluded, the model could finally explain .14 of the total variance (r2 = .14, f (2, 52) = 4.28, p < .05). none of the variables, however, could significantly predict performance on essay-type and fill-in-the-blank listening tests ( p > .05). hierarchical regression tests were next used to further examine the relationships. as it can be seen in tables 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9, the use of cognitive and socio-affective strategies alone was not able to predict listening performance on different listening tests, but the addition of metacognitive strategies could improve almost all the predictive models which consisted of metacognitive, cognitive, and socio-affective strategies as the independent variables and performance on the listening section of pet, mc non-pictorial pet, mc pictorial pet, mc pet, and fill in the blank pet as the dependent variables (table 4, table 5, table 6, table 8, table 9). metacognitive listening strategies, however, could not improve prediction of performance on the essay-type listening test (see table 7). as it is depicted in table 4, when the use of metacognitive strategies is entered into the model, the r2 value turns out to be .18. this significant increase in the magnitude of r2 ( p < .01) indicates that the variable can improve the model and predict performance on the listening section of pet. listening strategies and l2 listening comprehension:… tapsla.12097 p. 13/22 table 4 r-square values for correlation coefficients between predictor variables (socio-affective, cognitive, and metacognitive strategies) and the dependent variable (listening section of pet) model r r square adjusted r square standard error of the estimate change statistics r square change f change df1 df2 sig. f change 1 .13 .01 –.02 2.13 .01 .46 2 52 .63 2 .43 .18 .13 1.96 .16 10.61 1 51 .00* 1. predictors: socio-affective, cognitive 2. predictors: socio-affective, cognitive, and metacognitive dependent variable: listening section of pet similarly, table 5 illustrates that much of the variance in the performance on the mc non-pictorial pet can be explained after the use of metacognitive strategies is added to the model. the change in the magnitude of shared variance r2 is statistically significant ( p < .05). table 5 r-square values for correlation coefficients between predictor variables (socio-affective, cognitive, and metacognitive strategies) and the dependent variable (mc non-pictorial pet) model r r square adjusted r square standard error of the estimate change statistics r square change f change df1 df2 sig. f change 1 .29 .08 .04 1.26 .08 2.39 2 52 .10 2 .40 .16 .11 1.21 .08 5.04 1 51 .02* 1. predictors: socio-affective, cognitive 2. predictors: socio-affective, cognitive, and metacognitive dependent variable: mc non-pictorial pet table 6 provides information about the contribution of metacognitive strategies to the scores on the mc pictorial pet. as it is shown in the table, although there is an increase in the value of r2 after the use of metacognitive strategies is added to the model, the change is not statistically significant ( p > .05). tapsla.12097 p. 14/22 babak mahdavy, masoomeh mousavi namavar table 6 r-square values for correlation coefficients between predictor variables (socio-affective, cognitive, and metacognitive strategies) and the dependent variable (mc pictorial pet) model r r square adjusted r square standard error of the estimate change statistics r square change f change df1 df2 sig. f change 1 .25 .06 .03 1.07 .06 1.82 2 52 .17 2 .33 .10 .05 1.06 .04 2.47 1 51 .12 1. predictors: socio-affective, cognitive 2. predictors: socio-affective, cognitive, and metacognitive dependent variable: mc pictorial pet according to table 7, the use of cognitive and socio-affective listening strategies does not significantly predict performance on the essay-type listening test. r-square change value in table 7 also shows that adding metacognitive strategies does not significantly improve the regression model ( p > .05). table 7 r-square values for correlation coefficients between predictor variables (socio-affective, cognitive, and metacognitive strategies) and the dependent variable (essay-type pet) model r r square adjusted r square standard error of the estimate change statistics r square change f change df1 df2 sig. f change 1 .25 .06 .02 1.36 .06 1.75 2 52 .18 2 .25 .06 .00 1.37 .00 .01 1 51 .99 1. predictors: socio-affective, cognitive 2. predictors: socio-affective, cognitive, and metacognitive dependent variable: essay-type pet table 8, however, provides stronger evidence in support of metacognitive strategy use. as shown in the table, the magnitude of r2 change is statistically significant ( p < .05) indicating that performance on the mc pet can be predicted if metacognitive strategy use is included in the model. listening strategies and l2 listening comprehension:… tapsla.12097 p. 15/22 table 8 r-square values for correlation coefficients between predictor variables (socio-affective, cognitive, and metacognitive strategies) and the dependent variable (mc pet) model r r square adjusted r square standard error of the estimate change statistics r square change f change df1 df2 sig. f change 1 .12 .01 –.02 .94 .01 .41 2 52 .66 2 .38 .14 .09 .89 .12 7.69 1 51 .00* 1. predictors: socio-affective, cognitive 2. predictors: socio-affective, cognitive, and metacognitive dependent variable: mc pet and finally, as presented in table 9, a regression model which also consists of metacognitive strategies does not increase the r-squared value significantly (p > .05). table 9 r-square values for correlation coefficients between predictor variables (socio-affective, cognitive, and metacognitive strategies) and the dependent variable (fill in the blank pet) model r r square adjusted r square standard error of the estimate change statistics r square change f change df1 df2 sig. f change 1 .23 .05 .01 1.06 .05 1.53 2 52 .22 2 .27 .07 .02 1.06 .02 1.11 1 51 .29 1. predictors: socio-affective, cognitive 2. predictors: socio-affective, cognitive, and metacognitive dependent variable: fill in the blank pet it can be, therefore, suggested that use of metacognitive strategies plays a determining role in predicting performance on the listening section of pet, mc non-pictorial test, and mc listening test (table 4, table 5, table 8). in addition, after the use of metacognitive strategies is added to a regression model which consists of cognitive and socio-affective strategies as the independent variables and performance on the mc pictorial listening test as the dependent variable, it slightly increases the predictive power. the three kinds of strategies, however, do not predict mc pictorial test scores significantly (see table 6). furthermore, the results did not provide support for the higher significance of metacognitive tapsla.12097 p. 16/22 babak mahdavy, masoomeh mousavi namavar listening strategies over cognitive and socio-affective strategies in predicting performance on essay-type and fill-in-the-blank listening tests (table 7, table 9). discussion the findings have verified the role of metacognitive strategies which include planning, directed attention, selective attention, and monitoring (see appendix b) in l2 listening comprehension and are consistent with those of vogely (1995), vandergrift and tafaghodtari (2010), bozorgian (2014), wang & treffers-daller (2017), kök (2018), maftoon & fakhri alamdari (2020) and becker (2021). in addition, the results support kassem (2015) and kök (2018) who showed that use of cognitive strategies such as inferencing, elaboration, prediction, etc. (see appendix b) is positively related to l2 listening comprehension. the findings are also in congruence with the results indicating that use of socio-affective strategies which include cooperation and confidence building (see appendix b) does not significantly contribute to successful l2 listening (kassem, 2015; kök, 2018). metacognitive strategies have been found to be positively related to all the measures of l2 listening. and as the regression tables indicate, this variable can make l2 listening more predictable. the use of cognitive and socio-affective strategies, however, could not predict listening performance as measured by different types of response formats although both kinds of strategies positively contribute to l2 listening. compared with cognitive strategies, metacognitive strategies have been generally considered more important in l2 listening comprehension (janusik & varner, 2020). the fact that the use of metacognitive listening strategies makes a larger contribution to l2 listening comprehension might be interpreted as confirming that these strategies help learners manage and regulate cognitive processes and products during listening (flavell, 1979; iwai, 2011) and success of the cognitive operations under different conditions at least partly depends on learners’ ability to use metacognitive listening strategies effectively. the results also throw new light on the role of test methods in the relationship between the use of listening strategies and l2 listening comprehension. metacognitive strategy use did not make a statistically significant contribution when it was added to increase the predictive power of regression models which included performance on essay-type and fill-in-the-blank listening test. this might have been due to the fact that assessment of listening through these tasks does not seem to be merely related to listening comprehension and other skills such as writing and reading seem to contribute to learners’ performance listening strategies and l2 listening comprehension:… tapsla.12097 p. 17/22 on these listening tests. however, items containing multiple choice response formats seem to elicit information about learners’ listening ability as in the process of listening learners are not supposed to read and/or write to show their comprehension. the study has presented evidence in support of the robust role of metacognitive listening strategies in listening comprehension especially when it is assessed through multiple choice tests. this is partly confirmed by the results of other studies which used a variety of listening tests to assess l2 listening and reported varying degrees of positive relationships (vandergrift, goh, mareschal, & tafaghodtari, 2006; kassem, 2015; vogely, 1995; wang & treffers-daller, 2017). in other words, as it has been theorized and empirically shown test method affects test performance (bachman, 1990; bachman & palmer, 1990; in’nami & koizumi, 2009; kobayashi, 2002). accordingly, the results of the present study showed that metacognitive listening strategies might play a less important role if listening comprehension ability is assessed through writing and/or reading tasks. considering the fact that different listening tests might measure different listening abilities (becker, 2016; rukthong, 2021), follow up research may investigate the effects of other test methods on the results. the findings are also restricted to lower intermediate and intermediate efl learners and therefore it is recommended that future research also investigate combined effects of the test method and proficiency level on the relationships between l2 listening strategies and listening comprehension. and since the construct of listening comprehension also embraces a test input aspect (e.g., monteiro & kim, 2020), future studies may focus on the nature of the relationships between l2 listening strategies and listening tests with a variety of input characteristics. conclusions the study investigated the predictive power of metacognitive, cognitive, and socio-affective listening strategies as three independent variables on english language learners’ performance on different listening tests. the results provided empirical evidence in support of the superior role metacognitive strategies play in the process of listening (vogely, 1995; wang & treffers-daller, 2017). cognitive strategies were shown to be related to listening performance but the results indicated that they play a less important role (kök, 2018). socio-affective strategies, however, did not contribute to l2 listening significantly. another finding of the study was that the relationships between listening strategies and comprehension are mediated by the type of test methods (bachman, 1990; tapsla.12097 p. 18/22 babak mahdavy, masoomeh mousavi namavar rukthong, 2021) as the results of correlation and regression tests revealed that metacognitive listening strategies can significantly improve our prediction of listening performance especially if the test takers’ listening ability is measured by a multiple-choice test. references bachman, l. f. 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https://doi.org/10.1177%2f026553229801500102 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f026553229801500102 listening strategies and l2 listening comprehension:… tapsla.12097 p. 21/22 babak mahdavy, masoomeh mousavi namavar hörstrategien und hörkompetenz in der zweitsprache: zur rolle der gewählten testmethode z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g mehrere bisherige studien haben versucht, den zusammenhang zwischen hörstrategien und hörkompetenz zu untersuchen. es scheint jedoch, dass bei keiner davon der einf luss der testmethode auf die ergebnisse in den mittepunkt der analyse gestellt wurde. in der vorliegenden studie wurde diese frage untersucht, indem man 55 englischlernern illustrierte und nicht illustrierte hörverstehensaufgaben mit unterschiedlichen antwortformaten zu lösen gab. der hörteil im preliminary english test (pet) und ein aus 36 punkten bestehender fragebogen zu den hörstrategien wurden in der ersten sitzung bearbeitet, und nach einer woche pause legten die studienteilnehmer eine modifizierte version des pet-hörverstehenstests ab. die daten wurden in einem sprachlabor erhoben. dabei wurden mehrere korrelationsund regressionstests durchgeführt, um das verhältnis zwischen der hörkompetenz, die mit dem ursprünglichen und modifizierten pet-hörverstehenstest bewertet wurde, und den metakognitiven, kognitiven und sozio-affektiven hörstrategien zu untersuchen. die ergebnisse zeigten, dass die verwendung von metakognitiven hörstrategien bei zweitsprachenlernern der stärkste indikator für die hörkompetenz ist. darüber hinaus deuteten die ausgewerteten daten darauf hin, dass der zusammenhang zwischen verwendung von hörstrategien und hörkompetenz durch die art der testmethode vermittelt wird, die zur bewertung der hörkompetenz in der zweitsprache eingesetzt wird. es werden wege für zukünftige forschung und implikationen für die praxis aufgezeigt. schlüsselwörter: hörkompetenz, hörstrategien, testmethode a p p e n d i x a sample items of listening strategies questionnaire strategies sample items metacognitive i have a plan in my mind for how i am going to listen. when my mind wanders, i recover my concentration right away. i evaluate how much i’ve understood this time, e.g., i could comprehend 80% of the text. cognitive i use mental or actual pictures to help me comprehend the texts. i use what i have just heard to guess what the next part is. i write down the words and concepts that i heard in my mind. socio-affective i ask my classmate or friends to clarify my comprehension. i am not anxious and keep calm while listening. tapsla.12097 p. 22/22 babak mahdavy, masoomeh mousavi namavar a p p e n d i x b listening strategies classification scheme (vandergrift, 1997; goh, 2002) by chen (2009) cognitive strategies top down processing 1. listen for gist ▪ listen for main ideas first. 2. inferencing (filling in missing information and guessing meaning of words) ▪ use contextual clues; ▪ use information from familiar content words; ▪ draw on knowledge of the world; ▪ apply knowledge about the target language; ▪ use visual clues. 3. elaboration (embellishing an initial interpretation to make it meaningful and complete); ▪ draw on knowledge of the world; ▪ draw on knowledge about the target language. 4. prediction (anticipating the contents of a text) ▪ anticipate general contents (global); ▪ anticipate details while listening (local). 5. visualization (forming a mental picture of what is heard) ▪ imagine scenes, events, objects etc. being described; ▪ mentally display the shape (spelling) of key words. bottom up processing 6. understanding each word and detail ▪ try to figure out the meanings of most of words or sentences of the input; ▪ try to understand most of the details of the input. 7. translation (changing words, phases or sentences into l1 before interpretation) ▪ find l1 equivalents for selected key words; ▪ translate a sequence of utterances. 8. fixation (focusing attention on understanding a small part of text) ▪ stop to think about the meaning of words or parts of the input; ▪ memorize/repeat the sounds of unfamiliar words. cognitive 9. summarization ▪ organise important information in my mind. 10. note taking ▪ write down key words and concepts while listening. metacognitive strategies 1. planning (preparing mentally and emotionally for a listening task) ▪ preview contents; ▪ rehearse sounds of potential content words. 2. directed attention (monitoring attention and avoiding distractions) ▪ concentrate hard; ▪ continue to listen in spite of difficulty. 3. selective attention (decide in advance to listen for specific aspects of input) ▪ decide in advance to: – listen for familiar content words; – notice how information is structured (e.g.discourse markers); – pay attention to repetitions; – notice intonation features (e.g. falling and rising tones). 4. monitoring (checking/ confirming understanding while listening) ▪ confirm that comprehension has taken place; ▪ identify words or ideas not understood; ▪ check current interpretation with the context of the message; ▪ check current interpretation with prior knowledge. 5. evaluation (checking interpretation of accuracy, completeness and acceptability after listening) ▪ check interpretation against external sources; ▪ check interpretation using prior knowledge; ▪ match interpretation with the context of the message. social/ affective strategies 1. cooperation ▪ ask for explanation/clarification. 2. confidence building (encouraging oneself) ▪ tell oneself to relax; ▪ use positive self talk. contents preface (danuta gabryś-barker, adam wojtaszek) articles magdalena szyszka context-related beliefs about l2 language learning and teaching of the millennial pre-service efl teachers as a prognosis for future classroom actions meihua liu chinese university students’ beliefs about english language learning and self-efficacy astrid mairitsch, sonja babic, sarah mercer, giulia sulis, sun shin the role of compassion during the shift to online teaching for language teacher wellbeing ahmed al shlowiy, khaled layali efl teachers’ perceptions of a long shift to online learning in a saudi university during the coronavirus pandemic monika kusiak-pisowacka exploring fl readers’ metacognitive beliefs: narrations from learner diaries babak mahdavy, masoomeh mousavi namavar listening strategies and l2 listening comprehension: does the test method matter? eva maria luef, pia resnik phonotactic probabilities and sub-syllabic segmentation in language learning zuzana nováková making students responsible for grammar learning: a report on a learnercentered technique aimed at accuracy silvie válková, jana kořínková approaches to teaching agreement and disagreement in selected coursebook series reviews n. schmitt, m. p. h. rotgers (2020). an introduction to applied linguistics (routledge, taylor & francis)—by muhammad fahruddin aziz and herlandri eka jayaputri style guide for the authors theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (1), 2023, pp. 1/22 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.13123 astrid mairitsch https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9885-3399 university of graz, austria sonja babic https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1004-3090 university of graz, austria sarah mercer https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2558-8149 university of graz, austria giulia sulis https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8438-6275 university of graz, austria sun shin https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4380-8459 university of graz, austria the role of compassion during the shift to online teaching for language teacher wellbeing a b s t r a c t research on compassion has received increasing attention over the past decades (seppälä et al., 2017). however, empirical studies focusing on the role of compassion for teachers still remain sparse to date. this paper reports on a study designed to investigate the wellbeing of 21 language teachers across the globe during the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic crisis. in particular, the study sought out to examine the ways in which compassion and selfcompassion contributed to the wellbeing of language teachers during this time. data were generated through in-depth, semi-structured individual online interviews and were analyzed from a grounded theory perspective (charmaz, 2006). findings revealed that acts of compassion in the workplace and in the private lives of the teachers played a crucial role in shaping our participants’ wellbeing during this time of crisis. furthermore, self-compassion emerged as an important factor inf luencing the wellbeing of teachers during the pandemic crisis. indeed, compassion and self-compassion served as core elements in their teaching and appeared to affect their relationships with their students, colleagues, and headteachers. in the absence of compassion, the stressful and challenging situation they were already experiencing was exacerbated. these findings imply the potential benefits of compassion and self-compassion training for teachers, administrators, and policymakers to support and promote wellbeing in the educational workplace. keywords: compassion, self-compassion, language teacher wellbeing, education, covid-19 pandemic crisis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.13123 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9885-3399 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1004-3090 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2558-8149 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8438-6275 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4380-8459 due to the covid-19 pandemic crisis, teachers around the world were required to switch to online teaching with little or no preparation. however, even before the pandemic crisis, teaching was already regarded as an increasingly stressful profession with a higher-than-average risk of burnout (e.g., reimers et al., 2020). in language teaching specifically, teachers are confronted with additional stressors unique to the language classroom, such as high intercultural demands and low linguistic self-efficacy (horwitz, 1996), intense levels of emotional labour (dewaele & wu, 2021; gkonou et al., 2020), energyintense methodologies (borg, 2006), and poor working conditions (mercer, 2020). these stressors and strains can threaten their ability to thrive in their professional roles and can, in turn, negatively affect their wellbeing (mercer & gregersen, 2020). during the pandemic crisis, teachers across the profession were not only trying to negotiate the unknown domains of online teaching and exploring new digital tools in their professional lives, many teachers were also battling challenges in their personal lives alongside the considerable social constraints resulting from national lockdowns. in research, compassion and self-compassion have been linked with increased wellbeing and reduced stress and burnout (macbeth & gumley, 2012; neff, 2003, 2011; zessin et al., 2015). in this paper, we report on a study which aimed to explore language teacher wellbeing among 21 language teachers across the globe using interview data. the analysis revealed the key role played by compassion and self-compassion in both the professional and personal contexts of these teachers. literature review what is compassion? research on compassion has received increasing attention over the past decades (seppälä et al., 2017). especially in challenging and unpredictable times, people strive for a world that is other-oriented and in which positive psychological states such as empathy, sympathy, and compassion are held high in esteem and exercised regularly (saltzman et al., 2020). social behavior, including compassion, is evolutionary rooted and has always been playing a central role in shaping human interaction (carter et al., 2017). in fact, the practice of compassion has its roots in the earliest periods of buddhism (lavelle, 2017; nyanamoli, 1964), being understood as a “supportive practise […] on the path of awakening” (lavelle, 2017, p. 45). compassion is also regarded as a core component of all major world religions (armstrong, 2008). as cameron (2017) tapsla.13123 p. 2/22 a. mairitsch, s. babic, s. mercer, g. sulis, s. shin points out, “compassion lies at the core of what it means to be human. all major religions, moral philosophers, and social theorists have valued compassion as an indication of virtue in human beings” (p. 544). nowadays, compassion has been integrated into diverse psychological and clinical programs to increase people’s health, wellbeing, and prosocial behavior (lavelle, 2017). in research, compassion is described as a “cognitive, emotional, and volitional response to the suffering of others” (peterson, 2017, p. 2) which can lead to actions to alleviate the suffering of others. similarly, singer and klimecki (2014) define compassion as “a feeling of concern for another person’s suffering which is accompanied by the motivation to help” (p. 875). goetz and colleagues (2010) also conceptualize compassion as an affective state established by subjective feelings and defining it as “the feeling that arises in witnessing another’s suffering and that motivates a subsequent desire to help” (p. 351). although empathy, sympathy, and compassion are closely related terms, research has shown that there are certain features that distinguish these concepts from one another. in the literature, sympathy can be defined as “an emotional reaction of pity toward the misfortune of another, especially those who are perceived as suffering unfairly,” while empathy has been described as “an ability to understand and accurately acknowledge the feelings of another” (sinclair et al., 2017, p. 438). however, compassion is different to sympathy and empathy in terms of one aspect: a compassionate person does not solely recognize the suffering of others but goes a step further and seeks to find ways in which to reduce the suffering through pro-active behavior (dutton et al., 2014). this suggests a link between compassion and agentic behavior. when compassion is not directed outward but inward, it is referred to as self-compassion. self-compassion is, in fact, a form of compassion, where acts of compassion are directed towards yourself (neff, 2011). furthermore, gerber et al. (2015) highlight: since compassion includes being open to the other’s suffering and generating the desire to heal the other through kindness, self-compassion would entail applying these same qualities toward oneself. by conceptualizing self-compassion as embodying one’s perception of one’s self as a subject, one could heal oneself through kindness. (p. 395) as such, self-compassion portrays a kind, positive, and caring attitude toward oneself in instances of failure, perceived imperfection, and individual shortcomings (zessin et al., 2015). neff and germer (2017) point out the importance of self-compassion and claim that, “just as we can feel compassionate for the suffering of others, we can extend compassion towards ourselves, regardless of whether our suffering resulted from external circumstances or our own mistakes, failures and personal inadequacies” (p. 478). self-compassion is the role of compassion during the shift to online teaching… tapsla.13123 p. 3/22 as relevant as compassion directed towards others and it can help us overcome challenging times (neff, 2011). by being self-compassionate, we understand that flaws are simply part of being human, and, as a result, we can approach our perceived weaknesses from a broad, inclusive, and more humane perspective (neff, 2011). furthermore, neff (2021) makes a distinction between kind and fierce self-compassion, stressing that self-compassionate behavior can be viewed as a continuum, with one end being tender, kind, and soft, and the other fierce, strong, and ferocious. the latter, especially, can empower people by making them feel stronger, more competent, and assertive and less afraid of conflict to defend their own rights (neff, 2021). compassion and teacher wellbeing in times of the covid-19 crisis in march 2020, the world health organization (who) declared the coronavirus (covid-19) outbreak a global pandemic (who, 2020). consequently, many countries quickly started applying measures to reduce risk of transmissions of the virus, such as physical distancing, temporarily closing educational institutions, and implementing national lockdowns (sohrabi et al., 2020). due to the shutdown of schools, many teachers across the globe were required to switch to online/remote teaching formats and to use new digital tools with little or no preparation and notice (reimers et al., 2020). for those teachers who had not had much experience in teaching online and lacked digital skills, the pandemic placed enormous challenges on them, as they not only had to learn to use online formats but also had to guide their students in how to do distance learning, while, simultaneously, battling with their own wellbeing and that of their learners (macintyre et al., 2020). in a time of a global crisis, people typically try to share their common suffering and support others, “creating opportunities for deeper connection, mutual help, and community” (zaki, 2020, p. 588). as human beings are inherently social and rely on cooperation to survive and thrive, it is not surprising that compassion plays a key role in alleviating stress and loneliness (zaki, 2020). in respect to the pandemic crisis, galea (2020) points out that it is an occasion that “ultimately calls for compassion” (p. 1898). in fact, several studies have shown that compassion appears to be positively related with wellbeing, especially in reducing emotional distress (e.g., gilbert, 2010; goetz et al., 2010; neff, 2003). for example, macbeth and gumley’s (2012) meta-analysis revealed that higher levels of compassion appeared to lower levels of depression, stress, and anxiety. thus, the authors suggested that compassion is a critical variable in understanding mental health, wellbeing, and resilience (macbeth & gumley, 2012). research on self-compassion revealed that individuals who show self-compassionate behavior appeared to tapsla.13123 p. 4/22 a. mairitsch, s. babic, s. mercer, g. sulis, s. shin have higher levels of perceived wellbeing (zessin et al., 2015). furthermore, a body of empirical studies has found that self-compassion can lower negative emotions, such as depression and anxiety, and can increase positive emotions, such as life satisfaction, optimism, happiness, self-confidence, resilience, and wellbeing (neff, 2011; zessin et al., 2015). as such, both compassion and selfcompassion play a crucial role in positively influencing individuals’ wellbeing during times of crisis and beyond. in teacher research, the focus of identifying stressors and strains that can lead to teacher attrition and might result in teacher burnout has slowly shifted from a deficit viewpoint towards examining the lives of teachers from a more holistic perspective (e.g., macintyre et al., 2019; mercer et al., 2016), underscored by a positive psychology approach (e.g., seligman, 2018). it is equally, if not even more important, to not lose sight of the factors that keep teachers in the profession and contribute to their overall thriving and wellbeing, than focusing on what makes them leave (mercer et al., 2016; mercer & gregersen, 2020). factors that can potentially support teacher wellbeing are, for instance, teachers’ positive relationships with their students, colleagues, and headteachers (spilt et al., 2011), a high sense of self-efficacy (han et al., 2020), resilience (ergün & dewaele, 2021), supportive school culture (brady & wilson, 2021), having a sense of meaning and purpose (roffey, 2012), high job satisfaction (dreer, 2021), and high teacher status (troman, 2000). however, compassion can play an equally important role in the lives of teachers. in fact, several studies have been conducted to understand the link between teacher wellbeing and compassion in the workplace. for example, de stasio et al. (2019) investigated compassion in pre-school teachers’ work engagement. their findings showed that subjective happiness and compassion at work triggered positive feelings and enhanced teachers’ wellbeing and their attitudes toward work. in another study by de stasio et al. (2020), the authors reported that experiencing compassion with colleagues made teachers feel more involved in their work and enhanced their perceptions of their working environment. these findings align with research by eldor and shoshani (2016), who examined the influences of compassion from colleagues and principals on teachers’ engagement and subjective wellbeing in their professional lives. they found that, when teachers receive compassion from headteachers specifically, it can positively influence their job satisfaction and commitment, and reduce teacher burnout. it appears crucial, to implement (self-)compassion and other compassion-based skills into our educational contexts, in order to create more caring, thoughtful, and mindful classroom experiences, which are beneficial for both teachers and students (kudo & hartley, n.d.). during the covid-19 pandemic crisis, only a small number of studies have looked at compassion in the school context to date. for example, lepp et al. (2021) showed that online teaching has shifted teachers’ focus from subject the role of compassion during the shift to online teaching… tapsla.13123 p. 5/22 matter competences to a greater valuing of socialization and the wellbeing of students, and thus, the importance of teacher compassion. another study by gates and colleagues (2021) found that having implemented principles of both compassion and self-compassion in their university in australia during the shift to online teaching helped teachers and students to overcome challenges and better deal with stressors that the pandemic brought along. in this study, we aim to contribute to the field of research on compassion and teacher wellbeing by examining what acts of compassion were important for the wellbeing of 21 language teachers across the globe during the pandemic crisis. although the data were generated during the crisis, the insights are relevant for the field of wellbeing more broadly and help contribute to understandings about the role compassion can play in fostering positive mental health and job satisfaction in the workplace. methodological design this study explores the role of acts of compassion in the wellbeing of 21 foreign language teachers during the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic. it seeks to answer the following research question: what is the role of compassion for the wellbeing of 21 foreign language teachers during the shift to online teaching in the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic crisis? context and participants before the global pandemic occurred, as part of our broader research project, a global survey was administered to secondary-school foreign language teachers across the globe. the survey aimed to investigate language teacher wellbeing and remained open from january to march 2020. the participating teachers were given the opportunity to provide an email address if they wished to take part a follow-up interview; from among 472 completed responses, 114 teachers left their email addresses and were contacted to ask if they would still be willing to participate in a follow-up online interview. twenty-three participants agreed to be interviewed; however, the data of two participants who were teaching in the university settings were not analyzed in this reporting of the study in order to retain a focus on secondary education. the interviews took place between june and september 2020. in this article, we present the data based on these interviews which focused on the role of compassion in participants’ wellbeing during the pandemic crisis. tapsla.13123 p. 6/22 a. mairitsch, s. babic, s. mercer, g. sulis, s. shin all participants in this study (n = 21) were foreign language teachers at secondary schools, and they were working in the following continents: europe (n = 10), oceania (n = 3), north america (n = 4), central america (n = 1), and south america (n = 3). detailed background data about the participants are presented in table 1. table 1 participants’ biodata and demographic information pseudonym country of residence gender years of teaching first language teaching subject(s) living situation during the pandemic alice new zealand f 24–30 english french, spanish with a partner/ spouse maria argentina f 16–23 spanish english with a partner/ spouse and children jennifer uk f 4–7 english french, german, spanish with a partner/ spouse and children liliana hungary f 4–7 hungarian english with a partner/ spouse robin netherlands wishes not to specify 4–7 dutch french with a partner/ spouse and children charlotte us f 0–3 spanish spanish with parents or extended family hilary argentina f 4–7 spanish english, german with roommates naomi argentina f 24–30 spanish english alone christine australia f 24–30 estonian english, french with a partner/ spouse eliza us f 16–23 german german with a partner/ spouse and children jakob austria m 8–15 german english with a partner/ spouse and children maddison australia f 8–15 english japanese, spanish with a partner/ spouse louise switzerland/ france f 4–7 english french with children adrian germany m 24–30 german german alone penelope greece f 16–23 greek english alone victoria uk f 16–23 english french, german, spanish with a partner/ spouse amber us f 4–7 english german with a partner/ spouse gabriela nicaragua f 4–7 spanish english with parents or extended family the role of compassion during the shift to online teaching… tapsla.13123 p. 7/22 jane uk f 8–15 english french, spanish with a partner/ spouse suzy us f 8–15 english english, german no answer provided john uk m 8–15 english french, german alone research tools and procedures before the interviews took place, all participants were asked to complete a survey on their wellbeing during the pandemic, which was divided into two sections. the first section addressed their work and living situation during the pandemic. the second section aimed at gathering quantitative data and included the following measures: panas (positive and negative affect schedule) (watson et al., 1988), perma (positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment) (butler & kern, 2016), work engagement (schaufeli et al., 2006), psychological capital (psycap; luthans et al., 2007) and coping strategies (carver, 1997). however, in this article, we focus only on the qualitative data from the interviews. to promote a more conversational style of interviews, in-depth semistructured interviews were conducted. these allowed researchers to compare data across participants but remain flexible and responsive to individuality and uniqueness (dörnyei, 2007; o’leary, 2021). the interview protocol included questions regarding seven main themes, including the participants’ teaching biography, their teaching life (e.g., workload, online/remote teaching, job satisfaction, and engagement), professional relationships (e.g., school climate, relationships with parents and students), their perceived teacher status, identity and meaning, overall wellbeing (e.g., coping strategies, physical wellbeing work-life balance, sources of stress), and personal relationships, both prior to and during the first pandemic wave. all interviews were conducted online via skype or zoom between june 25 to september 13, 2020, and each interview lasted between 55 and 90 minutes. in total, 24 hours, 27 minutes, and 38 seconds of data were transcribed for content analysis, and this generated a corpus of 205,162 words. ethics in this study, before data were collected, ethical approval was obtained from the ethics committee from our institution. prior to the interviews, participants were given a participant information sheet and a consent form which included cont. table 1 tapsla.13123 p. 8/22 a. mairitsch, s. babic, s. mercer, g. sulis, s. shin detailed information of the study, participants’ right and involvement, any foreseeable risks, storage of data, and assurance of confidentiality and anonymity throughout the research process. participants were also made aware that they have no obligation to answer any questions they perceived as uncomfortable and right to withdraw any time up to the point of publication without giving a reason. all interviews were audio-recorded only and transcribed by our research team. audio-recordings were saved on password-protected computers and destroyed upon transcription. pseudonyms were given to each participant at all stages of the research and any identifying markers were removed during the transcription process. data analysis all members of the research team familiarized themselves with the data by carefully reading through all the transcribed interviews and adding memos and comments in a joint document which served as a basis for discussion. interview transcripts were then put into atlas.ti for the coding process. an inductive line-by-line coding approach (charmaz, 2006) was adopted for the first cycle of coding. then, the researchers discussed the dataset and first set of codes in a team meeting and decided on the next stage of focused coding of the dataset. all the codes were then compared and refined, and a unified code list was generated. during the final stage, through frequent discussions about coding and memos, compassion emerged as the main theme across the data. four categories of compassion became apparent: self-compassion, compassion for/from learners, compassion for/from colleagues and headteachers, and compassion for/from personal relationships. these themes are elaborated on in the following findings section. findings self-compassion self-compassion is understood as compassionate behavior directed inward and includes being caring towards ourselves through being mindful, kind, and accepting that as human beings, we are all imperfect and make mistakes (neff & germer, 2017). during times of crisis, kotera and van gordon (2021) explain that self-compassion and self-care competencies can lead to more resilience and the role of compassion during the shift to online teaching… tapsla.13123 p. 9/22 stability and can therefore serve as a useful resource to protect one’s wellbeing during periods of difficulty and beyond. in this study, the analysis revealed that 14 out of 21 participants explicitly mentioned that self-compassion played a key role in shaping their wellbeing during the pandemic crisis. one teacher (john, uk) mentioned that he found it difficult to be compassionate with himself during the stressful situation of the pandemic. throughout his whole interview, john showed a lack of selfcompassion and reported on being unconfident, unhappy, and unsatisfied in his professional role, even before the pandemic, as he struggled with student behavior and had the feeling that his “career might be coming to an end.” six teachers did not explicitly discuss self-compassion and did not report on any self-compassionate behavior in their interviews. among the 14 teachers, 12 teachers mentioned the importance of selfcompassion even before the pandemic crisis. for them, self-compassionate behavior mostly included assigning more time to themselves and seeking to reduce workload. one example was provided by jakob (austria), who realized that he could not fulfill his excessive workload anymore and therefore needed to reduce the amount of work in order to improve his wellbeing, without feeling guilty about it: “i think it has definitely become even more of a concern to me that i want to care more about life and not just work. and so that has changed.” to do so, he decided to say no to all non-essential work opportunities and made a note of this in a calendar, so he had a visual reminder of “seeing stuff that [he] didn’t have to do in [his] to-do-list.” he further added: “that really helped and that sort of strengthened this idea of doing less [and] that made it a bit easier.” another example was jennifer who was aware of the importance of affording time for herself and protecting her boundaries: “i actually quite like some time to myself, i try to cut corners with workload wherever i can.” indeed, the transition to online teaching and the high levels of stress experienced in this situation triggered 12 teachers to become more aware of the need to prioritize self-care and their wellbeing. eliza (us), for example, mentioned that during the pandemic she decided to “remove [herself] from a lot of things” since she juggled multiple obligations at the same time. she even concluded that this act of putting herself first was “the one good thing the pandemic has done.” similarly, naomi (argentina) also realized that she had to be more compassionate towards herself during the pandemic crisis. at first, she felt “down and cried all the time,” but soon she consciously engaged in positive self-talk and took a social comparison perspective to realize how this situation not only affected her but other people globally as well. indeed, one core component of self-compassion is the ability to recognize common humanity and reframe one’s own perspective; understanding that we are not alone during challenging times, helps us to feel less isolated and eases one’s pain (neff & germer, 2017). tapsla.13123 p. 10/22 a. mairitsch, s. babic, s. mercer, g. sulis, s. shin in contrast, a lack of self-compassion appeared to affect one teacher’s (john, uk) wellbeing negatively. john’s interview showed that throughout his life he has struggled with self-regulation and self-compassion. he reported often feeling tired, depressed, and engaging negative self-talk: i’m not self-disciplined enough to be working from home […] and it is frustrating that we don’t know what the students are doing. and i think that’s going to be very hard to fix next year when we start—hoping that we see the next year, that’s still far from certain. his negative feelings were further amplified by the pandemic crisis. although he was aware that he had to take care of his wellbeing and treat himself kindly, he just could not manage this and constantly reported feeling guilty “for wasting that time” during the pandemic. in contrast to the social comparison which highlighted the shared humanity for many participants, john’s social comparison processes implied to him a failure and missed opportunity: i’ve done the reading, […] i’ve watched a lot of tv, but i haven’t tidied my house. it’s those things that there’s always an opportunity, i could have spent my time more productively and when we get back, i will regret that my house is still untidy when i had this opportunity to deal with it. studies have shown that a lack of self-compassion is associated with anxious behavior, depressive symptoms, and rumination, whereas self-compassionate people tend to have higher levels of wellbeing and experience less emotional exhaustion and burnout (e.g., raes, 2010). therefore, findings from these interviews showed that teachers who were self-compassionate and proactive in enhancing their wellbeing were better able to regulate their stress during the pandemic crisis. compassion for/from learners in the educational workplace, compassion is a crucial asset and is typically expressed by teachers towards their students through forms of “affection, caring, generosity, and tenderness” (eldor & shoshani, 2016, p. 126). teachers who express acts of compassion towards their students experience higher job commitment, feel more satisfied in their chosen profession, and make their work more meaningful, thus affecting their wellbeing (dutton & worline, 2020). findings revealed that all 21 teachers in our study were compassionate towards their students during the pandemic. these acts of compassion were the role of compassion during the shift to online teaching… tapsla.13123 p. 11/22 expressed in different ways: focusing on socio-emotional learning in the classroom, trying to reach out to all students even if they appeared disengaged, and generally putting their students’ needs first. eleven teachers explicitly said that in light of the pandemic crisis they had shifted their focus from content-based teaching to the wellbeing of their students. for example, maria (argentina) explained: “when the pandemic started, there was a moment at its top, and i said, ‘okay, what do i want my students to have at this moment? content? support? what?’ and what i realized was that they need my support.” she continued: “so i left content aside, i planned my lessons focusing on their emotions [and] how i can help them realize that among these negative situations, they could find something positive.” in another example, louise (switzerland) also explained that she was very concerned about her student’s wellbeing during the pandemic: “i think it was really important that we focus on the welfare of the children while they were isolated in their rooms.” although, at first glance, teachers in this study were more occupied with the wellbeing of their students, they were also aware that the social interaction with them and their compassionate behavior towards them could be beneficial for their own wellbeing, as highlighted by penelope (greece): the thing about wellbeing is that it is a dynamic process. […] we are social beings. our wellbeing depends on other people to a various extent. and we should be kind to other people so that we can be kind to ourselves. similarly, teachers are not only the ones to express compassion for their learners, but they may also receive compassion which can, in turn, affect their wellbeing. indeed, the “act of receiving compassion may reenergize teachers and provide them the strategies to effectively cope with stress” (eldor & shoshani, 2016, p. 133). all 21 teachers mentioned that some of their relationships with students had changed in context of the pandemic crisis and, as such, affected their wellbeing. these changes were both positive and negative, depending on individual students. thirteen teachers reported on how some of their relationships to students had improved and described acts of mutual compassion. for example, charlotte (us) explained: “i think it’s a great relationship. i keep on getting emails every week, like ‘hey, i really miss you, i want to go back to school. please tell us if we are going back to school!”’ in another example, amber (us) talked about a similar experience with her students: “some of the students sent me some really nice emails, like, ‘thank you. you’ve still tried to make remote learning interesting for us and we appreciate your hard work!”’ these forms of compassion affected the teachers positively and gave them a welcome motivational boost. however, thirteen teachers reported that learners showed disengagement and a lack of interest in schoolwork, which was damaging to the studenttapsla.13123 p. 12/22 a. mairitsch, s. babic, s. mercer, g. sulis, s. shin teacher relationship. john (uk), for example, explained: “in some cases, the relationship is no longer there, because i’m not in any meaningful contact with them […]. they don’t do the work and they don’t respond to messages i send them.” nevertheless, all of the teachers explained that although they could not reach every student during the pandemic crisis, they still felt compassionate towards them and tried to do their best. a good example was provided by penelope (greece), who said: i try to do my best for them. what i think is best for them, of course, might not be what they think is best for them […] at the very least, i try to talk to them. and i try to be open to them. these acts of compassion between students and teachers played a key role in the wellbeing of these educators during the crisis. if teachers receive compassion from their students, it can simultaneously affect their wellbeing positively and improve their work engagement (eldor & shoshani, 2016). compassion for/from colleagues and from headteachers compassion in the workplace is understood as behavior and acts of kindness that are intended for the wellbeing of others, without expecting any organizational benefits in return (sprecher & fehr, 2005). in the current study, eight teachers reported that they felt their colleagues were compassionate towards them during the time of the pandemic crisis by offering help, support, and sharing workload. for instance, naomi (argentina) described her distress when she encountered technological problems and the way in which her colleague showed compassion and practical advice: i contacted her crying and crying. i said, “i cannot do this.” she said, “[naomi], relax. when you are ready, when you feel that you can speak without crying, call me. […] i’m going to explain with a cell phone on the computer part by part by taking pictures and everything how zoom works […].” and we did it. not only did these teachers report that they felt supported by their colleagues, but the interview data revealed that nine teachers also tried to help their fellow teachers. jennifer (uk) explained that in her school all language teachers split their workload and supported each other in this way. in another instance, jane (uk) helped a colleague by taking over her spanish classes and doing her marking, as she had family obligations and was struggling to balance work and private life. similarly, eliza (us) explained: “all of us teachers the role of compassion during the shift to online teaching… tapsla.13123 p. 13/22 are trying to help each other out. just keep our heads up in the water.” such collegiality appeared to be extremely important for the teachers in practical as well as emotional terms. five teachers also felt they received compassion and support from their headteachers. for example, alice (new zealand) mentioned that her headteacher was very supportive and did not pressure them to be “amazing teachers.” alice further explained that her headteacher said: “we know that it’s not going to be easy, and you just have to do what you can do and don’t beat yourself up about things that you can’t do.” it appeared that such compassionate behavior eased teachers’ distress, helped them cope during the pandemic, supported their self-efficacy, and, on the whole, positively influenced their wellbeing, as is in line with previous research (griffith, 2000). however, seven teachers also reported experiencing a lack of compassion from their colleagues and headteachers. in suzy’s case (us), she was forced to make a life decision due to lack of understanding and support from her headteacher. suzy was teaching online in another country and due to her sister getting covid-19, she asked her school to go back to her home country and teach. however, her headteacher told her: “you signed the contract, you have to be here.” she further explained: “so they just weren’t really willing to discuss things with me or negotiate things. and i was like, well, if my sister dies, i want to be at home. [and] i resigned.” in another example, louise (switzerland) felt disappointed about the lack of compassion and lack of contact from her headteacher: “i don’t think she was that interested in the teaching. you know, she wasn’t a teacher. only interested in the money.” she added: “i think i spoke to her once during the pandemic.” moreover, nine teachers reported that during the pandemic, relationships between colleagues deteriorated and they experienced uncompassionate and uncollegial feelings in the workplace. for example, gabriela (nicaragua) explained: “[a colleague] was screaming at me. […] those situations happened because all of this, the tension, the stress. and so yes, the relationships between some teachers are different. everything has changed. everything.” penelope (greece) also mentioned that some of her colleagues were “not willing to take the extra step” for other colleagues. this lack of understanding and compassion discouraged her: “this is a low for me, because obviously, this is a case where i cannot change my colleagues’ minds.” it seemed that a lack of compassion from colleagues and headteachers added to teachers’ stress in already difficult times and, indeed, is a key factor underlying teacher stress and attrition under normal working conditions (prilleltensky et al., 2016). in contrast, reciprocal compassion has been shown to be linked to positive emotions and can serve as a buffer against stress (cosley et al., 2010). these data show the importance of compassion in the workplace not only from leadership but amongst colleagues. tapsla.13123 p. 14/22 a. mairitsch, s. babic, s. mercer, g. sulis, s. shin compassion for/from personal relationships compassion was also a key factor in participants’ private relationships. all 21 teachers in this study discussed compassion in their personal relationships including family members, partners, and friends during the pandemic crisis. acts of compassion included protecting their loved one’s health, staying physically distant but remaining in close contact, and supporting each other in daily life matters, such as housework chores, grocery shopping, and looking after their children. eight teachers worried about their family’s health during the pandemic crisis and as such, put their family’s needs first. for example, maria (argentina) explained that, although she had the urgent need to see her parents, she opted not to, in order to keep them safe: “my parents are at risk because of the pandemic, so we don’t have so much contact with them, just for urgency.” however, she added that they are in frequent contact via phone. similarly, amber (us) mentioned that she tried to take care of her health, not to put her family in any danger: “my mom and my sister [are] both immunocompromised. so […] i just want to try to stay healthy because if i want to be around them ever, i don’t want to get them sick, because that would be awful.” john (uk) couldn’t see his partner during the pandemic, since he belonged to the risk-group, but john made a constant effort to call him every day and to encourage him as his partner was feeling lonely and vulnerable. another example was provided by gabriela (nicaragua) whose whole family depended on her taking care of them: i live with my parents and my sister and my grandma. […] so, i had everything on my back. i was the one cleaning, i was the one making sure everything is okay, i was going to the supermarket, i was doing pretty much everything. […] it’s kind of hard. as such, these teachers’ compassionate behavior stemmed from their worry about keeping their families healthy and safe, even if this meant putting their own needs behind for a period of time. similarly, five teachers reported on receiving compassion from their loved ones. jane (uk) provided an example of her husband, who has been “really supportive” during the pandemic crisis. likewise, naomi (argentina) explained how much she depends on the help of her sister, who does all the shopping, cooking, and cleaning for her: “so, it’s my sister helping me all the time” which eased her stress during online teaching. family members living in the same household as the teachers could see how stressful online teaching was, and therefore tried to be supportive and compassionate. this effort of perspective-taking can be relevant for creating a compassionate relationship between family members and beloved ones, which, subsequently, the role of compassion during the shift to online teaching… tapsla.13123 p. 15/22 can serve as a motivating force to understand when and how someone needs help (davis, 2017). in the case of the participants of this study, they offered and received both emotional (showing genuine interest, understanding, and providing encouragement) and instrumental support (taking over housework, going shopping, taking care of children) (davis, 2017) that in turn led them to develop compassionate relationships with their partners and family members in a time of crisis. discussion the aim of this research paper was to shed light on the role played by acts of self-compassion and compassion on language teacher wellbeing during the first wave of the pandemic crisis. the study has shown that these two psychological constructs played a crucial role in shaping language teachers’ wellbeing and the ways in which they handled the challenges posed by the pandemic crisis. firstly, a sense of self-compassion helped these teachers to prioritize their own wellbeing. as shown by the data, participants displayed different forms of self-compassion. some teachers in this study adopted more fierce forms of self-compassion (neff, 2021) by actively putting their own needs first to protect their wellbeing, while others showed acts of kind self-compassion through positive self-talk and reappraisal. these acts of self-compassion helped teachers to better regulate their own stress response during the time of crisis, but also made them aware to be more compassionate towards people around them. indeed, self-compassion and other-oriented compassion are inherently interwoven and influence each other (neff & germer, 2017). furthermore, teachers in our study foregrounded compassion as a core element in their teaching during the pandemic and beyond. a time of crisis can enhance the community’s wish to support other members of society; this positive prosocial tenor can “also generalize beyond the situation and over time” (vollhardt, 2009, p. 76). not only did teachers in our study enact compassion but they also received it from their students. indeed, compassionate behavior for and from students influenced teachers’ motivation and wellbeing. however, especially within collegial settings, several teachers in this study reported on a lack of compassion from their fellow teachers and headteachers, which added to their stress and amplified the negative emotions teachers were experiencing due to the pandemic crisis (prilleltensky et al., 2016). finally, language teachers in this study did not solely take meaning from acts of compassion in the workplace, but also showed and received forms of compassion in their private life domains. in fact, research has found that tapsla.13123 p. 16/22 a. mairitsch, s. babic, s. mercer, g. sulis, s. shin being kind and compassionate towards others is not only beneficial for the receiver of the act of kindness, but also for the giver, as it can enhance one’s own subjective wellbeing and self-esteem (lyubomirsky & layous, 2013; malti, 2020). conclusion in this study, we aimed to highlight the crucial role that compassion and self-compassion play in the workplace of teachers as well as in their private domains. we would like to emphasize the central role of compassion in the educational setting in order to make teachers, policy makers, and educational stakeholders aware of its relevance and links to teacher wellbeing. in recent years, research has argued for a more compassionate style of leadership (de zulueta, 2016), and we argue that this supportive form of management should also become established in educational contexts, as headteachers need to positively engage and enable their staff to thrive in their professional roles, not only in times of crisis but beyond. furthermore, we also emphasize the need for (self-)compassion interventions both for students and teachers to make them aware of the health benefits compassionate behavior can induce throughout their whole personal and professional life domains. indeed, these interventions can increase participant’s self-regulation, motivation, sense of agency, resilience, and overall wellbeing (e.g., bluth & eisenlohr-moul, 2017; dundas et al., 2017). this research has highlighted the need to cultivate acts of compassion and self-compassion in educational settings, in order to increase teacher wellbeing, but also to encourage teachers and students to become compassionate towards each other and to help create a more compassionate society in the long term. funding: this work was supported by the austrian science fund [fwf] under grant [p 31261-g29]. disclosure statement: no potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. data availability statement: due to the nature of this research, participants of this study did not agree for their data to be shared publicly, so supporting data is not available. the role of compassion during the shift to online teaching… tapsla.13123 p. 17/22 references armstrong, k. 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(2015). the relationship between self-compassion and well-being: a meta-analysis. applied psychology: health and well-being, 7(3), 340–364. https://doi.org/10.1111/aphw.12051 the role of compassion during the shift to online teaching… tapsla.13123 p. 21/22 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijsu.2020.02.034 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijsu.2020.02.034 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-011-9170-y https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-011-9170-y https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-009-0088-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-009-0088-1 https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---11-march-2020 https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---11-march-2020 https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---11-march-2020 astrid mairitsch, sonja babic, sarah mercer, giulia sulis, sun shin die rolle des mitgefühls in bezug auf das wohlbefinden von sprachlehrenden während der umstellung auf online-unterricht z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g forschung über mitgefühl hat in den letzten jahrzehnten zunehmend an aufmerksamkeit gewonnen (seppälä et al., 2017). empirische studien, die sich mit der rolle des mitgefühls für lehrkräfte befassen, gibt es allerdings nur wenige. in diesem beitrag wird über eine studie berichtet, in der das wohlbefinden von 21 sprachlehrer:innen aus aller welt während der ersten welle der covid-19-pandemie untersucht wurde. insbesondere sollte erforscht werden, wie mitgefühl mit anderen und mit sich selbst zum wohlbefinden von sprachlehrer:innen in dieser zeit beitrugen. die daten wurden durch ausführliche, semi-strukturierte online-einzelinterviews gewonnen und aus der perspektive der grounded theory (charmaz, 2006) analysiert. die ergebnisse zeigten, dass mitgefühl am arbeitsplatz und im privatleben der lehrkräfte eine entscheidende rolle bei der gestaltung des wohlbefindens unserer teilnehmer:innen in dieser zeit der krise spielten. darüber hinaus erwies sich selbstmitgefühl als ein wichtiger faktor, der das wohlbefinden der lehrer:innen während der pandemiekrise beeinf lusste. tatsächlich waren mitgefühl und selbstmitgefühl kernelemente ihres unterrichts und schienen sich auf die beziehungen zu ihren schüler:innen, kolleg:innen und schulleiter:innen auszuwirken. ohne mitgefühl wurde die stressige und schwierige situation, in der sie sich ohnedies durch die pandemie befanden, oft noch verschlimmert. diese ergebnisse deuten auf den potenziellen nutzen von trainings und fortbildungen im bereich mitgefühl und selbstmitgefühl für lehrpersonen hin, wodurch ihr wohlbefinden am arbeitsplatz gefördert werden kann. dies kann sowohl den lehrpersonen selbst, als auch den schüler:innen, eltern, und dem bildungssystem als ganzes zu gute kommen. schlüsselwörter: mitgefühl, selbstmitgefühl, wohlbefinden von sprachlehrer:innen, bildung, covid-19-pandemie tapsla.13123 p. 22/22 a. mairitsch, s. babic, s. mercer, g. sulis, s. shin theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 8 (1), 2022, pp. 129–155 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.10353 seray tanyer https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6190-8651 anadolu university, turkey samet deniz https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4493-816x anadolu university, turkey turkish efl learners’ acquisition of psych verbs and unaccusative verbs: a replication study on underpassivization and overpassivization a b s t r a c t the processability account anticipates that learners will make more underpassivization errors than overpassivization errors since passivization entails more processing. although one study on psych verbs and a few on unaccusatives examined turkish l2 learners’ acquisition, no research compared a single set of learners’ acquisitions of these verbs together from a processing point of view. in this regard, the current study aims to investigate whether the processing complexity of passivization inf luences acquisition of psych and unaccusative verbs. it also questions whether general accuracy levels in grammaticality judgement task (gjt) and degree of familiarity with target verbs are related to their level of accuracy with individual psych and unaccusative verbs. 33 undergraduate-level university students performed on the gjt and a word familiarity rating task (wfrt). the gjt included 38 items with 12 sentences for psych verbs, 12 sentences for unaccusative verbs, 12 sentences for distracters and two sentences for examples. the wfrt was a survey questioning familiarity with six psych and six unaccusative verbs. to analyse the data, a set of nonparametric tests and descriptive statistics were used. the results revealed that learners performed more accurately on unaccusatives than on psych verbs. they did more underpassivization errors by accepting ungrammatical active constructions of psych verbs. their performances on psych and unaccusative verbs went parallel with their general accuracy levels in gjt while their degree of familiarity with and accuracy level for two verbs do not correlate with each other. the results suggest that such factors as processability and l1 transfer seem to impact the acquisition. keywords: second language acquisition, psych verbs, unaccusative verbs, underpassivization, overpassivization https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.10353 seray tanyer, samet deniz130 research on l1 acquisition indicates that acquisition of passive voice by native english children is postponed to the later stages during their language development (de villiers & de villiers, 1973). this later development of child language in terms of passivization has been attributed to the complexity of syntactic operations and problems in semantic-syntactic mapping (pienemann, 2005). in a scenario where processability plays a role in the acquisition of english as an l2, passive constructions requiring more processing will be more difficult to acquire as compared to active constructions. as a result, l2 learners of english can potentially make more errors with passive constructions, favor active constructions over passive constructions, and even wrongly accept or use active constructions in the context where passives are necessary. the underuse and overuse of passive constructions with two particular verb classes (i.e., psych verbs and unaccusative verbs) have already been observed in the studies conducted with turkish learners of l2 english (i.e., kurtoğlu, 2006; montrual, 2001). what is deficient is a comparison between the acquisition of psych and unaccusative verbs from a processing point of view. as this view assumes that linguistic components necessitating less processing can be acquired earlier than those necessitating more processing, l2 learners of english can be expected to make more underpassivization errors with psych verbs than overpassivization errors with unaccusative verbs. hence, the current research mainly intends to investigate turkish efl learners’ acquisition of psych verbs and unaccusative verbs with a specific focus on underpassivization and overpassivization. literature review the literature suggests different hierarchies for thematic roles (e.g., bresnan, 2001; foley & van valin, 1984; givon, 1984; jackendof, 1972) and grammatical functions (keenan & comrie, 1977) as seen in (1) and (2) below. (1) thematic hierarchy (bresnan, 2001, p. 307) agent > beneficiary > experiencer/goal > instrument > patient/theme > locative (2) relational hierarchy (keenan & comrie, 1977) ( core ) ( non-core ) subj > obj > objq > objq > compl > adjunct depending on the thematic and relational hierarchies, pieneman et al. (2005) suggested the lexical mapping hypothesis which has recently been resolved as follows: turkish efl learners’ acquisition of psych verbs and unaccusative verbs… 131 in second language acquisition learners will initially map the highest available role in the semantic hierarchy onto a minimally specified sub/top. we call this: canonical mapping. then they learn to map further arguments onto grammatical functions (gf) other than subj or obj. finally, they learn to attribute prominence to a particular thematic role lower in the semantic hierarchy by promoting it to subj. at this stage they also learn to defocus the highest role by suppressing it or mapping it onto a gf other than subj. we call these non-canonical mapping. (kawaguchi, 2013, p. 93) as detailed above, canonical mapping in english necessitates at least two arguments in its transitive actualization. agent as the more prominent role is placed on subject while patient as the less prominent role is placed on object position. there also exist some intransitive verbs (i.e., unergative verbs, e.g., cry) which shows a canonical mapping operation. the only argument of these verbs would be an agent or experiencer which is a high role in the thematic hierarchy and is mapped on subject position. (3) canonical – transitive the dog ate the meat. agent patient (thematic roles) subject object (grammatical functions) (4) canonical – intransitive the child cried. agent (thematic role) subject (grammatical function) apart from canonical mapping, two types of non-canonical mapping can be observed in english that are either structurally or lexically created. the noncanonical mapping created structurally “is usually called ‘structural’ because the alternative lexical entry creates a structural frame which is regular and predictable” (kawaguchi, 2013, p. 96). this kind of non-canonical mapping can be exemplified with passive (e.g., active eat versus passive be eaten, (5)) and causative constructions (make x wash y). (5) passive mapping the meat was eaten by the dog. patient agent object subject the non-canonical mapping produced lexically, on the other hand, “are intrinsically required by the lexical verb” (kawaguchi, 2013, p. 96), which makes them irregular and unpredictable as compared to the first one. so, the l2 learners need to discover and learn them as how the occasion requires. two different verb classes which build non-canonical mappings in english and are within the scope of the current research are unaccusative verbs and psych verbs. unaccusative verbs are a sub-category of intransitive verbs which take themes as their subjects. this category of verbs includes verbs of occurrence (e.g., happen, occur), and dis/appearance (e.g., die, disappear; levin, 1993, seray tanyer, samet deniz132 pp. 30, 258) which are defined as non-alternating unaccusatives since they do not have any transitive or passive alternatives (6). (6) a. unaccusative an accident happened. theme b. transitive *the woman happened an accident. subject theme c. passive *the accident was happened. theme the other verb type forming non-canonical mappings in english are psych verbs which are a subcategory of transitive verbs (e.g., frighten, surprise, disappoint; although intransitive use of them is possible for some verbs and forms, it is not a concern of the current paper), and they basically “describe the bringing about of a change in psychological or emotional state” (levin, 1993, p. 189). in english, these verbs take at least two arguments in their transitive and passive use that are theme and experiencer. however, locating experiencer in subject position by using some psych verbs intransitively results in an ungrammatical use in english (see 7c). (7) a. transitive the news surprised the people. theme experiencer b. passive the people were surprised at the news. experiencer theme the people were surprised when they heard the news. experiencer c. intransitive *the people surprised when they heard the news. experiencer hahn (2011) argues that if processability plays a role in the acquisition of english as an l2, passive constructions requiring more processing will be more difficult to acquire as compared to active constructions. therefore, l2 learners of english can potentially make more errors with passive constructions, favor active constructions over passive constructions, and even wrongly accept or use active constructions in the context where passives are necessary. since psych verbs map the experiencer in the subject position (i.e., the people were surprised…), they can be regarded as a subcategory of passive constructions. this implies that the processing load of passivization is also valid for psych verb constructions, too. for this reason, l2 learners of english are supposed to deal with processing complexity of passivization in acquiring psych verb constructions. the incorrect underuse of passives with psych verbs was documented in a study of montrul (2001) conducted with turkish learners of l2 english. although intransitive psych verbs are accepted ungrammatical in english (i.e., *the hunter frightened), turkish l2 learners were found to label this turkish efl learners’ acquisition of psych verbs and unaccusative verbs… 133 use of psych verbs as grammatical. overpassivization can, on the other hand, be a probable area of errors for l2 learners of english. turkish learners, for example, have been observed while overpassivizing in the contexts where they are supposed to prefer active construction with unaccusative verbs (kurtoğlu, 2006). if turkish learners are observed while making such an underpassivization error in (7c) more than the overpassivization error in (6c), the reason of learners’ underpassivization in english psych verb constructions can stem from the processing complexity of passivization. this claim has also been supported by kawaguchi (2013, p. 99) which indicated that “within lexically non-canonical mapping, … unaccusatives are acquired before psych verbs.” therefore, the findings of the translation task conducted with japanese l2 learners of english revealed the following acquisition order: canonical > unaccusative verb > psych verb. the above few studies have indicated that turkish learners of l2 english can underpassivize psych verbs and overpassivize unaccusative verbs. if processability account has a role in constraining l2 acquisition of english, linguistic dimensions necessitating less processing can be hypothesized to be acquired earlier than those necessitating more processing. therefore, turkish learners can commit more underpassivization errors with psych verbs as compared to overpassivization errors with unaccusative verbs. as no particular research has been conducted related to this issue with a specific reference to turkish learners of l2 english, the current study has attempted to shed a humble light on it by investigating the acquisition of unaccusative and psych verbs simultaneously and comparatively. while quite a few studies (i.e., kurtoğlu, 2006; montrul, 2001) have investigated the nature of turkish learners’ acquisition of psych verbs and unaccusative verbs, no research have been conducted to examine these verbs together from a processing account of language acquisition and for a single set of subjects. the current study, therefore, aims to investigate turkish l2 learners’ acquisition of psych verbs and unaccusative verbs, and find out whether the development of these learners’ interlanguage is constrained by the processability account of language acquisition or not. it also aims to investigate whether turkish l2 learners’ perceived word familiarity is related to their acquisition of psych verb and unaccusative verb constructions. research questions rq1. do elt students perform more accurately on any verb type: psych verbs vs. unaccusative verbs? rq2. do elt students’ performances on psych verbs and unaccusative verbs differ across their accuracy levels in gjt (i.e., low, medium, high)? seray tanyer, samet deniz134 rq3. do elt students with low, medium and high accuracy of gjt perform better on any verb type: psych verbs vs. unaccusative verbs? rq4. are elt students more familiar with any verb type: psych verbs or unaccusative verbs? rq5. is there any relationship between elt students’ degree of familiarity and level of accuracy with psych and unaccusative verbs? rq6. do elt students perform more accurately on any construction of psych and unaccusative verbs: passive vs. active constructions? in parallel with these research questions, three main hypotheses developed by hahn (2011) and reported below have been tested. among them, rq1 and rq6 are relevant to hypothesis 1, rq2 and rq3 are related to hypothesis 2 while rq4 and rq5 are concerned with hypothesis 3. hypothesis 1: passives charge processing cost, and thus learners will make more errors due to underpassivization than overpassivization. as a result, psych verb constructions, which require passivization, will be more difficult to acquire than unaccusatives, which do not require it. hypothesis 2: once learners reach a stage where passivization does not charge extra-cost, learners’ underpassivization errors will reduce, and accordingly, their errors with psych verb constructions will decrease rapidly. hypothesis 3: learners’ difficulty with psych verb constructions and unaccusative constructions will not depend on their familiarity with individual verbs. (hahn, 2011, p. 63) method participants a total of 33 undergraduate-level university students enrolling in the program of english language teaching (elt) at a state university of turkey participated in the study. the participants consisted of first-year (n = 24, 73%), second-year (n = 7, 21%) and fourth-year (n = 2, 6%) students. of the 33 participants, 18 were females (55%) and 15 were males (45%). this group of students were chosen as the research sample because the current study was designed as a replication of the research conducted by hahn (2011) whose participants were comprised of the university students studying english as their major and minor. the participants of the current study were members of the course called critical reading which is developed for the second half of first-year elt program during the 2017–2018 academic year. the first-year turkish efl learners’ acquisition of psych verbs and unaccusative verbs… 135 program is also full of courses aiming to improve students’ l2 (i.e., english) such as contextual grammar, academic reading, written communication, listening comprehension, oral communication skills, and academic writing and report writing. instruments two different tasks developed by hahn (2011) were applied in the current study: (1) grammaticality judgement task (gjt) and (2) word familiarity rating task (wfrt). the first one, gjt, were a total of 38 items with 12 sentences for psych verbs, 12 sentences for unaccusative verbs, 12 sentences for distracters and two sentences for examples (see appendix a). the gjt included six psych verbs (i.e., disappoint, embarrass, frighten, frustrate, shock, surprise) and six unaccusative verbs (i.e., arrive, die, disappear, fall, happen, occur) with which six pairs of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences were formed as exemplified in (8) and (9). it also includes 12 distracting sentences theorized to be problematic for l2 learners and serving the purpose of preventing the students from concentrating excessively on psych and unaccusative verb constructions. for more details related to task design process, you may take a look at the “instrument and procedure” section of hahn (2011, pp. 63–66). (8) psych-verb constructions grammatical: the girl was disappointed when she found her grade. (item 19) ungrammatical: the boy disappointed because he got a bad grade. (item 31) (9) unaccusative-verb constructions grammatical: a letter from her mom arrived two days ago. (item 34) ungrammatical: your package was arrived a few hours ago. (item 20) the second task applied was the wfrt and it was a survey questioning familiarity with a total of 12 psych and unaccusative verbs (see appendix b). in this task, the participants were supposed to indicate their degrees of familiarity with individual psych and unaccusative verbs on a 4-point likert scale ranging from “1 = very unfamiliar” to “4 = very familiar.” data collection and analysis the data were collected in the second semester of 2017–2018 academic year at a turkish state university in turkey. the participants were from the two sections of critical reading class and the study was conducted during class time. the two tasks were implemented at the same time with gjt being the seray tanyer, samet deniz136 first and wfrt being the second one asked to be filled out. different from the previous study (hahn, 2011), an untimed application of the gtj was preferred because of practical reasons, and additionally, participants were requested not to turn back and revise their responses for the task. “volunteer participation” was an adopted criterion during the data collection process therefore only the students having this volunteerism performed the two target tasks by signing the certificate of consent (see appendix a). as for data analysis, firstly, the individual performances of the participants were calculated. in gjt, each accurate response corresponded to “1” point while each inaccurate response corresponded to “0.” the sum of the points participants collected from gjt was equivalent to their accuracy scores. in addition to the total score of gjt, the scores for psych verb and unaccusative verb constructions as well as distracters were also calculated. as for wfrt, degree of familiarity with psych and unaccusative verbs were determined according to the values chosen by the participants on the 4-point likert scale. therefore, the familiarity degree of each participant for individual and two groups of verbs ranged across 1, 2, 3, and 4. based on these scores, descriptive statistics were tabulated and a set of nonparametric tests were conducted with the aim of answering research questions. in order to answer rq1 (i.e., do elt students perform more accurately on psych verbs or unaccusative verbs?), a wilcoxon signed-ranks test was conducted to compare the participants’ performances on psych and unaccusative verbs. to investigate (rq2) whether elt students’ performances on psych verbs and unaccusative verbs differ across their accuracy levels in gjt (i.e., low, medium, high), two different kruskal-wallis tests were conducted, which was followed by a sets of mann-whitney u tests as follow-ups. for rq3 (i.e., do elt students with low, medium and high accuracy of gjt perform better on any verb type including psych verbs and unaccusative verbs?), three different wilcoxon signed-ranks tests were performed to compare the performances of low, moderate and high accurate participants on psych and unaccusative verbs. in order to find out whether elt students are more familiar with psych verbs or unaccusative verbs (rq4), a wilcoxon signed-ranks test was conducted to compare the participants’ degree of familiarity with psych and unaccusative verbs. the pearson correlation coefficient was used to investigate the possible relationship between degree of familiarity and level of accuracy with psych and unaccusative verbs (rq5). lastly, so as to investigate whether elt students perform more accurately on any of the two constructions of psych and unaccusative verbs (i.e., passive vs. active constructions), two sets of wilcoxon signed-ranks tests were conducted (rq6). in addition to these nonparametric tests, descriptive statistics of the related variables were also reported in the results section in a detailed manner. turkish efl learners’ acquisition of psych verbs and unaccusative verbs… 137 results as a first step to data analysis, the normality of the data has been tested. a shapiro-wilk’s test ( p = .031) and the visuals of histograms, normal q-q plots and box plots showed that the data from gjt were not normally distributed, with a skewness of –0.539 (se = 0.409) and a kurtosis of –0.769 (se = 0.798). also, the data from wfrt were found not to be normally distributed with a skewness of –1.572 (se = 0.409) and a kurtosis of 2.786 (se = 0.798). as the assumption of normality has not been met for this sample, the researchers used nonparametric tests for the analyses. table 1. descriptive statistics: psych-v, unaccusative-v, other structures and gjt n min. max. mean std. deviation std. error mean gjt_psych-v 33 1 12 9.424 2.598 0.452 gjt_unaccusative-v 33 3 12 9.787 1.916 0.333 gjt_other structures 33 5 11 8.545 1.715 0.298 gjt (total) 33 18 35 27.757 4.416 0.768 as indicated in the table 1, the participants of the current study performed more accurately on unaccusative verbs (m = 9.787, sd = 1.916) than on psych verbs (m = 9.424, sd = 2.598). table 2. wilcoxon signed-rank test: psych-v vs. unaccusative-v in gjt gjt_unaccusative-v gjt_psych-v n mean rank sum of ranks z p negative ranks 12 13.75 165 –.583* .560 positive ranks 15 14.20 213 equal 6 total 33 *based on negative ranks. to answer rq1 (i.e., do first-year elt students perform more accurately on any verb type: psych verbs vs. unaccusative verbs?) the following step was to conduct a wilcoxon signed-ranks test in order to compare the performances of the participants for two types of constructions: psych verbs (mdn = 10) and unaccusative verbs (mdn = 10). the results (see table 2) indicated that despite the values found by the descriptive statistics (table 2), seray tanyer, samet deniz138 unaccusative verb ranks were not statistically significantly higher than psych verb ranks (z = –0.583, p > .05). table 3. the formula applied to calculate three accuracy levels in gjt low m – sd = y (y and above scores) y = 23.341 x = 32.173medium m + sd = x and m – sd = y (the scores between x and y) high m + sd = x (x and above scores) to answer rq2 (i.e., do first-year elt students’ performances on psych verbs and unaccusative verbs differ across their accuracy levels in gjt (i.e., low, medium, high)?), firstly, the accuracy profile of the participants for gjt have been decided. for this purpose, the accuracy score of each participant for gjt has been calculated. while scoring the participants’ responses for the task, each accurate response corresponded to “1” point. each inaccurate response, on the other hand, corresponded to “0” point. therefore, the sum of the points participants collected for 36 items composed the accuracy score for gjt. as stated in table 3, the mean value and the standard deviation of the mean for gjt were found as follows: m = 27.757, sd = 4.416. based on these values, the obtained accuracy scores in gjt were divided into three levels as low-accurate, medium-accurate and high-accurate using the formula detailed in table 3. table 4. the accuracy profiles of the participants for gjt level accuracy in gjt min. max. n [%] low-accurate 23 and below 18 23 7 21 medium-accurate between 23 and 32 24 31 20 61 high-accurate 32 and above 32 35 6 18 total 33 100 as a result, the participants with the accuracy scores of “23” and below were determined as low-accurate (n = 7, 21%) while the ones with the accuracy scores of “32” and above were decided as high-accurate (n = 20, 61%). the rest of the participants having the accuracy scores between “23” and “32” were, on the other hand, defined as medium-accurate (n = 6, 18%) as depicted in table 4. turkish efl learners’ acquisition of psych verbs and unaccusative verbs… 139 table 5. descriptive statistics: accuracy for psych-v and unaccusative-v across 3-levels in gjt accuracy level gjt gjt_psych-v gjt_unaccusative-v mean std. deviation std. error mean mean std. deviation std. error mean low (n = 7) 6.571 2.820 1.065 8.142 2.609 0.986 medium (n = 20) 9.850 1.926 0.430 9.900 1.447 0.323 high (n = 6) 11.833 0.408 0.166 11.333 0.816 0.333 in table 5, the related values of low-accurate, medium-accurate and highaccurate participants for psych verbs and unaccusative verbs have been tabulated. as seen in the table, the mean scores of low and medium accurate participants for unaccusative verbs (m = 8.14, sd = 2.60 and m = 9.90, sd = 1.44 respectively) are higher than their mean scores for psychverbs (m = 6.57, sd = 2.82 and m = 9.85, sd = 1.92). but, the situation is totally opposite for the high-accurate participants. their scores for psych-verbs (m = 11.83, sd = 0.40) are higher than their scores for unaccusitive-verbs (m = 11.33, sd = 0.81). in addition to the descriptive statistics, a set of non-parametric tests (i.e., kruskal wallis test) have also been conducted in order to discover the performances on psych verbs and unaccusative verbs across three gjt accuracy levels. table 6. kruskal-wallis test: psych-v and unaccusative-v across 3 accuracy levels of gjt accuracy score groups n mean rank chi-square df p gjt_psych-v low 7 6.21 15.733 2 0.000 intermediate 20 17.78 high 6 27.00 total 33 gjt_unaccusative-v low 7 9.64 10.071 2 0.007 intermediate 20 16.78 high 6 26.33 total 33 the results of the kruskal-wallis test (see table 6) indicated that there is a statistically significant difference among three group of learners’ performances on psych verb constructions (h(2) = 15.733, p < .001), with a mean rank of 6.21 for the low-accurate students, 17.78 for the medium-accurate students and 27 for the high-accurate students. the same statistically significant difference seray tanyer, samet deniz140 also exists among learners’ performances on unaccusative-verb constructions (h(2) = 10.071, p < .001), with a mean rank of 9.64 for the low-accurate students, 16.78 for the medium-accurate students and 26.33 for the high-accurate students. these findings show us that as the total level of accuracy in gjt increases, the level of accuracy with psych verbs and unaccusative verbs increase individually, too. a series of mann-whitney u tests were conducted as follow-ups in order to detect the significant differences in verb accuracy occurring across three different general accuracy levels (i.e., low, intermediate, and high). the results indicated significant differences between the unaccusative verb scores of low (mdn = 9) and high (mdn = 11.5) accurate (u = 2.5, p = .007), and medium (mdn = 10) and high (mdn = 11.5) accurate participants (u = 22.5, p = .019) while the difference is not significant between the scores of low (mdn = 9) and medium (mdn = 10) accurate participants (u = 37, p = .062). they also revealed significant differences between the psych verb scores of low (mdn = 7) and medium (mdn = 10) accurate (u = 19, p = .004), low (mdn = 7) and high (mdn = 12) accurate (u = 0, p = .002), and medium (mdn = 10) and high (mdn = 12) accurate participants (u = 16.5, p = .006). table 7. wilcoxon signed-rank test: psych-v vs. unaccusative-v with low-accuracy in gjt gjt_unaccusative-v_low gjt_psych v_low n mean rank sum of ranks z p negative ranks 2 3.25 6.50 –0.841* .400 positive ranks 4 3.63 14.50 equal 1 total 7 * based on negative ranks. as indicated in the table 5, the low-accurate participants performed more accurately on unaccusative verbs (m = 8.142, sd = 2.609) than on psych verbs (m = 6.571, sd = 2.820). in order to answer rq3 (i.e., do first-year elt students with low, medium and high accuracy of gjt perform better on any verb type including psych verbs and unaccusative verbs?), the following step was to conduct a set of wilcoxon signed-ranks test in order to compare the performances of the low-accurate participants for two types of constructions: psych verbs (mdn = 7) and unaccusative verbs (mdn = 8). the results (see table 7) indicated that unaccusative verb ranks were not statistically significantly higher than psych verb ranks (z = –0.841, p > .05). turkish efl learners’ acquisition of psych verbs and unaccusative verbs… 141 table 8. wilcoxon signed-rank test: psych-v vs. unaccusative-v with medium-accuracy in gjt gjt_unaccusative-v_medium gjt_psych-v_medium n mean rank sum of ranks z p negative ranks 9 10 90 –0.204* .839 positive ranks 10 10 00 equal 1 total 20 * based on negative ranks. the same result is also valid for the medium-accurate and high-accurate participants. the medium-accurate participants performed slightly more accurately on unaccusative verbs (m = 9.90, sd = 1.447) than on psych verbs (m = 9.85, sd = 1.926). in order to compare the performances of the medium-accurate participants for psych verb (mdn = 10) and unaccusative verb (mdn = 10) constructions, the following step was to conduct a wilcoxon signed-ranks test. the results (table 8) indicated that unaccusative verb ranks were not statistically significantly higher than psych verb ranks (z = –0.203, p > .05). table 9. wilcoxon signed-rank test: psych-v vs. unaccusative-v with high-accuracy in gjt gjt_unaccusative-v_high gjt_psych-v_high n mean rank sum of ranks z p negative ranks 2 1.50 3.00 –1.342* .180 positive ranks 0 .00 .00 equal 4 total 6 *based on positive ranks. the high-accurate participants, on the other hand, performed slightly more accurately on psych verbs (m = 11.833; sd = 0.408) than on unaccusative verbs (m = 11.333; sd = 0.816). in order to answer rq3, one more wilcoxon signed-ranks test was conducted in order to compare the performances of the high-accurate participants for psych verb (mdn = 12) and unaccusative verb (mdn = 11.5) constructions. the results (table 9) indicated that psych verb ranks were not statistically significantly higher than unaccusative-verb ranks (z = –1.342, p > .05). seray tanyer, samet deniz142 table 10. descriptive statistics: psych-v and unaccusative-v in wfrt n min. max. mean std. deviation std. error mean wfrt_psych-v 33 1 4 3.300 0.825 0.143 wfrt_unaccusative-v 33 1 4 3.442 0.718 0.125 the values in descriptive statistics (table 10) indicate that the elt students are more familiar with unaccusative verbs (m = 3.442, sd = 0.718) than psych verbs (m = 3.300, sd = 0.825). in addition to descriptive statistics, a nonparametric test (i.e., a wilcoxon signed-ranks test) was also conducted in order to answer rq4 (i.e., are first-year elt students more familiar with any verb type including psych verbs or unaccusative verbs?). the aim was to compare the participants’ degree of familiarity with psych verbs (mdn = 3.666) and unaccusative verbs (mdn = 3.666). table 11. wilcoxon signed-rank test: familiarity with psych-v vs. unaccusative-v wfrt_unaccusative-v wfrt_psych-v n mean rank sum of ranks z p negative ranks 7 12 84 –1.650* .099 positive ranks 16 12 192 equal 10 total 33 * based on negative ranks. the results (table 11) indicated that unaccusative verb ranks were not statistically significantly higher than psych verb ranks (z = –1.650, p = .099). although a slight difference is observed between familiarity means of two types of verbs (table 10), this difference is not at any significant level. meanwhile, table 12 below also indicates that the familiarity ranks of two types of verbs (i.e., psych (six verbs) and unaccusative (six verbs)) do not also match up with the accuracy ranks of the same verbs in gjt, which has been detailed below. turkish efl learners’ acquisition of psych verbs and unaccusative verbs… 143 table 12. familiarity (wfrt) and accuracy (gjt) ranks & means of psych-v and unaccusative-v verb familiarity rank mean_wfrt accuracy rank mean_gjt happen_unaccusative-v 1 3.67 2 1.787 surprise_psych-v 2 3.59 9 1.484 shock_psych-v 3 3.55 3 1.727 die_unaccusative-v 4 3.52 1 1.818 disappoint_psych-v 4 3.52 11 1.393 fall_unaccusative-v 5 3.48 5 1.666 disappear_unaccusative-v 6 3.42 7 1.575 arrive_unaccusative-v 7 3.38 10 1.424 embarrass_psych-v 8 3.19 4 1.697 occur_unaccusative-v 9 3.18 8 1.515 frighten_psych-v 10 3.12 6 1.606 frustrate_psych-v 11 2.91 8 1.697 in table 12, the familiarity and accuracy ranks/means for individual psych and unaccusative verbs have been reported. the familiarity ranks of the verbs have been tabulated in a descending order, which means that the participants are found to be most familiar with happen and least familiar with frustrate. however, the verb that the participants performed on most accurately is die, while disappoint is observed to be the most challenging one. all in all, the values in table 13 indicate very little correspondence between the familiarity and accuracy ranks/means of the verbs. the answer to the rq5 (i.e., is there any relationship between first-year elt students’ degree of familiarity and level of accuracy with psych and unaccusative verbs?) also supports the finding above (table 13) because the participants’ degree of familiarity with and accuracy level for psych verbs (r = .174; p = .203 > .05) do not correlate with each other at any significant level. the same result is also valid for unaccusative verbs since the participants’ degree of familiarity with and accuracy level for unaccusative verbs (r = –.257, p = .262 > .05) do not also correlate with each other at any significant level. so much so that, unaccusative verbs show a negative correlation between its degree of familiarity and accuracy level. in addition to grouping the two verb categories, degree of familiarity and accuracy level of each verb was compared individually too. the results indicated no significant relationship between familiarity degrees and accuracy levels of six different psych verbs (disappoint (r = –.271, p = .127); embarrass (r = .096, p = .596); frighten (r = .325, p = .065); frustrate (r = .272, p = .126); shock seray tanyer, samet deniz144 (r = .120, p = .508), surprise (r = .068, p = .705)). the same result was also observed for six different unaccusative verbs (arrive (r = –.028, p = .877); die (r = –.247, p = .166); disappear (r = –.212, p = .236); fall (r = .085, p = .636); happen (r = .181, p = .313); occur (r = –.111, p = .538). table 13. accuracy for psych-v constructions: number & rate of the participants items n (33) [%] item 8 (g) p the little girl was frightened, so she called the police. 31 93.9 item 13 (g) p he was embarrassed because he could not speak english. 30 90.9 item 35 (g) p everyone was shocked to hear the news. 30 90.9 item 23 (g) p the people were frustrated because they lost all the money. 28 84.8 item 16 (ung) a all the people shocked to hear the news. 27 81.8 item 21 (g) p the hikers were surprised to see a big bear. 27 81.8 item 26 (ung) a the teacher embarrassed because she made a mistake. 26 78.8 item 19 (g) p the girl was disappointed when she found her grade. 23 69.7 item 31 (ung) a the boy disappointed because he got a bad grade. 23 69.7 item 3 (ung) a the woman surprised to hear the loud noise. 22 66.7 item 29 (ung) a the cat frightened when it saw a big dog. 22 66.7 item 11 (ung) a the woman frustrated because she could not find help. 22 66.7 g = grammatical, ung = ungrammatical, p = passive, a = active table 13 shows the number and rate of participants accurately responding to the twelve items of psych verb constructions in gjt. as the symbols n and [%] indicate, the number and rates of participants making accurate judgements for the listed items are higher for the passive construction of psych verbs than active construction of it. the first four lines followed by the sixth and eighth lines of the table include passive constructions with higher number and rates of participants responding accurately to the related items. this finding has also been verified by the nonparametric test results reported below. turkish efl learners’ acquisition of psych verbs and unaccusative verbs… 145 table 14. wilcoxon signed-rank test: active vs. passive constructions of psych-v gjt_psych-v_active gjt_psych-v_passive n mean rank sum of ranks z p negative ranks 15 13.6 204 –2.582* .010 positive ranks 7 7 49 equal 11 total 33 * based on positive ranks. in order to answer rq6 (i.e., do first-year elt students perform more accurately on any construction of psych and unaccusative verbs (i.e., passive vs. active constructions)?), a wilcoxon signed-ranks test was conducted in order to compare the participants’ degree of accuracy for the two types of psych verb constructions: passive (m = 5.121; sd = 1.192; mdn = 5) and active (m = 4.303; sd = 1.811; mdn = 5). the results (table 14) indicated that psych verb passive construction ranks were statistically significantly higher than psych verb active construction ranks (z = –2.582, p ≤ .01). table 15. accuracy for unaccusative-v constructions: number & rate of the participants items n (33) [%] item 30 (g) a their parents died of cancer when they were young. 32 97 item 25 (g) a a terrible accident happened last night. 31 93.9 item 18 (ung) p several storms were occurred in seattle last year. 30 90.9 item 7 (g) a the boy fell into the swimming pool. 28 84.8 item 9 (ung) p her mother was died of cancer 5 years ago. 28 84.8 item 37 (ung) p so many things were happened to her last week. 28 84.8 item 27 (ung) p the girl was disappeared into the forest. 27 81.8 item 33 (ung) p the cup was fallen from the table. 27 81.8 item 20 (ung) p your package was arrived a few hours ago. 26 78.8 item 15 (g) a the thief disappeared into the dark. 25 75.8 item 34 (g) a a letter from her mom arrived two days ago. 21 63.6 item 4 (g) a several fires occurred in seoul last year. 20 60.6 g = grammatical, ung = ungrammatical, p = passive, a = active table 15 shows the number and rate of participants accurately responded to the twelve items of unaccusative verb constructions in gjt. as the symbol n and [%] indicate, the number and rate of participants making accurate judgeseray tanyer, samet deniz146 ments for the listed items do not show a certain accumulation neither for passive construction nor for active construction of unaccusative verbs. the first two lines followed by the fourth of the table include active constructions while the third and the following five lines include passive constructions. this discrete distribution has also been verified by the nonparametric test results reported below. table 16. wilcoxon signed-rank test: active vs. passive constructions of unaccusative-v gjt_unaccusative-v_active gjt_unaccusative-v_passive n mean rank sum of ranks z p negative ranks 14 10.21 143 –1.481* .139 positive ranks 6 11.17 67 equal 13 total 33 * based on positive ranks. for rq6, one more wilcoxon signed-ranks test was also conducted in order to compare the participants’ level of accuracy for the two types of unaccusative verb constructions: passive (m = 5.030; sd = 1.237; mdn = 5) and active (m = 4.757; sd = 0.969; mdn = 5). the results (table 16) indicated that unaccusative verb passive construction ranks were not statistically significantly higher than unaccusative verb active construction ranks (z = −1.481, p = .139). table 17. wilcoxon signed-rank test: unaccusative-v passive constructions vs. psych-v active constructions gjt_unaccusative-v_passive gjt_psych-v_active n mean rank sum of ranks z p negative ranks 8 9.75 78 –1.844* .065 positive ranks 15 13.20 198 equal 10 total 33 for rq6, one more wilcoxon signed-ranks test was also conducted in order to compare the participants’ level of accuracy for the passive constructions of unaccusative-verb (m = 5.030; sd = 1.237; mdn = 5) and active constructions of psych verbs (m = 4.303; sd = 1.811; mdn = 5). the results (table 17) indicated that unaccusative verb passive construction ranks were not statistically significantly higher than psych verb active construction ranks (z = –1.844, p = .065). turkish efl learners’ acquisition of psych verbs and unaccusative verbs… 147 table 18. wilcoxon signed-rank test: unaccusative-v active constructions vs. psych-v passive constructions gjt_unaccusative-v_active gjt_psych-v_passive n mean rank sum of ranks z p negative ranks 15 11.77 176 –1.677* .094 positive ranks 7 10.93 76.5 equal 11 total 33 * based on positive ranks. for rq6, the last wilcoxon signed-ranks test was conducted in order to compare the participants’ level of accuracy for the active constructions of unaccusative verb (m = 5.121; sd = 1.192; mdn = 5) and passive constructions of psych verbs (m = 4.757; sd = 0.969; mdn = 5). the results (table 18) indicated that unaccusative verb active construction ranks were not statistically significantly higher than psych verb passive construction ranks (z = –1.677, p = .094). discussion hypothesis 1 claimed that it would be difficult to acquire psych verb constructions than unaccusative verb constructions since passives charge processing cost. for this reason, the participants had been hypothesized to be making more underpassivization errors than overpassivization errors. the above results confirmed the first hypothesis of the study to some extent. the descriptive statistics indicated that the participants performed more accurately on unaccusative verbs than on psych verbs; however, this accuracy difference was not statistically significant (rq1). therefore, there is still a possibility of this result to emerge by chance. also, the result related to the participants’ accuracy on active and passive constructions of psych verbs indicated that psych verb passive construction ranks were statistically significantly higher than psych verb active construction ranks. this result shows us that the participants did more underpassivization errors by accepting the ungrammatical active constructions of psych verbs (e.g., the cat frightened when it saw a big dog) as correct and by performing more accurately on passive constructions of psych verbs. (e.g., the little girl was frightened, so she called the police). in contrast, the difference between participants’ accuracy levels for passive (e.g., the girl was disseray tanyer, samet deniz148 appeared into the forest) and active (e.g., the thief disappeared into the dark) unaccusative verb constructions were not statistically significant. the above analyses also demonstrated that the performances on psych verbs and unaccusative verbs go parallel with their general accuracy levels in gjt. once the participants’ accuracy levels in gjt increased, their underpassivization errors, in other words, their errors with psych verb constructions decreased synchronously. the same result is valid for unaccusative verb constructions with an exception that is the low and medium level participants’ performances are close to each other for this verb class. this exception can suggest that unaccusative verbs are acquired at the later levels of proficiency because low and moderate-level student performances do not differentiate from each other. when the performances of low, medium and high-level participants on psych verbs and unaccusative verbs were compared, it was found that the low, medium and high-level participants did not perform differently on psych and unaccusative verbs. in other words, the low-levels performed less accurately both on psych and unaccusative verbs while the high-levels performed more accurately on both verb types. this suggests that the difficulty level of psych and unaccusative verb constructions do not vary for the same level of learners. therefore, once learners reach a stage, both underpassivization and overpassivization errors reduced, the gap in the performances between psych and unaccusative constructions did not enlarge and none of them got any advantage over the other. therefore, the hypothesis 2 was not confirmed by the current results. as for the hypothesis 3, it is not possible to regard degree of familiarity as a source of accuracy for psych and unaccusative verbs. the results firstly indicated that the participants’ degree of familiarity with two verb types did not vary from each other. moreover, their degree of familiarity with and accuracy level for unaccusative and psych verbs do not correlate with each other at any significant level. even, these two variables demonstrated a reverse relationship for some unaccusative (i.e., arrive, die, disappear, occur) and psych (i.e., disappoint) verbs. therefore, it can be concluded that the participants’ performance on psych and unaccusative verbs in the gjt was not influenced by their perceived degree of familiarity with these verb types, which confirms the third hypothesis of the study. the performance difference raised between active (ungrammatical) and passive (grammatical) constructions of psych verbs implies that the participants do not have as much difficulty in approving the grammatical (passive) constructions as they do in rejecting the ungrammatical (active) constructions. they were, instead, inclined to regard active constructions (e.g., the cat frightened when it saw a big dog) as correct. as the participants’ accuracy for psych verbs do not correlate significantly with their familiarity, and as their performance on active and passive constructions of psych verbs differentiate at a significant level, the participants’ responses to two different constructions turkish efl learners’ acquisition of psych verbs and unaccusative verbs… 149 rather than individual verbs can be interpreted as their actual performances. as seen in table 13, except “disappoint” (since the number/ratio of participants responding accurately for two constructions were equal for “disappoint”), all the passive constructions of five psych verbs were outperformed in contrast with their active constructions. as for unaccusative verbs, the participants’ level of accuracy for passive and active constructions were not statistically significantly different from each other. instead, it is possible to observe some differences in verb level. for instance, while the grammatical constructions (i.e., active) of the verbs die, fall, and happen are accepted more accurately than their ungrammatical constructions (i.e., passive), it is totally opposite for the other three verbs (i.e., arrive, disappear, occur). for these verbs, it was more difficult for the participants to approve grammatical items than rejecting ungrammatical ones. therefore, it is possible to state that the participants’ performances vary across different verbs. one possible explanation for this variety can be the different levels of exposure to these verbs throughout their language acquisition process. the potential support for this rationale can come from the lists of word frequencies in english. while die, fall, and happen, for example, are among the frequent words according to the two common wordlists (i.e., new general service list (ngsl) and bnc/coca headword list), the other three verbs, arrive, disappear and occur, are in higher rankings of these lists (see table 19). also, english vocabulary profile (evp) reports that die, fall, and happen are used by l2 english learners at the levels of a1, a2, and a2 respectively while arrive, disappear and occur are found to be used by the learners at a2, b1, and b2 levels. table 19. accuracy (gjt), familiarity (wfrt) and frequency (ngsl, bnc/coca headword list, evp) ranks of psych-v and unaccusative-v verb accuracy rank familiarity rank ngsl bnc/coca headword list evp die_unaccusative-v 1 4 493 1st 1000 a1 happen_unaccusative-v 2 1 245 1st 1000 a2 shock_psych-v 3 3 4118 2nd 1000 b2 embarrass_psych-v 4 8 2576 2nd 1000 c2 fall_unaccusative-v 5 5 353 1st 1000 a2 frighten_psych-v 6 10 2249 1st 1000 b2 disappear_unaccusative-v 7 6 1762 2nd 1000 b1 frustrate_psych-v 8 11 4913 2nd 1000 occur_unaccusative-v 8 9 728 2nd 1000 b2 surprise_psych-v 9 2 684 1st 1000 b1 arrive_unaccusative-v 10 7 574 1st 1000 a2 disaapoint_psych-v 11 4 1973 2nd 1000 b1 seray tanyer, samet deniz150 the significant difference between the participants’ performances on active and passive constructions of psych verbs, the participants’, though nonsignificant, outperformance on unaccusative verbs as well as the accuracy on unaccusative verbs varying based on individual verbs and constructions imply that processing passivization cannot be the only effective factor determining the acquisition of psych and unaccusative verb constructions. specifically, cross-linguistic factors and l1 interference can be some possible sources of the challenges faced by this sample group as indicated by montrul (2001) who found that the crosslinguistic difference in transitivity between english and turkish was responsible for turkish learners’ ungrammatical use of psych verbs because these learners used active psych-verb form where the experiencer is the subject (e.g., *the hunter frightened). conclusion the processability account anticipates that learners will make more underpassivization errors than overpassivization errors since passivization entails more processing. in a scenario where processability plays a role in the acquisition of english as an l2, passive constructions requiring more processing will be more difficult to acquire as compared to active constructions. as a result, l2 learners of english can potentially make more errors with passive constructions, favor active constructions over passive constructions, and even wrongly accept or use active constructions in the context where passives are necessary. in order to investigate these points, a set of research questions has been asked and answered. firstly, the results indicated that elt students did not significantly performed more accurately on psych verbs or unaccusative verbs. the second point handled was whether the performances on psych and unaccusative verbs differ across the accuracy levels in gjt. the results showed that as the total level of accuracy in gjt increased, the level of accuracy with psych verbs and unaccusative verbs increased, too. they also indicated significant differences between the unaccusative verb scores of low and high accurate, and medium and high accurate participants while the difference is not significant between the scores of low and medium accurate participants. as for psych verbs, the results revealed significant differences between the psych verb scores of low and medium accurate, low and high accurate, and medium and high accurate participants. thirdly, the comparison between the performances of the lowaccurate participants for psych verbs and unaccusative verbs indicated that unaccusative verb ranks were not statistically significantly higher than psych turkish efl learners’ acquisition of psych verbs and unaccusative verbs… 151 verb ranks. the same result is also valid for the medium-accurate and highaccurate participants. fourthly, when the familiarity with psych and unaccusative verbs was investigated, the results indicated that elt students were not more familiar with any verb type. also, the familiarity ranks of two verbs did not also match up with the accuracy ranks of the same verbs in gjt. the participants’ degree of familiarity with and accuracy level for two verbs do not correlate with each other at any significant level. lastly, the study compared the participants’ degree of accuracy for two types of verb constructions (i.e., passive and active), the results indicated that active construction ranks were statistically significantly different than passive construction ranks for each verb. all in all, the results suggested that beyond processability, such factors as l1 interference and word frequencies in english (table 19) seem to impact the acquisition process. references browne, c., culligan, b., & phillips, j. (2013). the new general service list. retrieved from: http://www.newgeneralservicelist.org hahn, hye-ryeong, (2011). korean efl learners’ underpassivization and overpassivization: psych verbs and unaccusatives. foreign language education research, 14, 54–76. kawaguchi, s. (2013). the relationship between lexical and syntactic development in english as a second language (pp. 92–106). in a. f. mattsson & c. norrby (eds.), language acquisition and use in multilingual contexts: theory and practice. media-tryck, lund university. kurtoğlu, ö. (2010). (over)passivization errors of turkish learners of english as a foreign language. journal of linguistics and literature, 7(1), 29–53. kurtoğlu, ö. (2006). a study on the passivisation errors of turkish learners of english as a foreign language (master’s thesis). retrieved from council of higher education thesis center (205789) https://tez.yok.gov.tr/ulusaltezmerkezi/tezsorgusonucyeni.jsp levin, b. (1993). english verb classes: a preliminary investigation. university of chicago press. montrul, s. (2001). first-language-constrained variability in the second-language acquisition of argument-structure-changing morphology with causative verbs. second language research, 17(2), 144–194. nation, i. s. p. (2012). the bnc/coca word family lists. retrieved on september, 2018 from: https://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/staff/paul-nation#vocab-lists pienemann, m. (2005). an introduction to processiblity theory. in m. pienemann (ed.,), crosslinguistic aspects of processibilty theory (pp. 1–60). john benjamins. pienemann, m., d biase, b., & kawaguchi, s. (2005). extending processiblity theory. in m. pienemann (ed.), cross-linguistic aspects of processiblity theory (pp. 199–251). john benjamins. the english vocabulary profile (n.d.). retrieved from: http://www.englishprofile.org/ seray tanyer, samet deniz152 appendices a p p e n d i x a grammaticality judgement task (gjt) – hahn (2011) participant name: …………………………. year of study : ( 1st ) ( 2nd ) ( 3rd ) ( 4th ) gender : ( ) female ( ) male instruction: this study is conducted as a preliminary study for a phd dissertation to investigate if the acquisition of specific constructions is affected by processing complexity of passivization. please put a mark next to the sentence if you think that the test sentence is grammatical (correct) or ungrammatical (incorrect). make your decisions only once, and do not turn back and correct your original answers after a second thought. thank you very much for your cooperation and contribution. certificate of consent i have been invited to participate in this research about acquisition of specific constructions in english. i have read the related details above and consent voluntarily to be a participant in this study. date: …. / …. / …….. signature: correct incorrect example: 1) the dog eating the meat. x example: 2) the dog was eating the meat. x 3) the woman surprised to hear the loud noise. 4) several fires occurred in seoul last year. 5) this is the company that he likes to work. 6) jane told us that she was going to church. 7) the boy fell into the swimming pool. 8) the little girl was frightened, so she called the police. 9) her mother was died of cancer 5 years ago. 10) the boy who finished all the assignments were so tired. 11) the woman frustrated because she could not find help. 12) the doctor asked him if he feels okay. 13) he was embarrassed because he could not speak english. 14) this is the topic that we want to talk about. 15) the thief disappeared into the dark. 16) all the people shocked to hear the news. 17) mr. jones asked me what the problem was. 18) several storms were occurred in seattle last year. 19) the girl was disappointed when she found her grade. 20) your package was arrived a few hours ago. 21) the hikers were surprised to see a big bear. 22) mary told her father that she has a fever. 23) the people were frustrated because they lost all the money. turkish efl learners’ acquisition of psych verbs and unaccusative verbs… 153 24) i asked him what kind of movies does he like. 25) a terrible accident happened last night. 26) the teacher embarrassed because she made a mistake. 27) the girl was disappeared into the forest. 28) the little boy who passed all the subjects was very proud. 29) the cat frightened when it saw a big dog. 30) their parents died of cancer when they were young. 31) the boy disappointed because he got a bad grade. 32) people who have a lot of friends do not have time to watch tv. 33) the cup was fallen from the table 34) a letter from her mom arrived two days ago. 35) everyone was shocked to hear the news. 36) the people in the room didn’t know what was the problem. 37) so many things were happened to her last week. 38) people who have only one child wants to have more children. a p p e n d i x b word familiarity rating task (wfrt) – hahn (2011) instruction: please mark the degree of your familiarity with the individual words on a 4-point likert scale: (1) = very familiar (2) = a bit familiar (3) = quite familiar (4) = very familiar ( 1 ) very unfamiliar ( 2 ) a bit familiar ( 3 ) quite familiar ( 4 ) very familiar example: eat x surprise happen arrive disappear shock die disappoint occur embarrass fall frighten frustrate seray tanyer, samet deniz154 a p p e n d i x c accuracy for the structures used as distracters in gjt: number & rate of the participants accurately answering items m n (33) [%] item 14 (g) geography is the subject that joseph wants to take. .969 32 97 item 28 (g) the little boy who passed all the subjects was so proud. .969 32 97 item 32 (g) students who do not pass the math exam must take math again. .939 31 93.9 item 17 (g) mrs. jones asked me what the problem was. .909 30 90.9 item 6 (g) jane told us that she was going to church. .727 24 72.7 item 10 (ung) the young woman who finished all the assignments were so tired. .727 24 72.7 item 38 (ung) students who does not want to take geography can take history. .696 23 69.7 item 24 (ung) i asked what kind of movies does he like. .636 21 63.6 item 36 (ung) the people in the room didn’t know what was the problem. .575 19 57.6 item 22 (ung) mary told her father that she has a fever. .484 16 48.5 item 5 (ung) a café is a small restaurant that people can get a light meal. .454 15 45.5 item 12 (ung) the doctor asked him if he feels okay. .454 15 45.5 g = grammatical, ung = ungrammatical (min. = 0; max. = 1) seray tanyer, samet deniz der erwerb von psychologischen und unakkusativen verben durch türkische efl-studenten: eine replikationsstudie zur unterpassivierung und überpassivierung z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die komplexität des transformierbarkeit legt die vermutung nahe, dass lernende mehr fehler hinsichtlich der unterpassivierung als überpassivierung begehen werden, weil die passivierung einen höheren aufwand an transformation erfordert. obwohl eine studie zu psychologischen und einigen unakkusativen verben deren erwerb durch türkische fremdsprachenlernende untersuchte, wurde bisher in keiner arbeit der erwerb der beiden genannten verbgruppen durch lernende unter dem gesichtspunkt der transformation einzeln analysiert. in diesem zusammenhang ist die vorliegende studie darauf abgezielt, zu untersuchen, ob die komplexität der passivtransformation den erwerb von psychologischen und turkish efl learners’ acquisition of psych verbs and unaccusative verbs… 155 unakkusativen verben beeinf lusst. außerdem wird die frage behandelt, ob das allgemeine genauigkeitsniveau in grammaticality judgement task (gjt) und der grad der vertrautheit mit zielverben mit dem genauigkeitsniveau in bezug auf die einzelnen psychologischen und unakkusativen verben zusammenhängen. 33 universitätsstudenten im grundstudium nahmen an einem gjt und word familiarity rating task (wfrt) teil. der gjt umfasste insgesamt 38 punkte, und zwar 12 sätze mit psychologischen verben, 12 sätze mit unakkusativen verben, 12 sätze mit distraktoren und 2 beispielsätze. der wfrt war ein fragebogen zur vertrautheit mit 6 psychologischen und 6 unakkusativen verben. zur datenauswertung wurden eine reihe von nichtparametrischen tests sowie deskriptive statistiken verwendet. die ergebnisse machten deutlich, dass die lernenden mit unakkusativen verben genauer als mit psychologischen umgehen konnten. sie begingen mehrere unterpassivierungsfehler, indem sie ungrammatische aktivkonstruktionen mit psychologischen verben zuließen. ihre leistungen in bezug auf die psychologischen und unakkusativen verben zeigten parallelen zu ihrem allgemeinen genauigkeitsniveau in gjt, während ihr grad der vertrautheit mit und genauigkeitsniveau von zwei verben nicht miteinander korrelierten. die ergebnisse deuten darauf hin, dass faktoren wie transformierbarkeit und muttersprachlicher transfer den erwerb zu beeinf lussen vermögen. schlüsselwörter: fremdsprachenerwerb; psychologische verben; unakkusative verben; unterpassivierung; überpassivierung preface the purpose of the preface to this new issue of theory and practice of second language acquisition is twofold. first, it offers a short introduction for new readers to familiarize them with the origins and development of the journal (a permanent element of the preface). second, it provides a concise comment on the contents of the present issue. theory and practice of second language acquisition was founded as a forum of discussion for both polish and foreign scholars and seems to have fulfilled its mission as a journal on the rise. the present volume marks the ninth year of its presence in the scholarly world. the journal has become quite popular and we receive more and more qualified submissions from polish and foreign researchers. indeed, since its foundation, every consecutive issue of the journal has welcomed contributions from renowned researchers, including peter macintyre, david singleton, larissa aronin, sarah mercer, tammy gregersen and jean-marc dewaele, among others. also, the fast growing number of oa uploads testifies to the journal’s increasing popularity, as does the queue of articles already accepted and awaiting their turn to be included in the next volumes to be published. this is why we have already made a couple of decisions to increase the number of research papers published in a single volume over the last few years: in the first years of the journal’s existence there were six, later seven, last year eight and, starting with issue 9(1), tapsla will include as many as nine research contributions, followed by one book review this time. it is the journal’s ambition to demonstrate new trends and hitherto unknown venues for research in sla, focusing both on theoretical discussions and the practical solutions to problems that are based upon them. we aim not only to publish and share with our readers contributions from well-known and respected scholars but also to promote young researchers from all over the world, who often present fresh and innovative ideas or open up new perspectives on issues already under discussion. in other words, the journal hopes to become theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (1), 2023, pp. 1/5 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.14558 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.14558 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed a venue for the exchange of ideas between well-established academics and those inspired by them. in terms of its content, the journal presents contributions on issues ranging from purely linguistic and cognitively-oriented research on language acquisition processes to psychoand sociolinguistic studies, always trying to feature the most recent developments in terms both of topic choice and of the methodology of research. we publish our journal through an open access system, where the entire production process is executed online and the final product is available to everyone, thus offering an opportunity to share ideas through a broad, effective and economical mode of dissemination. we maintain high standards and quality, which are guaranteed by the international editorial board of tapsla, whose members are well-known polish and foreign experts on a wide range of second language acquisition issues. the journal is indexed in numerous databases, including scopus. the journal is published by the prestigious polish academic publisher, wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego (university of silesia press), which provides an experienced team of editors to oversee the copyediting and technical side of the production. updated information and all the issues published so far are available on the journal webpage at www.tapsla.us.edu.pl. the present volume 9(1) offers a wide variety of interesting topics wellgrounded in theoretical considerations and literature overviews, but importantly, also reporting on empirical projects carried out by researchers, some of whom are well-known scholars, others aspiring young academics. the articles selected offer a balanced range of teachers’ and learners’ perspectives on various aspects of the process of language teaching and learning, in a variety of contexts, with the clearly visible motif of the recent covid-19 pandemic as an important factor which has shaped both teachers’ and learners’ experience and attitudes. the opening text by magdalena szyszka, entitled “context-related beliefs about l2 language learning and teaching of the millennial pre-service efl teachers as a prognosis for future classroom actions,” offers an outlook into the future of efl teaching, as it delves upon young trainee teachers’ beliefs and predictions related to their future profession. because the questionnaire used as a data collection tool was administered during the time of the covid-19 pandemic, the respondents’ responses drew upon their own experience of the changes brought about by isolation and the implementation of various forms of distance learning. they were witnesses of arguably the biggest change in the forms of teaching of our times, so the author considered it important to make a record of their fresh and dynamically changing opinions, attitudes, and predictions. in the next text, “chinese university students’ beliefs about english language learning and self-efficacy,” meihua liu takes us to beijing to report on a study of chinese learners of english as a foreign language: their beliefs related to language learning itself and their perceived self-efficacy in the process. self-efficacy is treated here as one of the most important factors tapsla.14558 p. 2/5 preface http://www.tapsla.us.edu.pl that lead to ultimate success or failure, so we can say that like the previous text, this one also takes us on a journey into the future, here seen from the learners’ perspective. apart from offering us a comprehensive picture of the factors that potentially influence success in language learning, the author demonstrates that learners’ perception of these factors is largely dependent on their proficiency level and individual experience. the third text in the volume returns to the teachers’ point of view and focuses on their wellbeing in the difficult times of the pandemic. astrid mairitsch, sonja babic, sarah mercer, giulia sulis, and sun shin, in their contribution entitled “the role of compassion during the shift to online teaching for language teacher wellbeing,” look at the rarely investigated issue of compassion for teachers, as people who are particularly burdened with the hardships and complications brought upon us by the pandemic. the study gives us a truly global perspective, as teachers from all around the world participated in the interviews. thanks to the qualitative nature of the investigation, we receive very rich analytic material from which emerges the vital role of compassion as a factor which helped teachers survive the most challenging and difficult time of the crisis. the paper voices yet another argument for the need to recognize the entire psychological environment of the teaching profession as a vital factor in teachers’ performance. another text that focuses on pandemic-induced complications and challenges, authored by ahmed al shlowiy and khaled layali and entitled “efl teachers’ perceptions of a long shift to online learning in a saudi university during the coronavirus pandemic,” presents the opinions of efl teachers working in saudi arabia on the drawbacks, but also the benefits, of online learning which was enforced by the crisis. it turned out that the benefits are more numerous than the drawbacks, and that many teachers saw the forced introduction of online learning as an ultimately beneficial side-effect of the pandemic. the fifth text of the present volume marks a shift to the investigation of the learning process and focus on the learners. monika kusiak-pisowacka, in her contribution “exploring fl readers’ metacognitive beliefs: narrations from learner diaries,” portrays a diary from two different perspectives: as a valuable data collection tool, but also as an excellent form of developing learners’ writing skills and self-reflection abilities. the author decided to focus on metacognition as a predictor of fl reading skills, highly recommendable in the process of language development. since the learners were asked to keep diaries for a period of at least one month, the author was also able to follow the dynamics of her respondents’ attitudes and beliefs. the next article, authored by babak mahdavy and masoomeh mousavi namavar and entitled “listening strategies and l2 listening comprehension: does the test method matter?,” looks at the receptive skill of listening, but more basically comprises a comparative investigation of research methodology application. the authors successfully demonstrate that scores and research results differ when different types of preface tapsla.14558 p. 3/5 data collection tools are used. additionally, they also managed to establish which type of listening strategy turned out to be the strongest predictor of learners’ overall performance. the following text, by eva maria luef and pia resnik, “phonotactic probabilities and sub-syllabic segmentation in language learning,” touches upon selected aspects of acquisition of l2 english phonology by austrian german and korean learners. the study supports claims of the influence of learners’ l1 pronunciation habits on the acquisition of their l2 language phonemes. in their investigation of the acquisition of l2 segments, the authors took into consideration phonotactic probabilities and typical syllable structure characteristic for the learners’ first languages. the article represents a typical hypothesis-testing, quantitative research design, based on previous research findings related to the phonetic description of austrian german, korean, and english. the eighth research article in the present volume is a text by zuzana nováková, entitled “making students responsible for grammar learning: a report on a learner-centered technique aimed at accuracy.” the paper focuses on the acquisition of learners’ grammatical competence in l2, narrowed down to their ability to self-correct noun and verb phrase constructions. the study design follows a learner-centered approach, in which the learners are invited to self-reflect upon their own speaking performance. in this way the authors also show an interesting application of a speaking task, conducive also to the development of learners’ metalinguistic awareness. in the last of the research papers published in the present volume, silvie válková and jana kořínková look at the development of politeness strategies in l2 english and the ways in which they are practiced in selected course-books. their text “approaches to teaching agreement and disagreement in selected coursebook series” examines pragmatic aspects of l2 acquisition that are vital for learners’ unproblematic performance in encounters with users of english. the investigation shows similarities between the coursebook series at the level of speech act realization patterns, but, at the same time, it reveals differences pertaining to how supportive the books are for teachers and learners in providing explanatory instructions for proper usage and background information. the present issue offers, atypically, only one book review. this is of the third edition (2019) of the well-known and widely acclaimed volume an introduction to applied linguistics by schmitt and rodgers, which is reviewed by muhammad fahruddin aziz and herlandri eka jayaputri. the reviewers comprehensively present and comment on all the chapters of the volume, pointing out that the contents have been updated and expanded, reflecting the development of the field. at the same time, however, they indicate a few other topics that are yet absent from the volume, but which in their opinion should be included in subsequent editions. tapsla.14558 p. 4/5 preface the articles contained in the present volume examine issues related to the process of foreign language learning and teaching in a broad context, presented from the perspectives of both teachers and learners. all of them represent reports on empirical research, but they are grounded in solid theoretical bases and offer comprehensive reviews of literature in a given area. the theme of the covid-19 pandemic appears for the first time in tapsla, but it seems that it will continue to constitute the background for a considerable number of investigations in the years to come. a clear trend to present a wide array of topics based on research carried out in different parts of the world is continued in the present volume and remains a valuable asset of the journal. importantly for the contributors, the open access online format of tapsla helps them to attract world-wide readership and in this way to become active members of international scientific debates. we believe that researchers, teachers, and students can all benefit from this issue of tapsla and will find the articles published here not only useful but inspirational. in this place we would like to thank all the authors of the articles in this issue and, as is our usual practice, extend our invitation to all polish and foreign researchers and academics to share their work with us by submitting it to the journal. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703 danuta gabryś-barker https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0308-4337 adam wojtaszek preface tapsla.14558 p. 5/5 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0308-4337 cover photo: “big_blue” by max iter (retrieved from www.f lickr.com) copy editing: gabriela marszołek proofreading: joanna zwierzyńska typesetting: marek zagniński cover preparation for printing: paulina dubiel electronic version is the original one. the journal was previously published in printed form with the issn 2450-5455 the journal is distributed free of charge issn 2451-2125 published by wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego ul. bankowa 12b, 40-007 katowice www.wydawnictwo.us.edu.pl e-mail: wydawnictwo@us.edu.pl first impression. printed sheets: 13.0. publishing sheets: 15.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (2), 2023, pp. 1/30 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12576 katarzyna budzińska https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1412-2140 lodz university of technology, poland language teacher wellbeing in the private school context: a case study a b s t r a c t language teacher wellbeing in the private education sector has almost been completely neglected in research. this study examines a well-functioning institution in the private sector and analyzes the systemic and contextual factors that contribute to the f lourishing of its teachers. the case study explores the wellbeing of english language instructors by means of open questionnaires, in-depth semi-structured interviews, and participant observation. the findings reveal a number of facets contributing to positive teacher wellbeing at the systemic, institutional level, such as corporate culture, policies, organization, management, opportunities for professional growth, and social life, as well as adequate resources, and good physical working conditions. most good practice emerging from the research is universal and can be implemented by language institutions in all contexts. however, some variables that affect language teacher wellbeing at this workplace are specific to the nature of the institution and, therefore, could not be put into practice elsewhere. keywords: private sector, positive psychology, teachers, wellbeing, positive institutions, language education teacher wellbeing is essential for an educators’ ability to cope with the everyday extensive emotional labor which is an integral part of their profession (mercer & gregersen, 2020). additionally, it is linked with student wellbeing, outcomes, and achievement (mercer & gregersen, 2020; dewaele & proietti ergün, 2021). language teacher wellbeing is worth even more consideration due to the additional stressors inherent in foreign or second language instruction (mercer, 2020b; piechurska-kuciel, 2011). yet, this aspect of education has not been researched sufficiently. furthermore, except for mercer’s (2020b) and budzińska’s (2021) studies, there is no research on the wellbeing of language educators working in the private sector despite the fact that this sector plays https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12576 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4035-0665 tapsla.12576 p. 2/30 katarzyna budzińska a crucial role in foreign language education globally, particularly in learning english as a foreign language. recently babic et al. (2022) examined factors supporting teacher wellbeing in relation to the workplace. with the exception of their study, existing research into language teacher wellbeing focuses mainly on negative aspects, that is, an absence of wellbeing. since wellbeing lies at the center of positive psychology, whose focus is on flourishing, the purpose of this paper is to explore contented rather than stressed educators and look for sources of happiness in their workplace. the present qualitative case study investigates instructor wellbeing at a language institution in the private sector and how it is promoted at the institutional level. this is in line with the collective approach according to which wellbeing is a shared responsibility of the individual and the institution in which they are inserted (mercer & gregersen, 2020). literature review positive psychology and its focus on the positive positive psychology (pp), defined as “the scientific study of what goes right in life” (peterson, 2006, p. 4) is a new branch of psychology created by seligman and csikszentmihalyi (2000). it focuses on the positive aspects of human experience, unlike traditional psychology, which concentrates on the negative, such as mental illnesses or disorders and their treatment. pp looks at human wellbeing and explores how people can function to the best of their potential (malczewska-webb, 2016, p. 194). its goal is to study factors that promote a good life, successful relationships, and engaging institutions (macintyre, 2021). there are three pillars of pp: positive emotions, positive individual characteristics, and positive institutions, also labeled enabling institutions. the third, least well-studied pillar has been defined as “organizational structures that enable success and promote positive language learning environments” (macintyre & mercer, 2014, p. 165). as gabryś-barker (2016) observed, positive institutions are concerned not just with grades and graduation rates, but with the affective growth and wellbeing of both students and educators. she highlighted that: language teacher wellbeing in the private school … tapsla.12576 p. 3/30 studying school as an enabling institution becomes one of important dimensions of present day research, especially with the advent of positive psychology in a language learning and teaching context. (gabryś-barker, 2016, p. 156) positive institutions have been the least well-studied out of the three pp pillars. as macintyre and mercer (2014) pointed out, “in sla research, greater care is now being taken to describe the contexts in which learning occurs, especially at the classroom level” (p. 165). therefore, scholars have called for more studies of positive or enabling institutions. teacher wellbeing wellbeing is defined from the hedonic perspective as “gaining pleasure and avoiding pain with the aim to maximize happiness” (mercer, 2020b, p. 2). from the eudemonic point of view, on the other hand, wellbeing is related to finding a sense of meaning in life, a chance to grow and develop. it is reflected in perma, seligman’s (2011) model of flourishing which stands for positive emotion, engagement, positive interpersonal relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. teacher wellbeing has been gaining attention over the last few years and its importance has been highlighted by many scholars. as mercer (2020b) points out, “teacher wellbeing is desirable for teachers themselves as well as for their learners” (p. 2). first of all, teacher wellbeing is “central to their ability to teach to their full potential” (macintyre et al., 2019, p. 26), and to “perceive themselves as better teachers” (dewaele & proietti ergün, 2021, p. 3). when educators are in good mental and physical health, they find it easier to manage the daily challenges of language teaching (mercer & gregersen, 2020; dewaele & proietti ergün, 2021) and they have better relationships with both colleagues and learners (mercer, 2020a). additionally, “happy and healthy teachers are much more likely to blossom in all aspects of their lives, including relationships in work and beyond” (mercer & gregersen, 2020, p. 2). this means there is also less risk of burnout (dewaele & proietti ergün, 2021) and teachers quitting the profession (mercer & gregersen, 2020). teachers whose wellbeing is at a high level are more motivated, feel more positive about their institution and students (dewaele & proietti ergün, 2021), and experience fewer discipline issues (jin et al., 2021; mercer, 2020b). according to fredrickson’s (2013) broaden-and-build theory, when teachers are in a positive state, their minds broaden, which allows them to think more creatively and thus, become more effective and innovative. tapsla.12576 p. 4/30 katarzyna budzińska furthermore, since teacher and student wellbeing are two sides of the same coin (roffey, 2012) teacher wellbeing positively affects student wellbeing and is linked to study effects (jin et al., 2021; mercer & gregersen, 2020). moskowitz and dewaele’s (2021) research on the influence of teacher wellbeing on student feelings and attitudes has demonstrated that “teachers who emanate happiness and clearly enjoy teaching strengthen their students’ motivation and attitudes toward the fl” (cited in dewaele & proietti ergün, 2021, p. 9). teacher stressors so far, teacher stressors have been much better researched than sources of instructor wellbeing. typical sources of educators’ stress include excessive workload (barbieri et al., 2019; macintyre et al., 2019; talbot & mercer, 2018), long hours (macintyre et al., 2019), poor relationships with colleagues, lack of suitable resources, constant changes within the profession (barbieri et al., 2019), inadequate salaries (barbieri et al., 2019; macintyre et al., 2019), poor physical environment (babic et al., 2022; guglielmi et al. 2012; mercer, 2020b), organizational conditions of schools context (fiorilli et al., 2015), being evaluated by others, lack of support (kyriacou, 2001), conflict with students’ parents, blurry boundaries between work and home (macintyre et al., 2019), discipline, lack of student motivation (wieczorek, 2016), and authoritarian management style (babic et al., 2022). apart from the stressors that may affect all teachers, the research has identified some specific foreign or second language teacher stressors, such as heterogeneous groups, lack of equipment and teaching aids (wieczorek, 2016), high intercultural demands (mercer et al., 2016), low linguistic self-efficacy (l2 teachers) (horwitz, 1996), lack of explicit linguistic knowledge (l1 teachers) (dewaele & proietti ergün, 2021) extensive emotional labor (gkonou & miller, 2017), energy-intense methodologies promoting communication (borg, 2006), unstable working conditions, for example, lack of job security (talbot & mercer, 2018), low prestige, scheduling, being called on to cover, lack of technology, the rigidity of following a set coursebook, and seasonal work (in summer schools) (mercer, 2020b). as piechurska-kuciel (2011, p. 219) has speculated, “the demands a fl teacher has to face in their work greatly exceed obligations of a teacher of any other subject, which may constitute a significant cause of more pronounced burnout levels.” additionally, recent research suggests that stressors experienced by private school fl teachers may be particularly acute since they tend to be exploited by greedy owners, usually work on zero hours contracts, and yet must meet high student expectations as paying customers. as mercer (2020b, p. 4) states: language teacher wellbeing in the private school … tapsla.12576 p. 5/30 the reason this group is especially important to understand is that they often have very little practical, structural or union-type support. their working conditions are often very intense, with a high turnover of students and limited perspectives for promotion, professional development, or job security. their status as educators and professionals is often more precarious than for those working in the state sector and they are typically employed without any medical care, paid sick leave, holiday leave, or pension provision. sources of teacher wellbeing teacher wellbeing has been demonstrated to be enhanced by opportunities for continuing professional development (cpd), the availability of educational resources (barbieri et al., 2019), positive social relations with administrators, parents, and colleagues (butt & retallick, 2002), teacher identification with the school’s values (skaalvik & skaalvik, 2011), a supportive school climate (babic et al., 2022; day et al., 2007), motivated colleagues, good rapport with managers and students, autonomy, involvement in decision-making, physical space, and a sense of purpose and meaning of one’s work stemming from students’ progress and achievements (babic et al., 2022). mercer, who (2000b) investigated a private school context of english language teaching in malta, found that a positive school environment and work climate may be sources of instructor happiness. teachers were positively affected by good relationships with their colleagues who were willing to share materials and help one another in teaching preparations. additionally, hardworking, fair, and respectful bosses, described as role models, who set a good example, were appreciated by staff members. instructors found it particularly helpful when their boss had an understanding attitude to scheduling and allowed them to teach their preferred groups of students. teachers also drew positivity from autonomy and involvement in the decision-making process. they valued continuous professional development (cpd) activities but believed that they should be paid for by their employer. teacher-student relationships and student progress and enjoyment also turned out to be salient sources of teacher wellbeing, which was in line with mercer and gregersen’s (2020) statement that happy students are usually more rewarding and motivating to teach. as far as physical aspects were concerned, instructors were generally happier in small set-ups, promoting a sense of belonging. tapsla.12576 p. 6/30 katarzyna budzińska the dominance of the negative in language teacher wellbeing (ltwb) research language teacher psychology and language teacher wellbeing, in particular, has only recently become the subject of empirical research (babic et al., 2022; gregersen et al. 2021; macintyre et al., 2019; mercer, 2020b; dewaele & proietti ergün, 2021). these few studies have mostly focused on the negative aspects of teacher wellbeing, mainly teacher stressors (macintyre et al., 2019; mercer, 2020b). wellbeing sources have to this point been understudied (budzińska, 2018, 2021; mercer, 2020b; dewaele & proietti ergün, 2021). ltwb has so far been researched by babic et al. (2022), mercer (2020b), and marginally by budzińska (2018, 2021). at present, it appears that there is no published empirical case study of an institution investigating its effect on ltwb. mercer (2020b) has called for research in this area, adding that “any examination of teacher wellbeing must also look at organizational variables, the quality of social relationships, especially with school leaders, and the various forms of social capital that teachers can potentially draw on” (p. 4). additionally, the third positive psychology pillar, positive institutions, has been neglected in research with only scarce exceptions (babic et al., 2022; budzińska, 2018, 2021). nevertheless, macintyre (2021, p. 6) have recently stated: it would be a significant contribution if positive psychology could help articulate and evaluate the principles to help establish policy that has an impact on classrooms to facilitate the flourishing of both students and teachers alike. the present study aims to fill the gap in research by focusing on the presence, rather than the absence of wellbeing, which is in line with the positive psychology philosophy. it is the first case study investigating language institutions in the private sector through the lens of instructor wellbeing. the status of elt teachers in the polish context it is not possible to understand a polish english language teaching institution without looking at the historical situation and its effect on the status of english language and english language teachers in poland. until the fall of communism in 1989, poland was under the influence of the soviet regime, which meant that russian was an obligatory foreign language in every school. other languages were also taught, but usually, the courses were less intensive language teacher wellbeing in the private school … tapsla.12576 p. 7/30 and started in high school. the english language was associated with the dream of the western world depicted in american movies. there were not many english teachers in those days, but those who were graduates of that niche, prestigious faculty of english, were also associated with that dream and therefore highly respected. even though english language is widely taught these days and teacher status is not as high as it used to be, an english teacher’s job is still considered a respectable profession unlike in the uk, where the status of language teachers is very low (meiritsch et al., 2021). private language schools in poland the study was conducted at a private language school of english in poland where languages are generally taught in two types of contexts: state schools and private language schools. the private sector complements state schools and plays a vital role in language education. classes at state schools are obligatory and free and usually take place in the morning, while private school lessons are usually taught in the afternoon and are paid for. many learners study a foreign language in both contexts. they are often sent by their parents to attend private language school classes in addition to their state school lessons to increase their hours of language learning. private language tuition is also popular because of the general belief that its quality is higher than state school tuition, which partly results from student and parent expectations as paying customers. another group of learners are adults who studied a foreign language at state schools in the past and who want to refresh or expand their knowledge. there is also a small group of customers who studied one language in state schools and are learning another one from scratch. although private schools do not usually offer permanent contracts with paid sick leave, holiday leave, medical care, or pension provision, this is not an issue for many polish teachers who are employed full time at states institutions and work part-time in the private sector on zero hours contracts to earn extra money. the hourly rate at private schools tends to be higher than at state schools, which has attracted another group of teachers to work freelance for them and pay their own medical or pension contributions. although the school researched in the present paper runs on a for-profit basis and belongs to the private sector, it is owned by a state university, which makes the set-up somewhat different from a typical private language school. tapsla.12576 p. 8/30 katarzyna budzińska methodology this study seeks to explore factors contributing to the wellbeing of language teachers working for a school in the private sector. in order to do this, the following research questions were posed: • research question 1: does the school promote teacher wellbeing? • research question 2: which aspects of the institution contribute to the language teacher wellbeing? • research question 3: what aspects of the institution contribute to teacher stress? participants all of the school’s fifteen instructors and the director of studies participated in this study. twelve were polish nationals, three were british. their average age was 48. there were ten females and five males. four of the teachers were full-time employees. eleven were part-timers, working for other institutions as well. on average the teachers had worked for the school for 20 years. their overall average period of language teaching experience was 24 years. the director of studies was also a teacher at the institution and participated in the study as a manager and an instructor. research instruments and procedure data were gathered through two open-ended questionnaires, zoom interviews with the teachers and the director of studies, and participant observation. questionnaires were chosen as the best means of maximizing responses as they could be completed at the instructors’ convenience. in addition, they guaranteed anonymity, increasing the likelihood of honest responses. the first questionnaire (see appendix a) consisted of a biodata section and an openended question. its purpose was to find out whether the school was a positive workplace from the instructors’ point of view, and what contributed to its positivity or negativity. the author sent an email to teachers informing them about the purpose of the study, what they were expected to do, and how data will be used and stored. they were assured anonymity and explained that their names would be changed to protect their confidentiality. the teachers were requested to read and sign the consent sheet attached to the email. the participants were asked to complete the first questionnaire and put it in a specially designated box in their staff room. all teachers completed the questionnaires, however, three language teacher wellbeing in the private school … tapsla.12576 p. 9/30 of them gave yes/no answers without providing any justification. one of them explained that they were too busy for open-ended questionnaires. the second questionnaire was designed to gather more details on the data obtained by the first questionnaire (see appendix b). it was posted online using google forms. the link was emailed to all teachers together with a request to take part. all teachers responded to the second questionnaire, however, some of them gave very short answers. the questionnaires were followed by zoom interviews with four teachers who accepted an invitation (see questions in appendix c). the interviews were organized to find out more details about the school’s corporate culture, history and organization, and their influence on the instructors’ wellbeing. teachers proved eager to contribute and got very engaged constructively in the conversations, which lasted 140 minutes in total. even though only four instructors volunteered to be interviewed, the author feels that the data are representative of the team because they are consistent with the findings obtained through questionnaires and with the general attitude of teachers that the author observed as a participant. the fact that only four participants responded to the invitation is attributed to constraints on the instructors’ time. after the interviews with the teachers had taken place, the director of studies was asked for a zoom interview. since the study was examining institutional, systemic variables affecting the wellbeing of staff, the author felt the research could not be complete without considering the manager who is largely responsible for the policies and organization of the workplace and, consequently, the staff’s job satisfaction. the director agreed to participate, and the meeting was arranged. the one-shot interview followed an interview protocol, the questions were grouped into three main sections: the institution’s policy promoting teacher wellbeing, teacher welfare, the manager’s attitude toward teacher wellbeing, and her involvement in the school’s social life. the interview (see questions in appendix d) lasted 29 minutes. both teachers and the director of studies consented to the zoom meetings being recorded. the total data corpus was 19,210 words. the author had worked for this school as a teacher for twenty years, hence she had been a member of the population she studied. therefore, to complement other qualitative instruments, she implemented participant observation. in this type of method, “a researcher takes part in the daily activities, rituals, interactions, and events of a group of people as one of the means of learning the explicit and tacit aspects of their life routines and their culture” (dewalt & dewalt, 2001, p. 1). insider research carries several benefits. as trowler (2011) states, “you have better access both to naturalistic data and to respondents; you are better able to produce ‘emic’ accounts (ones meaningful to actors), especially using an ethnographic approach; you are better able to use naturaltapsla.12576 p. 10/30 katarzyna budzińska istic data, critical discourse analysis and phenomenography, because you are ‘culturally literate’” (p. 2). being familiar with the context enabled the author to better understand the participant responses, and analyze and interpret the data. as dwyer & buckle (2009) point out, “this insider role status frequently allows researchers more rapid and more complete acceptance by their participants. therefore, participants are typically more open with researchers so that there may be a greater depth to the data gathered” (p. 58). since being a member of the group under investigation may influence the research in a negative way, the author had to stay detached and be constantly aware of her own personal biases and perspectives. the fact that the researcher did not work for the institution anymore when the study was conducted helped the author to stay neutral. it also increased the likelihood of receiving sincere answers to interview questions. analysis the interviews transcribed by means of otter.ai and narratives from open-ended questionnaires were manually coded and analyzed by the author and an external researcher. to analyze the data, a grounded theory approach was taken (charmaz, 2006). as charmaz (2006) explains, the approach allows systematic but flexible data analysis to formulate theories “grounded in the data themselves” (p. 181). the author and her colleague read the narratives separately looking for themes or categories, which in this study were institutional sources of teacher wellbeing. once all of the categories were identified, the two researchers went over the transcripts and narratives again, assigning units of analysis to categories. after reviewing and coding the transcripts, the themes were compared by the two researchers. any inconsistencies regarding interpretation and categorization were discussed and resolved. findings research question 1: does the school promote teacher wellbeing? all fifteen teachers state in unanimity that the school is a positive workplace promoting their wellbeing, which is further supported by the fact that the staff turnover is very low, and the average employment period is of 20 years (see participants section). as tobiasz highlighted, “once you work there, you want to work there and continue working there for many years.” language teacher wellbeing in the private school … tapsla.12576 p. 11/30 research question 2: which aspects of the institution contribute to the language teacher wellbeing? the results addressing the second research question are presented under headings representing the main themes which emerged from the analysis. the findings have been accompanied by excerpts from the narratives and interviews. cpd the school has a long tradition of incorporating a comprehensive professional development program, which consists of yearly observations by the director of studies or one of two teacher-trainers, yearly peer-observations, a yearly training weekend, and training at the beginning of each school year. teacher observations focus on a different aspect each year and are followed by in-depth oral and written feedback. peer observations concentrate on the same theme as formal observations. observers have to complete a specially designed feedback form explaining how a given aspect of teaching has been realized and hand in the form to the management team and the colleague observed. as for the training weekend, it is organized in an attractive nearby village. it is free with food and accommodation provided. training sessions are delivered by the school’s teacher trainers as well as teachers and occasionally guest teachertrainers (interviews, participant observation). the teachers seem to be very enthusiastic about the cpd provided by the school. agata highlighted that she benefitted from it greatly. as tobiasz pointed out, “there is a lot of scope for professional development offered by this school.” izyda highlighted that “not only is there a substantial amount of training at this institution, but its quality is at an utmost level.” only one of the teachers said that “teacher development could be improved a little by organizing more workshops, and sponsoring more conferences.” the main teacher trainer of the school is a resource writer and a leading trainer in the country, who draws from the most recent trends in foreign language acquisition and converts them into classroom activities that she first tests with her own students. consequently, teacher training sessions demonstrate innovative, practical activities. additionally, they address issues detected during class observations and peer observations. the sessions delivered by other teachers present hands-on, already tried classroom activities. teachers are typically asked to engage in the presented activities, such that they can experience them from the student’s point of view and, thus, develop an opinion about their usefulness. moreover, actively participating in these activities is meant tapsla.12576 p. 12/30 katarzyna budzińska to help teachers understand them and facilitate their future implementation (researcher’s insider knowledge). apart from taking part in cpds provided by the school, instructors are expected to participate in external teacher-training events, for example, conferences for teachers (tobiasz). instructors who wish to develop themselves professionally can also take advantage of a well-equipped (izyda) resource library or request a book to be purchased by the school (bożena). agata: we have a wide range of supplementary materials available. bożena: i am very impressed with our constantly updated resource library and the fact that everything is bought when requested. additionally, bożena pointed out that “you can develop yourself thanks to contact with experienced teachers.” as she observed, staff-room discussions typically relate to lesson preparation and sharing ideas and are as valuable as formal cpd. workplace culture the positive corporate culture at the school seems to be strictly connected to its history. founded in the 1990s by the british council, the institution has a long tradition of being the best in the city. when it was opened, people queued all night for enrolment as there were far more prospective students than the school could hold (researcher’s insider knowledge). since the school promotes self-growth, many of its instructors have developed to become experts in the field—delta holders, certified teacher-trainers, cambridge esol examiners, as well as elt material writers (researcher’s insider knowledge). consequently, members of staff feel proud and privileged to be part of this team (teacher interviews). both the school’s prestigious past and the high qualifications of its current teachers enhance staff morale, motivation, and the general work atmosphere. all these contribute to the overall drive for professionalism. everybody makes an effort to fit in with the school profile. participants also mention peer motivation which klementyna referred to as “positive competition.” tobiasz explained how other teachers motivate him: we motivate one another by example. we can see that other people are striving to be the best in our profession and we just want to be like them. language teacher wellbeing in the private school … tapsla.12576 p. 13/30 furthermore, instructors spoke very highly of the vibes in the staff room, where teachers “are eager to help each other,” plan lessons together, and happily exchange ideas and materials. an ongoing quality conversation makes the workplace truly professional. agata: we talk about teaching all the time but i think that we talk about it because we share ideas and materials and it is always like “oh, i have a lesson on whatever,” and then everybody has, you know, some kind of an idea, “you could do this, you could do that, this book, that book.” izyda: we are really great as a team, yes, as a group and i suppose, for everybody it is really, really pleasant to come to the teachers’ room and to share different things, to share different ideas or stories about students, or stories from private life, wherever, but it is a really, really friendly atmosphere. klementyna: i had an episode of working for another leading private school in town. i could not believe the boss was constantly chatting with teachers about fashion! i was missing the ongoing professional conversation. additionally, teachers declared that they identify themselves with the institution and are supportive of its policy, which, as one of the instructors pointed out, is not the case in every school. tobiasz: i couldn’t stress it enough. the place has made me: who i am and what i represent in my professional skills. organization and management the school is run in a democratic manner. all strategies, changes, and new policies are discussed during staff meetings and subsequently subject to majority voting (participant observation), which makes teachers feel an integral part of the institution. agata explained: i have always felt i can have my say in a lot of things and my suggestions are taken into account when it comes to making the school policy. by being involved in decision-making we are more connected to the place and feel the place is also our responsibility. tapsla.12576 p. 14/30 katarzyna budzińska the present director of studies, for example, was selected from among the teachers by vote (researcher’s insider knowledge). the narratives demonstrate the teachers’ appreciation of the boss and reflect the positive relationship between her and the instructors: tobiasz: the boss is very dedicated and does her best. the place wouldn’t be the same without her. klementyna: the boss is approachable and accessible, mostly among us in the staff room. she has a separate room adjoining the teachers’ room and when she is there the door is usually open. when i worked for another school, each time i wanted to speak to the boss, he told me to send him an email. at my other workplace, the boss shuts herself in a room with an access code, which has made me appreciate what i otherwise would have considered normal. izyda: this is a positive workplace thanks to a friendly atmosphere and a good rapport between the management and teachers. agata: the management is very employee-friendly. i have never felt any negativity coming from the management. autonomy, which is a major source of job satisfaction for some instructors, plays a vital role at this institution. teachers can choose levels (bożena), coursebooks, and the extent to which they want to exploit them. there is no rigidity in following the coursebook. the only uniformity that exists regards the number of tests and written assignments (participant observation). furthermore, instructors’ preferences about the days they wish to teach and the number of hours are taken into consideration (tobiasz). substitutions are paid for and not imposed upon, therefore teachers who wish to earn extra money volunteer for them. instructors appreciate the rule that the substituted teacher prepares the lessons and gives the lesson plan and materials to the substituting teacher (researcher’s insider knowledge). bożena: for me, this is the best working environment i’ve ever worked in—my personal space is respected and my preferences for selecting the level of teaching are considered prior to giving me classes before each academic year begins. klementyna: i love the feeling of freedom owing to the choice of dates of my classes. this flexibility has had a positive effect on my family life. the fact that i can choose a coursebook and use one that matches my teaching language teacher wellbeing in the private school … tapsla.12576 p. 15/30 style makes me feel comfortable. i also value the fact that all of us teachers are involved in the policy-making of our school. izyda: i get to choose the number of groups and the days i teach so i can’t complain. tobiasz: the management has confidence in me. i get to decide about pretty much everything. teaching experience instructors unanimously state that the comfort of teaching at this school is very high primarily thanks to small, homogenous groups and attractive, well-equipped classrooms. according to the school policy, the number of students per group must not exceed 12. in practice, many classes consist of 5–7 students (participant observation). as klementyna points out, a small class size reduces the risk of discipline issues and facilitates the implementation of the communicative approach to language teaching. it also makes it easier to tailor seating arrangements to language activities and smoothly switch between pair-work, group-work, and mingling. group homogeneity has been achieved through written and oral placement testing and creating groups at ten levels of advancement from elementary to post-proficiency. furthermore, during the first few lessons, teachers are encouraged to verify the level of the classes they are teaching and move learners up or down in order to minimize the differences between proficiency levels (researcher’s insider knowledge). consequently, as bożena observed: unlike at some other schools where i have taught, instructors here have the comfort of being able to concentrate on teaching, rather than managing mixed levels and differentiation. instructors also believe that the physical aspect of the school contributes to their wellbeing as well: the classrooms are clean, and well-kept with u-shaped desks. they are equipped with interactive whiteboards, computers, ohps, and an internet connection. as agata commented: “i do like to have a lot of technology. i am this gadget freak and the technology available is more than adequate. i really like the fact that the school is pro-technology.” the desks are small, light, and easily movable to form a horseshoe, islands, and other types of layout. each classroom has a name badge related to the culture of tapsla.12576 p. 16/30 katarzyna budzińska english-speaking countries with corresponding photographs hanging on the walls (participant observation). furthermore, the learners’ attitude and engagement stemming from their motivation contribute to the positive teaching experience. when asked about learner motivation, tobiasz explained: the students feel the special atmosphere in our school. this makes them want to learn. by showing them that we take our responsibilities seriously we show them that we want them to make progress and they appreciate it. we care more than teachers in other schools. physical aspect and resources the school is a modern, well-kept, bungalow with proper lighting and is kept at a comfortable temperature. the staff room is equipped with a wide range of constantly updated teaching and teacher development resources, stationery, two photocopiers, a computer, and a printer (participant observation). the instructors speak very highly of the available resources: tobiasz: the resources are sufficient and adequate. bożena: what i really like about this job is the opportunity to access new teaching resources and materials. izyda: the teaching resources are excellent here. the school promotes cooperation and sharing. the teachers have always been encouraged to put any supplementary resources or activities in special files dedicated to particular coursebooks (researcher’s insider knowledge). instructors found such shared resources extremely helpful in planning. as klementyna noticed, the shared resources save your time. they make your lessons more varied and interesting. they are also great for professional development. when i was new at the school, the shared resources helped me fit in with the style of the school. they also gave me lots of ideas for classroom activities that i continue using. language teacher wellbeing in the private school … tapsla.12576 p. 17/30 apart from sharing resources the instructors also share ideas. izyda mentioned a big poster in the staffroom, where instructors put new ideas for activities or useful websites they have discovered. she commented that the poster is an invaluable source of inspiration, which enhances her lessons. the fact that the school has many features more associated with a home has been reported as a boost to instructors’ wellbeing. opposite the teachers’ room, there is a lounge with a sofa, a kitchenette with a fridge, a microwave, a kettle, and a coffee machine. tea and coffee are always provided (participant observation). as agata commented, “all these facilities help us feel comfortable and make a long working day more manageable.” apart from the physical aspects of the school, which contribute to instructor wellbeing, teachers took pride in describing facilities that their school offered to its customers such as a lobby with tables for students to socialize or do homework; a reception area with a library and a quiet space for self-study. generally, instructors are pleased with the physical aspect of the institution. klementyna pointed out that she particularly appreciated it in comparison with other institutions that did not guarantee the same standard: i had a short episode of working for a different private language school and only then i began to appreciate what i took for granted when working here. the building was scruffy with peeling paintwork and old furniture. to get to the school area of the building i had to get through an unpleasant, run-down staircase, which put me off teaching. to make things worse, the classrooms were cold in winter! remuneration and perks salaries, described by one of the teachers as “competitive,” are within the top range for the private language schools (researcher’s insider knowledge) and most teachers (twelve out of fifteen) consider them to be satisfactory. what is different from other schools is that the pay rate is transparent and depends on the type of course and level, which, as teachers commented eliminates the rat race, encourages professional development, and is fair. there are usually opportunities to earn more money for placement testing, and exam practice weekends (researcher’s insider knowledge). yet, instructors feel nostalgic about the early days of the school, when remuneration was much more attractive in comparison with statutory pay. tapsla.12576 p. 18/30 katarzyna budzińska even though there has been little increase in salaries over the last few years (kuba), the school offers free tuition for teachers’ family members. klementyna said she was very appreciative of the perk and admitted that her daughter had studied at the school for five years from an elementary to advanced level. additionally, the school subsidizes the taking of development courses such as the cambridge delta preparation course. most of the teachers have enhanced their qualifications thanks to this perk (researcher’s insider knowledge). the most meaningful comment came from tobiasz, who said that this school offers him far more than money. social life a naturally occurring, non-imposed social life among the teachers contributes to teacher wellbeing. there are several regular occasions when teachers meet outside work (interviews). one of them is a christmas party organized by the boss at her own home. after the final meeting at the end of each school year, all teachers go out for a meal at a restaurant. every summer, there are garden parties with barbeques organized by members of staff (participant observation). teachers come to garden parties with their families and, as one of them reported: “children enjoy playing with one another as if in one, large family.” during the training weekend (see professional development), there is a party with team games and quizzes. strong bonds between instructors result in what agata described as “a close-knit teachers’ community” and “the second home.” some members of staff have become friends or even, as agata put it, “friends for life” and meet outside work, go together on holiday. klementyna, who brought her boyfriend to one of the events said, “my boyfriend told me that the school feels like a social club, rather than a school,” which appropriately sums up the atmosphere and relationships at this workplace. some of the instructors have become more established at other institutions but they continue working for the school part-time, because of their “sentiment and affection for the place in general.” interview with the director of studies the director of studies said she cared about the wellbeing of her staff. when asked about the methods she used to promote it, she explained: language teacher wellbeing in the private school … tapsla.12576 p. 19/30 i promote it mainly by speaking to people and finding out what their needs are and what their worries are as well and i think it’s very important that the director of studies is available for teachers um, even for private matters. it doesn’t have to be only strictly connected with teaching, but i think they need to know that there is somebody that they can always talk to, um, it’s kind of management by walking around, yes, and by being with people as much as possible and responding to their anxieties on the go. maria added that it is essential that teachers have everything they need: good quality classrooms, good quality equipment, and a sufficient number of books that can be used as extra materials. furthermore, she highlighted the significance of cpd: it’s important that people take part in webinars, conferences, so they can listen to other ideas of other people, and this gives them a spark to change something in their own teaching and this is motivating cause there is nothing worse than repeating the same things every year, the same textbook, the same exercises, the same methodology. i think it leads to burnout sooner or later, so there needs to be new fresh air that might come from these kinds of training or talking to other teachers. maria revealed that promoting social life was her conscious policy as the head of school: it’s important that people like each other, that they share parts of their private lives, so it is important to go out together, to have barbecues, to have this christmas party that i’m organizing at my house because this links people and when they are linked, they are more eager to cooperate, and the atmosphere is not as tense as it could have been otherwise. the director of studies observed that her effort has paid off because her staff do not seem to treat the school just as a place of work where you come and go as quickly as possible but they like talking to each other and are keen on each other’s company. she added that she also genuinely enjoyed socializing with them: “i love meeting the teachers privately, i love laughing and dancing with them, it’s not just part of my duties, but it is also a pleasure.” tapsla.12576 p. 20/30 katarzyna budzińska research question 3: what aspects of the institution contribute to teacher stress? the first questionnaire did not reveal any sources of stress. teachers mentioned several stress factors only when asked specifically to do so in the second questionnaire. three instructors said that their main source of stress was using technology, or rather, as agata put it, “expectations related to state-of-the-art technology.” two teachers expressed a wish for a designated technical support person to help with issues related to technology and thus, reduce a substantial amount of stress. as bożena pointed out, “there’s nothing worse than discovering that the equipment is not working just when you are about to start the class and you don’t know how to fix it.” time-consuming class preparation was another stressor mentioned by two instructors. teachers at this institution make an effort to meet the students’ expectations and fit in with a high standard of teaching. as agata reported, “the only stressor i can think of is the number of hours i have to put in in terms of preparation for classes.” kuba, who despite being a full-time member of staff, works freelance with a contract renewed each year revealed that “job insecurity is an issue and so is lack of benefits and no pay rise in years.” additionally, even though instructors generally agreed they benefitted from quality teacher training offered by the school, there was one negative comment that there was “too much cpd for experienced teachers because self-motivated teachers do not need so much supervision.” contrary to this, bożena, who was a less experienced instructor, observed: “teacher training could be improved a little by organizing more workshops.” she added that “sponsoring more conferences” would make a difference since not all teachers can afford them. discussion the study has identified and demonstrated institutional features that truly matter to teachers, contribute to their professional wellbeing, and help them to thrive as fl instructors. the crucial source of the teachers’ job satisfaction seems to be a wide range of free, quality teacher training opportunities, which have enabled the teachers to develop and achieve excellence that they are proud of. in addition, the teachers’ contentment results from being a part of a dedicated team of experts that motivate and support each other professionally. teacher-friendly, democratic management is another key source of the instructors’ wellbeing. the teachers value their boss’s availability and aplanguage teacher wellbeing in the private school … tapsla.12576 p. 21/30 proachability as well as the fact that they are involved in the decision-making process. furthermore, the team feel that the school policies contribute to their enjoyment by allowing instructors abundant autonomy as well as the influence on their timetable, and a degree of flexibility regarding dates of classes. this family-friendly approach helps teachers reconcile work with life and also with other jobs. additionally, school policies regarding small class size and careful placement together with the provision of appropriate physical conditions, equipment, and free resources have a positive effect on the instructor teaching experience (mercer, 2020b), which is further enhanced thanks to motivated learners attracted by the institution’s reputation. school experience outside teaching time also seems to be uplifting as a result of the institution’s home-like features and the positive atmosphere, which stems from instructors’ enjoyment and strong bonds between the staff members. the “close-knit teachers’ community” (questionnaire) is a result of the manager’s conscious effort to promote team building. last but not least are the adequate salaries and perks, making instructors feel that their work is appreciated. all these features give the instructors a sense of belonging and identification with the institution (skaalvik & skaalvik, 2011), which appears to be an essential element of their professional wellbeing. unlike previous study results on ltwb that focus on mainly teacher stressors (e.g., macintyre et al., 2019; mercer, 2020b) and look more marginally at uplifts, this research presents us with thriving teachers, experiencing good wellbeing. the participants are unanimous in terms of their enjoyment of the workplace and do not mention any negativity unless prompted, even though they must experience typical stressors embedded in the language teaching profession, like emotional labor (mercer, 2020b) or insecurities related to one’s second language (horwitz, 1996). this could signify that prevailing wellbeing overshadowed any job-related anxiety and resulted in an overall positive mindset. only when asked precisely about stressors in the follow-up questionnaire did the participants enumerate several downsides that were not critical for their overall wellbeing (babic et al., 2022). the samples did not demonstrate that they were affected by general teacher stressors found in previous research, with the exception of technology (mercer, 2020b), which in this institution was available, yet, not always reliable. as far as stressors more specific to private language school teachers are concerned, job insecurity and lack of benefits were mentioned by two full-time, selfemployed freelance staff members, which is consistent with previous research run in the private sector (mercer, 2020b). another similarity was the tension resulting from students or their parents who are paying customers with high expectations (mercer, 2020b). on the contrary, other factors contributing to teacher stress that were found in previous research, such as teacher status, access to resources, physical and organizational conditions or student motivation tapsla.12576 p. 22/30 katarzyna budzińska (wieczorek, 2016) were in this school considered as causes of positive emotions, rather than tension. furthermore, uplifts found in previous research (babic et al., 2022; mercer, 2020b), such as staff relationships, rapport with the manager, autonomy, and cpd, were observed in the present research as well. this case study results are different from mercer’s (2020b), who also conducted research in a private sector context. there are several reasons why this contradiction manifests itself in this institution. firstly, the difference may be attributed to the historically higher status of english language teachers in poland. as mercer (2020b referring to buunk and ybema, 1997) highlighted, professional status and prestige are important for staff wellbeing. secondly, the school is in the private sector but belongs to an institution rather than a private owner, therefore it is not so obvious that the business is run on a for-profit basis—there is no evidence of greed and willingness to exploit teachers (sullivan, 2014). on the contrary, as one of the teachers observed, this institution’s priorities are team spirit, professionalism, and self-development of the staff. thirdly, the school has an excellent reputation, a prestigious origin, and a long tradition of good practices, which boosts staff morale. additionally, most teachers have permanent jobs elsewhere and therefore are not nervous about a potential lack of stability. besides, the fact that they have worked for this school on average for 20 years suggests that job security is not a point of concern at this workplace. the study demonstrates how an institution can contribute to teacher wellbeing at the systemic level by depicting a well-functioning language school in the private sector in poland. it is hoped that the study will help policy-makers acknowledge teachers’ needs. previous research has shown that not all language institutions recognize the importance of teacher wellbeing (mercer, 2020b; wickham, 2015). hopefully, this paper will make a contribution toward educational leaders realizing the value of a satisfied team of teachers. leaders should recognize the invaluable amount of enthusiasm, engagement and dedication teacher wellbeing generates, which will surely translate into student achievement and joy of learning. perhaps this study will persuade those unconvinced managers and policy-makers to revisit their principles and begin recognizing and addressing their staff’s needs. the good practice emerging from the research could serve as guidelines for educational institutions in all contexts, the primary objective of which should be to maintain teacher wellbeing (maslach & leiter, 1999). this is the second study in this under-researched context after mercer’s (2020b) ecological research of language teachers working in the private sector in malta. research from other countries where english is taught as a foreign language in the private sector would shed more light on systemic factors promoting or detracting from teacher wellbeing. another salient research avenue would be looking at teachers of other languages working in the private sector. language teacher wellbeing in the private school … tapsla.12576 p. 23/30 the body of research that will hopefully grow will benefit fl teachers and their learners as well as managers and institution owners. conclusion the results demonstrate how the institution enables teachers to flourish, thanks to its positive culture, policies, organization, management, opportunities for professional growth, social life, as well as adequate resources and physical working conditions. this is consistent with mercer’s (2020b) argument that “systems, cultures, contexts, and policies can impact on individual wellbeing” (p. 3). it is remarkable that language teacher wellbeing was realized at this institution in a natural way, long before the arrival of positive psychology. for this reason, the institution embodies a long story of success. wellbeing is essential for teachers to thrive, to stay in the profession, to be in good physical and mental condition, and needs to be guaranteed by policymakers and people in charge of educational institutions. therefore, it is critical to demonstrate stress-provoking institution features that need healing. it is equally important to point out good practices that strengthen teacher wellbeing and empower instructors to enjoy their vocation despite the stressors which are inherent in their profession. this paper shows practices that matter to teachers, are appreciated by them, make them identify with the institution, and want to work for it. as jin et al. (2021, p. 20) state, it is thus important to understand what enables teachers to flourish in their professional roles and what challenges can hinder their professional wellbeing. the implications need to create guidelines for institutions and policy makers to ensure that teachers are in the best position to be the best educators they can be. some of the positive features that make up the ltwb at this workplace, such as the school’s well-established reputation, cannot be recreated elsewhere. other, more universal facets, such as those related to the organization and management, could be easily implemented by other language schools in the private as well as the public sector for the benefit of teachers, their learners, and consequently workplace performance. sometimes, all they require is a bit of goodwill, empathy, or a human approach. tapsla.12576 p. 24/30 katarzyna budzińska references babic, s., mercer, s., mairitsch, a., gruber, j., & hempkin, k. 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(2011). researching your own institution: higher education. british educational research association. http://www.bera.ac.uk/resources/researching-your-own-institution higher-education wickham, a. (2015). my tailor is not rich: a report on the teaching conditions in france. teaching times, 73, 9–12. wieczorek, a. l. (2016). high inhibitions and low self-esteem as factors contributing to foreign language teacher stress. in d. gabryś-barker & d. gałajda (eds.), positive psychology perspectives on foreign language learning and teaching (pp. 231–247). springer. katarzyna budzińska das wohlbefinden der lehrer im kontext einer privaten sprachschule: eine fallstudie z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g das wohlbefinden der sprachlehrer im privaten bildungssektor wurde bisher von der forschung fast völlig vernachlässigt. die vorliegende studie nimmt eine gut funktionierende private sprachschule unter die lupe und analysiert die systemischen und kontextuellen faktoren, die dazu beitragen, dass sich lehrkräfte in ihrer rolle entfalten können. das wohlbefinden der lehrer wird auf grundlage der befragungen mit offenen fragen, ausführlicher interviews bzw. teilnehmender beobachtung untersucht. die ergebnisse deuten auf mehrere aspekte hin, die sich auf systemischer und institutioneller ebene positiv auf das wohlbefinden der lehrkräfte auswirken, wie z. b. unternehmenskultur, arbeitsverfahren, arbeitsorganisation, management, beruf liche entwicklungsmöglichkeiten, zwischenmenschliche kontakte, unterrichtsmaterialien und -hilfen bzw. physische arbeitsbedingungen. die in der studie beschriebenen guten praktiken sind größtenteils universell und können in allen kontexten des sprachunterrichts angewandt werden. dabei gibt es einige faktoren, die sich besonders förderlich auf das wohlbefinden der lehrkräfte auswirken, allerdings sich nur schwer in anderen einrichtungen wiederholen lassen. schlüsselwörter: privatsektor, lehrkräfte, wohlbefinden, positive psychologie, positive institutionen, sprachunterricht https://doi.org/10.1111/soin.12029 https://doi.org/10.1515/cjal-2018-0031 https://www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/en/people/paul-trowler(189c1668-152d-4594-824f-15b38ece73d5).html https://www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/researching-your-own-institution-higher-education(11ce311c-b192-493a-9498-052a80bf9877).html http://www.bera.ac.uk/resources/researching-your-own-institution-higher-education http://www.bera.ac.uk/resources/researching-your-own-institution-higher-education language teacher wellbeing in the private school … tapsla.12576 p. 27/30 a p p e n d i x a questionnaire 1 personal information: age nationality gender number of years at the institution number of years as a language teacher • do you think x is a positive workplace (promoting teacher wellbeing)? why? a p p e n d i x b questionnaire 2 1. how do you feel about x student-friendly approach to evaluation (grades given in percentage, peer testing, descriptive final grade, possibility to retake every element of coursework)? does it make your job less stressful? why? does it have a positive effect on your relationship with students? please comment. 2. do you tend to have a good relationship with x students? where does it come from? (your conscious effort—give examples; student motivation, other reasons?) 3. how do you feel about your relationship with x management? can you name any positive/negative aspects of it? 4. how do you feel about your relationship with x colleagues? can you name any positive/negative aspects of it? 5. how do you feel about the student number and their level of homogeneity in your x classes? 6. do you find x students motivated? where do you think their motivation comes from? 7. how do you feel about the physical aspect of x? 8. how do you feel about x resources for teachers? 9. how do you feel about teacher development at x (observations, training sessions, conference)? 10. how do you feel about your autonomy at x (your influence on timetable days, times, dates, coursebook, level, workload, etc.)? 11. do you feel you have sufficient autonomy within your classroom? please comment/give examples. tapsla.12576 p. 28/30 katarzyna budzińska 12. how do you feel about x democracy in terms of policy-making, strategies, and changes (discussions and votes)? 13. are there any stressors related to your teaching job at x? can you name them? does your enjoyment outweigh negative emotions? please comment. 14. do you teach at any other institution(s)? how does your wellbeing at that institution compare with your wellbeing at x? 15. how much do the following aspects of being an x teacher contribute to your job satisfaction? 1) small groups 2) homogenous group levels 3) motivated students 4) your relationship with students 5) your relationship with colleagues 6) your relationship with managers 7) your salary 8) teaching resources 9) opportunities for professional development 10) autonomy (influence on timetable, level, coursebook) 11) autonomy within your classroom 12) democratic decisions about school policies 13) student-friendly evaluation (peer-testing, grades in percentage) 14) physical aspect—building, classrooms 15) equipment/technology 16) atmosphere at work 17) can you name any other sources of your job satisfaction? a p p e n d i x c focus group meeting—semi-structured interview questions 1) do you think the school promotes teacher wellbeing? why? 2) do you think this school is prestigious? why? does it affect the way you feel about working there? are you proud of working at this school because of its prestigious history? 3) how would you characterize the status of el teachers in poland? why is it high/low? has it changed? 4) does the fact that the school is owned by an institution—university rather than a private owner—have an influence on working conditions/atmosphere? 5) how would you characterize the corporate culture of the institution? is it different from other language schools? do you think there are more professional conversations than at other schools? language teacher wellbeing in the private school … tapsla.12576 p. 29/30 6) there are some highly qualified members of staff—leading teacher trainers, coursebook writers, delta holders—does it influence the way you feel about this institution? 7) do you think you have an influence on policy-making at this institution? is it important for you? 8) do you find the place professional? 9) how is cpd realized at this school? does it help you develop professionally? does professional development contribute to your wellbeing? is it important for you? 10) does the atmosphere positively affect your ltwb? 11) what can you say about your colleagues’ motivation and commitment to the profession? 12) can you observe peer motivation? peer support? 13) do you identify yourself with the institution? 14) is there anything about the boss’s style that has a positive/negative influence on your wellbeing? 15) is the scheduling teacher-friendly? 16) how do you feel about the comfort of teaching? (small, homogenous groups, motivated students?) 17) what do you think of the physical aspect of the workplace—classrooms, staff room, other facilities, and resources? 18) what are your comments on social life? does it contribute to your wellbeing? 19) does your relationship with your students affect your wellbeing? 20) is the salary adequate (in comparison with other schools)? 21) do you experience any stressors related to this workplace? 22) do positive aspects outweigh negative ones? a p p e n d i x d interview with the director of studies 1) do you care about teachers’ wellbeing? 2) what do you do to promote it? 3) apart from what you do does the school promote teacher wellbeing? 4) do you think ltwb would be more difficult to promote if there was a private school owner instead of a state institution owner? 5) in what way the fact that it is a profit-driven institution affects ltwb? 6) many members of staff remained loyal for over 20 years? what do you think has kept them? 7) do you think the school’s prestigious roots have affected ltwb? tapsla.12576 p. 30/30 katarzyna budzińska 8) the school had positive policies long before the arrival of positive psychology. how was it achieved? 9) what kind of contracts do teachers have? 10) do you genuinely enjoy taking part in the school’s social life? ana aldekoa university of the basque country (upv/ehu) gure ikastola en tres languages*: the teaching and learning of trilingual oral expository skills by means of a didactic sequence** a b s t r a c t the aim of this paper is to analyze the development of trilingual oral expository skills in sixteen-year-old students of spanish (l1), basque (l2), and english (l3) in the framework of a trilingual didactic sequence. initial and final oral expository texts produced at the beginning and at the end of a didactic sequence by trilingual students constitute the empirical data of this study. we followed text genre-based criteria in order to analyze students’ trilingual productions (dolz & schneuwly, 2016). results show that students improved their oral expository texts to different extents: among the aspects that showed a greater improvement, we can name: explicit mention of core elements at the introductory section in basque, more consistent use of topic introducers regardless of the language and more regular use in english of resources to clarify those concepts whose meaning could be difficult to grasp for foreign students. among those aspects where improvement is notably poor, we could mention that students hardly ever addressed the audience in english and thus failed to catch their interest; also, the production of target-deviant past tense verb forms in english remains quite problematic. we conclude that well-defined language alternation and integration, which in our case occur both in students’ productions and in the classroom activities, lead, overall, to the development of the three languages. we will further argue that this kind of language alternation and integration fosters interlinguistic transfer, resulting in the development of students’ multilingual competence (cummins, 2008). keywords: basque, english, spanish, trilingual oral expository skills, trilingual didactic sequence, language alternation and integration, interlinguistic transfer, multilingual competence theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 4 (2), 2018, pp. 73–92 * we called the didactic sequence gure ikastola en tres languages, which is a name made up of different words from the three languages that constitute the didactic sequence, and means “our school in three languages.” ** beneficiary of a pre-doctoral grant from the basque government (pre-doctoral programme to train the researchers who are not doctors 2015–2016). this paper has been supported by the project it983-16 /hije-2 from the basque government. ana aldekoa74 introduction multilingualism is an undeniable reality nowadays and there is no state in europe in whose territory there is only one living language (idiazabal, 2011). garcía-azkoaga and idiazabal (2015) state that what is natural is plurilingualism. even if the ubiquity of multilingualism is considered a reality, in the last years, the fact that languages are taught from an often too monolingual perspective has been criticized (cummins, 2008), standing up for the adoption of a more multilingual approach to language teaching. for example, leonet et al. (2017) report on a study in which students learn compounds in basque, english, and spanish by comparing the three languages. this integration of more than one language in the classroom, however, cannot assume just any form but has to be handled taking into account the specific sociolinguistic characteristics of each context (cenoz & gorter, 2017). this is especially relevant in a context in which a majority and a minority and minoritized language coexist and the use of the minority language has to be promoted. the aim of this paper is to study the acquisition of basque, english, and spanish oral expository skills by making a comparison between the initial and final texts of a didactic sequence. in fact, in this paper we introduce a didactic sequence based on the alternation of languages and on the interlinguistic transfer principle, and present some of its outcomes. in the first section the project is contextualized: we talk about the multilingual basque educational system and we also give some theoretical background information. the second section focuses on the didactic sequence that was implemented, called gure ikastola en tres languages, and gives details about the participants, the activities involved (from now on we will refer to this as the modules of the didactic sequence) and the analysis procedure we used to examine the data. the findings section shows the results that we have come up with, giving examples and commenting on them. in the conclusions, we draw some conclusions from the experimentation of the trilingual didactic sequence. multilingual basque educational system this project takes place in the basque autonomous community, where both basque and spanish have an official status and, according to the basque curriculum (basque government, 2015), students need to attain a b2 level in those languages by the end of secondary education. english is included as the first and main foreign language, and students must achieve a b1 level by the end of secondary education. the promotion of multilingualism including a minority language (basque in this case) is a major specificity of the basque gure ikastola en tres languages… 75 educational system (cenoz, 2009; idiazabal et al., 2015). in the basque educational system, parents can choose among three different models: a, where the language of instruction is spanish, except for language lessons; b, where some subjects are taught through spanish and others through basque; d, where the language of instruction is basque except for language lessons. english is also used in those three models as the language of instruction for some nonlinguistic subjects. our students, who are in fourth grade of secondary school, on a weekly basis, take three hours of english language arts classes, two hours of science in english, and also part of technology subject. for students who choose the scientific-technological specialty, robotics is also taught through the medium of english. integrated didactics of languages the integrated didactics of languages is highlighted as a relevant approach for multilingual education both in the basque and european contexts (basque government, 2015; 2016; candelier et al., 2010). the integrated didactics proposal states that the plurilingual communicative competence requires that the learning of all the languages of the curriculum is planned in a coordinated way. this planning is based on the same theoretical and methodological principles so that, according to the linguistic transfer principle (cummins, 1979), crosslinguistic transfer can occur (ortega & anakabe, 2015). the integrated didactics of languages is based on the communicative approach to language teaching, among which the text-genre-based approach has been considered relevant (larringan, 2009), and it takes texts as empiric forms of the use of language. text-genres constitute historically constructed models to use the languages and allow for stabilization of formal elements (artemeva & freedman, 2015). the text-genre-based teaching can be found in legal documents regarding education in the basque country and also in the common european framework of reference for languages. since the didactic sequence introduced in this paper is about the alternation of languages, it raises the controversial question of whether or not languages should be taught and learnt separately or whether or not an alternation of languages or adopting a translanguaging approach to language teaching is more desirable, seeing that it brings more positive effects to the learning process (cummins, 2008; cenoz & gorter, 2017). as we all may be familiar with, there has been a long tradition in separating languages in language teaching. in fact, at school there is a distinct space, time, teacher and content for each language and, apart from that, there is a tendency to correct students whenever they switch between languages, which shows that purism is regarded of utmost importance in language teaching. among the arguments for separatana aldekoa76 ing languages in educational contexts such as in immersion programs is the protection of minority languages. in sociolinguistic contexts where a minority language exists, there is, as baker (2017) claims, fear that students will choose the majority language over the minority language. the arguments that, on the other hand, support the alternation of languages and translanguaging are the following, taking these latter approaches, languages would benefit from each other and that these approaches respond better to today’s social exigencies. it is quite clear so far that languages can no longer be treated as isolated entities not being influenced in any way from the acquisition process of another given language and, therefore, it needs to be considered that they should be learnt in interaction because what is acquired in one language cannot be suppressed in the acquisition of another one. it is true, however, that integrating different languages requires certain criteria and, accordingly, cannot be implemented in any way. in fact, for example, there is a certain reaction against using translanguaging in the context of a minority language, and cenoz and gorter (2017, p. 910) claim that “the celebration of translanguaging without taking into consideration the specific characteristics of the socio-linguistic context can have a negative effect on regional minority languages.” having said that, we argue that the alternation of languages has to be precise, in order to be controlled and avoid the overuse of the majority language. taking the integration of languages to the precise context where the didactic sequence is carried out, the basque educational system assumes a general level of coordination as far as non-linguistic contents are concerned, since the non-linguistic contents achieved through basque are not repeated in spanish. however, the didactic materials of basque, spanish, and english based on a coordinated perspective are scarce (apraiz et al., 2012): in some cases, we find explicit interlinguistic references between the different languages (aldekoa, in prep.); in other cases, coordination is limited to working on a different text genre in each language (manterola, almgren, & díaz de gereñu, in prep.). gure ikastola en tres languages: a trilingual didactic sequence the two main research questions addressed in this project are the following: • is the trilingual didactic sequence outlined in this project effective in promoting an improvement of the oral expository skills in the three different languages? gure ikastola en tres languages… 77 • do the language alternation and interlinguistic transfer carried out in this project contribute to the improvement of oral expository skills in the three different languages? in this paper we will mainly focus on the development from the initial to the final text of the skills of the experimental group, who did complete the modules, but it does not fall within the scope of this paper to look at the results that the group of subjects who did not complete the modules of the didactic sequence obtained. participants and task the participants of our study are students of fourth grade of secondary education of a d model school in bilbao, where english is introduced at the age of three. in total, 21 students constitute the experimental group of our study (nine boys and 12 girls), divided into seven groups of three students each. the students, who have an autochthonous background, are mainly l1 spanish speakers, some are two l1 basque/spanish speakers and there are only a few l1 basque speakers. very often the use of basque is limited to the school context and spanish is predominant in the relationships outside the school, and, in their spare time, they usually conduct their activities in spanish or, to a lesser extent, english and basque. concerning the sociolinguistic background of bilbao, it can be said that the use of basque in bilbao has decreased in the last fifteen years (1989–2016); in bilbao other languages—spanish, french or others—are used more than basque (spanish 93.6%; french 0.3%; other languages 3.5%; basque 2.5%) (soziolinguistika klusterra, 2016). “a didactic sequence can be defined as a set of teaching periods (or “lessons”), grouped together in time and systematically organized around a lin­ guistic activity built in an explicit classroom activity, and articulated around a shared and homogeneous learning purpose” (idiazabal & dolz, 2013, p. 40, my translation). according to idiazabal and dolz (2013), the aim of didactic sequences is for the students to master texts that are placed in social context, and not the ones that are often produced for pedagogic purposes, which means that a selection of real model texts has to be made (figure 1). in our study, we designed a didactic sequence within which students, in groups of three, were required to produce an oral expository text as the initial text (gure ikastola en tres languages). “an oral expository text is a formal text genre, whose main aim is the transmission of expertise or knowledge” (garcía-azkoaga, 2007, p. 182, my translation). students had to combine three languages (basque, english, and spanish) in their texts. multilingual expository texts are common social practices, that is, in public conference contexts (cenoz & gorter, 2017). the text was ana aldekoa78 figure 1. (dolz, noverraz, & schneuwly, 2001, p. 7) fictionally addressed to students from an irish high school (exchange-program students) and to our students’ parents. students were provided with a planning model that contained the contents to be explained and the language to use for each of them, and their oral productions were videotaped and transcribed. in the oral expositions, students essentially had to mention their linguistic biography, one of the following three topics, depending on the speaker: the general characteristic, the projects or the history of the school, and finally, the most interesting aspect or what should be improved at school. it must be remarked that the instructions to produce the final text were modified in the sense that, in the final text, the use of a powerpoint presentation was introduced where a summary of what was said in basque or spanish was included, so that it was also understood by irish students. analysis criteria of the initial and final texts after producing and transcribing the initial texts of the didactic sequence, some analysis criteria were specified. the analysis criteria for the trilingual texts were established based on bronckart’s (1997) text architecture model and other works about expository texts, which include the works of j. dolz, and b. schneuwly (1998), j. dolz, r. gagnon, s. mosquera, and v. sánchez (2013); battaner et al. (1997). following bronckart’s text architecture model (figure 2), three categories were defined, namely, the planning, the adaptation to the communicative situation and the textuality. in the planning category, a subcategory was included, which had to do with the introductory section, which students produced in basque, and here we looked at whether the objective of the text was mentioned at the beginning of the oral presentation, an initial contact with the audience was established, the listeners’ attention was caught and the project was gure ikastola en tres languages… 79 presented. in the adaptation to the communicative situation, three subcategories were included, and the first one we looked at was whether the introductory and final sections were presented on behalf of the group in basque. the second one had to do with the target audience, whether the words whose meaning might be difficult to grasp for irish students were explained and whether the target audience was addressed in the text, and if yes, then by which linguistic means, all of it in english. the last subsection was whether the invitation to take part in the forum was addressed correctly in basque. in the textuality category, two subcategories were included. the first one had to do with connection among different segments; whether topic introducers were used in basque, english, and spanish; whether a text organizer that announces the end of the oral exposition was included in english; whereas the second one—whether verb forms were consistently employed to refer to the past when talking about the history of the school and the students’ linguistic biography in english. bronckart, 1997 analysis criteria 1. planning 1. the introduction in basque: is the objective of the text mentioned at the beginning of the presentation? is an initial contact with the audience established? is the listeners’ attention caught? is the project presented? 2. adaptation to the communicative situation 2. are the introductory and final sections presented on behalf of the group? 3. the target audience: are the words whose meaning may be difficult to grasp for irish students explained? is the target audience addressed in the text? by which linguistic means? 4. is the invitation to take part in the forum addressed correctly? 3. textutality 5. connection among the different segments: are topic introducers and a final marker used? 6. are verb forms consistently employed to refer to the past when talking about the history of the school and the students’ linguistic biography? figure 2. bronckart’s architecture model then, we analyzed those initial texts, so that we could design the trilingual modules that would help the students overcome the most prominent difficulties that they had encountered in the initial texts. the modules were designed according to the interlinguistic transfer principle (cummins, 2008), so the aspects to be improved have not been worked on in every single language (basque, english, and spanish), even in those cases in which we wanted them to improve in more than one language. ana aldekoa80 aims of the modules of the trilingual didactic sequence after the production of the initial texts, students received instruction in order to improve their oral expository texts. the skills worked on in the didactic sequence were divided into three different modules, each one of them targeting a specific aspect of the oral expository text. the aim of the first module was “giving a sense of entirety to the oral exposition.” in this first module students were taught to contextualize the oral exposition at the introductory section in basque, because that is the language students were asked to use at the introductory section. so they learnt how to mention the project within which the oral exposition took place, to outline the aim of the oral exposition and to set an initial contact with the audience in basque, attracting their attention. apart from learning how to contextualize the oral exposition, they also learnt to talk on behalf of the group at the introductory and final sections in basque. the third and last learning they acquired in this first module was using topic introducers to connect the different segments in basque, english, and spanish. with regards to the topic introducers, they learnt two different forms of topic introducers: the first type were topic introducers such as concerning, regarding or with reference to, that is, short phrases to let the audience know what the next topic will be. the second type of topic introducers were more complex, such as now i’m going to talk to you a bit about the history. within the acquisition of this second type of topic introducers students were taught to do three different things. first, in basque and spanish they were asked to use other verbs rather than the common ones such as esan, azaldu, zerbaiti buruz hitz egin; decir, explicar, hablar sobre algo (“say,” “tell” or “talk about something”) and in english the verbs “tell,” “talk,” and “explain” were the ones that were taught, since the basque curriculum heziberri 2020 states that students must attain a higher level of competence in their l1 and l2, that is, in basque and spanish, than in their l3 english. leaving the verbs aside, in the topic introducers section they also learnt how to modalize in order to somehow “justify” the little amount of information they were providing their audience with, because if, say, they were asked to talk about the history of the school, it is clear that some historical facts would be skipped, so modalizers were another teaching topic but only with regards to the amount of information they were giving (i.e., “i’m going to talk to you a bit about”; “i’m going to slightly explain to you…”). the third and last aspect that was taught within the topic introducers was to make reference to the audience. since we witnessed that when they made reference to the audience in english the reference to the audience was sometimes incorrect (they said things like “*talk you,” “*explain you,” “tell” without object), they were also taught to refer to the audience correctly. not only did they have to use topic introducers just before mentioning the gure ikastola en tres languages… 81 main topic of the oral exposition (the history of the school, the characteristics or the projects), but also when letting the audience know that the exposition was about to finish. the aim of the second module was “taking the audience into account.” this module had to do with interculturality. we need to bear in mind that the speakers and a part of the audience (the irish students) belong to two different cultures and, thus, have different social and cultural references. this can clearly be seen in the initial texts when they mention basque culture-specific terms that have to do mainly with both basque culture and education system (dbh—secondary education, ikastola—school, euskalki—dialect of basque, batuera—the name of the standardized form of basque, etc.). students were taught to make sure that the irish students understood what they were talking about, using the phrase which/who + to be in english. also within this second module, students were taught how to catch the listeners’ attention in a particular way in english: after spotting a word whose meaning could be difficult to grasp for the irish students, they had to define it using the phrase just mentioned, then if the word could lead to a comparison between the basque and the irish society, students were expected to raise a question and tell the irish students how interested they were in knowing more about it (we study in bizkaiera, which is the dialect spoken in the largest part of biscay. do you too have dialects in ireland? you’ll tell us when you come here/ we would really like to know about that). lastly, students were taught to address correctly the invitation to take part in the forum (specify how to take part and do it tactfully) in basque. the aim of the third module was “telling correctly the events in the past” and here students were taught how to use correctly in english the verbs to make reference to the past, that is, to consistently use the past verb forms to refer to the past. didactic sequence based on the alternation of languages and the interlinguistic transfer. as we can see, this is a didactic sequence based on the alternation of languages and interlinguistic transfer. there are three dimensions of alternation in it. the first dimension of alternation regards the fact that the target text itself proposed in this project alternates basque, english, and spanish. here the alternation remains at a textual level. the second dimension concerns the fact that the modules implemented in this project are also trilingual because they combine the three languages, but the combination here does not yet happen at the exercise level. in this second dimension we would include the forms they have produced in, say, basque in the initial text, have been worked through in basque in the modules and have been produced in basque again in the final text, and the same with each language. the last dimension regards alternation within the exercises of an individual module, that is, the use of more than one language within the same exercise. ana aldekoa82 as we have previously seen in the explanation of the aims of the didactic sequence, the way language alternation occurs in this project has been the outcome of a thoroughly thought-through process and it serves the purpose of giving each language the exposure that this specific sociolinguistic context requires (idiazabal et al., 2015). that is why basque is the most widely used language, because this didactic sequence is held in an immersion model and because basque is a minority language in this certain sociolinguistic context. english is the second most widely used language, in the basque country, because it is the main foreign language and students have little exposure to the language outside school. lastly, spanish is the least used language, because it is their l1 and students already have adequate exposure and motivation to learn the language (cummins, 1979). the modules work with the three languages jointly and, as a working strategy, at certain times interlinguistic transfer is fostered, more specifically, within the exercises of the modules. it occurs at two specific moments: the first one is when teaching about topic introducers. students are taught to use topic introducers both in basque and english, not in spanish, even if improvement is also pursued in spanish. in this moment interlinguistic transfer is promoted from basque and english to spanish, that is, from their l2 and l3 to their l1, because it is only in the control list that students are asked about how they would do it in spanish, without having been given instruction of any kind about how to do it in spanish. in this case interlinguistic transfer is encouraged to see if they also improve in spanish. the second moment of interlinguistic transfer occurs when teaching students to consistently use past verb forms in english. here the exercise in which they have to realize that they mix present and past verb forms to make reference to the past is in basque, and then the next exercise in which they have to fill in the gaps with the correct form of the verbs is in english. in this moment interlinguistic transfer is stimulated from basque to english, that is, from their l2 to their l3. in this case interlinguistic transfer is supported to see if doing metalinguistic reflection in a language, in this case the language they master better, causes that the knowledge acquired in that language is transferred to another. the final texts were transcribed and we conducted a thorough analysis of them. with this analysis we wanted to know what the influence of the didactic sequence had been, and therefore, to what extent the students had improved their oral productions, especially regarding the aims that were foreseen, but we also wanted to identify those aspects where improvement was notoriously less. moreover, we wanted to know if the alternation of languages suggested in the project had given way to provoking the intended interlinguistic transfer, and therefore, to achieving the goals set for each language, and also if there was any other aspect where interlinguistic transfer had occurred and to what aspect of the oral exposition that transfer belonged. gure ikastola en tres languages… 83 in the following section we will introduce the findings of the final text, by establishing a contrast with the initial texts. findings the planning the first analysis criterion concerns the introduction of the oral exposition in basque: whether or not the objective of the text is mentioned at the beginning of the presentation, an initial contact with the audience is established, or what is the same, whether the listeners’ attention is caught, and the project is presented. in the initial texts, 4/7 groups include no introductory section whatsoever and only 3/7 groups mention any of the three parts that were included in the introductory section, that is, they mention the objective of the exposition, set an initial contact with the audience or present the project within which the oral exposition takes place. example number (1) is a typical illustration of what students usually do at the introductory section in the initial texts, which is limited to introducing the group briefly. (1) e: kaixo gu / n1 ikastolako ikasleak gara / e: laugarren / dbhko ikasleak / eta x y eta z gara /  a: hi / we are students from n ikastola / a: dbh / four students / and we are x y and z / in the final texts, however, there is a significant improvement in how they produce the introductory section. all the seven groups include an introductory section and all the seven groups mention any of the three parts. as we can see in example number (2), in the final texts the introductory section is no longer limited to only briefly introducing the group, but they also mention the project, its aim and they set an initial contact with the audience by trying to catch their attention. (2) egun on gu x e: y eta z gara eta: e: n:ko hiru ikasle eta: orain gure ikastola en tres languages deitutako proiektu bat aurkeztuko dizuegu / e:m eta gure ikastolaren aurkezpena egitea da proiektu honen helburua 1 n, x, y and z have been employed so that both the school and the participants preserve their anonymity. ana aldekoa84 beraz berari buruz informazioa emongo deutsuegu / eta: / e: / hemendik gutxira: irlandatik etorriko zarienentzako: erabilgarria izan daiteke /  good morning we are x a: y and z and we are three students from n ikastola and now we are going to introduce you a project called gure ikastola en tres languages / a:m the aim of this project is to present our school so we are going to give you information about it / and / a:m / it can be useful for those of you who are coming from ireland / adaptation to the communicative situation in this section we will focus on three different analysis criteria. the second analysis criterion was whether or not the introductory and final sections are presented on behalf of the group in basque. in the initial texts only 3/7 groups talk on behalf of the group at the introductory section (mostly because in the remaining four groups there is no proper introductory section in the initial texts) and 5/7 groups do at the final section. in the final texts, however, all seven groups talk on behalf of the group at the introductory section and all seven groups do it at the final section too. examples (1) and (2) perfectly illustrate how, in the initial texts (1), the introductory section lacks any of its core elements most times, that is, the presentation of the aim of the text and of the project, and the setting of an initial contact with the audience are missing. in fact, if they talk on behalf of the group, it is only to introduce the group briefly or sporadically introduce any of the three core elements of the introductory section. at the final texts (2), along with the introduction of the core elements of the introductory section, there comes the use of the first person plural. the third analysis criterion focuses on the target audience, whether the words whose meaning may be difficult to grasp for irish students are explained in english. it should be reminded that the audience of the texts were, on the one hand, the students’ parents and, on the other hand, irish students. in the initial texts, orally in english, 49/84 concepts are clarified, that is, 58.3%. however, in doing so no group uses the phrase which/who + to be. instead of that, it is very common to use *that + to be in non-defining relative clauses. also, in 4/84 concepts, despite trying to clarify a given word which they guess could cause some degree of incomprehensibility among the irish students, the comprehensibility of the definition is questioned, as in example number (3). (3) here we study in bizkaiera / that is a euskalki / that it’s only spoken in bizkaia / gure ikastola en tres languages… 85 we can see that, apart from using incorrectly the pronoun that, in an attempt to describe the word bizkaiera (the name of the dialect spoken in biscay), the student introduces another word—euskalki (which means “dialect of basque”)—equally difficult to understand for irish students. in the final texts, in english orally, hints of progress can be seen. 61/85 words are clarified, or what is the same, 71.76%. six out of seven groups use the phrase which/who + to be sometime. however, it is very common to use *that + to be in non-defining relative clauses, therefore, we can say they have developed consciousness about explaining the difficult words, yet their form has not been fully assimilated. again, as happens in the initial texts, the comprehensibility of the definitions is questioned in 3/85 concepts. examples (4) and (5) are two good illustrations of what can be seen in the final texts. in (4) the correct form of the relative pronoun which is used, whereas in (5), in order to define the word “polikiroldegi” the pronoun that, which cannot be used in non-defining relative clauses, is applied. (4) we study dbh 4 / which is the secondary education here in biscay / (5) and finally the polikiroldegi that is e: like a normal sport centre but only with a: football couch / in the powerpoint presentation in english 37/93 concepts are clarified, that is, 39.7%, with the same problems as in english orally with regards to correctness of the relative pronoun and the comprehensibility of the definitions. besides, also with reference to the target audience, we looked at whether or not the target audience was directly addressed in english, and if it was, by which linguistic means. as we have mentioned in section aims and modules of the triangual didactic sequence, we taught them to make reference to the audience in quite an explicit way, and in the initial texts no groups makes such explicit reference to the audience. in the final texts, only 2/7 groups make such explicit reference and each only once. one such example can be seen in (6). (6) e:m e: do you too have e: school programmes i:n in iin ireland? e: we: you will tell us when you come here / the fourth analysis criterion concerns whether the invitation to take part in the forum is addressed correctly in basque. in the initial text no group specifies how to take part in the forum. however, 4/7 groups expand on the invitation, 6/7 groups make reference to the audience and also 6/7 groups use polite expressions in the invitation (in one group the invitation is addressed as an order). in total, 14 modalizers are used: the verb invite, conditional clauses and phrases with can and if you want constitute the main modalizers. ana aldekoa86 overall, the tendency in the initial texts is to make a very short invitation to take part in the forum, as in (7). (7) gogoratu e: joan ahal zariela / e: forparte hartu ahal dozuela foroan / e: ba agur /  remember that you can go / a: that you can take part in the forum / a: and goodbye / in the final texts, there is a significant improvement in how they produce the invitation to take part in the forum: 2/7 groups specify how to take part in the forum, 4/7 groups expand on the invitation although they do not say how to take part, so almost every group expands on the invitation; all seven groups make reference to the audience and 6/7 groups use polite expressions in the invitation (in one group the invitation is addressed as an order). in total, 18 modalizers are used: besides the verb invite, conditional clauses and phrases with can and if you want, we remind you and with pleasure are also included. as we can see in example number (8), the tendency in the final texts is to elaborate more on the invitation, introducing the forum as a chance for the audience to deepen their knowledge about the school while expressing their willingness to solve any doubt the audience may have. (8) […] e: gogoratu e: nahi dizuegu e: […] e: zalantzak e: badituzue e: e: webgunean foro bat e: daukazuela […] e: diapositiban ikusten denez e: link horretan e: sartze:n bazarete e: / e: forora e: sartu ahal izango zarete eta guk e: prest egongo gara zuen zalantzak e: argitzeko / […] […] a: we want to remind you that a: if you have a: any question […] you have a forum in the website […] a: if you go into the link a: you can see in the slide a: / a: you’ll be able to go into the forum and we’ll be a: willing to solve your doubts / […] / since the invitation to take part in the forum is expressed in basque in all seven groups, when this section is presented in the powerpoint in english, it can be observed that the polite forms acquired in basque in the modules have been transferred to english. four out of seven groups mention the invitation to the forum in the ppt and 3/7 groups copy the forms they have learnt in basque. as we can see in example number (9), the modal verb “can” or the polite form “with much pleasure” have been transferred from basque to english. gure ikastola en tres languages… 87 (9) if you have any questions you can get in the schools web where you’ll find forum and there, we will resolve your doubts with much pleasure. textuality in this section we will be looking at two analysis criteria. the fifth analysis criterion concerns connection among the different segments, more precisely, whether or not topic introducers are used in the three languages when introducing different topics of the oral exposition: the linguistic biography, the main topic (that is, the history of the school, the characteristics or the projects), the interesting aspect/to be improved and subtopics, and also, whether or not a final marker which announces the end of the oral exposition is employed. in the initial texts, in total, 13 topic introducers are produced: in english 5/7 groups produce some, and they produce 6; in spanish 3/7 groups produce some and they produce 4; in basque 3/7 groups produce some and they produce 3. the final marker is introduced in 6/7 groups. in the topic introducers, the verbs that are used in basque or spanish can be considered common verbs among the language users, since they do not demand a high command of the language from the speaker. the verbs used are hitz egin, hablar (“talk”). in their l3, english, the verbs they use are speak, talk, explain. concerning the modalizers, 2/7 groups use them in english and spanish, and 1/7 groups make reference to the audience in spanish. in the section of the oral exposition where each student had to let the audience know what they were going to talk about, we found out that the reference to the audience was wrong most of the times, since they used the verbs ungrammatically (*explain you, *talk you, *tell without object). in the following example (10), which is taken from the initial text, the speaker finishes talking in spanish about the general characteristics of the school and he starts right away talking about the most interesting aspect of the school in english, without introducing the new topic. (10) las obras empezaron en mil novecientos ochenta y uno y duraron once meses / e: now e: the thing that i like the most from: the school is that we don’t work as: only class and the teacher explaining […] in the final texts, there is a clear improvement from the initial text. in total, 48 topic introducers are produced: in english 7/7 groups produce some, and they produce 18; in basque 7/7 groups produce some, and they produce 16; in spanish 6/7 groups produce some and they produce 14. the fact that in spanish not all seven groups produce a topic introducer does not mean that ana aldekoa88 one group uses no topic introducer in spanish, but that for the topic they have to explain in spanish they use a topic introducer in english. the final marker is introduced in 7/7 groups. the verbs they use in the final texts in basque or spanish are still hitz egin, azaldu, esan, explicar (“talk,” “explain”) and, to a lesser extent, some that were taught in the didactic sequence: aipatu, mencionar, referirse (“mention,” “refer to”). in english they use explain, speak, talk. five out of seven groups use modalizers in basque, english, and spanish and 5/7 groups make reference to the audience in basque, english, and spanish. in the final text the reference to the audience is produced correctly within the topic introducers, although in the section of the oral exposition, where each student had to let the audience know what they were going to talk about, it seems that students still have difficulty addressing correctly the audience in english. example number (11) belongs to the final text version of the same group and speaker as example number (10). we can see that while in (10) the speaker does not introduce the new topic, in (11) he does let the audience know what he is going to talk about next by saying “now i’m gonna talk to you about…” (11) que tardaron: once: meses en construirlo y fue también gracias a: un benefactor de: la iglesia / e: ok and now i’m gonna: talk to you about the things that i like the most o:f this school / that’s for example the personal / the projects that we do in the school the sixth and last analysis criterion takes into consideration whether past verb forms are consistently employed to refer to the past when talking about the history of the school and the students’ linguistic biography in english. in the initial texts, when they do their linguistic biography or the history in english orally, in 6/7 groups we can find target-deviant past tense verb forms in english, that is, it is very usual that students mix present and past to refer to the past in english. (12) in ninety seventeen a group of parents built a school in m and they call it n ikastola / some years ago the number of pupils increased and they build another school bigger than the first one in the final texts, when they do their linguistic biography or the history in english orally, in 4/7 groups we can find target-deviant past tense verb forms in english. in the powerpoint in english, the production of past verb forms in writing is performed more successfully than in speech. gure ikastola en tres languages… 89 (13) it was founded on 1970 a group of parents was founded first built in neighbourhood called m but then they transported to other neighbourhood called k at first the school only has a 13 students but now has more of 1193 students in example number (13) even if the form is sometimes wrong, the tense is correct. it should be taken into account that in basque and spanish students produce correctly the verbs in the past. conclusions the goal of this paper was to analyze the development of trilingual oral expository skills in the framework of a trilingual didactic sequence. to achieve this goal, we designed a trilingual didactic sequence based on the alternation of languages and the interlinguistic transfer. after students produced the initial oral expository text of the didactic sequence, some modules were outlined taking into account the most prominent difficulties that were found in the text, and then the final text was produced. from the perspective of the integrated didactics of languages, we will conclude that the contrast between the initial and final text shows that teaching oral expository skills from an integrated perspective fosters multilingual development, being language alternation and interlinguistic discursive transfer relevant didactic resources (cummins, 2008). among the aspects that showed a greater improvement from initial to final texts are the following: the explicit mention of core elements at the introductory section in basque, talking on behalf of the group at the beginning and at the end of the exposition in basque, the more consistent use of topic introducers regardless of the language, the more precise way of inviting the audience to take part in the forum in basque, and the more regular use in english of resources to clarify those concepts whose meaning could be difficult to grasp for foreign students. among those aspects where improvement is notably less, the following can be mentioned: students hardly ever addressed the audience in english and thus failed to catch their interest, and the production of target-deviant past tense verb forms in english remains quite problematic. the reason of mixing present and past to make reference to the past can either be caused by fossilization of the ana aldekoa90 form or by lack of automaticity (thornbury, 2005). with the lack of automaticity we mean that students do know these forms because they perform them well in writing, but they have not automated these forms orally, so the students resort to a form which, even if it is not correct, enables them to communicate. interlinguistic transfer seems to have occurred at three different points. the first two have been consciously promoted by alternating languages in a specific way: when working on topic introducers from basque and english into spanish, and when working on the past verb forms in english: from basque into english. the last, however, has happened unexpectedly, when working on the invitation to take part in the forum: from basque into english. we argue that in our didactic sequence the role of each language is very precise and well defined, and therefore, specific and reliable control can be exerted over the results. the text genre employed in this project gives the opportunity to combine the languages, and the didactic sequence, for its part, to insert correctly the common and specific aims of the languages. the possibility that our text, as a target text, could be considered some kind of translanguaging practice can be pondered (cenoz & gorter, 2017). if that would be the case, it seems that a well-limited alternation of languages which prioritizes the minority language and gives each language the exposure that the specific sociolinguistic context demands when setting the aims and designing the modules of the didactic sequence fosters multilingual competence, and thus, can lead to an improvement in the three languages. references apraiz, m. v., pérez, m., & ruiz, t. 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(2017). challenging minority language isolation: translanguaging in a trilingual school in the basque country. journal of language, identity & education, 16: 4, 216–227, doi: 10.1080/15348458.2017.1328281 ortega, a., & anakabe, m. j. (2015). integración de lenguas y áreas desde los proyectos globales: una propuesta de integración de las materias conocimiento del medio, euskera, lengua castellana e inglés. in i. garcía azkoaga & i. idiazabal (eds.), para una ingeniería didác­ tica de la educación plurilingüe. euskal herriko unibertsitatea/universidad del país vasco. soziolinguistika klusterra (2016). hizkuntzen erabileraren vii. kale-neurketa. euskal herria. thornbury, s. (2005). how to teach speaking. pearson education limited. ana aldekoa92 ana aldekoa gure ikastola en tres languages: beibringen und erlernen dreisprachigen sprechvermögens mittels didaktischer sequenzen z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g in dem beitrag wird die entwicklung des dreisprachigen sprechvermögens bei 16-jährigen schülern mit spanisch als muttersprache, baskisch als zweitsprache und englisch als drittsprache mit hilfe didaktischer mehrsprachsequenzierung untersucht. das bildungssystem des baskenlandes fördert die mehrsprachigkeit mit besonderem nachdruck auf baskische sprache (conoz, 2009; idiazabal et.al, 20015). der unterricht erfolgt der idee des integrierten unterrichts zufolge (gobierno vasco, 2015; troncy, 2014). die vorliegende studie beruhte auf deskriptiven tests, deren ergebnisse haben aufgezeigt, dass die schüler ihre sprechfähigkeiten im bereich der darlegung des themas und erläuterung von neuen begriffen verbessert haben. ein nicht so großer fortschritt wurde dagegen im bereich der öffentlichen auftritte und anwendung von englischen grammatischen strukturen erzielt. schlüsselwörter: dreisprachigkeit, sprechvermögen, dreisprachige didaktische sequenzierung, sprachintegration, zwischensprachlicher transfer, mehrsprachfähigkeit theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 8 (2), 2022, pp. 1–25 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11581 hyang-il kim https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4340-0173 sahmyook university, south korea investigating the roles of the four sources of self-efficacy beliefs in an efl listening context a b s t r a c t research in the academic context has revealed the positive roles of self-efficacy in teaching and learning, showing that a thorough understanding of self-efficacy is essential. in this study, the relationships between the four principal sources and the formation of self-efficacy belief proposed by bandura (1997) are examined in order to further this understanding. based on this, several empirical studies have attempted to explore these relationships in various fields, but the relevant research appears to have produced insufficient empirical data in the field of language learning to support the theory. therefore, this study aims to investigate how these sources affect basic self-efficacy (bsse) and advanced skill self-efficacy (asse) classified according to the difficulty of listening tasks in english. as many as 107 korean university students participated in the study and mediation analysis was employed to examine the relationships. the results show that all four sources act as mediators of bsse, and all but physiological and emotional states serve as mediators of asse. the findings support bandura’s hypothesis and the pedagogical implications are discussed. keywords: four sources of self-efficacy, listening, self-efficacy, university students researchers have been interested in finding factors that could explain an individual’s performance or achievements and noted that the self-efficacy beliefs held by an individual play a powerful role. self-efficacy finds its framework in social cognitive theory and has been systematically described and established by bandura (1986, 1997). many subsequent studies in various contexts have examined the roles and effects of self-efficacy in several domains. there has been concerted effort and considerable progress in the explication of a comprehensive view of self-efficacy by incorporating other important domain specific variables, particularly in academic fields; student’s academic interest (kim, 2022), motivation (kim, 2019; prat-sala & redford, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11581 hyang-il kim2 2010), management of stress or anxiety (macinytre, noels, & clement, 1997; torres & turner, 2016), self-regulation in learning (kim, wang, bong, & ahn, 2015; pajares, 2009; wang & bai, 2017), academic achievements (bai, chao, & wang, 2019; bong & skaalvik, 2003; kim & cha, 2017; kim et al., 2015; pajares & urdan, 2006; todaka, 2017.), etc. most of the related studies suggest that self-efficacy is a powerful construct in motivational, affective, and behavioristic areas. what has been commonly indicated is that the more self-efficacy individuals have, the more likely they are to be active agents participating in their learning processes, thus those beliefs of self-efficacy that have been reinforced through learning experiences and information tend to produce positive outcomes (e.g., bai et al., 2019; kim et al., 2015, etc.). the formation of self-efficacy is, therefore, an urgent and important issue for students. given that the positive effects of self-efficacy on academic achievement are documented, it is necessary to enumerate and explore variables that are closely related to the development of self-efficacy beliefs. bandura (1986, 1997) hypothesized that the four sources—enactive mastery experience (eme), vicarious experience (ve), verbal persuasion (vp), and physiological and emotional states (pes)—influence the level of self-efficacy. although this hypothesis should be concretely supported by empirical data based on various samples so as to provide the ground for pedagogical implications, many studies still provide superficial information on these relationships, and there are not many subsequent studies (usher & pajares, 2008). it seems especially true in the field of language learning. only a handful of recent studies have focused on the relationship between these four variables and self-efficacy, which is context-specific, and it still seems insufficient to verify the widely accepted assumptions and to elucidate their relationship. for this reason, this study aims to investigate the mediating roles of these four principal sources of information on self-efficacy beliefs in the context of listening and provide pedagogical insight. an important link between these four sources and the learning of english listening would establish a point of interaction that can be acted upon by instructors and learners themselves. this would essentially allow for the fine tuning of the learner’s self-efficacy beliefs and by extension the maximization of academic perfor mance in context-specific tasks. investigating the roles of the four sources of self-efficacy beliefs… 3 literature review self-efficacy beliefs according to social cognitive theory, human beings are not passively responsive beings, but rather active agents capable of affecting and changing their environments through self-organizing, self-regulating, and self-reflecting (bandura, 2006a), allowing for the foundations of self-efficacy. perceived selfefficacy in its definition is seen as “beliefs in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments” (bandura, 1997, p. 3). this definition is often taken as the explanation of the individuals’ beliefs playing a pivotal role in their academic endeavors. individuals’ efficacy reflects their beliefs regarding what or how well they are capable of doing or performing a specific task, rather than reflecting their actual, objective outcomes or performance (bong & skaalvik, 2003). according to bandura (2006), individuals may have little motivation to take action without the belief that they can achieve the desired effects, or outcome expectations, indicating that self-efficacy is a major construct that underlies behavior. in other words, the self-efficacy an individual exhibits leads to particular patterns of behavior (bandura 1997, 2006a; bong & skaalvik, 2003; pajares, 2009; stevens, olivarez, lan, & tallent-runnels, 2004; wang & pape, 2007). for example, those with higher self-efficacy tend to try harder when faced with complex or demanding tasks, whereas those with lower self-efficacy are more likely to quit (bandura, 2006). this indicates that the level of self-efficacy likely affects the choices they make such as the amount of effort to put in and the length of their persistence in times of trouble (pajares, 2009). it follows logically that such behavioristic patterns of self-efficacy influence learning outcomes (graham, 2006; vuong, brown-welty, & tracz, 2010), making it a powerful predictor of students’ performance. four sources of self-efficacy and related studies bandura (1997) hypothesized that self-efficacy beliefs are constructed from four main sources of information—that is, eme, ve, vp, and pes. each of these conveys information about an individual’s capabilities and has their own set of efficacy indicators. he details the four sources as follows: eme is considered the most powerful source of information because success is the most direct and convincing evidence of an individuals’ beliefs. individuals can more strongly enhance self-efficacy beliefs gained through hyang-il kim4 experiencing achievements compared to those from cognitive self-knowledge structures that already exist. it should be noted that some difficulties in a task cause individuals to exert constant and sustained effort which, if successful, leads to a stronger eme. individuals can learn how to deal with various tasks despite difficulties and gain the opportunities to learn from potential failures to achieve success. an individual’s sense of efficacy is partly affected by observing achievements made by others around them (e.g., teachers, classmates, or friends, etc.), which is called ve. it affects efficacy beliefs by allowing one to assess their own ability in relation to modeled attainments. it is seen as particularly persuasive, when the models’ competence is similar to their own. in other words, by viewing and visualizing the attainments of others with similar abilities as their own, the observers are likely to perceive themselves as being able do it too. vp is another source that further reinforces self-efficacy beliefs. positive feedback of their performances or encouragement issued by their significant others has an impact on them maintaining and sustaining their efficacy beliefs. more specifically, positive verbal comments or evaluations can increase the mobilization of the individuals’ effort and the duration that effort is sustained. if realistic and persuasive encouragement leads people to sustain their effort and strive for success, then self-affirming beliefs boost self-efficacy and skill development. the somatic information produced by pes influences the self-judgment of one’s capabilities. often individuals perceive physiological activations or responses resulting from stress or difficult situations “as signs of vulnerability to dysfunction” (p. 106). notably, the stress responses coming from unsuccessful control may generate additional stress through predictive self-arousal. because a strong stimuli response can undermine performance, people tend to expect success more when feeling unaffected by a stimulus such as tension and visceral agitation. it should be noted that the effect of this on efficacy beliefs lies in how individuals interpret this arousal. for example, it has markedly different effects depending on whether the individual interprets the situation and their response as a challenge or a threat. individuals develop beliefs in personal efficacy which they constitute by weighing and integrating information obtained from these sources. the weights and integration assigned to these modes of efficacy information appear differently depending on their functional areas (bandura, 1997), which is why self-efficacy beliefs are considered task-, domainor context-specific (bong & skaavlik, 2003; wang, kim, bai, & hu, 2014). investigating the roles of the four sources of self-efficacy beliefs… 5 except for a few recent studies (e.g., shehzad, lashari, lashari, & hasan, 2020; wang & pape, 2007; zhang & ardasheva, 2019; zuo & wang, 2016, etc.), little research in language learning has an interest in the relationships between these four sources of information and self-efficacy beliefs, and the properties that come from such relationships. in a qualitative approach, zuo and wang (2016) explored the properties of the english self-efficacy beliefs of five chinese doctoral students in the united states. they found several emerging factors that influence these participants’ self-efficacy, which mostly correspond to the four main sources described by bandura. for example, the main themes they found are the participants’ past experience, social influence and persuasions from their peers and teachers, and pes. in addition, they also found other factors—such as self-awareness of english competence, task difficulty, and interest in english learning—as strong indicators of self-efficacy. similar emerging themes were found in a study by wang and pape (2007) which examined self-efficacy and its factors—that is, english proficiency and task difficulty as perceived by the participants, vp, interest, and attitude toward english learning, the english speaking community, and social and cultural context—in three chinese secondary students studying english in the same context. these two studies reveal some characteristics of these factors and suggest that there can be differences in the formation of self-efficacy depending on the individual’s cultural background. in the hong kong context, which can be seen as a collective and interdependent society, bai et al. (2019) examined the relationship between selfefficacy, achievements in english, and vp—one of the four major sources—in 1,092 secondary school students learning english. they hypothesized that relatedness to important others such as parents, peers, and teachers may have a strong influence on their self-efficacy and english achievements. this study confirmed that vp gained from those kinds of people is a factor that influences the formation of self-efficacy despite its weak strength, indicating that having positive feedback and encouragement around assists them in becoming confident in english learning. based on multiple regression analysis, bai and his colleagues suggested that social support such as vp may work better as a facilitator which promotes students’ self-efficacy beliefs, rather than working as a factor that directly affects english learning achievements. in addition, zhang and ardasheva’s (2019) study reveals how the relationship between these four sources and self-efficacy is dependent on domain and context, adding further support to bandura’s theory. they collected data from 263 students studying in six universities in china. the participants were required to make an english public speech at least once in the course. their background can be characterized by three aspects; the existence of english public speech course experience (223 students were identified to hyang-il kim6 have taken the related course at least once, but the rest have never done so), gender (203 females vs. 60 males), and academic majors (173 students belonged to liberal arts vs. 90 belonged to sciences). according to the results, three major sources, except pes, were identified to have predictor values for overall self-efficacy beliefs in english public speaking. the most powerful source was eme, which is in keeping with other studies (e.g., britner & pajares, 2006; shehzad et al., 2020, etc.) followed by vp, and ve. this study reveals that these four sources exhibited predictor values with different magnitudes according to the three different aspects, namely, course experience, gender, and majors. this implies that instructors need to have a better understanding of how these variables work in students’ selfefficacy formation in their teaching context. their study sheds some light on the nature of the theoretically established relationship, although more information is still required. reflecting on these findings, the four principal sources may have relationships that are similar but uniquely different depending on the task or domain. grounded in bandura’s theory, the current study aims to further expand the scope of knowledge by exploring how self-efficacy, depending on task difficulty, is differently shaped by these four sources of information in korean university students participating in an english listening course. more specifically, this study is interested in examining the individual mediating effect of each source on listening self-efficacy. the research questions are as follows; rq 1: do the four sources play mediating roles in the development of bsse (basic skill self-efficacy)? rq 2: do the four sources play mediating roles in the development of asse (advanced skill self-efficacy)? methods participants the participants in this study are korean university students who were learning english as a foreign language (efl), and the majority of them were first-year students studying at a local university, an approximate two-hour drive from seoul. at the time of data collection, they were taking a 15-week course aimed at developing skills for toeic listening comprehension (lc), one of the compulsory modules in liberal arts. the participants were aged investigating the roles of the four sources of self-efficacy beliefs… 7 18 to 24 (m = 19.2, s.d. = 1.6) and had various majors. the purpose of this study was stated to the three classes taught by the author of this study, and many of the students voluntarily participated in the study. the information about the factors that would be mainly examined in this study was not specifically mentioned on purpose so as not to unduly influence the data. for the study, the data from 107 students who participated in both data collections were used.1 instruments four sources of self-efficacy beliefs. a few tools exist to measure the amount of information from the four sources in other areas—the mathematics self-efficacy index (e.g., lent, lopez, & bieschke, 1991; matsui, matsui, & ohnishi, 1990, etc.) or the academic self-efficacy scale (hampton & mason, 2003), etc. due to the context-specific nature of self-efficacy, it may be inadequate to employ these tools in the field of language learning as such scales may have little relevance in this area. this is supported by bandura (2006b), claiming that the scale needs to be adjusted according to the area of interest for accurate measurement. considering that language learning has little to do with mathematics or science education, 21 items for the four sources of self-efficacy beliefs in english listening were constructed based on the literature (e.g., bandura, 1994, 1997; bong & skaalvik, 2003; usher & pajares, 2008; wang & pape, 2007; wang et al., 2014, etc.). as shown in table 1, the category of eme has seven items, followed by five for each ve and vp, and four for pes. to ensure validity or whether these items were properly structured in terms of relevance, phrasing, and classification, a fellow researcher in the related field was consulted and the items were modified based on consensus. the reliability of each source was calculated using cronbach’s α which shows internal consistencies of the items of each category. the resulting coefficients are as follows; the seven items under eme (α = .87), the five each items under ve (α = .91) and under vp (α = .84), and the four items under pes (α = .81). they are high and all exceed an acceptance level, indicating that each set of items can be used as a tool to examine the respective sources. 1 this study used part of a larger data set, some of which had been analyzed in another article (kim, 2022). hyang-il kim8 table 1 the items that belong to the four sources of information enactive mastery experience (eme) 1 i have been doing well with the listening tasks given to me in the listening class. 2 i understand the listening text better now compared to at the beginning. 3 i worked hard to get good results in vocabulary quizzes for listening. 4 i am satisfied with the results of my vocabulary quizzes. 5 after overcoming difficulties and setbacks, i feel more confident in my listening ability. 6 although there were times that i did not understand much, with perseverance i was eventually able to understand it. 7 i had difficulty listening to english, but i like the sense of accomplishment that comes from facing challenges and understanding. vicarious experience (ve) 1 i feel that my classmates are like me. if they can do the listening tasks, i think i can do it, too. 2 i feel that i could concentrate more when i see my classmates focusing on the listening activities. 3 when i see my classmates able to correctly repeat whole sentences in class, i feel more confident to do it, too. 4 when i see my classmates find it easy to get a lot of information from the listening texts after going over them a few times, i feel i can do this, too. 5 when my classmates get good scores in vocabulary quizzes for listening by trying hard, i also tried hard to do so. verbal persuasion (vp) 1 i work harder when my classmates tell me that i am good at listening. 2 i feel encouraged and work harder when the teacher tells our class that we are doing well. 3 i take it personally when the teacher tells us that our listening is improving. 4 i think the teacher is sincere when the teacher tells our class that we are working hard and improving. 5 my close friends (my significant others) praise my effort to improve my listening ability. physiological and emotional states (pes) 1 i am upset if i don’t understand the content, but i try to listen harder each time. 2 i feel nervous because the teacher might call my name in class, but this tension makes me more focused on listening activities. 3 the listening activity is fun, so i work harder. 4 if i can’t hear what i’m listening to, i get nervous and listen harder. investigating the roles of the four sources of self-efficacy beliefs… 9 self-efficacy beliefs in listening. this study employed a ten-item questionnaire (α = .89) to measure self-efficacy beliefs in listening which was also used in a study by kim (2022) since it is part of a larger project. originally, the seven listening self-efficacy items were from an english self-efficacy questionnaire constructed by wang et al. (2014) and were adapted2 with three items added to gauge self-efficacy that can possibly be improved through listening activities during class. the scale has a two-factor structure; basic skill self-efficacy (bsse) and advanced skill self-efficacy (asse) in listening. items one through six belong to bsse, and the remaining four items belong to asse (see appendix 1), with cronbach’s alpha coefficients of .88 and .78, respectively; above an appropriate level. the participants responded to the questionnaires, answering from one (strongly disagree) to six (strongly agree) and the descriptive statistics can be found in table 2. out of 495, the total score in toeic lc, the average score taken in the first week was 217.34. as this score shows, the english proficiency of the participants in this study is considered from beginner to low-intermediate. the mean score of the second test which was taken in the 12th week, was 259.35, showing their improvement in listening skills. a paired sample t-test revealed a significant difference between the two scores, t(1, 106) = –10.03, p < .001. the mean value of asse (mean = 2.69) was about one point lower than that of bsse (mean = 3.68). they both showed improvement in the post-test—by approximately .32 and .51 for bsse and asse, respectively. table 2 the descriptive statistics of the variables data collection variables pre-test post-test n mean s.d. mean s.d. listening scores 107 217.34 50.96 259.35 65.82 bsse 107 3.68 .75 4.00 .81 asse 107 2.69 .78 3.20 .87 eme 107 3.95 .82 ve 107 4.01 1.01 vp 107 4.16 .91 pes 107 3.89 .93 notes. bsse = basic skill self-efficacy, asse = advanced skill self-efficacy, eme = enactive mastery experience, ve = vicarious experience, vp = verbal persuasion, pes = physiological and emotional states. 2 originally, there were eight items that belong to listening self-efficacy in the study by wang et al. (2014), but one of them—can you understand english tv programs made in china?—was deliberately eliminated due to redundancy. hyang-il kim10 data analysis this study examined the mediating effects of the four major sources for self-efficacy formation, using the four-step procedure for testing mediation by baron and kenny (1986). first, the effect of the independent variable on the criterion variable is examined (c in figure 1). second, the effect of the independent variable on the mediating variable is tested (a). third, the jointed effects of the independent variable and mediating variable on the criterion variable are tested (b). fourth, the beta values for the previous three models (a, b, c) should be significant and the beta value for the first step should be bigger than the one for the third step (c > c’). in order to calculate indirect effect coefficient,3 a sobel (1982) test was employed. figure 1. a causal chain in a mediation model adapted from baron and kenny (1986). results this study aimed to explore the mediation effects of bandura’s (1997) four major sources of self-efficacy—eme, ve, vp, and pes—on bsse and asse. rq1 investigates the mediating effects of the principal sources on bsse development and the results show that all four sources are serving as partial mediators for self-efficacy development in basic listening skills (see figure 2). first with eme, a simple regression with the pre-bsse score as an independent 3 according to the usual cohen (1988) standards, .1 could be regarded to be small, .3 to be medium, .5 to be a large effect size. kenny (2018), however, maintains that these values need to be squared since an indirect effect comes from two effects; namely, .01 for small, .09 for medium, .25 for a large effect size. this study follows his recommendation for recognizing the size of the effect of indirect effect coefficients. investigating the roles of the four sources of self-efficacy beliefs… 11 variable and the post-bsse score as a dependent variable is revealed to be significant (see table 3); f(1, 105) = 55.67, p < .001, explaining 35% of the total variance (β = .59). then, another simple regression is conducted to see if the pre-bsse score predicts eme, and this model is found to be significant; f(1, 105) = 23.06, p < .001, explaining 18% of the total variance (β = .42). when a multiple regression is computed to see the joint effects of the bsse pre-score and eme on the post-bsse score, this model is also shown to be significant (see table 4); f(2, 104) = 79.46, p < .001, explaining 60% of the total variance. lastly, the condition that the standardized beta value (β = .59) in the first model is greater than that (β = .35) of the third model (c > c’ in figure 1)—is satisfied. this indicates that eme works as a partial mediating variable in the development of bsse. in addition, the sobel test indicates that the indirect mediating effect coefficient of eme on bsse development is .24, which can be considered a strong effect size (z = 4.17, p < .001). figure 2 shows the causal chains including eme as a mediator in the development of bsse. note. the numbers indicate standardized coefficient (beta) *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001 figure 2. a causal chain including enactive mastery experience (eme) as a mediator on the development of basic skill self-efficacy (bsse). note. the numbers indicate standardized coefficient (beta) *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001 figure 3. a causal chain including vicarious experience (ve) as a mediator on the development of bsse. hyang-il kim12 ta bl e 3 th e si m pl e re gr es si on s fo r th e ef fe ct o f p re -b ss e , e m e , v e , v p, a nd p e s d ep en de nt va ria bl e p os tb s s e s co re e m e v e v p p e s s ta nd ar di ze d c oe ff ic ie nt s β t p r 2 β t p r 2 β t p r 2 β t p r 2 β t p r 2 in de pe nd en t va ria bl e (c on st an t) 4. 90 .0 0 6. 30 . 00 5. 03 . 00 7. 39 .0 0 6. 28 . 00 p re -b s s e sc or e .5 9 7. 46 .0 0 .3 5 .4 2 4. 80 .0 0 .18 .3 5 3. 77 .0 0 .12 .2 2 2. 28 . 02 .0 5 .2 5 2. 67 .0 1 .0 6 n ot es . b ss e = b as ic s ki ll se lf -e ff ic ac y, a ss e = a dv an ce d sk il l se lf -e ff ic ac y, e m e = e na ct iv e m as te ry e xp er ie nc e, v e = v ic ar io us e xp er ie nc e, v p = ve rb al p er su as io n, p e s = ph ys io lo gi ca l an d em ot io na l st at es . ta bl e 4 th e m ul tip le r eg re ss io ns f or t he e ffe ct s of p re -b ss e a nd e ac h so ur ce o n po st -b ss e d ep en de nt va ria bl e p os tb s s e p os tb s s e p os tb s s e p os tb s s e s ta nd ar di ze d c oe ff ic ie nt s β t p r 2 β t p r 2 β t p r 2 β t p r 2 in de pe nd en t va ria bl es (c on st an t) 1. 49 .14 (c on st an t) 2. 69 . 01 (c on st an t) 1. 87 .0 6 (c on st an t) 1. 83 .0 7 p re -b s s e sc or e .3 5 5. 15 .0 0 .6 0 p re -b s s e sc or e .4 2 6. 04 . 00 .5 6 p re -b s s e sc or e .5 1 6. 98 . 00 .4 7 p re -b s s e sc or e .4 7 6. 95 . 00 .5 6 e m e .5 6 8. 23 . 00 v e .4 9 7. 01 .0 0 v p .3 6 4. 99 .0 0 p e s .4 7 6. 98 . 00 n ot es . b ss e = b as ic s ki ll se lf -e ff ic ac y, a ss e = a dv an ce d sk il l se lf -e ff ic ac y, e m e = e na ct iv e m as te ry e xp er ie nc e, v e = v ic ar io us e xp er ie nc e, v p = ve rb al p er su as io n, p e s = ph ys io lo gi ca l an d em ot io na l st at es . investigating the roles of the four sources of self-efficacy beliefs… 13 as for ve, it is found to be a partial mediator in the development of bsse (figure 3). the result of a simple regression indicates that the predicting power of the pre-bsse score on ve is significant (see table 3); f(1, 105) = 14.19, p < .0001, explaining 12% of the total variance (β =.35). when a multiple regression was conducted to examine if the joined independent variables (the pre-bsse score and ve) predict the post-bsse score, this model was also found to be significant (see table 4); f(2, 104) = 65.16, p < .001, explaining 56% of the total variance. in addition, the fourth step was satisfied (β = .59 > β = .42). the sobel test resulted in .17 for the indirect mediating effect coefficient of ve on bsse development with a much greater than moderate effect size (z = 3.32, p < .001). note. the numbers indicate standardized coefficient (beta) *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001 figure 4. a causal chain including verbal persuasion (vp) as a mediator on the development of bsse. note. the numbers indicate standardized coefficient (beta) *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001 figure 5. a causal chain including physiological and emotion states (pes) as a mediator on the development of bsse. similarly, vp is found to serve as a partial mediator in the development of bsse (figure 4). the result of a simple regression indicates that the predicting effect of the pre-bsse score on vp is significant (see table 3); f(1, 105) = 5.22, hyang-il kim14 p < .05, explaining 5% of the total variance (β = .22). a multiple regression with the joined independent variables of the pre-bsse score and vp, and the post-bsse score as a dependent variable results in having a significant (see table 4); f(2, 104) = 46.59, p < .001, explanatory power of 47% of the total variance. in addition, the fourth step was satisfied (β = .59 > β = .51). the sobel test results in .08 for the indirect mediating effect coefficient of vp on bsse development with a slightly less than the moderate effect size (z = 2.07, p < .05). pes is shown to have a partial mediating effect in bsse formation (figure 5). the result of a simple regression with the pre-bsse score as a predicting variable and vp as a dependent variable was significant (see table 3); f(1, 105) = 7.11, p < .01, explaining 6% of the total variance (β = .25). a multiple regression that examines the effect of the joined independent variables (the pre-bsse score and pes) on the post-bsse score as a dependent variable are also significant (see table 4); f(2, 104) = 64.86, p < .001, explaining 56% of the total variance. in addition, the fourth step was satisfied (β = .59 > β = .47). the indirect mediating effect coefficient of pes on bsse development is .12, with a slightly greater than moderate effect size (z = 2.49, p < .01). to sum up, the mediation analyses resulted in revealing that all the principal sources serve as mediators on the formation of the participants’ bsse with eme having the strongest effect size followed by ve, pes, and vp. concerning rq2, three major sources were found to have mediating effects—eme, ve, and vp, except pes—on asse development. first for eme (figure 6), a simple regression was used to examine if the pre-asse score predicts the post-asse score (see table 5); f(1, 105) = 100.20, p < .001, explaining 49% of the total variance (β = .70). then, it was tested to see if the pre-asse score predicts eme. this model was found to be significant; f(1, 105) = 12.39, p < .001, explaining 11% of the total variance (β = .32). when a multiple regression was computed to see if the joined independent variables, such as the pre-asse score and eme, predict the asse post-score. this model was also found to be significant (see table 6); f(2, 104) = 78.14, p < .001, explaining 60% of the total variance. lastly, the fourth step was satisfied (β = .70 > β = .58). this indicates that eme works as a partial mediating variable in the development asse. the indirect mediating effect coefficient of eme on asse development is .11 (z = 4.61, p < .001), which can be considered as a moderate effect size. its causal chains are shown in figure 6. ve is also found to be a partial mediator in the development of asse (figure 7). the result of a simple regression indicates that the predicting effect of the pre-asse score on ve is significant (see table 5); f(1, 105) = 14.81, p < .001, explaining 12% of the total variance (β = .35). when a multiple regression is conducted to examine if the joined independent variables, the preasse score and ve predict the post-asse score, this model was also found investigating the roles of the four sources of self-efficacy beliefs… 15 to be significant (see table 6); f(2, 104) = 76.58, p < .001, explaining 60% of the total variance. in addition, the fourth step was satisfied (β =.70 > β = .58). the indirect mediating effect coefficient of ve on asse development is .12 with a slightly more than moderate effect size (z = 3.11, p < .001). as for vp, it is also found to play a partial mediating role in the development of asse (figure 8). a simple regression to examine the predicting effect of the pre-asse score for ve is shown to be significant (see table 5); f(1, 105) = 5.35, p < .05, explaining 5% of the total variance (β = .22). when a multiple regression was conducted to test if the joined independent variables, the pre-asse score and vp predict the post-asse score, this model is also found to be significant (see table 5); f(2, 104) = 71.50, p < .001, explaining 58% of the total variance. in addition, the fourth step was satisfied (β = .70 > β = .63). the indirect mediating effect coefficient of vp on asse development is .07 (in figure 4) with a slightly lower than moderate effect size (z = 2.09, p < .05). note. the numbers indicate standardized coefficient (beta) *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001 figure 6. a causal chain including eme as a mediator on the development of asse. ve pre-asse score post-asse score figure 7. a causal chain including ve as a mediator on the development of asse .35*** .35*** .58*** the indirect effect coefficient = .12* note. the numbers indicate standardized coefficient (beta) *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001 a b c’ note. the numbers indicate standardized coefficient (beta) *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001 figure 7. a causal chain including ve as a mediator on the development of asse. hyang-il kim16 ta bl e 5 th e si m pl e re gr es si on s fo r th e ef fe ct o f p re -a ss e , e m e , v e , v p, a nd p e s d ep en de nt va ria bl e p os ta s s e s co re e m e v e v p p e s s ta nd ar di ze d c oe ff ic ie nt s β t p r 2 β t p r 2 β t p r 2 β t p r 2 β t p r 2 in de pe nd en t va ria bl e (c on st an t) 5. 15 .0 0 11 .2 9 .0 0 8. 48 . 00 11 .17 .0 0 10 .2 4 .0 0 p re -a s s e sc or e .7 0 10 .0 1 .0 0 .4 9 .3 2 3. 52 .0 0 .11 .3 5 3. 85 . 00 . 12 .2 2 2. 34 . 02 . 05 .2 0 2. 06 . 04 . 04 n ot es . b ss e = b as ic s ki ll se lf -e ff ic ac y, a ss e = a dv an ce d sk il l se lf -e ff ic ac y, e m e = e na ct iv e m as te ry e xp er ie nc e, v e = v ic ar io us e xp er ie nc e, v p = ve rb al p er su as io n, p e s = ph ys io lo gi ca l an d em ot io na l st at es . ta bl e 6 th e m ul tip le r eg re ss io ns f or t he e ffe ct s of p re -a ss e a nd e ac h so ur ce o n po st -a ss e d ep en de nt va ria bl e p os ta s s e p os ta s s e p os ta s s e p os ta s s e s ta nd ar di ze d c oe ff ic ie nt s β t p r 2 β t p r 2 β t p r 2 β t p r 2 in de pe nd en t va ria bl es (c on st an t) -.1 0 .9 2 (c on st an t) 1.1 0 .2 8 (c on st an t) .3 3 .7 4 (c on st an t) -.0 8 .9 4 p re -a s s e sc or e .5 8 8. 91 .0 0 .6 0 p re -a s s e sc or e .5 8 8. 64 . 00 .6 0 p re -a s s e sc or e .6 3 9. 65 .0 0 .5 8 p re -a s s e sc or e .6 3 10 .17 .0 0 .6 2 e m e .3 5 5. 40 .0 0 v e .3 5 5. 25 . 00 v p .3 1 4. 73 .0 0 p e s .3 7 6. 08 . 00 n ot es . b ss e = b as ic s ki ll se lf -e ff ic ac y, a ss e = a dv an ce d sk il l se lf -e ff ic ac y, e m e = e na ct iv e m as te ry e xp er ie nc e, v e = v ic ar io us e xp er ie nc e, v p = ve rb al p er su as io n, p e s = ph ys io lo gi ca l an d em ot io na l st at es . investigating the roles of the four sources of self-efficacy beliefs… 17 note. the numbers indicate standardized coefficient (beta) *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001 figure 8. a causal chain including vp as a mediator on the development of asse. note. the numbers indicate standardized coefficient (beta) *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001 figure 9. a causal chain including pes as a mediator on the development of asse. among the four main sources, it was found that only pes did not play a mediating role in this study (figure 9). a simple regression to test the predicting effect of the pre-asse score of pes is shown to remain at a nearly significant level (see table 5); f(1, 105) = 4.24, p < .05, explaining 4% of the total variance (β = .20). a multiple regression conducted to examine the joined independent variables, the pre-asse score and pes on the postasse score resulted in being significant (see table 6); f(2, 104) = 85.76, p = .0001, explaining 62% of the total variance. in addition, the fourth step was satisfied (β = .70 > β = .63). however, the indirect effect coefficient (.07) of pes on asse development was found to be insignificant (z = 1.95, p = .05). unlike the relationships with bsse, asse had significant causal relationships with only three sources—ve, eme, and vp in order of magnitude of indirect mediating effect. hyang-il kim18 discussion the present study aimed to investigate whether there exist mediating effects on the development of english listening self-efficacy beliefs according to the level of difficulty through the four major sources based on bandura’s (1997) assumptions that are widely accepted in academic fields. with the first question, the relationship between the four sources and bsse was explored. as the results show, all four sources were found to play a role in the mediation of the formation of bsse. in particular, students’ eme had the strongest mediating role in students’ bsse—with a strong effect size (the indirect effect size coefficient = .24), followed by ve, pes, and vp. these results are generally in line with several studies (e.g., zuo & wang, 2016; wang & pape, 2007). the most influential mediating role in the development of individuals’ self-efficacy lies in the success and eme of the tasks they performed. this finding supports the findings of many previous studies (bandura, 1994, 1997; shehzad et al., 2020; usher & pajares, 2008; zhang & ardasheva, 2019). although not as strong as the first source, ve was also shown to have more than a medium effect size (the indirect effect size coefficient = .17). it can be interpreted that the participants in this study thought that they could do the same by observing that other classmates are actively engaged in and performing given tasks successfully. this eventually appeared to have influenced the formation of their bsse. notably, pes were found to be the third-largest mediating variable in the formation of bsse, with a larger effect size (.12) than vp (.08). in other words, in relation to bsse, it is plausible that the positive messages delivered by one’s own somatic information, or positively translated somatic information, are more effective than the encouragement received through feedback and comments from teachers or peers. concerning the second question, the relationship between asse and the four sources was examined. the results suggest that three sources except pes plays a mediating role in the development of self-efficacy in advanced listening skills through learning and in class practice, which is consistent with the findings by zhang and ardasheva (2019). comparing with their relationships with bsse, the three sources served as mediators in the development of selfefficacy with an effect size that exceeds or is close to medium, which is smaller than those of bsse. the findings of the current study further support the importance of students’ eme for self-efficacy building. its mediating effect on asse is smaller than in that of bsse, which can be categorized as medium-sized (.11) and large-sized (.24) respectively. such differences in the effect size can be attributed to the participants’ proficiency in english. the participants may have gained more eme by performing relatively easy and basic tasks than by advanced and challenging investigating the roles of the four sources of self-efficacy beliefs… 19 tasks. according to bandura (1997), a sense of control over given activities is a crucial element that eme offers. for example, after completing a series of academic tasks given to individuals, they evaluate and interpret the results by themselves, and judge their capabilities according to the interpretation. if they believe that they have been successful or gained more control compared to their own pre-existing knowledge structures, they are likely to bolster their confidence in their capability of doing the related tasks well in the future. in the opposite case, confidence decreases. such confidence gained from this experience of mastery leads individuals to make choices to have higher levels of persistence and willingness to move on even when faced with challenges and adversities (bandura, 1997; mills, pajares, & herron, 2006; usher & pajares, 2008). importantly, a strong eme that serves as concrete evidence of one’s capacity provides the energy needed to restructure one’s own efficacy beliefs and affects the changes in efficacy beliefs in the functioning area (bandura, 2006). eme of the participants with low proficiency in english in the current study appeared to become a strong vehicle for changing their efficacy beliefs by showing a relatively large mediating effect on the students’ listening self-efficacy which supports the findings of the related empirical studies (e.g., shehzad et al., 2020; zhang & ardasheva, 2019, etc.) although some difference in effect sizes is found in the development of self-efficacy according to task difficulty. it is interesting to note that ve is found to have the strongest mediating effect on the development of asse, despite an effect size almost equal to eme (.12 and .11, respectively). it seems that social modeling plays a crucial role in improving students’ self-efficacy, especially when students perform difficult listening tasks. usher and pajares (2008) claim that social models have a great influence on self-efficacy particularly when students are not well aware of their capabilities because their experience with new or challenging tasks is limited. when students judge their capacities, they often compare them with the people they know, that is, peers. when they see their peers succeed in new tasks, they tend to form the belief that they are also capable of dealing with those challenges well. in other words, when faced with a demanding task and feeling uncertain about their own capabilities to perform it, individuals may have the idea that they can also achieve similar success to the related tasks by observing peers’ success, which likely works as an influential mediator in the formation of their efficacy beliefs. it is worth noting that the effect of ve becomes greater if it comes from people with similar abilities to themselves (usher & pajares, 2008). given that the participants of the current study are those with similar abilities—low proficiency in english, ve may have had more influence on self-efficacy beliefs. the crucial role of vp has also been reported to be significant in several studies (e.g., bai et al., 2019; lam & chan, 2017, etc.). through positive feedback and encouragement, students can recognize their strengths and build confidence hyang-il kim20 in their competence (bandura, 1997). this study also found that vp retained the almost similar medium-sized mediating effects in both relationships with bsse and asse (.08 and .07, respectively). in other words, comments or positive feedback from teachers or peers constantly and indirectly influences the development of self-efficacy beliefs in listening to english regardless of a task level. particularly, from the view that vp is most closely related to social and cultural contexts, bai et al. (2019) hypothesized that vp would affect students’ self-efficacy and english achievements because their participants, hong kong secondary students, are nurtured and educated in a collective and interdependent social environment. they found that vp, which is one of the socio-cultural factors, is positively related to self-efficacy although the relationship is weaker than that with academic english performances. it was interpreted that vp may play a role in facilitating self-efficacy development, rather than being a factor that directly affects students’ english learning achievement. similarly, lam and chan (2017) found a positive relationship between vp from parents and teachers and self-efficacy beliefs in chinese students in hong kong. however, considering that these results were obtained from secondary students who are relatively more socially supported by parents and teachers than university students, the results of the current study allow for a deeper understanding of the functions of vp on self-efficacy in university students in a similar cultural context. while the other three sources served as mediators for asse, the fourth, pes, did not play a mediating role. this indicates the last source failed to contribute to the development of self-efficacy due to uncontrollable somatic or emotional responses that they should handle. it is worth noting that this source of pes actually functioned as a mediator of the relationship with bsse—the third largest in terms of the effect size, even larger than vp. when performing relatively easy tasks, negative arousals are likely to be managed, showing that they influenced the formation of self-efficacy. in other words, when students interpret that they are capable of controlling such somatic information that comes from tension, agitation, or stress, this source may have a mediating effect in forming self-efficacy beliefs. what matters is not the degree of emotional and physical reactions, but how individuals perceive and interpret these reactions (bandura, 1997). on the other hand, when negative thoughts or responses arise, probably caused by incompetence, efforts to overcome such aversive arousals likely fail to mediate self-efficacy as shown in the relationship with asse. by evoking appalling and uncontrollable thoughts that individuals encounter with stress reactions, they are likely to experience high mental hardship that causes the very dysfunction they dread (bandura, 1997). in addition, “stress reactions to inefficacious control generate further stress through anticipatory self-arousal” (p. 106). this denotes that when students encounter tasks that they feel they cannot handle successfully with their current english proficiency, they reflect on their past experiences, predictable negative emotions or somatic reactions investigating the roles of the four sources of self-efficacy beliefs… 21 resulting from unsatisfactory outcomes which may lead to more stress and tension, hindering students from building further self-efficacy beliefs. importantly, however, bandura (1997) argues that such an impasse can be overcome by eme. treatments through eme eliminate the emotional reactions arising from the subjective threats individuals feel, and promote a sense of efficacy as well as performance improvements in the corresponding area. conclusion this study examined whether four sources influence the development of english listening self-efficacy of students taking a 15-week english mandatory course in a university, and the results indicate that the four sources actually play mediating roles, which supports the self-efficacy theory (bandura, 1997). it also uncovered the potentially vulnerable link to self-efficacy development among them—pes, particularly, when students deal with advanced tasks that can be found too arduous for students at their level. this indicates a need for teachers to look more carefully at students’ pes, particularly when students engage in tasks considered challenging for their current capabilities. as mentioned above, the treatment that removes or controls aversive arousals from physical and emotional responses can be obtained from an individual’s eme, while at the same time improving their self-efficacy beliefs. for a more effective english listening class, it is a teacher’s responsibility to prepare for stepwise tasks in advance so that students can experience gradual success which offers authentic evidence that can persuade and convince them of progressive improvement in their listening skills. according to graham (2011), skills in listening are not easily acquired and low self-efficacy can be aggravated depending on the way listening is taught. with this in mind, she emphasizes the importance and effectiveness of listening strategy instruction. for example, teachers can (1) inform students of useful effective listening strategies and how to use them, (2) guide them explicitly through modeling—between a teacher and students or between students and students, and (3) provide positive and constructive feedback that encourages and persuades students as well as the practical use of the strategies. this can possibly lead students to the development of both efficacy and listening skills. this study has a few limitations to report. in order to measure the four sources of self-efficacy, a scale suitable for the specific domain and function is required (bandura, 2006b; usher & pajares, 2008). the questionnaire constructed for the purposes of this study still needs to go through a more rigorous examination of construct validity in future studies despite having hyang-il kim22 thoroughly reviewed the literature related to the four sources of self-efficacy and reported the relatively high level of reliability of the scale. in addition, it is of note that these findings are obtained from a sample population with low proficiency in english. thus, in order to have a comprehensive view and to understand the dynamics of the relationships, it requires follow-up research with other sample groups with different proficiency levels. similarly, the selfefficacy beliefs that an individual holds are task-specific and may appear differently in different contexts. since the relationships uncovered in this study belong to the listening context in second language learning, further steps are needed to explore the effects of the four major sources on self-efficacy development in other language learning domains in subsequent studies to fill the existing gaps in the literatthe current study reveals and supports the crucial roles of the four sources of self-efficacy. it is desirable to use self-efficacy as an educational tool to improve students’ academic performances (zhang & ardasheva, 2019). undoubtedly, teachers entering listening classes will need to have a sufficient understanding of the four sources and influential variables that affect the formation of self-efficacy. taking it a little further, they need to consider how to apply these variables effectively for the benefit of their students. references bai, b., chao, g. c., & wang, c. 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(2008). sources of self-efficacy in school: critical review of the literature and future directions. review of educational research, 78(4), 751–796. vuong, m., brown-welty, s., & tracz, s. (2010). the effects of self-efficacy on academic success of first-generation college sophomore students. journal of college student development, 51(1), 50–64. wang, c., & bai, b. (2017). validating the instruments to measure esl/efl learners’ selfefficacy beliefs and self-regulated learning strategies. tesol quarterly, 51(4), 931–947. wang, c., kim, d.-h., bai, r., & hu, j. (2014). psychometric properties of a self-efficacy scale for english language learners in china. system, 44(1), 24–33. wang, c., & pape, s. j. (2007). a probe into three chinese boys’ self-efficacy beliefs learning english as a second language. journal of research in childhood education, 21(4), 364–377. zhang, x., & ardasheva, y. (2019). sources of college efl learners’ self-efficacy in the english public speaking domain. english for specific purposes, 53, 47–59 zuo, h., & wang, c. (2016). understanding sources of self-efficacy of chinese students learning english in an american institution. multicultural learning and teaching, 11(1), 83–112. hyang-il kim zur rolle von vier quellen der selbstwirksamkeit beim hörverstehen im efl-unterricht z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die akademische forschung hat die positive rolle der selbstwirksamkeit im lehrund lernprozess hervorgehoben und bestätigt, dass ein gründliches verständnis davon unerlässlich ist. um es zu fördern, wird in der vorliegenden studie das verhältnis zwischen den von bandura (1997) vorgeschlagenen vier hauptquellen und der entwicklung von selbstwirksamkeit untersucht. auf grundlage empirischer untersuchungen ist das verhältnis in vielerlei hinsicht erforscht worden. allerdings scheint es, dass die ergebnisse nur unzureichende empirische daten zum fremdsprachenerwerb ergeben, um die hypothese zu begründen. deswegen wird in dem beitrag untersucht, wie sich die quellen auf die nach schwierigkeitsgrad der hörverstehensübungen im englischunterricht klassifizierte, auf grundlegende (bsse) und fortgeschrittene (asse) fähigkeiten bezogene selbstwirksamkeit auswirken. an der untersuchung haben insgesamt 107 koreanische studierende teilgenommen. die probe wurde mittels mediationsanalyse ausgewertet. die ergebnisse zeigen, dass alle vier quellen als mediatoren von bsse und alle bis auf physiologische und emotionale zustände als mediatoren von asse fungieren. in anlehnung daran wird banduras hypothese bestätigt und die pädagogischen implikationen erörtert. schlüsselwörter: vier quellen der selbstwirksamkeit, hörverstehen, selbstwirksamkeit, studierend investigating the roles of the four sources of self-efficacy beliefs… 25 a p p e n d i x 1 self-efficacy in listening (adopted from the study by kim, 2022) factor 1: advanced skill self-efficacy (asse) 2. can you understand english tv programs (e.g., dramas which were produced in the u.s.a, the u.k. or korea, etc.)? 5. can you understand english movies without subtitles? 4. if your english instructor gives you an english dialogue between two or three people, can you understand it? 3. can you understand radio programs in english speaking countries? 6. can you understand english songs? 1. can you understand stories told in english? factor 2: basic skill self-efficacy (bsse) 8. can you concentrate on the content to which you listen? 10. can you do well the tasks and assignments you have to do to improve your listening skills? 7. can you understand numbers spoken in english? 9. can you get the important information of conversations told in the class? theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (1), 2023, pp. 1/25 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12797 meihua liu https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5951-4167 tsinghua university, china chinese university students’ beliefs about english language learning and self-efficacy a b s t r a c t learners’ beliefs on language learning and perceived self-efficacy are important to the success of their second/foreign language (sl/fl) learning. to reveal the general profiles of and relationship between chinese students’ beliefs about english learning and self-efficacy, the present study examined beliefs about english learning and self-efficacy held by chinese university efl (english as a fl) learners at differing english proficiency levels. a total of 1,698 students from a top university in beijing answered a battery of questionnaires. the results revealed a general overview of the students’ beliefs about the nature of language learning and the roles of teachers, feedback and learning strategies, and self-efficacy. another major finding was that participants at different english proficiency levels differed significantly from one another in beliefs about language learning and self-efficacy. keywords: english learning belief, self-efficacy, difference, proficiency, feedback, strategy introduction generally concerned with beliefs about the nature and process of language learning, including perceptions of mistakes, self-efficacy and the role of feedback, language learning beliefs are often measured by questionnaires and interviews in specific contexts. it is the same with self-efficacy beliefs which refer to beliefs in one’s abilities to do something such as learning a second/ foreign language (sl/fl). high self-efficacy seems to motivate students to study harder and achieve more (woodrow, 2011). since what learners believe and think what they can do often determines what efforts they will make to study a sl/fl (gao, 2016; horwitz, 1988; wenden, 1991), it is necessary https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12797 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5951-4167 to research what beliefs are often held by language learners. although diverse belief patterns have been revealed in learners in different contexts (al-roomy, 2015; daif-allah, 2012; yang, 1999), more research is needed considering the large number of learners and variety of contexts. this is especially so in china which houses a large foreign language learning population, while studies on language learning beliefs and self-efficacy are far from adequate. moreover, few studies have compared beliefs about language learning and self-efficacy between students at different proficiency levels. hence, the present study intended to explore beliefs about english learning and self-efficacy in chinese university efl (english as a fl) students at differing english proficiency levels, hoping to reveal the general profiles of and relationship between their beliefs about english learning and self-efficacy. literature review learning beliefs are notions, myths or misconceptions in contrast with “truth” (alanen, 2003), or subjective and individual understandings that are held to be true (alexander & dochy, cited in wenden, 1998), or the way we think we learn (riley, 1994). language learning beliefs are beliefs about how to learn a second language that emerge through one’s own experience and the influence of others (horwitz, 1987). they are generally concerned with beliefs about the nature and process of language learning, including perceptions of mistakes, the role of the teacher, and the role of feedback (dai & wang, 2002; song, 2013; wenden, 1991; zhong, 2012). to tap into the profile of students’ language learning beliefs, horwitz (1987) developed the beliefs about language learning inventory (balli), which consists of five parts: foreign language aptitude, the difficulty of language learning, the nature of language learning, learning and communication strategies, motivation and expectations. soon after, many other questionnaires have been developed based on the balli to fit different contexts, such as the language learner factors questionnaire designed by wen and johnson (1997), the belief survey designed by sakui and gaies (1999), the language learning beliefs questionnaire developed by liu and dai (2003), and the language learners’ beliefs scale (llbs) designed by birjandi and mohammadi (2014). studies targeting various learners have revealed differing belief patterns among students of different cultures. for example, korean students are high in their motivation to learn english, place spoken english in a higher place than formal english, while they are not confident enough to speak english with others (park, 1995). taiwanese students report to be positive in tapsla.12797 p. 2/25 m. liu self-efficacy about learning english, foreign language aptitude, the communicative function of english and repetitive practice (yang, 1999). saudi students seem to be more realistic in beliefs about learning and communication strategies and foreign language aptitude (al-roomy, 2015; daif-allah, 2012). mainland chinese students generally have high beliefs in self-management and foreign language aptitude, great instrumental motivation, and frequent use of learning strategies, but are rather low in self-efficacy, they also rely heavily on their mother tongue to learn english and stress functions more than forms of language learning (liu & dai, 2003). kern (1995) examined the beliefs of 180 berkeley freshmen from various ethnic groups, including asians (40%), caucasians (30%), hispanics (17%), african-americans (6%), and american indians (1.2%), and found that they placed more focus on grammar and were more cautious of making mistakes after having completed 15 weeks of first-year level french. zhang and cui (2010) explored beliefs held by distance english language learners in a highly prestigious chinese university and the differences in beliefs between beginner distance learners and those with more distance education experience. analyses of 90 questionnaires revealed that most participants regarded insufficient communication with teachers and peer students as the dominant difficulty in distance learning, and that learners with more distance learning experience believed more strongly in the benefits of an autonomous approach to learning. genç, kuluşaklı, and aydın (2016) examined perceived self-efficacy and beliefs on english language learning in 210 turkish efl undergraduate english majors. the findings showed that the students had medium scores in their english self-efficacy and strongly believed that motivation factors had a great role on their learning process. the study also showed that the student’s beliefs about language learning were affected by their english self-efficacy. the importance of self-efficacy in sl/fl learning has been well recog nized (e.g., bandura, 1997, 2006; raoofi, tan, & chan, 2012; sağlam & arslan, 2018). grounded within the framework of social cognitive theory of human behavior (bandura, 1997), self-efficacy beliefs refer to “beliefs in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments” (bandura, 1997, p. 3). and the efficacy belief system is “not a global trait but a differentiated set of self-beliefs linked to distinct realms of functioning” (bandura, 2006, p. 307). for example, a learner may believe that they will get a high score in the upcoming english test, another learner may believe that they are better than others in the language class. thus, “[…] there is no all-purpose measure of perceived self-efficacy” (bandura, 2006, p. 307). understandably, different self-reported surveys and questions have been used to measure self-efficacy related to different aspects of sl/fl learning in specific contexts, such as general self-efficacy, academic self-efficacy, and web-based learning self-efficacy (alegre, 2014; baleghizadeh chinese university students’ beliefs about english language… tapsla.12797 p. 3/25 & masoun, 2013; bandura, 2006; doménech-betoret, abellán-roselló, & gómez-artiga, 2017; genç, kuluşaklı, & aydın, 2016; kuo, tsai, & wang, 2021; ozer & akçayoğlu, 2021). for example, sağlam and arslan (2018) developed a 29-item english language skills self-efficacy scale to measure students’ self-efficacy beliefs in four basic language skills. baleghizadeh and masoun (2013) divided 57 iranian learners in an english-language institute into the experimental and control groups to investigate the continuous influence of self-assessment on their self-efficacy in their current english language class. the participants answered the english as a foreign language self-efficacy questionnaire. the results showed that self-assessment significantly improved the experimental group’s self-efficacy. kuo et al. (2021) administered the selfdeveloped web-based learning self-efficacy questionnaire to 608 university students from taiwan. the results showed that the components of web-based learning self-efficacy led to different types of engagement: general internetbased learning self-efficacy contributed to behavioral and emotional engagement, whereas functional internet-based learning self-efficacy contributed to emotional and cognitive engagement. these studies, as well as others, generally reveal that self-efficacy helps improve sl/fl learning and is related to many other variables such as academic success, strategy use, and motivation (e.g., blumenthal, 2014; bong, 2002; doménech-betoret, abellán-roselló, & gómez-artiga, 2017; kao et al., 2020; mills, 2009; ozer & akçayoğlu, 2021; pan & chen, 2021; wong, 2005; woodrow, 2011; zhan et al., 2021). for example, woodrow (2011) found that students with high self-efficacy tend to study harder and are more intrinsically motivated. mills, pajares, and herron (2007) found that intermediatelevel french learners’ confidence beliefs in their ability to attain a particular grade were highly related to their academic success. mills’s (2009) study of 47 university students of french showed that project-based learning significantly improved students’ self-efficacy in the areas of communication, cultures, connections, comparisons, and communities. heidari, izadi, and ahmadian (2012) explored the relationship between 50 iranian efl juniors’ self-efficacy beliefs and their employed vocabulary learning strategies. the results revealed that students had fairly high level of self-efficacy and that self-efficacy was significantly positively correlated with their use of vocabulary learning strategies. the results indicated that learners’ self-efficacy beliefs had great impact on successful learning experiences and achievements. doménech-betoret et al. (2017) administered the self-efficacy and expectancy-value beliefs questionnaires to 797 spanish secondary education students. structural equation modeling analyses revealed that students’ expectancy-value beliefs mediated the relationship between students’ academic self-efficacy and achievement/ satisfaction. the findings were partially consistent with those in zhan et al. (2021), which explored the impact of self-efficacy and learning motives tapsla.12797 p. 4/25 m. liu on 693 chinese undergraduates’ use of deep language learning strategies. 344 university efl students in turkey answered a battery of questionnaires in ozer and akçayoğlu’s (2021) study. analyses of the data revealed a medium negative correlation between foreign language self-efficacy and anxiety in addition to a small positive correlation between foreign language self-efficacy and self-regulated learning. pan and chen (2021) recruited 197 first-year chinese university students to investigate relations among teacher supports, technology acceptance, technological self-efficacy, and self-directed language learning. the results showed that technological self-efficacy mediated the relationship be tween teachers’ affective supports and students’ self-directed language learning as well as the relationship between teachers’ behavior supports and students’ self-directed language learning. research questions as reviewed above, most current literature shows that beliefs about language learning and self-efficacy affect how students behave to a great extent and that these beliefs interact with other variables during the process of sl/fl learning. although the current literature has revealed interesting findings about learners’ beliefs of language learning and self-efficacy, more research is called for given the large number of language learners, the huge variety of learning contexts, the complicated nature of language learning and the roles of learning beliefs and efficacy in language learning. it is the same in china with a large number of foreign language learners. moreover, limited studies can be found which have examined beliefs about language learning and self-efficacy between students at various proficiency levels. thus, to reveal the general profiles of and relationship between chinese students’ beliefs about english learning and self-efficacy, the present study aimed to examine beliefs about english learning and self-efficacy in chinese university efl students at differing english proficiency levels. the following questions were of particular interest: 1. what are the profiles of chinese university students’ language learning beliefs and self-efficacy? 2. are there any belief and self-efficacy differences among students at varying english proficiency levels? 3. how are the students’ learning beliefs related to self-efficacy? chinese university students’ beliefs about english language… tapsla.12797 p. 5/25 the present study this study was conducted in a top state-owned university in beijing, which often accepted outstanding high school graduates in each province of china. in this university, all first-year non-english majors had to take the standard english placement test prior to the start of formal classroom teaching when they first registered in the university. the test consisted of listening, reading, and writing, the results of which put the testees into bands 1–3 groups. students with lower scores went into lower band groups, which signified lower proficiency in english. they then selected english language courses accordingly. participants a total of 1,698 (776 male, 918 female, and four missing genders) students participated in the study, of whom 1,171 were freshmen, 481 sophomores, 41 juniors and four seniors. 833 (324 male, 505 female and four missing) were in the band 1 group, 444 (245 male and 199 female) and 421 (207 male and 214 female) were in bands 2 and 3 groups respectively. with an average age of 19 (sd = 1.10) and an age range of 16 to 24, the participants came from various disciplines such as architecture, civil engineering, medicine, business management, and psychology. instruments the survey consisted of three parts: background information questionnaire, english learning belief inventory, and self-efficacy belief questionnaire. the background information questionnaire covered such items as gender, age, discipline, and english band level. the 29-item english learning belief inventory (elbi) (cronbach alpha a = .749) and the 14-item self-efficacy belief questionnaire (sebq) (a = .644) were adopted from the questionnaire used in zhang and cui (2010). the elbi asked students to report their beliefs about the nature of language learning, the role of the teacher, the role of feedback and language learning strategies. the sebq had three parts: the 3-item self-efficacy questionnaire invited students to comment on their language learning abilities, the 8-item self-evaluation questionnaire asked students to assess the importance of feedback, opportunities, practice, teachers’ help and personal effort in language learning, and the last three items asked students to judge what type of learners they were. the elbi used a five-point likert scale with 1 referring to ‘strongly agree’ and 5 ‘strongly disagree,’ and the sebq employed ‘no’ (1) and ‘yes’ (2) choices for each item. tapsla.12797 p. 6/25 m. liu data collection procedure and analyses the survey was translated into english and back-checked by a teacher researcher with ph.d. in applied linguistics. then the survey, together with a consent form, was administered to students by their course teachers in class and was answered in about 15 minutes during class break. the collected data was analyzed via spss 20. means and standard deviations of elbi items as well as frequency and percentages of sebq items were computed to explore general patterns of students’ language learning beliefs and self efficacy. posthoc anova (duncan) was then run to examine differences in language learning beliefs and self-efficacy between students in different band groups. finally, correlation analyses were conducted to reveal relations between language learning beliefs and self-efficacy. results english learning beliefs beliefs about the nature of language learning as shown in table 1, the participants scored more than 3 on items 1–6, with a score of nearly 4 (mean = 3.83 ~ 4.00) on items 1–4. alternatively, 70% to 80% of the participants (strongly) agreed that making mistakes is a natural part of learning, that different people learn languages in different ways, that language learning takes a long time, that it is easier for children than adults to learn a foreign language, and that i need to know language rules before i can communicate in english; and around 60% believed that women are better than men at learning foreign languages. meanwhile, around 40% of the participants endorsed item 11 that making mistakes is harmful in language learning (mean = 2.10), further confirming their agreement with item 1 that making mistakes is a natural part of learning. in addition, a score of 2.996 on item 10 suggested that around half of the participants agreed that it is possible to learn a language in a short time. the participants scored 2.42 to 2.76 on items 7–9, indicating that around one third of the participants assumed that they can communicate in english without knowing the rules, that learning a foreign language is mostly a matter of learning a lot of grammar rules, and that learning a foreign language is mostly a matter of translating from chinese. chinese university students’ beliefs about english language… tapsla.12797 p. 7/25 a similar score pattern for items 1 to 11 was observed for all the three bands students. moreover, as reported in table 1, band 1 students scored the lowest on items 3–4, 6 and 10 yet the highest on items 7 and 11; band 2 students scored the highest on items 1–6 and 10 but the lowest on items 8–9 and 11; band 3 students scored the lowest on items 1–2, 5 and 7 but the highest on item 8. anova analyses revealed significant differences in items 1 (f = 6.18, p = .002), 2 (f = 4.02, p = .018), 5 (f = 4.02, p = .018), 8 (f = 13.22, p = .000), 9 (f = 11.12, p = .000), and 11 (f = 3.71, p = .025) (table 1). alternatively, band 2 students agreed significantly more strongly than their bands 1 and 3 peers that making mistakes is a natural part of learning but significantly less strongly than the latter two groups that learning a foreign language is mostly a matter of translating from chinese, and significantly more strongly than their band 3 peers that different people learn languages in different ways; band 3 students were significantly less in line with the statement that women are better than men at learning foreign languages than their bands 1 and 2 peers; band 1 students believed significantly more strongly than their band 2 peers that making mistakes is harmful in language learning; and the students of three bands differed significantly from one another in their agreement with item 8 that learning a foreign language is mostly a matter of learning a lot of grammar rules. role of teachers the participants scored 2.98 to 3.78 on items (12–18) on the role of teachers (table 1). namely, around 80% of the participants believed that the role of teachers was to help them learn effectively or to offer to help them. around half of them acknowledged that the role of teachers was to tell them what to do, what their difficulties were, and what progress they had made, to set their learning goals and give them regular tests. a similar score pattern was observed for students of all three bands. table 1 shows that bands 1–3 students had nearly similar scores on items 12–18. results of anova analyses (table 1) revealed significant differences in items 15 (f = 2.62, p = .073) and 18 (f = 2.55, p = .078). namely, band 2 students believed significantly less strongly than their band 3 peers that the role of teachers was to tell them what their difficulties were; and band 1 students were significantly more in line with the role of teachers being to set learning goals than their band 2 peers. tapsla.12797 p. 8/25 m. liu role of feedback the participants scored 2.97 to 3.33 on items 19 to 21, indicating that more than half of them acknowledged: having my work evaluated by others is helpful and i know best how well i am learning, and that around half of them considered themselves good at language learning. a similar score pattern was observed for students of all three bands. meanwhile, band 1 students scored the lowest on items 19–20; band 2 students scored the highest on items 19–21; and band 3 students scored the lowest on item 21. results of anova showed that significant differences occurred in items 20 (f = 10.87, p = .000) and 21 (f = 2.57, p = .077). namely, band 2 students agreed significantly more strongly that they were good at language learning than their bands 2 and 3 counterparts and that they knew best how well they were learning than their band 3 peers. use of strategies the participants scored 3.01 to 3.69 on all items (22–29) on the use of strategies except for item 26 (mean = 2.57). this meant that around 50% to 70% of the students believed that they could explain why they needed english, knew how to set their own learning goals, identify their strengths and weaknesses, find their own ways of practicing, plan their learning, measure their progress and check their work for mistakes. around 40% of them thought they would go up to practice speaking english when hearing someone speaking english. a similar score pattern was observed for students of all the three bands. band 1 students scored the lowest on items 22, 24–25 and 29 yet the highest on item 26; band 2 students scored the highest on all the items; and band 3 students scored the lowest on items 23 and 26–28. results of anova analyses revealed significant differences in items 24 (f = 6.10, p = .002), 25 (f = 6.20, p = .002), 27 (f = 2.93, p = .054) and 29 (f = 5.51, p = .004). alternatively, band 2 students believed significantly more strongly than their bands 1 and 3 counterparts that they knew how to identify their strengths and weaknesses, find their own ways of practicing and check their work for mistakes. they also believed significantly more strongly than their band 3 peers that they knew how to plan their learning. chinese university students’ beliefs about english language… tapsla.12797 p. 9/25 self-efficacy beliefs self-efficacy as shown in table 2, more than 68.9% of the participants acknowledged that they had the ability to learn a language successfully and to get the score they desired in their next english test, and that they knew how to find an effective way to learn english. a similar pattern existed for students of all three bands. band 2 students had the highest percentages of agreement, followed by bands 3 and 1 groups respectively. results of anova analyses revealed significant difference in items 31 (f = 7.31, p = .001) and 32 (f = 2.70, p = .067). namely, band 2 students believed significantly more strongly than their bands 1 and 3 peers that they would get the score they desired in their next english test, and significantly more strongly than their band 3 counterparts that they knew how to find an effective way to learn english. self-evaluation as many as 67.1%, 54.6%, and 41.6% of the participants believed that feedback they gave themselves, feedback from teachers, and feedback from other people helped them most, respectively. 62.7%, 81.9%, 80.3%, and 83.1% of the students held the view that feedback, opportunities to use the language, practice and their own effort played the most important role in successful language learning, respectively. only 39.8% believed that the language teacher played the most important role. similar patterns existed for students of all three bands. scoring higher or lower in different items, the three band groups differed significantly from one another in all self-evaluation items except for items 37–38, with f values ranging from 2.82 ( p = .06) to 11.71 ( p = .000). alternatively, band 2 students believed significantly more strongly than their bands 1 and 3 peers that the feedback given by themselves helped them most, yet significantly less strongly than the other two groups that the feedback from the teacher or other people helped them most and that the language teacher played the most important role in successful language learning. in addition, band 1 students believed significantly more strongly than the band 2 group that feedback played the most important role in successful language learning and significantly more strongly than their band 3 peers that their own effort played the most important role in successful language learning. tapsla.12797 p. 10/25 m. liu type of learner 62.1%, 59.1%, and 76.5% of the participants considered themselves to be learners who liked to learn with other people, a teacher and on their own, respectively. a similar pattern was observed for students of all the three bands. with similar scores on items 41–43, band 3 students significantly differed from band 2 students in item 42 (f = 2.03, p = .131) and band 1 students in item 43 (f = 2.65, p = .071). namely, band 3 students rated themselves as learners who liked to learn with a teacher significantly more strongly than their band 2 peers and themselves as learners who liked to learn on their own significantly less strongly than their band 1 peers. relationship between language learning beliefs and self-efficacy beliefs as reported in table 3, most of the elbi items were significantly related to sebq items. the coefficients significant for both the whole sample and the three band groups were those between elbi items 1–2, 10, 20, 22–25, 27–28 and sebq1, between elbi items 20, 23–29 and sebq items 2–3, between elbi items 20, 23–25, 28–29 and sebq4, between elbi8 and sebq5, between elbi items 9 and 19 and sebq6, between elbi items 9, 17–18 and sebq10, between elbi12 and sebq11, and between elbi19 and sebq13. the coefficients significant for three of the four samples were those between elbi items 11–13, 21, 26 and 29 and sebq1, between elbi items 10 and 21–22 and sebq2, between elbi items 7, 10, 21–22 and sebq3, between elbi items 7–8 and 26–27 and sebq4, between elbi items 9, 10, 16 and 18–19 and sebq5, between elbi items 2, 8, 11 and 18 and sebq6, between elbi items 11–12 and sebq8, between elbi items 6 and 11–12 and sebq9, between elbi items 1–2, 8, 11 and sebq10, between elbi items 2, 11 and sebq11, between elbi items 15, 19 and 26–27 and sebq12, between elbi items 15–16 and sebq13, and elbi items 7, 14 and 23–25 and sebq14. the remaining significant coefficients held true for one or two specific samples. all these findings indicated that students’ language learning beliefs were generally significantly correlated with their self-efficacy beliefs. for example, the more strongly a respondent agreed that making mistakes was a natural part of learning, the more strongly he/she believed in his/her ability to learn a language successfully. furthermore, 182, 131, 103, and 94 significant coefficients existed for the whole sample, band 1, band 2, and band 3 samples, respectively. it seemed that the larger the sample size, the more significant correlations there were between english learning belief statements and self-efficacy items. chinese university students’ beliefs about english language… tapsla.12797 p. 11/25 discussion findings and summary statistical analyses showed that both the elbi and sebq were fairly reliable in the present study, which also found that most of the elbi items were significantly related to sebq items for both the whole sample and the three band groups. in particular, the sebq items were generally significantly correlated with belief statements about strategy use, as found in similar studies (genç et al., 2016; heidari et al., 2012; raoofi et al., 2012; zhan et al., 2021). in addition, as shown in table 3, the larger the sample size, the more significant correlations there were between elbi and sebq items. these findings might be largely attributed to the large size of each specific sample. thus, the results need to be confirmed with samples of varying sizes. general profiles of and differences in students’ language learning beliefs the findings of this study presented a general overview of english learning beliefs and self-efficacy held by chinese university efl learners. the majority of the students, in spite of their english proficiency level, demonstrated similar beliefs and perceptions as learners of foreign languages. for example, to most of them, making mistakes was a natural part of learning; different people learned languages in different ways; learning a language took time; feedback, personal efforts and others’ help played important roles in learning foreign languages successfully; people should employ various strategies accordingly to learn foreign languages well. all these beliefs were generally in line with language learning theories. for instance, according to the behaviorism theory (mcleod, 2017; skinner, 1953) and the input theory (krashen, 1982, 1985, 2008), practice, interaction, reinforcement, mistakes, and feedback are crucial to the acquisition of a foreign language, especially to adult learners. moreover, according to the input theory, knowing language rules helps learners monitor their output, which justifies the belief held by many learners that they could not communicate in english without knowing the rules and that learning a foreign language was mostly a matter of learning a lot of grammar rules. since learning a foreign language takes time and is more than learning grammar rules and vocabulary, learners may experience various emotions such as anxiety and enjoyment, encounter numerous challenges and thus be under varying degrees of pressure during the learning process, as discussed in horwitz, horwitz, and cope (1986) and dewaele and macintyre (2014). all these findings attest to tapsla.12797 p. 12/25 m. liu the importance of learner-internal and external factors in sl/fl learning and acquisition (skehan, 1989). in addition, quite many students expected much of their teachers who should help them learn (more) effectively, tell them how to set goals, plan their learning and provide feedback on their progress. these beliefs might be influenced by traditional chinese culture which regards teachers as authority figures of knowledge who have supreme power to educate and plan for their students (cortazzi & jin, 1996; scollon & scollon, 2000). moreover, many participants agreed that learning a fl was mostly a matter of translating from chinese. this indicated that they were aware of other factors involved in sl/fl learning in addition to grammar and vocabulary, as discussed in horwitz et al. (1986) and skehan (1989) and evidenced in empirical research (e.g., botes, dewaele, & greiff, 2020; gardner, 1985; liu, 2020). concurrently, the present study revealed that most participants knew their motives to study english as well as their strengths and weaknesses, and knew how to plan and assess their learning, implying that they were largely autonomous and independent learners, as found in zhang and cui (2010). this might be attributed to the fact that the participants were from a top university in china, which generally accepted outstanding senior high school graduates in each province of the country. these students might have got accustomed to learning on their own to become exceptionally good. the present study also revealed significant differences in certain beliefs between students in different band groups, especially between band 2 students and their bands 1 and 3 peers. for example, band 2 students agreed significantly more strongly than their bands 1 and 3 peers that making mistakes was a natural part of learning but significantly less strongly than the latter two groups that learning a foreign language was mostly a matter of translating from chinese. they believed significantly less strongly than their band 3 peers that the role of teachers was to tell them what their difficulties were, and significantly less strongly than band 1 students that the role of teachers was to set learning goals. they also reported to be more significantly independent in learning foreign languages. it was hard to explain these differences, which needs further research. in addition, band 3 students were significantly less strongly in line with the statement that women are better than men at learning foreign languages than their bands 1 and 2 peers. this might be because the band 3 group had the lowest male to female ratio. moreover, band 1 students believed significantly more strongly than their band 2 peers that making mistakes was harmful in language learning. furthermore, students of three bands differed significantly from one another in their agreement with the belief that learning a foreign language is mostly a matter of learning a lot of grammar rules, indicating that chinese university students’ beliefs about english language… tapsla.12797 p. 13/25 the participants had mixed attitudes towards grammar learning. the following two reasons might have contributed to this: (a) english language education has long focused on grammar and continues to be so even now in many places in china, and (b) various teaching approaches have been introduced into classroom teaching and learning, especially communicative teaching and learning, which emphasizes the importance of effective communication. nevertheless, all these explanations remain assumptions, which need to be confirmed in future research. general profiles of and differences in students’ self-efficacy beliefs as presented above, the participants, in spite of their english proficiency level, acknowledged that they had the ability to learn a language successfully and knew how to learn english effectively. they were also aware of the importance of feedback, opportunities to use the language, practice, their own efforts and the language teacher, and knew what kind of learners they were. all these findings indicated that they had great self-efficacy beliefs, as found in similar studies (blumenthal, 2014; mills, 2009; pan & chen, 2021; yang, 1999; zhan et al., 2021; zhang & cui, 2010). these findings not only further supported the participants’ beliefs about language learning, but further pinpointed that they were confident and autonomous learners, like their peers in zhang and cui (2010). likewise, the present study also revealed significant differences in certain self-efficacy beliefs between students in different band groups, especially between band 2 students and their bands 1 and 3 peers. for example, band 2 students believed in their ability to achieve their goals and the supreme importance of their own feedback significantly more strongly than their bands 1 and 3 peers, and in their ability to learn english effectively significantly more strongly than their band 3 counterparts. band 1 students believed in the supreme importance of feedback in successful language learning significantly more strongly than the band 2 group and in the supreme role of personal efforts in successful language learning significantly more strongly than their band 3 counterparts. these findings seem to contradict with the belief that self-efficacy beliefs positively affect academic success (alegre, 2014; mills, 2009; woodrow, 2011). thus, they need to be further researched. limitations the present large-scale study provided an overview of chinese university efl learners’ beliefs and self-efficacy about english learning and revealed the tapsla.12797 p. 14/25 m. liu general relationship between the two, thus contributing to a better understanding of the two issues. even so, some limitations existed in the study. the biggest limitation was that the study solely relied on survey data. if complemented with qualitative data, the study might be able to better account for the significant differences in certain english learning beliefs and self-efficacy between students at varying english proficiency levels. in addition, the participants of the present study solely came from the same highly prestigious university, who had probably formed the habit of being confident and autonomous learners earlier in secondary schools. students with other backgrounds might display different belief and self-efficacy patterns, which will be examined in future research. moreover, as discussed in amuzie and winke (2009), zhang and cui (2010) and ozer and akçayoğlu (2021), language learning beliefs and self-efficacy are dynamic and change at different stages of the learning process. the present study only captured students’ english learning beliefs and self-efficacy at a certain moment. future research should be directed to examine whether, how, and why their beliefs and self-efficacy about language learning change over time. conclusions the present study examined english learning beliefs and self-efficacy held by chinese university efl learners. the results revealed a general overview of the students’ beliefs about the nature of language learning and the roles of teachers, feedback and learning strategies, and self-efficacy. the whole sample as well as those at varying english proficiency levels demonstrated similar beliefs and perceptions as learners of foreign languages. they generally believed that making mistakes was a natural part of language learning, that learning a foreign language took time, that students should resort to various strategies according to individual needs, and that teachers, feedback, practice, and personal efforts all played important roles in successful language learning. they also believed that they had the ability to learn a foreign language well. all these indicated that the students were generally confident and autonomous learners. the study also showed that students at different english proficiency levels differed significantly from one another in english learning beliefs and selfefficacy. though mixed findings occurred, band 2 students had stronger beliefs about the value of independent and autonomous learning and greater selfconfidence in successful language learning than the other two groups. even so, in terms of overall readiness for autonomous and independent learning, there is still room for development. this is especially so for students at lower profichinese university students’ beliefs about english language… tapsla.12797 p. 15/25 ciency levels. considering the great impact of long-history traditional chinese culture and classroom education, it may take chinese learners a lot more efforts to transit from passive to active, independent, and autonomous learners. the underlying mechanisms for this transition deserve research in the future. concurrently, teachers can help students with the transition by sharing learning experiences, co-setting goals, assigning both individual and collaborative projects and other means. meanwhile, as found in woodrow (2011), students with high self-efficacy tend to study harder and are more intrinsically motivated. heidari et al.’s (2012) study indicated that self-efficacy beliefs had great impact on successful learning experiences and achievements. thus, it is beneficial to develop positive self-efficacy beliefs in learners. for example, a positive and encouraging attitude can help facilitate students’ positive self-efficacy beliefs (woodrow, 2011). teachers can help students hold correct beliefs about foreign language learning to motivate them to study the target language (genç et al., 2016). moreover, as discussed in zhong (2012), learners might be more likely to act upon their beliefs when they are high in their self-efficacy. therefore, it is necessary to boost students’ self-efficacy, in that when they believe in their ability to perform they would invest more efforts into language learning and thus achieve better learning outcomes. references alanen, r. 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(2012). the beliefs and learner strategy use of low-proficiency chinese learners and their impact on learning english in a new zealand context. proquest dissertations and theses. retrieved from http://eproxy2.lib.tsinghua.edu.cn:80/rwt/75/https/ pntxc6udnayha6uqpf4xk65vf3sx85b/docview/1323346113?accountid=14426 meihua liu überzeugungen chinesischer universitätsstudenten über das erlernen des englischen sprache und die selbstwirksamkeit z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die überzeugungen der lernenden in bezug auf das sprachenlernen und die wahrgenommene selbstwirksamkeit sind wichtig für den erfolg ihres zweit-/fremdsprachenunterrichts (sl/fl). um das allgemeine profil von und den zusammenhang zwischen den überzeugungen chinesischer studierender über das englischlernen und die selbstwirksamkeit aufzuzeigen, wurden im rahmen der vorliegenden studie die überzeugungen chinesischer efl-lerner (englisch als fremdsprache) mit unterschiedlichen englischkenntnissen über das englischlernen und die selbstwirksamkeit unter die lupe genommen. insgesamt beantworteten 1.698 studierende einer spitzenuniversität in peking eine reihe von fragebögen. die ergebnisse gaben einen allgemeinen überblick über die vorstellungen der studierenden über die spezifik des sprachenlernens und die rolle von lehrkräften, feedback und lernstrategien sowie über die selbstwirksamkeit. eine weitere wichtige erkenntnis war, dass sich die teilnehmer mit unterschiedlichen englischkenntnissen in ihren überzeugungen über das sprachenlernen und die selbstwirksamkeit signifikant voneinander unterschieden. schlüsselwörter: überzeugungen über englischlernen, selbstwirksamkeit, unterschiede, sprachkenntnisse, feedback, strategie chinese university students’ beliefs about english language… tapsla.12797 p. 19/25 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0346-251x(99)00048-2 http://eproxy2.lib.tsinghua.edu.cn:80/rwt/75/https/pntxc6udnayha6uqpf4xk65vf3sx85b/docview/1323346113?accountid=14426 http://eproxy2.lib.tsinghua.edu.cn:80/rwt/75/https/pntxc6udnayha6uqpf4xk65vf3sx85b/docview/1323346113?accountid=14426 ta bl e 1 m ea ns , st an da rd d ev ia tio ns a nd a n o va r es ul ts o f e ng lis h le ar ni ng b el ie f in ve nt or y it em s e lb i ite m s w ho le s am pl e (n = 1 69 8) b an d 1 (n = 8 33 ) b an d 2 (n = 4 44 ) b an d 3 (n = 4 21 ) a n o v a r es ul ts m ea n s d m ea n s d m ea n s d m ea n s d f p p la ce s of s ig . di ffe re nc e (p = . 05 ) n at ur e of l an gu ag e le ar ni ng 1 . m ak in g m is ta ke s is a n at ur al p ar t of l ea rn in g. 3. 91 .9 4 3. 89 .9 8 4. 03 .8 3 3. 81 .9 4 6. 18 ** .0 02 b an ds 2 & 1 ba nd s 2& 3 2 . d iff er en t pe op le l ea rn l an gu ag es i n di ffe re nt w ay s. 4. 00 .8 4 3. 99 8 .8 9 4. 08 .7 5 3. 92 .8 4 4. 02 * .0 18 b an ds 2 & 3 3 . la ng ua ge l ea rn in g ta ke s a lo ng t im e. 3. 87 .9 1 3. 84 .9 6 3. 90 .8 8 3. 89 .8 1 .8 6 .4 22 / 4 . it is ea si er fo r ch ild re n th an ad ul ts to le ar n a fo re ig n la ng ua ge . 3. 83 .9 4 3. 81 .9 7 3. 87 .9 1 3. 84 .8 9 .7 2 .4 89 / 5 . w om en a re b et te r th an m en a t le ar ni ng f or ei gn l an gu ag es . 3. 33 1. 05 3. 39 1. 07 3. 34 1. 08 3. 21 .9 8 4. 02 * .0 18 b an ds 3 & 1 ba nd s 3& 2 6 . i ne ed t o kn ow l an gu ag e ru le s be fo re i c an c om m un ic at e in e ng lis h. 3. 53 .9 5 3. 51 .9 9 3. 57 .9 0 3. 55 .9 2 .5 9 .5 55 / 7 . i ca n co m m un ic at e in e ng lis h w ith ou t kn ow in g th e ru le s. 2. 76 .9 3 2. 79 .9 5 2. 76 .9 4 2. 71 .8 8 1.1 7 .3 12 / 8 . le ar ni ng a f or ei gn l an gu ag e is m os tly a m at te r of l ea rn in g a lo t of g ra m m ar r ul es . 2. 55 .9 6 2. 56 .9 8 2. 37 .8 7 2. 70 .9 6 13 .2 2* *. 00 0 al l 9 . le ar ni ng a f or ei gn l an gu ag e is m os tly a m at te r of t ra ns la tin g fr om c hi ne se . 2. 42 .9 5 2. 51 .9 9 2. 25 .8 9 2. 43 .9 1 11 .12 ** .0 00 b an ds 2 & 1 ba nd s 2& 3 10 . it is p os si bl e to l ea rn a l an gu ag e in a s ho rt t im e. 2. 99 6 1. 07 2. 98 1.1 1 3. 02 1. 08 2. 99 5 .9 9 .17 .8 41 / 11 . m ak in g m is ta ke s is h ar m fu l in l an gu ag e le ar ni ng . 2. 10 1. 00 2. 16 1. 05 1. 99 8 .9 2 2. 09 .9 8 3. 71 * .0 25 b an ds 1 & 2 r ol e of t ea ch er 12 . is t o he lp m e le ar n ef fe ct iv el y. 3. 78 .8 5 3. 78 .8 5 3. 79 .8 5 3. 77 .8 4 .0 9 .9 15 / 13 . is t o of fe r to h el p m e. 3. 73 .8 5 3. 72 .8 8 3. 77 .7 9 3. 69 8 .8 3 .8 2 .4 41 / tapsla.12797 p. 20/25 m. liu 14 . is t o te ll m e w ha t to d o. 3. 24 1. 06 3. 26 1. 09 3. 21 1. 04 3. 23 1. 02 .2 9 .7 51 / 15 . is t o sa y w ha t m y di ff ic ul tie s ar e. 3. 34 1. 01 3. 32 1. 03 3. 28 1. 01 3. 43 .9 5 2. 62 .0 73 b an ds 2 & 3 16 . is t o te ll m e w ha t pr og re ss i a m m ak in g. 3. 33 1. 01 3. 32 1. 02 3. 33 1. 03 3. 35 .9 7 .15 .8 58 / 17 . is t o gi ve m e re gu la r te st s. 2. 98 1. 07 3. 02 1. 08 2. 91 1. 07 2. 99 1. 06 1. 68 .18 7 / 18 . is t o se t m y le ar ni ng g oa ls . 3. 00 1. 06 3. 04 1. 07 2. 90 1. 07 3. 02 1. 03 2. 55 .0 78 b an ds 1 & 2 r ol e of f ee db ac k 19 . h av in g m y w or k ev al ua te d by o th er s is h el pf ul . 3. 27 .9 6 3. 25 .9 8 3. 30 .9 8 3. 26 .9 1 .3 7 .6 90 / 20 . i am g oo d at l an gu ag e le ar ni ng . 2. 97 .9 8 2. 90 5 1. 02 3. 16 .9 5 2. 91 4 .9 1 10 .8 7* *. 00 0 b an ds 2 & 1 ba nd s 2& 3 21 . i kn ow b es t ho w w el l i am l ea rn in g. 3. 33 .9 6 3. 29 8 .9 9 3. 41 .8 9 3. 29 .9 4 2. 57 .0 77 b an ds 2 & 3 s tr at eg ie s 22 . i ca n ex pl ai n w hy i n ee d e ng lis h. 3. 69 .8 9 3. 66 .9 4 3. 77 .8 2 3. 67 .8 4 2. 51 .0 82 / 23 . i kn ow h ow t o se t m y ow n le ar ni ng g oa ls . 3. 35 .9 6 3. 34 1. 01 3. 40 .9 2 3. 32 92 .8 2 .4 41 1 / 24 . i kn ow h ow t o id en tif y m y st re ng th s an d w ea kn es se s. 3. 43 .9 5 3. 37 1. 00 3. 56 .8 9 3. 43 .8 96 6. 10 ** .0 02 b an ds 2 & 1 ba nd s 2& 3 25 . i kn ow h ow t o fin d m y ow n w ay s of p ra ct ic in g. 3. 27 .9 3 3. 20 .9 6 3. 40 .8 8 3. 28 .9 2 6. 20 ** .0 02 b an ds 2 & 1 ba nd s 2& 3 26 . if i he ar d so m eo ne s pe ak in g e ng lis h, i w ou ld g o up t o pr ac tic e sp ea ki ng e ng lis h. 2. 57 .9 2 2. 58 .9 3 2. 58 .9 3 2. 56 .9 0 .0 6 .9 41 / 27 . i kn ow h ow t o pl an m y le ar ni ng . 3. 24 .9 4 3. 22 .9 7 3. 33 .9 1 3. 18 .9 2 2. 93 .0 54 b an ds 2 & 3 28 . i kn ow h ow t o m ea su re m y pr og re ss . 3. 28 .9 4 3. 28 .9 7 3. 31 .9 3 3. 23 .9 1 .8 1 .4 45 / 29 . i kn ow h ow t o ch ec k m y w or k fo r m is ta ke s. 3. 01 .9 8 2. 95 .9 98 3. 14 .9 9 3. 01 .9 4 5. 51 ** .0 04 b an ds 2 & 1 ba nd s 2& 3 chinese university students’ beliefs about english language… tapsla.12797 p. 21/25 ta bl e 2 f re qu en ci es , pe rc en ta ge s an d a m o va r es ul ts o f se lfe ff ic ac y b el ie f q ue st io nn ai re i te m s s e q i te m s w ho le s am pl e (n = 1 69 8) b an d 1 (n = 8 33 ) b an d 2 (n = 4 44 ) b an d 3 (n = 4 21 ) f p p la ce s of s ig . di ffe re nc e (p = . 05 ) n o ye s n o ye s n o ye s n o ye s d o yo u be lie ve 30 . i ha ve t he a bi lit y to l ea rn a l an gu ag e su cc es sf ul ly . 19 9/ 11 .7 14 99 /8 8. 3 10 9/ 13 .1 72 4/ 86 .9 43 /9 .7 40 1/ 90 .3 47 /1 1. 2 37 4/ 88 .8 1. 70 .18 3 / 31 . i ha ve t he a bi lit y to g et t he s co re yo u ar e tr yi ng fo r in yo ur ne xt e ng lis h te st . 44 1/ 26 12 57 /7 4 24 5/ 29 .4 58 8/ 70 .6 87 /1 9. 6 35 7/ 80 .4 10 9/ 25 .9 31 2/ 74 .1 7. 31 ** .0 01 b an ds 2 & 1; ba nd s 2& 3 32 . i kn ow h ow t o fin d an e ffe ct iv e w ay t o le ar n e ng lis h. 52 8/ 31 .1 11 70 /6 8. 9 26 8/ 32 .2 56 5/ 67 .8 11 9/ 26 .8 32 5/ 73 .2 14 1/ 33 .5 28 0/ 66 .5 2. 70 .0 67 b an ds 2 & 3 s el fev al ua ti on q ue st io ns i be lie ve f ee db ac k on m y la ng ua ge le ar ni ng … 33 .t ha t i gi ve m ys el f he lp s m e m os t. 55 9/ 32 .9 11 39 /6 7. 1 28 7/ 34 .5 54 6/ 65 .5 12 6/ 28 .4 31 8/ 71 .6 14 6/ 34 .7 27 5/ 65 .4 2. 82 .0 6 b an ds 2 & 1; ba nd s 2& 3 34 . fr om t he t ea ch er h el ps m e m os t. 77 1/ 45 .4 92 7/ 54 .6 36 6/ 43 .9 46 7/ 56 .1 24 2/ 54 .5 20 2/ 45 .4 16 3/ 38 .7 25 8/ 61 .3 11 .7 1* * .0 00 b an ds 2 & 1; ba nd s 2& 3 35 . fr om o th er p eo pl e he lp s m e m os t. 99 2/ 58 .4 70 6/ 41 .6 46 3/ 55 .6 37 0/ 44 .4 29 8/ 67 .1 14 6/ 32 .9 23 1/ 54 .9 19 0/ 45 .1 9. 47 ** .0 00 b an ds 2 & 1; ba nd s 2& 3 … pl ay s th e m os t im po rt an t ro le in su cc es sf ul l an gu ag e le ar ni ng 36 . fe ed ba ck . 63 3/ 37 .3 10 65 /6 2. 7 30 6/ 36 .7 52 7/ 63 .3 18 6/ 41 .9 25 8/ 58 .1 14 1/ 33 .5 28 0/ 66 .5 3. 37 * .0 35 b an ds 1 & 2 37 . o pp or tu ni tie s to u se t he la ng ua ge .3 08 /1 8. 1 13 90 /8 1. 9 15 3/ 18 .4 68 0/ 81 .6 89 /2 0 35 5/ 80 66 /1 5. 7 35 5/ 84 .3 1. 42 .2 43 / tapsla.12797 p. 22/25 m. liu 38 . p ra ct ic e. 33 5/ 19 .7 13 63 /8 0. 3 15 8/ 19 67 5/ 81 88 /1 9. 8 35 6/ 80 .2 89 /2 1.1 33 2/ 78 .9 .4 2 .6 59 / 39 . t he l an gu ag e te ac he r. 10 22 /6 0. 2 67 6/ 39 .8 48 9/ 58 .7 34 4/ 41 .3 30 5/ 68 .7 13 9/ 31 .3 22 8/ 54 .2 19 3/ 45 .8 10 .3 9* * .0 00 b an ds 2 & 1; ba nd s 2& 3 40 . m y ow n ef fo rt . 28 7/ 16 .9 14 11 /8 3. 1 12 2/ 14 .6 71 1/ 85 .4 78 /1 7. 6 36 6/ 82 .4 87 /2 0. 7 33 4/ 79 .3 3. 71 * .0 25 b an ds 1 & 3 w ha t ki nd o f le ar ne r ar e yo u? 41 . le ar ne r w ho l ik es t o le ar n w ith ot he r pe op le . 64 3/ 37 .9 10 55 /6 2. 1 31 6/ 37 .9 51 7/ 62 .1 17 0/ 38 .3 27 4/ 61 .7 15 7/ 37 .3 26 4/ 62 .7 .0 5 .9 54 / 42 . le ar ne r w ho l ik es t o le ar n w ith a te ac he r. 69 4/ 40 .9 10 04 /5 9. 1 34 4/ 41 .3 48 9/ 58 .7 19 4/ 43 .7 25 0/ 56 .3 15 6/ 37 .1 26 5/ 62 .9 2. 03 .13 1 b an ds 2 & 3 43 . le ar ne r w ho l ik es t o de ci de f or hi m se lf/ he rs el f ho w a nd w ha t he /s he l ea rn s. 39 9/ 23 .5 12 99 /7 6. 5 17 9/ 21 .5 65 4/ 78 .5 10 5/ 23 .6 33 9/ 76 .4 11 5/ 27 .3 30 6/ 72 .7 2. 65 .0 71 b an ds 1 & 3 n ot e. t he f ir st n um be r is f re qu en cy a nd t he s ec on d is p er ce nt ag e. chinese university students’ beliefs about english language… tapsla.12797 p. 23/25 table 3 correlations between elbi and sebq items (n = 1698) sebq1 sebq2 sebq3 sebq4 sebq5 sebq6 sebq7 elbi1 .1071**/.0922** .1513**/.0974* .0641**/ /.1014* -.0881**/ -.1723** -.0831**/ -.2063** elbi 2 .1401**/.1482** .1493**/.1114* -.0721**/ -.1023* -.0881**/-.0742* -.1293** elbi 3 .0601*/.1242** -.0571* elbi 4 elbi 5 elbi 6 .0541*/ /.1044* /.1094* 3 -.1013* -.1043* elbi 7 .0731**/ .1023* .0601*/ .1503** .1181**/.1192** .1843** .0871**/.0882* .1193* elbi 8 -.0571* .0731**/.0842* /.1134* .1511**/.1042** .1953**/.1554** .1051**/.0902** .1353** .0971**/.0922** elbi 9 -.0761**/-.0742* -.0571*/ /-.0964* -.0551*/ /-.1414** .0961**/.0742* .1223* .1321**/.1342** .1073*/.1124* .0551* elbi 10 .1031**/.0912** .1123*/.1204* .0731**/.0692* .0993* .0611**/ .1013*/.1034* .0551* /.0762* .0621*/.1402** elbi 11 -.1121**/-.1492** -.1003* -.0741**/ /-.1224* -.0481* .0951**/.1072** .1303** .1101**/.1032** .1793** elbi 12 .1221**/.1452** .1523** /.0722* /.1044* elbi 13 .0811**/.0812* .1923** /.1004* elbi 14 -.0741**/ -.0862* -.0611**/ -.1083* .0711** /.0964* elbi 15 .0541*/ /.1314** elbi 16 .1001**/.1002** /.1294** /.1024* elbi 17 .0851**/ .1223* .0761**/ .1513** .0511* elbi 18 -.0521* .1081**/.1022** .1273** .0741**/.0742* .1053* elbi 19 .0571*/ .1003* .0551*/ .0712* .1111**/.1222** /.1834** .1241**/.1352** .1093*/.1264** /.1064* elbi 20 .1621**/.1522** .1763**/.1574** .2291**/.2522** .2453**/.1294** .2221**/.2502** .2153**/.1494** .1511**/.1572** .1433**/.1234* -.0691**/-.1022** elbi 21 .0651**/ /.1094* .0811**/.0772* /.0964* .1041**/.0902** .1503** .0951**/.1132** elbi 22 .1681**/.1962** .1403**/.1204* .1001**/.0992** .1253** .1181**/.1132** .1653** .0621** -.0791**/ -.1523** elbi 23 .1741**/.1712** .1753**/.1804** .1981**/.2172** .1713**/.1754** .2601**/.2752** .2563**/.2294** .1801**/.1992** .1313**/.1814** /-.0802* elbi 24 .2531**/.2732** .2493**/.1974** .1501**/.1282** .1453**/.1784** .2161**/.1952** .2093**/.2554** .1261**/.1412** .0993*/.1034* -.0641** -.0781** /.0974* elbi 25 .1851**.2122** .1303**/.1654** .1991**/.1622** .2423**/.2144** .3331**/.3182** .3363**/.3524** .1261**/.1382** .0963*/.1124* -.0481* elbi 26 .0731**/.0762* /.1204* .1691**/.2022** .1353**/.1384** .1771**/.1842** .1513**/.1894** .1221**/.1512** .1273** .0791**/.1222** .1011**/.1192** /.1064* elbi 27 .1511**/.1672** .1263**/.1354** .2061**/.2202** .2023**/.1694** .3091**/.2922** .3463**/.2984** .1531**/.1992** .1223* elbi 28 .1321**/.1542** .1513** .2011**/.2162** .2083**/.1624** .2731**/.2732** .3063**/.2364** .2071**/.2402** .1893**/.1524** elbi 29 .1191**/.1582** .1003* .2041**/.2072** .1853**/.1944** .2471**/.2352** .2563**/.2524** .1281**/.1522** .0943*/.0964* /.0782* note. elbi = english learning belief inventory; sebq = self-efficacy belief questionnaire only significant coefficients are reported in table 4; 1, 2, 3, 4 refer to the whole sample, bands 1, 2, and 3 groups, respectively * p ≦ .05; ** p ≦ .01 tapsla.12797 p. 24/25 m. liu sebq8 sebq9 sebq10 sebq11 sebq12 sebq13 sebq14 /.1784** -.1231**/ -.2083**/-.1354** .0671**/ /.1164* .1623** .1101**/ /.2094** .0551**/ /.1254* -.1131**/ -.1863**/-.1244* .0771**/.0992** /.0994* -.0591* .0651**/.0782* .0631** .1031**/ /.1444** /.0942** .0521*/ /.1474** .0541* .0501* .0501* .0571*/ .1073* -.0983* .0891**/ .1113*/.1624** -.1003* .0891**/.0992** /.1304** .1163* .0591*/.0942** .0941**/.0782* .1213* .1163* .1351**/.0982** .2463** .0771** .1511**/.1582** .1453**/.1104* /-.0682* .0551* -.0951**/-.1002** -.1053* -.0511*/ -.0933*/-.1184* .1271**/.1562** .1333** -.1171**/-.1482**/.1504** .0963* -.0481*/ -.0933* .0651**/.0882* /.1544** .0941**/.1042** /.1414** .1141**/.1232** .1093*/.1044* .0801**/ /.1164* .0973*/.1904** .1031** /.1184* .0751** /.1514** .0701**/ .1303** .0921**/.1072** -.0871**/-.1082** -.0973* /.1934** .0591*/ .1143* /.1094* .0541*/.0682* /.0984* .1021**/ .1643**/.1014* -.0741**/-.0762* .0881**/ /.1894** .0721**/ /.0974* /.1084* .0511*/ /.1204* .0981**/.1112** .1273** .1163* .1401**/.1042** .1043*/.2334** .0831**/.0922** .1581**/.1772** .1493**/.1124* .0991**/.1372** -.0691**/-.0802* .0841**/ /.2284** .0681**/.0962** .0911**/.0842* .1233** .1361**/.1322** .1083*/.1804** .0541*/.0842* /.1074* .0551*/.0702* .0611**/.0702* .0701**/ .1163* /.1194* .0521* /-.0852* .0881**/.1072** .0611* .0901**/.1022** .0681**/.0802* .0551*/.0822* .0751**/.0832* /.1174* .1341**/.1372** .2183** .0771**/.1122** .0941**/.1162** -.0891**/ -.1963** .1411**/.2022** .1043* /.1004* .1431**/.2092** .1303** /.0882* -.1223* .0611*/.1132** .0511**/ /.1804** .1351**/.1812** .1003* .1231**/.1492** .1513** .1311**/.1682** /.1024* .0991**/.1532** .0651**/.0822* .0561**/ /.1074* .1171**/.1482** .0641**/.1032** .0801**/.0802* /.1474** .0771**/.0922** /.0752* /.0832* /.0942** .0641**/.0812* .0751**/.0962** .0481* chinese university students’ beliefs about english language… tapsla.12797 p. 25/25 theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 8 (1), 2022, pp. 53–70 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11162 hyang-il kim https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4340-0173 sahmyook university, south korea the impact of individual interest and proficiency on self-efficacy beliefs in foreign language listening a b s t r a c t interest and self-efficacy beliefs are important components of motivational constructs that share some common characteristics and inf luence learning. in this regard, several studies have explored how these two variables relate to each other in various domains and have offered meaningful implications. however, in the field of language learning, it appears that related research is relatively insufficient, and information offered through prior studies is very limited. therefore, the current study aims to investigate how individual interest in learning english and proficiency inf luence self-efficacy in listening to expand the current knowledge. with a pre-/post-test design, it analyzed the data collected from 107 efl korean university students with a low-intermediate english proficiency, using hierarchical regression analyses. the results reveal that, unlike at the beginning of the course, individual interest turned to be a significant factor in the development of self-efficacy in advanced english listening around the end of the semester, even predicting it more than proficiency did. on the other hand, individual interest inf luenced self-efficacy in basic english listening much more than proficiency did in the pre-test and maintained this pattern in the post-test. this study provides insightful information into the relationship between interest, self-efficacy, and proficiency, highlighting the essential role of individual interest in learning english. it follows that the maintenance and nurturing of interest is crucial for the development of self-efficacy beliefs which in turn can contribute to advances in language learning. keywords: individual interest, listening, l2 proficiency, self-efficacy beliefs developing listening skills in a foreign language can be a difficult process that may lead students to experience frequent frustrations and negative feelings before attaining a level of satisfactory skill (graham, 2011). it can be even more challenging for students with low proficiency (wang & fan, 2015). hyang-il kim54 individuals who perceive a given task as difficult, recognize that they do not have the capabilities to perform such a task in a specific field or have repeatedly experienced failure are more likely to have relatively low motivation (graham, 2007), or may not have much interest in learning a foreign language. bandura (1997) maintains that an individual’s motivation, affective states, and behavior tend to be formed based on their beliefs or self-perceptions rather than on their objective and actual state. this indicates that an individual’s positive perceptions such as interest and self-efficacy beliefs are likely to play pivotal roles in academic performance and students may need urgent aid to facilitate them having positive experiences and thus build their positive perception toward language learning. interest and self-efficacy are two motivational constructs that come from one’s judgments and beliefs accumulated overtime during past learning efforts, which are domain-specific (hidi et al., 2002). focusing on the similar characteristics and the influential roles in academic fields that the two variables have in common, a few studies offer some information about the relationship between these two constructs in various educational fields. however, it seems that the details and complexity of these relationships remain relatively little known in language learning circles. the study by hidi et al. (2002) called for more research on this issue to understand its nature almost two decades ago, yet relevant information on the relationship between them still appears insufficient to result in useful implications. recognizing the current gap, this study attempts to explore the complexity and interactive characteristics of the two motivational structures, along with the proficiency of korean university students with a low-intermediate english proficiency level. more specifically, it aims to broaden the scope of information presented by the literature by exploring how students’ interest and proficiency influence the formation of self-efficacy in english listening. this may allow us a better understanding of how these motivational variables are related. literature review interest in language learning interest in language learning is considered one of the motivational components that help students stay engaged and committed during the learning process (renniger & hidi, 2002). a few researchers claim that interest involves an individual’s cognitive and affective aspects (ainley et al., 2002; hidi & renninger, 2006). more specifically, hidi and renninger (2006) claim the impact of individual interest and proficiency on self-efficacy beliefs… 55 that the positive emotions that accompany engagement can be represented as the affective component of interest, while the perceptual and representational activities in relation to engagement are described as the cognitive counterpart of interest. it appears to be a general consensus that interest may strongly impact the cognitive performance and affective experience of an individual’s learning path, leading to positive outcomes (hidi et al., 2002). hidi (1990) differentiates interest into two types: individual interest and situational interest. she defines individual interest as an individual’s persistent tendency to repeatedly engage in certain content over time. since individual interest is related to the previous knowledge and experiences that an individual possesses, it is considered topic-specific and as having more potential for holding personal value for a relatively long period of time. on the other hand, situational interest is defined as the focused attention and affective response initiated while in a particular situation and by stimuli found in the immediate environment and is likely short-lived. this type of interest appears to be context-specific and without long-term value. previous research indicates that situational interest is likely part of the fundamental constructs of individual interest as suggested in a developmental model of interest (hidi & renninger, 2006; krapp, 2002; silvia, 2001). it should be noted that individual interest appears to have some traits in common with intrinsic motivation, but care should be taken with this interpretation since intrinsic motivation encompasses both individual interest and situational interest (lee et al., 2014). individual interest in a specific area is shaped through positive experiences—both in a cognitive and affective manner—during long-term participation in a task or activity related to that specific domain; reflecting a relatively well-developed and sustained form of interest. this serves as a basis for the probability of individual interest working as a concrete construct that can reveal part of an individual’s characteristics. for example, a few studies delineate its facilitative role in several fields of learning, such as self-regulation processes and academic performance (lee et al., 2014; hidi & renninger, 2006; sansone & thoman, 2005; schiefele et al., 1992). the study by schiefele et al. (1992) based on meta-analysis shows that individual interest significantly predicts academic achievements, although some differences exist depending on gender. lee et al. (2014) collected data from 132 korean adolescents and examined the roles of individual interest in the domains of korean, english, mathematics, and science with other variables using structural equation modeling. the study found remarkably similar patterns in the four subject areas. individual interest best predicts self-regulation, with self-regulation being the most influential mediator of individual interest and academic performance. these results support the idea that individual interest may also have a relationship with the development of self-efficacy, which is a strong predictor of academic achievement and can be seen to persistently hyang-il kim56 help individuals engage with and put effort into their learning processes, in a similar way that interest does (renninger & hidi, 2002). self-efficacy beliefs learning a foreign language involves understanding and becoming familiar with a whole new intricate system of a language—the cultural, social, and linguistic aspects (e.g., syntax, lexis, etc.) of language and language use. in other words, it poses a significant challenge for a student to learn another language that has a completely different system from their mother tongue. in this respect, it is vital for students to have the ability to predict and manage potential challenges or threats appearing in their learning processes, or to have a strong sense of self-efficacy. as individuals exercise their ability to overcome such difficulties as they encounter them, they build a solid sense of efficacy that helps tackle and handle new challenges (bandura, 1997). bandura’s (1997) self-efficacy falls within the framework of the social cognitive theory of human functioning that comes from the supposition that humans have the ability to control their behavior, with a self-belief system serving as a possible guide to control what they think, feel, and act. what he defines that as “perceived self-efficacy” refers to beliefs in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the course of action required to produce given attainments” (p. 3). in this point of view, a number of scholars maintain that a robust sense of efficacy beliefs equip students with a willingness to face the challenge of given tasks, to make an effort to fulfill them, and to stay on track persistently in order to perform the tasks despite there being obstacles along the way in the learning processes (bandura, 1997; kim & cha, 2017; stevens et al., 2004; vuong et al., 2010). not surprisingly, there are a lot of studies that reveal the influential role of self-efficacy in academic achievements or self-regulation, which in turn are related to learning listening skills in language (e.g., graham, 2007, 2011; mills et al., 2006; rahimi & abedini, 2009, etc.). the study by graham (2007, 2011) emphasizes the importance of student self-efficacy in developing listening skills, showing that students benefit from the formation of self-efficacy through listening strategy instruction. recognizing that selfefficacy is a motivational construct essential for learning, it is very important to look at the relationship of variables that can reinforce students’ self-efficacy. the impact of individual interest and proficiency on self-efficacy beliefs… 57 the relationship between interest and self-efficacy in learning interest and self-efficacy are reported to have some association with each other in several educational fields such as writing (hidi et al., 2002), mathematics (bandura & shunk, 1981), and physical education (zimmerman & kitsantas, 1997). hidi et al. (2002) show that interest and self-efficacy in the same domain or content area can be correlated by sharing the same knowledge base. they contribute to similar behavioral outcomes such as positive emotional reaction, persistence, making an effort, and focused attention during learning processes. this strongly indicates that these two motivational constructs may influence each other’s development. however, the nature and method of their interaction still appear to be unclear (renninger, 2010), and this holds true for the field of l2 learning. it is at this point that the current study finds its relevance and attempts to investigate how these motivational variables are related in the field of l2 listening, which may lead to further consolidate pedagogical and theoretical conjectures. the research questions are as follows. 1. what are the underlying factors found in listening self-efficacy beliefs that beginner to low-intermediate students have? 2. is there any relationship between interest in learning english, listening proficiency, and self-efficacy beliefs in listening? 3. how do these relationships change over time? method participants this study was conducted at a university located in eastern korea, approximately two-hours away from seoul, by car. this university requires students to take at least two mandatory english courses regardless of major and is offered by the general education center. the 107 participants—who agreed to join the study voluntarily—chose listening comprehension (lc), which aims to develop students’ listening comprehension skills based on toeic. most participants’ english proficiency varied between beginner and lowintermediate as seen by their toeic lc scores taken at the beginning of the course; the average score was 217.3 (s.d.1 = 51.0) out of a total of 495 (see table 2). most of them were freshmen from various majors with ages rang1 s.d. = standard deviation hyang-il kim58 ing from 18 to 24 (m2 = 19.2, s.d. =1.6) and had spent an average of about eight years learning english. the 107 students were from the three classes taught by the author. among them, one class was asked whether they study english apart from in the english class in the third week from the first data collection and 29 participants responded to the question. it was found that only three students (10.3%) answered that they were studying apart from the english course they were taking and almost 90% of them (n = 26) responded that they got english input only through the english class taught by the author. the data was collected through convenience sampling because the population targeted was considered sufficiently diverse for the aim of the study. instruments listening self-efficacy. for this study, eight items of self-efficacy in listening from the english self-efficacy questionnaire (wang et al., 2014) were used. some of them were modified and some added to suit the educational environment and purpose for which the research was being conducted. firstly, three original items were modified or eliminated. for example, the item “3. can you understand american english tv programs?” was modified to “can you understand english tv programs (e.g., dramas which were produced in the u.s.a, the u.k. or korea, etc.)?”. by deleting the word ‘american,’ it was intended to expand the concept of english used in many places, not english used only in one region. with this change, item “10. can you understand english tv programs made in china?” was removed to avoid redundancy. in addition, considering the listening contents covered in class, “15. if your english instructor gives you a tape-recorded english dialogue about everyday school matters, can you understand it?” was changed to “if your english instructor gives you a recorded english dialogue between two or three people, can you understand it?”, and then, the following three items were added to measure self-efficacy that can be developed through english listening classes; “can you concentrate on the content to which you listen?”, “can you understand important information of conversations in english?” “can you do the tasks and assignments you have to do well, to improve your listening skills?”. in this study, ten items were translated into korean, considering the level of language proficiency of the participants, and used to measure the participants’ self-efficacy beliefs in listening and the overall cronbach’s alpha coefficient was .89, which is almost the same as that shown in wang et al.’s (α = .88). listening proficiency. the results obtained from the two toeic lc tests were used as the participants’ listening proficiency data. one of the publishers 2 m = mean the impact of individual interest and proficiency on self-efficacy beliefs… 59 that regularly make toeic related books provided the tests and they were administered in the first and the twelfth week. the publisher calculated the results. since the process took about two weeks, the test was taken on the twelfth week so that the students were able to check their grades within the 15-week course. with a total score of 495 in the listening section, the means of their test results were 217.34 (s.d. = 50.96) and 259.35 (s.d. = 65.82), respectively. interest in english learning (iel). in this study, iel represents “individual interest,” showing relatively stable affective orientations (hidi, 1990). in order to elicit the participants’ level of individual interest toward learning english, a question, “do you have interest in learning english?”, was asked in a similar way to the study by hidi et al. (2002). they were instructed to use their own judgment to mark their answer on a six-point likert scale ranging from 1 and 6. data collection a brief outline of this study was described, and data were collected only from those who agreed to participate. the students were aware that their responses would be released for analysis after the semester is over, and that they would remain anonymous. data were collected twice in the 15-week course of the english class; in the second and fourteenth weeks. for the analysis, a dataset of 107 participants who responded to both pre-/post-data collection were used. data analysis to address the first research question, an exploratory factor analysis was carried out using the ten-item questionnaire to explore the underlying factors of listening self-efficacy beliefs in the current population. for the second and third research questions, two multiple hierarchical regression analyses were run for each set of preand post-tests. the scores of interest and proficiency were used as independent variables and the identified underlying self-efficacy factors were used as dependent variables for analysis. hierarchical regression analysis enables examination of whether independent variables significantly predict the identified underlying self-efficacy factors, and further examines which predictors have a greater proportion in explaining the total variance of the dependent variable. in addition, they allow examination of the changes occurring in the patterns of models by comparing the results of preand post-tests. hyang-il kim60 results to answer research question 1, an exploratory factor analysis was computed, employing the principal axis factoring extraction method and the oblique direct oblimin rotation method. items were eliminated if they were not greater than a cutoff value of 1.0 based on the eigenvalue. the first trial resulted in a two-factor solution, accounting for 55.1% of the total variance. all ten items of self-efficacy beliefs in listening yielded a two-factor structure. the six items were loaded on factor 1 (f1) (α = .88), accounting for 47.5% of the total variance and was labeled as self-efficacy in advanced english listening (sael) since these items indicate capabilities in advanced levels of listening, such as asking if they can understand mostly authentic texts in english through media such as speeches or tv programs. factor 2 (f2) included the rest of the four items (α = .78), accounting for 7.6% of the total variance, and was labeled as self-efficacy in basic english listening when learning (sbel). these items are related to activities and tasks required to improve listening competence which are normally conducted during listening classes. a display of the factor loadings gained from factor analysis is shown in table 1. table 1 factor loadings for self-efficacy beliefs in listening sael, sbel factor 1 2 factor 1: self-efficacy in advanced english listening (sael) 2. can you understand english tv programs (e.g., dramas which were produced in the u.s.a, the u.k. or korea, etc.)? 0.853 5. can you understand english movies without subtitles? 0.848 4. if your english instructor gives you an english dialogue between two or three people, can you understand it? 0.747 3. can you understand radio programs in english speaking countries? 0.586 6. can you understand english songs? 0.582 1. can you understand stories told in english? 0.567 factor 2: self-efficacy in basic english listening when learning (sbel) 8. can you concentrate on the content to which you listen? 0.745 10. can you do well the tasks and assignments you have to do to improve your listening skills? 0.658 7. can you understand numbers spoken in english? 0.529 9. can you get important information from english conversations heard in the class? 0.522 note. extraction method: principal axis factoring / rotation method: direct oblimin the impact of individual interest and proficiency on self-efficacy beliefs… 61 with the second question, this study aimed to uncover any relationship existing between interest in english learning (iel), listening proficiency, and self-efficacy beliefs in listening when joining the english listening class. table 2 presents the descriptive statistics for the variables that were collected in preand post-data collection. first, when examining the values of the pre-variables, the means for pre-sael and pre-sbel were 2.7 and 3.7, respectively, on a 6-point likert scale. this may partly reflect the characteristics of the students who have proficiency levels between beginner and intermediate, as evidenced by their listening scores in table 2. however, their iel was 4.3 and 4.2; higher than the mid-point. table 2 descriptive statistics for the variables in preand post-test variables n. min. max. m s.d. pre total self-efficacy 107 1.2 4.6 3.1 0.7 post total self-efficacy 107 1.3 5.3 3.5 0.8 pre-sael 107 1.0 4.3 2.7 0.8 pre-sbel 107 1.5 5.3 3.7 0.8 post-sael 107 1.0 5.5 3.2 0.9 post-sbel 107 1.5 5.8 4.0 0.8 pre-iel 107 1.0 6.0 4.3 1.3 post-iel 107 1.0 6.0 4.2 1.3 pre-toeic score (listening proficiency) 107 65.0 350.0 217.3 51.0 post-toeic score (listening proficiency) 107 130.0 460.0 259.4 65.8 note. n = number; m = mean; s.d. = standard deviation; sael = self-efficacy in advanced english listening; sbel = self-efficacy in basic english listening when learning; iel = interest in english learning for the pre-test, the relationship between iel, listening proficiency, and self-efficacy beliefs in listening when joining the english listening class was explored. hierarchical multiple regression was employed for the analyses. the dependent variable was sael and the independent variables were iel and listening proficiency. as model 1 shows in table 3, when iel alone was used as an independent variable, it significantly predicted sael, f(1, 105) = 7.89, p = .01, accounting for 7% of the total variance (r = .26). however, when proficiency was put along with iel as independent variables, iel failed to retain its significance as a variable that influences sael ( p = .11). in other words, while model 2 was significant, f(2, 104) = 9.88, p = .001, accounting for 16% of the total variance, proficiency was the only variable that significantly predicts sael ( p = .001). the summary of table 3 is illustrated in figure 1. hyang-il kim62 table 3 the regression models with sael as a dependent variable for pre-test independent variable(s) unstandardized coefficients standardized coefficients b se beta t-value p-value r2 model 1 (constant) 1.98 .26 7.61 .00 .07 pre-iel .16 .06 .26 2.81 .01 model 2 (constant) 1.21 .34 3.55 .00 .16 pre-iel .10 .06 .16 1.63 .11 pre-listening proficiency .00 .00 .32 3.33 .00 note. sael = self-efficacy in advanced english listening; iel = interest in english learning figure 1. the relationship between the variables and sael for pre-test another hierarchical regression was conducted to examine how interest and proficiency affect sbel for the pre-test. sbel was used as the dependent variable and iel and listening proficiency were the independent variables. as model 3 shows in table 4, when iel alone was used as an independent variable, it significantly predicted sbel, f(1, 105) = 55.28, p = .001, accounting for 35% of the total variance (r = .59). when proficiency was put along with iel as the independent variables in model 4, this model was found to be significant, f(2, 104) = 33.42, p = .001, accounting for 39% of the total variance, predicting 4% more than that of model 3. examining the two predictor variables, iel predicted sbel far more strongly (beta = .51) than proficiency (beta = .23). the summary of table 4 is illustrated in figure 2. the impact of individual interest and proficiency on self-efficacy beliefs… 63 table 4 the regression models with sbel as a dependent variable for pre-test independent variable(s) unstandardized coefficients standardized coefficients b se beta t-value p-value r2 model 3 (constant) 2.18 .21 10.30 .00 .35 pre-iel .35 .05 .59 7.44 .00 model 4 (constant) 1.64 .28 5.85 .00 .39 pre-iel .30 .05 .51 6.26 .00 pre-listening proficiency .00 .00 .23 2.81 .01 note. sbel = self-efficacy in basic english listening when learning; iel = interest in english learning figure 2. the relationship between the variables and sbel for pre-test the third research question was related to the changes in the relationship between the variables on each self-efficacy in listening over time. in the post-test, the results of the hierarchical multiple regression indicate that the explanatory values of the two predictor variables—iel and proficiency on sael increased considerably, compared to those of the pre-test. for example, model 5 with iel as a single independent variable was significant, f(1, 105) = 26.73, p = .001, accounting for 20% of the total variance (r = .45), 13% more than that of the pre-test. model 6 with both iel and proficiency as independent variables was also found significant, f(2, 104) = 16.13, p = .001, accounting for 24% of total variance which is 8% more than that of the pre-test. it is worth noting that among the two variables, iel was still a significant variable when proficiency was put as a combined variable on sael, a result different from the pre-test— the contribution of iel to sael became insignificant when proficiency was hyang-il kim64 put in as a combined independent variable (see table 3). moreover, iel had more predictor value (beta = .38) than that of proficiency (beta = .20) on sael this time. in other words, the contribution of iel became almost twice as high as that of proficiency after a series of lessons aimed at learning to listen. the summary of table 5 is illustrated in figure 3. table 5 the regression models with sael as a dependent variable for post-test independent variable(s) unstandardized coefficients standardized coefficients b se beta t-value p-value r2 model 5 (constant) 1.90 .26 7.19 .00 .2 post-iel .31 .06 .45 5.17 .00 model 6 (constant) 1.43 .34 4.26 .00 .24 post-iel .26 .06 .38 4.05 .00 postlistening proficiency .00 .00 .20 2.15 .03 note. sael = self-efficacy in advanced english listening; iel = interest in english learni figure 3. the relationship between the variables and sael for post-test to investigate the impact of the two variables on sbel in the post-test, a hierarchical multiple regression was performed. when iel was put in as a single independent variable, its contribution to sbel was significant, f(1, 105) = 45.12, p = .001, accounting for 30% of the total variance. when proficiency was combined along with iel, these two predictor variables significantly affected sbel, f(2, 104) = 26.81, p = .001, accounting for 34% of the total variance. compared to the results of the pre-test, the predicting values of the independent variables decreased moderately. however, these the impact of individual interest and proficiency on self-efficacy beliefs… 65 values remained in a similar pattern. in other words, iel had a better explanatory value—more than double—with sbel than proficiency did in both the preand post-test (see figure 2 and 4). this illustrates that sbel increases as both iel and proficiency increase, but the degree of iel has more influence on sbel than proficiency. table 6 the regression models with sbel as a dependent variable for post-test independent variable(s) unstandardized coefficients standardized coefficients b se beta t-value p-value r2 model 7 (constant) 2.52 .23 11.01 .00 .3 post-interests .35 .05 .55 6.72 .00 model 8 (constant) 2.06 .29 7.10 .00 .34 post-interests .30 .06 .47 5.42 .00 post-listening proficiency .00 .00 .22 2.50 .01 note. sbel = self-efficacy in basic listening when learning; iel = interest in english learning figure 4. the relationship between the variables and sbel for post-test discussion this study aimed to examine the effects of iel—individual interest—and proficiency on self-efficacy beliefs which are considered an important contributor to an individual’s academic development in the domain of listening. as hyang-il kim66 shown by the average scores of the two toeic lc tests, most of the participants consisted of efl university students who have an english proficiency ranging from beginner to low-intermediate. notably, the scores of self-efficacy and listening performances increased by the end of the course as compared to those collected at the beginning of the course as shown in the descriptive statistics, but the iel scores remained almost intact. this partly reflects the nature of individual interest in that it is considered to possess more potential for holding personal value for a relatively long period of time without much change (hidi, 1990; hidi & harackiewicz, 2000). when participants began taking this course, iel as a single independent variable maintained its significance in predicting sael, but it is worth noting that its significance was lost when placed together with listening proficiency as another independent variable. in other words, the interest of participants with low proficiency in english did not play a role in predicting self-efficacy in performing advanced listening skills, mostly dealing with authentic texts, when considered alongside listening proficiency. this may be due to the possibility that engaging in difficult listening activities can be considered a daunting task for these participants to approach, even armed with their interest in learning english. conversely, it is considered a natural result to discover that listening proficiency is a predictor for self-efficacy beliefs especially in dealing with highlevel listening tasks since several studies support the close relationship between them (e.g., bong & skaalvik, 2003; cubillos & ilvento, 2013; graham, 2011; mills et al., 2006, etc.) around the end of the course, however, the data analysis results show a markedly different pattern in the relationship between iel and sael from those of the pre-test (see table 3 and 5). for example, iel as a single independent variable plays a significant role in predicting the formation of sael and explains sael approximately three times (20%) more in the post-test (model 5) than the model in the pre-test (model 1). moreover, even when english proficiency is put as a predictor along with iel, iel does not lose its significance and rather is shown to have more (about twice as much) influence on sael than english proficiency (model 6). this means that interest did not play a role in predicting the development of sael in the beginning, but over time, interest turned into an influential variable, even more influential than english proficiency. although they had a relatively high level of interest, the pre-test result suggests that students with low proficiency in english did not describe themselves as capable of advanced listening skills. it is likely that such a result may have been caused by them cognitively recognizing the gap between their skills, based on their subjective judgments, and the level of english listening activities they knew they would face at the beginning of the course or the authentic materials they would have to listen to. the post-test result, however, indicates that the interest they possess in learning english may emerge as a significant the impact of individual interest and proficiency on self-efficacy beliefs… 67 and influential facilitator of their efficacy beliefs in listening to and understanding difficult or authentic materials through a series of learnings such as taking classes, even for students who are considered low-intermediate. it is worth recalling that at the time of data collection, few students were learning english other than in the english course, despite the data being collected from only one of the three classes (see participant section in method). this possibly indicates that the majority of their input of english learning was through the english course that they were taking. it is plausible to infer that the four major sources of self-efficacy that bandura (1997) indicates—personal success in performing listening activities (mastery experiences), observed indirect successful experiences by classmates (vicarious experiences), received encouragements and positive feedback from the teacher and classmates (social persuasion), and psychological and affective states (bandura, 1997)—may have contributed to such a pattern of changes. however, such casual relationships could not be investigated further as they fall beyond the scope of the current study. the positive experiences students likely have through the classes can turn students’ interest into a factor that actually affects self-efficacy. regarding the sbel, at the beginning of the course, the participants who had interest in studying english seem to have the idea that they are capable of performing listening activities that require the basic skills needed to improve listening competence, which are normally conducted during listening classes (e.g., understanding numbers spoken in english, concentrating on listening content, performing related activities, etc.). this is seen in models 3 and 4, accounting for 35% and 39% of total variance respectively and iel had a greater effect on sbel than actual english proficiency, unlike its effect on sael. this indicates that these participants’ perception that they are interested in english learning affects their self-efficacy making them believe that they can perform listening activities at a relatively easy level. even around the end of the semester, this pattern remained unchanged; although interest had a higher influence on sbel in both models (models 4 and 8), the explanatory powers of the two post-models (model 7 and 8) became moderately smaller than those of the pre-test, decreasing by 5% of the total variance each. this is possible because as time went by, most students seem to perceive that they have obtained the enhanced ability to deal with and get used to handling a basic level of activities with relative ease, through participation in the classes. in this respect, it can be inferred that the explanatory powers in the regression models decreased moderately in the post-test whereas the regression models maintained the same pattern—individual interest has a greater influence on the development of sbel—in both preand post-test. looking at the relationship between iel and sbel in preand post-results indicates that providing only an appropriate level of activities that are not demanding or challenging for the student’s level does not help develop self-efficacy. hyang-il kim68 conclusion this study aimed to understand the complexities and the nature of interest and self-efficacy beliefs in university students with low english proficiency in korea. the findings show that their interest in english learning was quite high despite the participants of this study having had little success in learning english in a relatively long period of time. in addition, these students were found to have their self-efficacy in a provisional or malleable state (klassen, 2006)—a transitional state of self-efficacy that is still undergoing changes and has positive development even in students with a low level of proficiency. moreover, it was revealed that the formation of self-efficacy beliefs in performing advanced listening skills can be facilitated by individual interest, one of the motivational variables in learning english. as hidi and harackiewicz (2000) highlight, students’ interest is likely to influence the development of a strong sense of efficacy over time since interest plays a strong facilitating role in cognitive function. in this respect, helping students develop their interest in language learning is effective in developing their self-efficacy beliefs. individual interest and self-efficacy beliefs are particularly important in that they are motivational constructs that can influence learning processes. the findings of this study suggest that even for those with a low-proficiency and relatively little success in learning efl, it is important to ensure the continuation of individual interest in english learning. if done correctly, the possibility of the student’s progress is substantially higher than if their interests are not taken into account. when individual interest in one domain is met with several conducive learning conditions, it may play a role as a facilitator of self-efficacy. it would be worth investigating what role individual interest plays as a mediator in the formation of self-efficacy beliefs in future studies. notably, the results were derived from convenience sampling and cannot be generalized. this suggests further research is needed with different samples. in addition, a valid and reliable instrument to measure individual interest should be considered to better support the findings. references ainley, m., hidi, s., & berndorff, d. 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(1997). developmental phases in self-regulation: shifting from progress to outcome goals. journal of educational psychology, 89(1), 29–36. hyang-il kim der einfluss von individuellen interessen und kenntnissen auf selbstwirksamkeitsüberzeugungen im verstehen von fremdsprachen z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g interesse und selbstwirksamkeitsüberzeugungen sind wichtige bestandteile von motivationskonstrukten, die einige gemeinsame merkmale aufweisen und einen einf luss auf den lernprozess haben. in diesem zusammenhang hat man in mehreren studien untersucht, wie die beiden variablen unter verschiedenen aspekten miteinander in beziehung stehen, und auf dieser grundlage sinnvolle schlussfolgerungen formuliert. nichtsdestotrotz scheint die diesbezügliche forschung im bereich des fremdsprachenlernens relativ unzureichend und die aus den früheren studien gewonnenen informationen sehr begrenzt zu sein. aus diesem grund ist die vorliegende studie darauf abgezielt, zu untersuchen, wie das individuelle interesse am englischlernen und sprachkenntnisse die selbstwirksamkeit im hörverstehen beeinf lussen, um das vorhandene wissen zu erweitern. mittles eines vortest-nachtestdesigns wurden die daten von 107 koreanischen efl-studenten mit niedrigeren mittleren englischkenntnissen unter verwendung hierarchischer regressionsanalysen ausgewertet. die ergebnisse zeigen, dass, anders als zu beginn des kurses, das individuelle interesse ein signifikanter faktor bei der entwicklung von selbstwirksamkeit in bezug auf die fortgeschrittene kompetenz am ende des semesters war und sie sogar mehr voraussagte als sprachkenntnisse. von der anderen seite hatte das individuelle interesse einen viel stärkeren einf luss auf die grundsätzliche selbstwirksamkeit im hörverstehen als die sprachkenntnisse im vortest und dieses modell wurde auch im nachtest beibehalten. die studie bietet auch aufschlussreiche informationen über die wechselbeziehung zwischen interesse, selbstwirksamkeit bzw. leistung und hebt die bedeutende rolle des individuellen interesses beim englischlernen hervor. daraus folgt, dass die aufrechterhaltung und förderung des interesses entscheidend für die entwicklung von selbstwirksamkeitsüberzeugungen ist, die wiederum zu fortschritten beim fremdsprachenlernen beitragen können. schlüsselwörter: individuelles interesse, hörverstehen, fremdsprachenkenntnisse, selbstwirksamkeitsüberzeugungen theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (2), 2023, pp. 1/26 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12686 joanna rokita-jaśkow https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6272-9548 pedagogical university of cracow, poland dorota werbińska https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1502-7199 pomeranian university in słupsk, poland language teacher identity and emotions in a duoethnographic narrative: the perspective of teacher, parent, and teacher educator a b s t r a c t teacher identity building rather than learning teaching in terms of skills and subsystems has recently been acknowledged as a priority in future teacher preparation. several teacher identity models have been offered, including the 3a language teacher identity framework (3altif) (werbińska, 2017a) in which teacher identity comprises affiliation (teachers’ willingness to teach), attachment (teachers’ beliefs related to their teaching) and autonomy (teachers’ agentive, ref lective, and resilient powers). with hindsight, it seems that the 3altif, which drew on other identity models available at the time of its conception, does not address the affective side of language teacher identity explicitly enough and therefore can hardly embrace the uniqueness of this profession. that is why we decided to explore the issue of emotions more deeply and conduct a lengthy duoethnographic narrative to consider the 3altif’s ‘missing’ component for the future ‘improvement’ of the 3altif. duoethnography was chosen as a qualitative research method thanks to its novelty, its suitability for investigating identity issues and the opportunity it provides for us to explain and express ourselves. in our duoethnographic dialogues we focused on our own emotions from three perspectives: former school language teachers, language teachers as parents, and language teacher educators, all of which are the roles we have played. the findings reveal our experience of emotions that once affected us and also suggest that emotions are not only psychological constructs but have social dimensions as well. keywords: language teacher identity, emotions, duoethnography, teacher narratives https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12686 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6272-9548 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1502-7199 tapsla.12686 p. 2/26 joanna rokita-jaśkow, dorota werbińska research on teacher identity and, analogously, language teacher identity has been flourishing in recent years. several anthologies of identity research (e.g., barkhuizen, 2017; cheung et al., 2015; gallardo, 2019; schutz et al., 2018), monographs (e.g., alsup, 2019; gray & morton, 2018; rudolph et al., 2020; werbińska, 2017a), including those with practical activities for teachers and learners (e.g., olsen, 2016; barkhuizen & strauss, 2020), special issues in language journals (tesol quarterly, 2016; modern language journal, 2017; konińskie studia językowe, 2018) and numerous journal articles and theses have expanded our vision on identity and the language teacher. it is clear that identity provides the key to the language teaching profession and to educating future teachers. this is an important shift given that only three decades ago teacher education, at least in poland, was mostly restricted to teaching concrete skills and systems, with very little room for the role of reflection. the focus on identity and all that it involves allows teachers to be ‘more of themselves’ within the contexts in which they work and to consider identity as a dimension of their professionalism. in this paper, we acknowledge teacher emotions as vital in (re)narrating and (re)constructing our own language teacher identities. the immediate stimulus for the present study was the recent appearance of various identity definitions and models in the literature that accommodate teacher emotions. this led to a need to overhaul the 3altif framework which was offered by one of us (werbińska, 2016) for conducting teacher identity research (werbińska, 2017a, 2017b). the 3altif model consists of three ‘a’ components: affiliation which stands for teachers’ willingness to teach, attachment which signifies teachers’ beliefs related to their teaching, and autonomy which embraces teachers’ agentive, reflective, and resilient powers. although the three components, drawn from the available teacher identity models at the time of the 3altif’s conception, are undoubtedly permeated with emotional connotations, the 3altif does not have a clear fourth component that would cover the affective side of language teacher identity. the present project is focused on the duoethnographic dialogues in which we—two experienced english language teachers—talk about language-related emotions within the context of the roles of school language teacher, parent, and language teacher educator. we begin with a discussion of teacher identity models and the way identity has been conceptualized in recent years. this is followed by a discussion of teacher emotions and the role they play in any understanding of teacher identity. we then present a brief description of the design of our duoethnographic research project upon which this paper is based. against this background we provide and discuss our findings from the study, focusing on emotions as seen from three teacher perspectives: school teacher, parent, and teacher educator. in the discussion section, we explore what this reveals about teacher emotions in language teacher identity. language teacher identity and emotions… tapsla.12686 p. 3/26 theoretical framework in the following sections, we turn to the literature in order to address the most popular models of language teacher identity and the nature of teacher emotions. both teacher identity models and emotions experienced by language teachers provide the theoretical foundations for the study we have conducted. teacher identity models the identity frameworks that provided the conceptualization models for the creation of the 3altif were: wenger’s (1998) communities of practice, gee’s (2001) four perspectives on the n-identities, the i-identities, the d-identities, and the a-identities, varghese et al.’s (2005) distinction between identity-indiscourse and identity-in-practice, and similar to it, the distinction between narrated identities and enacted identities (kanno & steward (2011), clarke’s (2009) diagram for “identity work,” and benson’s et al.’s (2013) facets of identity. appearing after the creation of the initial 3altif model in 2014, pennington’s (2015) frames of teacher identity and trent’s (2015) framework were added and treated as a confirmation of the 3altif’s core constituents. although emotions were undoubtedly taken for granted by the authors of identity frameworks, in all these models the word affective or emotional was not explicitly used. recent years have witnessed a new focus on the emotional complexity of language teachers. what teachers encounter, undergo, and tolerate, and how this experience relates to teachers’ practices has prompted a surge of interest in the study of language teacher emotions. naturally, this has been reflected in teacher identity definitions and frameworks that now tend to include the emotional component. barcelos (2015), for example, comments that one of the moral dimensions of language teacher identity is teachers’ emotional involvement, which determines what teachers do and what they suppose is right to do. golombek (2015) views identity-related tensions as “emotional dissonance” between the emotions appearing in a given context and those that would be expected under certain circumstances (p. 471). departing from the douglas fir group’s (2016) framework for language teaching, de costa and norton (2016) highlight the emotion and affect which english language teachers experience in their job, whereas varghese et al. (2016) suggest that teachers’ emotional lives bring about agency in identity formation. harbon (2017, in barkhuizen, 2017) argues that in her acknowledgment of the generational aspect of language teacher identity development, “the affective” makes a lot of sense (p. 180). for day (2018), teacher professional identity is linked to emotional energy and emotions, which tapsla.12686 p. 4/26 joanna rokita-jaśkow, dorota werbińska represent one of the core strands of teacher professional identity. fairley (2020), in turn, distinguishes four competencies that are crucial for language teacher identity development, and “emotional literacy” (p. 9) constitutes one of them. clearly, the body of literature devoted to exploring teacher identity is constantly expanding while the inclusion of the affective component has enriched teacher identity research. language teacher emotions it has been noted that an interest in emotions in english language teaching has developed from the affective turn (de costa et al., 2019). the emotional state of the learner, or affect, has been recognized as an important individual variable (e.g., gabryś-barker & bielska, 2012) influencing second language learning in the classroom, with learner anxiety initially being the most widely studied classroom emotion. it is only recently that the focus on emotions has been shifted onto language teachers (e.g., martínez agudo, 2018). this interest resonates with developments of research within vygotskian sociocultural theory, positive psychology, critical applied linguistics, or discourse analysis (de costa et al., 2019). the change of focus from learner to teacher emotions can be attributed to their reciprocal relationship. it has been speculated that only when the teacher’s own well-being has been provided for, can they cater for the well-being of their learners and create a positive classroom climate conducive to learning (gabryś-barker, 2012). two major approaches can be distinguished in relation to the study of language teacher emotions (de costa et al., 2019): the cognitive and the social. the cognitive approach assumes that the teacher is able to look after their own well-being by recognizing the emotions they feel and learning to manage the challenges encountered in their professional growth. from this viewpoint, the responsibility for the regulation of emotions, which is a component of emotional intelligence, is placed on the individual teacher (benesch, 2019, p. 1112). the social approach, on the other hand, looks at how teacher emotions are generated by the teaching contexts at macro-levels (e.g., language policy), meso-levels (e.g., the school community), and micro-levels (e.g., teacher identity), which would comply with bronfennbrenner’s (1979) socio-educational model of human development. in this view, the impact of macro-level forces, such as globalization and neoliberalism, are of particular import for english language teachers, whose professional tool is a global language that is hugely influential socially. the resultant commodification of knowledge of english means that language teachers are encumbered by external constraints, such as the pressures of the accountability involved in having to prepare their students for high-stakes examinations. this burden often creates an ethical dilemma between what language teacher identity and emotions… tapsla.12686 p. 5/26 teachers would like to do on their own and what they are expected to teach by various stakeholders, be it parents, head teachers or local governments. within the social framework of studying teacher emotions particular attention has been drawn to the notion of emotional labor defined as “the relationships that teachers have to negotiate as they balance between how they feel in particular work situations and how they are supposed to feel according to social expectations” (de costa et al., 2019, p. 2) in other words, teachers undertake efforts (“labor”) to learn how to control or suppress their negative emotions, as this is expected of them in their school environment. benesch (2017, p. 12) offers another definition of emotional labor as “‘the struggle between workplace feeling rules’ (hochschild, 1983) and employees’ prior training or beliefs about appropriate workplace conduct” (benesch, 2017, p. 12). in the cognitive view of teacher emotions, emotional labor would imply a conflict between institutional demands and personal beliefs about teaching versus a teacher’s true self. it would take a great deal of individual effort to resolve the tension by employing various emotion-regulation strategies (bielak & mystkowska-wiertelak, 2020) or practicing personal resilience to inhibiting factors (frydenberg, 2017). it can be further speculated that conducting too much emotional labor and/or doing so too often can lead to teacher burnout (chang, 2009; keller et al., 2014) and, consequently, disengagement from the profession, and even though this can only be mental disengagement, it hampers a smooth development of teacher identity. as emotions appear to play a pivotal role in language teacher identity formation, experiencing positive emotions in the profession (e.g., pride) helps build affiliation to the profession. by contrast, negative emotions affect teacher vulnerability (jackson et al., 2007; song, 2016) and, consequently, identity. vulnerability has two functions. on the one hand, it indicates the emotional labor the teacher does (mental exhaustion caused by hiding one’s true feelings and displaying what is organizationally desirable), at the same time placing them in isolation. on the other hand, it may provide the teacher with an insight into the realities of life, thereby initiating the transformation of their identity and influencing professional deterioration or growth (zembylas, 2002). one feeling that affects teacher vulnerability is the feeling of shame and/ or anxiety when facing students of a higher level of language proficiency. an example of such a case is provided by song (2016) in a situation when korean teachers confront their inadequate language skills with those of returnee students from the study abroad period. as a way of protecting their vulnerability and securing their positions at school, korean teachers resort to using “cover stories, in which they portray themselves as experts who comply with the school curriculum and policy through which they sustain their position” (song, 2016, p. 636). tapsla.12686 p. 6/26 joanna rokita-jaśkow, dorota werbińska teacher vulnerability can also be impacted in teacher-parent relations (lasky, 2005). in her interview study, teachers claim to experience positive emotions, such as happiness or enjoyment, in relation to parents who conform to the teachers’ institutional expectations of the parental role, for example through being responsible, supportive, and appreciative of teacher efforts. by contrast, they experience negative emotions, such as anger, frustration or disgust, if parents do not come up to the teachers’ preconceived expectations. these judgements have been recognized as a struggle for power (lasky, 2005, p. 850). teachers enjoy the recognition of their professionalism, and yet their (verbal) behavior is embedded within the institutional norms of hierarchy and surveillance. for this reason, they may find it difficult to leave this perspective in encounters with students’ parents. the above examples also suggest that much of teacher identity construction takes place through discursive practices which are emotionally loaded. here, emotions are not viewed “as universal, measurable, or unchanging across time and space. in fact, the focus is not so much on what emotions are as on what they do socially” (ahmed, 2004, in benesch, 2019, p. 114). benesch (2019) goes on to say that poststructuralist/social-constructive approaches “theorize emotions as cultural practices, changing across time and space […] effects of human encounters with objects, including ideas, policies, memories, other people, events, activities, places, animals, and so on” (p. 114). finally, it should be recognized that teachers’ emotional tension can be resolved through their reflectivity, understood here as their ability and willingness to reflect, which could be regarded as a tool for teachers’ professional development and identity construction (gabryś-barker, 2012). the project design participants while we share very similar values when it comes to english language teaching or language teacher education, we also acknowledge that there are several aspects that differentiate us with regard to our respective identity markers. dorota was born a decade earlier than joanna and she comes from a small town in the north of poland where she completed her basic education. she continued her tertiary studies and later doctorate at a major english department at poznan university in the times of polish communism, when a shortage of english speakers, admiration of western values, and a common willingness to learn english prevailed. she completed her studies in the very same year that the collapse of communism was announced in poland (1989) and, after graduation, returned to her native town to work as a state school teacher of english. language teacher identity and emotions… tapsla.12686 p. 7/26 she also has a more diverse history of working in elt as, apart from being a full-time school teacher for eight years, she also worked as a regional part-time in-service teacher educator in a state teacher development center, a part-time representative of an elt publishing house, and a pre-service teacher educator at a local teacher training college. she has one adult son. joanna began her english studies at the jagiellonian university of cracow a few years after the collapse of communism in 1989, when poland became open to western businesses and there was a pressing need, as well as numerous career opportunities, for any person knowledgeable in foreign western languages. for this reason, she easily and relatively early found employment first in a secondary school, where she worked for seven years as an english teacher, and almost simultaneously as a pre-service teacher educator at a local teacher training college. she has continued to work at the university and has been doing research for over twenty years now. she has two sons, who are currently attending upper-primary school and it is through them that she gains a wealth of insight into polish education and current school life. thus, though educationally aligned, we acknowledge our differences in terms of age, geographical backgrounds in poland, and the diversity of elt job experience. considered a strength in any duoethnographic project, these differences are the ‘place’ from which we speak that may contribute to our reconceptualizations. research questions the study was guided by one overarching research question: what emotions emerge from our biography-based dialogues? we also thought that answering the main research question would help us shed light on language teacher emotions with respect to teacher identity (re)formation in the process of fulfilling our different teacher roles (our ‘perspectives’) and, indirectly, make us better see the necessity of supplementing the 3altif with an affective component. finally, we wished to experience duoethnography as a tesol research method. methodology as duoethnography is still a rather unfamiliar qualitative method, we feel some explanation is required for why we opted for this method in our exploration of teacher identity and emotions. the reasons were basically threefold: the inherent nature of duoethnography as a research method, which we thought tapsla.12686 p. 8/26 joanna rokita-jaśkow, dorota werbińska would lend itself very well to the present project, its link to emotions, which was our research topic, and the sheer novelty of the method. duoethnography is a method in which “people of difference conceptualize their stories through a particular phenomenon in juxtaposition with one another” (norris & sawyer, 2017, p. 1). we entered into our conversations as two different individuals, though educationally aligned, in order to track the experience of our elt-related emotions. our selves constituted the context for the analysis of our emotions, their reconceptualizations and potential meanings so as to view the emotions anew. in our dialogues we talked about our time as novice teachers, parents who were simultaneously language teachers, and our work as teacher educators. all of our stories were authentic, not hypothetical, as we provided legitimate examples of emotions experienced in playing all these roles. as the frame for investigation and the first principle of duoethnography (sawyer & norris, 2013) is the concept of currere (pinar, 1978)—an informal curriculum of individuals’ lives—we were convinced that duoethnography would be an appropriate method for learning from each other’s biographies and critically investigating our emotions. another benefit of using duoethnography in investigating emotions is the very nature of emotions. admitting to experiencing emotions (especially negative) requires sincerity, which can only be expressed in a safe environment. obviously, there are duoethnographic projects where there are power differentials and all this may involve (see lowe & lawrence, 2020); however, in general, the creation of trust, respect, and a safe space for researchers is considered crucial for duoethnography. we began our project from the position of collegiality, which we found helpful in talking about emotions. moreover, duoethnography provides the kind of nuanced perspective, that is necessary when discussing emotions, which are, on the whole, subjective in nature. lastly, we were attracted by the novelty of the method. although other aspects of teacher identity have been duoethnographically researched (banegas & gerlach, 2021, lowe & kiczkowiak, 2016), the emotions of language teachers have, to the best of our knowledge, never been explored in this way. the openness of the method, its lack of prescriptivism, along with the gradual emergence of the data, was what we found suitable for our first contact with this method. data collection methods in this study, we gathered data via oral and written dialogues over a period of five months. we arranged a two-hour zoom meeting in english in december 2020 which was facilitated by our prior individual reflection with the help of the stimulus questions (appendix). although our discussion eventually assumed most of the direction from that originally anticipated (we did not address the language teacher identity and emotions… tapsla.12686 p. 9/26 issue of emotion management at all), and we do not, in fact, offer answers to the stimulus questions appended to this paper, we have included them, as they helped to make us deliberately think and focus attention on our emotions. during the meeting we aimed to discuss our experiences related to emotions when we were school teachers, followed by what emotional incidents we remember that were felt as parents and teacher educators, in the hope that this dialogic investigation would contribute to a reconceptualization of ourselves. we then created a conversation-based online document in which we analyzed and supplemented our discussion with new information, comments, and followup questions. it could be said that the joint word document became a space in which our suggestions, understandings, and incomplete ideas were posited for further examination. on the basis of the zoom written data, we conducted a thematic analysis to find out what we thought the emerging emotions in our discussion were. based on this process, we identified the emotions that emerged from the zoom meeting: the experience of pride, joy, and anxiety when we were english teachers, an occasional experience of anger, disappointment and shame in the role of parents, and the emotions that we still experience in our work as teacher educators. in addition to the zoom meeting, we regularly emailed each other and talked on the phone in order to further discuss the identified areas or resolve any points of disagreement. we then created another document, based on our original zoom dialogue, in which we deconstructed and reconstructed the original duoethnographic text, a step advised by sawyer and norris (2013). we also incorporated the theory and professional literature that we had studied in relation to the investigated topic, which is in line with one of the central tenets of duoethnography, or working principles, of “literature as participant” (sawyer, 2012, p. 24). according to this tenet, the literature consultation does not take place before the beginning of the study but, once the topic emerges, duoethnographers review relevant literature. we decided to present our conversation within three themes referring to our recalled emotions from the perspectives of teacher, parent, and teacher educator, which became our “reconceptualized” retrospectives explored duoethnographically. each section starts with a short introduction and finishes with an analysis of the preceding fragment. data presentation theme 1: emotions from the perspective of novice teachers. at the time when we worked as school teachers, we did not know each other. that was why we decided to start the duoethnographic project with our personal narratapsla.12686 p. 10/26 joanna rokita-jaśkow, dorota werbińska tives from the period when we joined the english teaching profession and our recollection of how we felt then. dorota: i can say why i stayed in the teaching profession, which may also be true about other teachers. i was a graduate, i didn’t have any job experience and, suddenly, i was recognized, and accepted as a great teacher by almost all my english students of different ages, their parents and my superiors. i was a young teacher and there were no other english teachers around. i was offered a job practically in every school in my town as they all desperately wanted to have english on offer. that was some kind of power. you are recognized, powerful and treated as a fully-fledged teacher, a professional. whatever you say related to learning or teaching english is respected. if people think highly of you thanks to what you do in the classroom, if your opinion matters, you feel appreciated. this is positive. this is what novice teachers may be looking for if we think about emotions [….] you are proud of being an english teacher and you can subscribe to this. joanna: i agree. when i think of those days now, i remember being very much engrossed in lesson preparation. […] lesson preparation at that time was enjoyable, maybe because i expected appreciation in reward. i could describe that state as a kind of csikszentmihalyi’s (2009) flow. my first years of teaching were really in a state of flow when i was learning how to teach and enjoying myself. despite the positive emotions experienced at that time, the ‘downs’ which adversely impacted the first years on the job were also experienced. joanna: i think, for novice teachers especially, it is quite stressful to enter a new group. in the beginning, you must establish clear power roles and rules of conduct. and it always takes a lot of energy. you don’t feel like reprimanding or setting a rule and being consistent with it, but you have to bring out all the strength and somehow pursue a rule or react to any misbehavior. it cost me a lot of emotional labour, as benesch (2017) called it, to comply with the school’s demands or feeling rules, and this is what many novice teachers have to learn too, as yuan & lee (2016) observe. dorota: i can recall another example of anxiety that i felt when i was a beginning teacher in the 90s. that was a time when a point of reference at my university was the native speaker. during my first years of teaching, we used to have school exchanges where i had to be an interpreter. i wasn’t paid, but i had to interpret in front of the whole school of teachers and students. one school exchange was with a town in the north of language teacher identity and emotions… tapsla.12686 p. 11/26 england and their accent was often a problem for me. i was the only english teacher at school and situations when students could compare my english with the english of native speakers was stressful and made me anxious. other people from school thought that since you were a teacher of english, you knew everything about english speaking countries, their literature, everyday culture. they took it for granted that you knew all the intricacies of interpreting too. that echoed my thinking from university in which the native speaker was the best model to emulate. this has changed recently, thanks to the communicative approach, the focus on the learner, translanguaging, etc. but at that time, making a mistake or not offering the answer to a student’s question was failing to provide the right professional standards. we didn’t have smartphones for looking up unknown words. i remember comparisons of who is a better teacher: a native speaker or a non-native speaker, just like in medgyes’s (1994) book, and my negative feelings about such comparisons. joanna: the teacher needs a lot of self-confidence and a high level of competence. i remember reading dewaele’s (2018) study where he found that a teacher’s ability to regulate emotions was related to teacher competence. i believe it is very important that teachers are actually well educated. that was difficult to achieve in the past with limited access to language. others’ expectations were unrealistic with limited opportunities for learning the language from native speakers. at university methodology classes we were told that we were not “walking encyclopedias,” which stuck in my mind, so i never felt ashamed if i didn’t know an answer, even if students tried to put me on trial, even if they commented on something, i never took this to myself. dorota: and in my case that was a bit like a “sticky object” phenomenon to use benesch’s (2012) phrase. it is still somewhere in my head. you resent this, and you are still attached to it. despite the differences in our demographic backgrounds, we both had rather positive reminiscences from our novice teacher years. it was interesting to note that out of three emotions that emerged two were very positive: pride and joy. both of us agreed that the english teacher’s profession in poland at the time we started teaching was extremely attractive. there were so few english teachers that even novice english teachers were looked up to. our knowledge of language and teaching skills were immediately recognized by others: learners, their parents, and school superiors. both of us were rewarded with a credit of trust, which undoubtedly made us believe how valuable we were and how useful our work was. that may have served as the basis for our self-respect, tapsla.12686 p. 12/26 joanna rokita-jaśkow, dorota werbińska professional security and, in a word, our pride on account of being english teachers. that may also have been why joanna so enthusiastically prepared for her classes, as she knew her efforts would be appreciated by learners and rewarded with praises from parents and school principals. thus, it would seem that our initial attraction to the job, clearly helped by others’ recognition and respect, must have contributed to our desire to remain in the profession for good and expand our knowledge about language teaching on a regular basis. as the above narratives also illustrate, we identified one negative emotion, that is, anxiety. although joanna recalled stress related to teaching new groups, especially with respect to classroom discipline, which is a common feeling experienced by beginning teachers, dorota focused on stress resulting from her comparisons to english native speaking teachers and rating herself less favorably in such comparisons as far as her linguistic competence was concerned. although today, with the prevalence of english as a lingua franca and various models of world englishes, the native speakerism ideology with its perceptions of non-native speakers in terms of deficit rather than difference is disputable, the fact that she remembers it so vividly may indicate that native-speakerism was really a problem to her. at dorota’s university, noam chomsky’s (1957; 1963) books pointing to native speakers as points of reference were frequently quoted by professors. it is little wonder, then, that non-native speakers of english often felt an inferiority complex while speaking english in the company of native speakers. for dorota, that “sticky object” phenomenon (benesch, 2012) was particularly acute and anxiety producing when she had to interpret in front of others, especially her learners for whom she aspired to be a language teacher role-model. having said that, it is worth noting that joanna’s experience in this matter differs. she studied several years later, after the publication of phillipson’s (1992) seminal book exposing linguistic imperialism, which may account for her attempt to rationalize this issue with no feelings of inferiority or language deficits on her part. theme 2: emotions from the perspective of parents. teacher educators perform different roles in their professional and private lives. most of them also act as parents. the following excerpts show what kind of emotions we experienced as parents. joanna: i don’t visit the lessons, but i can gather from the conversations with my kids what the lessons look like and what i get is that the teachers hardly ever speak english, or if they do, just the instructions, and they only follow course books. i really wonder why this happens. i just can’t understand that because it would be boring for me as a teacher to have identical lessons for so many years. language teacher identity and emotions… tapsla.12686 p. 13/26 that’s why i started thinking of emotions […] is it because teachers are tired, stressed, burnt out and protect themselves by doing the teaching mechanically, the bare minimum, from cover to cover? is it because this helps them conduct the lesson without emotional engagement? some kind of fun activity, talking to students, playing games, singing songs… this never happened with my children who have been at school for seven, nine years. i found that what we teach at university doesn’t seem to materialize in practice. dorota: that’s unlike the case of my friend who teaches french. she says she has to think about everything from the beginning to the end because she doesn’t have much support from publishers. perhaps english teachers are lazy or deskilled, because of the availability of ready-made materials, as richards (1998) warned. if they have something ready, they think, why not use it? i just wonder because i don’t believe they are all so… as you said, burnt out, right? joanna: maybe there’s no place for creativity now because a lot of students tell me that there’s so much emphasis on the results of school leaving exams. teachers feel that they have to do all this cramming for tests, and have to focus on exam preparation techniques all the time. dorota: what counts are the outcomes, exams, leagues. what has become of education? the consequence of exams is school ranking. if teacher quality is measured only by the effectiveness of exam results, then teachers direct all their efforts towards this goal, at the same time minimizing their efforts in other areas, such as creative lesson planning or materials design. in this exchange, joanna, as a teacher educator and simultaneously a parent, discloses the kind of emotions she experienced when she re-entered school in the role of parent. her first reaction was surprise, and then disappointment with school practice, for many of the methodological guidelines that have been taught to pre-service teachers for years are actually not practiced in schools. this concerns the general lack of communicative methodology, overuse of polish and overreliance on ready-made teaching materials. she observed little teacher creativity and individualization in lessons design, which is likely to act against learners’ abilities and needs and, consequently, against their engagement and motivation (dὅrnyei, 2020). as joanna tries to reflect on the issue more deeply and identify the reasons for this, she hypothesizes that one problem could be teachers’ emotional exhaustion and burnout. dorota does not agree with this interpretation and tries to find her own justification for this situation. in her view, english language teachers’ lack tapsla.12686 p. 14/26 joanna rokita-jaśkow, dorota werbińska of creativity in material and test design may have been caused by neoliberal pressures. the widespread availability of materials concerns english, the most widely-used global language, and, as dorota observes, may not relate so much to teaching other languages, as the example of a french teacher shows. this observation is in accord with block et al. (2012) who point out that the global elt coursebook industry is a sign of neoliberal forces pervading education. it could even be hypothesized that creativity has been sustained among teachers of those languages which do not have a global reach. clearly, the popularity of teaching english has led to its homogenization in terms of methodological practice. by the same token, many individuals who may not have felt a particular vocation for teaching have found the occupation easy to perform thanks to the rich supply of ready-made elt materials. in contrast, teachers of less popular languages, with poorer access to teaching materials in comparison to english teachers, may prove more creative and therefore more passionate about their work, as they invest more in their work in order to motivate students to learn their languages with fewer ready-made teaching resources available. further, joanna agrees with joanna that the social context has changed since they themselves worked at school and that all teaching nowadays, including one in a foreign language, is subjugated to external high-stakes examinations. this has been identified as another cause of the lack of creativity, as well as lack of enthusiasm, which joanna finds contagious. joanna extrapolates on this issue, blaming neoliberal thinking about education for this state of affairs (“what counts are the outcomes, exams, leagues”). the relationship of the teacher educator as parent and teacher has one more dimension. it can produce a slight feeling of shame in relation to their children. this may happen if the child does not come up to the high expectations of parents who are teacher educators, particularly if the child’s english teachers are former trainees of their parents. a feeling of unfulfilled expectations can be sensed by both parties, that is, by the teacher in reference to the child whose parent was their trainer, and by the teacher educator parent in reference to the child, as well as his teacher. dorota: you were this kind of teacher, a reliable one, everybody looked up to what you said, to what you did in your methodology class, and my son […] a complex that he wasn’t good enough. i just felt that was connected with the position of teacher educators in the power hierarchy, or some individual perfectionist inclinations. or perhaps i just wanted to be trustworthy in the sense that what i do at university should also work with my own child. joanna: and that’s why i didn’t want to contact the language teachers of my sons. i have to say my son is not the best student of english, unforlanguage teacher identity and emotions… tapsla.12686 p. 15/26 tunately, although i think he could be. i find the teacher unsupportive in terms of emotions and motivation. my son would need more appreciation and encouragement and he doesn’t get it. he has a good grade, but with my help. i know he doesn’t like english and it’s because of the teacher. i don’t feel like going to the teacher because what could i tell her? that i’m actually unhappy about how she teaches my son? dorota: just one incident that i can recall […] i told my son when he was in the third grade that you could write ‘cannot’ as one word in english. and he told this to the teacher who always wrote it separately. after a few days, she told him off in the presence of his friends, almost shouting that he was wrong because people write ‘cannot’ separately in american english and, what was really strange, that he shouldn’t have said such things to the teacher if he didn’t know for sure. i think she over-reacted. she must have felt insecure. he was just a child and she must have taken his comment too seriously. i didn’t want to contact her personally. what could i have said? “you are not prepared?”. on another occasion, she lowered his grade explaining that his grammar was too poor. should i have gone to her and said “you can’t demand so much grammar when you are teaching a child.” she could have answered, “i’m a teacher now. and besides, you taught me methodology.” and that’s quite disconcerting because we should be proud of working as teacher educators. but when we are not recognized by practicing teachers, again, coming back to recognition, it is upsetting. perhaps they are afraid of us. parental feelings of shame may lead to the avoidance of confrontation with the child’s teacher, confrontation which may become a struggle for power or an attempt to prove both teachers’ and teacher educators’ positions as (more?) legitimate professionals. both parties appear to be vulnerable to criticism that could undermine their expertise and, perhaps, their position in the hierarchy of educational institutions. having left the training institution, a school teacher is already independent of the teacher educator, and would like to treat the teacher educator parent just like any other parent, which is from the position of an expert, an expectation found by song (2016) and lasky (2005). by contrast, the teacher educator considers herself a knowledgeable expert, and does not want to fit in the shoes of an ordinary parent. the school teacher, in turn, does not want to recognize the parent’s expertise as this might undermine her status as a competent professional. this is the place where the interests of both parties come into conflict. the teacher educator does not want to admit to the “educational failure” of her own child. conversely, school teachers may expect that the teacher educator practices with the child at home what is taught at school so that the child would be able to prove his competence. the pupil, in turn, appears tapsla.12686 p. 16/26 joanna rokita-jaśkow, dorota werbińska to accumulate the expectations of the parent that he should do well at school and, simultaneously, of the teacher, who expects the educator’s child to be a model learner. the child, therefore, is in the middle of a conflictual situation for proving ‘better’ methodological expertise. similar positioning practices taking place through discourse have been observed in various sociocultural contexts (e.g., pavlenko & lantolf, 2000) and professional situations (werbińska, 2020). the excerpt above reveals teacher vulnerability and insecurity about their language competence. this sensitivity to criticism may be rooted in the still highly-valued native-speaker model. the teachers who were linguistically educated in an instructional setting and have little first-hand experience of living abroad or acquiring language through everyday contacts may feel inferior when confronted with more skilled experts, like the teachers found in song (2016). it requires a great deal of self-esteem and self-confidence to renegotiate teacher roles and at times admit to incompetence in certain areas. theme 3: emotions from the perspective of teacher educator. both of us are enthusiastic and devoted teachers, and the feeling of mission is what probably led us to undertake the position of teacher educator. having served this role for over 20 years now, our viewpoint on teacher education has also undergone modifications, which is visible in the excerpts below. joanna: i began my teacher training career four years after i started teaching at school. naturally, i was apprehensive of my students’ reactions, especially as they were often a few years older than me, and had come back to university to be retrained to become english teachers. i realized they had more life experience. fortunately, i had background knowledge in communicative language teaching which was a novelty then. also doing microteaching tasks followed by reflection was enjoyable for students. i also continued to work at school. the school experiences fed back onto my credibility as a teacher educator as i was able to provide first-hand examples of classroom situations instantly. dorota: during my studies the communicative teaching was not much emphasized. the obligatory course book during my methodology classes was h. d. brown’s (1987) “practice in language learning and teaching” which we had to know almost by heart. unfortunately, i copied the same model in my beginning methodology classes, and students didn’t learn many practical things. what helped me most with developing my teaching methodology was the western methodological help with lots of teacher access to books from the british council, peace corps—all providing invaluable help. i often used their offer, given the fact that i worked at college and at a local in-service teacher training centre. language teacher identity and emotions… tapsla.12686 p. 17/26 both joanna and dorota began teacher training in the 1990s, which was both a challenge and an opportunity for professional development. assuming a new role always brings out anxiety, which in our becoming teacher educators turned out to be facilitative. we drew on the available resources which gave us confidence and advantage over our trainees: being language teachers in school, which allowed us to provide authentic examples from school practice, thorough theoretical background, the knowledge of innovative methodology transferred to polish university courses by western organizations. with hindsight, it seems clear that we were also emotionally engaged, willing to learn language teaching, and enthusiastic, which might have resulted from the fact that we were pioneers in preparing english teachers for their future jobs. the aspect of novelty seems to play a key role in capturing our own interest (as teacher trainers) and that of our trainees who were becoming acquainted with elt communicative trends for the first time. dorota: with years to come and next generations of students, i observed less enjoyment or engagement on their part. i continued to teach in a similar way through introducing activating techniques and micro-teaching followed by reflection, but i observed it required from me more energy and nonverbal techniques to attract their attention. i started wondering what the reasons were: was it because the techniques were no longer a novelty, since the students had already been exposed to communicative methodology in their own english language learning? new technologies, the introduction of new apps, etc. seemed to strike their interest at first, but i found it harder to make them think more deeply about their use, go beyond mere operation of the it tools, to make them think what would work in class and under what conditions […]. they were not interested in that once all the fun of using ict stopped. joanna: some of the students are passive, that’s true, but they often come to study teaching for other reasons than wanting to become teachers. what i noticed is that they want to be entertained. this is a pity. a lot of them hold a belief that an enjoyable activity is always learning-rich. but it’s often not the case. you may have a good time and learn very little. […] what i don’t like is the emphasis on all that is practical: apps, ready-made games, things to take and use in the classroom. they make students less interested in creating things by themselves or designing their own lessons. they’d rather download an activity recommended as interesting than create their own. our zeitgeist? the internet? but i can’t say i’m myself bored. paradoxically, i find it puzzling. investigating a particular case seems interesting to me, which doesn’t mean tapsla.12686 p. 18/26 joanna rokita-jaśkow, dorota werbińska that i manage to make all students interested in my class. but i manage to keep myself interested in my course. is this a strategy of combating teacher burnout? in the continuation of this part of our duoethnographic study, some disillusionment can be detected. the observation that old tricks no longer work, that the times and teacher candidates have changed seem to testify to this. the difficulty in applying in-depth critical teaching or lesser interest in the teaching profession and the general social context can be clearly witnessed. the neoliberal economy seeping into education encourages teacher trainees, like other language learners, to consume attractive products, imitate enjoyable techniques, download teaching solutions in the name of accountability. the fact that teacher trainees, though full-time students, now have to work to cover the costs of their studies also changes the perspective of their teaching mission. joanna finds the trainees’ decreased interest and engagement less rewarding, as their passivity rubs off on her. alternatively, it may also be an initial sign of emotional exhaustion, one of three symptoms of teacher trainer’s burnout (maslach & leiter, 2006), as dorota hints. dorota “manages” to keep herself interested in the course, which may also signal her own self-direction and autonomy. both of them find the situation puzzling and duoethnographic reflection on it may stand for their effort to better understand the reasons behind the trainees’ passivity. discussion this duoethnographic project has focused mainly on our own emotions experienced from the positions of school teachers, parents, and language educators. we were curious to find out what emotions would emerge in our reminiscences of these roles, how they affect our teacher identity which, in a way, matches our question whether “affect” should be added to the constituents of the otherwise quite capacious 3altif model. finally, we wanted to know whether the method of duoethnography would be useful for this elt project. to answer our main research question, we identified several emotions emerging in the different stages of our professional careers and in relation to other people. we recalled pride, joy, and anxiety while working as novice teachers, shame and disappointment when engaged in the role of parents, and reduced motivation, but also puzzlement, in training future candidates for the teaching profession. we found that our emotions were socially-constructed, and their character (be it positive or negative) enhanced (our roles as school language teacher identity and emotions… tapsla.12686 p. 19/26 teachers) or weakened (joanna’s disillusionment with some of her students) our motivation to work. another finding that emerged through our discussion was that strong emotions were long remembered after the experience (benesh’s (2012) “sticky object” phenomenon), and can be regarded as influential to the formation of teacher identity. this uncovering also brings us to the answer of how emotions affect teacher identity. in our study, we realized that assuming new challenging roles in favorable social situations (our roles as novice teachers), generated positive emotions, such as pride and enjoyment and, therefore, strengthened our affiliation to the profession, to use the term of the first 3altif’s constituents. anxiety also appeared in confrontation with new challenges, such as teaching a new group or the necessity of school public interpreting in the context of the native speaker/non-native speaker dichotomy; yet, with time, it proved facilitative, as it prompted us to work on minimizing those negative emotions by thorough preparation for lessons or reflecting and developing a critical perspective on the concept of native-speakerism. therefore, it could be concluded that particularly in the early stages of a teacher’s career, it is important to cater for the wellbeing of teachers, which could be done by watchful mentoring (smith, 2018) and general support from positive institutions (budzińska, 2018), with a view to strengthening the teacher’s affiliation to teaching. catering for wellbeing is also important for teachers at later stages of their career. nevertheless, being more experienced (and hopefully more autonomous), teachers may require less institutional support, as they have developed coping strategies for themselves through reflexivity and the constructive search of for solutions to problems encountered. this is the goal of many recent publications (gabryś-barker & gałajda, 2016; gkonou et al., 2020; mercer & gregersen, 2020) promoting positive psychology in language learning and teaching. self-awareness, reflectivity, agency, and resilience to adverse situations are all tenets of an autonomous teacher, demonstrated in the 3altif model (werbińska, 2017a). more negative emotions started to appear as we gained more experience, and perhaps greater awareness of teaching complexities and their connection with the socio-educational context. these emotions appeared in relation to other people, such as teachers of our children, when we performed both the roles of parents and teacher educators. the feelings of disappointment and shame emerged as an outcome of our struggle for power (benesch, 2018, 2019) in contexts where there is a struggle for the recognition of one another’s expertise, as positioning theory posits (davies & harré, 2001). as our study showed, there is tension in the relationship between our children’s teachers and ourselves as parents who also happen to be language and teaching experts. there is effort on the part of the teacher to be recognized as a legitimate teacher and an expert, which is difficult in confrontation with a superior language and/or methodology expert. this inferior position may cause anger, while the person in the superior tapsla.12686 p. 20/26 joanna rokita-jaśkow, dorota werbińska position feels equally angry and disappointed that not all expectations have been met. perhaps the language educator, not working at school any longer, has an idealistic image of a teacher’s everyday job. perhaps she herself, having read and researched on the subject of language teaching is actually more knowledgeable and finds it hard to put up with the deficiencies of others. scholarly work does require perfectionism and attention to detail from which her high expectations of competency may derive. our duoetnographic conversations also revealed that it is not emotions themselves that are important, but what we do about them, as gkonou et al., (2020) point out. the confrontation of our expectations with the realities of teaching led us to strive to find the reasons for the appearance of emotions. to great extent, they were triggered by the changing educational contexts that are marked by neoliberal trends. this sociopolitical setting in which many teachers now have to work, has had devastating effects, as indicated in another duoethnographic study by hayler (2020), who pointed to its being responsible for teachers’ emotional tension. recognized as a threat to the agency of many teachers, this unfavorable climate has not spared us as teacher educators. in our case, however, we observed that emotions have positively affected reflectivity, agency and self-criticality, as our reflection on our emotional experience has led us to questions, thus constituting a link between reflection and agency. the positive emotions that we experienced mainly in the beginnings of our career as teachers and teacher trainers have generally had an effect on making us learn more, pursue our interests, develop our careers as researchers, and, at the same time, better understand our learners and their needs. nevertheless, it should be acknowledged that we had a chance to begin our career in times when teacher professionalism was associated with higher levels of agency, autonomy and creativity, whereas for the last two decades, at least in poland, it has been linked with accountability and efficiency demonstrated in high-stakes testing. constructing teacher identity, more important than merely acquiring professional knowledge and skills, is a dynamic lifelong experience and a story of becoming. emotions are an invisible element impacting teacher identity, as they contribute to the growth of reflectivity, agency and resilience—all attributes of an autonomous teacher—noted in the 3altif model. for us, and perhaps many other teachers, an incentive to becoming an english teacher was this striving for recognition, authority, and power. these are more difficult to maintain in today’s world where language can be learnt in various informal settings, while language knowledge is no longer limited to what can be learnt from a school teacher. looking back on our teaching careers we have also learnt something about ourselves. through examining the distinctive features of two persons from three different perspectives we can better witness how emotions may contribute language teacher identity and emotions… tapsla.12686 p. 21/26 to our identity (re)formation. the sometimes divergent positive and negative emotions that emerged and that have accompanied us as teachers, parents, and teacher educators prove that language teacher educators also reveal that language teacher educators, though educationally aligned, need not constitute an identical group of people. the examples of experiences that we have recalled exhibit commonalities but they also differ. this may show the complexity of teacher identity as well as the diversity of ways in which we understand ourselves and other elt professionals. this awareness may also serve us as an important insight into our professional becoming and our teacher identity (re)negotiation and (re)consideration. we can better understand other teachers, our students who are future teachers and, above all, ourselves and who we are as language teachers and who we have become. our goal was also to experience duoethnography as a method of inquiry. we assumed it would help us share our autobiographic narratives, untangle the emotions that would emerge from them and make a deeper sense of the dialogues. with hindsight, we do acknowledge that thanks to this method, relatively new to both of us, our lived experiences from the past were given a new voice. as duoethnography relies on approaching dialogues through a selected lens so as to recognize the variability in the duoethnographers’ experiences, the investigation and interpretation of teacher emotions (our selected lens in the study) was made possible. the confrontation of what we once felt with what we think now allowed us to gain a better understanding of emotions that each of us experienced while playing the roles investigated in this project. therefore, we hope that this article may contribute to highlighting the power of duoethnography as a theoretical approach that can shed light on teacher emotions in identity research. final thoughts experiencing emotions leads to reflection on their causality as well as learning or (re)constructing knowledge about the realities of teaching. for this reason, experiencing emotions might feed back into teacher training as well as feed forward to their possible aftermaths. the venture we embarked on with this small project started with a view to enriching the 3altif model with a fourth a that stands for affect, which, as a work yet in 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(2005). teaching with emotion: a postmodern enactment. information age publishing. joanna rokita-jaśkow dorota werbińska die identität und emotionen der sprachlehrer in duoetnografischem diskurs: perspektiven von lehrern, eltern und lehrerausbildern z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g das auf bauen von lehreridentität anstelle des erlernens, wie man fähigkeiten und subsysteme beibringt, gilt seit einiger zeit als priorität in der ausbildung zukünftiger lehrkräfte. bisher wurden mehrere modelle der lehreridentität vorgeschlagen, darunter das 3altif-modell (3 a language teacher identity framework) (verbinska, 2017a), in dem die lehreridentität aus affiliation (wille der lehrer zu unterrichten), attachment (überzeugungen der lehrer in bezug auf das unterrichten) und autonomy (handlungsfähigkeit, ref lexivität und belastbarkeit der lehrer) besteht. rückblickend scheint es, dass das 3altif-modell, welches auf anderen identitätsmodellen gründet, die zum zeitpunkt seiner entstehung vorhanden waren, die affektive komponente der identität von sprachlehrern nicht explizit genug berücksichtigt und daher die besonderheit des berufs nicht ganzheitlich erfassen kann. aus diesem grund will man die frage der emotionen eingehender untersuchen und einen duoethnografischen diskurs durchführen, um die „fehlende“ komponente des 3altif-modells zu analysieren und möglicherweise zu ergänzen. die duoethnografie wurde aufgrund ihrer innovation, eignung für die untersuchung von identitätsfragen sowie fähigkeit, das selbst zu klären und auszudrücken, als qualitative forschungsmethode gewählt. die geführten duoethnografischen dialoge konzentrierten sich auf unsere eigenen emotionen aus dreierlei sicht: ehemaliger fremdsprachenlehrer in der schule, fremdsprachenlehrer als eltern und fremdsprachlehrer, die wir waren. die ergebnisse zeigen unsere wahrnehmung von emotionen, die uns einst beeinf lusst haben, und legen nahe, dass emotionen nicht nur psychologische konstrukte sind, sondern auch eine soziale dimension haben. schlüsselwörter: identität des sprachlehrers, emotionen, duoethnografie, lehrerdiskurs https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12370 tapsla.12686 p. 26/26 joanna rokita-jaśkow, dorota werbińska a p p e n d i x stimulus questions 1. what role do emotions play in language teaching? 2. what emotions are important in maintaining teachers’ affiliation to their job? 3. what professional situations seem to provoke most serious emotions? 4. which emotions help/inhibit teachers to remain in teaching? 5. what do you understand by ‘emotional management’? theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (2), 2023, pp. 1/22 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.13190 kirsten hempkin https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4035-0665 university of maribor, slovenia language teacher identity outside the state-school context a b s t r a c t the importance of understanding language teacher identity is well-established in the existent literature. it has been shown to impact upon many aspects of teachers’ lives both inside and outside the classroom, such as wellbeing (day & kington, 2008) and self-efficacy (canrinus, helms-lorenz, beijaard, buitink, & hofman, 2012). the nature of language teacher identity is broadly categorised from a socio-cultural perspective, as dynamic rather than static, as negotiated in social interaction and (potentially) a source of struggle (barkhuizen, 2017) or friction (beijaard, meijer, & verloop, 2004). as this struggle with identity comes to the fore during periods of transition, when identity is seen to be challenged, the focus of research has largely been trained on pre-service or early-service teachers (mercer & kostoulas, 2018). the research in this paper addresses a teaching population who have thus far escaped the research gaze, but aspects of whose identity could be problematic and possible sites of struggle. drawing upon a narrative approach, in case-study form, i examine how two established teachers (with four years or more service) who have been trained to work in the state-school context and who, for a variety of reasons are now working outside it, construct their language teacher identities. the findings point to the importance of the teachers’ own experiences as learners in their identity formation, and how emotion accompanies and acts as a driver of identity change as they seek stability and status on an uncertain professional path. keywords: language teacher identity, identity struggle, established teachers, state-school context, private context https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.13190 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4035-0665 tapsla.13190 p. 2/22 kirsten hempkin there is a growing recognition of the need to understand language teacher identity, as how teachers perceive themselves and their teaching has been linked to an array of factors which impact significantly on their lives both inside and outside the classroom. these factors range widely, from issues such as teacher wellbeing (day & kington, 2008) to long-term engagement and motivation (hiver & dornyei, 2015). identity is generally categorised as dynamic, negotiated and, when challenged, open to shifts, which may be potentially painful (clarke, 2008; sheridan, 2013). it is the pre-service and induction phase of teachers’ careers that has been the focus of much existing identity research (mercer & kostoulas, 2018). more experienced teachers, understood as teachers of four years’ service or more, as this is the period in which teachers are seen to process their professional practices (see, for example, huberman, 1989), have to some extent escaped such intense research scrutiny. yet, it is clear that they also experience identity shifts and what barkhuzien (2017) labels as “struggle.” identity may be challenged by a redrawing in working practices or priorities, often at the level of curriculum reform (e.g., ketelaar, beijaard, boshuizen, & den brok, 2012), or by a change in context, either through moving to another area or field of teaching (tao & goa, 2018) or through teaching in another country or culture (leigh, 2019; takeda, 2017). through narrative inquiry, the case study presented in this paper hopes to shed light on the identity construction of teachers who have escaped research attention thus far. they are experienced teachers (working for more than the four years of the early years phase), employed outside the context for which they were trained, that is, working in the private rather than the public sector. the teacher training the two participants in this study have undergone focused on the primary and high school context (reflected in course curriculum and content and teaching practice). however, they have worked mostly in the private sector, having set up their own businesses, offering private tuition to a variety of age-ranges. this study seeks to understand what implications, if any, this change from public to private sector has had for their language teacher identity—given that these teachers have entered a context for which they were not specifically trained, and may not have expected to work in, through circumstance rather than choice. the private sector carries a number of specific challenges for language teachers, yet despite the extensive number of teachers who are engaged in private language education, little research has focused on their psychology (mercer, 2020). the main question i therefore attempt to address in this paper is how trained state school teachers construct their teaching identities when teaching in a non-state context and what implications this has, if any, for teacher training and development. language teacher identity… tapsla.13190 p. 3/22 literature review understanding of identity the understanding of identity that underpins the present study is rooted in a socio-cultural framework, similar to the conceptualizations offered by authors such as beijaard et al. (2004), sachs (2005), rodgers and scott (2008), and barkhuizen (2017), who categorize identity formation as a complex interplay of individual and society. i consider the identity of my participants as intricately constructed and reshaped through the people and experiences they have encountered along their professional paths. i draw upon notions of both personal and professional (language teacher) identity, understanding that the two are deeply entwined. identity should be understood as a shifting rather than fixed entity that it is continually negotiated, with some authors pointing to the never-ending nature of identity development (barkhuizen, 2017; cooper & olson, 1996; gee, 2000). also critical is that identity formation is neither a passive nor neutral process. beijaard et al. (2004) highlight the role played by agency in driving the construction and reconstruction processes of identity development, while zembylas (2003) reminds us that identity is felt, with emotion accompanying the construction of our identity through mediation and interaction with others, our perceptions of them and in turn theirs of us (johnson, 2003). identity formation can also potentially be a site of struggle. tsui (2007) points to the multiple identities an individual maintains, echoed by barkhuizen (2017) who describes the negotiation of sub-identities as perhaps harmonious but also “contested and resisted” (barkhuizen, 2017, p. 4). just as identity is renegotiated through time, it may also be renegotiated through space, context included (gee, 2000), the influence of which on identity formation is nuanced by social, cultural, political, and historical factors (rodgers & scott, 2008). this understanding of identity underpinning the present study, as a constantly shifting and at times painful process, driven by agency and mediated by others, allows me to capture most fully the complexity of the participants’ identity as they have negotiated their professional path. the importance of identity while definitions of identity vary, there is strong consensus in the literature on the importance of understanding language teacher identity. the impact of identity on teachers and their teaching is undeniable, with leibowitz (2017) pointing to the role identity plays in how teachers perform their professional actapsla.13190 p. 4/22 kirsten hempkin tivities in the classroom, claiming that it “[…] informs everything he or she does […]” (leibowitz, 2017, p. 75). identity has also been linked to teacher wellbeing (day & kington, 2008), which has in turn been linked to learner wellbeing and improved learning (dresel & hall, 2013; mercer & kostoulas, 2018); other studies point to identity as playing a vital role in teacher effectiveness (alsup, 2006) self-efficacy, job satisfaction, and commitment (canrinus, helmslorenz, beijaard, buitink, & hofman, 2012), and also in long-term engagement and motivation (hiver & dornyei, 2015). at every stage of the teacher’s career, in learning and development, critical engagement with professional identity is vital (beijaard & meijer, 2017; day & kington, 2008; olsen, 2008; rodgers & scott, 2008). while it has been argued that critical reflective practice be instilled at the pre-service stage (korthagen, 2004), other studies have pointed to the need for in-service teachers to also engage in identity work, to question their beliefs about themselves, their learners and their practices, in order to direct their professional development and learning (bucholtz & hall, 2005; korthagen, 2004). this may suggest that the participants in this study, a population as yet not systematically addressed in the literature, could also benefit from such identity work to support them on their professional path. state-school trained teachers in the private sector identity transition in more experienced teachers has been addressed in the existent literature largely in terms of changes within context. shifts in identity have been triggered by new demands placed on teachers in the form of working practices or priorities (e.g., implementing educational innovation in vocational education (ketelaar et al., 2012). in language teaching specifically, the literature has dealt with english teachers moving between fields of language teaching, entering esp, for example (tao & goa, 2018). moving between contexts has also been addressed in terms of identity construction and shifts, yet largely from a cultural perspective, focusing on the identity (re)negotiation, for example, of foreign english language teachers in the chinese educational context (leigh, 2019) and in the japanese education system (takeda, 2017). what has yet to be addressed in the literature is context from the perspective of trained state school teachers working in the private sector. as the participants in this study have entered a context for which they have not been specifically trained, or indeed expected to work in, it may be that they also experience the friction (beijaard, 2019) that can occur when expectation meets professional reality. these challenges to identity may be intensified due to the specific demands of private sector teaching as outlined in the existent literature: the working conditions themselves, which for many verge on the language teacher identity… tapsla.13190 p. 5/22 precarious (mercer, oberdorfer, & saleem, 2016; sun, 2010; wickham, 2015; wieczorek, 2016), or the nature of private sector teaching, in which teachers may find themselves responding to the needs of a profit-driven business (skinner, leavey, & rothi, 2019). the perceptions of private language teaching may also be problematic, as this profession enjoys a lower status than others (johnston, 1997), while in the classroom, teachers in this context may be less respected by students (bowen, 2013). as language teacher identity is linked to many aspects of a teaching professional’s life, both inside and outside the classroom, throughout their career, it is vital that we begin the process of unravelling the language teacher identity of the teachers addressed in this study. if their identity is indeed a site of struggle as a result of working in the private context, understanding how they construct their language teaching identity, and identifying any specific needs they may have in regard to managing their identity, will hopefully allow us to establish how best to support them in their english teaching careers. narrative inquiry this case study employs narrative inquiry to explore the language teacher identity of the participants. the narrative inquiry method recognizes the centrality of the story in identity formation, reflecting the notion of identity as rooted in the “stories to live by” (connelly & clandinin, 1999, p. 4). while what we say about ourselves expresses our identity, the telling of the narrative offers the potential to reshape it (beijaard et al., 2004), a process which takes place through stories over time (rodgers & scott, 2008). in our attempts to make meaning of the experiences we have lived, we interpret them as part of a continuum, rather than isolated events (carr, 1986). our stories are subject to constant reinterpretation, and imposing coherence on them can be a source of struggle (day, 2006). the use of narrative in this study is two-fold, taking what could be described as a holistic approach to the study of identity (leigh, 2019). i have employed it both as methodological tool to gather data and an analytic tool to make sense of it. i approach the stories told by the participants about their professional trajectory as english language teachers not as a fixed reality, but, drawing upon the work of ricoeur (1991), as presentations of the participants’ self-understanding. in this way, their stories can be understood as not just descriptive but somehow selective (crossley, 2000). these narratives serve as devices which allow me to explore how they have constructed their identity, through the recounting of the meaning-making experiences, figures and events on their professional path. through careful analysis of these stories, i hope tapsla.13190 p. 6/22 kirsten hempkin to bring to light, as bell (2002) suggests, the assumptions and insights that underlie them. given that the question under research is both highly complex and personal, i hope that presenting the data in a narrative case study form has allowed me to reflect the intricacies or “rich detail” of the participants’ identity construction (duff, 2014, p. 234), while capturing something of their voices as they have reflected upon it. while it is the participant’s narrative i present, i have to some extent co-constructed it with them, as the researcher is inevitably cast in the co-constructor role with this approach (clandinin & connelly, 1998). drawing upon the work of stake (2006), the use of two participants in the study has enabled me to consider both the individualities and commonalities of the participants’ identity. methodological design research question through the narrative inquiry approach described above, the study attempts to answer the following research: how do state-school trained english language teachers construct their language teacher (professional) identities when teaching outside the state context? procedure the sampling procedure was tailored to the population described above: trained state-school english language teachers working outside the state context. as this is a relatively specific teaching population, i looked first to former students who are part of my personal and professional circle on social media. the fact that i was in some way familiar with this group meant that i was able to locate potential participants, and also, importantly, understand the complexity and nuance of their experiences. from the potential participants, the two who were first approached (through private messages (messenger)) on facebook, agreed to participate. initial messages asked the potential participants to confirm that they were suitable for the study (i.e., that they had been trained to work in the state context but had had largely been working outside of it). follow-up messages briefly outlined the nature of the study, indicating that i was exploring english language teacher identity. mindful of this relationship (as their former university professor), i was at pains to point out that they were under language teacher identity… tapsla.13190 p. 7/22 no obligation whatsoever to take part in the research and that they were able to withdraw at any time. i felt, however, that knowing the participants, a positive rapport had been established, which would facilitate a more honest and open interaction during the interview process. i am mindful of the limitations of this sampling procedure, as i have had access only to those participants who were contactable via social media and only those who were willing to discuss their identity with me. however, it is this special relationship that has allowed me an insight into their personal experiences and ensured the inclusion of participants in the study who fit the profile of the population i wished to understand. ethical procedures were followed throughout the data generation. the participants were fully informed of the aims and method of the research, in writing and orally. they were assured of confidentiality (that they would be assigned pseudonyms and also any identifying information would be redacted). prior to being interviewed, both participants were sent a consent form to sign to indicate their agreement. before the interview began, i checked the participant’s willingness to participate once more and asked if there were any questions we should address before beginning. i also reminded the participants that they did not have to answer any questions they were uncomfortable with during the course of the interview. it was emphasized to the participants that they were free to withdraw from the procedure at any point up until the point of publication and if they chose to do so, all data would be immediately destroyed. context and participants the participants, referred to by their pseudonyms, andreja and borut, are both english language teaching graduates. they studied at the same faculty at approximately the same time, although they graduated some years apart (there is a certain degree of flexibility in the slovene system as to when a student can complete the obligations required for their study program). both students were enrolled in the pre-bologna era, when studies were four years, with the teacher training element taking place in the last two years of study. unlike now, under the bologna 3+2 system, all students enrolled at the english department graduated as teachers. andreja has worked as an english language teacher for 15 or 16 years and has been mostly self-employed during that period. she has set up her own business, providing private tuition to both young and adult learners, while she has also worked on contract with young learners in a private language school. she has spent a brief period (two months) in a state primary school, providing sick-leave cover. borut has been teaching for a shorter period, six to seven years, and has also through that period been mostly self-employed. he has also spent some tapsla.13190 p. 8/22 kirsten hempkin time in a state primary school (six months) also providing sick-leave cover. his teaching has consisted mostly of private tuition with primary-level learners and teaching adults on contract in a language school setting. borut has combined teaching with a job entirely unrelated to education. table 1 participants’ biographical data participant gender age no. of years teaching type of teaching andreja female 40 15–16 self-employed: private tuition; young learners and adults state school sick-leave cover (two months) borut male 40 6–7 self-employed: part-time private tution, combined with other job state school sick-leave cover (six months) research instruments the data for the case-study were collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews (cohen et al., 2000). this particular format was selected as it gives both an element of structure and flexibility, allowing the interviewer to respond to points of interest as and when they arise. at the same time, the data generated by this format ensures a certain degree of comparability, whilst allowing the participants to retain their uniqueness and individuality (kvale & brinkman, 2009). the interviews were based on an interview protocol, designed to capture the participants’ trajectory in terms of their identity, based on questions establishing their professional paths from english learners to students and then in their transition to teachers. the questions probed their initial and ongoing motivations, critical events and figures, their relationships with learners and other teachers. both of the interviews were conducted in english and lasted approximately one and a half hours. the interviews were transcribed verbatim. during transcription, any identifying information such as real names and places were removed or changed to protect the participants’ identities. all the interviews were also transcribed for content, including anything, such as pauses or laughter, which contributed to the meaning of the data. the audio files were deleted immediately following transcription. the transcription generated a data corpus for these two teachers of 30,594 words. language teacher identity… tapsla.13190 p. 9/22 analysis to analyze the data, a grounded theory approach as proposed by charmaz (2006) was adopted. the data were first transcribed, and i familiarized myself with the data by listening to it first, reading over it in paper form and making provisional notes before any formal coding took place. the interviews were then coded using a bottom-up approach, with the aim of allowing the data to speak for themselves, keeping a focus on emergent themes. throughout the coding procedure, i attempted to remain reflexive at all times in an effort to manage my own subjectivities, consulting with my colleague during my analysis. i used atlas.ti to code the data, keeping memos during the multiple waves of coding, until i felt that “code saturation” had been reached. the interviews were coded first separately, and then compared in order to detect what was common to both participants and what was unique to them. in this way, i was able to identify any commonality across the data sets in terms of the main themes, yet also establish in what ways, if any, those main themes differed in the participants’ experiences. results the results of the case study are presented in the form of individual narratives for each of the participants, while commonalities are reflected upon in the discussion section. andreja: transcendent stability according to andreja, she has always wanted to teach. she remembers that when playing with her sister in early childhood, she always adopted the role of teacher. she has also wanted to be connected to english and working with the language somehow. as a learner of english, andreja felt she was extremely competent, and presented a challenge to her teacher, whom she feels was lacking proficiency in english. andreja’s high-school english teacher was a meaningful figure for her. andreja was not only critical of her language proficiency but also of her classroom approach and methods: her knowledge of english wasn’t good; she didn’t prepare for lessons. her lessons were boring; she was reading out the coursebook. tapsla.13190 p. 10/22 kirsten hempkin this resulted in a crisis for andreja. she felt personally aggrieved—hurt— by the effect her teachers’ approach had on her attitude to a language she loves. so, in her own teaching, andreja strives to avoid the method and approaches to which she was subjected as a learner. for her, it is important to prioritize the needs of the students in terms of individualizing the approaches she adopts, requiring exhaustive preparation on her part: to me, the first thing is always, who am i teaching? that is the first, so what is my student like? that’s the first thing. when i plan my lesson, what is my student like, where do their interests lie? what is their personalitywise like, where are their problem areas? how can i reach this student? but, that’s the basis. tied to her focus on preparation, she feels strongly that one of her roles as the teacher is to ensure that her learners remain motivated and are always exposed to useful and relevant language. during her high-school experience, she encountered a teacher who pulled her back from her crisis, a role-model in which she roots her own language teacher identity: it’s crazy, and that’s also one part, that i’ve always sworn to myself, it was like something i said to myself back then: i want to be the teacher to make the kids feel the way that they made me feel. in this class, the teacher approached the learners as equals and shared an open and relaxed relationship with them. this has in turn informed andreja’s own classroom practice. she too embraces the notion of equality, which underpins the relationship she has with her learners, which she claims is more effective than being a disciplinarian or aloof. andreja perceives herself as a competent teacher, whose approach to teaching, founded on the beliefs and values shaped by her learning experience and expressed in the methods and approaches she employs, can be employed both in the state and private context. during the period she spent teaching in a state primary school, she was able to resist the challenges to “her way” in the form of parental expectations, and the demands of the curriculum and paperwork. when her method was questioned by a fellow teacher during her state-school experience, who said that she did not train to be a teacher to “clown around” (her characterisation of andreja’s methods), she rejects the criticism. andreja says the way you teach depends on your personality and she is prepared to try any method to achieve results. she looks to the positive affirmations she has received of her teaching throughout her career: language teacher identity… tapsla.13190 p. 11/22 i do believe that what i’m doing, i’m doing right […] and i’ve had so many feedbacks in the past years that i absolutely don’t […] it may sound a bit self-assured but i really don’t doubt it […]. andreja is largely critical of her teaching colleagues. she looks past her local community of teachers, aligning herself to the finnish system of teacher education, which is more demanding to enter and complete, she feels. other teachers often appear to her as unmotivated, stuck in their teaching ways, sometimes lacking proficiency in english. andreja has encountered few, if any, problems with her teaching. teaching is something that she feels has always come easily to her. she is proud of her ability to find ways to tackle any issues that arise and her self-reliance in drawing upon the extensive bank of material resources she has created. her perception of herself as a teacher is that of a natural. her competence as a teacher rests on the fact that she can make a “connection with kids,” which is “a gift she was given.” teaching nourishes her; her classes are her “soulfood” and teaching her “superpower.” learners open up to her and share their problems in english. she feels rewarded by the work she has done with socially-disadvantaged groups, which sustains her. as andreja looks to the future, she considers that a state school position might be preferable for the job security it provides. andreja also views this not only as an opportunity for her teaching methods to reach the widest possible audience in terms of learners, but there is also the added motivation that in the state-school context, she would be able to encourage her teaching colleagues to adopt her methods in their classrooms: […] but i still have this maybe sort of idealistic idea that i could show other teachers that it is doable. borut: painful change borut perceived himself as a lazy learner. during high school, he was taught english by a teacher who was marked by a deep personal trauma. she shouted at students and trained them simply for exam knowledge. he feels that by the time he reached university, he was far behind his peers in language competence. he ties becoming a teacher with academic performance. as a student, he was unsure of his career path, feeling that he was pushed somehow into studying; he believed at first that he would be unable to teach, as he was unable to meet the academic demands of the study program. with the help of a fellow tapsla.13190 p. 12/22 kirsten hempkin student, however, he began to improve, although he was still unsure he would ever teach, and it was only after the completion of his studies that he saw himself as becoming a teacher. this experience, though, gave him a sense of teaching purpose: […] i didn’t have […] there’s lots of kids that don’t know how to study or so, i think this is my way of sort of giving some things back. helping learners to study will be part of keeping them engaged, which he believes to be the core, or “shell” of teaching. during a period when he was unable to find employment, borut missed teaching, and felt “bitter” that he had wasted time and energy on training to be a teacher. borut is currently teaching english to business people. he perceives himself to be an effective teacher in the private context. he sees his learners as making progress and his boss, who is taking an english class with him, tells him he is a good teacher. otherwise, borut engages little with the wider community of teachers, having little contact with those employed at the same language school, or those employed in state schools. although he feels that his studies were helpful, he has had to educate himself for the teaching he is doing now. it is through experience that he has learned how to manage the specific demands of teaching adults: […] you have to do things yourself, so this would be an interesting part you know as well if you think about the studies. it’s very different to teach adults. you have to know what you’re doing because people expect more of you. he is extremely conscious of his learners’ needs, identifying the ways in which they differ to the children he was trained to teach. he recognizes how their earlier learning experiences affect them, with school often having made them extremely self-conscious. he is motivated by his feeling of helping them: and they’re very afraid to speak english in front of others, their colleagues or boss and you know making these things easier for them […] sort of […] it’s okay, it’s a bit of rewarding. borut has had to adjust his approach to teaching adults, especially when working in business settings. he has learned to accept that business people will use their phones during class, and that they will resist homework. he tries to make as few unnecessary demands on his learners as possible, remaining as unobtrusive as he can. he perceives that english for many of them plays a minimal role in their lives, or is even a burden. when asked what his learners think of him as a teacher, he claims that he is sure they hardly think of him at all. language teacher identity… tapsla.13190 p. 13/22 at the same time, he also recognizes the new role he has to fulfill, that of being a service-provider and the learner a customer. being self-employed means he has to engage with accountants and worry about finances. as borut reflects on his experiences, he feels that teaching adults is more demanding than children, but more manageable for him. borut spent some time in a primary school, providing sick-leave cover. drafted in just after the holiday period, borut found that he could not keep up with the pace of preparation, nor manage the discipline issues he faced with a learner who undermined his authority and who controlled the class through “manipulative behavior.” he was stressed, which led to losing his cool and shouting at the pupils, which reminded him of his high-school teacher. feeling underprepared, he allowed the children to watch cartoons. he was expected to assess the learners, yet he felt out of his depth and could not admit this to his colleagues. asking for help was out of the question, as he “should know” how to set exams. he could not prepare adequately for class, as he had a young son at home. he is still troubled by this period of teaching. it still “gnaws” at him. this episode, he says, made him realize he is not cut out to teach in a state school. he says he is too old, too weighed down by domestic demands. he cannot engage with the learners in state school in the meaningful ways he does with his adult learners. yet, as he looks to the future, he recognizes the pain of expectation from the early years of his career when he hoped to teach in a state school but was employed in his other job instead: […] then i really kind of got a bit bitter i think because it took me a long time to maybe find myself after high school, which was hell, and the first years here were hell. i spent so much time and energy and then sort of to be doing something that i could have done without those things. as borut considers his future, he sees that although to a certain degree he feels that he has established himself in the private school context, finding a number of clients and figuring out how to meet their demands, there is still a sense of unfinished business in the public sector. he acknowledges that his future most likely lies outside the state context, yet somehow he is unable, or unwilling, to say for certain that his future lies where he is now. the thread running through his narrative of uncertainty and painful change is very much present. despite the bruising episode from primary school, and his statement that he has somehow missed his chance of a state school position, the idea that he will not return there is difficult for him to accept: i will probably not teach in school, and this is something that i’ve been struggling for, for a year now. tapsla.13190 p. 14/22 kirsten hempkin discussion this study hoped to shed light on the ways in which english language teachers trained to work in the state context and working outside it construct their language teacher identities. despite the stark contrast in the individuality of the data sets, there are also common themes which emerge for both. the discussion addresses the three main themes from across the data: the role of past language learning experience and teacher selves, the need for status and the role of emotion in identity formation. teacher selves what features strongly in both of the narratives is that the participants make sense of themselves professionally through conceptions of teaching and teachers shaped by their own experience as learners. both participants seem to have, during their learner years, built a strong core of beliefs through which they measure their teaching. drawing upon possible selves theory (hamman gosselin, romano, & bunuan, 2010; kubanyiova, 2009), these can be understood as “ought to” beliefs, while key figures from the participants’ learning experiences provide a model of both the “ideal teacher self” and the “feared teacher self.” in andreja’s case, she perceives herself as close to the “ideal teach er self.” she sees herself as able to teach exactly as she would like to, according to her concept of an ideal teacher, in any context she would choose to work in. in contrast, borut’s enactment of his “feared self” in his public sector experience has led him not to question his beliefs about teaching per se but to instead shift context where he can enact his preferred teaching identity. one way to perhaps understand this finding is to consider the teaching selves of the participants in this study, shaped in part by their own language learning experience, as offering a sense of stability to our participants in their identity construction. this reflects the findings of day, kington, stobart, and sammons (2006), who suggest that teachers are pushed into “finding ways” to establish and maintain stability in their professional lives. it could be argued that andreja and borut have encountered particular instability on their professional trajectory. they have worked in both the state and private context, managing their own expectations and the expectations of others at the institutions at which they have been employed. they have settled in the private sector, a context for which they have not been specifically trained and in which they have experienced a degree of financial insecurity due to being self-employed, yet they both also acknowledge that they may return to the public sector. while their path may be categorized as unstable, what has language teacher identity… tapsla.13190 p. 15/22 remained stable is andreja and borut’s core teaching values, as expressed by their teacher selves. as with other teaching professionals, when they teach close to their preferred teaching selves, as they perceive they do in the private sector (and andreja in the public sector also), this fosters a sense of efficacy, which in turn leads to a more stable, and stronger, language teacher identity (thomas & beauchamp, 2011). although both of the participants, as described above, perceive themselves as achieving a degree of professional efficacy in the private sector, both refer to returning to state school, at least for the financial security it would bring, despite reporting challenges from their state school experience, with borut’s “praxis shock” (kelchtermans & ballet, 2002) and andreja’s discomfort with colleagues. what may have been beneficial to both in the past, and what may still prove beneficial, they should decide to return, is engaging in some form of identity work. other researchers, such as beijaard (2019) and alsup (2006), have called for identity work to be incorporated at the pre-service stage. smagorinsky, cook, moore, jackson, and fry (2004) suggest identity-challenging activities during teacher training in order to mitigate “praxis shock,” while the use of autobiographical stories (le fevre, 2011) or metaphors (thomas & beauchamp, 2011) may lead to pre-service teachers reflecting more profoundly on their identities. freese (2006) suggests that such practices may reveal inconsistencies between students’ beliefs and practice, allowing them to find counter-examples to beliefs, which is crucial in identity development. at this stage in their careers, andreja and borut could benefit from identity work which would be useful in helping them develop an understanding of the cognitive aspect of their identity, that is, the beliefs they have formed about themselves as teachers and their teaching, allowing them hopefully to maintain professional efficacy without compromising their core teaching values (bucholtz & hall, 2005; korthagen, 2004). the role of status besides this apparent need for stability, the data may also point to a need for status among members of this teaching population. this may be particularly reflected in andreja’s narrative, in her perception of her teaching as problemfree, and the anchoring of her identity in rather esoteric or perhaps spiritual concepts, for example, referring to her teaching as abilities or a “gift,” contrasting with the generally negative descriptions of her teaching peers in the state sector. however, there are echoes of the need for status elsewhere in both participants’ narratives. while, as mercer points out, the reasons for engaging in private sector teaching are “often more pragmatic than an intrinsic calling to education” (mercer, 2020, p. 4), andreja and borut frame employment in tapsla.13190 p. 16/22 kirsten hempkin the public sector as the pragmatic choice, as something they would only leave their private sector work for—in which they enjoy a relative degree of freedom and meaningful relationships with the learners—to guarantee a regular in come and a degree of job security. this is hardly surprising, as borut’s financial concerns reflect the worrying levels of precarity reported by language teachers employed in the private sector (walsh, 2019). his inability to commit fully to the private sector illustrates precisely something walsh refers to when he describes private sector teachers employed in circumstances “in which the ability to plan a coherent future is compromised” (walsh, 2019, p. 1). in order to understand this finding, we can look to social comparison theory, which draws upon the work of festinger (1954). both participants, to varying degrees, seem to be engaging in downward social comparison in order to bolster their language teacher identity. this response may well have been triggered by both participants entering this sector through circumstance rather than choice and as a result, feeling the need to justify their professional path. this downward social comparison may also be triggered by the negative perceptions of the context in which they are employed, which the participants here may have absorbed, offering a strategy with which to counter the lower perceptions of efl private teaching (fiske, 2011) and its business-oriented nature (skinner et al., 2019). engaging in such comparisons may be beneficial in terms of ensuring job satisfaction and affective commitment (brown, ferris, heller, & keeping, 2007), which may in turn help to enhance their language teacher identity. while the perceptions of this sector as a whole can only be challenged through systemic and fundamental change, one step which could be taken is the incorporating, or even acknowledging, of private sector teaching during teacher training. this could perhaps not simply take the form of training preservice teachers in the specific skills and approaches they need for the type of teaching they are engaged in but also perhaps include training in the business aspect of this work. at present, in some institutions in slovenia, where the case study was carried out, the focus is placed almost entirely on the public context. perhaps recognizing private sector teaching at the pre-service stage would go at least some small way towards bolstering its legitimacy as a career and rendering the need for such social comparison strategies redundant. the role of emotion in teacher identity another significant theme in the narratives is the role of emotion in the participant’s identity construction. while emotion connects the data sets, the role it plays varies. in andreja’s data, we see emotion as a quality (hamman et al., 2010) reflected in her striving to make an emotional connection with her learners. in borut’s narrative, we witness emotion as a response (hamman et al., language teacher identity… tapsla.13190 p. 17/22 2010), accompanying challenges to his identity, but also motivating a change in teaching context. the emotion expressed in both these narratives, while different in nature, seems triggered largely by the striving for self-efficacy, in how the participants teach best and in which context they teach best. what is clear from the data is that borut has carried a pronounced emotional burden on his career path, brought about by employment uncertainty, unemployment, and the identity challenges of moving context. this becomes potentially problematic when considering his teacher agency. emotion offers the potential for self-transformation in identity construction (zembylas, 2003). yet, when professional legitimacy is called into question—as in the ways described above—the emotional consequences can profoundly negatively affect agency (golombek & johnson, 2005). if borut is any way illustrative of other teachers who have shared similar experiences, we may find that they also are “paralysed” and unable to pursue career possibilities or avenues that would otherwise be open to them. the link between emotion, identity, and agency has already been clearly established by authors such as day (2012) and reis (2015), while elsewhere in the literature, calls are being made for teachers to be supported in understanding their “affective selves” (goh, 2015). verity (2000) points out the need for the affective aspects of teacher identity to be reflected upon and professionals trained in what wu, liang, and cseplyi refer to as “affective management” (2020, p. 13). while it may remain as yet unclear how to best support them in doing so, the data in this study suggests that it would also be beneficial for the participants to understand the affective element of their identity in order to effectively manage their professional paths. conclusion the study sought to shed light on the identity construction of an until now overlooked language teacher population, namely, that of trained state-school teachers working in the private sector. although this was a small-scale study carried out in slovenia, its findings may be of relevance for other teachers following a similar career path elsewhere. it draws attention to the specific challenges of working in the private sector, a sector which the participants in the study entered through circumstance rather than choice and were not specifically trained for, and the subsequent problems and challenges this poses for their identity construction. the participants in this case study tread an uncertain path in a sector which is often underappreciated in comparison to its public counterpart. this has tapsla.13190 p. 18/22 kirsten hempkin triggered a need for both stability and a quest to bolster their sense of status when constructing their identity. the case study has also drawn attention to the heavy emotional toll identity challenges exacted on one of the participants, which negatively affected agency and directly impacted on their teaching career. however, it is hoped that acknowledging private sector teaching during the pre-service stage and implementing some of the suggestions made regarding identity work could be constructive in supporting these teachers in their professional trajectories. references alsup, j. 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(2015). my tailor is not rich: a report on the teaching conditions in france. teaching times, 73, 9–12. wieczorek, a. l. (2016). high inhibitions and low self-esteem as factors contributing to foreign language teacher stress. in d. gabryś-barker & d. gałajda (eds.), positive psychology perspectives on foreign language learning and teaching (pp. 231–247). springer. wu, a., liang, j., & csepelyi, t. (2010). coping strategies for nnes teachers’ development. in a. mahboob (ed.), the nnest lens: non native english speakers in tesol (pp. 202–221). cambridge scholars publishing. zembylas, m. (2003). emotions and teacher identity: a post structural perspective. teachers and teaching: theory and practice, 9(3), 213–238. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540600309378 kirsten hempkin die identität der sprachlehrer außerhalb des staatlichen schulwesens z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die bedeutung des verständnisses von identität der sprachlehrer ist in der vorhandenen literatur gut belegt. es wurde nachgewiesen, dass diese sich auf mehrere aspekte des beruflichen und außerberuf lichen lebens der lehrkräfte auswirkt, z.b. auf das wohlbefinden (day & kington, 2008) und die selbstwirksamkeit (canrinus, helms-lorenz, beijaard, buitink, & hofman, 2012). die identität der sprachlehrer wird aus soziokultureller sicht eher als dynamisch und nicht als statisch betrachtet, als im rahmen sozialer interaktion ausgearbeitet, und stellt (potenziell) eine quelle des ringens (barkhuizen, 2017) bzw. des streitens (beijaard, meijer, & verloop, 2004) dar. da das ringen mit der identität in zeiten des übergangs, wenn die identität in frage gestellt wird, in den vordergrund rückt, hat sich die forschung hauptsächlich auf angehende lehrkräfte konzentriert (mercer & kostoulas, 2018). der artikel befasst sich mit einer lehrergruppe, die bisher noch nicht erforscht worden ist, deren identität jedoch problematisch und ein möglicher gegenstand des ringens sein könnte. auf der grundlage eines narrativen ansatzes wird in form einer fallstudie untersucht, wie zwei erfahrene lehrkräfte (mit vier bzw. mehreren jahren berufserfahrung), welche für den dienst im staatlichen schulwesen ausgebildet wurden und nun aus verschiedenen gründen außerhalb dieses umfelds arbeiten, ihre identität als sprachlehrer auf bauen. die ergebnisse zeigen, wie wichtig die eigenen erfahrungen der lehrer als lerner für ihre identitätsentwicklung https://doi.org/10.1080/13540600309378 tapsla.13190 p. 22/22 kirsten hempkin sind bzw. wie emotionen ihren identitätswandel begleiten und vorantreiben, während sie auf einem unsicheren beruf lichen weg nach stabilität und status suchen. schlüsselwörter: identität der sprachlehrer, ringen um identität, erfahrene lehrkräfte, staatliches schulwesen, privates schulwesen style guide for the authors please note that we are changing from apa 6th edition to newer 7th edition. authors are requested to submit manuscripts formatted in apa style (american psychological association, 7th ed.). all manuscripts must include an abstract in english (maximum of 250 words). after the abstract please provide keywords. main text: 12 times new roman long citations (more than 40 words): 10 times new roman, indent by 1 tab either side, one empty line above and below, no quotation marks. 1.5 spacing apa headings level format 1 centered, boldface, uppercase and lowercase heading 2 left-aligned, boldface, uppercase and lowercase heading 3 indented, boldface, lowercase heading with a period. begin body text after the period. 4 indented, boldface, italicized, lowercase heading with a period. begin body text after the period. 5 indented, italicized, lowercase heading with a period. begin body text after the period. in-text citations (examples): author’s name and date in brackets: the experience of critical incidents and effective ref lection upon them allows teachers to control their classroom actions more consciously and create critical events (ce’s), which were described earlier as intended, planned and controlled (woods, 1993). woods (1993) believes that critical events are structured and occur in well-defined staged of conceptualization . . . two authors: (ballantyne & packer, 1995) as ballantyne and packer (1995) demonstrate … three authors: (barker, callahan, & ferreira, 2009) subsequent use: (barker et al., 2009) six authors or more: lorenz et al. (1998) argued… (lorenz et al., 1998) authors whose last names are the same: (d. francis, 1985; h. francis, 2004) style guide for the authors190 online sources (unpaginated), provide paragraph or section title instead: (peterson & clark, 1978, para. 4) (moss, springer, & dehr, 2008, discussion section, para. 1) no author, provide shortened title: (“primary teachers talking,” 2007) (reflective practice, 2005, pp. 12−25) secondary citations: smith (as cited in maxx & meyer, 2000) noted that “there is . . . .” citation within citation: as it has been noted that “there is no relevance . . . (smith, 2005)” (maxx & meyer, 2000, p. 129). & vs. and: as smithson and stones (1999) demonstrated. . . . . . as has been shown (smithson & stones, 1999) . . . references selected examples (for more consult apa manual 7th ed.): book, one author: goldberg, a. (2006). constructions at work. oxford university press. book, two authors and more: jarvis, s., & pavlenko, a. (2008). crosslinguistic influence in language cognition. routledge. translated book: freud, s. (1960). jokes and their relation to the unconscious. (j. strachey, trans.). routledge & k. paul. (original work published 1905). edited book: flowerdew, j., brock, m., & hsia, s. (eds.). (1992). second language teacher education. city polytechnic of hong kong. chapter in an edited book: goldberg, a., & casenhiser, d. (2008). construction learning and second language acquisition. in p. robinson & n. c. ellis (eds.), handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition (pp. 197–215). routledge. article in a journal: hammarberg, b. (2010). the languages of the multilingual. some conceptual and terminological issues. international review of applied linguistics in language teaching, 48, 91–104. article online: tully, k., & bolshakov, v. y. (2010). emotional enhancement of memory: how norepinephrine enables synaptic plasticity. molecular brain, 13 may. retrieved from: http://www.molecularbrain.com/content/ style guide for the authors 191 bakker, a. b., hakanen, j. j., demerouti, e., & xanthopoulou, d. (2007). job resources boost work engagement, particularly when job demands are high. journal of educational psychology, 99(2), 274–284. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.99.2.274 magazines online: miller, g. (2014, september 4). cinematic cuts exploit how your brain edits what you see. wired. retrieved from: http://wired.com/ smith, a. (2007, june 12). dying languages. the western star. retrieved from: http://www. thewesternstar.com/ blog: palmer, p. (2001). now i become myself. yes magazine, blog post, 31 may. retrieved from: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/working-for-life/now-i-become-myself e-books: bolande, v. u. (1981). on the psychology of humor. retrieved from: http://www.uf lib.uf l.edu /ufdc/ufdc.aspx?n=palmm&c=psa1&m=hd2j&i=45367 conference proceedings: souleles, n., & pillar, c. (eds.). (2014). proceedings from the first international conference on the use of ipads in higher education. paphos: cyprus university of technology. doctoral dissertation: churchwell, j. (2005). becoming an academic: factors that inf luence a graduate student’s identity commitment (doctoral dissertation). university of michigan, ann arbor, mi. reachel, l. h. (2001). native languages and toponyms: origins, meaning, and use (doctoral dissertation). available from proquest dissertation and theses database. (document id 1964749161). http://www.thewesternstar.com/ http://www.thewesternstar.com/ http://www.uflib.ufl.edu /ufdc/ufdc.aspx?n=palmm&c=psa1&m=hd2j&i=45367 http://www.uflib.ufl.edu /ufdc/ufdc.aspx?n=palmm&c=psa1&m=hd2j&i=45367 style guide for the authors please note that we are changing from apa 6th edition to newer 7th edition. authors are requested to submit manuscripts formatted in apa style (american psychological association, 7th ed.). all manuscripts must include an abstract in english (maximum of 250 words). after the abstract please provide keywords. main text: 12 times new roman long citations (more than 40 words): 10 times new roman, indent by 1 tab either side, one empty line above and below, no quotation marks. 1.5 spacing apa headings level format 1 centered, boldface, uppercase and lowercase heading 2 left-aligned, boldface, uppercase and lowercase heading 3 indented, boldface, lowercase heading with a period. begin body text after the period. 4 indented, boldface, italicized, lowercase heading with a period. begin body text after the period. 5 indented, italicized, lowercase heading with a period. begin body text after the period. in-text citations (examples): author’s name and date in brackets: the experience of critical incidents and effective ref lection upon them allows teachers to control their classroom actions more consciously and create critical events (ce’s), which were described earlier as intended, planned and controlled (woods, 1993). woods (1993) believes that critical events are structured and occur in well-defined staged of conceptualization . . . two authors: (ballantyne & packer, 1995) as ballantyne and packer (1995) demonstrate … three authors: (barker, callahan, & ferreira, 2009) subsequent use: (barker et al., 2009) six authors or more: lorenz et al. (1998) argued… (lorenz et al., 1998) authors whose last names are the same: (d. francis, 1985; h. francis, 2004) style guide for the authors194 online sources (unpaginated), provide paragraph or section title instead: (peterson & clark, 1978, para. 4) (moss, springer, & dehr, 2008, discussion section, para. 1) no author, provide shortened title: (“primary teachers talking,” 2007) (reflective practice, 2005, pp. 12−25) secondary citations: smith (as cited in maxx & meyer, 2000) noted that “there is . . . .” citation within citation: as it has been noted that “there is no relevance . . . (smith, 2005)” (maxx & meyer, 2000, p. 129). & vs. and: as smithson and stones (1999) demonstrated. . . . . . as has been shown (smithson & stones, 1999) . . . references selected examples (for more consult apa manual 7th ed.): book, one author: goldberg, a. (2006). constructions at work. oxford university press. book, two authors and more: jarvis, s., & pavlenko, a. (2008). crosslinguistic influence in language cognition. routledge. translated book: freud, s. (1960). jokes and their relation to the unconscious. (j. strachey, trans.). routledge & k. paul. (original work published 1905). edited book: flowerdew, j., brock, m., & hsia, s. (eds.). (1992). second language teacher education. city polytechnic of hong kong. chapter in an edited book: goldberg, a., & casenhiser, d. (2008). construction learning and second language acquisition. in p. robinson & n. c. ellis (eds.), handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition (pp. 197–215). routledge. article in a journal: hammarberg, b. (2010). the languages of the multilingual. some conceptual and terminological issues. international review of applied linguistics in language teaching, 48, 91–104. article online: tully, k., & bolshakov, v. y. (2010). emotional enhancement of memory: how norepinephrine enables synaptic plasticity. molecular brain, 13 may. retrieved from: http://www.molecularbrain.com/content/ style guide for the authors 195 bakker, a. b., hakanen, j. j., demerouti, e., & xanthopoulou, d. (2007). job resources boost work engagement, particularly when job demands are high. journal of educational psychology, 99(2), 274–284. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.99.2.274 magazines online: miller, g. (2014, september 4). cinematic cuts exploit how your brain edits what you see. wired. retrieved from: http://wired.com/ smith, a. (2007, june 12). dying languages. the western star. retrieved from: http://www. thewesternstar.com/ blog: palmer, p. (2001). now i become myself. yes magazine, blog post, 31 may. retrieved from: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/working-for-life/now-i-become-myself e-books: bolande, v. u. (1981). on the psychology of humor. retrieved from: http://www.uf lib.uf l.edu /ufdc/ufdc.aspx?n=palmm&c=psa1&m=hd2j&i=45367 conference proceedings: souleles, n., & pillar, c. (eds.). (2014). proceedings from the first international conference on the use of ipads in higher education. paphos: cyprus university of technology. doctoral dissertation: churchwell, j. (2005). becoming an academic: factors that inf luence a graduate student’s identity commitment (doctoral dissertation). university of michigan, ann arbor, mi. reachel, l. h. (2001). native languages and toponyms: origins, meaning, and use (doctoral dissertation). available from proquest dissertation and theses database. (document id 1964749161). http://www.thewesternstar.com/ http://www.thewesternstar.com/ http://www.uflib.ufl.edu /ufdc/ufdc.aspx?n=palmm&c=psa1&m=hd2j&i=45367 http://www.uflib.ufl.edu /ufdc/ufdc.aspx?n=palmm&c=psa1&m=hd2j&i=45367 style guide for the authors please note that we are changing from apa 6th edition to newer 7th edition. authors are requested to submit manuscripts formatted in apa style (american psychological association, 7th ed.). all manuscripts must include an abstract in english (maximum of 250 words). after the abstract please provide keywords. main text: 12 times new roman long citations (more than 40 words): 10 times new roman, indent by 1 tab either side, one empty line above and below, no quotation marks. 1.5 spacing format of headings the following table demonstrates how to format headings in apa style. level format 1 centered, bold, title case headingtext begins as a new paragraph. 2 flush left, bold, title case headingtext begins as a new paragraph. 3 flush left, bold italic, title case headingtext begins as a new paragraph. 4 indented, bold, title case heading, ending with a period. text begins on the same line and continues as a regular paragraph. 5 indented, bold italic, title case heading, ending with a period. text begins on the same line and continues as a regular paragraph. note. in title case, most words are capitalized. in-text citations (examples): author’s name and date in brackets: the experience of critical incidents and effective ref lection upon them allows teachers to control their classroom actions more consciously and create critical events (ce’s), which were described earlier as intended, planned and controlled (woods, 1993). woods (1993) believes that critical events are structured and occur in well-defined staged of conceptualization . . . two authors: (ballantyne & packer, 1995) as ballantyne and packer (1995) demonstrate … three authors: (barker, callahan, & ferreira, 2009) subsequent use: (barker et al., 2009) six authors or more: lorenz et al. (1998) argued… (lorenz et al., 1998) authors whose last names are the same: (d. francis, 1985; h. francis, 2004) online sources (unpaginated), provide paragraph or section title instead: (peterson & clark, 1978, para. 4) (moss, springer, & dehr, 2008, discussion section, para. 1) no author, provide shortened title: (“primary teachers talking,” 2007) (reflective practice, 2005, pp. 12−25) secondary citations: smith (as cited in maxx & meyer, 2000) noted that “there is . . . .” citation within citation: as it has been noted that “there is no relevance . . . (smith, 2005)” (maxx & meyer, 2000, p. 129). & vs. and: as smithson and stones (1999) demonstrated. . . . . . as has been shown (smithson & stones, 1999) . . . references selected examples (for more consult apa manual 7th ed.): book, one author: goldberg, a. (2006). constructions at work. oxford university press. book, two authors and more: jarvis, s., & pavlenko, a. (2008). crosslinguistic influence in language cognition. routledge. translated book: freud, s. (1960). jokes and their relation to the unconscious. (j. strachey, trans.). routledge & k. paul. (original work published 1905). edited book: flowerdew, j., brock, m., & hsia, s. (eds.). (1992). second language teacher education. city polytechnic of hong kong. chapter in an edited book: goldberg, a., & casenhiser, d. (2008). construction learning and second language acquisition. in p. robinson & n. c. ellis (eds.), handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition (pp. 197–215). routledge. article in a journal: hammarberg, b. (2010). the languages of the multilingual. some conceptual and terminological issues. international review of applied linguistics in language teaching, 48, 91–104. article online: tully, k., & bolshakov, v. y. (2010). emotional enhancement of memory: how norepinephrine enables synaptic plasticity. molecular brain, 13 may. retrieved from: http://www.molecularbrain.com/content/ bakker, a. b., hakanen, j. j., demerouti, e., & xanthopoulou, d. (2007). job resources boost work engagement, particularly when job demands are high. journal of educational psychology, 99(2), 274–284. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.99.2.274 magazines online: miller, g. (2014, september 4). cinematic cuts exploit how your brain edits what you see. wired. retrieved from: http://wired.com/ smith, a. (2007, june 12). dying languages. the western star. retrieved from: http://www. thewesternstar.com/ blog: palmer, p. (2001). now i become myself. yes magazine, blog post, 31 may. retrieved from: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/working-for-life/now-i-become-myself e-books: bolande, v. u. (1981). on the psychology of humor. retrieved from: http://www.uf lib.uf l.edu /ufdc/ufdc.aspx?n=palmm&c=psa1&m=hd2j&i=45367 conference proceedings: souleles, n., & pillar, c. (eds.). (2014). proceedings from the first international conference on the use of ipads in higher education. paphos: cyprus university of technology. doctoral dissertation: churchwell, j. (2005). becoming an academic: factors that influence a graduate student’s identity commitment (doctoral dissertation). university of michigan, ann arbor, mi. reachel, l. h. (2001). native languages and toponyms: origins, meaning, and use (doctoral dissertation). available from proquest dissertation and theses database. (document id 1964749161). http://www.thewesternstar.com/ http://www.thewesternstar.com/ http://www.uflib.ufl.edu /ufdc/ufdc.aspx?n=palmm&c=psa1&m=hd2j&i=45367 http://www.uflib.ufl.edu /ufdc/ufdc.aspx?n=palmm&c=psa1&m=hd2j&i=45367 theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 8 (1), 2022, pp. 179–182 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.10425 david singleton and larissa aronin (eds.), twelve lectures on multilingualism. bristol: multilingual matters, 2019, isbn 978-1-78892-205-0 this timely and most welcome handbook includes a state-of-the-art overview of multilingualism research from a variety of angles and perspectives. it is organized around four main parts dealing with (i) multilingualism in society and education, (ii) aspects of individual multilingualism, (iii) the psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics of multilingualism, and (iv) forms of multilingualism in the past and present. part 1 of the book on educational and societal perspectives includes four lectures. the first two chapters provide a comprehensive description of what multilingualism entails. aronin presents defining features of a very complex phenomenon. she refers to historical and current multilingualism. as aronin puts it, language use has changed dramatically as some languages are more dominant than others. this idea leads to the notion of dominant language constellations (dlc) also presented in lecture 2. aronin and gabryś-barker both refer to dlc as a new stable pattern of organization that shows the languages employed in a given speech community and how these are used. this dynamic description accounts for reality of language use both at an individual and societal level. as argued by gabryś-barker, considering dlc as an approach may change actual perspectives in research. the way participants and communities are described in bilingualism and multilingualism studies would be more realistic and could thus help explain patterns of multilingual language acquisition and use. interestingly, gabryś-barker raises another important contribution of multilingualism research to applied linguistics in general, namely, that of qualitative methodology. currently, many scholars argue for the need to use mixed-methods and it often involves data triangulation and the incluhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.10425 pilar safont180 sion of qualitative data collection procedures. introspection techniques and narratives may show patterns of acquisition that would be invisible in plain statistical data. research by gabryś-barker (2013, 2017), which also examines the use of metaphors, is an excellent example of this fact. in addition to multilingualism methodology, this second chapter deals with key concepts that help the reader understand the scope of multilingualism. one of these concepts is herdina and jessner’s dynamic model of multilingualism (2002) which is also mentioned in lecture 3. hufeisen and jessner tackle the psycholinguistics of multiple language learning by presenting research to date and challenges for future studies. these authors argue for the need to create new guidelines in teacher training and language instruction. the final chapter of this first part of the volume also deals with language teaching and it considers norms for language education. cenoz and gorter refer to minority languages in educational policies as one type of multilingual education (see gorter, zenotz, & cenoz, 2014). content and language integrated learning (clil) is described when tackling the educational framework of majority language speakers. as raised in their work (cenoz, 2015), clil may be seen as an effective way to learn a third language but there is still a need to include all learners’ languages. part 2 of the volume tackles individual multilingualism throughout four lectures. edwards in lecture 5 raises two main points. on the one hand, the author states that languages do not evolve identically in multilinguals. in fact, factors like motivation, attitudes or levels of fluency may influence their development. on the other hand, edwards challenges the direct connection between multilingualism and intelligence. the repertoires that multilinguals possess and their interaction are the focus of chapter 6. de angelis examines the factors that boost cross-linguistic influence (cli) in language learning. in so doing, the author points to recency of use, second language status and typological proximity. one of the most powerful factors in language acquisition is motivation, and research on this topic has largely focused on l2 as argued by ushida in lecture 7. this author refers to notions like identity that may best embrace the complex and individual experiences of multilingual learners. another factor that has raised much interest is that of age. lecture 8 is devoted to age and multilingualism. according to muñoz and singleton, who have largely investigated this topic (muñoz & singleton, 2011), significant exposure may be responsible for better acquisition rates in younger learners. they also refer to the great influence of attitudes and motivation, as well as the key role of quality in multilingual schools. interestingly, these authors conclude that learners of all ages may become successful multilingual individuals. parts 3 and 4 of the volume include two lectures each. festman deals with the psycholinguistics of multilingualism in lecture 9 of the present volume. david singleton and larissa aronin (eds.), twelve lectures on multilingualism… 181 she describes a number of concepts used in psycholinguistics together with some assumptions and empirical evidence. the author highlights some open research areas that refer to the representation of l1 or l3 and the extent to which these may differ. in line with ushida’s recommendation (see lecture 7), festman argues for the use of mixed-methods in multilingualism research. kadyamusuma, higby, and obler tackle the neurolinguistics of multilingualism and they present evidence against the idea that languages are stored in different compartments in the multilingual brain. these authors also refer to interesting findings on the cortical organization of language representation and its relationship with dementia. forms of past and present multilingualism are included in the last part of the volume. lecture 11 deals with historical multilingualism. braunmüller comments on the traces of covert multilingualism and he raises the possibility of comparing those who had latin as l2 during the roman empire and current l2 learners. the presence and spread of english as a lingua franca and the fact that its use is often restricted to academia or the media in some sociolinguistics contexts may be one of the causes of current receptive multilingualism. this is the last topic of the book and it is examined by ten thije in lecture 12. as the editors state in the introduction of the book, we live in a multilingual world where citizens from a variety of cultures and identities interact, learn languages and are virtually connected. research no longer compares native and non-native speakers of a given language but it now focuses on intercultural speakers with dominant linguistic repertoires that vary across time. the complexity of multilingualism that was raised by hufeisen, cenoz, and jessner (2001) almost two decades ago is now also the norm in l3 research. we now know more about the peculiarities of multilingual language learners and speakers from psycholinguistic, educational or sociolinguistic perspectives and this volume is a wonderful source to introduce graduate students, scholars or interested parties to that knowledge. the strength of the volume also lies in the outstanding scholars who have contributed to this book. while all authors are widely recognized scholars, i may specifically refer to the three founders of the international association of multilingualism, jasone cenoz, ulrike jessner, and britta hufeisen as well as co-founding members like larisa aronin, david singleton, danuta gabryś-barker whose work has inspired that of other scholars with an interest in the teaching, acquisition and use of languages beyond the second or third one. twelve lectures on multilingualism is a must-read in any graduate or postgraduate course on languages in contact, multilingual education or third language acquisition. this book is also a great excuse to review what has already been done and the challenges that remain in this exciting, innovative, pilar safont182 and interdisciplinary area of study that has captivated many of us, that of multilingualism. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2130-2409 pilar safont universitat jaume i (castelló – spain) references gabryś-barker, d. (2013). face to face with one’s thoughts: on thinking multilingually. in m. pawlak and l. aronin (eds.), essential topics in applied lingusitics and multilingualism: studies in honour of david singleton (pp. 185–204). springer. gabryś-barker, d. (2017). new approaches to multilingualism research. focus on metaphors and simils. in d. gabryś-barker, d. gałajda, a. wojtaszek, & p. zakrajewski (eds.), multicultiralism, multilingualism and the self (pp. 77–95). springer. cenoz, j. hufeisen, b., & jessner, u. (2001). looking beyond second language acquisition: studies in triand multilingualism. stauffenburg. cenoz, j. (2015). content-based instruction and content and language integrated learning. the same or different? language, culture and curriculum, 28, 1–24. gorter, d. zenotz, & cenoz, j. (2014). minority languages and multilingual education. springer. muñoz, c., & singleton, d. (2011). a critical review of age-related research on l2 ultimate attainment. language teaching, 44, 1–35. theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (2), 2023, pp. 1/4 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.15148 antony hoyte-west https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4410-6520 independent scholar, united kingdom zoltán dörnyei, katerina mentzelopoulos, lessons from exceptional language learners who have achieved nativelike proficiency: motivation, cognition and identity multilingual matters, 2022, xviii + 196 pp. the reviewed volume, lessons from exceptional language learners who have achieved nativelike proficiency: motivation, cognition and identity, by zoltán dörnyei and katarina mentzelopoulos, forms part of the series in the psychology of language learning and teaching (multilingual matters). one of the world’s leading figures in applied linguistics, zoltán dörnyei was professor at the university of nottingham (united kingdom) before his untimely passing in the summer of 2022. accordingly, as one of his last works, the current volume opens with an in memoriam by his co-author and doctoral student katerina mentzelopoulos, where she pays tribute to the scholar and the man whom she and many others held in such high esteem. though it of course depends on the context and type of interaction, one of the most appreciated accolades received by non-native l2 learners is to be unexpectedly mistaken for a native speaker. indeed, with native-level proficiency often seen as the pinnacle of linguistic achievement by many language students and their teachers, it is perhaps surprising that research relating to the psychological and developmental features of such highly-skilled language learners has attracted scant attention from the scholarly community (dörnyei & mentzelopoulos, 2022, p. xii). the work’s introduction outlines the origin and novelty of the idea which led to the research project as well as information regarding the basic selection procedure for the interviewees (for example, heritage language learners were ineligible, as were learners who had mastered an l2 that they had been surrounded by during their childhood/teenage years). in addition, some preliminary https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.15148 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4410-6520 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8767-9332 tapsla.15148 p. 2/4 antony hoyte-west remarks on the broad approach taken over the course of the subsequent twelve chapters are also given. noting the wealth of participant data obtained during the study, the introduction also contrasts the reviewed work’s more analytical approach to motivation, cognition, and identity with the more narrativebased approach taken in its interconnected yet independent companion volume (mentzelopoulos & dörnyei, 2022), which centres primarily on the voices and stories of these exceptional language learners. the first three chapters provide the necessary background and context which are the foundation for the study. as such, chapter 1 locates the analysis within the framework of past research on these exceptional learners. acknowledging previous work done from a linguistic perspective, the authors then review the relevant literature on previous psychological and developmental studies pertaining to the processes, limitations, and characteristics of these nativelike learners. this is supplemented by an overview of other research that exceptional learners have participated in, but where their nativelike skills have not been the major focus (for example, in studies exploring the critical period hypothesis or in more general research on aptitude and talent within language learning). the second chapter outlines the methodological approach undertaken, with information on how the interviewees were obtained, as well as information on how the qualitative data was collected and analysed. comprehensive demographic and linguistic information regarding the 30 participants is presented in a convenient table (dörnyei & mentzelopoulos, 2022, pp. 23–26) which is a useful point of reference as the book progresses. with the title of the book explicitly referring to the concept of nativelikeness (and by extension, to the native speaker, chapter 3 tackles this at-times contentious aspect by considering relevant interpretations of this concept as presented in the theoretical literature as well as by the study participants themselves. indeed, a subsection of this chapter (dörnyei & mentzelopoulos, 2022, pp. 35–39) focuses on the interviewees’ own perception of those instances where they had been assumed to be native speakers of the l2. the next seven chapters shine the spotlight firmly on the participants in this study, each adopting a similar structure of first presenting the salient aspects, before a closing discussion subsection provides additional analysis. this is supplemented by text boxes (ranging from half a page to a whole page in size) which present short examples taken from the relevant experiences of a given interviewee. in chapter 4, entitled a favourable set-up, the importance of environmental factors is underlined, including indirect and direct linguistic exposure through the media, family connections, as well as to broader social and societal aspects including globalisation and the seeming ubiquity of english encountered in certain non-anglophone countries. chapter 5 outlines how participants developed a bond with the selected l2, discussed as “one of the most important productive features” (dörnyei & mentzelopoulos, 2022, p. 44) zoltán dörnyei, katerina mentzelopoulos… tapsla.15148 p. 3/4 of the interviewees’ narratives. indeed, some of the different aspects which were presented and discussed included cultural sources such as literature and music, direct contact with the l2 and its speakers, as well as practical reasons such as education, leisure, or socializing. for some, this could even comprise grammatical or script-related characteristics of a given language. the sixth chapter shifts towards a cognitive focus, where the authors present and discuss various factors relating to personality, motivation, success, and so forth, also making the interesting observation that aspects of the study did not fully align with traditional approaches to language aptitude. chapter 7 examines nativelike pronunciation, examining it through various lens (e.g., via the l1, family influence, mimicry, musical training, social benefits, etc.). in analysing this phenomenon, the authors also posit that the lower priority of pronunciation in traditional l2 pedagogy may be the reason why many l2 learners might not realize their full capabilities in this area (dörnyei & mentzelopoulos, 2022, p. 104). chapter 8 highlights the efforts made and strategies employed by these nativelike learners to achieve their skills, including even by those who seemingly absorbed the l2 in a spongelike fashion. in this regard, the importance of creativity and awareness within learning patterns is also presented. as such, the authors observe that there are multiple “approaches that can lead to successful learning, provided that one takes a flexible approach” (dörnyei & mentzelopoulos, 2022, p. 114). in the ninth chapter of the volume, robert c. gardner’s (1985) theory of language learning motivation is used as a springboard for exploring personal and professional relationship-related and social aspects of these exceptional language learners. dörnyei’s (2020) framework is used to structure chapter 10 of the volume, which examines the source of the persistence that the interviewees drew upon during their language-related quests. using several automotive analogies as a metaphor (i.e., that the language learning journey is similar to going on a lengthy trip by car), this chapter presents the participants’ experiences and insights accordingly. in the penultimate chapter, the focus is on how interviewees view themselves within the context of their l2 proficiency, as the title confidence, comfort, and ownership suggests. chapter 12 highlights the concept of identity, the third element of the book’s subtitle. through analysing this multi-layered and often blurred notion, the authors seek to understand what “membership in the highly selective club of nativelike second language l2 speakers” (dörnyei & mentzelopoulos, 2022, p. 154) signifies to the interviewees. the book’s conclusion draws together the various strands of motivation, cognition, and identity, and distils the insights gained through the study into eight succinct and impactful points. in terms of dimensions, lessons from exceptional language learners who have achieved nativelike proficiency: motivation, cognition and identity comes in at 196 pages of text, including an appendix containing the interview tapsla.15148 p. 4/4 antony hoyte-west questions as well as a list of the over 250 works cited and an index, with more information regarding the participants’ own narratives contained in the companion volume (mentzelopoulos & dörnyei, 2022). as has been outlined above, the book is concise, clearly-structured, and extremely well-thought out, with chapter subheadings making the volume suitable for dipping into and out of as needed. indeed, the breadth and depth of the new perspectives contained in the work mean that this volume is highly recommended for all scholars interested in any aspect of applied linguistics and second language acquisition. in the opinion of this reviewer, it would also be of relevance for language teachers and for any advanced language learners seeking to gain academic perspectives on how to proceed beyond the cefr c2 level (for example, student interpreters seeking to improve a retour language). hence, lessons from exceptional language learners who have achieved nativelike proficiency: motivation, cognition and identity is a ground-breaking work with immense potential to influence the future scope of research in this valuable and important area. references dörnyei, z. (2020). innovations and challenges in language learning motivation. routledge. dörnyei, z., & mentzelopoulos, k. (2022). lessons from exceptional language learners who have achieved nativelike proficiency: motivation, cognition and identity. multilingual matters. gardner, r. c (1985). social psychology and second language learning: the role of attitudes and motivation. edward arnold. mentzelopoulos, k., & dörnyei, z. (2022). stories from exceptional language learners who have achieved nativelike proficiency. multilingual matters. cover photo: “big_blue” by max iter (retrieved from www.f lickr.com) copy editing: gabriela marszołek proofreading: joanna zwierzyńska typesetting: tomasz kiełkowski, marek zagniński cover preparation for printing: paulina dubiel electronic version is the original one. the journal was previously published in printed form with the issn 2450-5455 the journal is distributed free of charge issn 2451-2125 published by wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego ul. bankowa 12b, 40-007 katowice www.wydawnictwo.us.edu.pl e-mail: wydawnictwo@us.edu.pl first impression. printed sheets: 14.75. publishing sheets: 17.5. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ cover photo: “big_blue” by max iter (retrieved from www.f lickr.com) copy editing: gabriela marszołek proofreading: joanna zwierzyńska typesetting: barbara wilk translation of summaries into german: magdalena podraza copyright © 2018 by wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego all rights reserved issn 2450-5455 (print edition) issn 2451-2125 (digital edition) published by wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego ul. bankowa 12b, 40-007 katowice www.wydawnictwo.us.edu.pl e-mail: wydawus@us.edu.pl first impression. no. of copies: 50 + 20. printed sheets: 9.25. publishing sheets: 10.5. offset paper grade, 90 g. price 20 zł (+ vat) printing and binding volumina.pl daniel krzanowski ul. księcia witolda 7–9, 71-063 szczecin theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 8 (2), 2022, pp. 1–6 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12378 larissa aronin, eva vetter (eds.), dominant language constellations approach in education and language acquisition springer, 2021 (ebook), 240 pp. isbn 978-3-030-70768-2 dominant language constellations approach in education and language acquisition is the second volume in springer’s educational linguistics series on dominant language constellations (dlc); the first volume is titled dominant language constellations: a new perspective on multilingualism (2020), edited by joseph lo bianco and larissa aronin. both present the concept of dominant language constellations (dlc). dlc are a group of an individual’s or a group’s most important, thus most used, languages that function as a unit in their multilingual environment. the dominant language constellation includes only the most expedient languages for a person, rather than all the languages known to them, as would be the case in language repertoire. unlike a language repertoire, a dlc comprises the languages which, together, perform the most vital functions of language (aronin, 2016, p. 196). in the second volume, this definition of dlc is reconsidered more in detail in the first chapter (lo bianco) and the second one (aronin); the concept is the main subject of the book. the aim of this second volume is to apply dlc in school and in teacher training and to show how the concept of dlc can reveal processes of multilingual and language education, without claiming completeness. the book is divided into a theoretical introduction and three parts according to different domains. in the first part, dlc in language educahttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12378 lisa marie brinkmann2 tion policy and school practices are discussed. in the second part, the concept of dlc is applied to teacher training, and in the last part, innovative ways of researching dlc and identity are found through the use of narratives and visualizations. in his introduction titled literacy learning and language education: dominant language constellations and contemporary multilingualism, joseph lo bianco uses the concept of dlc to apply it to literacy teaching. this connection is made to understand the impact contemporary multilingualism has on education and how literacy teaching manifests itself in the multilingual classroom. in a first step, he describes dlc as an analytical category in which languages are organized in constellations and as an opportunity for adequate simplification of multilingualism. in a second step, he adapts the dlc approach to literacy which he defines as a “complex fusion of audio, visual, image, color, movement and design” (p. 7) and underlines the importance of developing multilingual literacy in a gradually converging (“flatter”) world. after briefly describing the book chapters one by one, he concludes that all the contributions enable an academic examination of dlc that becomes increasingly important in today’s society. in the second chapter titled dominant language constellations in education: patterns and visualisations, larissa aronin explains that the concept of dlc, which includes a reduced number of languages (usually three), is complementary to the concept of language repertoire that includes all the languages known. dlc represent an interconnected and complex system of the most expedient languages. she views dlc as context dependent patterns and shows how these patterns allow dealing with various factors in multilingual education, for example, language policy and education, teaching third/fourth/…nth languages or teaching immigrants, but also a language’s association with cultures and mentalities. in the last part, she presents models and visualizations of dlc patterns for multilingual education that capture dlc more easily than other methods. visualizations as pedagogical appropriate designs of a person’s dlc are dlc maps and 3d models that represent the multidimensionality of multilingualism. in her chapter about language education policy through a dlc lens: the case of urban multilingualism, eva vetter addresses language education policies in the urban context. more specifically, she researches the european language education policy in three different lower secondary schools in the multilingual and superdiverse city of vienna. she presents data on formal language practice through analyzing languages present at 60 schools’ websites to select the three most diverse language profiles. these profiles will then be further explored through interviews with the school’s principal about their perception and handling of multilingualism. in the last step, she researches less formalized language use by teachers and students through classroom ob larissa aronin, eva vetter (eds.), dominant language constellations… 3 servation in the least multilingual of the three schools. the results show that most websites are dominated by monolingualism, and that principals perceive their schools as multilingual although they follow a language policy that results in activities limited in addressing linguistic diversity. the classroom observations show that pupils make use of their dlc and the epistemic function of multilingualism. the results indicate that dlc can be used to understand language policy and its planning, involving bottom-up and top-down structures in educational language policy. caterina sugrañes, author of the chapter promoting plurilingual competences in primary schools in barcelona: a dominant language constellation approach to teaching and learning languages, discusses the benefits of using dlc to understand multilingual learning and teaching contexts. she exemplifies this based on a five-month study (including pre-post quantitative data and qualitative data such as interviews with the pupils), during which 45 primary school pupils in barcelona worked on english story books and translated them into the languages they knew. her results show that by using such a translanguaging practice to illustrate pupils’ dlc in learning, pupils become more aware of the languages around them and their motivation for using a specific language, especially catalan, was viewed more positively after the intervention. the results indicate that pupils’ academic performances and teachers’ positive attitudes towards teaching language increased resorting to this intervention. in his chapter family language policy and dominant language constellations: a canadian perspective, nikolay slavkov adapts a dlc lens to family language policy in the context of the officially bilingual (french/ english) province of ontario. more than being officially bilingual, the province is multilingual including heritage and indigenous languages. family language policy involves the transmission of minority language(s) and the choice of one of the two official languages of schooling. his empirical data derive from a mixed methods study with questionnaires from 170 bilingual/multilingual pupils and interviews with 20 selected families (with one parent representing the family). the results show that the pupils’ dlc is influenced by the family language policy in terms of number and choice of languages in the constellation, active vs. passive use of these, and the dlc dynamics. the last chapter of the first part (language educational policies and school practices) is titled educational and career opportunities for refugeebackground adults in norway: a dlc perspective. the authors anna krulatz and anne dahl refer to norwegian language training for adult refugees. by means of interviews, they compare the actual refugees’ dlc—composed of individual language(s) and norwegian while lacking english, the most important foreign language in norway—to the dlcs their teachers are aiming at, and to the provided language offers at governmental websites. the results attest to a discrepancy between the refugees’ dlc, the dlcs teachers aim at, lisa marie brinkmann4 and the provided language offers that lies in the norwegian authorities’ denial of offering english language training, which would contribute to success in education, and possibly to a more favorable profession and financial situation. the second part consists of two contributions. in the first one, titled embracing multilingualism in teaching practicum in finland? dlc as a tool for uncovering individual and institutional multilingualism, mikaela björklund and siv björklund explore university teachers’ dlc in constitutionally bilingual (finnish/swedish) finland. the participants lead a teaching practicum and work at two different universities, one with swedish as the teaching language and one with finnish. they were given blank dlc maps in which they should visualize the languages they use before they commented on them via think-aloud protocols. the teachers’ dlc differ slightly between the two universities, although there is a general tendency for a rather stable dominant language constellation (including the languages swedish, finish, and english) and variation in the language affordances upon personal awareness, interest and classes taught. the other contribution to the second part is the dominant language constellations of immigrant teacher trainees in israel: russian, hebrew and english by judith yoel. the author explores the dynamic community dlc of seven english teacher trainees from the former soviet union who immigrated to israel in the last four years. she gave them guiding questions about their dlc to encourage narration (narrative method). participants’ dlc differ slightly; however, there is a common importance given to mastering israel’s national language, hebrew, as well as a common initial benefit associated to mastering english as a transition language. nevertheless, the language’s functions, for example, english serving as a lingua franca in daily life, shift according to the mastery of hebrew. this shift, or interplay, is also closely linked to a shift in immigrant teacher trainees’ identity. three contributions form the last part where narratives and visualizations enable the immersion in individual dlc and identities. in the chapter titled exploring identities and life stories of multilingual transnational couples through the lens of multilinguality and dominant language constellations, anna krulatz and jennifer duggan discuss the identities and experiences of five multilingual, transnational couples residing in norway by employing the concept of multilinguality and dlc. multilinguality refers inter alia to the complexity, variation, varying functionalities, and balance of multilingual actions. data from all ten participants were gathered through a language use questionnaire and dlc maps to investigate changes in their dlc and shifts in their identities. all multilingual identities are highly complex and multifaceted. they depend on different factors: changing attitudes towards languages and cultures as well as individual language trajectories due to international mobility—including the length of residence in the target community. larissa aronin, eva vetter (eds.), dominant language constellations… 5 sílvia melo-pfeifer’s contribution, titled understanding dominant language constellations through analysis of visual linguistic autobiographies by foreign language student teachers in germany represents a description and analysis of the dlc from 64 spanish and french student teachers at the university of hamburg through linguistic autobiographies drawn by themselves. these autobiographies enable the identification of the languages that form part of the dlc in both cohorts. she understands dlc as a dynamic and complex system, that is, a system that undergoes constant change and reorganizes itself according to change and interaction with the environment. the corpus consists of 31 visual linguistic autobiographies from french student teachers and 34 from spanish student teachers. quantitative analysis of the visualized languages shows that the linguistic dispensation varies. additionally, selected drawings are analyzed qualitatively viewing dlc as a dynamic system that depends on the individual life story, but also on the curricular language offer at school. dlc are based on the language policies at school, in the family, and in professionalization (latent dlc) and do not differ between the groups. this shows that dlc depend on the ecology of languages in the world and the national educational language policies. the last chapter of the book by guðrún gísladótti is titled languages as ways of being: the linguistic biography of a nordic nomad. gísladótti explains her ever-changing dlc in the realm of her multilingual repertoire. she describes the languages she learned (starting with her first language, that is, icelandic), referring to the emotions she has about them and the role they take in her life. she divides her chapter into the languages in her homeland and into the languages away from her home where cultural experience and autonomous language learning play an essential role and feelings like “i am a different self, when there” (p. 232) emerge. in the summary of her linguistic autobiography, gísladótti relates that her dlc changes according to where she lives, where she works, and with whom she communicates. in both volumes, the concept of dlc is commonly defined as the use of only the most important languages in the individuals’ repertoire and the concept is seen as adequate for superdiverse linguistic contexts. all the parts (dominant language constellations in language education policy and school practices; dominant language constellations in teacher training; dominant language constellations and identity through narratives and visualizations) of the second volume can be understood as completing the parts current developments in dlc research and institutional expressions of dlc of the first volume by enhancing empirical studies (e.g., vetter’s research on language policy and slavkov’s insights into family language policies) and as continuing the first volume’s part personal and group experiences with dlc (e.g., björklund and björklund’s study on teacher trainers in finland and yoel’s contribution on the group dlc of russian immigrants in israel). thus, the volume dominant lisa marie brinkmann6 language constellations approach in education and language acquisition shows that the concept of dlc presents a theoretical framework in which diverse language studies can find their places. thanks to the concept, clear insights about multilinguals and multilingualism can be gained because the concept of dlc simplifies multilingualism and makes it researchable as is shown in the contributions. i would like to emphasize the rich data basis and the diverse data collection methods, that is, qualitative research and mixed-methods, in all empirical studies. additionally, the contributions show an integrated consideration of the context, by providing thorough information about the national or regional (diverse) linguistic context; discussions are also highly contextual. this second volume continues the ideas and results from the first volume since nearly all contributions provide applications of dlc in the school context, discuss educational language policy, and refer to contributions from the first volume. slavkov forecasts this application to the educational language policies as follows: “more explicit and targeted multilingual policies […] and awareness raising of multilingual values can contribute to an even larger proportion of the population having rich and interesting dlcs” (p. 105). in the end, this innovative book shows how dlc can be a point where society and individuals meet each other. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3217-7399 lisa marie brinkmann references aronin, l. (2016). multicompetence and dominant language constellation. in v. cook & l. wei (eds.), the cambridge handbook of linguistic multicompetence (pp. 142–163). cambridge university press. lo bianco, j., & aronin, l. (2020). dominant language constellations. a new perspective on multilingualism. springer. theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (1), 2023, pp. 1/18 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12096 ahmed al shlowiy http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8441-1987 english language and preparatory year institute, jubail, saudi arabia khaled layali http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3036-1953 dept. of languages and publishing, police academy, cairo, egypt efl teachers’ perceptions of a long shift to online learning in a saudi university during the coronavirus pandemic a b s t r a c t discovering the new variants of coronavirus by the end of 2020 pushed many countries to continue suspending universities and schools. a complete change to online learning seemed the only available option to continue education given the detection of new coronavirus variants. such a long time of using online learning can display how teachers experience this hard time of the pandemic. the researchers performed this study to explore efl teachers’ perceptions of online learning in a saudi university during this period. they aimed to have a closer look at efl teachers’ perceptions of the sudden shift into online learning. they focused on the teachers’ benefits, drawbacks, and suggestions. they used a questionnaire and interviews to collect qualitative data to answer research questions. results showed five benefits and two drawbacks of using online learning to teach english in that saudi university. the benefits are being a good and useful option for teaching during the coronavirus pandemic, motivation of teachers, ease of access and use, interacting between teachers and students, and being less teacher-centered. the drawbacks are disruption by poor internet and technical issues and cheating by students on assessments. the participants provided some suggestions to improve the benefits and overcome the drawbacks. keywords: benefits and drawbacks, covid-19, online learning, saudi efl context, teachers’ observations https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12096 http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8441-1987 http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3036-1953 introductory remarks the world health organization (who) declared covid-19 as a world pandemic in march 2020. the confirmed cases in the world were 509,167 with 23,335 deaths including 1012 cases with three deaths in saudi arabia as per who situation report 67 (who, 2020). therefore, many countries decided to shut down universities and schools. similarly, the kingdom of saudi arabia (ksa) suspended educational institutions (saudi gazette, 2020). after months of border closure, the ksa partially resumed air travel in august 2020. certain precautionary measures were enforced, such as the use of face masks, hand sanitizers, and social distancing. the us food and drugs administration issued an emergency use authorization (eua) for the covid-19 vaccine in december 2020 (“pfizer-biontech,” 2021). the new pfizer vaccine was used to vaccinate people in several countries including the ksa. unfortunately, new coronavirus variants were discovered in the uk with more contagious than the original strain (“coronavirus latest,” 2021; who, 2021), and in south africa and brazil (“about variants of the virus,” 2021). to combat the new variants, many countries shut down borders again and imposed a lockdown to prevent the spread of these new variants (reuters staff, 2020). the ksa detected the new coronavirus variant in january 2021 (taha, 2021), and it extended the border closures extension till may 2021. universities and schools were closed in many countries as a result of the coronavirus pandemic in march 2020 (who, 2020). a sudden shift to online learning took place to continue education (hassan, mirza, & hussain, 2020). indeed, online learning was used in many countries including the ksa via various platforms, such as blackboard before the pandemic (alshehri, rutter, & smith, 2019). however, online learning platforms were used to complement face-to-face learning. because of covid-19 and its new variants in many countries, education came to a full online mode. the problem then was to investigate the advantages and disadvantages of online learning from the perceptions of saudi university efl teachers in light of the overnight change to online education as the only teaching option in the near future. this study aimed to describe the teachers’ perceptions of the benefits and drawbacks of online learning in teaching english when new coronavirus variants appeared. in addition, it aimed to have a closer look at the teachers’ experiences and suggestions to develop the benefits and lessen the drawbacks of online learning. tapsla.12096 p. 2/18 a. al shlowiy, k. layali research questions the research questions were: 1. what are teachers’ perceptions of the benefits and drawbacks of online learning for efl in a saudi university during the coronavirus pandemic? 2. what are teachers’ suggestions to enhance such benefits and to alleviate drawbacks? it was important to explore efl teachers’ perceptions of the whole shift into online learning in a saudi university during covid-19. moreover, this shift lasted for a long period and was the only accessible option to teach especially after the presence of the new variants (taha, 2021). in online teaching, teachers are responsible to ensure that the content offered to students is engaging and not very difficult because students get bored and frustrated easily. therefore, teachers attempt to make lessons more interesting and easier (almansour & alahdal, 2020). literature review many research studies reported several benefits and drawbacks of online learning in several language learning settings (arkorful & abaidoo, 2014; al-qahtani, 2019; al shlowiy, 2021; coman et al., 2020; dhull & sakshi, 2017; guatam, 2020). online learning can be defined as promoting and supporting teaching and learning through suitable information and communication technologies (ellis, ginns, & piggott, 2009). with this definition in mind, online learning can comprise educational platforms, such as blackboard and moodle; video-conferencing tools, such as skype and zoom; mobile applications, such as telegram and whatsapp; and social media sites, such as facebook and blogs. these technologies include both synchronous and asynchronous means of communication used for teaching and learning purposes. before coronavirus appeared in 2019, many studies discussed the benefits and drawbacks of online learning. for instance, islam, beer, and slack (2015) conducted a review of e-learning studies in the uk higher education. the benefits included flexibility of teaching and learning, encouraging students to learn resulted in better engagement and interaction between teachers and students beyond the limitations of location. on the other hand, the drawbacks were the lack of clarity of students’ learning styles, inability to prepare appropriate teaching materials, technical challenges, failure to build online assessments, lack of training to use e-learning effectively, time skills of management, and loss of students’ interest. arkorful and abaidoo (2014) reviewed the literature concerning the use of e-learning in tertiary education in ghana as well as internationally. they found efl teachers’ perceptions of a long shift to online learning… tapsla.12096 p. 3/18 several advantages, such as flexibility in time and place, ease of access and use of information, motivation of students to interact with each other and with their teachers, cost-effectiveness as it eliminates travel expenses, and students’ learning at their own pace as the classes are recorded. the disadvantages were feeling remote and isolated because of the lack of physical interaction between teachers and students; inferiority to face-to-face education in respects of clarifications, explanations, and giving feedback; worse communication skills of learners, cheating in assessments and plagiarism in assignments; deterioration of the socialization role of the educational institutions; and being suitable only for social sciences and humanities not for sciences that require hands-on applications. in another study at maharshi dayanand university in india, dhull and sakshi (2017) found these benefits: ease of access, convenience, paced learning that suits different students, and teachers being facilitators not transmitters of knowledge. the drawbacks included frustration caused by technical glitches, computer anxiety by some learners that prevented proper interaction with technology, and stress caused by over-involvement with the internet (compulsive web surfing or database searching). in the ksa, several studies about online learning found similar advantages, such as ease of access (khalawi & halabi, 2020) and student motivation (al-qahtani, 2019). similar disadvantages were reported including the absence of human-like communication, facial expressions, and physical interaction (khalawi & halabi, 2020). al-qahtani (2019) studied efl teachers’ and students’ perceptions of virtual classes and whether these perceptions enhanced communication skills. this study was performed with 15 teachers and 15 students at king khaled university. it shows that 62% of the teachers had positive attitudes towards virtual classes. they benefited from the convenience of the classes that were sensory-rich media to motivate students and enhance the learning process. on the disadvantages side, teachers reported technical issues, needed more training, and required blended classes rather than virtual-only classes. nine teachers disagreed that virtual classes can develop the efl four skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. nine students agreed that online classes can develop their efl four skills. a year later, khalawi and halabi (2020) investigated the efl teachers’ and students’ perceptions of online learning and its relation to learner autonomy in another saudi university. twenty teachers and 22 students participated in a questionnaire. the results showed that 75% of the teachers had positive attitudes towards virtual classes although 80% of them preferred face-to-face classes rather than online classes. they faced many technical issues and internet disconnections. they also missed the human-like communication, facial expressions, body language, and students’ interests and punctuality. on the tapsla.12096 p. 4/18 a. al shlowiy, k. layali other hand, students believed that the virtual classes made them autonomous learners. focusing on efl teachers’ perceptions of using online learning, freihat (2020) used a survey and interview to collect data from 81 instructors at imam mohammad ibn saud islamic university. the results showed that the instructors’ perceived drawbacks of online teaching were the following: cheating on online exams by students, teachers’ lack of knowledge in using some applications, and restricting the time of some applications such as zoom. they expressed their need for more training to develop online materials, teaching techniques, and classroom management skills. online learning in a pandemic the researchers sought to find out efl teachers’ perceptions of online learning when the new variants of the coronavirus appeared. in the ksa, almansour and alahdal (2020) described the state of online education during covid-19 in the electronic university and qassim university. they explored the teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards online education and their skills in dealing with online education. the results showed that both teachers and students had positive attitudes towards online education in both universities. however, teachers reported the technical problems and internet issues that disrupted online classes. besides, teachers called for more interactive, interesting, and engaging courses as some students become bored easily. it was suggested to break long lessons into shorter parts to appeal to students because learners’ boredom was the main drawback. in five saudi universities, khafaga (2021) studied efl teachers’ and students’ perceptions of using blackboard collaborate-based instructions. online questionnaires and interviews were used by 29 teachers and 311 students. despite some challenges, blackboard provided a flexible teaching environment that offered synchronous and asynchronous means of communication between teachers and students. it provided several opportunities to engage in discussions and take tests online. regardless of their positive attitude, about 59% of the teachers required the technical skills to use blackboard. about 50% of the teachers faced difficulties to teach via blackboard and needed face-to-face teaching. about 35% of them faced technical issues while teaching on blackboard. as many as 71% of the students communicated easily with their teachers via blackboard. however, only 37% of the students were able to complete their assignments and get feedback from their teachers. about 65% of them reported that the time allotted for online tests was not sufficient. at king abdulaziz university, hakim (2020) found that 50 efl teachers enjoyed teaching their classes via the blackboard ultra platform during efl teachers’ perceptions of a long shift to online learning… tapsla.12096 p. 5/18 covid-19 in spite of weak internet connectivity, inability to access modern equipment, and learners’ low motivation. about 76% of them believed online classes could improve the learners’ skills of communication and writing. about 88% of the teachers thought that online teaching could accommodate the learners’ learning styles. about 84% of them reported online teaching motivated students. however, low tech-savvy teachers needed intense training to deal with technology. some teachers struggled to track their students’ writing and grade them. some teachers complained about the learners’ low motivation, while others demanded a revisiting of the online assessment. in non-saudi efl contexts, it seems that teachers’ perceptions of the benefits and drawbacks of online learning during covid-19 are the same. nugroho, ilmiani, and rekha (2020) employed self-reported reflections and interviews to collect data from 17 efl teachers in indonesia. the main problems were lack of online learning platform, students’ demotivation, internet disconnection, and cheating in online assessments. teachers offered insights to solve these problems by adopting free, open-resource online learning as well as developing special materials for online teaching. to them, online learning was a way to connect with their students and to keep education going through the coronavirus pandemic. moving to romanian universities, coman et al. (2020) analyzed 762 students’ perceptions of using online learning platforms and their capacity to integrate information. although the study was primarily on students’ perceptions, many references involved teachers. the students accepted online platforms and saw their importance during the pandemic although they encountered the following drawbacks: disruption by slow internet connection, teachers’ unpreparedness, distraction by chatting and games, the feeling of isolation because of lack of physical interaction, and concerns about physical health including back problems. teachers used only limited functions of the available teaching tools and needed to adapt their teaching methods to suit online classes and to motivate students. a systematic review to explore the strengths and weaknesses of online learning during the coronavirus pandemic and similar crises was conducted by dhawan (2020). the strengths of online learning included flexibility of time and place, ability to accommodate a large number of students, interaction, and collaboration between teachers and students. however, the weaknesses of online learning were technical difficulties, disparity of students’ various abilities and confidence levels, students’ anxiety, frustration, distraction, lack of personal attention, and missing physical interaction. previous studies and reviews shed light upon several benefits and drawbacks of online learning. it is clear that teachers accept online education, especially during the pandemic. they have a positive attitude towards it although they lack some technical skills to teach. as with any teaching method, online teachtapsla.12096 p. 6/18 a. al shlowiy, k. layali ing may have its benefits and drawbacks (guatam, 2020). understanding such benefits and drawbacks is important to make the utmost of online teaching. teachers can be effective online via the use of a variety of modes such as text, audio, and video to facilitate students’ learning to overcome the challenges of online teaching including screen issues, training issues, technical issues, and physical-distance issues. this existing review of literature guides the study to go beyond the teachers’ positive perceptions of online learning as one of the learning options. what about using online learning as the only learning option? what about forcing teachers and students to use online learning without any preparation or notice? therefore, this study investigates the advantages and disadvantages of online learning during covid-19 as the only teaching option, which teachers were forced to use. this is the gap that the researchers aim to enrich the literature with some in-depth details. they explore the participants’ perceptions and experiences to teach english in the pandemic and how they observe the sudden changes in the learning contexts and students’ skills and behaviors. research context setting this study was conducted at the foundation program (fp) in one of the saudi universities. the fp is a one-year program that is also called the preparatory year program. commonly, the fp adopts the quarter, rather than the semester system of study, which lasts for eight weeks. it teaches english, mathematics, and computer skills to prepare the learners to start their undergraduate studies. there were about 57 eft teachers at fp. participants all efl teachers at fp were invited through their management to participate in this study. ten male efl teachers in the fp agreed to participate in an online questionnaire and interview. their ages ranged from 30 to 50 with the mean age as 40. they were four saudis, two americans, one british, one south african, one sudanese, and one jordanian teacher. they all had earned master’s or doctoral degrees in applied linguistics and held the rank of lecturer or assistant professor. they taught a four-level integrated-skills course called interchange (richards, hull, & proctor, 2017). it ranged from beginner level (a1) to intermediate level (b1) as per the common european framework of reference for languages. the textbook used in this study was at b1 level (intermediate level) that was taught online by blackboard. efl teachers’ perceptions of a long shift to online learning… tapsla.12096 p. 7/18 data collection methods this study follows the qualitative nature to access the inner world of perception and make meaning by understanding, describing, and explaining the social process from the participants’ perspectives and experiences (maykut & morehouse, 1994). the researchers attempted to make conceptual comparisons across the functional contexts and rich data to produce formal theories. to collect in-depth data, the researchers employed a questionnaire and interviews to answer the research questions. questionnaire. the researchers used a fifteen item self-devised online questionnaire (appendix a). it contained four main sections: (a) availability of digital devices, internet, and platform; (b) benefits of online learning; (c) drawbacks of online learning; and (d) an open-ended question. the question naire was shared with two professors of applied linguistics who went through them and provided constructive feedback to finalize the questions. it was sent via google forms to the ten teachers to complete it and return it anonymously. interviews. the interviews were conducted individually via zoom with the same ten teachers who completed the questionnaire to obtain in-depth answers and meaningful information about their thoughts, experiences, and perceptions. the interviews included five questions (appendix b) corresponding to the four sections of the questionnaire (excluding the section of availability of devices, internet, and platform) to ensure teachers’ consistency of answers. the items included: (a) benefits of online learning; (b) suggestions for enhancing the benefits; (c) drawbacks of online learning; (d) suggestions for minimizing the drawbacks; and (e) future use of online learning the after coronavirus pandemic ends. conducting interviews helped the researchers to employ some prompts that built comprehensive details about teachers’ answers. data analysis the researchers started analyzing the data when they collected them. data analysis occurred across the entire study. it was intertwined with data collection. they were continually comparing data items to understand and describe the participants’ perceptions. therefore, they followed the means of the constant comparative method (maykut & morehouse, 1994) to explain the study problem based on participants’ words and experiences. this method assists in dealing with data and investigating the verbal data from questionnaires and interviews. it combines inductive category coding with a simultaneous comparison of all data across patterns, which are redefined as newly obtained data. data analysis was flexible in creating initial themes and categories as well as modifying the themes and categories upon more perusal and analysis of tapsla.12096 p. 8/18 a. al shlowiy, k. layali verbal data. in addition to looking for themes to emerge, the researchers coded all items of data to compare and conceptualize them (maykut & morehouse, 1994). therefore, two main categories were identified in the data: (a) benefits of online learning and (b) drawbacks for online learning. under each category, different themes were identified (table 1). to validate the analysis process, these categories were shared with professors of applied linguistics at the same university to peruse the qualitative data several times and confirm the themes and categories. table 1 benefits and drawbacks of online learning as per teachers’ perceptions benefits of online learning drawbacks of online learning 1. being a good and useful option of teaching during the coronavirus pandemic. 2. motivation of teachers. 3. ease of access and use. 4. interacting between teachers and students. 5. being less teacher-centered. 1. disruption by poor internet and technical issues. 2. cheating by students on assessments. findings the ten efl teachers who participated in this study had laptops and/or mobile phones with internet connection at their homes. their university had an online learning platform called blackboard. five teachers used blackboard to teach as an additional resource before the coronavirus pandemic started. seven teachers used social media, websites, and/or mobile applications to teach along with blackboard, including whatsapp, quizlet, kahoot, examenglish.com, and test-english.com. all of the ten efl teachers explained that online learning was a good and useful option to teach during the covid-19 pandemic. for instance, teacher #1 explained in the questionnaire that it was a good choice for teaching because it kept education going while taking safety measures, such as physical distancing between individuals. the same teacher #1 stated in the interview that online learning was suitable for teachers and learners as it allowed for more educational and communication opportunities. another participant, teacher #5, reported in the questionnaire that he kept good interaction with his students and managed to motivate them but still he preferred face-to-face classes for issues of interaction and motivation. teacher #5 further stated in the interview that his students spoke more and participated in an online class as they were less afraid to interact as in traditional classes (table 2). efl teachers’ perceptions of a long shift to online learning… tapsla.12096 p. 9/18 table 2 teacher #1 and teacher #5 answers in benefits of online learning section participant questionnaire interview teacher #1 yes. due to the need for social distancing during the pandemic and because learning should be a continuous endeavor, online learning becomes a very good option for teaching. more convenient to both students and teachers, more educational tools and technology available, and more communication channels. teacher #5 i maintain good interactions with my students using my skills and experience to motivate them. however, this cannot be compared to the face-to-face mode. my students are less intimidated than in actual classrooms. they are more comfortable when speaking and asking questions online. furthermore, in the questionnaire, teachers #2, #3, #4, #6, #7, #8, #9, and #10 expressed their perceptions of the benefits of online learning which included motivation for teachers, ease of access, and use for efl teaching, interactions between teachers and students and among students, and creating less teacher-centered classes. they also expressed their satisfaction with online learning and blackboard as good means of education and communication during the pandemic. however, efl teachers did not like the disruption sometimes caused by slow internet or the cheating of students in online assessments. teacher #4 reported in the questionnaire that the unreliable internet connection caused delays in classes or submitting grades to students. he explained that the same internet problem happened to his students as well and that it was unavoidable. he further explained in the interview that some learners had limited internet quota or could not access the internet in certain areas. teacher #8 stated in the questionnaire that despite many measures taken to prevent cheating, learners found ways to cheat online, which showed in high marks for low-achievers. he further explained in the interview that cheating was very difficult to control in online assessments than in traditional assessments on campus (table 3). table 3 teacher #4 and teacher #8 answers in drawbacks of the online learning section participant questionnaire interview teacher #4 yes. i sometimes lose my internet connection and need to log in again to the blackboard as a result of the poor internet. it happens to my students as well. it also causes some delays in submitting grades or being on time to do your job. the problem is that the speed of the internet is different from one area to another. it’s a problem that we can’t control. some students have limited access to the internet in some areas or have specified internet quota. teacher #8 yes. we used many different tools to prevent cheating, but we found that we still have high grades for low-level students in some sections. cheating is unavoidable. stu dents can cheat in online assessments more easily than in classroom-based tests. tapsla.12096 p. 10/18 a. al shlowiy, k. layali discussion this study explores teachers’ perceptions of the long shift to online learning during covid-19. it examines the benefits and drawbacks of using online learning as the only teaching way to deliver english lessons in the pandemic time. it looks at teachers’ experiences with the benefits and drawbacks that were reported in the literature (al-qahtani, 2019; al shlowiy, 2021; coman et al., 2020; dhull & sakshi, 2017; guatam, 2020). this section discusses the findings according to the previous studies and learning theories. online platforms and websites are part of web 0.2 technology, which is marked by an interactive interface that enables communication between teachers and students and among students (hartshorne & ajjan, 2009). as an online educational platform, blackboard has features that allow for synchronous (video/audio conferencing and real-time chat) as well as asynchronous (email and threaded discussion) communication. owing to such features of web 0.2 and the affordances of blackboard, the participants had a positive attitude to online learning for efl teaching and learning in the fp at this university. as was stated in the section above (findings), all the ten teachers expressed the following perceptions of the benefits of online learning and blackboard for efl: • being a good and useful teaching option during the coronavirus pandemic. • motivation of teachers. • ease of access and use. • interacting between teachers and students. • being less teacher-centered. these benefits are similar to the results of other studies performed in saudi arabia. for instance, having a positive attitude to teach efl in online settings was found in several studies including almansour and alahdal (2020), khafaga (2021), and khalawi and halabi (2020). the second benefit that focuses on teachers’ motivation to teach online is supported by al-qahtani’s (2019) study, which showed that teachers were motivated to teach in online settings and develop their teaching approaches. it also supported the third findings of allowing students to learn anywhere and at their convenience. the third and fourth benefits go with the findings of khalawi and halabi (2020) and concern convenience, ease of access and use, and interactivity. khafaga (2021) also confirms that online learning can enhance students’ interactions and communication. for the last benefit, it is repeated by the students who believed that online classes made them autonomous learners (khalawi & halabi, 2020). al shlowiy (2021) indicates that serious students develop the required skills to succeed as autonomous learners in online learning settings. efl teachers’ perceptions of a long shift to online learning… tapsla.12096 p. 11/18 technology and learning theories efl teachers in this study found online learning, especially blackboard, a useful teaching choice during the coronavirus pandemic. they further stated that for efl teaching it was easy to access and use. such ease of use and usefulness reminded us of davis’s (1989) technology acceptance model. davis (1989) posited that such variables as perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness may affect one’s attitude towards using technology. attitude in turn may affect the behavioral intention to use technology eventually leading to its actual use. in other words, since efl teachers perceived online learning to be an easy to use and valuable teaching option during the coronavirus pandemic, this affected their attitude towards online learning and blackboard, which in turn affected their behavioral intention to use them and thus resulted in using online learning and blackboard to teach efl. furthermore, online learning and blackboard led to interaction between teachers and students and among students as well, which was facilitated by blackboard’s asynchronous threaded discussion and synchronous chat features. this was in line with vygotsky’s (1978) socio-cultural theory of learning where interaction between teacher-student and among students leads to a scaffolding process that enhances the students learning of efl. although the ten efl teachers expressed perceptions of the benefits of online learning, they all stated two drawbacks of it. the first one is the teachers suffering from the disruption that is caused by poor internet connections and technical issues. many teaching classes were disrupted by slow internet or some technical glitches of blackboard. such a drawback was found in several studies (almansour & alahdal, 2020; khafaga, 2021; khalawi & halabi, 2020). most teachers spent their time fixing these issues and training themselves to cope with them. al-qahtani (2019) and hakim (2020) discuss the teachers’ lack of technical skills and their need for training that could help them in overcoming this inconvenience. it also affected negatively the reporting of students’ grades or giving them feedback on assignments. in addition, one teacher felt isolated by the lack of physical interaction with students and other teachers in online learning classes. another teacher stated that it was time-consuming to adapt teaching materials for online use and yet another reported it was sometimes more difficult to give his students clarifications and feedback in online learning than in face-to-face classes. the second drawback is students cheating in online assessments. all teachers disapproved of the fact that some students cheated in online assessments. students were unrestricted to copy their colleagues’ answers or to use different resources without stating the reference (al shlowiy, 2021). despite taking mea sures to prevent cheating, it persisted and showed high marks for low-achieving students. this issue matches what is mentioned in the earlier studies, such as tapsla.12096 p. 12/18 a. al shlowiy, k. layali students cheating when they took online examinations at a university-level (freihat, 2020) or a secondary school (al shlowiy, 2021). cheating in an online context is expected because learners can find many simple ways to cheat online to obtain high marks, especially for careless students. it is difficult to manage the behavior in online-based exams compared to traditional-based exams (al shlowiy, 2021; coman et al., 2020, freihat, 2020, & nugroho et al., 2020). implications the findings lead to discussing some implications of the best practices in saudi efl contexts. the study presents suggestions for efl teachers, learners, and policymakers to use online learning technologies, platforms, resources, and applications. these suggestions guide the efl teachers to maximize the benefits and minimize the drawbacks of online learning. first, training and re-training of teachers and students in the online learning platform, other websites, and mobile applications that are useful for online teaching and learning. second, equipping both teachers and students with laptops and reliable internet connection along with providing necessary technical support in case of technical glitches. third, choosing the best teachers to prerecord the efl educational videos and upload them on blackboard thus freeing the live sessions for questions and more interaction on the part of students. in other words, teachers called for converting the live sessions into flipped online classes. fourth, providing teachers with all online materials ready to use before the semester starts, as it was time-consuming for some teachers to adapt ma terials for online teaching and learning. fifth, preparing suitable teaching materials and supportive online resources to promote students’ learning autonomy. sixth, having both summative tests and ongoing formative quizzes on campus to combat cheating online while taking the necessary safety measures for both students and teachers. conclusion understanding the advantages and disadvantages of online learning depending on the perceptions of saudi efl teachers was the focus of this qualitative study. it investigated the participants’ words, thoughts, and experiences about the situation of the sudden shift into online education during coronavirus. it efl teachers’ perceptions of a long shift to online learning… tapsla.12096 p. 13/18 aimed to answer both research questions: (a) what are teachers’ perceptions of the benefits and drawbacks of online learning for efl in a saudi university during coronavirus variants?; and (b) what are teachers’ suggestions to enhance such benefits and to alleviate drawbacks? the accumulation of rich qualitative data from ten efl teachers enabled to formulate two main categories of concepts, that is, benefits and drawbacks. however, these findings cannot be generalized to a larger population because of their qualitative nature that focused on gaining deep insights about the perceptions of a specific number of efl male teachers and their experience of online teaching in a saudi university during the covid-19 variants. it was not a longitudinal study that lasted a full academic year. it lasted only eight weeks. because perceptions may change over time, it is recommended to conduct the study in a longitudinal nature. this is to seek participants’ perceptions over a whole academic year and expose them to the experience of online studies more deeply. moreover, their perceptions were not quantitatively measured. it is advisable to plan a quantitative study with a large sample of teachers for comparing purposes. as for future research, it is suggested to replicate this study in various universities in non-english-speaking countries to find out if perceptions of efl teachers are consistent or different. in addition, it would be advisable to conduct a study of female efl teachers in saudi universities in order to compare the results of both studies. finally, another option is to conduct similar studies with efl teachers of secondary and intermediate schools. references about variants of the virus that causes covid-19. center for disease control and pre vention. 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(2021). new strain of coronavirus discovered in uk. https://www.who.int/csr/don/31december-2020-sars-cov2-variants/en/ ahmed al shlowiy, khaled layali wahrnehmungen der eaf-lehrer hinsichtlich der langzeitigen umstellung auf online-lernen an einer saudischen universität in der corona-zeit z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die entdeckung der neuen varianten des coronavirus ende 2020 veranlasste viele länder dazu, universitäten und schulen weiterhin auszusetzen. eine komplette umstellung auf onlinelernen schien angesichts der mutierten corona-varianten die einzige möglichkeit zu sein, den unterricht fortzusetzen. eine langzeiterfahrung mit dem online-lernen lässt nachvollziehen, wie lehrkräfte die schwere zeit der pandemie erlebt haben. das ziel der durchgeführten studie war es zu untersuchen, wie die eaf-lehrer an einer saudischen universität das onlinelernen in der corona-zeit wahrgenommen hatten. in den fokus der untersuchung rückten insbesondere ihre wahrnehmungen hinsichtlich der abrupten umstellung auf online-lernen. der schwerpunkt lag dabei auf den vorund nachteilen bzw. vorschlägen vonseiten der lehrkräfte. mithilfe eines fragebogens und der durchgeführten interviews wurden qualitative daten zur beantwortung der forschungsfragen erhoben. die ergebnisse der untersuchung zeigten fünf vorteile und zwei nachteile des online-lernens für den englischunterricht an der betreffenden saudischen universität. zu den ersteren gehören: eine gute und nützliche alternative für den unterricht während des coronavirus, motivation der lehrkräfte, ein einfacher zugang und nutzung, interaktion zwischen lehrkräften und studierenden sowie die tatsache, dass der unterricht weniger lehrerzentriert gestalten werden kann. die nachteile sind hingegen: unterbrechung durch schlechte internetverbindung bzw. technische probleme sowie das betrügen bei den klausuren. die studienteilnehmer machten einige vorschläge, um die vorteile zu verbessern und die nachteile zu überwinden. schlüsselwörter: vorund nachteile, covid-19, online-lernen, saudischer eaf-kontext, wahrnehmungen der lehrer tapsla.12096 p. 16/18 a. al shlowiy, k. layali https://www.reuters.com/article/iduskbn28u0uh https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/331613 https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/331613 https://www.who.int/csr/don/31-december-2020-sars-cov2-variants/en/ https://www.who.int/csr/don/31-december-2020-sars-cov2-variants/en/ a p p e n d i x a questionnaire efl teachers’ perceptions of e-learning during the coronavirus pandemic variants questionnaire اجنبية كلغه االنجليزية اللغه ي درس م اراء عن تبيان اس ور تح الم ورونا ك زمن ى ف ى رون االليكت ليم التع ول ح availability of digital devices, internet and platform والمنصه رنت واالنت ية م رق ال االجهزة ر وف ت 1. do you have a computer/smart phone and a reliable access to the internet? وق وث م صال وات ذكي هاتف / بيوتر كم جهاز لديك هل اإلنترنت؟ إلى 2. does your university have a platform for e-learning? what is the platform’s name? م اس و ه ما اإللكتروني؟ م ل للتع صة ن م تك جامع تلك تم هل صة؟ ن الم 3. did you use e-learning to teach (as an addit ional resource) before the coronavirus pandemic start? در ص (كم للتدريس اإللكتروني م ل التع ت تخدم اس هل ورونا؟ ك يروس ف ظهور بل ق إضافي) 4. do you use social media, websites and mobile applications along with your university e-learning platform? واقع والم االجتماعي ل واص الت واقع م تخدم تس هل صة ن م جانب إلى ول المحم الهاتف وتطبيقات اإللكترونية تك؟ جامع في اإللكتروني م ل التع benefits of e-learning ى رون االليكت ليم التع وائد ف 5. is e-learning a good option to teach during coronavirus pandemic? explain how? يروس ف أثناء للتدريس جيد خيار اإللكتروني م ل التع هل كيف؟ إشرح ورونا؟ ك 6. do you feel motivated to use e-learning to teach? explain how? في اإللكتروني م ل التع تخدام الس بالتحفيز تشعر هل كيف؟ إشرح التدريس؟ 7. do you feel e-learning is easy to use for teaching efl? explain how? لتدريس تخدام االس سهل اإللكتروني م ل التع أن تشعر هل كيف إشرح أجنبية؟ كلغة اإلنجليزية .اللغة 8. do you think e-learning facilitates interaction with your students? explain how? طالبك؟ مع التفاعل يسهل اإللكتروني م ل التع أن تقد تع هل كيف؟ إشرح 9. do you think e-learning makes your classes less teacher-centered and makes you more of an advisor or guide? explain how? أقل ولك ص ف ل يجع اإللكتروني م ل التع أن تقد تع هل كيف؟ إشرح كمرشد؟ لك ويجع م ل المع اعتماداعلى drawbacks of e-learning ى رون االليكت ليم التع ساوئ م 10. do you feel disrupted by slow or no internet connectivity? explain how? أو باإلنترنت صال االت بطء بب بس بالتعطيل تشعر هل كيف؟ إشرح دامه؟ انع 11. do you feel isolated because of lack of physical interaction with your students and other teachers? explain how? طالبك مع دي س الج التفاعل قلة بب بس بالعزلة تشعر هل كيف؟ إشرح اآلخرين؟ ين درس والم 12. is it time consuming to adapt materials for online teaching? explain how? وقتًا اإلنترنت عبر للتدريس واد الم تكييف تغرق يس هل كيف؟ إشرح ويالً؟ ط 13. is it difficult to control students’ cheating in online assessment? explain how? عبر التقييم في الطالب غش في م التحك ب صع ال من هل كيف؟ إشرح اإلنترنت؟ 14. is it more difficult to give your students clarifications and explanations in e-learning than in traditional face to face classes? explain how? في وشروحات وضيحات ت الطالب إعطاء ب صع ال من هل وجه؟ ل وجهاً التقليدية ول ص بالف مقارنة اإللكتروني م ل التع كيف؟ إشرح open-ended question وح فت م ؤال س 15. what are your suggestions to enhance e-learning benefits and alleviate its drawbacks? اإللكتروني م ل التع وائد ف لتعزيز م اقتراحاتك ي ه ما عيوبه؟ من والتخفيف efl teachers’ perceptions of a long shift to online learning… tapsla.12096 p. 17/18 a p p e n d i x b interview questions semi-structured interview شخصية قابلة م 1. what are the benefits of e-learning from your point of view? نظرك؟ وجهة من االلكترونى ليم التع يزات مم ى ه ما 2. what are your suggestions for enhancing the benefits of e-learning? االليكترونى؟ ليم التع يزات مم م لدع مقترحاتك ى ه ما 3. what are the drawbacks of e-learning from your point of view? نظرك؟ وجهة من االلكترونى ليم التع مساوئ ى ه ما 4. what are your suggestions for minimizing the drawbacks of e-learning? االليكترونى؟ ليم التع مساوئ لتقليل مقترحاتك ى ماه 5. will you use e-learning after coronavirus ends? explain reasons. ورونا؟ ك انتهاء د بع االلكترونى ليم التع تسخدم س هل باب االس اشرح tapsla.12096 p. 18/18 a. al shlowiy, k. layali theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (2), 2023, pp. 1/22 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.13311 liljana mitkovska https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4447-4289 aue-fon university, skopje, north macedonia eleni bužarovska https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1334-0501 ss. cyril and methodius university in skopje, north macedonia natasha stojanovska-ilievska https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1221-0999 ss. cyril and methodius university in skopje, north macedonia acquisition of structures at syntax-discourse interface: post-verbal subjects in l2 english a b s t r a c t the present study explores the acceptability of postverbal subjects by intermediate and advanced l2 english learners with l1 macedonian, a pro-drop slavic language with rich verbal morphology. the two languages differ regarding the distribution of subject-verb inversion (svi): in macedonian, it is a default pattern in thetic sentences, but english severely restricts svi to specific contexts. to test the hypothesis that macedonian learners encounter difficulties in acquisition of english svi because of crosslinguistic inf luence, a grammaticality judgement and correction task was administered to two groups of macedonian learners of english and a control group of english native speakers. the results revealed that l2 learners find english vs sentences and vs + it-insertion examples more acceptable than the native speakers, but the performance of the advanced group is closer to the native speakers than to the intermediate learners. both non-native groups accept more readily inappropriate english sentences that conform to typical l1 structures. keywords: subject inversion, information structure, word order, interface hypothesis this paper reports the findings of the investigation into the acquisition of post-verbal nominal subjects by l2 english learners with l1 macedonian. we examine the presence of inverted subjects in the interlanguage of macedonian learners of english. although both languages typologically belong to svo languages, english has a rigid word order which restricts sv inversion to specific contexts. in macedonian, a slavic language with rich verbal morphology https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.13311 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4447-4289 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2451-7242 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1334-0501 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1221-0999 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2451-7242 tapsla.13311 p. 2/22 liljana mitkovska, eleni bužarovska, natasha stojanovska-ilievska and null referential subjects, the word order is more flexible. the mapping of arguments to syntactic positions is conditioned by the universal cognitive principle that old information precedes new information (comrie 1989, p. 127) to facilitate its processing. this results in a much higher frequency of postverbal subjects in macedonian, compared to english (mitkovska & bužarovska, 2023). in view of these cross-linguistic differences, the paper aims to determine whether macedonian learners of english at intermediate and advanced proficiency levels have become aware of the subject-verb inversion restrictions in english. assuming that l2 learners rely on pragmatic knowledge from their l1 system in building their interlanguage (gómez soler, 2013), we attribute the presence of inappropriate postverbal subject constructions in the english interlanguage of macedonian l1 learners to cross-linguistic influence from l1. at lower proficiency stages, learners experience syntactic deficiencies related to subject realization. they tend to transfer null and postverbal subjects relying on the information structure of such constructions in l1 (cf. oshita, 2004; lozano & mendikoetxea, 2010; judy & rothman, 2010; prentza & tsimpli, 2013; mitkovska & bužarovska, 2018, among others). since macedonian requires postverbal subjects, learners of english expand the use of vs in contexts unacceptable for native speakers following the pragmatically-driven word order of their l1. partial overlap between parallel structures in l1 and l2, as is the case with vs, leads to the overuse of postverbal subjects in the initial stages of l2 acquisition because learners assume complete equivalence between these structures. this is especially true if the l1 structure has a broader functional scope compared to the corresponding l2 structure. once learners notice the divergence, which typically occurs when they reach a more advanced level of l2, the tendency for overgeneralization of the syntactic rules of l1 subsides and learners approximate native speakers’ use of this structure. the examination of students’ academic works in english and in the macedonian english learner corpus (melc) shows that l1 macedonian learners of english encounter difficulties with the english word order. the attested atypical vs structures are presented below: type (a) contains intransitive unaccusative verbs (1 and 2) and transitive verbs in passive voice (3), type (b) contains transitive verbs in active voice (4), while in type (c) a dummy it is inserted in subject position (5 and 6). the use of svi in passive voice sentences dominates, very often with an inserted dummy it. (a) adjunct + vs (1) on the position of post-modifiers can stand either phrases or clauses. (2) a week before in my class came a new girl by name mila. (3) in both texts is also raised the question of directionality in conversion. acquisition of structures at syntax-discourse interface… tapsla.13311 p. 3/22 (b) (adjunct) + ovs (4) the most important role in producing a vowel has the tongue. (c) (adjunct) + it + vs (5) it should be used “these” because the noun is in plural. (6) i promise that this time it won’t happen anything that will postpone our deal. in this study we set out to examine intermediate and advanced level learners’ acceptance rate of the attested types of deviating sentences. we attempt to answer the following research questions: 1. are macedonian learners of english sensitive to the constraints of subjectverb inversion (svi) in contemporary english in the same way as native speakers (ns)? 2. do these learners understand that the pronoun it cannot fill the subject position if the subject np is postposed? 3. is there a difference between the advanced and the intermediate learners in these respects? 4. in what ways does the learners’ l1 affect their judgement of such constructions? the paper is organized as follows: the next section introduces the theoretical prerequisites of our investigation based on the contrastive analysis of svi in the two languages. the third section briefly explains the research methodology applied in the analysis of obtained results which are presented in the “results” section of this paper. the following section is devoted to the discussion of the results. the last section summarizes the findings of the investigation and draws final conclusions. theoretical background subject-verb inversion in english and in macedonian from a typological perspective, subject-verb inversion is a syntactic manifestation of theticity realized by presentational constructions and event reporting sentences. in “presentational sentences proper the newly introduced element is an entity (a discourse referent), while in event-reporting sentences it is an event, which necessarily involves an entity” (lambrecht 1994, p. 144). this discourse function triggers a wide focus reading in presentational constructions reflected in the following constituent order: the adverbial carrying presupposed tapsla.13311 p. 4/22 liljana mitkovska, eleni bužarovska, natasha stojanovska-ilievska information occupies the sentence-initial position, followed by the verb and the focused subject. by placing the subject in focus, the speaker asserts the presence of a discourse-new subject referent at a given location. the fronted adverbial, known as stage topic (erteschik-shir, 2007; lahousse, 2007), sets the spatiotemporal frame for the appearance or existence of the new participant on the stage of discourse. stage topics may be covert when contextually understood, but without them the whole sentence is in focus. no inversion occurs in english event-reporting sentences with sentence focus information structure. languages display different levels of sensitivity to the discourse-syntactic and lexicon-syntactic constraints that regulate word order. in generative approaches these variations are linked to the so-called null subject parameter (nsp). it is claimed that languages that allow null pronominal subjects (e.g., italian, spanish, and greek) exhibit fewer restrictions on svi than non-null subject languages, such as english and french (e.g., teixeira, 2018; agathopoulou, 2009; lozano & callies, 2018; lozano & mendikoetxea, 2008). english and macedonian are positioned at the opposite ends of this typological continuum: english rigorously sanctions the omission of referential subject pronouns1 and permits non-referential dummy subjects. macedonian, on the other hand, disallows dummy subjects while the distribution of referential pronominal subjects is entirely regulated by discourse principles (mitkovska & bužarovska, 2018). consequently, svi, though encountered in both languages, displays important differences in the analysis of parallel texts (macedonian-english and englishmacedonian).2 research results reveal sharp distributional differences between the languages: macedonian texts contained 5.23 examples of svi per 1000 words compared to only 0.46 examples in corresponding english texts. this testifies to a considerably wider distribution of this phenomenon in macedonian than in english. the infrequent use of svi in english was confirmed in corpus studies (biber et al., 1999). yet, the analysis of the attested macedonian and english clauses with svi showed that they share some structural properties. thus, proportionally, svi structures in both languages are more often encountered in main clauses headed by an element which is otherwise placed towards the end within predicate focus. these elements usually code locative circumstances (stage topics), while other types (temporal, manner, instrument or reason) are seldom found in both languages. it has been noticed that the discourse function of the presentational construction imposes semantic constraints on the choice of verbs, as well as on the length of the inverted subject. studies on the english svi show that it overwhelmingly occurs with unaccusative verbs. informationally “light” unergative 1 except in some colloquial registers (haegeman, 2007). 2 this research was done by mitkovska and bužarovska on selected texts in two written genres: prose fiction and academic texts, translated in both directions (macedonian to english and english to macedonian). acquisition of structures at syntax-discourse interface… tapsla.13311 p. 5/22 verbs with impoverished semantics are admitted in certain contexts (levin & rappaport hovav, 1995, pp. 251–260). these verbs lose their noteworthiness and informativeness in contexts in which their relation with the subjects is highly predictable (mendikoetxea, 2006; teixeira, 2018). it should be noted that the same verb may oscillate between sv and vs order depending on the communicative goal of the sentence, namely whether it expresses a thetic or a categorical statement.3 regarding the type of verb in the predicate, mitkovska and bužarovska (2023) found that in both languages svi occurs with copula verbs, intransitive verbs and passivized transitive verbs.4 svi with these three verbal forms are not equally distributed in the two languages. thus, inversion with the copula be5 is more frequent in english, while svi clauses with passive verb forms dominate in macedonian (both be and reflexive se-passives). similar disproportion characterizes the distribution of intransitive verbs in svi structures: 73.36% of the macedonian examples contain intransitive verbs compared to 38.46% in english. the english construction typically limits the range of verbs to the “core” unaccusatives, that is, verbs of existence, appearance, and directed motion which imply existence or appearance at a location (lie, stand, appear, come). this constraint has been pointed out in the literature (levin & rappaport hovav, 1995; birner, 1995; among others), along with the conditions for svi occurrence with change of state unaccusative verbs and “core” unergatives (teixeira, 2018, pp. 67–81). in macedonian, the construction tolerates all types of unaccusative verbs (including decausative and pseudo-passive constructions) and even core unergative verbs. this has also been observed in italian and spanish, which use inversion as “focalisation device” with all verb types (lozano & mendikoetxea, 2008; lozano & callies, 2018). in both macedonian and english, the discourse-new inverted subjects in the examined texts refer either to brand new or accessible participants from the previous discourse (as claimed for english, e.g., in birner, 1994). however, the syntactic complexity of the subject does not seem to impact equally the inversion in the two languages. only a third of the inverted subjects in the macedonian sample comply with the end-weight principle, which indicates that this principle is not decisive in triggering svi in this language. for english, corpus studies have shown that in 70–80% of the examples the inverted subjects are heavy (prado alonso, 2011, p. 79). the distributional constraints of svi in english in comparison to macedonian (and other languages with a flexible word order) may be attributed 3 categorical statements have a topic-comment information structure. 4 transitive verbs are allowed in their passive form in english (teixeira, 2018, p. 77). 5 the copula be has been reported to be the most frequently occurring predicate in the english locative inversion sentences (e.g., teixeira, 2018, p. 67; biber et al., 1999, p. 954; levin & rappaport hovav, 1995, p. 240). tapsla.13311 p. 6/22 liljana mitkovska, eleni bužarovska, natasha stojanovska-ilievska to its pragmatic function. in english, svi creates rhetorical effects in narrative and descriptive discourse. these effects are described under different terms: camera movement (dorgeloh, 1997, p. 104), vividness (prado-alonso, 2011, p. 55), immediate observer effect (kreyer, 2006), dramatic effect (quirk et al., 1985, p. 522), suspense and tension effects (chen, 2003, p. 234). mitkovska and bužarovska (2023) attribute the distributional contrast between macedonian and english svi to the differences in the discourse-pragmatic properties of svi in the two languages, arguing that in macedonian vs is the default order for presentational function, characteristic of thetic statements, while in english this discourse function is restricted by the rigid sv(o) word order. the small number of english presentational constructions is stylistically marked, occurring in special discourse contexts. in unmarked uses their translational equivalents lack svi, as shown in examples (from macedonian prose) with an unaccusative verb (7), se-passive (8), and an ergative verb (9). (7) na edna leska stoeše bel polžav. ‘a white snail was sitting on a hazel tree.’ (8) od nivnata vreva, […] ne se sluša ni telefonot, ni domofonot. ‘because of their racket, […] neither the telephone, nor the speakerphone […] can be heard.’ (9) po sviocite frčat koli so mladi majki izbrzani od rabota. preku uličkite pretrčuvaat mački […]. ‘cars with young mothers hurrying from work speed around the curves. cats run across the alleys […].’ the above contrastive analysis leads to the following conclusions. the application of svi in english is highly limited in comparison to macedonian. in english, theticity is coded only in presentational constructions which are stylistically marked and restricted to special contexts. in macedonian, svi in presentational constructions, as a default word order, is unable to produce dramatic effects. therefore, we assume that the differences in the functional scope of svi and its rhetoric load may affect the acquisition of english svi by macedonian learners. second language acquisition research on subject—verb inversion acquisition of the null subject and related structures, including subject inversion, has received a great deal of attention in the literature. in some frameworks vs structures are considered to belong to interface phenomena which acquisition of structures at syntax-discourse interface… tapsla.13311 p. 7/22 result from the interaction between syntax and discourse. regarding language acquisition, especially sla, the syntax-discourse interface is claimed to be a problem area even for near-native speakers (teixeira, 2018, p. 152). numerous studies investigating such features use the interface hypothesis to account for the prolonged developmental difficulties in the acquisition of l2. the interface hypothesis (ih) claims that properties resulting from the interaction of grammar internal domains (e.g., syntax-lexicon) with grammar external domains (e.g., syntax-discourse interface) are more difficult to acquire than the properties within the grammar itself. moreover, properties depending on the interaction between syntax and grammar-external domains (discourse and pragmatics), can never be fully acquired due to processing limitations. therefore, they display permanent optionality (tsimpli & sorace, 2006; sorace, 2011), that is, they cannot be completely acquirable in a second language, in contrast to “narrow grammar” structures. consequently, developmental problems manifested at the syntax–discourse interface are not attributed to formal features but to “inefficient processing strategies to coordinate syntactic and pragmatic knowledge” (sorace & filiaci, 2006, p. 345). the ih was tested in a number of studies involving interface features. indeed, studies focusing on distribution of pronominal subjects and sv inversion in the interlanguage of advanced spanish and italian learners with english l1 (non-null-subject l1 > null-subject l2) suggest that morphosyntactic properties are acquired before discourse properties and the properties interacting with discourse create persisting difficulties (lozano, 2006, 2014; belletti et al., 2007). however, experimental studies involving the reverse direction of acquisition: null-subject l1 > non-null l2 (english) could not give definitive answers whether interface properties are ultimately acquirable in l2 (prentza & tsimpli, 2013). they suggest that the acquisition of syntactic properties depends on the directionality of acquisition, that is, whether l1 constitutes a subset or a superset in comparison to l2 for a given property (judy & rothman, 2010; judy, 2011). research findings on svi show that advanced speakers of null-subject l1 allow inversion structures with frequent unaccusative verbs predominantly with structurally complex subjects (oshita, 2000; 2004; prentza & tsimpli, 2013). some studies attribute an equal role to the three interfaces (lexicon-syntax, syntax-discourse, and syntax-phonology) in production of vs structures in l2 english (lozano, 2006; lozano & mendikoetxea, 2008, 2010), although the impact of subject heaviness as a feature of the syntax-phonology interface has not been fully confirmed (agathopoulou, 2014). while acknowledging that vs with unaccusatives is conditioned by discourse factors, such as the principle of end focus, it is not always clear what is more prevalent in triggering inversion in l2 english. it is suggested that “the syntax of subjects” is more difficult to acquire in null subject l1–l2 english pairings as they cause more develtapsla.13311 p. 8/22 liljana mitkovska, eleni bužarovska, natasha stojanovska-ilievska opmental problems (teixeira, 2018, p. 174). these problems are manifested in the overuse of svi, as observed by lozano and mendikoetxea (2010) regarding spanish learners of l2 english and prentza (2014) for greek learners. similar problems are detected in macedonian learners. we think that the optionality of vs/sv order in presentational constructions can be explained if the notion of “discourse constraints” subsumes stylistic choices between alternative word orders. authors of various texts, especially fiction, subjectively decide whether to choose one of the alternatives. it has been noted that even native speakers of english disagree on particular uses of svi (see agathopoulou, 2014). these unwritten rules of stylistically-based syntactic choice of otherwise infrequent vs structures are not explicitly taught in schools. their rare use and paucity of input are factors that contribute to the developmental difficulties (slabakova, 2015),6 which explains why their distribution cannot be fully acquired by advanced or near native learners. hence, it can be assumed that these problems may not stem from “processing inefficiencies,” as the ih predicts, but from restricted distributional properties of english vs structures due to their typological differences and predominantly marked stylistic status. the former factor causes syntactic problems (prentza & tsimpli, 2013) which lead to transfer. thus prentza (2014, p. 1775) argues that “l1 transfer in the process of l2 acquisition amounts to an incorrect application of l1 syntactic properties in structures where l1 and l2 abstract syntactic features differ.” similarly, lozano and mendikoetxea (2010) suggest transfer and input as possible explanations for difficulties in acquisition of subject inversion. drawing on the ideas presented above, we assume that l2 learners with null-subject l1 (macedonian) use and accept postverbal subjects inappropriately due to crosslinguistic influence of discourse-syntax properties of svi in l1. this influence is manifested at two levels: as deficits regarding the “syntax of subject” at earlier stages of acquisition (it-insertion) and as discourse-pragmatic deficits at advanced stages (reflected in svi overproduction).7 failure to acquire the stylistic-pragmatic functions of inversion in english causes difficulties in discriminating the acceptable from unacceptable discourse contexts. to test the main hypothesis that intermediate and advanced macedonian learners of english overuse svi in their l2 because of the wider use of sv inversion in their l1 we put forward the following sub-hypotheses: 6 slabakova (2015) challenges the ih, arguing that the only unattainable properties at syntaxdiscourse interface at advanced level are those that are different in l1 and l2, and that are underrepresented in the input. 7 that the acquisition of purely syntactic properties precedes the acquisition of discourse constraints on syntax is shown in some studies referred to in teixeira (2018, p. 175). acquisition of structures at syntax-discourse interface… tapsla.13311 p. 9/22 1. native speakers’ acceptance of vs structures is lower than that of the learners of both levels, but the advanced learners perform closer to the native speakers than the intermediate ones. 2. native speakers do not accept the inserted it in vs constructions in contrast to macedonian learners. 3. acceptance is generally lower for sentences where the post-verbal subject is given/old information. 4. the least acceptable examples are those with short post-verbal subjects, which violate the end-weight principle. research methodology the participants of this study formed an experimental group of l1 macedonian learners of english and a control group of english native speakers. a grammaticality judgement and correction task (gjct) was administered to both groups in order to test the respondents’ acceptance of post-verbal subjects in english. the macedonian-speaking l2 english learners were 138 university students of english, aged between 18–28 years. of those, 66 students were at an intermediate level of l2 english, comprising level b1 and b2 according to the common european framework of reference for languages (cefr), and 72 students at an advanced to proficiency level, comprising cefr’s c1 and c2. students were tested by means of a short placement test used for determining the proficiency level of the macedonian l2 english learners participating in data collection for melc. one hundred adult native speakers of english (66 american, 23 british, 8 canadian, 3 australian) were also asked to complete this test so that a comparison could be drawn between the results produced by the native speakers’ and the students’ judgement regarding the acceptability of the test items. the gjc task consisted of 30 sentences, of which the sentences with sv inversion (as examples 1 to 4 above) and sv inversion with it-insertion (examples 5–6) were the central focus of the investigation. in designing the gjc task, we tried to make it representative of the types of vs examples attested in students’ written works. we tried to balance the choice of vs sentences in gjc task considering the semantics of their predicates: they are represented by unaccusative verbs (come, appear, happen, belong), copular predicates, transitive verbs in passive and one in active voice. in terms of information structure, the majority of the vs sentences express thetic statements with the subject in focus; for sentences in which the subject referent is given information (sentence 8 in table 2) a preceding sentence is provided. vs sentences with an expletive tapsla.13311 p. 10/22 liljana mitkovska, eleni bužarovska, natasha stojanovska-ilievska it placed in initial position feature prominently in students’ works, which was the reason for their inclusion in the task. they are referred to as it-insertion (cf. lozano & mendikoetxea, 2008, 2010; agathopoulou, 2014). two more types of sentences were chosen for the task: sentences with non-referential null subjects (10) and sentences with referential null subjects (11). the former type was meant to check whether there is a correlation between null subjects and it-insertion in vs constructions, while the latter served as distractors. (10) for pronunciation _ is very important to practice as much as we can. (11) i have classes in the morning so _ could come at two o’clock. in addition, two types of grammatically correct sentences were included: sv sentences with unaccusative and passive verbs (12) and sv sentences with non-referential it (13). (12) suddenly two faces appeared at our window. (13) in english it isn’t always easy to know how to pronounce the words. the following research procedure was applied: respondents were instructed to judge the sentences as ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ and then explain or correct the error in the allotted time (20 minutes). the answer was counted as ‘incorrect’ if the error they indicated was related to subject position, subject omission or unnecessary it-insertion. in cases when the respondents specified other reasons for their judgement of a sentence as ‘incorrect’ (articles, tense, prepositions, etc.) the answer was counted as ‘correct.’ for each sentence, scores (expressed in terms of percentages of the respondents’ judgements of a sentence as ‘correct’) were calculated and compared between the two groups (students and native speakers) and between the two learner levels within the students’ group. results overall results the overall results are presented in table 1. percentages indicate attained levels of acceptance of the following structures examined in this study: (a) sentences with vs word order, (b) sentences with vs order and it-insertion, acquisition of structures at syntax-discourse interface… tapsla.13311 p. 11/22 (c) correct task sentences with sv word order, and (d) sentences containing a required non-referential it. native speakers of english largely rejected the vs sentences, while about 60% of intermediate learners did not find them unusual. the acceptance level of the advanced learners, which scored somewhere inbetween the two groups, corroborate the sub-hypothesis 1. indeed, the ns’ acceptance of vs structures was lower than that of the learners and intermediate students were more likely to accept such structures than the advanced students. the results related to it-insertion support the sub-hypothesis 2 even more strongly. ns demonstrate a strong rejection of inserted it in vs constructions. the score of 3.20% acceptance could be caused by oversight or fatigue. at intermediate level, the acceptance rate of inserted it is quite high (64.84%), as expected, but this rate drops significantly at the advanced level (24.16%), signaling that these learners have mostly overcome the it-insertion developmental phase. table 1 overall results types of constructions in the gjct b n = 66 c n = 72 ns n = 100 % % % vs 62.12 30.75 12.71 vs with it-insertion 64.84 24.16 3.20 sv with unaccusatives and passives 96.21 99.30 98.75 sv with expletive and anticipatory it 93.56 98.26 96.25 key: b – macedonian students at intermediate level of english proficiency, c – macedonian students at advanced level of english proficiency, ns – native speakers single factor anova results show a significant difference of p < 0.002 between the three groups for vs, whereas for vs with it-insertion, there was a significant difference of p < 0.000. based on one-tailed t-test, the difference between the intermediate and advanced learners for these two variables together is much greater than the difference between advanced learners and ns. more specifically, the test revealed significant pairwise differences of p < 0.004 between groups b and c, and p < 0.038 between groups c and ns. results obtained for correct sentences present a different picture. even though a large number of learners did not correct the less acceptable vs constructions, most of them accepted the sv sentences with the same type of verb forms. sentences with non-referential subjects were also well accepted. in both types of sentences, the learners did not differ significantly from the ns group. tapsla.13311 p. 12/22 liljana mitkovska, eleni bužarovska, natasha stojanovska-ilievska results for sv inversion the acceptability results obtained for each of the seven task sentences with vs word order are presented in table 2. in this type of constructions, all groups show different levels of acceptance for the individual sentences, as they differ regarding the verb meaning and form, the information status and the length of the postposed subject np. table 2 results for sentences with sv inversion* gjct sentences b n = 66 c n = 72 ns n = 100 nr % nr % nr % 24. later came a world of disorder, during and after the first world war. (unaccusative) 58 87.88 58 80.55 67 67.00 4. in the group of non-finite clauses belong also the past participle clauses. (unaccusative) 43 65.15 31 43.50 11 11.00 27. here we can see that the action is completed and should be used past simple. (passives) 45 68.11 20 27.78 4 4.00 30. at the reception are invited only close family members and some friends. (passive) 44 66.67 19 26.39 5 5.00 1. in dictionaries usually is given the class of the word. (passive) 46 69.70 14 19.44 0 0.00 18. in the production of vowels important role plays the tongue. (transitive) 24 36.36 8 11.11 0 0.00 8. this tense is also used for immediate future. in the following examples is illustrated this function. (passive) 27 40.90 5 6.94 2 2.00 total: 287 62.12 155 30.75 89 12.71 *numbers of the sentences in the tables correspond to the numbers they had in the test. the sentences in the tables are ordered according to the c level results from most to the least acceptable. acquisition of structures at syntax-discourse interface… tapsla.13311 p. 13/22 as shown above, the single factor anova for the overall results revealed a significant difference between the three groups. one-tailed t-test was conducted to examine the difference between the groups. it pointed to a significant difference between groups b and c ( p < 0.009) and groups b and ns ( p < 0.000), while the difference between groups c and ns was not significant ( p < 0.097). this may indicate that advanced level learners have attained native speaker knowledge of the english subject verb inversion structures. however, a careful examination of the data obtained for each sentence reveals that all respondents, including the ns, rated sentence 24 as the most acceptable of all. although the percentage of acceptance is higher in the learners’ groups, the difference rate between the scores of ns and intermediate and advanced learners is much smaller than for the other sentences. this sentence skewed the results and distorted the relations between the groups, especially between the group of advanced learners and ns. upon removing sentence 24, the significance coefficient increased ( p < 0.007) indicating a significant difference between these two groups. results for sv inversion + it-insertion the data obtained for the five sentences containing sv inversion + itinsertion are presented in table 3. results for individual sentences show similar differences as the overall scores, which proved to be statistically significant ( p < 0.000). while ns almost completely rejected these sentences, a large number of learners accepted them as accurate. the acceptance rate is especially striking in the intermediate learners’ group, where all the sentences, except sentence 16, were rated acceptable by 70–80% of the learners. these results were expected in light of the fact that the strategy of it-insertion in sv inversion structures was largely noticed in the language of intermediate level learners. in fact, most of our collected examples come from upper-intermediate learners. the high acceptance rate for sentence 9 corresponds to the frequent use of the structure ‘it should be used np’ in intermediate students’ works. advanced learners accepted the vs + it-insertion much less frequently than the intermediate ones. at this level, they seem to have come to grips with the use of expletive and anticipatory it, feeling more confident of its correct distribution. intermediate learners’ acceptance rates were considerably higher than those of the other two groups. however, the advanced learners’ acceptance rate clearly differs from the ns rate, which indicates that some learners are still confused. the one-tailed t-test yielded significant difference between all groups: p < 0.003 between groups b and c, p < 0.006 between groups c and ns, and p < 0.000 between groups b and ns. tapsla.13311 p. 14/22 liljana mitkovska, eleni bužarovska, natasha stojanovska-ilievska table 3 results for sentences with sv inversion + it-insertion* gjct sentences b n = 66 c n = 72 ns n = 100 nr % nr % nr % 29. then in front of us it appeared a dark creature with red eyes. (unaccusative) 45 68.11 29 40.28 6 6.00 9. instead of plural form ‘were’ it should be used the singular form ‘was’. (passive) 53 80.3 23 31.94 3 3.00 23. it is quite obvious the omission of the definite article "the". (copula) 50 75.76 20 27.78 6 6.00 19. in both texts it is also raised the question of definite articles. (passive) 47 71.21 13 18.05 1 1.00 16. on the second day of my holiday it happened an accident. (unaccusative) 19 28.79 2 2.78 0 0.00 total: 214 64.84 87 24.16 16 3.20 *numbers of the sentences in the tables correspond to the numbers they had in the test. the sentences in the tables are ordered according to the c level results from most to the least acceptable. discussion the findings of this study indicate that macedonian learners of english encounter difficulties in acquisition of the english svi constructions up to high levels of proficiency, thereby confirming our hypothesis that they accept sentences with subject inversion more often than native speakers. though advanced learners performed better than the intermediate ones, still they differed significantly from the control group of native speakers. considering the differences between the learners’ l1 and l2, we suggest that learners are constrained by the discourse-syntactic rules of their first language. a number of researchers point out that learners’ failures in production and reception of svi (and other null subject parameter properties) are caused by crosslinguistic influence (e.g., prentza, 2014; prentza & tsimpli, 2013) imposed by the syntactic differences between l1 and l2. lozano and mendikoetxea (2010) found that spanish learners produced significantly more ungrammatical postverbal structures than native english speakers. given that vs sentences occur more frequently in spanish, these results could be attributed to l1 transfer. however, if that was the only reason learners would be expected to produce many more acquisition of structures at syntax-discourse interface… tapsla.13311 p. 15/22 incorrect vs sentences. they conclude that the reason why learners cannot fully acquire l2 grammar “may be largely attributed to problems at integrating different types of knowledge at the interfaces” (p. 494). we assume that macedonian learners fail to judge svi sentences correctly because of the differences in their functional scope and rhetoric load in l1 and l2. as observed in the section on subject-verb inversion in english and macedonian, a number of studies have pointed out the particularly marked nature of the english construction and its restriction to specific contexts (quirk et al., 1985; dorgeloh, 1997; chen, 2003; kreyer, 2006). even if all conditions for svi were met, often it would not be considered fully appropriate.8 sentence 24 in the research task was accepted only by 67% of the ns, even though the verb come is the second most frequently occurring verb in vs sentences in english, following the copula be (levin & rappaport hovav, 1995, p. 240) and the subject phrase is rather heavy.9 the other unaccusative verb (belong) in sentence 4, reached only 11% acceptance. the discrepancy in the learners’ judgements is not pronounced. in the advanced group, the acceptance rate is reduced by half (80.55% for 24 vs. 43.50% for sentence 4) and the difference is rather small in the intermediate group (87.88% vs. 69.70). this suggests that a substantial number of learners at b level failed to perceive subtle differences between the sv inversion sentences, since in both sentences inversion would be the more natural word order in their l1. another strong evidence for l1 influence is the use of vs with passive sentences. though they are possible in both languages,10 macedonian passives are more prone to presentative interpretation: the be-passive is rather resultative and the se-passive has mainly agent defocusing functions. ns generally rejected vs in passive constructions even when the dislocated subject was quite long and complex, as in sentence 30. contrary to the ns’ judgement, about 65–70% of the intermediate and about 20–30% of the advanced learners rated most sentences with passive verbs acceptable, irrespective of their length (sentence 30) and complexity (sentence 27). however, the rates for sentence 18, containing subject—direct object inversion, suggest that learners do not treat active transitive constructions in the same way as intransitive and passive ones, demonstrating lower acceptance (intermediate 36.36%, advanced 11.11%), though this construction is also possible in their l1. the total rejection of this sentence by ns indicates stronger typological divergence between the two languages, which reduces the l1 influence effects. 8 according to kreyer (2006), the language user as a creative writer (apart from syntactic complexity and information status) inf luences the use of svi in english. 9 moreover, the sentence-initial adverb (later) resembles enumerative listing conjuncts, which trigger sv inversion and usually co-occur with the copula be, go, and come (prado-alonso, 2011, p. 140). 10 according to birner (1995), this is quite rare. tapsla.13311 p. 16/22 liljana mitkovska, eleni bužarovska, natasha stojanovska-ilievska it should be noted, though, that sentence 8, where the subject referent is anaphorically related to the previous discourse, was accepted by fewer learners (40.9% intermediate and 6.94% advanced). this evidence proves the sub-hypothesis 3 that learners are sensitive to the information status of the inverted subject. information-packaging is an important aspect of the english svi (birner, 1994; 1995), but the decisive factor for these results seems to be the fact that the discourse properties regulate the macedonian vs structures. this indicates again a strong l1 influence on the learners’ acceptance of the english svi. furthermore, the length of the inverted subject does not seem to play an important role: sentence 30, in which the inverted subject is rather long, was deemed slightly less acceptable than sentence 27, with a two-word subject ( past tense). this goes counter to the sub-hypothesis 4. the advanced learners’ results follow the same pattern, though at much lower degree. figure 1 results for vs sentences in the three groups of respondents 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 b c ns regarding l2 development, our results confirm our sub-hypothesis concerning improvement in the advanced learners’ group. the diagram in figure 1 shows graphically that the advanced group’s acceptance rates were in most cases closer to the ns’ scores than to the intermediate learners’ ones. however, we observe a noticeably higher level of acceptance in this group, compared to the ns’ rates. still, we cannot prove whether native-like attainment is constrained by the interplay of discourse-syntactic factors, since our advanced learners were not near-native speakers. it seems that the infelicitous use of inverted structures is to be sought in discourse-pragmatic constraints of english, while the use of ungrammatical it-insertion belongs to syntactic deficits. lozano and callies (2018, p. 427) observe that: “learners can eventually attain native‐like competence of the discourse constraints that regulate word order in english but show some residual optionality in producing ungrammatical preverbal expletives (*it/*ø), which is acquisition of structures at syntax-discourse interface… tapsla.13311 p. 17/22 argued to be a purely grammatical problem.” our results displayed in table 2 corroborate the findings that english learners with null-subject l1 resort to inserting a dummy it when inverting the subject (e.g., oshita, 2004; judy & rothman, 2010; lozano & mendikoetxea, 2010; prentza, 2014). the diagram in figure 2 illustrates a clear developmental trend towards improvement in the advanced group. figure 2 results for vs + it-insertion sentences in the three groups of respondents 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 29. then in front of us it appeared … 9. instead of plural form ‘were’… 23. it is quite obvious the omission … 19. in both texts it is also raised the … 16. on the second day of my holiday … b c ns what motivates the learners’ use of it-insertion in svi is a puzzle worth investigating. as lozano and mendikoetxea (2010, p. 487) have pointed out, this construction “is neither in their l2 input nor directly a result of l1 transfer.” ns’ reactions in our study strongly indicate that vs + it-insertion is not characteristic of english. agathopoulou (2014, p. 178) reports similar rejection of this construction by the native english speakers she consulted. however, oshita (2004, p. 121) attributes the occurrence of such structures in the spanish and italian learner language corpora to the pro-drop typology of their l1s, which allow null expletives. on the other hand, the speakers of topic-drop languages (japanese and korean), which lack null expletives, produce considerably fewer it-insertions. this explanation is challenged by the following asymmetrical findings: only one it-insertion was found in the l1 greek learner corpus (agathopoulou, 2014) compared to 38 and 27 occurrences in the spanish and italian learner corpora, respectively (lozano & mendikoetxea 2008, 2010). agathopoulou (2014, p. 182) allows for some possible l1 effects in the italian data, suggesting, however, that the reasons for the spanish–greek data discrepancies should be sought in students’ proficiency. namely, greek students whose contributions were included in the corpus were at advanced level, while the spanish ones were intermediate learners of english. this explanation is strongly supported by our findings, which display a sharp difference between intermediate and advanced learners’ acceptance rates. tapsla.13311 p. 18/22 liljana mitkovska, eleni bužarovska, natasha stojanovska-ilievska we argue that the occurrence of it-insertion in l2 english of learners with a pro-drop l1 is in correlation with both the acquisition of non-referential it and the constraints of svi in english. in our data, we observe parallel development of non-referential it omission, sv inversion and sv inversion plus it-insertion, shown in figure 3, as the values for all three categories drop equally from intermediate to advanced level. figure 3 comparison of acceptance rates in three categories among the learners’ groups 0 20 40 60 80 b c non-referential it omission 62,37 23,84 sv inversion+ it-insertion 64,84 24,16 sv inversion 62,12 30,75 results show that there is a developmental correlation between it-insertion and the acquisition of null subjects. numerous studies report that null-subject l1 learners of english have more difficulties in acquiring non-referential rather than referential subjects in english (e.g., oshita, 2004; judy & rothman, 2010; prentza & tsimpli, 2013; prentza, 2014). mitkovska and bužarovska (2018), analyzing data from learner corpus materials by l1 macedonian speakers between 8 and 14 years of age, observe a steady decrease in omission of the expletive it from about 70% at a2 to about 30–40% at b1 and b2 level. this means that learners at intermediate level start becoming aware that the syntactic subject position is obligatorily filled with it in the absence of a referent. at that stage, intermediate learners receive exposure to input involving extraposition of clausal subjects and the “filler” function of the non-referential, cataphoric it. it is possible that learners may equate extraposed subject clause with postposed np subjects, especially if the latter are longer. acquisition of structures at syntax-discourse interface… tapsla.13311 p. 19/22 concluding remarks the results of this research show that macedonian learners generally find english vs sentences, as well as vs + it-insertion examples, more acceptable than native speakers of english, but the extent of this acceptance is variable depending on students’ level of english proficiency. the differences between the groups proved statistically relevant confirming the sub-hypotheses 1 and 2. the native speakers’ results support the general opinion that vs sentences are not readily acceptable and that speakers’ sensitivity to word order alterations displays variability. yet, it is obvious that unaccusative verbs are more acceptable than verbs in passive voice. the sensitivity to subject information status and syntactic complexity is difficult to judge, as ns equally rejected sentences with long and short subjects, expressing both new and old information. the degree of learners’ acceptance of vs structures depends on verbal semantics and the information status of the subject referent, but not on the syntactic complexity of the subject constituent. the observed results reflect typical properties of svi in macedonian: acceptance of a wide range of verbs, especially in passive or passive-like constructions, equal acceptance of inversions with short and long subjects that have discourse-new information status. in both groups, the learners’ high acceptance rate of postverbal subjects in sentences with vs pattern, unacceptable for english speakers, reflects the adherence to the pragmatic principle in macedonian to place the discourse-new subject in focus. as noted by prentza (2014), l1 transfer is most likely to occur “in structures where l1 and l2 abstract syntactic features differ” (p. 1775). this is most probably responsible for lingering syntactic deficits at syntax-discourse interface even at advanced level. the sensibility to it-insertion marks the developmental stage when english learners become aware of expletive subjects in l2 but the word order is still regulated by the discourse rules of l1. the increase in expletive subject acquisition and greater awareness of vs constraints in english at advanced proficiency level parallels the decrease in acceptance of it-insertion. the results of our investigation confirm the main hypothesis that l1 transfer effects are mainly responsible for the acceptance of post-verbal subjects in learner english. these effects stem from the information structure of the l1 sentences expressing thetic statements. in macedonian, these constructions are realized by unaccusative verbs and se-passive or passive-like constructions whose unmarked word order is vs. in english, vs sentences are stylistically marked since subject inversion is restricted to certain registers and performs specific pragmatic functions. moreover, the functional scope of svi is much narrower in english because its use depends on author’s narrative goals and stylistic preferences. the low distribution of svi due to its rhetoric nature is tapsla.13311 p. 20/22 liljana mitkovska, eleni bužarovska, natasha stojanovska-ilievska compounded by the fact that learners in formal educational settings do not receive sufficient evidence for the appropriate use of vs structures. all these factors cause difficulties in discriminating the acceptable from unacceptable discourse contexts and complicate the acquisition of svi by learners whose l1 has a discourse-driven word order. references agathopoulou, e. 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(2006). inversion in modern written english. syntactic complexity, information status and the creative writer. gunter narr. lahousse, k. (2007). implicit stage topics. discours, 1, 1–23. https://journals.openedition.org/ discours/117 lambrecht, k. (1994). information structure and sentence form: topic, focus, and the mental representation of discourse referents. cambridge university press. levin, b., & rappaport hovav, m. (1995). unaccusativity. mit press. lozano, c., & mendikoetxea, a. (2010). postverbal subjects in l2 english: a corpus-based study. bilingualism: language and cognition, 13(4), 475–497. https://journals.openedition.org/discours/117 https://journals.openedition.org/discours/117 acquisition of structures at syntax-discourse interface… tapsla.13311 p. 21/22 lozano, c., & mendikoetxea, a. 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(2018). l2 acquisition at the interfaces: subject-verb inversion in l2 english and its pedagogical implications. doctoral dissertation. universidade nova de lisboa. tsimpli, i., & sorace, a. (2006). differentiating interfaces: l2 performance in syntax–semantics and syntax–discourse phenomena. proceedings of the 30th annual boston university conference (pp. 653–664). cascadilla press. tapsla.13311 p. 22/22 liljana mitkovska, eleni bužarovska, natasha stojanovska-ilievska liljana mitkovska, eleni bužarovska, natasha stojanovska-ilievska erwerb von strukturen nach syntax-discourse interface: postverbale subjekte in l2-englisch z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die vorliegende studie untersucht die akzeptabilität von postverbalen subjekten durch l2-englischlerner der mittelund oberstufe mit l1-mazedonisch, einer slawischen nullsubjektsprache mit reicher verbalmorphologie. die beiden sprachen unterscheiden sich hinsichtlich der verwendung von subjekt-verb-inversion (svi): im mazedonischen ist die svi ein standardmuster in thetischen sätzen, während sie im englischen ausschließlich in bestimmten kontexten verwendet wird. um die hypothese zu überprüfen, dass mazedonische lernende aufgrund des sprachübergreifenden einf lusses auf schwierigkeiten beim erwerb der englischen svi stoßen, wurde eine aufgabe zur beurteilung der grammatikalität und korrektur an zwei gruppen mazedonischer englischlerner und eine kontrollgruppe englischer muttersprachler gestellt. die ergebnisse zeigen, dass die l2-lerner englische vs-sätze bzw. vs-beispiele mit dem eingefügten it akzeptabler finden als die muttersprachler. allerdings liegen die sprachkenntnisse der fortgeschrittenen gruppe näher bei den muttersprachlern als bei den lernern der mittelstufe. beide nicht-muttersprachler-gruppen sind mehr bereit, inkorrekte englische sätze zu akzeptieren, die den typischen l1-strukturen entsprechen. schlüsselwörter: subjektinversion, informationsstruktur, wortstellung, interface-hypothese preface the present issue of theory and practice of second language acquisition completes the seventh year of publishing this journal. it was founded as a forum of discussion for polish as well as foreign scholars and seems to have fulfilled its mission as a journal on the rise. the journal has become more and more popular as we get more and more interesting submissions from both polish and foreign researchers. indeed since its foundation, every consecutive issue of the journal has welcomed contributions from many renown researchers, such as peter macintyre, david singleton, larissa aronin, sarah mercer, tammy gregersen, and jean-marc dewaele, to name just a few. also, a fast growing number of oa uploads has been observed as an indication of the journal’s popularity, as is the queue of the articles already accepted and awaiting their turn to be included in the next volumes to be published. it is the journal’s ambition to demonstrate new trends and unknown venues for research in sla, focusing both on theoretical discussion and the practical solutions to problems based upon them. we aim not only to publish and share with our readers contributions from well-known and respected scholars but would like to promote young researchers, who often present fresh and innovative ideas or open up new perspectives on issues already researched. in other words, the journal hopes to become a venue for the exchange of ideas between well-established academics and those inspired by them. in terms of its content, the journal presents contributions on issues ranging from purely linguistic and cognitively-oriented research on language acquisition processes to psycho and sociolinguistic studies, always trying to feature the most recent developments in terms of topic choice, as well as in the methodology of research they employ. we publish our journal through an open access system, where the entire production process is executed online and the final product is available to everyone, thus offering an opportunity to share ideas through a broad, effective, and economical mode of dissemination. we aim at keeping high standards and quality, which are theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 7 (2), 2021, pp. 5–8 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11585 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en 6 preface guaranteed by the international editorial board of tapsla, whose members are well-known polish and foreign experts on a wide range of second language acquisition issues. the journal is indexed in numerous databases, including scopus. as the journal is published by the prestigious polish academic publisher, wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego (university of silesia press in katowice), the copyediting and technical side of the production are done by an experienced team of editors at the university of silesia press in katowice. updated information and all the issues published so far are available on the journal webpage at www.tapsla.us.edu.pl. the topics of the present volume range from those discussing individual learner differences from a variety of perspectives and settings to the development of language skills and different forms of instruction, presenting some innovative ideas in face-to-face and online mode of teaching a foreign language. the opening text “using character strengths to address english writing anxiety: a mixed-methods study” by tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, and rachel buck is quite an innovative way of looking at foreign language instruction, which employs elements of positive psychology in the language classroom to create a context of well-being for the learners. the authors not only introduce some of the seminal ideas taken from positive psychology, but most of all, they demonstrate in a practical way how the main assumptions of positive psychology can be applied in a classroom. the case study presented focuses on one of the pillars of positive psychology—character strengths—and through pedagogical intervention points out benefits of the intervention implemented for the learner. the topic of positive reinforcement is a widely-discussed issue not only in psychological research, but also in the context of educational theory and practice in the classroom. the next article is an example of how such positive reinforcement, that is, praise, is being investigated by means of a pedagogical experiment. adrian leis, in his text entitled “praise in the efl classroom: a growth mindset perspective,” demonstrates the role of giving positive feedback in the form of praising and how it affects those who do not receive such feedback. the results of this interesting and well-designed experiment lead the author to highlight practical implications and offer advice on how to give feedback effectively. in the text entitled “the relationship between attention and extraneous load: bridging second language acquisition theory and cognitive load theory,” christopher j. l. hughes, jamie costley, and christopher lange argue convincingly for an integration of cognitive load theory of sweller (2017) into second language acquisition practices to facilitate the learning process. the context described is that of asynchronous video instruction at a korean cyber-university and the data collected comes from a learner survey carried out by the authors. the results clearly indicate that there is a statistically significant relationship between distraction and extraneous load, which allowed the researchers to construct an explanatory model explaining this relationship. 7preface the authors offer us the pedagogical implications of this in the context of multimodal language instruction. the next text “gender-based differences in efl learners’ language learning strategies and productive vocabulary” by alejandra montero-saizaja considers one of the most significant individual learner differences, that is, gender, and its impact on various aspects of language learning processes. the author suggests that one of the under-researched areas in this respect is productive vocabulary use and strategies employed in an efl context by male versus female learners. the study based on the strategy inventory for language learning (sill) (oxford, 1990) and the productive vocabulary levels test (pvlt) (laufer & nation, 1995, 1999), reports on the relationship between language learning strategies and productive vocabulary in the case of male and female learners. the findings show that female learners in the study used more strategies than the male ones, however, there were no statistically significant differences in terms of productive vocabulary. next, carla ferrerós pagès, in her text “conceptual and linguistic transfer from l2 (catalan) to l1 (amazigh) within the context of migration,” looks at the phenomenon of lexical and semantic transfer between l2 (catalan) and l1 (amazigh). the analysis focuses on a selected semantic field of body parts to demonstrate the possibility (or otherwise) of conceptual transfer between these two languages. the author discusses various factors that may have an impact on this transfer such as the amount of exposure to l2, language context or the status of the languages and the characteristics of speakers. the next article entitled “effects of using corpus-based instructional mediation on efl students’ academic writing skills improvement” by amare tesfie birhan, mulugeta teka, and nibret asrade describes a quasi-experimental study carried out in the context of efl mechanical engineering students. the results of the study and statistical analysis confirm the hypothesis that corpus-based instructional mediation results in a more effective development of fl writing skills in learners in such important aspects as text construction, its content, communicative value, structure and grammar, and vocabulary usage. thus, the authors conclude by calling for the “inclusion of corpus-based authentic linguistic elements in their teaching material when teaching academic writing courses in the efl context” (p. 133). the last text in this issue, authored by xiaoyan li and entitled “learning japanese onomatopoeia through a narrative-evaluation e-learning system,” introduces a wholly different learning context, where online instruction is implemented in teaching japanese as an fl. it focuses on an interesting but troublesome for learners aspect of japanese—onomatopoeia—expressing feelings and experiences. the author proposes an online learning system to teach japanese onomatopoeia via three-step instruction in the form of “narrative strategies to mimic the process by which native speakers learn” (p. 133). the system consists of teaching the formal rules with nuances involved—the creation of individual onomatopoeia by learners and teacher feedback in a form 8 preface of narrative interpretation. the effectiveness of an e-learning system was confirmed in the study, in which the experimental group outperformed the control group in their understanding and use of japanese onomatopoeia. the present issue also includes two book reviews. the first review by katarzyna molek-kozakowska presents the monograph by timothy reagan linguistic legitimacy and social justice, which comments on current discussions of selected topics in critical language pedagogy from the perspective of ideologies, language norms, and uses and, consequentially, also language education practices. the book makes an attempt to answer important questions on language norms and language use and how they translate into a speaker’s social position. ultimately, the answers to the questions posed have a bearing on the teaching of certain versions of a language, which may contribute to social (in)equality. the other book, reviewed by katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia, looks at one of the most important individual learner differences—language anxiety. the book, authored by christina gkonou, mark daubney, and jean-marc dewaele and entitled new insights into language anxiety: theory, research and educational implications, offers a new perspective on studying language anxiety. it is a dynamic perspective, which requires an interdisciplinary approach and knowledge of varied research paradigms. this issue therefore offers both theoretical overviews and practical reflections based on individual researcher’s empirical work and experiences in the realm of teaching and learning foreign languages—in traditional as well as in less-conventional e-learning contexts. we hope that this innovative and creative research (in its outcomes and its implications) will be of interest to other scholars. also, the practical solutions to problems proposed by some of the authors can be adapted for other teaching and learning contexts. we hope that all types of readers—researchers, teachers and students—will find the articles not only useful but also inspirational. more than anything else, we would like to thank all the authors in this volume and, as is our usual practice, to extend our invitation to all polish and foreign researchers and academics to share their work with us by submitting it to our journal. danuta gabryś-barker adam wojtaszekhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-0308-4337 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703 beata webb, alicia vallero bond university, australia developing learning environments for blended and online learning a b s t r a c t developing online and blended learning programs at a university requires the selection of an appropriate framework which addresses the criteria of effective pedagogy. this paper aims to determine a framework for developing and evaluating online and blended learning environments within university educational contexts. the paper is based on the experience of developing blended and online teacher training programs in teaching english to speakers of other languages at bond university, gold coast, australia. first, the paper outlines the methodology of the project. then, it explores various concepts and theoretical models of learning environments. the next part of the paper examines students’ perspective of the elements of the learning environment as defined by the framework of choice. the paper concludes with a comparative overview of the theoretical framework and its application within the bond university context. keywords: language learning, online learning, blended learning, teacher training introduction while developing online and blended programs in the faculty of society and design at bond university, it became essential to determine an appropriate framework to ensure that the developed learning environments addressed the criteria of effective pedagogy. this paper aims to determine a framework for developing and evaluating effective online and blended learning environments. first, the paper outlines the methodology of the project. then, it explores various concepts and theoretical models of learning environments in order to select the framework which addresses the elements and features of blended and online theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 4 (2), 2018, pp. 93–107 94 beata webb, alicia vallero education best. the final part of the paper examines students’ perspective of the learning environment elements as defined by the framework of choice. project methodology: research background, research aims, research tools, and research sample this section outlines research background, aims, research tools, and the sample. the study explores (1) language teacher education programs in teaching english to speakers of other languages (tesol) and (2) spanish programs including levels 1 to 4, at bond university, gold coast, australia. bond university offers two postgraduate programs for language teacher education, master of arts in tesol and the graduate certificate in tesol. the programs aim to either prepare students for teaching english as an additional language or dialect (eal/d) or to extend the expertise of existing eal/d teachers. the tesol programs have been offered in the on-campus mode of delivery since 1989, and in the online mode since 2013. the spanish program has been offered in its blended format for seven years which provided important longitudinal data on effective practices in the blended environment. both, tesol and spanish programs, have been undergoing continuous evaluation to strengthen the alignment between the content, pedagogy, learning design, instructional design, and emerging technologies that increasingly offer better teaching and learning solutions. students enrolled in the programs represent very high level of diversity regarding age, cultural and linguistic backgrounds and fields or levels of previous teaching and learning experience. three aims have been formulated for the purposes of this paper. the first aim was to examine theoretical frameworks for developing learning environments for blended and online learning to determine the model which conceptualises online context best. the second aim was to analyse students’ perspective regarding an effective learning environment in the context of online and blended education. the final aim was to compare the key elements of the theoretical framework with the students’ perspectives to determine whether the bond university tesol and spanish programs address the requirements of effective pedagogy. tevals (teaching evaluations) are a non-compulsory teaching evaluation tool that allows students to provide feedback on each subject they enrol in. they consist of two parts, in the first part, the students respond to ten questions rating various aspects of teaching and the subject using the likert scale. in the second part, students answer the following two open questions: 95developing learning environments for blended and online learning 1. what aspects of this educator’s approach helped you learn? 2. what aspects of this subject did you find most helpful? this project focused on the analysis of the qualitative data provided in the tesol and spanish student responses. the sample was collected over six semesters between 2015–2016, then the responses were tabulated and analysed, according to the categories representing the elements of the learning environment selected in the research phase of the project. the next section explores a range of learning environment frameworks for developing blended and online environments. learning environments: definitions and frameworks this section examines the frameworks of learning environments. first, it outlines the need for a flexible learning environment suitable for developing online and blended programs. next, it explores definitions of learning environment and reviews a variety of learning environments defined in professional literature. the last part presents the selected learning environment model and explores its elements in detail. defining features of learning environment in blended and online contexts one of the main challenges the authors of this project experienced while developing blended and online learning environments was the difficulty in communicating the features of online education employed for the purpose of the program delivery. this difficulty resulted from the high level of ambiguity in the terminology employed to describe online environments and their resources. in particular, it was difficult to describe the tesol online program which is delivered fully online, using tools which allow for high level of interactivity and collaboration, not commonly associated with online environments. a wide range of asynchronous resources is delivered via blackboard management learning system, and the blackboard collaborate (classic and ultra) video conferencing tool is used for synchronous weekly tutorials. due to the advancement of technologies, many terms used to describe and distinguish between the online and the ‘brick and mortar’ classrooms no longer describe this dichotomy accurately. for example, when discussing the characteristic features of online education, this mode of delivery is often referred to as lacking in interaction, collaboration, and personalisation. therefore, it is 96 beata webb, alicia vallero viewed as less effective than brick and mortar ‘face-to-face’ mode of delivery. however, the principal feature of the blackboard collaborate platform is the ability for students and teachers to work ‘face-to-face,’ in a virtual classroom. consequently, both modes of delivery allow students to engage in live sessions which are interactive and personalised. accordingly, ‘the brick and mortar’ term of reference was the only term which adequately described the difference between the two modes of delivery. to sum up, the way educational technologies are employed in the program blurs the existing terminology and it emphasises the need for redefining learning environments concepts and frameworks. review of learning environments the next step in the project was to explore concepts and models of learning environments suitable for blended and online education. many sources (abualrub, karseth, & stensaker, 2013) referred to a learning environment within the political contexts. other authors used the term ‘a learning environment’ when discussing issues with connection to technology, blended learning or difficulties with their implementation (abualrub et al., 2013). accordingly, many articles were written by information technology experts in the language easily accessible only to this particular expert group. overall, very few references and sources defined learning environments. koper (2000, p. 3) stated in 2000 that “the term ‘learning environment’ has been widely used but it has rarely been defined.” it appeared the situation, almost 20 years later, has changed very little (abualrub et al., 2013). the most comprehensive overview of learning environments was recently provided by abualrub et al. (2013). they identified various ways with which a learning environment is referred to in professional literature. for example, salmi (2009, in abualrub et al., 2013) referred to it as “an educational environment,” while hiemstra (1991 in abualrub et al., 2013) described it as “educational climate.” other researchers used the terms “academic environment” (lizzio, wilson, & simons, 2002, in abualrub et al., 2013), or “study environment” (kirschner & vilsteren, 1997, in abualrub et al., 2013). grabinger and dunlap (1995, in abualrub et al., 2013) proposed that educational researchers often use the term “learning environment” to encode “unlimited and more unspecified things in education, places and activities.” the definitions of learning environments vary in topic, range, and features. they may refer to physical spaces where learning activities take place, supportive technologies, online conditions or approaches. abualrub et al. (2013) concluded that a learning environment was the sum of teaching and learning activities and approaches. they also observed that a concept of learning environment is often intended to fit a specific research agenda. 97developing learning environments for blended and online learning the holodeck while reviewing the models of learning environment, one framework in particular came into focus due to its flexibility and the positive lack of reference to the terms associated with online or non-online learning environments. thornburg’s (2013) concept of a learning environment as ‘a holodeck’ presents an ideal framework for developing blended and online educational settings. a holodeck is a concept known to star trek (an american science fiction television series) fans, and it refers to a virtual reality room (a plot device) on board of star trek uss enterprise, in which the crew can participate in a variety of plots, in different environments of their choice. to sum up, the holodeck provides a virtual environment which allows the star trek staff to do what they need or wish at any particular moment. thornburg’s (2013) model of a learning environment as a holodeck underlines the features of an effective pedagogical model, defining them at a level which goes beyond the terms difficult to avoid in many other frameworks. a learning holodeck, according to thornburg’s (2013) metaphor, is, therefore, an environment where learners can have a full successful learning experience, and to do what they need during their learning experience. its four elements reflect the principal features of good pedagogy models promoted in broad education. thornburg’s (2013) design of a learning environment as a pedagogical setting includes four learning spaces: (1) campfires, (2) watering holes, (3) caves, and (4) life. the first learning space, campfires, is the home of didactic presentation of the material. the term campfires refers to the ancient way of learning, where, sitting by the campfire, the young generations listened to the stories passed on by the elders. this epitomises teaching provided by the storytellers, who were the keepers of knowledge. thornburg (2013) underlines the importance of such learning and compares it to one of the roles of a successful learning environment, with teachers as arbiters of knowledge, disseminating it at a metaphorical campfire, the home of the lectures. thornburg (2013), however, recognises that lectures are only one of the important elements of effective teaching and learning processes and he identifies the second learning space as watering holes. the watering holes are “a place of social learning among the peers” (thornburg, 2013). the concept of social learning as a dominant activity in various communities has been debated and accepted through the work of vygotsky in the 1920s, who developed a concept of the zone of proximal development initiated by social interaction (vygotsky, 1978). similarly to many current methodologies (scarino & liddicoat, 2009), thornburg (2013) views the role of the metaphorical watering holes, or in educational conceptual spaces where learners meet in small groups of three or four and talk informally about the material they have learnt in lectures. 98 beata webb, alicia vallero the third space, caves, is the home of reflective learning. again, this feature of education has been central to many older (i.e., humanistic approaches) and more contemporary concepts in teaching, such as intercultural language teaching and learning (scarino & liddicoat, 2009). scarino and liddicoat (2009) emphasise the role of reflection in learning language and culture: “learning involves becoming aware of how we think, know and learn about language (first and additional), culture, knowing, understanding and their relationship as well as concepts such as diversity, identity, experiences and one’s own intercultural thoughts and feelings” (scarino & liddicoat, 2009, p. 35). similarly, thornburg (2013) refers to caves as the home of cognitive understanding of the material. caves, depending on the learner, may or may not be solitary places. importantly, thornburg (2013) highlights the fact that the teacher’s role is twofold: to provide the space for reflection and something to reflect on. the fourth and the last learning space in thornburg’s holodeck learning environment is referred to as life. this learning space provides learners with an opportunity to demonstrate that they understand what they have learnt and to apply that knowledge to practical real-life contexts (thornburg, 2013). according to thornburg (2013), the learner continues the learning process through applying what they have learnt in authentic situations and sharing the application with others. in other words, learning in this space continues through practicing and applying knowledge gained in the previous three learning spaces in real-life situation. the four elements of thornburg’s metaphorical learning holodeck provide program designers with a flexible and universal model of an effective learning environment, which superimposes features of any specific pedagogy. thornburg’s (2013) model of a learning environment and its four learning spaces at bond university the holodeck: a learning environment from a student perspective this section explores whether the tesol and spanish programs at bond university fulfil the requirements of an effective learning environment. each section first presents the evidence selected from the program design and curriculum. next, students’ teval comments are investigated for the references to the four elements of the thornburg (2013) model of a learning holodeck. table 1 presents all student teval comments and it shows that, although the 99developing learning environments for blended and online learning distribution is uneven, all the elements of the holodeck model of a learning environment are referred to in the student remarks. table 1 student comments on elements of the holodeck as a learning environment no. elements of the holodeck as a learning environment student comments 1. campfire 80% (109) 2. the whole subject: the holodeck? 11.9% (16) 3. watering hole 3.7% (5) 4. cave 3.7% (5) 5. life 0.7% (1) the majority of the comments made by the students concerned the first learning space, campfires, or the home of the lecture. the second cluster of the responses were comments referring to all of the program elements, the whole holodeck. watering hole and cave were mentioned by a smaller group of five students each. only one remark was made when referring to the fourth learning space, life. next, each of the four learning spaces in bond university programs are addressed in detail. campfires at bond university tesol and spanish programs as far as campfires are concerned, bond university programs provide this space for both online and brick and mortar students. the programs offer both synchronous and asynchronous resources. the synchronous resources, where learning and teaching occurs at the same time, include live lectures on campus and live lectures online, using blackboard collaborate. both online and on-campus students also participate in asynchronous learning, which involves watching the pre-recorded lectures, either recorded earlier by program lecturers or made available from educational sources. while analysing student teval comments, this space also was identified by students as the most significant. out of 136 student comments, 80% (109) of the comments made very positive references to campfire, the home of lectures. table 2 details the topics of students tevals and it demonstrates that teacher’s teaching is the most important aspect of student positive learning experience (coe, aloisi, higgins, & major, 2014). 100 beata webb, alicia vallero table 2 topics of student teval comments: campfire no. campfire: student teval comments student comments 1. teacher’s teaching 62% (37) 2. teacher’s knowledge 15% (9) 3. liked the topics 15% (9) 4. teacher’s experience 8% (5) 5. total 60 the table above demonstrates that the majority of students in this category, 62% (37), made positive references to teacher’s teaching (1), and that teacher’s knowledge (2) and the topics students liked (3) were appreciated by 15% (9) students each. teacher’s experience (4) was valued by 8% of the students referring in their positive comments to teaching and teachers. examples of student quotes concerning teacher’s knowledge and skills are included in table 3. table 3 students quotes on teacher’s knowledge and skills no. teacher’s strengths knowledge and skills 1. teacher’s knowledge ‘teacher is knowledgeable; experienced; with impressive depth of knowledge’ 2. teacher & teaching content makes content authentic; makes it relevant; directs me when i am confused; prepares highly valued activities; explained concepts and theories: interestingly, easily, thoroughly; introduces remarkable and relevant topics 3. teacher, tasks, & activities enables the environment that engages us with the lesson engages us with the tasks at hand; involves us in activities; always keeps the class engaged throughout the lesson student remarks referring to specific characteristics of a teacher form another large cluster of 49 comments. the students made positive comments about teacher’s learner-centredness and they appreciated the fact that the teacher provided a positive learning environment. the teacher attributes emphasised by the students included teacher’s willingness to support and help them and to encourage and inspire them in their learning. it was important to students that the teachers were approachable and they valued teachers’ positive personality and attitude. overall, examples from the bond university program design as well as student teval comments, provide the evidence of addressing the require101developing learning environments for blended and online learning ment of the first learning space in thornburg’s (2013) framework. therefore, the programs address the first element of a successful learning environment as a holodeck. the qualitative data also suggests that teachers, their knowledge, skills and ‘soft teaching skills’ (webb & vallero, in press b) are of particular importance to the students, that the campfire element is addressed in the bond programs, and that students value quality lectures and lecturers as central to their successful learning. watering holes at bond university tesol and spanish programs thornburg’s (2013) watering hole, the home of social interaction between peers, is the second learning space explored in the tesol and spanish programs at bond university. bond university tesol and spanish programs, which are offered both, in the brick and mortar physical classrooms of the bond university campus, as well as in an online mode of delivery, provide watering holes for students of both cohorts. the brick and mortar campus provides many watering holes, and students who undertake their studies on campus can utilise the many physical spaces for meeting with their peers outside the classroom. these learning spaces can range from the collaborative learning spaces on campus such as multimedia learning centre or the non-quiet parts of the bond library, to a coffee shop or a bar. surprisingly, considering the technology regularly employed for online learning and the explosion of social media, it is still easier for some educators to picture students talking during the break outside the classroom, than envisaging them communicating digitally (webb & vallero, 2017, september). in the physical classroom, students communicate during and after the class. the virtual classroom allows online students to do the same, by using many interactive tools, for example, the chatroom, the whiteboard in the collaborate ultra environment, the camera and audio tools. additionally, the online classroom is always open for them to drop in and work with their classmates. online students, similarly to on-campus students, can participate in a lecture and exchange ideas with their peers in small groups. the differences between the way the two cohorts use watering holes blur even further as the students of both modes of delivery use digital communication tools extensively. watering holes for both groups also include learning spaces made possible through the use of facebook, email, texting, messenger or whatsapp. as far as the bond university student comments concerning the watering hole are concerned, some students made very positive comments highlighting the importance of this learning space. interestingly, however, all the five comments in this category were made by the online students only. they all refer to the interactions within the blackboard collaborate and its tools. the online 102 beata webb, alicia vallero students stated that they “really enjoyed the interaction in the collaborate tutorials,” others added that “online sessions were very personable.” the remaining comments emphasised the effective use of the collaborate sessions which allowed for rich student to student interaction. this section demonstrates that the tesol and spanish programs at bond university address the watering hole criterion for a successful pedagogy designed by thornburg (2013). the only difference between the online and the brick and mortar students is the utilisation of the physical learning spaces on the bond university campus. both cohorts, students studying on campus and online, participate in the watering hole activities, in their physical and online classrooms, and through the use of digital media. cave at bond university tesol and spanish programs caves are the third learning space identified by thornburg (2013) as part of the holodeck model of the effective learning environment. caves refer to the element of learning where learners can reflect on what they have learnt so far. this is, however, not just the space for reflection and the teachers need to prepare something for the students to reflect on. for bond university tesol and spanish students, that includes asynchronous resources prepared for the students and delivered through the blackboard learning management system. these resources are accessible for all the students, on-campus and online, via the designated subject website. they include reflective learning activities, tasks students can complete throughout the semester, self-tests, and weekly quizzes. as far as the evidence from the tevals is concerned, students identified and pointed to the importance of the cave activities. similarly to the watering hole learning element, only five students (3.7%), highlighted its importance. three students made positive remarks specifically referring to weekly revision tasks: “the weekly tasks made sure we were practicing outside of class to improve our learning” and two stated “the weekly tasks were helpful.” two other students emphasised the importance of weekly quizlets and self-assessed quizzes. the evidence provided by the instructional design of the programs, supported by student comments indicates that the tesol and spanish programs at bond university take into consideration the third learning space defined by thornburg (2013), caves. students undertake these reflective learning activities and the recognition of their importance is demonstrated in some teval remarks. 103developing learning environments for blended and online learning life at bond university tesol and spanish programs the fourth element of the holodeck learning environment, life, is the learning space where it all ties together, where students demonstrate what they have learnt. in the spanish programs, the application of spanish language in real life is interwoven in authentic, interactive, and communicative tasks which students participate in regularly during the class time. they also have regular tasks set up via learning management system. these weekly tasks have been discussed in the cave learning space but they also include authentic language tasks. in the tesol programs, that application of knowledge is evident in the subjects which bring the theory of language learning and teaching into classroom practice. the practical subjects in the tesol program provide the space for the students to observe teachers in the classroom, to design language programs, tests, and lesson plans. students studying in the physical classrooms and online have to undertake the teaching practicum which is organised, set up and discussed during physical and virtual classes. consequently, both cohorts of the tesol program must participate in the learning activities in this learning space such as using and developing the teaching resources, or working on lesson plans. one student commented in tevals that “the practicum aspect of this course is especially useful.” similarly to the other three learning spaces, the fourth learning space, life, was also documented both through the instructional and learning design of the programs and supported by student response in the tevals. to sum up, the evaluation of the bond university spanish and tesol programs demonstrates that these programs address the learning needs of the four learning spaces defined by the thornburg’s (2013) holodeck model of the learning environment. students’ overall experience of the bond university tesol and spanish programs the last category formed by the student comments from tevals include the positive comments about students’ overall experience of the programs. a significant number of 16 student responses (11.9%) evaluated the subject they undertook positively as a whole. the student remarks in this grouping focused on remarks describing the subject as “enjoyable learning experience,” highlighting the fact that “all aspects were very helpful.” this means that all of these students appreciated the design of the subject they were enrolled in as a whole. it is tempting to observe that all the elements of learning have been addressed, however, without the specific details of types of student experience, it is difficult to make such a statement. nevertheless, the student responses sug104 beata webb, alicia vallero gest that many students found the variety of learning experiences developed by the two programs as providing an effective learning environment. learning environment as a holodeck at bond university spanish and tesol programs the choice of thornburg’s (2013) holodeck as a framework of an effective learning environment was a result of careful consideration of many pedagogical frameworks. the holodeck as a conceptual pedagogical model offers noteworthy flexibility and, as a concept, it supersedes traditional notions in curriculum design which often interfere in developing blended, online or mixed mode delivery programs. the holodeck, in order to form the basis of an effective learning environment, must develop the four learning spaces. conversely, for any learning environment to be effective, it must provide learners with opportunities to learn in the metaphorical learning spaces of campfires, watering holes, caves, and life. several steps were undertaken in the process of comparing bond university programs with the holodeck structure of the pedagogical framework. the first step of this research project was to determine a suitable model of a learning environment as a basis of evaluating and developing the iterative process of curriculum design in spanish and tesol programs at bond university. the choice of an appropriate learning environment is essential for the ongoing evaluation of the programs and as the diagnostic tool to determine its strengths and weaknesses. the second step in the process of evaluation was assessing the bond university spanish and tesol programs according to the four learning spaces defined by thornburg (2013) in the holodeck. two types of evidence were selected to determine whether it was possible to categorise the bond programs into the four holodeck elements. in other words, the evaluation aimed to determine whether the programs under investigation fulfilled the requirements of the holodeck, or whether changes were necessary to ensure the development of a successful model of a learning environment. the first type of evidence included information concerning the instructional and content design. the second type of data was drawn from the tevals, and the aim of this information was to see whether students observed and valued different learning spaces during their educational experience as a whole. the result of this evaluative process clearly delineated the view of the bond university programs as adhering to the principles of the four learning spaces of the holodeck. data collected from both sources, instructional and pedagogical design of the subjects and from student responses to open teval questions demonstrated that the programs under investigation take into consideration all 105developing learning environments for blended and online learning the four spaces, which, in turn, implies that the holodeck is already in place. although the aim of the project was to identify the learning spaces in the bond university programs, and not to undertake the statistical analysis of the student comments, it is noteworthy to observe the significant gaps between student comments concerning the four learning spaces. accordingly, the majority of comments concerned teacher’s skills, knowledge, experience and soft teaching skills such as encouragement, promoting interaction between learners and empathy. despite the fact that the remaining three learning spaces are well-developed in the program and subject design, they were the topic of comparatively very few comments. this result supports the view that teachers have a greater impact on student achievement than any other source or factor (stillings, 2015; coe et al., 2014). the student comments show the students recognise the fact that good teaching practice helps students succeed (chubb, 2012). another very important observation should be added following the comparison of the student engagement in the teaching and learning process in different modes of delivery. the results of the study suggest strong similarity between the learning experience for students who attend classes in the bond university brick and mortar classroom and students who attend the blackboard collaborate sessions. this further indicates that technology employed in the development of the bond university blended and online programs allows both cohorts to have a very similar learning experience (webb & vallero, 2017, september; malczewska-webb, vallero, king & hunter, 2016). additionally, the source of student data, student ratings, also supports the validity of bond university student responses from tevals. student ratings are considered as having moderate validity in evaluating teaching. evaluating the quality of teaching is a very complex phenomenon and no methods are considered of high validity. although the most reliable approach involves a mixedmethod approach, student ratings are considered the best, next to classroom observations by peers, bosses and external evaluators, and ‘value-added’ models (assessing gains in student achievement) (coe et al., 2014; chubb, 2012). conclusions: bond university spanish and tesol programs as a holodeck to conclude, thornburg’s (2013) framework of an effective learning environment was selected for the purposes of the evaluation and development of the spanish and tesol blended and online programs at bond university. thornburg’s (2013) model promotes the features critical for learning such as learning through interaction, reflection, independent thinking and application of skills, and knowledge in real world situations. the four learning spaces safeguard the essential conditions of successful learning, in any educational 106 beata webb, alicia vallero context or through any mode of content delivery. in this sense, the framework is both flexible and universal. the examination of the elements of the bond spanish and tesol blended and online programs demonstrated that the programs take into consideration the four learning spaces delineated by thornburg (2013). the students’ comments show that the key factors in determining program success are teachers and their development of the learning holodeck. it is, however, crucial to undertake further research in order to explore teachers’ understanding of the four elements of the learning environment and the ways they can support student positive learning experience in developing blended and online settings. references abualrub, i., karseth, b., & stensaker, b. (2013). the various understandings of learning environment in higher education and its quality implications. quality in higher education, 19(1), 90–110. chubb, j. e. (2012). the best teachers in the world: why we don’t have them and how we could. chicago: hoover institution press. coe, r., aloisi, c., higgins, s., & major, l. e. (2014). what makes great teaching? review of the underpinning research. london: sutton trust. koper, r. (2000). from change to renewal: educational technology foundations of electronic learning environments [inaugural address]. heerlen: open universiteit nederland. retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1820/38 scarino, a., & liddicoat, a. j. (2009). teaching and learning languages: a guide. carlton south, vic: curriculum corporation (australia). department of education, employment and workplace relations. stillings candal, c. (2015). great teachers are not born, they are made: case study evidence from massachusetts charters. [white paper no. 130]. boston, ma: pioneer institute for public policy research. retrieved september 2017 from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext /ed565732.pdf thornburg, d. (2013). from the campfire to the holodeck: creating engaging and powerful 21st-century learning environments (first ed.). san francisco: jossey-bass. vygotsky, l. s. (1978) mind in society. the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. webb, b., vallero, a., king, c. p., & hunter, s. (2016). breaking down the barriers of online teaching: training tesol teachers in a virtual environment. in d. gałajda, p. zakrajewski, & m. pawlak (eds.), researching second language learning and teaching from a psycholinguistic perspective (pp. 237–259). berlin: springer international publishing. webb, b., & vallero, a. (2017, september). redefining the concept of ‘ face­to­face’ and online learning using the collaborate ultra. paper presented at the blackboard teaching and learning conference, darwin, australia. 107developing learning environments for blended and online learning webb, b. & vallero, a. (in press a). best teachers: research view of great teaching practices. konteksty pedagogiczne, 9. webb, b., & vallero, a. (in press b). what makes good teaching? students’ view of effective teaching in language and language teacher education programs at a university (primary research). konteksty pedagogiczne, 9. beata webb, alicia vallero die entwicklung der unterrichtsumgebung in gemischtem und digitalem bildungssystem z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die entwicklung von lehrprogrammen in gemischtem (blended) und digitalem (online) bildungssystem bedarf eines solchen modells, das die für erzielung der bildungsziele angemessene und wirksame kriterien berücksichtigen würde. der vorliegende beitrag bezweckt, ein für entwicklung und beurteilung von gemischten und digitalen unterrichtsumgebungen an hochschulen geeignetes modell auszuwählen. er basiert auf der praxis, solche programme zu entwickeln, deren ziel weitere ausbildung der englischlehrer an der bond universität in gold coast in australien ist. im ersten teil wird die methodologie des entwurfs und ergebnisse verschiedener konzepten und theoretischen modellen der unterrichtsumgebung dargestellt und die einzelnen elemente des ausgewählten modells aus der sicht der studenten beschrieben. der beitrag schließt mit der diskussion zu theoretischen grundlagen des modells und dessen verwendung für die an der bond universität geltenden programme. schlüsselwörter: lehrerausbildung, gemischter (blended) unterricht, digitaler (online) unterricht, modelle des digitalen unterrichts theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 5 (1), 2019 wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego • katowice 2019 editors-in-chief danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia, katowice adam wojtaszek university of silesia, katowice language editor david schauffler university of silesia, katowice editorial board janusz arabski (university of silesia, katowice/vistula university, warsaw) larissa aronin (oranim college of higher education/trinity college, dublin) jasone cenoz iraqui (university of the basque country, donostia – san sebastian) halina chodkiewicz (maria curie-skłodowska university, lublin) gessica de angelis (trinity college, dublin) anna ewert (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) tammy gregersen (university of northern iowa, cedar falls) ulrike jessner schmid (university of innsbruck, innsbruck) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities/university of warsaw) jolanta latkowska (university of silesia, katowice) peter macintyre (cape breton university, sydney) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, cracow) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) miroslaw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz/state school of higher professional education, konin) ewa piechurska-kuciel (university of opole, opole) andrzej porzuczek (university of silesia, katowice) david singleton (trinity college, dublin/university of pannonia, veszprem) eva vetter (university of vienna, vienna) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, łódź) maria wysocka (university of silesia, katowice) this publication is indexed in the following databases: scopus, ceeol, polindex (pbn), worldcat, public knowledge project index, oai-pmb data provider registry, bazhum, mla directory of periodicals, erih plus creative commons attribution-sharealike 4.0 international (cc by-sa 4.0) https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en contents preface (danuta gabryś-barker, adam wojtaszek) 5 articles teodor petrič ratings of affective and non-affective aspects of german idioms in second language processing 11 krystyna warchał humour in professional academic writing (with some implications for teaching) 43 marzena s. wysocka poetry in teaching grammar to the advanced users of polish as a fl 55 katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia, angélica carlet, maria pujol valls l2 gain or l2 pain? a comparative case study of the target language development among erasmus+ mobility students and at-home students 73 liliana piasecka foreign language students’ perceptions of their identity 93 łukasz matusz, anna maria rakowska self-reported difficulties in learning english as a second language for thirdage students in poland 113 reviews hadrian lankiewicz, teacher language awareness: a collaborative inquiry based on languaging (wydawnictwo uniwersytetu gdańskiego)―by danuta gabryś-barker 133 danuta wiśniewska, action research in efl pedagogy: theory and analysis of practice (wydawnictwo naukowe uam)―by ewa piechurska-kuciel 137 style guide for the authors 143 theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 8 (1), 2022, pp. 105–127 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11514 ayalew tilahun https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1564-3044 bahir dar university, ethiopia berhanu simegn https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6192-9858 bahir dar university, ethiopia mulugeta teka https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9786-8871 bahir dar university, ethiopia investigating effects of integrated reading and writing skills instruction on enhancing students’ critical thinking skills in efl classroom a b s t r a c t the primary concern of this study was to investigate the praxis of integrated reading and writing skills instruction on efl learners’ critical thinking development at bahir dar university. the study used a pre-test–post-test quasi-experimental design, and 96 english majoring students randomly assigned to (n = 48) experimental and (n = 48) control group took part in the study. herein, the control group was instructed through a separated reading and writing approach and the experimental group learned through a newly designed integrated reading and writing way for 12 weeks concurrently with three sessions per week, and then, 25 pre-and post-tests of critical thinking questions were designed to assess students’ critical thinking development. here, kappa inter-rater and split-half reliability tests were employed to compute the reliability and internal consistency of both tests, respectively. finally, an independent t-test was employed to compute the data, and then the results revealed that both the control and experimental group were homogeneous regarding their level in the pre-tests of critical thinking skills. however, after the treatment, the study showed the supremacy of integrated reading and writing skills instruction over the conventional approach in enhancing students’ critical thinking skills. keywords: integrated reading and writing instruction, language pedagogy, reading skills, writing skills, critical thinking skills https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11514 ayalew tilahun, berhanu simegn, mulugeta teka106 introduction english is functional as a foreign language in ethiopian context. as a result, it is not working as a viable lingua franca in everyday lives of the people outside of the efl classroom. thus, in the country, the opportunity of learning and practicing english outside the classroom is less frequent, and for this reason, particularly at the university level, students more often learn the language through reading and writing in their academic careers. therefore, the instructional methods that the efl teachers use in reading and writing would play vital roles in students’ language and reasoning development, for the reason that reading and writing skills are two of the major skills that need to be taught efficiently to enable students to comprehend texts in a critical way. consequently, reading analytically, composing text coherently and critical thinking skills are supposed to be the basis for the success of any university student, for these are very vital cognitive fundamentals that the learners must develop to explore the sphere of knowledge. the contemporary thinking about the nature of reading and writing views the two skills as interdependent and transactive (carson, 1993; spack, 1998; rossenblatt, 2004). furthermore, these researchers point out that meaning is created through the transaction between the reader, the writer, and the text. therefore, to equip students with the required capabilities, the teaching and learning activities which are employed in the university setting, particularly in efl classrooms, should focus on enabling students to interact with a text through the process of integrating reading and writing activities because when learners involved in both analytical reading and writing skills in integrated ways, they also build up their critical thinking ability in their academic career. in this respect, researchers claim that reading extensively can improve students’ writing abilities, and in the process of writing, the logical thinking abilities will be enhanced (cavdar & doe, 2012). here, instructors can no longer be information givers and students must learn thinking and reasoning skills to reach their fullest potential, and this can be done explicitly and directly in an integrated manner (cobine, 1995; fisher, 2001). thus, involving students in the above activities encourages them to use the language for thinking rather than studying about the language. in a similar way, facione (1990) asserts that “involving students in critical thinking activities helps them to become more mentally dynamic and decisive rather than passive receivers of contents in the classroom” (p. 3). when reading and writing are integrated into classroom instruction, it enables students to think about effective comprehension strategies and engage in constructing meaning from a given genre. in line with this, researchers also claim that skill training and critical thinking can be reached simultaneously investigating effects of integrated reading… 107 by integrating reading and writing skills in esl/efl classrooms (richards & rodgers, 2001; rosenblatt, 2004; li & yang, 2014). in doing so, a reader tries to use higher cognitive skills to describe, respond, or interpret a reading text, and then a new interpreted text is produced in the process. under these strategies, learners would be trained to organize their thoughts through writing. likewise, the integration of reading into writing enables students to develop both critical thinking and critical literacy because it augments their ability to transform information for their own purposes in reading and to blend their prior awareness with another text in writing. furthermore, put differently, both reading and writing skills are so closely linked, they mutually reinforce each other, and therefore, promote learning when they are integrated into classroom activities (cobine, 1995). by the same token, atkins et al. (1996), cavdar and doe (2012) all confirm that integrating the skills not only develops students’ ability to express themselves, but it also develops students’ thinking power— they get mental training. in the same vein, students become better readers, writers, and thinkers when they learn reading and writing together (carson, 1993; rosenblatt, 2004). similarly, fisher (2001) asserts that “students must develop thinking and reasoning skills to reach their fullest potential, and this can be done explicitly and directly in an integrated manner” (p. 17). put briefly, making students engage in critical thinking helps them to maximize their involvement with the activities because critical thinking is an intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, inferring, interpreting, synthesizing, evaluating, reasoning activity during reading or writing communication (paul & scriven, 2008, p. 25). with this in mind, involvement in the above activities allows students use the language for thinking rather than studying about the language. therefore, to make students fully engage in critical thinking, learners should get involved in both analytical reading and composing skills based on their reading. as students’ knowledge and critical thinking develop through reading, their internal motivation to produce their own ideas through writing will also be enhanced. furthermore, various scholars suggest that reading and writing skills are so closely linked that they mutually reinforce each other, and therefore promote learning when they are integrated into classroom activities (alghonaim, 2018; pysarchyk & yamshynska, 2015; al-dosari, 2016; eun-hee & myeong-hee, 2020). thinking critically, as an essential part of the higher-order cognitive skills and the most important component of undergraduate efl education, includes many other skills of higher-order mental processes like reasoning, reflective thinking, analysis, synthesis, inference, evaluation and decision making, creative thinking, and self-regulation. thus, in relation to this, elder and paul (2009) recommend that every classroom activity with the aim to develop learners’ critical thinking abilities should lead to an environment that enhances ayalew tilahun, berhanu simegn, mulugeta teka108 these basic skills in students’ learning. subsequently, in the light of the above view, integrated reading and writing instruction is where developmental reading and writing are taught in one course within a reduced period of time. in brief, all the above research claims imply that separating reading and writing skills in efl classroom instruction has its own detrimental effects on enabling learners to make connections between these two skills in comprehending texts and critical thinking development. therefore, researchers and theorists recommend examining assumptions and reviewing educational practices, as current pedagogical thinking seems to be shifting away from traditional behaviorist model of teaching to constructivist views of learning whereby teaching is seen as transformative (brandis & ginnis 1986, as cited in richards & rodgers, 2001, p. 197). furthermore, these researchers also suggest that skill training and critical thinking can be reached simultaneously by integrating reading and writing skills in esl/efl classrooms. similarly, graham and hebert (2010) argue that “understanding a text encompasses writing about it; writing about a text should augment comprehension, for it provides learners with a tool for visibly and permanently recording, connecting, analyzing, personalizing and manipulating key ideas in text” (p. 13). these pedagogical positions range from the traditional skill-based, text-driven models to more holistic, process-oriented approaches associated with integrating the language arts. in the same way, ferire (1984) and dubrowa (2011) state that transformative and real literacy learning takes shape when the learner takes part in reading and writing activities and participates in the real-life insightful process. when the two language skills are integrated, it augments deep and careful thinking in meaningful ways. furthermore, the integration of reading into writing enables students to develop both critical thinking and critical literacy that promote students’ ability to transform information for their own purposes in reading and to develop text in writing. with all this in mind, integrated reading and writing instruction is widely discussed in the esl and efl classrooms in a foreign context. however, in ethiopia, though theoretically discussed, it is not practically implemented in the efl classroom. for instance, in bahir dar university english courses like basic writing skills and communicative language skills are designed in an isolated skill approach. furthermore, in secondary and preparatory english textbooks, reading and writing skills activities are presented on a separate basis. why is that so? is integrated reading and writing skills instruction not effective in the ethiopian context? can’t it be practiced in the ethiopian context? therefore, testing integrated reading and writing skills instruction empirically plays a vital role to see its effectiveness for building critical thinking skills in the context of the university (undergraduate) education in ethiopia. investigating effects of integrated reading… 109 statement of the problem in the context of efl in ethiopia, the curriculum and pedagogy of writing and reading courses have traditionally been designed on a separate basis. as a result, more emphasis is given to skill-based language activities. moreover, tasks and activities have been designed usually focusing on one specific skill. for instance, in reading instruction, more emphasis is given to answering reading comprehension questions, vocabulary meaning, references, and so on. indeed, these sorts of activities are important particularly for language practice, but their contribution to enable students to go beyond the literal meanings of the text is reduced. as a result, most learners neither understand the text fully nor give critical explanations about the text. furthermore, in writing instruction classrooms, most often, writing lessons focus on writing activities on prescribed topics, and attention is too often paid to modeling correct grammatical and essayist forms instead of creating conducive environment for students to interact with language actively for authentic communicative purposes. moreover, after students’ writings, efl instructors’ main focus would be on correcting different kinds of writing mechanics like spelling errors, punctuation, wrong use of words, phrases, tenses and other related problems. likewise, hand-written texts are evaluated on the accuracy of grammar rather than on content, style or creative expressions of ideas. as a result, students cannot get critical mental exercises through writing. the above instructional approaches are very much emphasized in the traditional efl teaching and curriculum provisions. researchers like taizad and namaghi (2014) state that although segregated skills teaching may help students develop their knowledge of the language, its impact on enabling learners to use the knowledge in actual communication is less likely. tsai (2006) also claims that the separate teaching of reading and writing skills approach is an obstacle in fluent learning of a foreign language. likewise, oxford (2001) states that segregated teaching emanates from the philosophy that sees successful l2 learning as a process departing from content learning. furthermore, she explains that this philosophy is easier in practice, yet ineffective to warrant later whole language development. similarly, squire (1983) and cavdar and doe (2012) argue that failing to practice composing and comprehending, which are basically interrelated thinking oriented skills, impedes the efforts not only to teach students to read and write but also how to think. with all these in mind, in the ethiopian efl context, as some past and recent local research findings and my close observation evidenced, the quality of critical thinking has been deteriorating in the efl classroom, and then university students do not seem to meet the required competence. in his doctoral dissertation, geremew (2009) reported that students’ writing in ayalew tilahun, berhanu simegn, mulugeta teka110 different faculties of addis ababa university is weak in treating a given topic both in content and form. furthermore, he noted that most professors require their students to critique books, term/research papers, articles, academic essays, films, and formal reports related to the content of their courses. these activities require students to think critically about how they approach problems, questions, issues, and how they apply affective dispositions such as open-mindedness and diligence in seeking relevant information, being systematic in analyzing information, and inferring that can reasonably be drawn from facts. however, students are not capable of doing these sorts of activities. in the same way, dawit (2008) claims that even though the ministry of education (1994) asserts that active learning methods or student-centered teaching should govern educational practices in schools and universities, ethiopian educational system continues to provide students with the traditional model of instruction. furthermore, he adds that the faulty everyday reasoning and poor argumentation skills used by most students (both orally and in writing) indicate that even a college/university education appears to have a limited effect on graduates’ critical thinking abilities, including making reasonable interpretations of texts. adege (2009) conducted research on “critical thinking pedagogy in efl classrooms at jimma university” and came to the conclusion that the majority of efl instructors (71%) agreed that critical thinking is an important goal of their instructional objectives and/or practices, but only 2% of the total number of university efl teachers bring explicit modeling of critical thinking in their classroom instruction and 5% of them bring critical thinking assessment into their assignments and examinations. therefore, the study shows that critical thinking is given less emphasis, or it is a neglected aspect in efl classrooms in ethiopia. wondifraw (2018) also conducted a study to analyze the effect of infusing intellectual standards of critical thinking on students’ critical reading performance. in his study, assessing efl students’ attitudes and practices in reading academic texts critically and exploring students’ level of critical reading performance were aimed to supplement the analysis. finally, it was found that most english language students had inadequate insights on critical reading tasks and inquisitive strategies, and the practices of critical reading activities were not engaging. likewise, the students’ critical reading performance was found to be unsatisfactory. in sum, all the above research results show that there is a gap in instructional practices that need to be addressed particularly in building critical thinking skills. concerning reading and writing integrated instruction, there are many recent research works that have been conducted in a foreign context. for instance, li and yang (2014) conducted a study on the effects of reading-to-write on critical thinking skills and concluded that practicing reading to write in the investigating effects of integrated reading… 111 classroom helps students to shift from the passive reception of knowledge to an active seeking for knowledge and also to move from the rote learning of the text to the practical use of the knowledge in solving problems. however, the research conducted in a chinese educational setting which differs from the ethiopian context. similarly, al-dosari (2016) carried out a study on the effects of integrated reading and writing on the quality of writing. the results of the study showed a statistically significant improvement in writing, but the researcher did not address critical thinking skills. likewise, hailah (2020) conducted a study on the effectiveness of integrating reading and writing pedagogy in the efl setting and teachers’ perception, and he came to the conclusion that integrated reading and writing had a significant impact on students’ reading abilities and writing proficiency over a short period. however, he did not address critical thinking skills. in fact, in the ethiopian context, there are not many pieces of research that have been conducted on the effects of integrated reading and writing instruction in the efl classroom. however, desta (2019) investigated the effects of integrated reading-and-writing practice on efl learners’ performance and self-efficacy of reading comprehension and summary writing with grade eight students. the researcher applied tests and interviews to collect the required data. finally, he came up with the conclusion that integrated reading-and-writing skill instruction has a positive influence on students’ reading comprehension, summary writing, and self-efficacy. however, the researcher did not investigate its effects on students’ critical thinking skills achievement. likewise, alemu (2015) conducted a study on the integrated content-based instructions in teaching english reading skills to grade 11 students. he used an interview, classroom observation, and document analysis to collect the data. finally, he came to the conclusion that teachers had high theoretical orientations about integrated instruction, but because of a number of impediments in the environment related to school, integrated content based instruction could not be implemented in language teaching in reading classrooms. however, the researcher’s focus was only on assessing the implementation of integrated content-based instruction on teaching reading skills, not on students’ critical thinking. therefore, as the literature review and different research evidence imply, in the practice of integrating reading and writing skills, readers must be able to interact with text to construct meaning and in the process of gaining meaning, they should get involved in writing in response to comprehension exercises. learners should interact with a text to comprehend and compose a text in various forms based on the text they have read. for instance, in the process of reading comprehension instruction, students are supposed to respond to comprehension exercises by writing their predictions, identifying the main idea of paragraphs, paraphrasing, summarizing, interpreting texts, analyzing activities, ayalew tilahun, berhanu simegn, mulugeta teka112 explaining, inferring information, writing the gist of the text, and so on. finally, students should be involved in connecting activities like text-to-self, text-totext and text-to-world, connecting what students read to what they are familiar with, which is a part of the transaction readers use to comprehend and analyze the text. challenging students to think critically about academic subjects and to develop the reasoning abilities they need to deal successfully with real-world reasoning tasks in life is rarely practiced in efl context in ethiopia. this observation has, therefore, further motivated this researcher to empirically examine if the university undergraduate students in ethiopia would be better able to demonstrate critical thinking abilities, and use these same abilities to do better academically in their learning, and in everyday reasoning tasks after having received a semester-long specific integrated reading and writing skills instruction. hence, the major concern of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of an integrated reading and writing instructional approach on undergraduate students’ critical thinking skills development in the efl classroom. as far as the researcher’s knowledge is concerned, no research of this sort has been conducted in ethiopia so far. therefore, this research would be the first and new in its kind, and it would attempt to add to the knowledge in the field and try to fill the gap in this respect. objectives of the study teaching and learning reading and writing skills in an integrated way is basic in contemporary language theory and pedagogy. furthermore, the theory claims that readers must be able to transact with the text to construct the meaning and, in the process of gaining meaning, the students would get involved in writing in response to open comprehension exercises. therefore, the main objective of this study is checking empirically whether the integrated reading and writing skills instructional approach has an effect on students’ critical thinking development in the ethiopian efl context. thus, in this study, the following research questions were formulated: 1. is there a statistically significant difference between the achievement of the experimental group and that of the control group in their critical thinking skills before the treatment? 2. is there a statistically significant difference between the achievement of the experimental group and that of the control group in their critical thinking skills after the treatment? investigating effects of integrated reading… 113 the null hypotheses 1. there is no statistical difference between the achievement of the experimental and the control group in their critical thinking skills achievement before the treatment. 2. there is no statistical difference between the achievement of the experimental and the control group in their critical thinking skills achievement after the treatment. research design in order to address the objectives of this research, experimental research design was employed, and the kind of experiment was a quasi-experiment. this type of experimentation is helpful to examine the effects of an independent variable on dependent variables. moreover, the quasi-experiment plays a crucial role in the environment where it is not possible to control all other factors that might affect the results. in this experimentation, two intact groups of freshmen who take communicative english skills courses i participated. they were assigned randomly to control experimental groups in order to avoid any experimental bias. scope of the study this study was delimited to first-year undergraduate students of bahir dar university. the reason for delimiting this study to the first-year undergraduate students was mainly that these students were supposed to study the course communicative language skills. the assumptions of the course are that it would help them to maximize their communicative and reasoning competence in their oral and written communication. furthermore, in this stage, students are expected to work at a higher level (i.e., to read more critically, to write more analytically, to think more conceptually with higher-order thinking skills than ever before). on the other hand, the researcher has chosen these groups of students for some other basic reasons, too. the first one is that the researcher had tangible corpus evidence at hand on the existence of the problems in comprehending texts, composing and critical thinking performance that had been collected through assignments and examinations at various times from the same level of ayalew tilahun, berhanu simegn, mulugeta teka114 students in the first semester. the corpus documents that the researcher collected from the groups of students were the main trigger that instigated him to conduct this experimental research with these groups of students. data collection instruments in this study, the test was employed as the main data collection instrument. preand post-tests were employed to collect the required data. the tests were adapted from the toefl tests by the researcher in collaboration with curriculum experts at the university. the reasons why the researcher adapted the reading passage from toefl with some modifications were that the tests are standardized. pierce (1994) notes that toefl tests are standardized, highly secure and internationally administered for assessing the language proficiency level of foreign language speakers. furthermore, the same author points out that toefl tests have high reliability and validity. they have substantial reliability estimates between 0.87 and 0.90 (pierce, 1994). the test also included questions that measured students’ critical thinking abilities on the basis of the texts. at this point, the critical thinking questions were prepared in an open-ended question format. in sum, 25 critical thinking questions were prepared for the test. the tests were prepared and assessed based on facione’s (1995) critical thinking model. facione (1995) states that a person engaged in critical thinking uses a core of self-regulated cognitive skills like interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, and explanation to form logical reasoning and judgments (p. 3). herein, the first test was a pre-test that was given to both control and experimental groups to make sure that the two groups had equivalent capacities before the treatment. the second test was a post-test that had been given to both groups at the end of the intervention to check whether the intervention had an effect on the experimental group. all the above-listed assessment models were employed to assess students’ critical thinking skills except ‘evaluation’. assessing students’ ‘evaluation’ skill was not used in this specific study since it is highly exposed to subjectivity, as proved in the pilot study. hence, it was not found convenient in this particular study. finally, the results of the pre-test and post-test scores were analyzed using an independent t-test. investigating effects of integrated reading… 115 the reliability of the tests in order to ensure the reliability of the pre-test of the critical thinking questions, two university tefl professors rated each item to check whether the tests are relevant, appropriate, and consisting of adequate items for the intended purpose and then cohen’s kappa statistical measurement was employed to compute the results of the raters’ agreement. so, kappa coefficient measure of agreement between the two tefl professional raters regarding the pre-test of critical thinking lies in the category of ‘very good’ was 88%, and the value of the kappa measure of agreement is 0.638. therefore, according to koch’s benchmark (1977) percent agreement rate classification, the result obtained by the kappa coefficient measure of agreement between the two raters can be considered as perfect agreement, and then the test was used for the intended purpose. therefore, the pre-test questions which are designed to measure students’ critical thinking were reliable. similarly, 25 critical thinking questions were rated by two tefl professionals: the cohen’s kappa coefficient measure of agreement between the two tefl professional raters regarding the post-test critical thinking questions which lie in the category of ‘very good’ was 92%, and the value of the kappa measure of agreement was −0.569. therefore, according to koch’s benchmark (1977) the percent agreement rate classification, the result obtained from the kappa coefficient measure of agreement between the two raters can be considered as a perfect agreement. as a result, the questions were found reliable for the intended purpose. internal consistency of the tests in the same way, the internal consistency of both the preand post-tests of critical thinking skills’ questions were computed using split-half reliability tests. based on this, the value of the half-split reliability of the pre-tests of critical thinking questions’ correlation between forms is 0.309, and the value of the spearman-brown coefficient is 0.871. similarly, the value of the post-test critical thinking correlation between forms is 0.39, and the spearman-brown coefficient is 0.85. this indicates that the spearman-brown coefficient or the aggregate result exceeds the value of the correlation between forms in both tests. therefore, based on the above analysis of reliability interpretation, the value of the preand post-tests’ results of this data is reliable. in general, the values of all types of tests’ half-test reliability results revealed that the tests’ internal consistency was reliable for the intended purpose. ayalew tilahun, berhanu simegn, mulugeta teka116 the validity of the tests as stated above, the tests were adapted from the toefl exams. in order to determine whether the reading passages matched the students’ level, gunning fog index formula was used to measure the difficulty level of reading texts. the difficulty level of the preand post-tests were 11 and 12 respectively. gunning (1968) recommends that difficulty levels of reading passages between 8 and 13 are considered as appropriate for undergraduate students. furthermore, to assess the validity of the tests, the designed test was given to two tefl university professors to check whether the test is relevant, appropriate, and consisting of adequate items for the intended purpose. moreover, the tests have been assessed whether they have a mix of easier and harder questions. in all the above criteria, the tests were rated by two professionals in the categories of very good, good, or poor. finally, the rating results were computed using the kappa measure of agreement. apart from the two professors, the test was also given to two of research advisors to be commented on and checked whether the tests consist of the required face and content validity for the intended purpose. eventually, the advisors’ and two of the professors’ comments were followed in the final preparation of the tests. lastly, with all amendments, the tests were administered to collect the required data. procedures of the study as discussed above in the research design, students from two efl groups were assigned randomly as control and experimental groups. the trained instructor was assigned to teach communicative language skills i in these groups. in this study, the main focus area is reading and writing. other language learning activities were shared by both groups. therefore, in the conventional approach, students often read the text and do a set of activities focusing on comprehension, while the instructor’s feedback would focus on correcting students’ errors to the given answers. similarly, writing would be done or practiced on prescribed topics focusing on end products of the handwritten text, and then the instructor’s feedback would concern the grammatical accuracy. however, the newly designed integrated reading and writing instructional procedure was implemented for the experimental group with the following three steps. firstly, apart from brainstorming discussions, there were writing before reading activities like predicting contents in the form of paragraphs investigating effects of integrated reading… 117 or writing a short paragraph on different sayings related to the texts before going through the texts (write-before-you-read activities). secondly, the students were supposed to write their response to the literal and open-ended questions like comparing their prediction, identifying the main idea of paragraphs, paraphrasing, summarizing, interpreting texts, analyzing, explaining, inferring information, writing the gist of the text (read and respond through writing activities). finally, the students were involved in connecting activities like text-to-self, text-to-text and text-to-world activities (write-text connecting activities). indeed, when the students failed to implement the above cognitive strategies by themselves, the instructor was supposed to guide and teach explicitly each selected strategy until the students mastered it and worked independently, and the instructor’s feedback was given through reflective observation. the implementation of the instructional strategy for both the control and experimental group lasted for 12 weeks with three sessions per week and was held from october 1, 2019, to december 30, 2019. finally, a critical thinking test was given to the two groups to see if there is a change in students’ critical thinking results. eventually, the tests were corrected by two different tefl instructors to avoid unintended biases in correcting the subjective items, and the results the students obtained in the 25 critical thinking questions were used for analysis. finally, the two instructors’ average score was taken for analysis, and then it was analyzed and computed through an independent t-test to see if a significant difference existed between the groups in terms of critical thinking skills development. data analysis, findings of the study, and discussions in this part, data analysis, findings, and their discussion of the study are presented in accordance with the students’ critical thinking skills’ test results. rq; is there any significant difference between the two randomly selected intact groups of students in terms of critical thinking skills before the treatment? ayalew tilahun, berhanu simegn, mulugeta teka118 table 1 descriptive and inferential statistics of the experimental and control groups— pre-test results of students’ critical thinking skills group n mean std. deviation t df sig. (2-tailed) cohen’s d effect size inference control group 48 11.770 2.746 –2.063 94 .072 0.421 experimental group 48 12.791 2.052 interpretation control group 48 12.250 2.693 –.671 94 .504 0.136 experimental group 48 12.583 2.142 explanation control group 48 12.583 3.167 –.868 94 .388 0.177 experimental group 48 13.125 2.943 analysis control group 48 14.791 3.395 –.530 94 .598 0.108 experimental group 48 15.125 2.733 as shown in table 1, there were 48 participants both in the control and experimental groups. the mean scores of the control and experimental groups in terms of each critical sub-skill is presented sequentially. among the critical thinking elements, inference is one of the sub-skills. the mean score of the experimental (group 2) (m = 12.791; sd = 2.052) was slightly higher than in group 1 (m = 11.771; sd = 2.746). here, the two groups’ mean difference is –1.0208 which is an insignificant means difference. thus, the results show that students do not differ significantly in inferring before the treatment. likewise, an independent-samples t-test revealed no statistically significant difference between group 1 (the control group) and group 2 (the experimental) mean scores since t (94) = –2.063; the sig. (2-tailed) value = .072, p > 0.05. in the same way, the effect size is cohen’s d = 0.421 signifying a medium effect size. therefore, the results show that there is no statistically significant difference between the two groups in their inference skills before the treatment. correspondingly, in terms of students’ interpretation, both groups had almost equal mean scores on the pre-test. the mean difference between the groups is –.333. therefore, between the two groups, a non-significant mean difference was obtained. this indicated that the two groups were equal before the treatment. moreover, the result of an independent samples t-test signified that there is no significant difference between the experimental and control groups in their interpretation. the t (94) = –.671; the sig. (2-tailed) value = .388, p > 0.05. in the same way, the result of the effect size is cohen’s d = 0.136, specifying a small effect size. therefore, there was no significant difference investigating effects of integrated reading… 119 between the two groups of students in their interpretation achievement before the treatment. similarly, students’ explanation achievement mean score of group 2 (m = 13.125; sd = 2.943) was slightly higher than that of group 1 (m = 12.58; sd = 3.167). the difference between the two groups in their mean scores is –.541. so, the difference margin is very narrow, and this portrays that the two groups did not differ in their explaining achievement before the treatment. the independent samples t-test result shows that there is no significant difference between the experimental and the control group in their explanation achievement since t (94) = –.868; the sig. (2-tailed) value = .388, p > 0.05. likewise, the result of the effect size is cohen’s d = 0.177 signifying a small effect size. with this in mind, the statistical evidence showed the absence of statistically significant difference between the two groups in terms of their explanation achievement. likewise, students’ achievement in analyzing texts was also compared. based on this, the mean scores of group 2 was (m = 15.125; sd = 2.733) and group 1 (m =14.791, sd = 3.395) respectively; their mean difference is 1.333 which is insignificant. the results of the independent samples t-test result showed the absence of a significant difference between the control and experimental groups scores in terms of their analysis achievement since t (94) = –.530; the sig. (2-tailed) value = –.333, p > 0.05. in the same way, the result of the effect size is cohen’s d = 0.108, showing a small effect size. therefore, from these results, it is possible to conclude that the two groups of students did not differ in their analyzing achievement before the treatment. the independent sample test results also confirm that the groups’ mean differences are not statistically significant in all the above listed critical skill components in the pre-test results or before the treatment. therefore, there is no significant variance between the experimental and control groups in terms of inferences, interpretations, explanations, and analyses skills’ achievement before the treatment. as a result, the null hypothesis is accepted. critical thinking post-test result comparison between the control and experimental groups the following research question and corresponding null hypothesis were addressed in this section: rq: is there a statistically significant difference between the achievement of the control and experimental groups of students in their critical thinking skills after the treatment? ayalew tilahun, berhanu simegn, mulugeta teka120 null hypothesis (h01): there is no statistical difference between the achievement of the control and experimental groups in their critical thinking skills achievement after the treatment. table 2 descriptive and inferential statistics of the experimental and control groups— post-test result of students’ critical thinking skills group statistics group n mean std. deviation t df sig. (2-tailed) cohen’s d effect size inference control group 48 12.25 3.131 –3.634 94 .000 0.74 experimental group 48 14.5 2.931 interpretation control group 48 12.08 4.556 –5.187 94 .000 1.05 experimental group 48 16.33 3.385 explanation control group 48 12.25 4.397 –5.762 94 .000 1.05 experimental group 48 17. 3.643 analysis control group 48 14.25 3.491 –5.184 94 .000 1.176 experimental group 48 18.33 4.193 as it is clearly displayed in table 2, the number of students in group 1 (control group) and group 2 (experimental group) is equal to 48 participants. the table shows the results of students’ critical thinking sub-skills like inference, interpretation, explanation, and analysis after the treatment. inference is one of the sub-skills. as displayed in the table, there is a significant difference between the experimental (m = 14.5; sd = 2.931) and the control group (m = 12.25; sd = 3.131) in inferring information from a given reading text. as a result, the mean difference between the two groups is –2.25. the independent sample t-test result depicts that there is a significant difference between the experimental and control groups of students in text inference since the t (94) = –3.634; sig (2-tailed) value = 000, p < 0.05. furthermore, the result of the effect size shows that cohen’s d = 0.74, specifying a strong effect. therefore, the result of the independent samples t-test indicates that there is a statistically significant difference between the experimental and the control groups of students on the inference post-test. in other words, the experimental group of students scored higher than the control group in terms of inferring information after the intervention. in general, all the above descriptive and inferential statistical data confirm that the intervention that had been implemented in the investigating effects of integrated reading… 121 experimental group in the efl classroom had a positive effect on students’ inference skills. by the same token, as the data demonstrated in table 2 shows, there is a significant mean difference between the experimental (m = 16.331; sd = 3.385) and the control group (m = 12.083; sd = 4.556) in text interpretation in the post-test results. thus, the mean difference between the two groups is –4.25. so, this descriptive statistics result justifies the claim that the experimental group surpassed the control group in interpreting on the critical thinking skills post-test due to the intervention. this is supported by the independent sample t-test result which shows that there is a significant difference between the experimental and control group in text interpretation; the sig. (2-tailed) value = 000, p < 0.05. moreover, the result of the effect size shows that cohen’s d = 1.05, specifying a strong effect. thus, the results of the independent samples t-test verify that there is a statistically significant difference between the experimental and control groups in interpretation due to the intervention. in brief, the experimental group scored higher than the control group on critical thinking post-test. this clearly demonstrates that integrating reading and writing intervention that had been practiced by the experimental group in the efl classroom had a positive effect on their interpretation skills. the data exhibited in table 2 shows that there is a significant mean difference between the experimental (m = 17; sd = 3.643) and the control group (m = 12.25; sd = 4.397) with respect to text explanation. hence, the mean difference between the two groups is –4.75. so, this result attests that the experimental group exceeded the control group on the text explaining achievement on the post-test after the intervention. this result is verified by the independent sample t-test result that shows a significant difference between the experimental and control groups on text explanation since the t (94) = –5.762; the sig. (2-tailed) value = 000, p < 0.05. furthermore, the effect size shows that cohen’s d = 1.176, showing a strong effect. therefore, the results of the independent sample t-test reveal that there is a significant difference between the experimental and the control group in the explanation achievement in the critical thinking skills post-test. generally, the evidence obtained from these statistical data shows that there is statistically significant difference between the two groups of students on explaining texts in the critical thinking skills post-test result. in a nutshell, it is possible to conclude that the experimental group’s test result surpassed the control group text explanation achievement as a result of reading and writing integrated instructional intervention. table 2 also shows that there is a mean difference between the experimental (m = 18.333; sd = 4.193) and the control group (m = 14.250; sd = 3.491) in text analyses in the post-test results. consequently, the mean difference between the two groups is –4.083. hence, these results assert that the experimental group outscored the control group on text analyzing achievement after the intervention. ayalew tilahun, berhanu simegn, mulugeta teka122 also, the independent sample t-test analysis shows that there is a significant difference between the experimental and control group on text analysis for the t (94) = –5.184; the sig. (2-tailed) p value = 000. moreover, the effect size shows that cohen’s d = 1.058, indicating a strong effect. thus, the statistical evidence obtained from the independent sample t-test pointed towards the idea that there is a statistically significant difference between the experimental and the control group in the text analysis achievement on the critical thinking skills post-test. altogether, the descriptive and inferential statistical data endorse that there is a statistically significant difference between the experimental and control group in text analysis skills. in other words, the experimental group scored higher than the control group in terms of analyzing texts on critical thinking skills post-test as a result of the intervention. this clearly indicates that the treatment that had been implemented in the experimental group in the efl classroom had brought a positive effect on students’ analytical skills. to sum up, all these data would seem reasonable to point to the likelihood that the null hypothesis is rejected. discussion in this part, to investigate the existence of the difference between the two groups, a 12-week integrated reading and writing instructional intervention was implemented on the experimental group and the traditional reading and writing segregated approach on the control group. finally, the two groups’ critical thinking pre-test and post-test results were compared. based on this, the students’ pre-test critical thinking result was homogeneous before the treatment. however, the post-test results demonstrate that the students in experimental group performed well (p < .05) in terms of various aspects of critical thinking like inference, interpretation, explanation, and analysis skills compared to the control group whose scores on each of these scales showed a lower result. furthermore, the experimental groups of students’ post-test question items were deeply analyzed to see which aspects of the critical thinking skills the experimental group did better than the control group. the analysis of the experimental group students’ results revealed that they manifested better results in inferring information like constructing reasonable meaning from a text, identifying the author’s purpose or the intended message he/she wants to convey, identifying information that was not clearly stated in the text, and framing syntheses of related ideas into a coherent view and so on. similarly, the experimental group was good at interpreting texts, identifying key ideas investigating effects of integrated reading… 123 from the text, paraphrasing a text, guessing the meanings of unfamiliar terms, identifying the purpose of the text, and so on. also, the experimental group’s results at explaining texts like clarifying, summarizing, describing, justifying were much better than the control groups. likewise, the experimental group was good at analyzing texts by identifying main ideas from a text, finding a relationship between texts, identifying similarities and differences between claims in the specified text, finding the relationship of sentences or paragraphs, and so on. therefore, the results imply that the treatment that had been implemented in the experimental group in the efl classroom had brought a positive effect on students’ critical thinking skills. the results of this experimental study substantiate the results obtained by li and yang (2014) who state that reading to write practice helps students to shift from passive reception of knowledge to active seeking for knowledge and to move from rote learning to the practical use of knowledge in solving problems. the results obtained in the research also confirm that students could infer, interpret, explain, and analyze the required information on their own more effectively than the control group. similarly, the result is also consistent with hirvela’s (2004) proposition that using both writing and reading skills in harmonious integration in efl instruction enhances students’ understanding, composing skills, and the ability to look at things critically. likewise, the findings also agree with the claims of graham and hebert (2010) who argue that understanding a text involves writing about it, and writing about a text should enhance comprehension, for it provides students with a tool for visibly and permanently recording, connecting, analyzing, personalizing and manipulating key ideas in a text. therefore, the results of the current experimental group’s critical thinking improvement concurred with the above findings. the findings of the current study imply that when reading and writing are integrated into instruction, it helps students to combine input and output together at the same time in the efl classroom. reading is input, and writing is output, therefore, when students read a text, there are contents and language elements that they can explore in the text. thus, when they construct written responses for an open-ended comprehension, they apply both comprehension and composition concurrently. in doing so, they show their understanding of what they have read in the text, for writing is important for thinking. when they write in response to the text, the knowledge they get from the text can be transformed into their writing. the results obtained in this research also confirm this reality. in contrast, when reading and writing are taught separately in classroom instruction, students do not connect input and output together. rather, their focus will be on discrete skills, and there is no way to use language in a holistic way and, as a result, it hampers students’ thinking development. therefore, integrating reading and writing in instruction has immense benefits for students’ critical thinking advancement. moreover, the results of the curayalew tilahun, berhanu simegn, mulugeta teka124 rent study also affirm that integrating reading and writing skills instruction to enhance learners’ critical thinking can be also practiced in the ethiopian efl setting. conclusion in this study, the data collected quantitatively revealed that learners who received an integrated reading and writing instruction demonstrate higher critical thinking skills than the learners who learned in the conventional way. the intervention boosted students’ ways of thinking in various dimensions particularly, on inference, interpretation, explanation, and analysis respects. in a nutshell, these results show that integrating the two skills gives students more opportunities to construct their own learning than the conventional approach does, and it also encourages them to be a self-reliant learner and help them develop their self-confidence to take responsibility for their own learning, especially with respect to foreign language learning. moreover, the findings show that integrated reading and writing instruction into efl is a good predictor of critical thinking skills improvement for learners as it transforms them from passive to active readers and writers, and also maximizes students’ language use instead of simple memorization of facts and grammar rules. as the results of the students’ improvement in the critical thinking post-test indicate, integrating the two skills empowered the students to practice the critical thinking components in meaningful ways. the results are in line with dubrowa’s (2011) findings that the integration of reading and writing enables students to develop both critical thinking and critical literacy that promote students’ ability to transform information for their own purposes. furthermore, efl instructors should be aware that implementing reading and writing integrated instruction helps learners to be immersed in reading and writing which demand the use of the two language skills at a time, and then it may make learners be motivated to use authentic language and enables them to interact naturally with the target language and develop implicit knowledge as well. moreover, it develops students’ learning in all disciplines because it requires them to become more actively engaged in what they are learning and with that engagement, greater academic success will come and that in turn increases students’ motivation. in the same way, it is more relevant to teach reading and writing in an integrated way while teaching communicative language skills in higher institutions to enhance students’ critical thinking in the efl classroom. investigating effects of integrated reading… 125 finally, the researchers of this study recommend other researchers to continue to explore the potential effects of this pedagogical approach at different grade levels, using multiple data collection instruments. limitations of the study there were some limitations that affected this study. some were associated with the area of sample and sampling; the sample in this study was handpicked on purpose from one university which may not represent most students from all universities 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(1986). approaches and methods in language teaching. cambridge university press. https://www.novaconcursos.com.br/blog/pdf/richards-jack-c.&-rodgers.pdf rosenblatt, l. m. (2004). the transactional theory of reading and writing: theoretical models and processes of reading. international reading association, 48(1), 1363–1398 https://northtrap.wordpress.com/2012/07/15/the-transactional-theory-of-reading-and-writinglouise-m-rosenblatt tsai, j. (2006). connecting reading and writing in college efl courses. the internet tesl journal, 12 (12), 465–485. http://iteslj.org/articles/tsai-readingwritingconnection.html wondifraw, d. (2018). infusing intellectual standards of critical thinking on students’ critical reading performance. (unpublished phd dissertation). addis ababa university. ayalew tilahun, berhanu simegn, mulugeta teka die untersuchung der praxis vom integrierten leseund schreibunterricht zur förderung des kritischen denkens bei efl-studenten z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g das grundlegende ziel der vorliegenden arbeit war es, die praxis des integrierten lese und schreibunterrichts im hinblick auf die entwicklung des kritischen denkens bei den efl-studenten der universität bahir dar zu untersuchen. dabei wurde ein quasi-experimentelles vortest-nachtest-design eingesetzt. an der untersuchung nahmen 96 studenten im hauptfach englisch teil, die nach dem zufallsprinzip einer versuchs(n=48) bzw. einer kontrollgruppe (n=48) zugeordnet wurden. die kontrollgruppe wurde mittels einer separaten leseund schreibmethode unterrichtet, während die versuchsgruppe 12 wochen lang drei stunden pro woche mittels einer neu entwickelten, integrierten leseund schreibmethode lernte. anschließend wurden 25 vorund nachtests mit fragen zum kritischen denken bearbeitet, um die entwicklung des kritischen denkens bei den studierenden zu bewerten. zur überprüfung der zuverlässigkeit und der internen konsistenz von den beiden tests wurden kappa-statistiken (interraterund split-half-reliabilitätstest) verwendet. schließlich bediente man sich bei der datenauswertung eines unabhängigen t-tests, dessen ergebnisse zeigten, dass sowohl die kontrollals auch die versuchsgruppe in bezug auf deren niveau in den vortests zum kritischen denken gleich abschnitten. allerdings stellte sich am ende der untersuchung heraus, dass der integrierte leseund schreibunterricht gegenüber den herkömmlichen methoden zur förderung des kritischen denkens bei studierenden überlegen ist. schlüsselwörter: integrierter leseund schreibunterricht, sprachpädagogik, lesekompetenz, schreibkompetenz, kritisches denken theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 5 (1), 2019, pp. 133–136 10.31261/tapsla.2019.05.08 hadrian lankiewicz, teacher language awareness: a collaborative inquiry based on languaging. gdańsk: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu gdańskiego, 2015, isbn 978-7865-624-1, 368 pages the book by hadrian lankiewicz entitled teacher language awareness: a collaborative inquiry based on languaging is a very ambitious and passionate publication, not only demonstrating the author’s excellent orientation in literature on the subject, but also the ability to apply it to his main concern as an academic teacher, which is the teacher-training of prospective efl teachers. the monograph consists of 368 pages, embracing four chapters, a very extensive bibliography of over 650 sources and a set of appendices, which consists of research instruments, tasks, and materials used in the empirical study itself. the author decided—for a good reason—to offer an extensive theoretical background to his study (179 pages), compared to a much smaller empirical part (116 pages). it shows the author’s concern for a strong theoretical grounding of his study, as well as a useful promotion of ideas not very well known or popular in glottodidactic research. the work presents precise definitions of the basis for the study, constructs used and their evolution, advocating the most recent approaches. it refers for example to the concept of language awareness (andrews, 2007) emphasising the relationship between language and ideology, in which appropriacy of discourse in a given context should be of major concern to the language user, but also to any language educator (teacher). the author rightly assumes the need to develop critical teacher language awareness, which should already have been initiated at the pre-service stage, that is, during teacher training at the university or college. the most substantial part of the theory (chapters 1–3) is a presentation of the ecological perspective, not only in glottodidactic research but also in its evolution in linguistics up to the postmodernist era. this thorhttps://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.2019.05.08 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en danuta gabryś-barker134 ough overview of the main assumptions of the ecological approach constitutes a good resource text for researchers in multilingualism (see van lier, 2004). the text is not very easy to read, as the reader needs to dig through a dense set of references to names, unfortunately, not always connected directly to the field, for example, gramsci, bakhtin, bourdieu or even to marx, but whom the author considers the fathers of the ecological thinking. it seems a bit too far-fetched to me and an unnecessarily ideologized position. fortunately, these references are balanced by numerous recourse to language context, and works by t. van lier, d. larsen-freeman, or c. kramsch. at the same time, however, lankiewicz does not seem to be aware of works by l. aronin, m. o’laoire, d. singleton or p. herdina and u. jessner on language awareness from an ecological perspective. especially, he should include herdina and jessner, who are known for their dynamic model of multilingualism, which presents generally accepted theory in studying multilingualism, as well as aronin and o’laoire, with their ecological approach. the former authors have not been commented on here in much depth and the latter are not mentioned at all. in chapter 2 the author presents the ecological perspective in eco-pedagogy, which stands against the normative approach and introduces a holistic approach to language understood here as a mediator in communication, which promotes a variable norm. lankiewicz believes, correctly in my view, that discourse analysis should take the form of critical discourse analysis, in which language awareness and learner/teacher autonomy become the basic concepts. it would be hard to disagree with such a point of view, as all the evidence demonstrates that the normative approach did not succeed in developing teacher/learner autonomy, as was initially expected. chapter 3 of the book is devoted to the discussion of language awareness as a concept and teacher language awareness in particular, focusing on the need for developing teacher critical awareness. the author’s strong belief in the above led him to coin a new term, tcela—teacher critical ecological awareness, which of course draws upon an ecological perspective. despite an extensive discussion, lankiewicz seems to totally ignore previous conceptual work on teacher reflectivity, which is paramount to language awareness development, for example the research of loughran (1996), farrell (2007) or also that of gabryś-barker (2012), just to mention of few of a large bulk of studies on reflectivity. also, the author’s position seems too radical in relation to the need for creating a post-modern/post-national approach to language, which eliminates awareness of one’s mother tongue as a factor in foreign language acquisition/learning. once the reader manages to get through the reference-dense text of the first three chapters of the theoretical discussion, the most interesting part is awaiting in chapter 4. it presents in detail the empirical study carried out by the author which, as he himself states, derives from his own personal need hadrian lankiewicz, teacher language awareness: a collaborative inquiry… 135 and reflection when working with trainee efl teachers, who are university students, in respect of autonomous teacher/learner development and its virtual impossibility in the present-day conditions teachers work in. the ecological approach seems to be a possible remedy. a triangulated mixed-method longitudinal study has been carried out and aimed to demonstrate the development of trainees’ reflectivity in the period of writing their b.a. thesis in tefl. this research has to be treated as a case study in its main qualitative part, as the sample consisted of eight students (members of a b.a seminar). in its quantitative part, lankiewicz extended the number of subjects, as he used three samples of pilot, control, and target groups. the most interesting fragment of the study is its qualitative section. it demonstrates in its well-designed stages of data collection, trainees’ development of reflection and thus of tcela (teacher critical ecological awareness). it is a typical example of fairly rigorous action research, in which the teacher (the author) is the researcher and the motivation is contextually-grounded and, as a consequence, used pragmatically in the teacher’s own didactic practice and his/her professional development. the author assumes that this form of research is not very popular among polish educational centres, which unfortunately, demonstrates little knowledge of other teacher training institutions and (published) research carried out there, precisely in a form of action research projects (arguably this leads us to the sad conclusion that there is little cooperation between academic centres training future fl teachers). action research is being incorporated in various academic institutions, just to mention two significant ones, the university of adam mickiewicz in poznań (e.g., wiśniowska, 2013) and the university of silesia in katowice (e.g., gabryś-barker, 2012). one of interesting, inspiring, and attractive features is the introduction of think aloud technique by the author, a form of introspection, diaries and oral narration (presentations of the subjects). this fairly innovative methodology made participation in the study motivating for the student-subjects and allowed the researcher to elicit rich data for his analysis. this data is supplemented by self-constructed questionnaires, verified by means of statistical measures as to their reliability, which is not always the case in proposed research projects. apart from being thorough, the analysis of the collected data is also interesting, leading the author to conclusions that can constitute valuable guidelines for teacher trainers to be implemented in the course of professional development of future teachers of efl, or any other foreign language. the intervention proposed by lankiewicz in his project is an excellent illustration of how to sensitize trainees to the issues of reflectivity in general and in critical reflection on language awareness in particular. it has been tested and successfully carried out and completed by the author in his own teaching context. i see its value mostly in demonstrating that such an intervention not only develops the critical awareness of teachers in its ecological dimension, but it also becomes a motivating factor and a challenge, compared danuta gabryś-barker136 by the author to “a responsible adventure” for both the trainer and trainee. to sum up, in its empirical part, the book is an excellent example of constructivist thinking in education, whereas in its theoretical part it seems a little overloaded with ideology. the book is written in coherent and cohesive academic language, though its references to numerous scholars and their research overwhelms, making it not very reader-friendly on the one hand. on the other, it can be used as a valuable reference source. one minor drawback which could be mentioned is the lack of index of names and index of subjects in his book. i believe that this interesting and innovative publication should be of interest to, first of all, fl teacher trainers in various educational centres concerned with the professional development of teachers at different levels: both at pre-service and at the in-service stage. references farrell, s. c. (2007). reflective language teaching. london & new york: continuum. gabryś-barker, d. (2012). reflectivity in pre-service teacher development: a survey of theory and practice. katowice: university of silesia press. loughran, j. (1996). developing reflective practice. learning about teaching and learning through modelling. london–washington d.c.: the falmer press. van lier, l. (2004). the ecology and semiotics of language learning. a sociocultural perspective. berlin, heidelberg: springer. wiśniowska, d. (2013). action research in ef pedagogy. theory and analysis of practice. poznań: uam. danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia in katowice, poland https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703 theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (2), 2023, pp. 1/25 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11388 rachel garton https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7650-3478 university of north texas, usa the impact of orthographic transparency and typology on l2 learner perceptions a b s t r a c t while there is substantial research on literacy in the l1, factors impacting literacy in the l2 remain understudied. preliminary research indicates that orthographic accuracy and typology inf luence literacy acquisition, indicating these aspects of linguistic representation need further exploration within the context of second-language acquisition (sla). additionally, sla research on individual learner differences highlights emotional factors such as attitude and motivation, which are widely considered critical indicators of l2 success. motivation is closely linked to perceptions towards the l2, which indicates learner perceptions of l2 literacy could impact success in learning to read and write. as such, this paper presents a cross-lingual, mixed-methods study that compares the orthographic transparency and typologies of 26 languages against learners’ (n = 217) perceptions of l2 literacy acquisition, such as perceived difficulty of the orthography and a self-assessment of literacy skills. results indicated that orthographic transparency has a greater impact on learners’ perceptions compared to typology alone. keywords: phonology, orthography, l2 literacy, literacy acquisition, learner perceptions, grapholinguistics language is multifaceted and comprised of many interdependent systems, with phonology as one of the central pillars. as such, all other aspects of a language are inexplicably tied to phonological inventory and processes, including literacy. research shows that phonological awareness results in higher levels of reading and improved literacy development in the l1 (e.g., torgesen, 1999) and stronger phonological awareness and phonological working memory are associated with improved encoding of lexemes and literacy in the l2 (lau & rickard liow, 2005; meschyan & hernandez, 2004). however, l2 literacy acquisition is still a relatively understudied subfield in second language acquihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11388 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7650-3478 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0629-7410 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2451-7242 tapsla.11388 p. 2/25 rachel garton sition (sla). it was a small field in the early 2000s (koda, 2005, 2007) and even now remains a niche area of sla, preventing researchers and language instructors from having a comprehensive understanding. additionally, there is even less focus on learner perceptions on literacy and how those perceptions are impacted by the orthography itself. most studies focus, understandably, on literacy skill acquisition. of the literature which does exist on l2 literacy, the majority of studies are on english as a second language (esl). there is minimal research on literacy of other languages and orthographies from an l2 perspective (cook & bassetti, 2005; koda, 2005; perfetti & liu, 2005). even more recent publications that are not focused on esl are predominantly focused on either semitic languages (e.g., eviatar, taha, & shwartz, 2018; havron & arnon, 2017) or chinese languages (e.g., kim, packard, & christianson, 2016; zhang & roberts, 2019). this research has, however, established that orthographic typology seems to impact processing and the skills needed for literacy. to contribute further to this small-but-growing area of sla, this paper presents a cross-lingual, mixed-methods study that examines how the orthographic transparency and typologies of 26 languages influences learners’ perceptions of literacy acquisition in the l2. the specific research questions are as follows. 1. how does the phonological accuracy of an orthography impact learner perceptions towards l2 literacy acquisition? 2. how do differences between l1 and l2 orthographic typology impact learners’ perceptions towards l2 literacy acquisition? literature review phonological transparency and literacy phonological awareness has been tied to stronger literacy (lau & rickard liow, 2005; meschyan & hernandez, 2004; torgesen, 1999) and phonological transparency is key to stronger phonological awareness (carlisle, 2004; lau & rickard liow, 2005). these two concepts are strongly related but also critically different, so it is important to define each. phonological awareness is a general (i.e., non-metalinguistic) sense of a language’s phonological inventory and processes. some scholars contrast this with phonemic awareness, which is an explicit (i.e., metalinguistic) knowledge of a language’s phonological inventory (torgesen, 1999). phonological transparency refers to how intact the base form the impact of orthographic transparency and typology… tapsla.11388 p. 3/25 (stem) of a word is in the derived or inflected form (carlisle, 2004). for example, ⟨heal⟩ [hil] is the stem in both ⟨healing⟩ [hiliŋ] and ⟨health⟩ [hɛlθ]. in this example, ⟨healing⟩ is phonologically transparent but ⟨health⟩ is phonologically opaque (carlisle, 2004). research with children indicates that phonological awareness and orthographic phonological transparency have impacts on l1 literacy development; more phonologically opaque words are seen as more difficult for readers to correctly identify and lower degrees of phonological awareness correlate to lower levels of literacy (e.g., carlisle, 2004; torgesen, 1999; windsor, 2000). this implies that the more phonologically accurate an orthography is, the easier it will be to learn to read. this paper distinguishes between “phonological accuracy” and “morphological accuracy” in regards to orthographic transparency. an orthography may have high phonological accuracy, in which case everything is written as it is pronounced. an orthography may also have high morphological accuracy, in which case the surface form resulting from morphophonological processes are disregarded in lieu of maintaining accurate representation of the underlying forms. this is a divergence from more general terms such as “orthographic depth” or “orthographic regularity” because the distinction allows discussion about accurate representation of underlying vs. surface forms. the example of ⟨health⟩ above represents higher morphological accuracy and lower phonological accuracy. it is also important to note the distinction between a writing system and an orthography. perfetti and liu (2005) distinguish them by the level to which they apply, which is also an approach used by cook and bassetti (2005) and, more recently, meletis (2020). a writing system is the series of characters that may be used for a multitude of languages, such as the shared writing system of english and german, based on the latin alphabet, contrasted with the writing system used for russian and ukrainian, based on the cyrillic alphabet. orthographies, however, are at the language-level and are the specific set of graphemes and rules that govern how a particular language is written. for example, while english and swedish may share the latin writing system they have different orthographies, with swedish having letters that are not used in normal english like ⟨å⟩ and ⟨ö⟩ and the two orthographies representing different phonemes with different letters, like how ⟨j⟩ encodes /dʒ/ in english but /j/ in swedish. this paper will follow the definitions as outlined by perfetti and liu (2005), cook and bassetti (2005), and meletis (2020). literacy development and processing there are several models of literacy processing from a range of disciplines, many of which focus on the information processing and decoding aspects of tapsla.11388 p. 4/25 rachel garton reading and writing. two in particular were foundational for the design and analysis of the present study—dual route model (drm), also known as dualroute hypothesis, and the laberge-samuel’s model of automatic information processing (hereafter referred to as the laberge-samuel’s model). both models are influenced by more general information processing models. dual-route model shows two procedures that readers can leverage during reading—one at the lexical level and one at the sub-lexical level (angelelli et al., 2018; coltheart, curtis, atkin, & haller, 1993; cook & bassetti, 2005; paap & noel, 1991). the lexical procedure is when readers recognize a lexeme as a whole unit and do not break apart each sub-part into phonemes, syllables, morae, etc. the sub-lexical procedure is when subunits are decoded individually to achieve full lexeme decoding. the model has been used widely in literacy acquisition and developmental psychology research, especially in studies focusing on dyslexia. the dual-route model has also been applied to writing, by which writers will either take the sub-lexical route and remember spellings based on individual grapheme-phoneme correspondences and sub-lexical chunks or take the lexical route and remember spellings based on complete wordforms (cook & bassetti, 2005). dual-route model makes the distinction between lexical processing and sub-lexical processing, which is also a feature in the laberge-samuel’s model (samuels, 1994). this model has multiple procedures by which a reader decodes a text by leveraging visual, phonological, and semantic memory. similar to the dual-route model, a reader may decode more at the grapheme and subunit level through recognition of spelling patterns, or at the word level through recognition of an entire word unit. this recognized visual stimuli is then connected to phonological information which then links to the meaning of the word (samuels, 1994). while some other models of literacy processing recognize that decoding of text is not always so bottom-up and linear (e.g., rumelhart, 1994) and literacy research has indicated that there are more cognitive processes at work than merely decoding visual stimuli (see doyle, 2013), the laberge-samuel’s model cleanly models the decoding process of literacy by which the reader converts visual stimuli into linguistic information. both models indicate that decoding happens more granularly when a word is unfamiliar or when an individual is just beginning to learn to read and write. then, once spelling patterns and words become more familiar, words can begin to be recognized as a single unit. however, the level of reliance on phonological decoding at the sub-lexical level appears to differ across orthographies (angelelli et al., 2018; cook & bassetti, 2005; koda, 2008; perfetti & liu, 2005). for example, phonological activation occurs prior to word identification for languages such as english but not chinese (perfetti, zhang, & berent, 1992). this is explored further in the following section. the impact of orthographic transparency and typology… tapsla.11388 p. 5/25 dual-route model and the laberge samuel’s model are primarily about the cognitive procedures used for encoding and decoding language. if one takes the stance that the core function of an orthography is to encode a particular language, then it is also assumed that the core process behind reading is decoding linguistic information from written symbols. in other words, reading is “converting graphic input to linguistic concepts” (perfetti & liu, 2005). it is important to note that this encoding to linguistic information may not always be at the phoneme or even the syllable level (bassetti, 2005; cook & bassetti, 2005; koda, 2005; lau & rickard liow, 2005). a review of writing systems which are pictographic and ideographic in nature, such as chinese and japanese, show that not all orthographies encode simple phonemic information (perfetti & liu, 2005). rather, some orthographies encode a mix of phonemic and semantic information. as an example, the japanese word for “to think (about)” is /kaŋgaεɾɯ/ and written as ⟨考える⟩, with an ideographic symbol – 考 – and two syllabary graphemes – え /ε/ る /ɾɯ/. analysis of other levels of encoding, such as this, leads to the proposal of the universal phonological principle (upp), which states that during reading, phonological information is activated at the lowest level allowed by that language’s orthography (perfetti, zhang, & berent, 1992; perfetti & liu, 2005). this may be at the level of the phoneme (e.g., russian), syllable (e.g., cherokee), morpheme (e.g., chinese) or even word (e.g., japanese gikun words). an important note is that this does not mean readers decode a single grapheme as a single unit, since some orthographies use multiple graphemes for a single phonological unit. as an example, english encodes /t/ as ⟨t⟩ but /ʃ/ as ⟨sh⟩ (perfetti, zhang, & berent, 1992). this ties to the concept of “grain size,” which is the smallest amount of orthographic information needed to successfully decode the orthography into linguistic units (cook & bassetti, 2005, p. 16). for example, italian has a very small grain size due to the very simple phoneme-grapheme correspondence in the orthography. conversely, english has a higher grain size which sometimes requires multiple graphemes making up a full syllable to be decoded as a chunk (cook & bassetti, 2005), such as the ⟨ough⟩ /u/ in ⟨through⟩ /θɹu/. these ideas raise interesting questions about the potential influence of phonological accuracy and orthographic typology on literacy. much research tying phonological transparency and phoneme awareness to literacy has been focused on english and other alphabetic languages, where phonological information is encoded at the phoneme level. these ideas also highlight the importance of phonological activation for literacy, regardless of the orthographic typology. there is some disagreement in the literature about the role of phonological activation for literacy and exactly when in the reading process phonological activation occurs. it is fairly well established that phonological activation is a part of the reading process, regardless of writing system typology (cook & bassetti, 2005; perfetti, zhang, & berent, 1992), but the typology can imtapsla.11388 p. 6/25 rachel garton pact when this activation occurs in relation to activation of other linguistic features (cook & bassetti, 2005). assuming this is true, then this implies the more easily readers can identify phonological segments during phonological activation, the easier the word form itself can be successfully decoded. this leads to the idea that an orthography that is ideal for literacy is one that best facilitates the most efficient encoding and decoding of wordforms. as can be seen, phonological activation is a part of this encoding and decoding process and strong phonological awareness appears to be a better indicator of literacy skills in young english l1 readers than morphological awareness (windsor, 2000), though the importance of morphological transparency and awareness should not be forgotten. there is a disjunction between phonological and morphological accuracy in orthographies, with the two often being two ends of a spectrum. some languages that have minimal morphophonological processes tend to be both phonologically and morphologically transparent, allowing the orthography to also be both phonologically and morphologically accurate. however, morphophonological processes result in opacity of underlying forms, which in turn results in either a morphologically or phonologically inaccurate orthography. so, which is better for literacy processing? is it better for an orthography to represent the underlying morphemes, disregarding phonological processes, or provide a more accurate phonological representation, obfuscating underlying morphemes? literacy studies, including the present study, seem to suggest that phonologically accurate orthographies should be easier to read. early writing on phonology and orthographies took this approach to the extreme. for example, from pike’s 1947 guide phonemics: a technique for reducing languages to writing: “once the native learns an orthography which is closely correlated with his sound units, there is no ‘spelling’ problem. everything is spelled as it is pronounced and pronounced as it is spelled” (pike, 1947, p. 57). swadesh (1934) took a similar stance by suggesting that orthography development should be a mere phoneme-to-grapheme relationship. however, carlisle (2004) argues for the opposite—more morphological accuracy. carlisle (2004) and others have shown the importance of morpheme awareness on literacy processing (bryant & nunes, 2006; koda, 2005, 2007). she gives the example of how confusing it may be to recognize the english plural suffix if english spelled words with too much phonological accuracy, such as [kæts ænd dɔgz] being encoded as *⟨cats and dogz⟩ rather than ⟨cats and dogs⟩ (carlisle, 2004). another example of higher morphological accuracy in a different writing system is from korean, which uses hangul. in korean, the formal indicative form of a verb has the suffix ⟨ㅂ니다⟩, which could be literally transcribed as /b.ni.da/, as in 줍니다 “give” /dʒumnida/. 줍니다 is spelled with ⟨ㅂ⟩ /b/, which becomes [+nasal] when preceding an nasal. the underlying the impact of orthographic transparency and typology… tapsla.11388 p. 7/25 morpheme is retained by writing 줍니다 rather than *줌니다, using the hangul letter for /m/ – ⟨ㅁ⟩. snider (2014) proposes a sort of compromise—one which appears to be strongly supported by the collective research on literacy development. he proposes that in cases of derivational morphology, more phonological accuracy should be preferred whereas in cases of inflectional morphology, more morphological accuracy should be preferred. the reason for this is that speakers are likely more sensitive to morphophonological changes in cases of inflectional morphology (snider, 2014). this is likely because inflectional morphology is often a more productive part of the language, meaning the surface forms are more readily accessible and, therefore, do not need to be represented as accurately. this is echoed by willis oko (2018) when discussing orthography development for unwritten languages. her stance is that if the target audience of readers are native speakers, then it could be assumed that phonological changes due to productive morphology could be represented with their underlying forms, seeing as native speakers will be fluent in these alternations. however, if the target audience of readers are semi-fluent or new learners then a more phonologically transparent orthography would be preferred so that those without native speaker intuitions could still accurately decode the text sub-lexically into correct pronunciation. transferring this to foreign language students, it could very well be the case that more morphologically transparent orthographies serve native speakers very well but provide more difficulties for learners of the language. it is possible that new learners of an orthography rely heavily on sub-lexical decoding and cannot yet decode entire morphemes and lexical units. a more phonologically accurate orthography would better enable this sub-lexical route of processing. literacy development in the l2 despite substantial research on literacy development in the l1, there remains sparse literature focusing on literacy acquisition in the l2, much of which has been focused on l1 transfer to the l2 (cook & bassetti, 2005). while research on l1 literacy does provide insight, literacy acquisition for the l2 is impacted by the l1 and, as a result, it is different and more complex (bassetti, 2005; cook & bassetti, 2005; koda, 2005, 2007). the transfer facilitation model (tfm) assumes that all reading is filtered through l1 metalinguistic knowledge and l1 literacy experience (koda, 2005). it is common for learners to already have some level of literacy in their l1, which can result in transfer that impacts processing of the l2 orthography (koda, 1998, 2005, 2007). as an exercise, examine the grapheme ⟨j⟩. in some languages like spanish this grapheme encodes /h/, in some like swedish it encodes /j/, and in others tapsla.11388 p. 8/25 rachel garton like english it encodes /dʒ/. the phonological activation of ⟨j⟩ for readers who speak swedish and english both will likely differ than readers who only speak one of these languages. additionally, the activation of ⟨j⟩ will also be different for speakers of swedish and english compared to readers who know swedish and danish (which also encodes /j/ with ⟨j⟩). as a more specific example, a popular german tourist destination is the town of rothenburg, which is read [ʁotn̩bʊʁk] in german but is often mistakenly read as [ɹɑθɪnbɹ̩ g] by english speakers due to, among other things, incorrect decoding of ⟨th⟩ as [θ] from l1 interference. meschyan and hernandez (2004) explore this in detail, focusing on phonological working memory and other cognitive processes impacting both vocabulary and literacy acquisition in the l2. they define “phonological working memory” as “temporary storage for unfamiliar sound forms until more permanent representations are constructed” (p. 74). in other words, a reader must store newly learned phoneme and grapheme correspondences in their working memory until long-term retention (ltr) is achieved. as in the above example, remembering to read ⟨th⟩ in german as [t.h] instead of [θ] requires use of phonological working memory for beginner german readers with an english l1 background. similarly, learning completely new graphemes and associating these symbols to phonemic units requires phonological working memory, like when a student is learning to read russian and must remember that ⟨я⟩ encodes /ja/ until ltr is achieved. phonological ability is considered a combination of phonological working memory alongside phonological awareness, which has been linked to better acquisition of new lexemes and literacy in the l2 (meschyan & hernandez, 2004). the examples of ⟨j⟩ and ⟨th⟩ demonstrate how the l1 can influence the l2, which can in turn influence literacy acquisition and decoding accuracy. it may be easy to assume that learning to read an l2 orthography with the same writing system as the l1 should be an easy task, but the above examples show that things are not so clear-cut. koda (1998, 2005) has explored the transfer of l1 literacy to the l2 and found that l1 phonological processing behaviors seemed to carry from the l1 to the l2, meaning the orthographic typology of the l1 comparative to the l2 can also impact l2 literacy acquisition. in her study, koda compared english l2 orthography decoding behavior between students of alphabetic (korean hangul) and non-alphabetic (chinese hanzi) l1 backgrounds. the relationship between phonemic awareness and decoding of written words was stronger for korean l1 readers compared to chinese l1 readers (koda, 1998). this corroborates prior research that indicated phonemic awareness transfers between spanish and english, both of which use the latin writing system (koda, 1998). this does not mean there is identical processing across alike typologies– there is still different processing from one orthography to the other even within the same writing system. for example, german readers tend to rely more on phoneme-grapheme decoding during reading compared to english readers, who the impact of orthographic transparency and typology… tapsla.11388 p. 9/25 tend to also rely on whole-word decoding due to the inconsistencies of english spellings (perfetti & liu, 2005). koda also cites prior research on young english and japanese readers, comparing an alphabet to a syllabary, which indicated that alphabetic literacy better promotes phonemic awareness (koda, 1998). these studies and others (e.g., bassetti, 2005, lau & liow, 2005), demonstrate that not only phonological and morphological accuracy impact l2 literacy acquisition but also the typology of the l1 orthography. this is yet another way l2 literacy is more complex than that of the l1. learner perceptions and motivation the current study seeks to explore l2 learner perceptions and attitudes towards literacy, primarily due to the strong relationship between learner attitudes and learner motivation (dörnyei, 2005; gardner, 1985). these attitudes may be in relation to the language community or the language itself. in the case of the present study, the focus will be on attitudes towards the language, especially the orthography. perceptions of the orthography being easy or difficult could potentially put learners in a positive or negative frame of mind when engaging in literacy practice. additionally, frustration over orthography difficulty could lead to negative emotions being related to literacy. this is important because motivation is tied to emotional factors (dörnyei, 2009). these factors could be positive emotions such as confidence or negative emotions such as frustration (dörnyei, 2009). therefore, negative emotions associated with an orthography or, conversely, positive emotions associated with an orthography could influence learner motivation to learn to read and write. these emotions and perceptions could even influence learners’ decisions about trying to achieve literacy at all. as an example of this, the japanese orthography is generally considered extremely challenging to learn and literacy is often the most difficult aspect of acquiring the language (paxton & svetenant, 2014). as a result, it is not unusual to see certain japanese instructional books avoid the orthography altogether to cater to those learners who do not want to struggle with it. japanese for busy people is a popular self-study book series that offers a fully “romanized” version where all japanese words are transcribed using the latin alphabet (association for japanese-language teaching). in addition to sla research on more general emotional factors, there has been substantial focus on individual differences, of which motivation is a component. individual differences refer to unique or personal factors that make each learner different and, thus, make each learner approach language learning slightly differently. these differences are believed to impact how successful an individual may be at learning the l2 (dörnyei, 2003). commonly examined individual differences include language aptitude, attitude, motivation, and tapsla.11388 p. 10/25 rachel garton learning styles (dörnyei, 2003). of these, motivation is considered among the most critical indicators of l2 success (gass, behney, & plonsky, 2013, p. 453). considering the importance of motivation on l2 learner success and the close relationship between attitude and emotion on motivation, this study seeks to better understand attitudes and perceptions of learning l2 orthographies. it is hoped that results will provide insight that can aid in motivational techniques for foreign language students as well as give educators a better understanding of potential circumstances which may necessitate early intervention for student success. methods to address the research questions, the author performed a pilot study to inform the present study, which uses two components—a semi-structured survey and an analysis of orthographies. the pilot study was a small, simplified online survey of eight questions. the survey focused on testing the questions and assessing the validity of the data analysis. the data from the pilot was fully analyzed to identify potential gaps or shortcomings of the nature of data collected. additionally, it allowed for a test of the survey content to ensure that participants understood the questions and that the questions yielded the desired type of data. the pilot survey was semi-structured with a mix of quantitative and qualitative questions that focused on learner perceptions of difficulties with l2 literacy acquisition. the survey also collected basic information regarding the learner’s l1, their l2, and self-assessments for general fluency and literacy. the pilot study had a total of 55 respondents, 35 of which were english l1. the 55 respondents collectively gave answers about 14 different languages. the orthographies of these 14 languages were then assessed for phonological accuracy and typology to compare against the transparency and typology of the corresponding l1. preliminary results from the pilot indicated that more accurate orthographies are easier to learn, regardless of the orthographic typology. the present study attempts to verify these initial findings from the pilot using an improved survey and larger data set. like the pilot, the present study leveraged a semi-structured online survey modeled after the version used in the pilot. based on the results from the pilot study, more biodemographic questions were added and the phrasing of one question was modified to avoid confusion that was encountered by respondents in the pilot. being semi-structured, the survey was a mix of qualitative and quantitative questions, though the quantitative questions were largely in the impact of orthographic transparency and typology… tapsla.11388 p. 11/25 place to capture descriptive statistics and control variables such as l1 and selfassessments of the l2. to assess learner perceptions, the below two questions were asked about the respondents’ identified target languages: “please describe any difficulties with learning the writing system, including learning new symbols and learning the proper spelling of words.” “what frustrated you most about learning to read the language?” following data collection, an analysis was performed on both the l1 and the l2 orthographies reported by respondents of the survey. the analysis focused on the phonological accuracy of the orthographies themselves which, as discussed in the literature review, is the degree to which a word’s written format accurately reflects its pronunciation. until recently, there was not a strong way to quantify phonological transparency or orthographic accuracy with much confidence (borleffs, maassen, lyytinen, & zwarts, 2017). however, very recent developments in research using artificial technology have shown some promising results. marjou (2021) used artificial intelligence to give different orthographies a score for orthographic transparency. while this research is still preliminary and the results are not exhaustive for all languages captured in the survey, it does serve as a good baseline for analysis and is more reliable than the subjective analysis performed for the data gathered from the pilot. additionally, since specific percentage scores from marjou (2021) are not available for all languages, the full analysis was partially subjective and could not be as accurate as the data from marjou (2021). therefore, languages were merely given a low, medium or high ranking that was meant to be largely relative for the purposes of comparing against the survey data set. for example, even though italian was shown to have a higher transparency score than spanish (marjou, 2021) both were given an orthographic accuracy score of high due to their relative accuracy compared to many other orthographies such as french, english, and japanese. additionally, some orthographies that are sometimes considered more “regular,” such as french, still have lower orthographic phonological accuracy in terms of grapheme-phoneme correspondence and reflecting surface form vs. underlying form so they received a lower ranking. ultimately, it was also decided that a very low ranking should be used for writing systems that encoded meaning over phonological information and are therefore much less phonologically transparent and difficult to learn, such as japanese kanji. a ranking of very high was not deemed necessary and was thus not added to the ranking system. for the purposes of comparing rankings, these values were also given corresponding numbers, very low = 0, low = 1, medium = 2, high = 3. while not perfect, this method allowed for key patterns to be isolated among the survey results and provide a basic foundation on which tapsla.11388 p. 12/25 rachel garton to ground the following analysis. appendix a includes the rankings given to each orthography. the results of the analysis were then compared against the answers from the survey to find possible patterns. results and analysis the survey for the present study had 233 completed responses recruited through online language learning communities and social media. once responses were reviewed, 16 responses were thrown out due to malformed data or invalid responses, resulting in a final total of 217 responses for analysis (n = 217). spss 25 was used to perform the quantitative analysis and run descriptive statistics. of the 217 respondents, 116 (53.5%) identified as female and 87 (40.1%) as male, with the remaining 14 (6.4%) identifying as non-binary or preferring not to answer. 121 (55.8%) respondents were between the ages of 18 and 34, which is likely a result of the recruitment methods. all but 26 respondents (88%) were under the age of 55. education level was a mix, with 69.1% of the respondents having completed college and 30.4% of those also having completed graduate school. across all 217 responses, there was a total of 30 unique native languages identified, with 145 (66.8%) being l1 english. for target language, there were 26 unique languages identified. the writing systems and writing system typologies for each language were identified and are listed in tables 1 and 2. a more detailed breakdown of l2 languages among the responses are listed in appendix a. in addition to the primary target languages identified, respondents frequently listed additional languages they had exposure to or had learned. for the purposes of the present study, only the primary target language was the focus for each respondent’s answers. table 1 l1 writing systems and typologies in responses l1 writing system typology frequency percent arabic abugida/abjad 3 1.4 brahmic abugida/abjad 4 1.8 cyrillic alphabet 12 5.5 hanzi/kanji picto-/ideographic 2 0.9 latin alphabet 196 90.3 the impact of orthographic transparency and typology… tapsla.11388 p. 13/25 table 2 l2 writing systems and typologies in responses l2 writing system typology frequency percent arabic abugida/abjad 8 3.7 brahmic abugida/abjad 1 0.5 cyrillic alphabet 12 5.5 greek alphabet 1 0.5 hangul alphabet 1 0.5 hanzi/kanji picto-/ideographic 35 16.1 latin alphabet 159 73.3 as seen in tables 1 and 2, the majority of the respondents had a latinbased alphabet for their l1 and their l2, and there were a few incidents of l2 writing systems with minimal responses. rather than looking specifically at writing systems, much of the following analysis was focused on l1 and l2 writing system typologies, which is a broader category (e.g., greek and hangul both fall under alphabet). when comparing the l1 writing system typology to that of the l2, the typologies mismatched in 50 (23%) of the responses while matched in the remaining. in a self-assessment of l2 literacy abilities, which was prompted with a 0–10 sliding scale, 146 (67.3%) indicated they felt they at least a moderate (> 5) level of literacy. scores of self-assessed literacy skill were higher on average (6.11) than the self-assessment of general fluency (4.94), possibly due to the fact that, generally, it is faster to learn the l2 orthography than the entirety of the l2. this was also seen in the data collected from the pilot survey. additionally, 37.8% of the respondents assessed their reading abilities at 8–10 compared to only 20.3% of the respondents giving an 8–10 score on self-assessment of fluency, which also follows the pattern seen from the pilot. the exceptions to this were the responses with a target language of chinese (mandarin) or japanese, with much more complex orthographies that can take years to master. for these two target languages, no respondents indicated a 9–10 for literacy skills and 77.1% put 5 or lower compared to only 62.9% put 5 or lower on general fluency. it is important to remember these are self-assessments only, so while they may not indicate actual fluency and literacy abilities, they do provide insight into learners’ perceptions of their own skills, which is more relevant for the present study. the answers to the two open-ended questions were coded to determine patterns across respondents’ perceptions. the codes were designed to capture the presence or absence of difficulty with literacy acquisition and, if present, the nature of the difficulty. the codes for difficulty indicated whether the tapsla.11388 p. 14/25 rachel garton respondent had problems with general spelling, diacritics, phoneme-grapheme correspondence, or the writing system itself. general spelling covers memorizing spelling patterns and remembering “silent” letters, etc. there is some overlap between the general spelling and the phoneme-grapheme correspondence difficulty code, but the grapheme-phoneme correspondence was specific to difficulty remembering correspondences or learning new correspondences, such as in one response from an english l1 learner of dutch: some letter combinations produce different sounds than they do in english. a distinct code was used for problems with diacritics due to the frequency of comments about accent marks and umlauts (12%). the difficulty code for writing system was used for responses which explicitly stated difficulty learning new symbols for writing, such as one respondent who was an english l1 learner of arabic: different alphabet and right to left writing. table 3 shows the complete breakdown of the difficulty codes from the data set. of the 47 responses coded for writing system difficulty specifically, 37 were for a target language of chinese (mandarin) or japanese. table 3 descriptive statistics for difficulty codes nature of difficulty frequency percent none 105 48.4 spelling 29 13.4 diacritics 26 12 phoneme-grapheme correspondence 10 4.6 writing system 47 21.7 the free-form answers to the open-ended questions in the survey also provide some interesting insight. while many respondents put brief answers, stating they had no issues with learning to read and write, others gave more in-depth responses. some of the more notable results from both the quantitative analysis and qualitative answers are provided in the following sections. difficulty and self-assessed literacy a univariate analysis was run to compare the literacy self-assessment score with reported difficulty given based on qualitative answers. there was a statistically significant correlation with perceived difficulty and the self-assessment of literacy skills (f = 25.938, p = .00000076964604651431, η2 = .108) with an observed power of 0.999. in other words, if a respondent expressed difficulty the impact of orthographic transparency and typology… tapsla.11388 p. 15/25 with learning to read their target language, then they were more likely to also rate themselves as less literate compared to the respondents who expressed no issues with learning to read or write. since the literacy assessment was a selfassessment, it is not clear whether difficulty with l2 literacy acquisition actually results in lower levels of literacy skill or merely a perceived lower level of literacy skill. additional research would be necessary to determine whether this difficulty merely results in a lack of confidence in one’s own literacy or if there is actually an impact to literacy abilities. if the latter, it would be valuable to explore whether this impact was related to difficulty of the l2 itself or due to avoidance of literacy practice stemming from frustration or poor experience with learning. another possible explanation is that learners who are still not very literate are still in the midst of learning to read and write, so they perceive the difficulty more strongly compared to more literate respondents who may have forgotten some of their early struggles. l1 and l2 mismatch to assess a potential relationship between l1 and l2 writing system typologies and perceived difficulty, a chi-square test was run to compare difficulty from qualitative answers to both l1–l2 writing system mismatch and typology mismatch. interestingly, while the chi-square test indicated a statistically significant correlation between perceived difficulty and both typology and writing system, the significance for the typology mismatch—x2 (1, n = 217) = 24.022, p = .00000095255810167634—was greater than for the writing system mismatch—x2 (1, n = 217) = 18.001, p = .00002207434151596157. this indicates that, while a new writing system in general is usually perceived as more difficult, there is a much stronger chance of perceived difficulty when the typologies of the l1 and l2 writing systems do not match. this was also the case during the pilot. these results initially seem very significant. however, chinese and japanese both have exceedingly more complex writing systems compared to, for example, arabic or russian, since they encode linguistic information at the morpheme level as opposed to the phoneme or syllable level. therefore, to verify the significance of the chi-square test, responses for l2 chinese (mandarin), chinese (cantonese), and japanese were removed and the tests were re-run with the remaining data (n = 182). with these more complex writing systems removed, the significance of the relationship between difficulty and typology mismatch vanished—x2 (1, n = 182) = .365, p = .54548840201428050000—but the relationship between difficulty and writing system difference remained significant—x2 (1, n = 182) = 1.068, p = .30138063626919240000—albeit only at the 0.05 level. this indicates that the level of linguistic information encoded by tapsla.11388 p. 16/25 rachel garton the orthography, which often determines complexity, influences the relationship more than typology mismatch alone. for all of these relationships, tests were also run with age, gender, and education level as controls to confirm these were not significant factors. results showed that the relationship between l1–l2 writing system and typology mismatch were still statistically significant even when controlling for age, gender, and education level. additionally, when looking at age, gender, and education level compared to general difficulty, there was no statistically significant relationships, indicating these are not significant factors for learners’ perceived difficulty of literacy acquisition in the l2. orthographic phonological accuracy based on the ranking of orthographic phonological accuracy given to each language, results were given a transparency offset score, which indicated how much more or less the transparency of the orthography of the l2 was compared to that of the l1. for example, if the l1 was a high (3) transparency and the l2 is a low (1) transparency, the offset score was –2. this offset was then compared to difficulty scores to examine potential relationships. a univariate analysis was used to compare difficulty to transparency offset scores. there was a significant (f = 17.625, p = .00003938537485147854, η2 = .076) relationship between difficulty and transparency offset codes that indicated the less transparent the l2 is relative to the l1, the more likely a respondent will report difficulty learning to read. figure 1 chart comparing transparency offset to reported difficulty the impact of orthographic transparency and typology… tapsla.11388 p. 17/25 to explore this further, responses for l2 chinese (mandarin), chinese (cantonese), and japanese were removed (n = 182) and a univariate analysis was run again to compare difficulty with transparency offset. as seen with other tests, the correlation between difficulty and transparency offset was not as significant once the more complex writing systems were excluded from the analysis (f = .738, p = .39154513894622280000, η2 = .004). figure 2 chart comparing transparency offset to reported difficulty excluding chinese and japanese l2 responses transparency offset scores were also compared to self-assessed literacy skills using a univariate analysis. transparency offset showed to have a significant relationship with self-assessed literacy (f = 4.913, p = .00028295736452932905, η2 = .104). however, as with other tests run, chinese (mandarin), chinese (cantonese), and japanese l2 responses were removed and the tests rerun. with the more opaque writing systems of chinese and japanese removed, the correlation between transparency and self-assessed skill did not show to be as strong, but still significant (f = 6.017, p = .00014579934867490815, η2 = .120). figure 3 summarizes the significant relationships ( p-values) between tested variables when all responses were considered (n = 217). however, considering the impact more opaque writing systems chinese and japanese had on the analysis, figure 4 shows how the relationships changed when those l2 responses were removed (n = 182). tapsla.11388 p. 18/25 rachel garton figure 3 model of significant relationships across all responses figure 4 model of relationships excluding chinese and japanese l2 responses this is further evidence that it is not merely the typology and writing system alone but also the level of complexity of the orthography. the remaining results sections are largely excerpts from the qualitative answers. perception of phonological accuracy a common complaint among responses was about phonological accuracy and, when responses mentioned learning to read was easy, they sometimes attributed this to the phonological accuracy of the orthography. the following responses are a mix from the present study and the pilot. the impact of orthographic transparency and typology… tapsla.11388 p. 19/25 “the writing system in spanish is very easy, in fact it seems more phonetic than english” (l1 english, l2 spanish) “[...] if you know the alphabet in spanish, you can read it.” (l1 english, l2 spanish) “[…] words aren’t spelt the way they are pronounced.” (l1 russian, l2 english) “i have had three main difficulties with the writing system” […] “there are a number of spelling rules/irregularities, such that it isn’t always possible to correctly pronounce unknown words.” (l1 english, l2 korean) “it is difficult to know whether a word finishes with a d or a t, as they sound the same.” (l1 english, l2 dutch) diacritics there were several responses noting difficulty around the representation of suprasegmental features, such as accent marks for stress. this difficulty could merely be due to lack of accent marks/diacritics in their l1 orthography, making the graphemes harder to remember. however, it could also be due to the l1 orthography not encoding suprasegmental features at all, so these phonological attributes are not paid much attention to. the necessity to now encode these features in the orthography is challenging because it requires more attention be given to these phenomena. therefore, it is not merely remembering the graphemes themselves but a greater burden on phonological working memory to remember suprasegmental features that are not a focus in the l1. “accent marks are sometimes difficult as they vary greatly depending on the conjugation of the verb.” (l1 english, l2 french) “accents above vowels have no apparent reason/logic as to where they’ll be.” (l1 english, l2 spanish) “it’s very hard to remember how to spell words with accents because in english accents don’t matter at all.” (l1 english, l2 french) tapsla.11388 p. 20/25 rachel garton discussion and future research in addition to the brief discussion given in the previous sections, the following section will synthesize major themes from the results and discuss potential pedagogical applications, study limitations, and future research. the present study was aimed at addressing the following research questions: 1. how does the phonological accuracy of an orthography impact learner perceptions towards l2 literacy acquisition? 2. how do differences between l1 and l2 orthographic typology impact learners’ perceptions towards l2 literacy acquisition? for question 1, phonological accuracy of the l2 orthography does appear to impact students’ perceptions of difficulties, but this accuracy is relative to that of the l1. in other words, the level of transparency of the l2 relative to that of the l1 is inversely correlated with the difficulty students are likely to report. while this may seem intuitive, it is interesting when considering the findings for question 2. based on the results of the study, different writing systems and different writing system typologies do not seem to result in difficulties for foreign language students but, rather, the orthographic transparency of the l2 compared to the l1 is a greater factor to predict student difficulty. prior research has shown that typology seems to have some impact on literacy (bassetti, 2005; cook & bassetti, 2005; koda, 2005; lau & rickard liow, 2005), but the present study indicates that either this impact is not as apparent to the learners themselves or the nature of the relationship between typology and literacy is more complex. additionally, much of the prior literature examining the impact of typology was focused on chinese or japanese being either the l1 or l2. as indicated by the results of the present study, when these two languages are compared to others, the typology does have a significant impact. however, that is more likely due to the complexity of these writing systems and the fact that they require acquisition of a larger number of units rather than being indicative of an impact of typology itself. in other words, is the difficulty actually due to how linguistic units are encoded or the sheer number of graphemes in the orthography? more research would be necessary to explore this further. it is also important to reiterate that the present study focuses on selfassessment and personal narratives rather than examining strictly quantitative language competency scores. the purpose of the study was to see how students themselves felt about their literacy abilities and personal struggles learning to read. further research on student perceptions and literacy that also leverages the impact of orthographic transparency and typology… tapsla.11388 p. 21/25 quantitative competency scores would help clarify our understanding of these findings. the present study was also focused primarily on the phonological accuracy of orthographies, rather than the morphological accuracy. while this was intentional, it does narrow the analysis of the data and could be a potential limitation. as previously mentioned, orthographic transparency has two main aspects—phonological accuracy and morphological accuracy, as was illustrated by the examples of ⟨healing⟩ and ⟨health⟩. snider (2014), willis oko (2018), and others (e.g., carlisle, 2014) have argued that there is benefit to morphological transparency in certain situations and for certain reader demographics. while phonological accuracy better facilitates sub-lexical decoding, morphological accuracy could better benefit fluent readers with more rapid morpheme and word-level identification. in fact, one respondent who was l1 czech and l2 english seemed aware of this in their response: “it seems english is geared towards recognition of words, rather than letter sounds, which makes it difficult to construct words by their letters alone.” subsequent research to follow this study would include more comprehensive analysis of both the phonological accuracy and morphological accuracy of orthographies to see if any patterns emerge. there are potential applications of these findings in the classroom. based on the present study, more phonologically opaque orthographies are more difficult for learners to acquire. however, if the orthography is morphologically accurate, then teaching morphemes more explicitly could help students jump to morpheme-level decoding faster. if students can more easily identify familiar chunks of words, then this could get them to the lexical processing route more quickly, thus mitigating the difficulties of phonologically opaque text. students may also benefit from instructors directing their attention to the morphological accuracy of the orthography so they can begin to recognize chunks in written words. having a better appreciation for how an orthography is encoding the language could alleviate frustration with phonological opacity. as mentioned throughout the literature review, l2 literacy acquisition remains understudied. future research could extend this study and improve upon it further, as the present study had some limitations despite being improved after the pilot. one limitation was that the present study made no attempts to get objective language competency scores through any assessments. subsequent studies could include objective data on respondent fluency to compare against the self-reported, subjective data that was collected for the present study. while subjective data was the focus, to gauge perceptions, comparison with objective data could add value to the overall analysis. another limitation of this study was a failure to get a quantitative ranking of difficulty from the respondents. the respondents gave only qualitative answers which had to be coded. assigning a ranking to a qualitative answer tapsla.11388 p. 22/25 rachel garton would have been too subjective, so only the type of difficulty was coded, not the level of difficulty. conducting a similar study while capturing a difficulty ranking from the respondents, such as with a likert scale, could yield more accurate quantitative analysis of relationships between variables. lastly, while the present study had a fair sample size (n = 217), 30 target languages were identified so the number of respondents for some of the languages was low. a much larger data set would ensure all target languages have more representation, which would verify the transferability of the results. despite these limitations, it is hoped that the present study provides additional insight into perceptions of literacy among l2 learners. references angelelli, p., marinelli, c. v., putzolu, a., notarnicola, a., iaia, m., & burani, c. 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(1994). toward a theory of automatic information processing in reading, revisited. in r. b. ruddell, m. r. ruddell, & h. singer (eds.), theoretical models and processes of reading (pp. 816–837). international reading association. seidenberg, m. s., & mcclelland, j. l. (1989). a distributed, developmental model of word recognition and naming. psychological review, 96(4), 523–568. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033295x.96.4.523 snider, k. (2014). orthography and phonological depth. in m. cahill & k. rice (eds.), developing orthographies for unwritten languages (pp. 27–48). sil international. swadesh, m. (1934). the phonemic principle. language, 10(2), 117–129. torgesen, j. k. (1999). assessment and instruction for phonemic awareness and word recognition skills. in hugh w. catts & alan g. kamhi (eds.), language and reading disabilities (pp. 128–153). allyn and bacon. windsor, j. (2000). the role of phonological opacity in reading achievement. journal of speech, language and hearing research, 43, 50–61. https://doi.org/10.1044/jslhr.4301.50 willis oko, christina m. (2018). orthography development for darma (the case that wasn’t). language documentation and conservation, 12, 15–46. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24761 zhang, h., & roberts, l. (2019). the role of phonological awareness and phonetic radical awareness in acquiring chinese literacy skills in learners of chinese as a second language. system, 18, 163–178. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2019.02.007 rachel garton der einfluss von orthografischer transparenz und typologie auf die wahrnehmung von l2-lernenden z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g während die leseund schreibfähigkeit in l1 bereits eingehend erforscht ist, bleiben faktoren, die sich auf dieselben sprachkompetenzen in l2 beziehen, von der forschung vernachlässigt. vorläufige untersuchungen deuten darauf hin, dass orthografische genauigkeit und typologie den schriftspracherwerb beeinf lussen, was dafür spricht, dass die aspekte der sprachlichen repräsentation im kontext des zweitspracherwerbs (sla) weiter erforscht werden müssen. darüber hinaus werden in der sla-forschung zu individuellen unterschieden zwischen lernenden emotionale faktoren wie einstellung und motivation hervorgehoben, die weithin als kritische indikatoren für den l2-erfolg gelten. die motivation steht in engem zusammenhang mit der l2-wahrnehmung, was darauf verweist, dass die wahrnehmung der l2-lernenden den erfolg beim lesenund schreibenlernen beeinf lussen könnte. im vorliegenden beitrag wird eine sprachübergreifende studie mit gemischten methoden dargestellt, in der die orthografische transparenz und typologien von 26 sprachen mit wahrnehmungen der lernenden (n = 217) in bezug auf den schriftspracherwerb in l2 verglichen werden, z. b. mit der wahrgenommenen schwierigkeit der orthografie und selbsteinschätzung der leseund schreibfähigkeit. die ergebnisse zeigen, dass die orthografische transparenz einen größeren einf luss auf die wahrnehmung der lernenden als die typologie selbst hat. schlüsselwörter: phonologie, orthografie, leseund schreibfähigkeit in l2, schriftspracherwerb, wahrnehmung der lernenden, schriftlinguistik the impact of orthographic transparency and typology… tapsla.11388 p. 25/25 a p p e n d i x a orthographic transparency rankings for included languages target language transparency writing system typology arabic medium arabic abugida/abjad chinese (cantonese) very low hanzi picto-/ideographic chinese (mandarin) very low hanzi picto-/ideographic dutch medium latin alphabet english low latin alphabet french medium latin alphabet german high latin alphabet hindi high brahmic abugida/abjad hungarian low latin alphabet indonesian medium latin alphabet irish low latin alphabet italian high latin alphabet japanese very low hanzi picto-/ideographic korean high hangul alphabet latvian high latin alphabet modern greek high greek alphabet norwegian medium latin alphabet pashto medium arabic alphabet portuguese medium latin alphabet russian high cyrillic alphabet scottish gaelic low latin alphabet spanish high latin alphabet swedish medium latin alphabet turkish high latin alphabet vietnamese low latin alphabet welsh high latin alphabet theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (2), 2023, pp. 1/26 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.14121 teresa maria włosowicz https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8767-9332 university of economics and humanities, bielsko-biała the relationship between students’ motivation for studying business english and their knowledge of business english and its terminology a b s t r a c t the study investigates the relationship between english philology students’ motivation for studying business english and their actual knowledge of business terminology, some underlying economic concepts and basic rules of business correspondence. it is hypothesized that students who have higher motivation also possess more extensive knowledge of business english, yet motivation alone is not enough but must be accompanied by a real effort put in studying the language. the study consisted of a test focusing on business terminology, the correction of errors in a business letter, and a test of selected economic concepts, followed by a questionnaire. as the results show, both the students’ motivation and knowledge of business english are varied. in particular, their knowledge varies between years of studies and areas of terminology or skills. in fact, some of the terms proved difficult even for relatively advanced students. thus, even though motivation does play a role, its role does not seem to be decisive, as business english is a complex field whose mastery requires extensive study and a lot of sustained effort. however, their awareness of their language needs is quite high, so they are likely to remain motivated and to attain a high level of competence in business english. keywords: subject inversion, information structure, word order, interface hypothesis undoubtedly, english is nowadays the global language as well as the language of international business. as crystal (2003, p. 10) explains, the maintenance of the global status of a language requires economic power and, indeed, the driving force behind the dominance of english is economics. thus, it goes without saying that people who want to work in business need to learn english, though not only general english, but also business english with its terminology and rules of correspondence. as motivation constitutes an essential component of foreign language learning, which is a long and laborious process (szałek, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.14121 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8767-9332 tapsla.14121 p. 2/26 teresa maria włosowicz 2004, p. 22), it can be assumed that they are motivated to learn business english, regardless of whether their motivation is purely instrumental, based on the desire to obtain, for example, a better-paid job, or integrative, involving willingness to communicate with native speakers and become a member of the english-speaking community (gardner, 1985, as cited in dörnyei, 1994, p. 274), or a combination of both. however, motivation alone does not yet guarantee foreign language learning success if it is not accompanied by a concrete learning effort. as cherciov (2013) has shown for language maintenance in contexts conducive to attrition, a positive attitude and motivation cannot counterbalance attrition but require a language maintenance effort. by the same token, however essential motivation is for learning business english, it can only help learners to focus on studying this area of english, but it cannot replace the necessary effort. the purpose of the study is thus an investigation of english philology students’ motivation for learning business english and of the relationship between that motivation and their actual learning results. more precisely, it is attempted to find out whether and to what extent the participants’ knowledge of business english depends on their motivation, or whether motivation is something they only declare, but their actual knowledge of business english is independent of it. for example, a student might regard themselves as highly motivated, but not devote enough time and effort to the study of business english. therefore, attention is paid not only to the students’ motivation, but also to their knowledge of business english and of selected economic concepts. as the participants are firstand second-year students, the knowledge of business english tested here is still quite elementary and includes general business terms and the basic rules of business correspondence, and their motivation can be assumed to be based on a general interest in business english, combined with plans regarding their future jobs, but it cannot yet be the same as the motivation of employees with specific language needs. in fact, as the present author has shown elsewhere (włosowicz, 2018), sources of motivation for learning business english are varied and complex, showing a mixture of instrumental motivation, integrative motivation and an interest in business english, which does not depend on the year of studies or even the students’ nationality (polish and czech in that case). in general, research on the pedagogical aspects of business english so far has focused mainly on teaching it, on the one hand, and on learners’ needs on the other, taking into consideration the content of the course and the teacher’s and the learners’ linguistic competence and subject-matter knowledge (donna, 2000; dudley-evans & st john, 1998; hutchinson & waters, 1987; sing, 2017), but, arguably, little attention has been paid to the role of motivation in learning business english. certainly, the role of motivation has been extensively studied in the context of general language learning (e.g., dörnyei, 1994; dörnyei & ushioda (eds.), 2009), but research on business english tends to emphasize the relationship between students’ motivation… tapsla.14121 p. 3/26 learners’ needs rather than their motivation. as will be discussed in more detail below, needs and motivation can be assumed to be related to each other, as people are generally motivated to meet their needs, whether physiological, emotional or related to knowledge and development (szałek, 2004, pp. 8–10), but needs and motivation are not the same. rather, the perception of needs might be regarded as a source of motivation to meet them, for example, by learning what is perceived as useful or likely to become useful. however, in the case of university students who do not work in business yet, needs related to business english cannot be very specific, such as the need to master general business terminology and understand the underlying economic processes. business english as an area of esp generally speaking, english for specific purposes (esp) constitutes a field of research and teaching in its own right, ruled by a number of principles. it also imposes a number of requirements on the teacher and the content. in their definition of esp, dudley-evans and st john (1998, pp. 4–5) enumerate several absolute and variable characteristics of the field. the absolute characteristics include focus on meeting the learner’s specific needs and using the methodology and activities of the disciplines esp serves; in fact, “the language (grammar, lexis, register), skills, discourse and genres” (dudley-evans & st john, 1998, p. 5) esp focuses on are those which are required by those activities. on the other hand, the variable characteristics are as follows: “esp may be related for or designed for specific disciplines” (dudley-evans & st john, 1998, p. 5), in some cases its teaching methodology may diverge from that of general english, it is most likely to be taught to adults (less frequently to secondary school students), and it “is generally designed for intermediate or advanced students” (dudley-evans & st john, 1998, p. 5), who possess at least basic knowledge of english, although it can also be taught to beginners. at the same time, esp constitutes a multi-disciplinary activity (dudleyevans & st john, 1998, p. 17) in which two kinds of content are used: carrier content and real content. the real content is the language being taught, for example, the language of process, presented to biologists in the context of a text about the life cycle of a plant, which, in turn, constitutes the carrier content (dudley-evans & st john, 1998, p. 11). the esp practitioner also has five different roles: a teacher, a “course designer and materials provider” (dudley-evans & st john, 1998, p. 13), a collaborator, a researcher, and an evaluator. however, in esp, evaluators do not necessarily have to be teachers. as shown by zhang (2013), the evaluation of tapsla.14121 p. 4/26 teresa maria włosowicz business english students’ skills may differ between evaluators. while academic teachers focus on language accuracy and the appropriate formats, business practitioners emphasize more practical criteria, such as power relationships, the corporate culture and time constraints (puvenesvary, 2003, as cited in zhang, 2013, p. 145). similarly, the results of zhang’s (2013, p. 153) study confirm that students and professionals approach the business genres differently, which indicates a gap between the classroom and the professional context. as zhang (2013, p. 154) concludes, “business genres need to be taught in a holistic way,” taking into consideration “the goal of the activity” (zhang, 2013, p. 154). moreover, it has often been emphasized that teaching english for specific purposes (esp), including business english, is closely connected with needs analysis and the effort to meet learners’ language needs (dudley-evans & st john, 1998; hutchinson & waters, 1987; sing, 2017). as vandermeeren (2005, p. 176) concludes, before putting learners in contact with a foreign language and culture, “the teachers must know which business-related skills and knowledge their learners need.” according to hutchinson and waters (1987, p. 53, their emphasis), the main difference between esp and general english “is not the existence of a need as such, but rather an awareness of the need.” hutchison and waters (1987, p. 54) distinguish between target needs, or “what the learner needs to do in the target situation,” and learning needs, or “what the learner needs to do in order to learn.” target needs include necessities (knowledge and skills necessary for the learner to function in the target situation), lacks (which of the necessities they have not mastered yet), and wants, or needs perceived by the learner, which may differ from those perceived by the teacher or another person involved, such as the learner’s superior. for example, a salesman may speak english fluently but incorrectly. he may regard his english as sufficient and feel no motivation to improve it, though his employer may think he ought to improve his grammatical accuracy in order not to taint the company’s image (hutchinson & waters, 1987, p. 57). on the other hand, knowing the target situation is not a sufficient indicator of learning needs. in fact, as hutchinson and waters (1987, p. 62) put it, “learners may be well motivated in the subject lesson or in their work, but totally turned off by encountering the same material in an esp classroom.” thus, learning needs analysis should take into consideration such factors as the learners, their background, the reasons for taking the course, the available resources, etc. (pp. 62–63). however, as sing (2017, p. 337) has remarked, traditional needs analysis has been challenged by new approaches to learning and teaching. for example, “[t]alking of contradictory needs, the gulf between target genres in education and those in the workplace continues to be a vexing issue” (sing, 2017, p. 337). for example, lung (2014, p. 267, as cited in sing, 2017, p. 337) proposes a “blended needs analysis,” which combines three perspectives: the individual, the institutional and the societal one, and involves a shift “from a predomithe relationship between students’ motivation… tapsla.14121 p. 5/26 nantly languageand genre-based target-situation analysis towards the inclusion of community-based practice and the attainment of institutional goals” (sing, 2017, p. 337). this confirms zhang’s (2013, pp. 153–154) observation that there is a discrepancy between the teaching of business english and its actual use, and that teaching should be more holistic and should take into consideration the corporate culture, the target situation, etc. still, it must be remembered that the needs of actual business people, company employees, etc., who work in a particular branch of industry or commerce, who have business partners in particular foreign countries and perform a particular role in the company, have much more specific language needs than university students do, who may not know yet where they will work in the future. thus, while meeting their language needs can be regarded as motivating, it must be remembered that, at that stage, their beliefs about business english in use and thus their perceived language needs may not be fully accurate and it is rather the teacher who is likely to know what knowledge and skills they may need in the future. similarly, as it is still impossible to know the target situations in which they will find themselves in the future, they should be taught more general business english, and be prepared for lifelong learning. language needs and motivation by and large, it can be assumed that learners who are motivated to study a foreign language perceive some learning needs. such needs may be connected, on the one hand, with short-term learning goals, especially ones related to instrumental motivation (cf. gardner, 1985, as cited in dörnyei, 1994, p. 274), such as passing a test and obtaining a good grade, and to long-term goals, which may involve either instrumental motivation (e.g., obtaining a good job in the future) or integrative motivation (communicating with native speakers, exploring the target language culture, travelling and becoming a member of the english-speaking community, etc.). indeed, motivation can be of many different types and can have different sources. one of the most frequently cited divisions is the one introduced by gardner (1985, as cited in dörnyei, 1994, p. 274), into integrative and instrumental motivation. however, as gardner and mcintyre (1993, p. 4) admit, this division is “too static and restricted” because, in fact, motivation is dynamic and involves a complex set of factors. at the same time, both types of motivation can be conducive to learning. as shown by a number of studies (dörnyei, 1990; lukman, 1972; gardner & mcintyre, 1991, as cited in gardner & mcintyre, 1993, p. 4), “achievement in a second language is facilitated by tapsla.14121 p. 6/26 teresa maria włosowicz instrumental orientation (or motivation) as well as integrative motivation and attitudes” (gardner & mcintyre, 1993, p. 4). another division, proposed by deci and ryan (1985, as cited in dörnyei, 1994, pp. 275–276), distinguishes between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. while intrinsic motivation is based on learners’ natural curiosity and interest, extrinsic motivation involves expecting an external reward or avoiding punishment. however, as dörnyei (1994, p. 276, his emphasis) remarks, “under certain circumstances—if they are sufficiently self-determined and internalized—extrinsic rewards can be combined with, or even lead to, intrinsic motivation.” still, according to dörnyei (2009, p. 10), the term “integrative” does not apply to many learning environments and, simultaneously, it is ambiguous, as it is often difficult to determine “what the target of the integration is” (dörnyei, 2009, p. 23). instead, dörnyei (2005, as cited in dörnyei, 2009, p. 29) has proposed “the l2 motivational self system,” which comprises three components: the ideal l2 self, the ought-to l2 self, and the l2 learning experience. if we imagine our ideal self as fluent in the foreign language, we are more likely to be motivated “to reduce the discrepancy between our actual and ideal selves” (dörnyei, 2009, p. 29). according to dörnyei (2009, p. 29), the ideal l2 self encompasses “traditional integrative and internalized instrumental motives.” by contrast, the ought-to l2 self relates to “the attributes that one believes one ought to possess to meet expectations and to avoid possible negative outcomes” (dörnyei, 2009, p. 29, his emphasis). finally, l2 learning experience is related to “executive” motives which apply to the learning environment and functions at a different level, as a bottom-up process. as mentioned by the present author elsewhere (włosowicz, 2018, p. 109), in the context of business english it would also be difficult to talk about integrative motivation, unless one meant becoming a member of the international business community. however, the ideal l2 self can play an important role here. imagining one’s ideal self as being able to use business english correctly in all situations can be a significant motivating factor, which has been confirmed by the present author (włosowicz, 2018, p. 111). indeed, as students who still lack experience with business english in a work environment, they are motivated by imagining their ideal selves. moreover, as mentioned above, motivation is dynamic (gardner & mcintyre, 1993), so it can be assumed to change with time. it may be hypothesised that if students’ learning needs are met, they are more likely to feel that they are engaged in a meaningful activity, which, in turn, can motivate them further (cf. włosowicz, 2016, p. 281). according to the perma model (seligman, 2011, as cited in mcintyre & mercer, 2014, p. 154), the dimensions of a good life—and, arguably, also of successful learning—include: the relationship between students’ motivation… tapsla.14121 p. 7/26 a focus on positive emotion (p), engagement with activities that use one’s character strengths i, developing positive interpersonal relationships i, finding meaning by serving a cause beyond oneself (m), and recognizing areas of accomplishment and achievement (a). (mcintyre & mercer, 2014, p. 154) applying these dimensions to the learning of business english, it might be assumed that students are likely to feel motivated if they focus on the positive emotions of doing what really interests them and what they find meaningful, if they observe progress in their business english skills, and if their relationships with one another and the teacher are positive. as for the character strengths, they can be supposed to be comparable for business english and for foreign language learning in general, though students choosing to specialize in business english might be supposed to possess some interpersonal skills useful in business. the study participants the present study was carried out with forty-four english philology students specializing in business english at the university of silesia in katowice (faculty of humanities in sosnowiec), twenty of whom were first-year students and twenty-four were second-year ones. thirty-three of them were female (fifteen in the first year and eighteen in the second year), five were male (three in the first year and two in the second year), and six did not indicate their gender (two in the first year and four in the second). their native language (l1) was polish, except for one person who indicated ukrainian, and three participants did not provide any information about their language repertoires. though no placement test was administrated, they could be assumed to be advanced in l2 english (b2/ c1) and they were studying to develop their english language competence with a focus on business english. forty of them had german as l3, one had french as l3, and three mentioned spanish as l4 and one—french as l4. it may thus be supposed that, as multilingual learners, they possessed considerable language awareness and were also aware of their language needs and motivation sources. for the purposes of the study, each group (i.e., the first and the second year) was divided into a high-motivation and a medium-motivation group on the basis of the overall motivation levels (question 2: how strong is your overall tapsla.14121 p. 8/26 teresa maria włosowicz motivation for studying business english?) indicated in the questionnaire (see appendix 2). it was assumed that 1 or 2 on the 1 to 5 likert scale corresponded to low motivation, 3—to medium motivation (one student marked 3.5, which was not included in the scale, but his motivation was also classified as medium), and 4 or 5—to high motivation. in fact, nobody marked 1 or 2, so none of the students had low motivation for studying business english. hence, seventeen students in the first year had high motivation and three had medium motivation. in the second year, fourteen students had high motivation and ten students had medium motivation, which might suggest some disappointment with the business english specialization or a change in priorities. in order to check whether the difference between the first and the second years was statistically significant, a chi-square test was performed. however, the difference was not significant at p = 0.0535 (df = 1), which indicates that, although some of the second-year students might have lost their motivation for studying business english, it cannot be said that the second year’s motivation is significantly lower. method the study consisted of two parts: a business english test and a questionnaire concerning the students’ motivation for studying business english, the reasons for studying it, their motivation for studying business vocabulary and business correspondence, and acquiring background economic knowledge, as well as the test they had just taken. the components of the test were: a multiplechoice terminology test, a gap-filling task, the correction of errors in an enquiry about a product, and a multiple-choice test of economic and business knowledge. the test is presented in appendix 1 and the questionnaire in appendix 2 at the end of the article. the business english test was based on such textbooks as mascull (2010), sweeney (2002), ashley (2003), and jendrych and wiśniewska (2012), complemented with the author’s general knowledge of business and its terminology. though most of the terms were supposed to be already known to the participants, some of them could be more difficult, but it was assumed that more strongly motivated students could study business english on their own and thus their knowledge could go beyond the classes at university. the research questions were as follows: first, what do the results reveal about the participants’ knowledge of business english as well as about their general knowledge of economics? second, do the students’ results depend on their motivation for studying business english? the relationship between students’ motivation… tapsla.14121 p. 9/26 results first, the results of the multiple-choice terminology test varied across years and motivation levels, but it can also be observed that some items posed the participants more difficulty than the others. in each item, only one answer was correct (corr), the other three were incorrect (inc) and the lack of an answer was classified as avoidance (av). the results (both numbers and percentages) are presented for all four groups, 1m (first year, medium motivation), 1h (first year, high motivation), 2m (second year, medium motivation) and 2h (second year, high motivation), in table 1 below. table 1 the results of the multiple-choice terminology test ite m first year second year medium (1m) high (1h) medium (2m) high (2h) corr n % inc n % av n % corr n % inc n % av n % corr n % inc n % av n % corr n % inc n % av n % 1 2 66.7 1 33.3 8 47.06 9 52.94 10 100 11 78.57 3 21.43 2 133.3 2 66.7 2 11.76 15 88.24 6 60 4 40 8 57.14 6 42.86 3 2 66.7 1 33.3 14 82.35 2 11.77 1 5.88 7 70 3 30 13 92.86 1 7.14 4 3100 16 94.12 1 5.88 9 90 1 10 12 85.71 2 14.29 5 3100 15 88.24 2 11.77 9 90 1 10 13 92.86 1 7.14 6 3100 5 29.41 12 70.59 5 50 5 50 2 14.29 10 71.43 2 14.29 7 133.3 2 66.7 5 29.41 11 64.71 1 5.88 4 40 6 60 5 35.71 9 64.29 8 133.3 2 66.7 13 76.47 4 23.53 10 100 12 85.71 2 14.29 9 133.3 2 66.7 11 64.71 6 35.29 6 60 4 40 10 71.43 3 21.43 1 7.14 10 3100 10 58.82 4 23.53 3 17.65 9 90 1 10 13 92.86 1 7.14 to ta l 17 56.7 13 43.3 0 99 58.24 66 38.82 5 2.94 75 75 25 25 0 99 70.72 38 27.14 3 2.14 in general, there were more correct answers than incorrect ones in all four groups, which indicates that the students were relatively familiar with the vocabulary. apparently, the most difficult items were 2, 6, and 7, as they had tapsla.14121 p. 10/26 teresa maria włosowicz the highest percentages of incorrect answers. in 2, not only did the participants confuse shareholders with stakeholders, but they also accepted the irrelevant answers “involveds” (invented by the author) and “companions.” the correct answer was “stakeholders,” but it is possible that they had encountered the term “shareholders” more often (in fact, shareholders are also stakeholders, but not all stakeholders are shareholders) and formal similarity influenced their choices as well. in 6, the target answer was “telecommuting,” a word not all of them probably knew. in 7, a market where the supply is greater than the demand is a buyer’s market, because buyers can choose and may buy from the competition, and also prices are low. this could not so easily be guessed if one did not know the term, as the opposite also seemed logical (a seller’s market as a market filled with goods by sellers). by contrast, the easiest items were 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, and 10 for both years, and 1 for the second year (the first year might not have studied it yet, but the percentages of correct answers indicate that some of them had already encountered the term “brand loyalty” or guessed it). “merger” (5) was certainly known to them, and so were probably such terms as “flexitime” (3), “a trade surplus” (4), “perishables” (8) and “outsourcing” (9), or they were easy to guess. finally, 10 (the amount of money spent on advertising not being a key indicator of the state of a country’s economy) could be supposed to be logical enough to infer. the results of the first and the second years were then compared by means of a chi-square test in order to check whether their correctness depended on the year of studies. as p < 0.01 ( p = 0.004, df = 2), it can be concluded that the difference between the first and the second years was statistically significant. however, comparing all four groups (the high and medium motivation groups in the first and in the second year, the difference was no longer statistically significant ( p = 0.036, df = 6). it can be concluded that the role of motivation is not so straightforward: on the one hand, highly motivated first-year students could do as well as or even better than second-year students. on the other hand, the existence of high scores (even 100% for items 1 and 8 in the 2m group) in the medium motivation groups suggests that moderately motivated students could also possess extensive knowledge of business english. the second part, the gap-filling task, consisted of ten sentences, which required filling in the gaps with one word (for example, “accountant” to complete the expression “chief accountant”) or with a whole expression (for example, “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats” for the acronym swot). therefore, the answers were divided into four categories: correct (fully correct, possibly with a small spelling mistake which still showed that the student knew the target term), partly correct (only a part of the expression or one element of a pair was given correctly, for example, the student provided the target expression, “indirect taxes,” but in the same sentence they wrote “income taxes” the relationship between students’ motivation… tapsla.14121 p. 11/26 instead of “direct taxes”), incorrect (the wrong term or a non-existent one), and avoidance, which meant leaving a gap. the results of the gap-filling task are presented in tables 2 and 3, for the first and the second year respectively. table 2 results of the gap-filling task (first year): numbers and percentages item medium (1m) high (1h) correct n % partly correct n % incorrect n % avoidance n % correct n % partly correct n % incorrect n % avoidance n % 1 266.7 1 33.3 8 47.06 4 23.53 1 5.88 4 23.53 2 3100 15 88.24 1 5.88 1 5.88 3 133.3 2 66.7 5 29.41 3 17.65 3 17.65 6 35.29 4 3100 17 100 5 266.7 1 33.3 8 47.06 1 5.88 8 47.06 6 133.3 1 33.3 1 33.3 5 29.41 12 7 3100 1 5.88 16 8 133.3 2 66.7 5 29.41 12 70.59 9 133.3 2 66.7 7 41.18 1 5.88 4 23.53 5 29.41 10 133.3 2 66.7 4 23.53 2 11.76 11 64.71 total 1343.33 2 6.67 4 13.33 11 36.67 69 40.59 8 4.71 18 10.59 75 44.11 tapsla.14121 p. 12/26 teresa maria włosowicz table 3 results of the gap-filling task (second year) as can be seen above, here the results are more varied, as retrieving business terminology from memory was more difficult than choosing the correct answers from the available ones. therefore, a high percentage of avoidance (possibly, due to the inability to retrieve the terms) can be observed in all four groups. it might seem surprising that the avoidance rates are higher in the high motivation groups than in the medium motivation ones, but a possible explanation is that highly motivated students preferred leaving a gap to making a mistake; indeed, the percentages of incorrect answers are higher in the medium motivation groups. surprisingly enough, the percentages of correct answers in the high and medium motivation groups are comparable; in the second year the high motivation group provided slightly more correct answers (40.71%) than the medium motivation one (39%), but in the first year it is the opposite (43.33% correct answers in the medium motivation group and 40.59% in the high motivation group). it is possible that the medium motivation groups item medium (2m) high (2h) correct n % partly correct n % incorrect n % avoidance n % correct n % partly correct n % incorrect n % avoidance n % 1 990 1 10 14 100 2 10100 3 21.43 4 28.57 3 21.43 4 28.57 3 880 1 10 1 10 11 78.57 2 14.29 1 7.14 4 880 2 20 13 92.86 1 7.14 5 440 1 10 5 50 4 28.57 10 71.43 6 330 7 70 2 14.29 12 85.71 7 330 7 70 1 7.14 13 92.86 8 110 9 90 2 14.29 1 7.14 11 78.57 9 550 1 10 3 30 1 10 7 50 1 7.14 2 14.29 4 28.57 10 220 7 70 1 10 9 64.29 5 35.71 total 3939 3 3 25 25 33 33 57 40.71 7 5 16 11.43 60 42.86 the relationship between students’ motivation… tapsla.14121 p. 13/26 were more inclined to take risks, that is why they wrote what seemed correct to them, and in some cases it proved correct. the results were compared by means of a chi-square test to find out whether the correctness of the answers depended, first, on the year of studies and, second, on both the year of studies and motivation. in the former case, the difference between the first and the second years was not statistically significant at p = 0.3211 (df = 3). in the latter case, the difference between the four groups 1m, 1h, 2m, and 2h was not statistically significant either at p = 0.1336 (df = 9). thus, the students’ performance on the gap-filling task did not depend on the year of studies, nor on their motivation. the most correct answers were given in sentences 1 and 4, and the most avoidance (or ignorance of the target terms) was observed in sentences 6, 7, 8, and 10. undoubtedly, the acronyms swot (1) and asap (4) were familiar to the students, the latter probably not only from business english classes. by contrast, the expressions “hands-on experience” (6), and “chief accountant” (10), as well as the acronym agm (8), were much more difficult to retrieve or even unknown to some students. however, “the glass ceiling” (7) might have been familiar to them from the press, etc., not necessarily from business english classes, but it proved not to be the case. table 4 shows examples of the students’ errors. table 4 examples of errors in the gap-filling task example group student’s response (in the sentence context) 1 2h the acronym usp stands for unique selling product. 2 2m the set of stereotypes, prejudices, etc. which prevent women from reaching senior executive positions is referred to as the head ceiling. 3 2m the person responsible for preparing a company’s balance sheets is its chief executive. 4 1m contact with customers gives salespeople work-on experience. 5 1h this car is more economic than the other because it uses less petrol. 6 2m visible taxes are paid on one’s income, while hidden taxes are paid when one buys some products and the tax is included in the price of the products (e.g. vat). 7 2m income taxes are paid on one’s income, while taxes are paid when one buys some products and the tax is included in the price of the products (e.g. vat). as the examples show, the participants’ attempts to fill in the gaps often reflected reliance on words which seemed to fit in the contexts (e.g., “work-on experience,” instead of “hands-on experience,” “unique selling product” for tapsla.14121 p. 14/26 teresa maria włosowicz “unique selling point/proposition”), or expressions which sounded familiar but did not fit in the context (e.g., “chief executive” for “chief accountant”). in example 5, the error comes from the confusion of the adjectives “economical” and “economic.” in example 6, the answer was plausible, but the target terms were “direct taxes” and “indirect taxes.” as for the background knowledge of economics, again, a multiple-choice test was administered, so the possible response categories were “correct,” “incorrect” and “avoidance.” table 5 the results of the test of economic knowledge (numbers and percentages) thus, it can be seen that the highest percentages of correct answers (100%, 94.12% and 92.86%) were provided by the high motivation groups, however, this also depended on the question, as in response to question 5, 78.57% of the second-year high motivation group gave incorrect answers and none gave a correct one. similarly, in the second-year medium motivation group, there were more incorrect (60%) than correct (10%) answers to question 5. by contrast, there were equal numbers of correct and incorrect answers (seven students, i.e., 41.18%) in the first-year high motivation group. either they were better at guessing, or they had just learnt the difference between theory x and theory y, while the second-year students might not have learnt it—possibly, with another ite m first year second year medium (1m) high (1h) medium (2m) high (2h) corr. n % inc. n % av. n % corr. n % inc. n % av. n % corr. n % inc. n % av. n % corr. n % inc. n % av. n % 1 2 66.7 1 33.3 4 23.53 12 70.59 1 5.88 8 80 2 20 14 100 2 2 66.7 1 33.3 13 76.47 3 17.65 1 5.88 6 60 2 20 2 20 13 92.86 1 7.14 3 2 66.7 1 33.3 16 94.12 1 5.88 8 80 2 20 13 92.86 1 7.14 4 2 66.7 1 33.3 11 64.71 6 35.29 3 30 5 50 2 20 3 21.43 10 71.43 1 7.14 5 2 66.7 1 33.3 7 41.18 7 41.18 3 17.65 1 10 6 60 3 30 11 78.57 3 21.43 to ta l 6 40 4 26.67 5 33.33 51 60 29 34.12 5 5.88 26 52 13 26 11 22 43 61.43 23 32.86 4 5.71 the relationship between students’ motivation… tapsla.14121 p. 15/26 teacher—or might have forgotten it. on the other hand, in question 1 (about the four p’s and the additional three p’s) the second-year students did visibly better, and in question 3 (about a mixed economy), all four groups provided many more correct answers than incorrect ones. this suggests that those questions were based on material they had mastered well. a chi-square test was carried out to compare the first and the second year. at p = 0.795 (df = 2) the difference was not statistically significant at all. however, it all four groups were compared, the difference was statistically significant ( p = 0.00695, df = 6, so it was significant at p < 0.01), which suggests that the results depended both on motivation and on the year of studies. moreover, the students’ performance on the error correction task was analyzed. however, as the responses could vary—which was mentioned above (zhang, 2013)—the evaluation of business correspondence can depend on who evaluates it and what the purpose of the letter is—the analysis was qualitative. generally, the students noticed that the letter was badly written; as one person remarked, it was slightly chaotic. as for the layout, they noticed that the letter should be divided into paragraphs, two students noticed that the address should be before the date, and some wanted to change the address from “april 21, 2017” to “21 april 2017” and the address from “25, fox street” to “fox street 25” (in fact, both formats are possible). some students also tried to make the letter more polite, for example, by adding “or madam” (there was only “dear sir”), “i look forward to hearing from you,” or changing “i want” to “i would like,” or “best regards” to “yours faithfully.” three first-year students insisted that the sender should have indicated his position in the company. in fact, he might have been an individual customer, so his position in the company would have been irrelevant. it is possible that the first year had studied a lot of examples of business letters with the sender’s position in the company, which affected their decisions. however, not all corrections were accurate, for example, changing “best regards” to “kind regards,” which did not increase the level of politeness. finally, it is worth analyzing the participants’ motivation for studying business english in general, as well as different components of business english knowledge. the students’ mean overall motivation in all four groups was m = 3.8488 (sd = 0.6412), so it was fairly high and relatively similar among the students. in the 1m group the mean was 3 (sd = 0), as they had all indicated 3, in 1h m = 4.235 (sd = 0.437), in 2m m = 3.05 (sd = 0.158), and in 2h m = 4.1538 (sd = 0.376). this indicates that the groups were fairly consistent in their motivation, that is, that there were not big differences within the groups. however, the participants’ levels of motivation for learning particular components of business english competence were more varied. mean motivation for learning business terminology varied from 3 (sd = 0) in the 1m group, tapsla.14121 p. 16/26 teresa maria włosowicz thorough m = 3.4 (sd = 0.699) in 2m, m = 4 (sd = 0.612) in 1h and m = 4.1429 (sd = 0.5345) in 2h, which indicates that the second-year students were more motivated than their first-year counterparts; probably, they understood how important terminology was. still, mean motivation for studying business terminology calculated for all four groups remained relatively high (3.8409, sd = 0.68). on the other hand, motivation for learning business correspondence was already lower: m = 3.5116 (sd = 1.055) for all four groups together, m = 2.667 (sd = 1.1547) for 1m, m = 3.5294 (sd = 0.7998) for 1h, 3 (sd = 1.15) for 2m and m = 4 (sd = 0.7845) for 2h, which suggests that those second-year students who were highly motivated for studying business english also understood the importance of correspondence skills. motivation for learning economics to understand the underlying concepts was slightly higher for all four groups together (m = 3.727, sd = 0.924), but also more varied: from m = 2 (sd = 0) in 1m, through m = 3.1 (sd = 0.738) in 2m, m = 4.0588 (sd = 0.748) in 1h, and m = 4.1429 (sd = 0.663) in 2h. thus, while the less motivated students in the first-year may have regarded economics as irrelevant to business english, the more motivated ones in both years understood its importance, and even the less motivated second-year students were already more willing to learn it. however, although the mean motivation for acquiring background economic knowledge in the 2h group was the same as that for learning terminology, in the former case it varied more from one student to another. last but not least, the students’ perception of the difficulty of the tasks was analyzed: the mean difficulty analyzed for all four groups was medium: m = 3.4886 (sd = 0.774), but it varied among the groups. thus, the mean difficulty level was 4 (sd = 1) in 1m, 3.47 (sd = 0.7174) in 1h, 3.75 (sd = 0.9789) in 2m and 3.2143 (sd = 0.579) in 2h, which shows that the less motivated students found the tasks more difficult than the more motivated ones. this is not surprising, as the less motivated ones can be assumed to have possessed less knowledge of business english. conclusions in general, the results show a certain relationship between motivation and the students’ performance on the tasks as well as their perception of the tasks’ difficulty. however, the relationship is not as straightforward as it might be expected. to answer the research questions, first, the participants’ knowledge of business english is relatively good (taking into consideration the time of the relationship between students’ motivation… tapsla.14121 p. 17/26 studying the field), but also considerably varied. certainly, some of the terminology and concepts were better-known to them than others, which can be explained by the fact that they were still in the process of learning business english. still, some of the general knowledge items could be assumed to be known from the press, the internet or other media, not necessarily from the business english course at university. for example, in the economic knowledge task, items 2 (about the benefits of international trade) and 3 (about a mixed economy), which seemed quite logical if one had enough general knowledge, proved fairly easy for all groups. still, it can be supposed that the highly motivated students read more about economics (for example, press articles) in their free time too, because they were interested in it. judging by the numbers of correct and incorrect answers, predictably enough, the multiple-choice tasks proved to be easier than the gap-filling task, as recalling partial knowledge or even choosing the most plausible answer using logical thinking was easier than retrieving terms from memory. second, motivation certainly plays a role in the learning of business english, but the relationship between the students’ motivation and performance is quite complex. on the one hand, the highly motivated students often provided more correct answers than those with medium motivation, but that was not always the case. in fact, even highly motivated students had difficulty with some terms as well as with economic background knowledge. it is possible that they had not studied them yet or that they had not acquired them well enough. as the chi-square tests show, the differences between the first and the second year were significant at p < 0.01 in the terminology task, but not in the gap-filling task and the one concerning economic knowledge. by contrast, the differences between all four groups, taking into consideration both the year of studies and motivation, were significant at p < 0.01 for the economic knowledge task, but not terminology, either in the multiple-choice task or in the gap-filling one. on the other hand, the students generally coped relatively well with the error correction task. certainly, it can be assumed that the more motivated students are interested in business english, understand the importance of the different skills, even the less obvious ones, such as correspondence (the less motivated ones might assume that everyone who works in a company and sends emails to foreigners has sufficient correspondence skills; indeed, company employees do send emails which diverge from the rules of formal business correspondence, włosowicz & kopeć, 2017) and economic knowledge, and are aware of their language needs. thus, it may be supposed that they will remain motivated and attain a high level of competence in business english. however, one reservation needs to be made: as the motivation levels were indicated by the students themselves, it should be admitted that they were to some extent subjective. for example, one may have felt highly motivated (for tapsla.14121 p. 18/26 teresa maria włosowicz example, they found business english interesting and exciting) but they may not have put enough effort in studying business english and related economic topics, which led to lower results in the study. on the contrary, a person studying business english with a view to a well-paid job in the future might study hard but without much curiosity, and such a learner might perceive their motivation as lower than it actually was. thus, it must be remembered that motivation is a highly complex phenomenon and its role in learning business english, though important, is not so straightforward and high motivation does not yet guarantee the mastery of all business english skills. acknowledgements i wish to thank mr paweł zakrajewski, ph.d., for allowing me to carry out the study with his students. references ashley, a. (2003). oxford handbook of commercial correspondence. oxford university press. cherciov, m. (2013). investigating the impact of attitude on first language attrition and second language acquisition from a dynamic systems theory perspective. international journal of bilingualism, 17(6), 716–733. crystal, d. (2003). english as a global language (2nd ed.). cambridge university press. donna, s. (2000). teach business english. cambridge university press. dörnyei, z. (1994). motivation and motivating in the foreign language classroom. the modern language journal, 78(3), 273–284. dörnyei, z. (2009). the l2 motivational self system. in z. dörnyei & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identity and the l2 self (pp. 9–41). multilingual matters. dudley-evans, t., & st john, m. j. (1998). developments in english for specific purposes. cambridge university press. gardner, r. c., & mac intyre, p. d. (1993). a student’s contributions to second-language learning. part ii: affective factors. language teaching, 26, 1–11. hutchinson, t., & waters, a. (1987). english for specific purposes. a learning-centred approach. cambridge university press. jendrych, e., & wiśniewska, h. (2012). business matters. wolters kluwer polska. long, m. h. (2005). overview: a rationale for needs analysis and needs analysis research. in m. h. long (ed.), second language needs analysis (pp. 1–16). cambridge university press. mascull, b. (2010). business vocabulary in use. advanced. cambridge university press. mcintyre, p., & mercer, s. (2014). introducing positive psychology to sla. studies in second language learning and teaching, 4(2), 153–172. the relationship between students’ motivation… tapsla.14121 p. 19/26 sing, c. s. (2017). english as a lingua franca in international business contexts: pedagogical implications for the teaching of english for specific business purposes. in g. mautner & f. rainer, (eds.), handbook of business communication (pp. 319–355). walter de gruyter inc. sweeney, s. (2002, 5th impression 2008). test your professional english. marketing. pearson education limited. szałek, m., (2004). jak motywować uczniów do nauki języka obcego? motywacja w teorii i praktyce. wagros. vandermeeren, s. (2005). foreign language need of business firms. in m. h. long (ed.), second language needs analysis (pp. 159–181). cambridge university press. włosowicz, t. m. (2016). adult learners’ expectations concerning foreign language teachers and the teaching-learning process. in d. gabryś-barker & d. gałajda (eds.), positive psychology perspectives on foreign language learning and teaching (pp. 267–285). springer international publishing switzerland. włosowicz, t. m. (2018). sources of motivation for studying business english. komunikacja specjalistyczna, 15–16(2018), 99–116. włosowicz, t. m., & kopeć, a. (2017). the acquisition of business correspondence skills at university and in a company. paper presented at 29th international conference on foreign/ second language acquisition, szczyrk, 18–20 may 2017. zhang, z. (2013). business english students learning to write for international business: what do international business practitioners have to say about their texts? english for specific purposes, 32(3), 144–156. teresa maria włosowicz zum zusammenhang zwischen der motivation der studierenden, wirtschaftsenglisch zu lernen, und ihren sprachkenntnissen in wirtschaftsenglisch z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g gegenstand der vorliegenden studie ist der zusammenhang zwischen der motivation von anglistikstudenten, wirtschaftsenglisch zu lernen, und ihren tatsächlichen kenntnissen in bezug auf wirtschaftsterminologie, ausgewählte wirtschaftsbegriffe und grundlagen der geschäftskorrespondenz. im rahmen der studie wurde ein kompetenzentest im bereich der wirtschaftsterminologie, wirtschaftsbegriffe bzw. fehlerkorrektur in einem geschäftsbrief durchgeführt sowie ein fragebogen ausgefüllt. die ergebnisse zeigen, dass es unterschiede sowohl in der motivation der studierenden als auch in ihren sprachkenntnissen in wirtschaftsenglisch gibt und dass manche begriffe selbst für relativ fortgeschrittene studenten eine schwierigkeit darstellen. auch wenn die motivation eine gewisse rolle spielt, scheint sie nicht entscheidend zu sein, weil die wirtschaftssprache ein komplexes wissensgebiet ist, dessen beherrschung langfristige anstrengungen erfordert. allerdings ist ihr bewusstsein von sprachlichen bedürfnissen recht ausgeprägt, so dass es wahrscheinlich ist, dass sie motiviert bleiben und ein hohes kompetenzniveau in wirtschaftsenglisch erreichen werden. schlüsselwörter: wirtschaftsenglisch, motivation, terminologie, sprachlicher bedarf tapsla.14121 p. 20/26 teresa maria włosowicz a p p e n d i x 1 the test used in the study part 1: business english test 1) choose the most appropriate word: 1. buying a certain product or the products of a certain company regularly is referred to as a) branding, b) brand loyalty, c) faithful shopping, d) company attachment. 2. all people connected with the activities of a company (its owners, employees, customers and potential customers, etc.) are called a) involveds, b) stakeholders, c) shareholders, d) companions. 3. this company is particularly valued by students, who need to reconcile work with their studies, because it offers its employees a) protectionism, b) job satisfaction, c) outsourcing, d) flexitime. 4. if a country exports more than it imports, it has a trade a) balance, b) surplus, c) gain, d) income. 5. combining two companies of similar sizes and status into one in which they have equal rights is called a(n) a) merger, b) takeover, the relationship between students’ motivation… tapsla.14121 p. 21/26 c) acquisition, d) vertical integration. 6. working from home and sending one’s work (translations, designs, etc.) to the company by email can be referred to as a) flexibility, b) job sharing, c) emailing, d) telecommuting. 7. a market where the supply is greater than the demand can be referred to as a a) seller’s market, b) buyer’s market, c) social market, d) free market. 8. products which go bad quickly, such as food, are called a) perishables, b) generic products, c) fast moving consumer goods, d) products past the sell-by date. 9. the fact that a company focuses on its core activities and commissions external experts, companies, etc. to do certain things for it is called a) consultancy services, b) cost-effective management, c) outsourcing, d) a portfolio. 10. one of the key indicators of the state of a country’s economy is not a) the amount of money being spent on advertising, b) inflation, c) consumer spending, or how much money people are spending in the shops, d) the jobs market, including the unemployment rate. 2) fill in the gaps: 1. the acronym swot, as in swot analysis, stands for: , , , . tapsla.14121 p. 22/26 teresa maria włosowicz 2. taxes are paid on one’s income, while taxes are paid when one buys some products and the tax is included in the price of the products (e.g. vat). 3. the acronym usp stands for 4. the abbreviation asap stands for 5. one should not spend all one’s life at work. instead, many experts recommend work-life 6. contact with customers gives salespeople -on experience. 7. the set of stereotypes, prejudices, etc. which prevent women from reaching senior executive positions is referred to as the ceiling. 8. the abbreviation agm stands for 9. this car is more than the other because it uses less petrol. 10. the person responsible for preparing a company’s balance sheets is its chief . 3) correct the errors in the enquiry. pay attention to the content, form and layout. april 21, 2017 computer world ltd. 25, fox street london sw 105 dear sir, i want to order a computer from your company, but i have a few questions to ask you. first of all, do you send any free samples? if so, can i get one? secondly, how much would the computer cost? third, may i have it delivered to my home? and, finally, is there any after-sales customer care? best regards, mr adam williams your comments: the relationship between students’ motivation… tapsla.14121 p. 23/26 4) general knowledge of business and economics. 1. in marketing, the four p’s and the three additional p’s include: a) 1. product, price, planning and promotion, and 2. people, process and protection of customers, b) 1. project, production, place and promotion, and 2. people, physical presence (or physical evidence) and process, c) 1. product, price, place and promotion, and 2. people, physical presence (or physical evidence) and process, d) 1. production, price, place and planning, and 2. people, physical presence (or physical evidence) and process. 2. one of the benefits of international trade is not: a) the possibility of buying products which would otherwise be unavailable in one’s country, such as citrus fruit, b) allowing every country to manufacture products for which it has particularly good conditions, for example, wine in a climate which allows the growing of high-quality grapes, c) protectionism, d) closer economic ties between countries. 3. a mixed economy a) manufactures different kinds of products, b) has both private and state-owned companies, c) has more than one currency in use, d) is chaotic and not controlled by anybody. 4. the term ‘fair trade’ refers to a) trade in which part of the income is donated to charity, b) trade in sustainable goods, c) a positive balance of trade, d) trade that ensures farmers in poor countries a sufficient income and good working conditions. 5. in management, what is the difference between theory x and theory y? a) theory x assumes that people are lazy by nature and have to be forced to work by an authoritarian manager, while theory y assumes that people want to feel valued for their work and to participate in decision-making, so management should be democratic, b) theory x assumes that decisions are best made anonymously, and theory y requires transparence and voting in public, c) theory x is based on past experience, while theory y is based on planning future activities, d) theory x involves democratic management, while theory y requires managers to be authoritarian. tapsla.14121 p. 24/26 teresa maria włosowicz a p p e n d i x 2 the questionnaire used in the study part 2: questionnaire sex: f /m _ 1. l1 (native language): l2: level of proficiency/time of study: l3: level of proficiency/time of study: what other languages have you studied? (please, indicate the proficiency levels.) 2) how strong is your overall motivation for studying business english? 1 – very weak, 5 – very strong 1 2 3 4 5 why? (you can choose as many answers as you want.) □ i want to use it in my future job, for example, as a translator. □ i want to become a business person. □ i want to combine english philology with another profession, such as economics, management, marketing, etc. □ i am interested in business english in general. □ i am interested in business and economics. □ it is one of the subjects i study at university and i want to have good marks in it. □ my motivation is actually weak, because it has turned out i chose the wrong specialization. □ other (please, specify) 3) how strong is your motivation for studying business vocabulary and terminology? 1 – very weak, 5 – very strong 1 2 3 4 5 why? (you can choose as many answers as you want.) □ vocabulary has to be used with precision. □ vocabulary is indispensable to understand business english texts. □ vocabulary knowledge allows me to understand the underlying phenomena better. the relationship between students’ motivation… tapsla.14121 p. 25/26 □ business english vocabulary is very interesting. □ i think that business vocabulary in english and polish reflects some cultural differences between both countries. □ i want to have a good mark in business english. □ vocabulary is not very motivating because it only requires learning the english equivalents of polish terms. □ vocabulary is not very motivating because it is very easy to learn. □ vocabulary is not very important as long as you possess enough background knowledge of economics and you can make yourself understand. □ other (please, specify) 4) how strong is your motivation for learning business correspondence? 1 – very weak, 5 – very strong 1 2 3 4 5 why? (you can choose as many answers as you want.) □ it is going to be useful in my future job. □ i already work in a company and my knowledge of business correspondence is very useful to me. □ it is an interesting reflection of cultural differences between poland and the english-speaking countries. □ i am interested in intercultural communication is general. □ correspondence is one of the most important activities in business. □ learning business correspondence is fun because it allows me to imagine that i am another person, for example, a manager writing on behalf of my company. □ business correspondence helps me to develop my creativity. □ i want to have a good mark in business correspondence. □ i am not interested in business correspondence, but i have to learn it. □ it is boring because i cannot see any significant differences between polish and english business correspondence. □ other (please, specify) how strong is your motivation for acquiring background knowledge of business and economics? 1 – very weak, 5 – very strong 1 2 3 4 5 why? (you can choose as many answers as you want.) □ i do not think i need any economic knowledge; it is enough to know the necessary vocabulary, expressions, etc. □ background knowledge is necessary if you want to understand the concepts underlying economic vocabulary. □ i am interested in business and economics in general. □ business communication requires a certain knowledge of the field. tapsla.14121 p. 26/26 teresa maria włosowicz □ apart from english philology, i study or want to study economics (or marketing, management, etc.) too. □ translation requires a lot of background knowledge and i want to translate business texts. □ for another reason (please, specify) 5) what do you do in order to learn business english? (you can choose as many answers as you want.) □ i only rely on what we do at university and i do my homework, but i have no time for anything else. □ i study business english at university and i do my homework, but i also study on my own. □ i read books in economics in english on my own. □ i read press articles in economics in english on my own. □ i read books and press articles in economics in polish in order to expand my general knowledge of the field. □ i do exercises from business english textbooks on my own. □ i work in a company and use every opportunity to use business english there □ i consult experts in the field, for example, economists who are fluent in english □ something else (please, specify) 6) how difficult did you find the test you filled in for the present study? 1 – very easy, 2 – very difficult 1 2 3 4 5 why? (please, justify your answer.) theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (2), 2023, pp. 1/31 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.13865 k. james hartshorn https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0629-7410 brigham young university, provo, utah, usa aylin surer https://orcid.org/0009-0006-5490-8518 brigham young university, provo, utah, usa contributions toward understanding the acquisition of eight aspects of vocabulary knowledge a b s t r a c t with the intent of adding to the literature leading toward a more complete theory of second language vocabulary acquisition, this study elicited accuracy data from 110 esl learners ranging from novice high to advanced low on 64 words randomly selected in the 2k–3k range of corpus of contemporary american english (coca) (32 verbs, 24 nouns, 8 adjectives) covering eight aspects of word knowledge. these included spelling based on hearing the spoken form, selecting collocations based on the written form, pronunciation based on the written form, selecting inf lections based on the written context, selecting the definition based on hearing the spoken form, selecting the written definition based on the written form, selecting appropriate derivations based on the written form, and selecting the written form based on the written definition. anova results show accuracy levels varied across word knowledge aspects and that implicational scaling was possible with some but not all aspects of word knowledge examined simultaneously. in aggregation with other current and future studies, this has important implication for developing l2 vocabulary acquisition theory. keywords: second language vocabulary acquisition, aspects of word knowledge, implicational scaling for four decades, scholars have lamented the lack of a complete theory of second language vocabulary acquisition (e.g., meara, 1983; schmitt, 1995, 2019). nevertheless, some incremental progress has been made. for instance, we now have valuable insights regarding vocabulary coverage needed for text comprehension (laufer, 1989, 1992; hu & nation, 2000; nation, 2006; schmitt et al., 2011). scholars such as richards (1976) and schmitt (1998) have also described various components of word knowledge and suggested that some https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.13865 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0629-7410 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2451-7242 https://orcid.org/0009-0006-5490-8518 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2451-7242 tapsla.13865 p. 2/31 k. james hartshorn, aylin surer may be interrelated and that their acquisition may be incremental (schmitt, 1998). more recently, gonzález-fernández and schmitt (2020) have used implicational scaling to suggest an acquisition order for a number of aspects of word knowledge. this progress is promising for increasing vital insights about second language vocabulary acquisition. nevertheless, more complementary and confirmatory data are needed from multiple streams of evidence across many contexts if we are to solidify our knowledge of how vocabulary is acquired and whether a durable acquisition order for various word knowledge components can be established (e.g., gonzález-fernández & schmitt, 2020; schmitt, 2019). such insights would be invaluable for l2 teachers, materials developers, theorists, and researchers alike. therefore, this study was designed to provide important contributions to the literature by identifying an accuracy order for second language learners on eight specific aspects of word knowledge in an esl context. review of literature a robust knowledge of vocabulary is fundamental to second language development and comprehension. in reading, for example, many scholars agree that comprehension requires mastery of approximately 95 to 98% of the words readers encounter (laufer, 1989; hu & nation, 2000; schmitt et al., 2011). thus, vocabulary acquisition is an essential component in language development. though at its most fundamental level, vocabulary acquisition requires knowledge of a word’s “form” and “meaning” (thornbury, 2002, p. 15), much more can be included in what it means to know a word. for example, richards (1976), described word knowledge as including an understanding of the word’s form, meaning, frequency, syntactic features, derivations, associations, and the various limitations on the use of the word. in an effort to describe word knowledge, some researchers have examined vocabulary development in terms of breadth and depth (chapelle, 1998; qian & schedl, 2004; schmitt, 2014). the notion of word breadth or the number of words known is well correlated with efficacy in writing (milton et al., 2010; stæhr, 2008), and speaking (zimmerman, 2004), as well as in higher levels of comprehension in listening (stæhr, 2008; zimmerman, 2004) and reading (laufer, 1992; qian, 1999; stæhr, 2008). despite benefits associated with vocabulary breadth, determining the depth of one’s vocabulary knowledge seems to be more difficult. the development of various instruments has been useful such as wesche and paribakht’s (1996) vocabulary knowledge scale, which identifies word familiarity by measuring contributions toward understanding the acquisition of eight… tapsla.13865 p. 3/31 vocabulary recognition and production. another helpful resource has been read’s (1998) word associates format test which examines knowledge of paradigmatic and syntagmatic word associations (zhang & koda, 2017). in addition, research has examined the positive effects of vocabulary depth on various skills such as speaking (koizumi, 2005; kilic, 2019), listening (farvardin & valipouri, 2017; teng, 2014), writing (atai & dabbagh, 2010; kilic, 2019), and reading comprehension (farvardin & koosha, 2011; mehrpour et al., 2011; qian, 1999). such studies highlight the importance of learners developing both vocabulary breadth and depth. nation (2001) has also suggested that a more complete understanding of vocabulary depth is needed. he described word knowledge as a word’s form (including the spoken form, written form, and word parts), meaning (including connections between form and meaning, concepts and referents, and associations), and use (including grammatical functions, collocations, and various constrains on the use of a word). thus, word knowledge could refer to an individual’s facility with each of these nine elements. yet, because aspects of word knowledge can be examined productively and receptively, nation’s nine components could be expanded to eighteen. despite these numerous aspects of word knowledge, however, specific attempts to operationalize data elicitation of word knowledge could further expand the number of contexts worth studying. for example, consider the various types of stimuli that might be used to prompt a learner to write a specific word. in the l2, learners might hear the word, one or more definitions, a derivation, or an inflection. or, they might read a definition, a synonym, an antonym, a derivation, an inflection, and so forth. conversely, they might encounter these or many other types of prompts in their l1. alternatively, prompts may be much less direct, or language data may be based on completely natural production with no prompt at all. although the specific task for the learner to write a particular word may be the same across settings, performance levels may vary widely depending on the exact nature of the stimuli, the context, and the learners themselves. this variability should be taken into account in vocabulary acquisition studies. relationships among word knowledge components gonzález-fernández and schmitt (2020) have noted that while most studies currently available have examined only one aspect of word knowledge at a time, this approach may be inadequate for developing a more complete understanding of vocabulary acquisition. rather they “encourage the measurement of multiple components concurrently” (p. 483). a few studies have simultaneously examined a small number of word-knowledge components. for tapsla.13865 p. 4/31 k. james hartshorn, aylin surer example, in their research on the effects of lexical depth and breadth on reading comprehension, qian (2002) examined synonymy, polysemy, and collocations. pellicer-sanchez and schmitt (2010) examined word class, word recognition, spelling, and recall of meaning. wesche and paribakht (1996) developed the vocabulary knowledge scale and had students describe their level of word knowledge in terms of word production and recognition. several scholars have undertaken studies designed to reveal key relationships among various aspects of word knowledge. for example, over the course of one year, schmitt (1998) examined the development of four of these, including senses of meaning, spelling, associations, and grammatical features. schmitt concluded that some of these aspects of word knowledge seemed to be related in their development. he noted that senses of meaning were more closely related to grammatical features and associations than grammar. schmitt also observed that spelling was generally acquired before the other aspects of word knowledge. despite these insights, schmitt was unable to identify a valid implicational scale showing a developmental hierarchy across word knowledge components due to inconsistencies in his data. looking at both receptive and productive contexts, webb (2005) examined five aspects of word knowledge including meaning, grammatical features, syntax, association, and orthography. he observed that strategies associated with productive skills generated more productive and receptive knowledge of orthography, meaning, syntax, and grammar but the strategies associated with receptive learning only produced more receptive knowledge of meaning. he advocated the use of instruments that measure both productive and receptive word-knowledge components. later, when examining the effects of repetition, webb (2007) noted that some aspects of word knowledge emerged before others. for example, receptive knowledge syntax, grammatical features, orthography, and productive knowledge of association emerged before meaning. building on the work of webb (2005, 2007), chen and truscott (2010) similarly observed language development for both receptive and productive aspects of word knowledge for orthography, part of speech, associations, and meaning and form, though they noted that the link between form and meaning took longer to be mastered compared to the other components. laufer and goldstein (2004) examined four aspects of word knowledge including active recall where the learner produces the target word), passive recall where the learner provides the word’s meaning, active recognition where the learner identifies the word from a list of options, and passive recognition where the learner identifies the meaning of the word from a list that includes distractors. as they hypothesized, accuracy levels for these tasks showed a clear difficulty order ranging from easiest to most difficult: passive recognition, active recognition, passive recall, and finally active recall. contributions toward understanding the acquisition of eight… tapsla.13865 p. 5/31 with an emphasis on the acquisition order of various aspects of word knowledge, gonzález-fernández and schmitt (2020) identified a valid implicational scale based on difficulty for these components in writing. from most accurate to least accurate, these include: (a) form-meaning recognition, (b) collocate form recognition, (c) multiple meaning recognition, (d) derivative form recognition, (e) collocate form recall, (f) form-meaning recall, (g) derivative form recall, and (h) multiple meaning recall. they concluded that the form-meaning link is more difficult than productive and receptive knowledge of orthography, part of speech, and associations. they also suggested that the form-meaning link is easier for learners to master than collocations, multiple meanings, and derivatives. though few studies have examined multiple aspects of word knowledge simultaneously, the work of gonzález-fernández and schmitt (2020) provides important new insights with the generation of a valid implicational scale. though cross-sectional rather than longitudinal, these findings suggest incremental development and a hierarchical order of the various aspects of word knowledge examined. nevertheless, gonzález-fernández and schmitt (2020) acknowledge that the construct of vocabulary knowledge is based on many more aspects than can possibly be examined effectively in one study and that many more studies are needed. they have suggested that “future studies should explore different combinations of components to build a composite picture of the overall word knowledge component constellation” (p. 501). scholars interested in answering this call to contribute should also consider the many valuable suggestions regarding this line of inquiry. one challenge has to do with “test contamination […] where exposure to a target word on one test […] may give hints to answering a subsequent test” (schmitt, 2019, p. 263). a potential solution could be to utilize different words in different instruments rather than the same set of words across aspects of word knowledge (e.g., kieffer & lesaux 2012; li & kirby 2015; milton & hopkins 2006). gonzález-fernández and schmitt (2020), who only used twenty words in their study, recommended that researchers use a larger sample of words and that researchers should include students from heterogenous l1 backgrounds rather than a single l1 background. based on the preceding review, and in consideration of these important suggestions, the current study was designed to add to the literature by examining a complementary set of aspects of word knowledge. the aspects selected for this study were based on the literature as well as constraints inherent to our research context and include some of the most common tasks associated with what it means to know a word. tapsla.13865 p. 6/31 k. james hartshorn, aylin surer research questions as mentioned previously, testing various aspects of word knowledge in this study are operationalized as particular tasks based on specific prompts. these include: (a) spelling based on hearing the spoken form, (b) selecting collocations based on the written form, (c) pronunciation based on the written form, (d) selecting inflections based on the written context, (e) selecting the definition based on hearing the spoken form, (f) selecting the written definition based on the written form, (g) selecting appropriate derivations based on the written form, (h) selecting the written form based on the written definition. with these targeted aspects of word knowledge in mind, the following research questions are articulated: 1. to what extent does the accuracy of esl learner performance vary across the specified eight aspects of word knowledge? 2. do accuracy levels of esl learner performance across the specified aspects of word knowledge form an implicational scale? methods this section describes the selection of the words used in this study, the development of the instrument, the learners who provided data for this study, and the planned analyses. word selection building on the recommendation of gonzález-fernández and schmitt (2020) to use more than twenty words, a total of 64 words were selected to represent eight different aspects of word knowledge. these words were initially chosen randomly from between frequency rankings of 2k–3k in the corpus of contemporary american english (davies, 2008). this frequency range was selected based on previous assessments that suggested that many of these words would be known by the advanced proficiency learners but not by the novice learners. it was expected that such a range in word knowledge would be necessary for implicational scaling. it was intended that a representative list of words from different parts of speech be used that could help answer the research questions associated with the different aspects of word knowledge of interest in this study. some adjustments from the original randomized list were made to ensure that all words could have derivational and inflectional forms. contributions toward understanding the acquisition of eight… tapsla.13865 p. 7/31 adverbs were not used in this study since they do not undergo inflection in english. the final list included 32 verbs, 24 nouns, and eight adjectives (see appendix a for the complete list). instrument development this section details the creation of the data instrument used in this study. the instrument was developed as an electronic survey to be delivered to student email addresses during a class period in the iep’s computer lab with monitoring provided by the students’ teachers and the researchers. as described above, the instrument was designed to test eight different aspects of word knowledge, using eight words to establish mastery for each aspect. each of these item types will be described below. at the outset, however, we begin with a brief description of the creation of the audio recordings used in this study. two of the item types in the instrument required audio recordings of the words of interest. audio recordings to be included were made using adobe audition cc 2019 and the built-in microphone in a 2019 macbook pro with the speaker’s voice one and a half feet away from the microphone. postproduction included reduction of ambient noise using the default setting of the denoise effect. each recording was also normalized to 95%. minor post-production editing resulted in the final recordings for each word beginning with 500 milliseconds of silence followed by a first audio presentation of the word of interest. this was followed by two seconds of silence and then a second production of the word. this was done for all 64 words and example recordings used to introduce item types that utilized audio. we now provide a brief description of each item type. recognizing the meaning from hearing the word the first item type in the instrument provided students with the audio and then invited them to choose the best definition of the word they heard by using their mouse to select the most appropriate response. figure 1 illustrates this item type for the word “accuse.” students clicked on the play button to hear the audio and then selected the best definition from among five options. distractor definitions were randomly selected from other words within the 2k–3k range. in the very few cases where the randomly selected definition shared a meaning sense with the target word, another definition was randomly chosen so there would be only one correct response. as shown in the figure, definitions were kept short and utilized high frequency vocabulary. this was done with the intent that incorrect responses would be based on not knowing the meaning of the word rather than challenges associated with reading or understanding the tapsla.13865 p. 8/31 k. james hartshorn, aylin surer options within the item. each of the eight items of this type were simply scored as correct (1 point) or incorrect (0 points) depending on the answer. figure 1 sample item for recognizing a written definition based on the spoken form spelling the word the second aspect of word knowledge tested student ability to spell a word based on hearing the word. the prompt for this item type was the same as the previous item in that students were presented with the audio in the same format. after clicking on the play button to initiate the audio, students were invited to type the word in a provided textbox as illustrated in figure 2. scoring was limited to the actual spelling of words without regard to capitalization. no attempt was made to give partial credit. this item type was scored with 1 point for each correctly spelled word, and no points for any misspelled words. figure 2 sample item for spelling the word based on the spoken form contributions toward understanding the acquisition of eight… tapsla.13865 p. 9/31 recognizing the meaning from the written form the third item type in the elicitation instrument presented students with the written form of the word and then invited them to identify the best written definition of five possible options. as with previous items, definitions were randomly selected. they were also kept relatively short and utilized higher frequency vocabulary than the word being defined. figure 3 provides a sample of this item type from the instrument. as with previous items, students were given one point for each correct answer and no points for any wrong answers. figure 3 sample item for selecting the definition based on the written form recognizing the word from a written definition the fourth item type in the instrument was the inverse of the previous item. students were presented with a simple definition and invited to select the word that was the best match for the definition. as with previous item types, words were randomly selected from within the 2k–3k frequency band. figure 4 provides an example of this item type. as with previous tasks, students were awarded one point for each correct response and no points for incorrect answers. tapsla.13865 p. 10/31 k. james hartshorn, aylin surer figure 4 sample item for selecting the written word based on the written definition recognizing appropriate inflections the fifth item type was designed to test learner knowledge of word inflection. students were provided with the uninflected word of interest and a sentence requiring an inflected form of the word. students chose from among five options. distractors were formed by adding inflectional morphemes common in english but that were not appropriate for the context. figure 5 illustrates this item type from the instrument for the word “expose.” correct answers were given one point and incorrect answers with given no points. figure 5 sample item for selecting the written word based on the written definition contributions toward understanding the acquisition of eight… tapsla.13865 p. 11/31 collocations the next item type was designed to test learner knowledge of collocations for each word of interest. the collocations used in our instrument were based on information provided in the frequency dictionary by davies and gardner (2010). our intent was to choose three of the most common collocations for each word included in the instrument. figure 6 provides a sample item from the instrument where “people,” “jury,” and “try” are common collocations for the word “convince” (davies & gardner, 2010, p. 121). we note that “people” and “jury” were the first two collocations listed in the dictionary under the noun category and that “try” was the first entry under the miscellaneous category. though this entry for “convince” only included a noun and miscellaneous categories, other entries included additional categories. for example, the word “pepper” in the dictionary includes the adjectives (“red, black, green, hot…”), nouns (“salt, teaspoon, bell…”), and verbs (taste, add, chop, dice…”). in such cases, we generally went with the first word from each category such that the correct response for “pepper” would be “red, salt, taste.” responses were scored with one point for correct answers and no points for incorrect answers. figure 6 sample item for selecting collocations based on the written form derivations this item type was designed to test learner knowledge of derivations of the target words emphasized in the instrument. learners were presented with the word and then invited to choose which of the five options was an actual word in english based on the written form of the word of interest. distractors were tapsla.13865 p. 12/31 k. james hartshorn, aylin surer generated by using nonwords that were morphologically related to the word and were designed to appear as the same part of speech. figure 7 illustrates this item type for the word “employ.” as with other items, one point was given for each correct response. figure 7 sample item for selecting an appropriate derivation based on the written form oral production based on written form the final item type was designed to test the learner’s ability to appropriately pronounce the word in context. in this case, one of the target words was situated in one of eight sentences presented to the learner for them to read aloud while being recorded. as with previous items, care was given to keep the sentences relatively short and to ensure that the other included words were of higher frequency than the word of interest. though short, complete sentences were used to help differentiate polysemous forms such as “suspect” (in the second sentence below) which could be interpreted as a noun or a verb with different phonological forms without the context provided by the sentence. the software used to record learner voices was proprietary and had been installed on the computers in the lab where data were collected. one point was given for each correctly pronounced word. however, scoring for this item type was more complicated due to the need to establish inter-rater reliability estimates which will subsequently be described in more detail. this item type is displayed in figure 8. contributions toward understanding the acquisition of eight… tapsla.13865 p. 13/31 figure 8 sample item for oral production of a word based on the written form as described previously, the elicitation instrument included eight words for each of the eight item types for a total of 64 words. however, since the questions for certain aspects of word knowledge could give away the answers for other aspects of word knowledge, the instrument had to be carefully constructed. for example, hearing the spoken form of the word for one item testing one component of word knowledge could alert the learners how to pronounce the same word for an item testing a different component of word knowledge. to avoid this problem, eight different test forms were created. this allowed testing that included all 64 words used for the eight different components of word knowledge but that did not use the same words across forms to elicit data on the same aspect. for example, consider table 1 that illustrates the distribution of just eight words (represented by letters a–h) across the eight different aspects and eight different test forms. let’s say the letter “a” represents the word “accuse.” in form 1 of the instrument, the word “accuse” is used to test the first aspect of word knowledge. therefore, the student hears the word “accuse” and selects the best definition. in form 2 of the instrument, however, the word “accuse” is used to test the second aspect of word knowledge. so, the student hears the word and types the word “accuse” in the space provided. thus, in summary, all students were tested on all eight aspects of word knowledge using the same 64 words, though not all students were presented with the same words for the same aspects across the eight different test forms. tapsla.13865 p. 14/31 k. james hartshorn, aylin surer table 1 distribution of words across aspects and test forms test forms aspect 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 1 a h g f e d c b 2 b a h g f e d c 3 c b a h g f e d 4 d c b a h g f e 5 e d c b a h g f 6 f e d c b a h g 7 g f e d c b a h 8 h g f e d c b a though we acknowledge this is an imperfect data elicitation solution since the respective forms are not exactly the same, we believed that in aggregate, this approach would prevent the elicitation instrument from inappropriately revealing additional word information to the participants. we also believed that the potential benefits associated with new insights from this strategy likely outweighed the potential limitations of this approach. also, since it is conceivable that the ordering of particular aspects of word knowledge could impact learner performance, the order of these different item types were presented randomly within the different forms of the elicitation instrument. participants this study was sponsored by the intensive english program where the study occurred with the express intent that results could help inform materials development and pedagogy. accordingly, all ethics standards were met in the gathering of these data. unfortunately, due to the covid-19 pandemic, student enrollment in the program was less than half its typical number. thus, only 110 students provided data for all eight of the aspects of word knowledge examine in this study. of the participating students, there were 58 females and 52 males. participant ages ranged from 18 to 57 though most students were in their twenties (m = 24.37; sd = 6.29). although about two-thirds of the students were native speakers of spanish (73), other l1s included japanese (16), portuguese (6), chinese (4), french (3), haitian creole (3), korean (2), russian (2), and albanian (1). proficiency levels ranged from novice high to advanced low according to guidelines from actfl (american council on the teaching of foreign languages, 2012) as illustrated in table 2. contributions toward understanding the acquisition of eight… tapsla.13865 p. 15/31 table 2 proficiency levels of student participants proficiency n % advanced low 20 18.18 intermediate high 30 27.27 intermediate mid 40 36.36 intermediate low 14 12.73 novice high 6 5.45 total 110 100.00 raters though most data examined in this study did not require a reliability estimate, the interrater reliability for oral production of the words was established by the two authors, one of whom holds a ph.d. and who has worked in the field of second language teaching and learning for more than three decades. the other holds an ma in tesol and has taught efl/esl for about seven years. analyses interrater reliability for oral production of the words examined in this study was established by the authors based on two broad categories. the first was the phonological appropriateness of the production, and the second was the appropriate stress accent based on the word in a simple sentence. though the raters agreed that some latitude would be allowed for slight departures from phonological norms, any overtly conspicuous phonological substitution of consonants or vowels would be considered an error. similarly, any obvious departures from stress accent norms would also be considered an error. raters only evaluated the specific words targeted for the study, so any additional departures from pronunciation norms within the sentences were ignored. rating involved evaluating each of the eight words used to test oral production, resulting in a rating deemed correct (1) or incorrect (0) for each word. thus, raters provided each student with a raw score ranging from 0 to 8. in six cases, recordings for one or more of the words were unexpectedly cut short. rather than completely discard data from these students, the missing data were replaced with mean performance levels for the items for which recordings were available. while one researcher provided a rating for each student included in the study, the other randomly rated 70% of the group. this initially produced a pearson correlation of .85 ( p < .001). however, examination of the data revealed four tapsla.13865 p. 16/31 k. james hartshorn, aylin surer cases with a rating difference of two or more. without discussing any details about these cases, raters were invited to reexamine these recordings to ensure no clerical mistakes or other oversights had produced the discrepant scores in error. after reexamination, some corrections to these cases were made, with a resulting pearson correlation of .92 ( p < .001). in an effort to leverage the perceptions from both raters, averages were calculated for those students with two ratings. subsequent analyses were based on these scores. the intent was that each test form functions similarly for each aspect of word knowledge. test forms were randomly assigned within each proficiency level. though not all students completed the test, the number of students taking each test form and their respective proficiency levels were fairly well distributed, with no statistically significant difference across performance levels for the test forms themselves, f(7,102) = .089, p <. 999 (see table 3). table 3 descriptive statistics and proficiency level by test form proficiency level descriptives form nh il im ih al n m sd 1 1 2 6 4 2 15 335 110 2 1 2 5 4 2 14 337 114 3 0 3 4 4 2 13 344 104 4 0 3 4 4 3 14 355 108 5 1 1 4 3 3 12 356 123 6 1 1 6 4 2 14 344 107 7 1 1 6 3 3 14 351 114 8 1 1 5 4 3 14 358 114 total 6 14 40 30 20 110 moreover, no significant difference was observed for performance levels across test forms for five of the eight aspects of word knowledge including spelling based on hearing the spoken form, f(7,102) = 0.49, p = .84, selecting the inflection based on the written context, f(7,102) = .519, p = .819, pronouncing the word based on the written form, f(7,102) = .577, p = .773, selecting the definition based on hearing the spoken form, f(7,102) = .667, p = .691, and selecting the derivation based on the written form, f(7,102) = 1.708, p = .115. however, the original performance levels for three of the aspects of word knowledge were not uniform across test forms including selecting the written form based on the written definition, f(7,102) = 2.307, p = .032, selecting the collocations based on the written form of the word, f(7,102) = 3.726, p = .001, and selecting the written definition based on the written form of the word, f(7,102) = 4.945, p < .001. given these discrepancies, test form effect was accounted for and eliminated in subsequent analyses. contributions toward understanding the acquisition of eight… tapsla.13865 p. 17/31 implicational scaling was used to address the second research question (e.g., hakansson, 2013; hatch & lazaraton, 1991; rickford, 2002). implicational scaling can be used to show which aspects of word knowledge may be the easiest or most difficult for learners to master. if an accuracy order is scalable, it may suggest an acquisition order. implicational scaling has been widely used for hierarchical ordering of “grammatical, lexical, and phonological features of language” (hatch & lazaraton, 1991, p. 204) with important applications for teaching and second language materials development. for this study, the accuracy threshold for each aspect of word knowledge was set at 75%. though this threshold is on the lower end of the acceptable range, typically between 75–90% accuracy (e.g., dulay & burt, 1974; ellis, 1988), this level was chosen with the hope it might help mute error levels that might be introduced by using different test forms. since the use of longitudinal data were not feasible for this study, implicational scaling was based on cross-sectional accuracy data gathered on a single occasion. before presenting the findings designed to answer our research questions, we briefly examine student responses in greater detail. items used for elicitation were of three types. these include several multiple-choice formats as well as the spelling and spoken production of specified words. figure 9 shows the distribution of responses for one multiple choice item type seeking the best definition of the word accuse. this illustrates the typical pattern with most students responding correctly while others chose various distractors. for additional examples of multiple-choice responses, see appendix b. figure 9 example of response distributions perhaps more informative than the multiple-choice items, however, are the variety of productive responses of spelling and pronunciation. though extensive analysis of these errors is beyond the scope of this work, a few examples and comments about errors may be useful. in spoken production, some errors were phonologically similar english words though not those elicited such as poor for pure, pose for oppose, rear for rare, pry for pray, concrete and complete for compete, and so forth. in some cases, students substituted one or more erred phonemes such as /ˈbæʃən/ for passion, /tɹænz f̍ɔrn/ for transform, and / t̍ʃɑɹp/ tapsla.13865 p. 18/31 k. james hartshorn, aylin surer for sharp. in other cases, students altered or omitted one or more phoneme such as /səs̍ pɛt/ for suspect, /ˈmɪsɪri/ for mystery, and /kɑn̍ vaɪz/ for convince, and /ˈæksə/ for access. still in other cases, productions shared only vague similarities with the elicited words such as / f̍iɛt/ for thief. in terms of spelling, just four of the sixty-four words included in the study were spelled correctly by all participants including mix, invest, suspect, and emotion. words which generated five or more misspellings are presented alphabetically in table 4. similar to some pronunciation errors, some words or phrases were spelled correctly but were not those elicited by the prompts. these include errors such as a quarter for acquire, quiz for accuse, uplift for athlete, belief and breath for brief, complete for compete, device for divide, ask to me for estimate, mistreat for mystery, vacation for occasion, orange for origin, poor for pure, and strait and stretch for straight. possibly due to limitations in working memory, some students also produced errors by inappropriately inflecting target words such as attracted for attract, employed for employ, and opposed for oppose. other error types seem consistent with predictions from the orthographic depth hypothesis which suggests greater difficulties where orthographies such as english are not well aligned with phonology (frost, 2005). many students attempted to use a single letter to represent phonemes spelled with two letters in english. these include misspellings such as acomplish for accomplish, acuse for accuse, aprove for approve, atract for attract, colum for column, ocasion for occasion, pasion for passion, and so forth. similarly, other mistakes may have been associated with multiple letters or word formation patterns in english that represent the same or similar sounds, resulting in constructions such as mistery for mystery, filozofi and phylosofy for philosophy, strait and strate for straight, breaf and breef for brief, welth for wealth, and so on. additional research may be needed to better understand these spelling error patterns more fully. table 4 words with five or more misspellings word misspellings accomplish acmplish, acomplesh (2), acomplish (5), acoplish accuse acuse (9), quiz acquire a quarter, aquair, aquaire (2), aquare, aquareir, aquarer approve aprofe, aprouve, aprove (6) athlete afflide, aflate, afleed (2), aflict, aflied, aflix, afraid, afread, afrid (2), uplift attract atrack, atracked, atract (3), attracted, atractt, attarct brief belief, breaf (2), breath, breef, brive (2) column calam, colam, colom (3), colon (3), colonne, colum, coron contributions toward understanding the acquisition of eight… tapsla.13865 p. 19/31 compete compet, competa, compite (6), complete convince convence (3), convens, convience divide devaed, device, devid, devide (5), duvaret emphasize emphazise, emphese, emphsize, enfacides, enfasis, enphase, inphasize employ employe (2), employed (3), imploe, impory, improal estimate ask to me, astomate, attrac, estmate, estmit, stament, stimate fiction ficcion, ficion, ficttion, fitshen, fixion mystery mistry, mistery (6), mistread, mistreat occasion acation, ackigan, ocasion (2), ocassion, ocation (3), occation, vacation oppose apos, apous, appose, appouse, opositive, oposive, opouse, opposed origin orange (2), orgen, origaine, origen (3), origine passion pacient, pacient, partsion, pasion (2), pation permit permet, permite, premitted, promed, promet (2) philosophy filosophy (2), filozofi, forasefi, forasefy, phirosify, phylosofy, phylosophy pure pior poor, priort, puler, puor, pur scholar schollar, scholor, schoolar (3), schooler, (3) scoger, scolar, skoler smooth slud, smode, smooded, smoose, smoth straight schoolar, straght, strait (2), straith, strate, streat, streid, strenge, stretch symbol sambal, sembal, simbol, simbole (3), symbole wealth walth, weld, welf (3), welft, welth (2) note: parentheticals indicate the number of observations of the same spelling. results this section presents findings associated with the two research questions. the first question addressed the extent to which the accuracy of esl learner performance varied across the eight aspects of word knowledge examined in this study. results of a one-way anova indicated that performance levels indeed varied across aspects of word knowledge, f(7,872) = 12.1, p < .001, and a tukey post-hoc test showed statistically significant differences between specific aspects of word knowledge. figure 10 illustrates these differences, presenting means, standard deviations (in parentheses), p-values, and effect sizes. performance on these aspects of word knowledge were based on a possible range of 0 to 8 and are arranged from least accurate at the top of the figure to most accurate at the bottom of the figure. tapsla.13865 p. 20/31 k. james hartshorn, aylin surer figure 10 mean accuracy levels across aspects of word knowledge the second research question addressed whether esl learner performance across aspects of word knowledge form an implicational scale such that mastery of one aspect would suggest mastery of one or more other aspects. though the findings illustrated in figure 10 provide general evidence that the esl performance levels varied across components of word knowledge, an implicational scale could not be formed utilizing all eight components of word knowledge simultaneously. nevertheless, implicational scaling was successful with some subsets of the total list. for instance, implicational scaling was achieved1 with the following aspects of word knowledge: being able to spell a word based on hearing the spoken form ⊂ being able to pronounce the word based on the written form ⊂ being able to recognize the written from based on the written definition. in other words, these data suggest that accurate spelling implies the ability to pronounce the word, and accurate pronunciation implies the ability to identify the written form based on the definition (crep = .927; mmrep = .333; %imp =.5937; cscal = .89). 1 in order to claim scalability, usually the coeffect of reproducibility (crep) must be ≥ .90 and the coefficient of scalability (cscal) must be ≥ .60 (guttman, 1944). contributions toward understanding the acquisition of eight… tapsla.13865 p. 21/31 similarly, the following slightly varied list was also scalable: being able to spell a word based on hearing the spoken form ⊂ being able to select appropriate inflections based on the written form of the word ⊂ being able to recognize the written form based on the written definition (crep = .939; mmrep = .333; %imp =.606; cscal = .909). other potential scales were also observed though they merely approached but did not meet the traditional expectation of .90 for the coefficient of reproducibility. here are three of these. the first includes being able to spell a word based on hearing the spoken form ⊂ being able to pronounce the word based on the written form ⊂ being able to select a definition of the word based on hearing it ⊂ being able to recognize a definition of the word based on reading the written form ⊂ being able to recognize the written form based on the written definition (crep = .866; mmrep = .351; %imp =.515; cscal = .793). the second includes being able to spell a word based on hearing the spoken form ⊂ being able to select an appropriate inflection based on the written form ⊂ being able to select an appropriate derivation based on the written form ⊂ being able to select an appropriate definition based on reading the word ⊂ being able to select the written form based on the written definition (crep = .85; mmrep = .333; %imp =.594; cscal = .89). the third includes being able to spell a word based on hearing the spoken form ⊂ being able select an appropriate inflection based on the written form ⊂ being able to select a definition based on reading the word ⊂ being able to select the written form based on the written definition (crep = .886; mmrep = .334; %imp =.555; cscal = .83). discussion building on the work of other scholars including gonzález-fernández and schmitt (2020) and employing some innovations in data elicitation, this study sought to examine the extent to which accuracy of esl learner performance varied across eight aspects of word knowledge and whether esl learner performance levels would form an implicational scale. data for this study were elicited through the presentation of certain tasks based on specific types of prompts or stimuli. though a valid implicational scale could not be formed for all eight aspects of word knowledge examined simultaneously in this crosssectional study, analysis of variance and implicational scaling of subsets of the complete list of aspects of word knowledge revealed meaningful differences in accuracy levels across components of word knowledge. thus, these findings may be useful in aggregate with other current and future studies in providing important insight about vocabulary acquisition. tapsla.13865 p. 22/31 k. james hartshorn, aylin surer for the eight aspects of word knowledge included in this study, spelling— based on hearing the word—proved to be the most difficult for learners on average. the accuracy levels for spelling were significantly lower than every other aspect of word knowledge observed in this study. the next most difficult feature for learners in this study after spelling was knowledge of collocations. collocations were significantly more difficult for learners compared to selecting a derivation based on the written form or selecting the written form based on the written definition. the third most difficult aspect of word knowledge was pronunciation of the word based on the written form, which was significantly less accurate compared to selecting the written form based on the definition. thus, the two item types requiring demonstration of productive skill ended up in the cluster of the three most difficult aspects of word knowledge. despite clear differences in learner performance levels for these components of word knowledge illustrated in figure 10, no other differences were observed in performance levels across the other aspects of word knowledge. at a broad level, such findings showing varied performance levels across aspects of word knowledge are consistent with the studies of other researchers such as laufer and goldstein (2004), webb (2005, 2007), and gonzálezfernández and schmitt (2020). generally, the pattern observed in this study showed that active recall was more difficult than passive recognition consistent with laufer and goldstein (2004) and gonzález-fernández and schmitt (2020) and that demonstrations of productive knowledge was more difficult than receptive knowledge consistent with webb (2005, 2007). thus, whilst general observations in this study associated with productive and receptive knowledge, recall and recognition, seem consistent with previous research, some discrepancies remain that warrant further study. noting inconsistencies in previous research, gonzález-fernández and schmitt (2020) question “whether all the recall aspects are more difficult than all recognition aspects,” as they observed in their study, “or whether some recall aspects can be easier than some recognition aspects” (p. 497). in their earlier research, pigada and schmitt (2006) observed that students performed more accurately on the recall component of spelling than they did with the recognition component of grammar knowledge. however, pellicer-sanchez and schmitt (2010) observed that the recall components of word class and meaning were more difficult compared to the recognition components of meaning and spelling. though it might be expected that demonstrating productive knowledge would be more difficult than demonstrating receptive knowledge, in the current study, passive recognition of collocations was clustered closely with the most difficult active recall items of spelling and pronunciation based on hearing and reading the words respectively. this is of particular interest since the collocation items used for elicitation included three examples of collocates rather than just one. moreover, unlike the current study, gonzález-fernández and schmitt contributions toward understanding the acquisition of eight… tapsla.13865 p. 23/31 (2020) found that recognition of collocates was the second most accurate item type of the eight aspects of word knowledge examined in their data. though gonzález-fernández and schmitt (2020) observed learner performance with recognition of collocates to be more accurate than performance with derivations, in the current study, learner performance with derivations was more accurate than with collocations. of course, a wide array of possibilities could account for these inconsistencies including different students learning in different contexts as well as the precise nature and differences of the instruments and elicitation processes. since not all aspects of word knowledge can be studied at one time, our position is that many more studies need to be undertaken across as many components of word knowledge as possible. then findings need to be aggregated to provide a general picture of the entire landscape. though many scholars have aptly called for consistency in the ways in which vocabulary-based data are elicited to ensure comparability across studies, it is also important to note that there are many different types of data elicitation for a single aspect of word knowledge—each of which may be equally warranted for study. thus, perhaps some focus needs to shift from simply labeling an aspect of word knowledge by the overarching terms such as definition, derivation, collocation, and so forth to a careful description of the specific elicitation contexts that includes the nature of the stimuli and the task. we may find that there may be many different ways to test particular aspects of word knowledge, each of which may occupy a different position in an implicational scale. teaching and learning the findings of this study coupled with previous research suggest a number of implications for l2 vocabulary development. first, it is imperative that practitioners and students understand the importance of vocabulary acquisition to l2 development and the unique challenges associated with l2 vocabulary acquisition (barclay & shmitt, 2019). nation (1993) appropriately described the need for l2 learners to experience a flood of new vocabulary, particularly at lower proficiency levels. moreover, practitioners and learners must understand which english vocabulary will be most important for their specific context. all who are learning english will benefit immensely from mastering the most frequent one thousand word families, which should provide more than 80% coverage of common texts (nation, 2006). while continuing to work toward mastery of the next few thousand most frequent word families, all learners are likely to benefit from learning academic vocabulary that is foundational to all disciplines such as found in the academic vocabulary list (gardner & davies, 2014). the organization tapsla.13865 p. 24/31 k. james hartshorn, aylin surer of this list is based on lemmas and includes part of speech, reducing many challenges associated with polysemy. at higher proficiencies, if learners have begun studying within specific disciplines, it may also be helpful for them to begin learning vocabulary from specialized lists of technical terms in fields such as business (konstantakis, 2007), chemistry (valipouri & nassaji, 2013), engineering (gustafsson & malstrom, 2013), medicine (wang, liang, & ge, 2008), and so on. since no single endeavor will provide all of the vocabulary development l2 learners need, grabe (2009) has suggested that vocabulary learning must be advanced from multiple approaches simultaneously such as providing direct instruction to raise student awareness, helping students to apply effective vocabulary-learning strategies including using vocabulary notebooks or flashcards for ongoing review, learning new words through extensive reading, and ensuring students experience multiple encounters and ongoing recycling of new words. once a robust effort toward vocabulary development is underway, findings from this and other studies suggest that students may benefit from learning experiences that initially emphasize receptive vocabulary knowledge and then move toward production such as pronunciation and spelling (also see schmitt, 2019). vocabulary development is incremental over time (barclay & schmitt, 2019) and eventually learners should develop a deep understanding that includes knowledge of orthography, morphology, pronunciation, meanings, inflections, derivations, collocations, register, and so on. nevertheless, in the short-term, particularly at lower proficiencies, effort should be made to minimize cognitive load on the learner while seeking to optimize vocabulary acquisition. though perhaps counterintuitive for some, initially, this might take the form of learning more words (breadth) with fewer word-knowledge components rather than fewer words with more word-knowledge components (depth). this also might take the form of using l1 definitions, particularly at lower proficiency levels, to minimize cognitive load and expedite the speed and efficacy of vocabulary learning (e.g., grace, 1998; laufer & shmueli, 1997; nations, 1982). many other efforts made by practitioners may support the vocabulary development of their students such as nurturing student motivation for vocabulary study and helping students to implement the most effective vocabulary review regimens (e.g., barclay & schmitt, 2019). limitations and future research as with all research, limitations should be considered in the interpretation of these findings and in preparation for future research. first, though data were elicited from a substantial number of learners (110), this was about half the number of participants planned for this study. it is possible that a larger sample contributions toward understanding the acquisition of eight… tapsla.13865 p. 25/31 of learners might have revealed greater differentiation of the relative difficulty of the aspects of word knowledge in the anova and implicational scaling. similarly, though the rationale for limiting word selection to the 2–3k range was to ensure that the different test forms functioned as similarly as possible, this range may have been too narrow for the smaller number of participants and may have adversely impacted the results. if large numbers of participants are not available, extending the frequency range of vocabulary studied might better reveal accuracy differences across word-knowledge components. conclusion building on the previous work of other scholars, this study used an innovative approach to creating an instrument designed to identify differential performance levels of esl learners on eights aspects of word knowledge. results showed performance levels varied across word-knowledge components and that implicational scaling was possible with some but not all aspects of word knowledge examined simultaneously. this study contributes to our understanding of important characteristics of vocabulary acquisition when examined in aggregate with other studies. nevertheless, more research is needed to help clarify inconsistencies among studies. we believe that rather than limiting future research to traditional views of word-knowledge components, researchers should pursue the many different stimuli and tasks that could target a single aspect of word knowledge, thus greatly expanding our developing understanding leading toward a more complete theory of l2 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(2004). the role of vocabulary size in assessing second language proficiency. [master’s thesis, brigham young university]. byu scholars archive. http://scholarsarchive. byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1577&context=etd k. james hartshorn, aylin surer zum verständnis des erwerbs von acht aspekten der vokabelkenntnisse z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g im rahmen der vorliegenden studie wurden auf genauigkeit bezogene daten von 110 esl-lernern erhoben – von der höheren grundstufe bis zur niedrigen oberstufe – mit der absicht, einen beitrag zu einer umfassenderen theorie des wortschatzerwerbs in der zweitsprache zu leisten. sie beziehen sich auf insgesamt 64 vokabeln, die stichprobenartig aus der 2k-3k-liste von coca ausgewählt worden sind (32 verben, 24 substantive, 8 adjektive) und acht aspekte der vokabelkenntnisse abdecken. dazu gehören: die rechtschreibung auf grundlage der gehörten gesprochenen form, die wahl der kollokationen auf grundlage der geschriebenen form, die aussprache auf grundlage der geschriebenen form, die wahl der flexionsformen auf grundlage des geschriebenen kontextes, die wahl der definition auf grundlage der gehörten gesprochenen form, die wahl der schriftlichen definition auf grundlage der geschriebenen form, die wahl entsprechender ableitungen auf grundlage der geschriebenen form und die wahl der geschriebenen form auf grundlage der schriftlichen definition. die anova-ergebnisse zeigen, dass das genauigkeitsniveau bei verschiedenen aspekten der vokabelkenntnisse variiert sowie dass bei einigen, jedoch nicht bei allen simultan untersuchten aspekten der vokabelkenntnisse eine implizierende skalierung möglich ist. in zusammenhang mit anderen aktuellen und künftigen studien bietet dies wichtige schlussfolgerungen für die entwicklung der theorie des l2-wortschatzerwerbs. schlüsselwörter: wortschatzerwerb in der zweitsprache, aspekte des wortwissens, implizierende skalierung tapsla.13865 p. 30/31 k. james hartshorn, aylin surer a p p e n d i x a words used in data elicitation instrument (with frequency ranking) 1. accuse (2004) 2. mix (2091) 3. athlete (2169) 4. recover (2298) 5. philosophy (2345) 6. evaluate (2357) 7. wise (3046) 8. republic (2506) 9. question (2034) 10. approve (2098) 11. instrument (2112) 12. acquire (2331) 13. wealth (2351) 14. graduate (2407) 15. smooth (2903) 16. occasion (2530) 17. estimate (2042) 18. inspire (2118) 19. experiment (2011) 20. attract (2200) 21. academy (2474) 22. emphasize (2415) 23. rough (2847) 24. finance (2864) 25. invest (2048) 26. separate (2119) 27. revolution (2176) 28. divide (2239) 29. scholar (2493) 30. accomplish (2423) 31. straight (2434) 32. fiction (2607) 33. expose (2054) 34. reject (2128) 35. emotion (2178) 36. disagree (2261) 37. prince (2502) 38. adjust (2464) 39. brief (2463) 40. drama (2679) 41. convince (2056) 42. account (2147) 43. expense (2240) 44. compete (2291) 45. exception (2387) 46. assist (2467) 47. sharp (2408) 48. symbol (2780) 49. guide (2064) 50. assess (2157) 51. therapy (2303) 52. employ (2173) 53. passion (2388) 54. permit (2470) 55. pure (2391) 56. origin (2575) 57. pray (2070) 58. suspect (2165) 59. column (2315) 60. oppose (2192) 61. mystery (2398) 62. transform (2489) 63. rare (2015) 64. champion (2865) contributions toward understanding the acquisition of eight… tapsla.13865 p. 31/31 a p p e n d i x b additional examples of student reponses to multiple-choice items preface the present issue of theory and practice of second language acquisition initiates the fifth year of publishing this journal. it was founded in 2015, at a time when not many journals in applied linguistics (and specifically those focusing on second language acquisition) were available. it was established as a forum of discussion for polish as well as foreign scholars. indeed since then, every consecutive issue of the journal has welcomed contributions from many renowned researchers, such as peter macintyre, david singleton, larissa aronin, and jean-marc dewaele, to name just a few. it is the journal’s ambition to demonstrate new trends in sla research, broadly understood, both worldwide and in poland, focusing on theoretical discussion and practical solutions to problems based upon them. it is our aim not only to publish contributions from well-known and respected authors but also from young researches presenting fresh and innovative ideas. thus, the journal hopes to become a venue for the exchange of ideas between well-established academics and those inspired by them. the journal presents issues ranging from purely linguistic and cognitively-oriented research on language acquisition processes to psychoand sociolinguistic studies, always trying to feature the most recent developments in terms of topic choice as well as in the methodology of research they employ. it is crucial for the development of academic research that we offer this opportunity to share ideas in an effective and disseminated manner via journal publication, especially that we publish using an open access system and where the entire production process is executed online and the final product is available to everyone. the journal’s standards and quality are guaranteed by the international editorial board of tapsla composed of well-known polish and foreign experts on a wide range of second language acquisition problems. the editors are also proud to announce that the journal has obtained positive evaluation from scopus and is now indexed in their database, as well as covered as one of elsevier products. 10.31261/tapsla.2019.05.01 http://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.2019.05.01 6 preface this means that the present issue is the first one gaining increased visibility and discoverability of the content, as elsevier products are used by leading research institutions, government organizations, decision-making bodies and corporate organizations around the world. updated information on the journal is available on the university of silesia institute of english webpage at www.ija.us.edu.pl (via a special link) and on the journal webpage at www. journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/tapsla. the present issue opens with a study of the affective aspect of figurative language in the context of learning german by native speaker of slovene. the paper by teodor petrič attempts to offer a descriptive and analytic framework for capturing the psycholinguistic (especially affective) dimensions of a large set of german idioms, as perceived by slovene learners of german, and also to relate the research results to such earlier elaborations as citron et al. (2015). the author hopes that the results will contribute to the development of our knowledge of the role of affect in a foreign/second language setting. humor undoubtedly possesses a high positive affective potential, which constitutes a thematic link to the second paper published in the present issue, the study by krystyna warchał titled “humour in professional academic writing.” the author explores the issue of apparent inherent incompatibility between humorous elements and the arguably mandatory solemnity of academic publications. she points to a number of reader-engaging strategies quite often used by authors of academic papers, which may potentially enhance the author-reader rapport and thus facilitate scholarly communication. the paper makes also an important educational contribution, in formulating a number of valuable recommendations for the esl/efl context, highlighting the human face of academic writing to the students of the subject. the article “poetry in teaching grammar to the advanced users of polish as a fl” by marzena s. wysocka continues the theme of reconciling some apparently mutually exclusive factors in fll, juxtaposing the alleged systembreaking nature of poetic language with the apparent rigidity of grammatical instruction. the subjects were learners of polish as a foreign language at the school of polish language and culture at the university of silesia in katowice, who responded very positively to the introduction of poetry as a kind of “grammar refresher,” creating opportunities for polishing up grammatical correctness and expanding their linguistic repertoire. one of the very visible facts of contemporary european university education is the high volume of international student exchange, especially within the erasmus+ framework. no wonder that it inspires research interests of representatives of many disciplines. the potential l2 linguistic gain resulting from a study placement abroad is put to test in a small-scale investigation, reported in a paper by katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia, angélica carlet, and maria pujol valls. the authors came to the conclusion that although erasmus+ mobility 7preface is a very powerful factor contributing positively to the development of l2 speaking skill and grammar proficiency, it is definitely not the guarantee of success, as many other factors, such as language engagement, overall satisfaction from the erasmus+ experience, as well as the amount and quality of language input outside the classroom influenced in an important way the ultimate potential gain. the paper “foreign language students’ perceptions of their identity” by liliana piasecka explores the dynamic character of foreign language learning process in the context of an alternative l2 language identity construction, experienced by students of english as a foreign language. the author highlights the positive aspects of this process, enumerating such beneficial effects as increased appreciation of english as a tool of cross-cultural communication, leading to the development of more open-minded attitude and tolerance. the new language identity obtained thanks to the development of english is described as prestigebuilding, self-confidence raising and mind-broadening factor. the last research paper of the issue returns to the learning environment of the third-age language students, which has already been explored in a number of papers published in previous volumes. the study by łukasz matusz and anna maria rakowska focuses on the learning difficulties faced by senior participants of third-age university language courses organized by academic institutions in silesia. their past experience and awareness of own limitations guarantee reliable and valuable source of information for course developers aimed at this particular language group. the issue concludes with two book reviews. one of them is the review of the monograph by hadrian lankiewicz, teacher language awareness: a collaborative inquiry based on languaging (wydawnictwo uniwersytetu gdańskiego, 2015), a volume worth of interest especially for fl teacher trainers in various educational centers concerned with the professional development of teachers at different levels: both at pre-service and at the in-service stage (reviewed by danuta gabryś-barker), and a slightly earlier publication by danuta wiśniewska, action research in efl pedagogy: theory and analysis of practice (wydawnictwo naukowe uam, 2013), a work highly recommended not only for efl teacher trainees and their instructors, but also for all teachers of english for whom constant reflection and self-development constitute indispensable ingredients of their professional career (reviewed by ewa piechurska kuciel). this issue offers mainly new research contributions, reflecting the variability of the learning environments in which language learning and acquisition take place in the contemporary world, but in addition, point to practical applications of the findings and suggest a number of ingenious solutions, ready to be implemented in language teaching practice. 8 preface we would like to thank all the contributors to this volume and to invite other polish and foreign academics to share their scholarly research with us by submitting their work to our journal, which is published by the prestigious polish academic publisher, wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego (university of silesia press). danuta gabryś-barker adam wojtaszekhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-0308-4337 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0308-4337 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703 anna michońska-stadnik university of wrocław, poland the classroom learning environment and its influence on selected aspects of foreign language attainment—insights from students a b s t r a c t the twenty-first-century learning environment, the classroom in particular, is believed to create conditions for a language learner to engage in autonomous and cooperative learning activities. it is also believed to develop and sustain motivation, to foster self-regulation and— last but not least—to facilitate the learning process. the learning environment is composed of the learner, other students, the teacher and the physical environment, that is, the furniture and equipment. the research presents students’ opinions concerning the positive and negative inf luences of selected aspects of the classroom environment on their language learning process, motivation, ability to self-assess, self-confidence and attitudes to the target language and culture. as seen from data analysis, it is the teachers whose knowledge, behaviors, and attitudes appear to have the biggest inf luence on students’ learning process. the opinions are collected from students’ written guided interviews and may become an inspiration for teacher educators at the university level keywords: learning environment, classroom environment, students’ opinions, foreign language learning process, attitudes to learning, target language culture introduction when it comes to the relationship between the learning environment and an individual learner, researchers often argue about the degree and direction of adaptation. the debate concentrates on whether it should be the environment that adapts to the learner or the learner who should adapt to the environment, as theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 4 (2), 2018, pp. 55–71 56 anna michońska-stadnik well as to what extent. however, in twenty-first-century education, the question could perhaps be formulated differently, for example “how can the learning environment influence the learner and in what possible ways can the learner shape the environment?” (lippman, 2010). in this regard, there appears to be some progress from the idea of adaptation to that of influence or shaping, as the former entails submission whereas the latter accepts change without submission. the inspiration for this paper came from a comment made by an undergraduate student about her school teacher’s influence on her pronunciation and how she personally discovered the nature of fossilised errors. thus, the paper focuses on the classroom environment and its impact on students’ beliefs and opinions related to selected aspects of the foreign language learning process. it will concentrate on the influence of the environment on an individual. it is possible, however, that subsequent to data analysis, some tentative suggestions can be made to reshape selected aspects of the learning environment in order to create more facilitative conditions for the language learning process. the paper consists of five sections. first, definitions and characteristic features of the learning environment in general and of the formal classroom environment in particular are presented and commented on. these will be followed by the description of the study group, the data collection procedure and instrument, the results of the research and discussion. in the conclusion the paper aims to offer some tentative implications for future teacher training and development at the university level. the detailed aim of the research is to collect university students’ opinions on the influence of some selected aspects of the classroom learning environment during their primary and secondary education and their influence on their individual language development, their attitudes to foreign language learning and their attitudes to the foreign language culture and community. it should be mentioned that the participants in the research were second year undergraduate university students who had completed their formal compulsory school education two years prior to taking part in the study. learning environment this part begins by defining the learning environment as a general construct. “learning environment refers to the diverse physical locations, contexts and cultures in which students learn” (bates, n.d.). students may, in fact, learn in different settings: in a school building that contains classrooms, at home while browsing the internet, during a school trip or during family travels, while talking to friends and acquaintances, while watching television, or listening to audiobooks. there may also be numerous other opportunities for learning 57the classroom learning environment and its inf luence… which remain beyond the scope of this paper. it is enough to say that the rapid development of mobile information technology has created extremely favourable conditions for learning, provided the process is properly channelled. the term learning environment may also denote the prevailing ethos and characteristics of a school or class—how individual members of the group relate to one another, how they interact and in what ways the teachers create a positive classroom atmosphere to facilitate the learning process (bates, n.d.). in the case of language attainment, we frequently make a distinction between the formal learning environment and the naturalistic learning environment. the former will be referred to in the next section as the research summarised in this paper concerns students’ opinions formulated in contact with formal classroom instruction. the latter, in contrast, refers to learning the language outside the classroom and resembles, to some extent, the process of language acquisition. in contact with the target language community, individuals implicitly attain the language without concentrating on its formal features. it is frequently claimed (e.g., krashen & terrell, 1983) that people acquire languages more efficiently in naturalistic settings and that formal classroom learning does not facilitate language attainment. we return to this discussion in the section: anvantages and disadvantages of the classroom learning environment (p. 61 of this paper). a different viewpoint is adopted by other specialists (e.g., ryan & mercer, 2011, pp. 160–162; michońska-stadnik, 2013, p. 76). they claim that cultivating strong beliefs about the advantages of naturalistic settings over formal settings may weaken students’ motivation to learn, make them less active and less willing to accept challenges. many individuals believe then that a mere visit to a target language country will miraculously trigger language development and guarantee success. it seems advisable to ascertain that such a visit may appear profitable for students, but that contact with the target language in a formal setting may strengthen their strategic competence and academic learning skills and develop learner autonomy. as wolff (2011, p. 8) claims, various learner features may be affected by the two types of learning environment. the first characteristic trait that comes to mind in this context is motivation. some learners will be more motivated while interacting in the naturalistic setting, whereas others will thrive in the formal classroom environment in which they may be able to make effective use of their academic abilities. students’ use of learning and communication strategies will also undergo change due to exposure to different learning contexts. learning beliefs, attitudes, affective states and willingness to communicate may also be influenced by the environment. as young people are usually subject to institutionalised schooling for around 12 years during their most sensitive developmental period, it seems reasonable to assume that this form of learning environment may have a profound influence on their beliefs, opinions and attitudes. let us now concentrate on the classroom environment 58 anna michońska-stadnik and its characteristic features following wolff’s (2011, p. 10) point that “[in] my understanding, a learning environment encompasses the classroom and the activities that take place there.” to conclude, even though the term learning environment covers different educational settings, it is traditionally associated, even by specialists, with formal education in the classroom. classroom learning environment general characteristics of the classroom environment long (2000, pp. 131–134) agrees with the statement expressed above that institutionalized forms of education may shape learners’ attitudes, beliefs, and even personality. he refers to the educational context in general when he writes that students’ school experience “will have important effects on their development” (long, 2000, p. 131). in his opinion, school organization plays an important role. by school organization long means, among other features, the size of the school, classroom size and the number of students in a group. classroom size and layout will clearly depend on the students’ age and the school subject being taught. a chemistry laboratory will look different from a language classroom and a primary classroom will scarcely resemble a secondary one. in the distant past, however, educational authorities did not really put much effort into adjusting classrooms to students’ age and needs—there seemed to be no interest in creating a learner-friendly atmosphere. school organization also involves different forms of ability grouping, which is a procedure frequently criticized by parents and other social groups. the critics often claim that once a learner is classified into a lower ability group, no matter how hard they try later and achieve better results in tests, they may remain in that group till the end of their school education. this may result in lower motivation, unwillingness to attend school and even truancy. in a language classroom, however, it seems more natural to group students according to their proficiency level—which may have little to do with their general academic learning abilities—and students may be moved to higher level groups when they make noticeable progress. long (2000) also mentions that school organization may sometimes have political significance. discussing that issue, however, remains beyond the scope of this paper. 59the classroom learning environment and its inf luence… determinants of an effective classroom learning environment in his further description of the classroom environment, long (2000, pp. 133–134) proposes some conditions favoring academic achievement. first, he emphasizes an orderly and favorable school climate, in which learners may feel safe and secure. this is much easier to achieve if the school and classes are smaller. in densely populated neighborhoods, unfortunately, schools are usually overcrowded and young learners may feel lost, insecure and deprived of the teacher’s appropriate attention. another condition necessary for academic achievement is agreement and cooperation between teachers, which also includes effective school administration and the head teacher’s supportive leadership. this leadership should involve, for example, appropriate lesson scheduling, adjusted to learners’ and teachers’ needs, departure from fixed lesson times and the appropriate distribution of recess periods. the most important aspect, however, is the quality of the school curriculum and the coordination of that curriculum with methods of instruction. other favorable conditions for academic achievement include the degree of parental involvement, effective monitoring of students’ progress and—last but not least—high expectations and strong beliefs in learners’ abilities. this set of conditions proposed by long (2000) is focused mostly on school as an institution, on its organization and cooperative mood within the school community. another approach can be observed in heick (2014), who also proposes a collection of the characteristics of a highly effective classroom learning environment. these characteristics concentrate on students’ attitudes, behavior and the relationship between classroom learning and the world outside. first of all, in an effective learning environment students are encouraged to ask questions and such questions are valued more than the answers. students ask questions not because the teacher directs them to do so, but because they genuinely want to know and display authentic curiosity. by asking questions, students direct the teacher towards explaining things they really want to understand, which makes the whole teaching process worthwhile. that is why good questions are more important than answers. heick (2014) also emphasizes the fact that in effective learning, ideas for lessons do not all come from the teacher or from the course book—they may derive from different sources, for example, the students themselves, their families, the internet, or the outside world, to name just a few. this variety of learning sources may motivate the students to pursue authentic, real-life knowledge. as heick (2014, n.p.) claims, “[c]lassroom learning ‘empties’ into a connected community—learning starts from the real world and ends there.” in an effective learning environment different learning models are employed. the learners develop awareness of their own learning style preferences and they are encouraged to make use of their individual learning strategies. the 60 anna michońska-stadnik teacher’s role involves, inter alia, the presentation of different learning habits so that the learners can personally assess their effectiveness in various learning contexts. when it comes to assessment, according to heick (2014), it should be regular, persistent, authentic and transparent. it should never be treated as a punishment for lack of knowledge or for misbehavior. the assessment criteria should also be clear and transparent. last but not least, in an effective learning environment constant opportunities for practice should be created. effective learning environments in relation to different approaches to learning different learning theories developed over the last 60 years show diverse understandings of the effective classroom learning environment. this effectiveness is determined by the role of the teacher, the treatment of learners, the attitude to the learning process itself and—last but not least—by the classroom layout (guney & al, 2012). guney and al discuss six different learning theories with respect to how each of them understands the conditions for effective education: behaviourism, cognitivism, constructivism, experiential learning, humanistic learning, and social-situational learning theory. for behaviourists, learning consists of creating new habits, the stimulus for learning comes from the environment and it is an observable process, with the learner being a passive participant. “[k]nowledge is viewed as objective, factual and absolute” (guney & al, 2012, p. 2335). the teacher is the center of attention because he or she is the only source of knowledge available to the students. that is why the teacher’s desk occupies the central position in the classroom and students sit in rows, all facing the teacher. effective teaching and learning consists of inspiring new but predictable behavior and the teacher is responsible for this. from the cognitivist perspective, learning is a mental process which requires attention and focus. this process involves noticing, storage, the retrieval of new information and finally its use. the teacher still remains at the center of students’ attention, but favorable conditions for stimulating curiosity and exploration are also created, for example by arranging space for both individual learning and group work. learning is supposed to be meaningful and the learners are encouraged to experiment and explore on their own rather than only listen to the teacher’s instructions. for constructivist theorists, learning involves constructing knowledge through individual experience. this experience is the result of one’s social, cultural and environmental interactions, which help to interpret new information and reflect on it (guney & al, 2012, p. 2335). the effective learning environment should create conditions for individual learning and group discussions 61the classroom learning environment and its inf luence… as both are equally important for acquiring knowledge. the teacher circulates within the classroom learning space and facilitates the learning process. both the teacher and students must take part in the organization of an efficient learning space and learners must become aware that they are also responsible for their success or failure. the usefulness of the learning content must constantly be stressed and learning styles should be respected (wolff, 2011, p. 12). experiential learning theory (kolb, 1984) is similar to constructivism in understanding learning as a combination of experiences, perceptions, behavior, and cognitive processing. the classroom environment should encourage reflection on activities, feelings, and thoughts. there should be space for social interaction to gain experience and create better group relationships. experiential learning can take place both in the classroom and outside it. humanists emphasize learners’ needs in learning and treat them holistically, which means that education should cater for students’ mental, physical, and emotional development. knowledge develops gradually and lifelong learning is a natural process. therefore, the learning environment should first of all cater to learners’ safety and sense of belonging, which are basic physiological needs according to maslow’s (1954) hierarchy. this seems to be of the utmost importance in a primary classroom as young children’s safety and security are especially essential for the learning process to take place. what is more, learners will need to personalize their learning space to attain the maximum amount of independence and realize their goals. finally, social-situational learning theory emphasizes “that learning takes place in social relationships” (guney & al, 2012, p. 2337). people learn by observation, contact with others and modeling the behavior of others. consequently, group and pair work will mostly be used to create an effective learning environment. each of these learning theories favors a different type of effective classroom environment. generally, however, cooperation between various elements of the environment is necessary to achieve success. thus, we need to look into such aspects of the environment as the relationship between the learners and the teacher, relations within the group itself, the teaching materials and the preferred classroom layout. only then will it be possible to observe the extent to which the environment may shape learners’ opinions, attitudes and beliefs. advantages and disadvantages of the classroom learning environment in foreign language attainment the opinions in research reports on classroom language learning, instructed language learning or formal instruction related to successful foreign or second language development are diverse. there is no agreement on the extent to which 62 anna michońska-stadnik this form of language attainment is beneficial for learners, or whether it is perhaps more profitable to replace formal instruction with some form of naturalistic language acquisition. the opinions of second language acquisition specialists are generally divided into two groups: there are those who believe that formal instruction should be abandoned (the zero option, e.g., krashen, 1982) and those who treat formal instruction as a facilitator of the language learning process (e.g., sharwood-smith, 1981). among those scholars who believe in the facilitative effect of classroom instruction, four distinct positions may be distinguished: the interface hypothesis (sharwood-smith, 1981), the variability hypothesis (e.g., tarone, 1983), the teachability hypothesis (e.g., pienemann, 1984) and the selective attention hypothesis (e.g., seliger, 1979). according to the first hypothesis, instruction facilitates language acquisition by providing conscious rules and by supplying the learner with numerous opportunities for practice. practice is needed to make conscious knowledge automatic. the variability hypothesis, on the other hand, claims that teaching new structures consciously will only affect the learners’ careful, planned but not spontaneous language performance. the teachability hypothesis concentrates on the fact that the learners will not automatize certain language structures until there are no maturational constraints on attainment based on the natural order of acquisition. finally, the selective attention hypothesis argues that formal instruction acts as an aid to learners in helping them concentrate their attention on salient language structures. theoretical considerations seem to confirm the facilitative effects of formal instruction on language development. formal instruction takes place primarily under classroom conditions. even though the facilitative effects of the classroom environment itself are not unconditionally supported by research, from the practical point of view, formal learning conditions seem to hold more advantages than disadvantages (hendricks, n.d.). from the positive viewpoint, the classroom environment offers opportunities for face-to face interaction with the teacher, who is a proficient user of the foreign language, as well as with peers. in the classroom, friendships and relations are formed, which sometimes continue for a lifetime. what is more, in the classroom, students are encouraged to ask questions and to discuss issues, which may enhance their cognitive development. on the other hand, there is no flexibility in the classroom—there is a fixed curriculum, a nationally established core syllabus and mandatory course books. opportunities for individual and autonomous learning are also limited. in the study presented below, the participants comment on both the positive and negative features of the classroom environment. 63the classroom learning environment and its inf luence… the study purpose of the study and research questions as already stated in the introduction, the purpose of this study was to explore students’ opinions and beliefs concerning the influence of different aspects of the classroom learning environment on their language development and attitudes to the target language culture and community. the aspects of the classroom environment taken into consideration were: the teacher, the group, the school, the course book and the classroom layout. in addition, some other influential factors were also remarked on by the students themselves. the following five research questions were addressed: 1. in what way did different elements of the school environment influence students’ language development? 2. in what way did they influence students’ general attitudes to learning a foreign language? 3. in what way did they influence students’ attitudes to the target language culture and community? 4. which opinions prevailed, positive or negative? 5. which aspect(s) of the classroom environment appeared to be the most influential in shaping students’ language development and attitudes? group characteristics, research procedure and instrument the research used a data collection instrument appropriate for the qualitative methodology adopted. the participants in the research were secondyear undergraduate students at the institute of english studies, university of wrocław (n = 56). their level of english approached b+ or c1 according to the common european framework of reference for languages (2001). they had completed their standard primary and secondary education two years prior to taking part in the research. it may thus be assumed that the students would still remember their school experience quite well, but at the same time would be ready to evaluate it from a certain distance. in april 2017 they were asked to give written answers, in english, to three open-ended questions on questionnaire sheets. students answered each question extensively, which may mean that all three questions were relevant to them and the answers were based on their genuine experience. the questionnaire was formulated as follows: 64 anna michońska-stadnik the influence of the learning environment on selected aspects of language attainment try to remember your formal language education in english in the school environment. which elements of that environment (e.g., the teacher, the group, the classroom layout, the school, the course book, etc.) influenced positively or negatively: a) your language development; b) your general attitude to learning a foreign language; c) your attitude to the target language culture and community? results the quantitative data referring to the number of opinions expressed are presented in tables 1, 2, and 3 and examples of students’ comments are then provided. table 1 question 1—influences on students’ language development type of comment teacher group school course book classroom layout other total positive 40 13 5 14 3 3 78 negative 23 17 3 9 1 7 60 total 63 30 8 23 4 10 138 altogether the students provided 138 responses to question one, which asked about the perceived influence of different aspects of the learning environment on their language development. there were 78 positive and 60 negative opinions, which on the whole is rather concerning because of the relatively high percentage of critical comments (43%). the teacher appears to be the most influential element in the classroom environment with regard to students’ language attainment. students gave 40 positive and 23 negative opinions concerning the teacher’s role in building their language confidence. the peer group influence rendered more negative (17) than positive (13) comments, which was again quite disturbing. the school itself appeared not to have much impact: five positive and three negative opinions. the course book influence was quite favorably evaluated: 14 positive and nine negative comments. classroom layout seemed not to have much influence on students’ language development, but the participants mentioned other factors which unfortunately had mostly a negative impact. a few examples of students’ comments are presented below. 65the classroom learning environment and its inf luence… positive: “enthusiastic teacher,” “the teacher had a very good accent,” “the teacher was demanding but friendly and well-organised,” “the group—we talked in english so i could see my mistakes and strong points,” “the teacher developed vocabulary awareness,” “the teacher was devoted to her subject,” “the classroom was cosy and tidy.” negative: “…if groups are streamed according to language level, weaker students have no chance to improve,” “the school—lessons were frequently cancelled and there was no replacement,” “the group wasn’t interested in english,” “the teacher looked bored all the time,” “the teacher couldn’t make the class quiet and it was disruptive all the time,” “the course book was not inspiring,” “the teacher’s language level was really poor and she couldn’t understand what i was saying.” other: “…learning the same things for many years,” “the program was not inspiring.” table 2 question 2—influences on students’ attitudes to learning foreign languages type of comment teacher group school course book classroom layout other total positive 29 5 4 4 2 7 51 negative 13 7 10 7 – 6 43 total 42 12 14 11 2 13 94 examining the responses to question two, which concerned the influence of selected aspects of the classroom environment on students’ attitudes to learning foreign languages, the picture is not particularly optimistic. students offered 94 comments altogether, out of which 51 were positive and as many as 43 negative. similar to the comments covering question one, in this context also the teacher seems to have the strongest influence, with 29 positive and 13 negative opinions. the influence of school as an institution was in most cases negatively evaluated (only four positive in contrast to ten negative opinions). also the group, the course book and classroom layout gathered more negative than positive answers. the influence of classroom layout seems to be insignificant. there also appeared other influential factors, not mentioned in the questionnaire. a few examples of students’ comments are presented below. positive: “the teacher—she really loved her job and inspired me to learn,” “the teacher told us that learning a foreign language is really important,” “the school events organised for us to have contact with the foreign language,” “the group—because it was advanced and had a motivating influence.” negative: “even bad teachers couldn’t make me lose interest in learning a foreign language,” “pathetic dialogues and stories were discouraging,” 66 anna michońska-stadnik “nothing in my formal education had a positive influence,” “school—learning a foreign language was just an obligation.” other: “not school—music and film were influential,” “a visit to england with my mum,” “tests were too easy—no challenge,” “private lessons.” table 3 question 3—influences on students’ attitudes to foreign language culture and community type of comment teacher group school course book classroom layout other total positive 25 5 12 11 8 13 74 negative 2 3 11 3 1 20 total 27 8 23 14 8 14 94 when it comes to the influence on students’ attitudes to foreign language culture and community, 94 opinions were expressed, out of which 74 were positive and only 20 negative. the positive opinions significantly outnumbered the negative ones, which gives hope that at least in this respect the classroom environment plays a more constructive role. again, the teacher’s influence appears to be the most important, with as many as 25 positive comments from the students. the school and the course book also seem to exert quite a significant influence, even though the students’ opinions on the role of the former in affecting their attitudes are distributed almost equally between the positive and the negative impact. there were also 14 other factors, not mentioned in the questionnaire, which contributed to students’ formation of attitudes. a few examples of their opinions appear below. positive: “the teacher was excited about culture,” “school competitions i took part in,” “classroom layout—maps, flags, pictures,” “some colleagues from the group travelled to england and told us about their experience,” “school language open days,” “the teacher who didn’t think that by teaching about culture she would lose precious time.” negative: “teachers didn’t encourage us to look for information,” “none of the formal language education elements made me actually think anything of the english-speaking part of humanity,” “only grammar was discussed.” other: “meeting with guests from different countries,” “private lessons,” “books, films, not school.” 67the classroom learning environment and its inf luence… discussion in light of the findings presented in section results, it can be confirmed that the students’ opinions expressed in the questionnaires provided an extremely rich set of authentic data. it must be observed, though, that the participants in the research, who all studied in the english department, were exceptionally gifted individuals whose language level was definitely above average. they expressed their opinions in english without any constraint. there is much fascinating material in the students’ answers, which clearly needs further analysis and categorization to relate students’ comments to various factors, such as conditions favoring academic achievement in the classroom environment. the following are just a few comments based on the preliminary analysis of the data. at the same time, they include answers to the first three research questions. students voiced as many as 326 opinions altogether, which gives an average of almost six opinions expressed by one student. in all, 203 (62%) were positive and 123 (38%) negative. these numbers, even though the percentage of critical comments seems to be rather high (see comments to question 1, table 1), offer a relatively optimistic image of the classroom environment and its role in influencing students’ attitudes to the three selected aspects of their language development. the teacher appeared to be the most influential element of the classroom context. students gave 94 positive comments about the teachers’ attitudes and behavior and 38 (around 29%) negative. the participants appreciated teachers’ involvement, creativity, enthusiasm and professionalism, for example: “the teacher was really demanding but as a result i could develop my language”; “he was the one who made me think about learning as an interesting process, made me see the perspectives for the future”; “i think it was the teacher who made me fall in love with english. all my teachers were very creative, funny and i always wanted to be just like them”; “brilliant guy, made the group feel special”; “she always seemed to be interested in what she was doing”; “the teacher had a very good accent.” unfortunately, there were also critical comments, for example: “i’ve had many different teachers. mostly they weren’t educated enough to do the job properly, which i noticed even at that time”; “i used to argue with my teachers to the point that people laughed. i was better than them”; “secondary school was only about the course book, most often without any teacher’s help or involvement”; “we had only theory; the teacher didn’t speak english to us”; “they always made even the most interesting topic dull”; “every teacher i have met during my education made some pronunciation mistakes.” as far as the group’s influence is concerned, students expressed 50 opinions altogether, out of which 23 were positive and 27—negative (54%). this situation seems to be rather disturbing because the process of foreign language learning in the classroom requires, among others, effective group cooperation. those 68 anna michońska-stadnik students who gave positive comments about the group’s influence wrote, for example: “because of the students who grew up in english-speaking countries i was always motivated to study harder in order to catch up with them”; “it was an advanced group and it was motivating”; “conversations within the group had shown my strong and weak points.” the negative comments predominantly stressed the group’s indifferent attitudes to english lessons and the low language level, for example: “the group treated english very lightly and didn’t pay much attention to it”; “the group was never really that interested in language”; “my class in the middle school did not like english lessons so it was hard for me to work in groups sometimes”; “the level of the group was also rather low and i think i would have benefited much more if the level had been higher.” there were 45 comments on the influence of the school as an institution, out of which 21 were positive and 24 (53%) negative. positive opinions mostly stressed the many school events organized to provide contact with foreign languages, for example meeting foreigners, exchange programs, competitions, workshops and virtual lesson projects with a partner group abroad. negative opinions mostly concerned the attitude to foreign language lessons, for example: “maths, chemistry—these were really important subjects, not english, so it was a little bit discouraging”; “elementary school … didn’t want to allow us to learn english and therefore i started learning when i was in the 4th grade”; “often cancelled classes, no replacement teachers.” there were 48 comments concerning the influence of the course book on students’ attitudes. most of them (29) were positive and 19 (39%) were negative. students praised the course books for their interesting activities, additional materials offered and for information about the culture associated with the foreign language, for example: “the course books made use of excerpts from books, videos, radio talks—it all showed me that i have to know the language in order to be able to function in everyday life”; “the [course book was a] help needed to expand knowledge and developed some aspects of language.” students were also critical of course books, for example: “course books are rarely amusing and entertaining”; “ the course book was so chaotic and disorganised”; “english teachers in my school relied heavily on the course books and hardly ever looked beyond them, which made the classes boring and not very useful.” students expressed only 14 opinions regarding the role of the classroom layout, of which only one was negative. it seems that students do not pay much attention to this factor of the classroom environment. positive remarks mostly concerned posters on walls, colorful pictures and the use of interactive boards. apart from the five aspects of the classroom environment which appeared in the questionnaire, students also mentioned other factors that could have a positive or negative influence on their attitudes. these were mentioned 37 times: 23 were positive comments and 14 (38%) were negative. students listed the influence of parents, media, the internet, private lessons, television, films 69the classroom learning environment and its inf luence… and oral and written interactions with foreigners. some experiences were not entirely encouraging, for example private lessons were sometimes inappropriately planned and the core curriculum was not sufficiently challenging. in response to question number four, positive opinions (62%) prevailed. students generally seemed to appreciate the influence of the classroom environment on their language development, attitude to language learning and attitude to the target language culture and community. research question number five referred to which of the classroom elements, in students’ opinions, exerted the greatest influence. in turn, these were first of all the teacher, then the group and the course book. as demonstrated with respect to all the factors in question, the evidence offers substantial amount of insight into the contribution of all these variables of the classroom learning environment to the quality of the learning process itself. as it appears, none of the factors which determine the integrity of the environment can be completely ignored. implications for teacher education and suggestions for further research the influence of the teacher on different aspects of learning a foreign language in the classroom environment is enormous. pre-service teachers must be made aware of how much influence they possess. what seems to be one of the most essential problems is the teacher’s pronunciation. higher proficiency students notice pronunciation errors very quickly and comment on them. as a consequence, pre-service teachers must not neglect to work on their pronunciation, word stress and intonation because they are more salient than grammatical accuracy. future teachers should also be instructed to devote time to developing their own enthusiasm and group motivation. they should also take care to develop background knowledge and collect information about the target language culture and community. it is best to avoid “i don’t know” answers to students’ questions. teachers must show good group management. this skill must be acquired during teaching practice under the careful guidance of a mentor teacher. the organization of contests, quizzes, and meetings with native speakers is appreciated by students. teachers and schools should devote time to these aspects. as already mentioned, the participants in the study were english students (philology), that is, they were all genuinely interested in the target language and culture. it would be interesting to compare their opinions with those of students from different university departments. the research could also be advanced by investigating the influence of other elements of the classroom environment 70 anna michońska-stadnik (e.g., classroom interaction patterns, type of school) on students’ attitudes to a different set of language development variables, for example pronunciation, vocabulary or grammar learning. references bates, a. w. (n.d.). what is a learning environment? (https://opentextbc.ca). council of europe (2001). common european framework of reference for languages: learning, teaching, assessment guney, a., & al, s. (2012). effective learning environments in relation to different learning theories. procedia. social and behavioral sciences, 46, 2334–2338. doi: 10.1016/j. sbspro.2012.05.480. heick, t. (2014). the characteristics of a highly effective learning environment. (www.teach thought.com/). hendricks, s. (n.d.). advantages and disadvantages of classroom learning. (www.classroom. synonym.com). kolb, d. (1984). experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. englewood cliffs, nj.: prentice hall, inc. krashen, s. (1982). principles and practice in second language acquisition. oxford: pergamon. krashen, s., & terrell, t. (1983). the natural approach: language acquisition in the classroom. oxford: pergamon press. lippman, p. c. (2010). can the physical environment have an impact on the learning environment? cele exchange, 13. oecd, 1–5. long, m. (2000). the psychology of education. london and new york: routledge/falmer. maslow, a. (1954). motivation and personality. new york: harper & row. michońska-stadnik, a. (2013). teoretyczne i praktyczne podstawy weryfikacji wybranych teorii subiektywnych w kształceniu nauczycieli języków obcych. wrocław: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu wrocławskiego. pienemann, m. (1984). psychological constraints on the teachability of languages. studies in second language acquisition, 6, 186–214. ryan, s., & mercer, s. (2011). natural talent, natural acquisition and abroad: learner attributions of agency in language learning. in g. murray, x. gao, & t. lamb (eds.), identity, motivation and autonomy in language learning (pp. 160–176). bristol, buffalo, toronto: multilingual matters. seliger, h. (1979). on the nature and function of language rules in language teaching. tesol quarterly, 13, 359–369. sharwood-smith, m. (1981). consciousness-raising and the second language learner. applied linguistics, 2, 159–169. tarone, e. (1983). on the variability of interlanguage systems. applied linguistics, 4, 143–163. wolff, d. (2011). individual learner differences and instructed language learning: an insoluble conf lict? in j. arabski, & a. wojtaszek (eds.), individual learner differences in sla (pp. 3–16). bristol, buffalo, toronto: multilingual matters. 71the classroom learning environment and its inf luence… anna michońska-stadnik das schulumfeld und dessen einfluss auf manche aspekte des fremdspracherwerbs. studentenbemerkungen z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die unterrichtsumgebung und namentlich eine schulklasse sollen entsprechende bedingungen für autonomes und zur zusammenarbeit bewegendes agieren schaffen. hier sollen die motivation der schüler und deren fähigkeit zur selbstregulierung entwickelt und aufrechterhalten als auch vor allem der fremdsprachenunterricht begünstigt werden. die unterrichtsumgebung bilden: schüler, schulklasse, lehrer und lehrbedingungen, z.b.: ausstattung der schulklasse. die inspirationsquelle der vorliegenden studie waren meinungen der studenten zum positiven und negativen einf luss der ausgewählten elementen der schulklasseumgebung auf prozess der erlernung der englischen sprache, auf ihre motivation, selbsteinschätzung, selbstsicherheit und einstellung zur zielsprache und deren kultur. die mittels gesteuerter schriftlicher befragung gesammelten studentenbemerkungen können eine inspiration für die an hochschulen tätigen sprachlehrer werden. schlüsselwörter: unterrichtsumgebung, schulklasseumgebung, studentenmeinungen, prozess des fremdsprachenunterrichts, einstellung zum unterricht, kultur des zielsprachelandes theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 4 (1) 2018, pp. 7–22 david singleton university of pannonia, hungary simone e. pfenninger university of salzburg, austria l2 proficiency as a function of cultural identity in interlingual couples a b s t r a c t the “love factor” has increasingly figured in sla research. thus, piller (2002) studied the language “glue” between cross-lingual couples; marinova-todd (2003) found a link between l2 proficiency and co-habitation with native speakers; muñoz and singleton (2007) reported a romantic connection between successful late l2 learners and native speakers; gonçalves (2013) explored hybridity in bicultural relationships; and kinsella and singleton (2014) found that the participants in their study of late l2 learners whose l2 test results were all within native-speaker range had native-speaker life-partners. this issue is now being taken very seriously, as dewaele and salomidou’s (2017) recent article on “loving […] in a foreign language” demonstrates. in the present article we report on the results of some recent qualitative research, based on interview data collected from five individuals who are involved in intercultural and cross-lingual relationships. the research shows the l2 learning process to be clearly inf luenced by the affective context in which it occurs. the data also suggest that identity construction may be moved in a particular direction by the language principally adopted by the couple, and that, for the partner for whom this language is an l2, the results can be dramatic in terms of both linguistic and cultural affiliation. keywords: identity, interlingual couples, love, l2 proficiency, affective introduction with the increasing urge in today’s society to travel as well as to engage and communicate with people from all over the world, many people have found love with a person from a different country from their own and, as a result, david singleton, simone e. pfenninger8 find themselves living in an intercultural, binational relationship. while it is argued that such a cross-cultural exchange can offer many advantages, such as the sharing of traditional customs, people in intercultural relationships often find their own cultural understanding to be challenged, as they are confronted with the juggling of identities and the ideologies associated with them (see breger & hill, 1998). as language has been shown to form an essential part of an individual’s identity (e.g., bucholtz & hall, 2004, 2005, 2010), being able to speak one’s native language in an intercultural relationship has been argued to be a stabilizing component of individual identity construction, while the abdication of native language use has been portrayed as rather adverse. interlingual relationships have, on the other hand, frequently been talked about in sla research in connection with the dramatic rise in l2 proficiency of the partner who opts to use the language of his/her “significant other.” one thinks of marinova-todd’s (2003) study of 30 post-pubertal learners of english from 25 countries, which found that the six most proficient participants cohabited with native english speakers. or of muñoz and singleton’s (2007) study, which found that of the most successful late l2 learners, in a group of 11 spanish/catalan-l1 near-native learners of english they investigated in ireland, one was espoused to an irishman and the other had an irish boyfriend (whom she subsequently married). nor are we surprised by such results. we always knew that falling in love with a speaker of another tongue could change not only your life, but also your command of his/her language—and, adverting to our earlier point, to some extent your sense of self. such changes very much relate to “the degree to which the individual is open to disruptive novelty in terms of developing identity” (skrzypek & singleton, 2016, p. 89; cf. schumann, 1976). this kind of openness appears to be encouraged by romantic love, which seems to have the capacity to take the threat out of threats to identity. as gonçalves (2013) points out, at least some of the people experiencing intercultural relationships are “culturally hybrid individuals,” “living in the in-between” (2013, p. 528). they live another identity, besides the one they grew with, and perform accordingly. such developments are not unique to intercultural couples. one thinks of the latin poet, quintus ennius, who, because he had three languages, used to say he had three hearts. in a similar vein, dewaele (2016) mentions pavlenko’s (2006) analysis of the feedback from the bilingualism and emotion questionnaire. pavlenko found that almost two-thirds of participants reported feeling like different people when they switched languages. interlingual/intercultural couples do though offer prime examples of the phenomenon! this paper aims to contribute to our understanding of language acquisition in “bilingual, cross-cultural, interpersonal communication” (piller, 2000, p. 1). it outlines the obstacles and communicative challenges confronted by three intercultural couples as well as their varying motivation and success in learning, l2 proficiency as a function of cultural identity in interlingual couples 9 maintaining and using a second language. with communication as a vital factor in the make-up of a modern romantic relationship (see piller, 2001), how and to what extent do significant others in couples whose languages, cultures, and identities differ influence each other with respect to l2 acquisition, maintenance, and attrition? how do the couples choose their language? what are the reasons behind those choices? we report on three cases of relationships involving pairs of native speakers of different languages. we describe the communicative configuration that resulted in each case and tentatively explore an explanation for the differences between them. literature review identity construction and sla communication between partners is crucial for a relationship (piller, 2001). additionally, when the two individuals in question stem from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, an extra dimension is added to an already complex psychological process (dewaele & salomidou, 2017, p. 117). importantly, in situations of cultural contact, equal status may be won, if at all, via struggle (bucholtz & hall, 2003). it is now widely understood that engagement in language learning is an “investment in a learner’s own identity, an identity which is constantly changing across time and space” (norton, 2013, p. 51). the period of destabilization described above has also been referred to as the third place (bhabha, 1994; hall, 1996), in which the past and present “encounter and transform each other” (papastergiadis, 2000, p. 170). in her 2002 study of german-english couples, piller describes the importance of private language, which is the central element of the relationship, “a glue that binds it together” (p. 222). piller found that many couples perceive their private language as the foundation of their relationship: “[…] we were both happy then that we could speak german, and our relationship started with drinking coffee and speaking, and so speaking was very important to us and whenever we are having a serious conversation, it really needs to be in german, otherwise it doesn’t go well, and it doesn’t feel right” (piller, 2002, p. 222). dewaele (2013) went on to describe this private communication as depending on three channels: a visual channel such as body language, facial expressions, and gestures, a vocal channel such as vocalizations, prosody, intonation, pitch, volume, and a verbal channel that covers the content of the speech. if the information shared between the partners is not congruent on all three channels, difficulties within the communication can arise. for instance, when somebody david singleton, simone e. pfenninger10 sounds but does not look angry, or when somebody says something positive without looking and sounding positive (dewaele, 2013; dewaele & salomidou, 2017, p. 118). love and sla sla research is now taking the love issue and its consequences very seriously: various studies, some of which have already been mentioned, have focused in detail on the language of love among multilinguals and their preferred languages for inner and articulated speech. kinsella and singleton (2014) found that, of the 20 anglophone late learners of french they investigated, the three whose french test results were all within native-speaker range had each married french natives and had either bilingual or french-speaking children. french, for all three, was the language spoken at home. thus, all three had strong links to the french community, and the majority of their social interactions were carried out through french (kinsella & singleton, 2014, p. 16). in 2008, dewaele found that while the phrase i love you has most emotional weight in an l1, 30% of investigated participants felt that it had equal weight in their l1 and an lx, and 25% felt it was stronger in their lx. in their wide-ranging article on “loving a partner in a foreign language,” dewaele and salomidou (2017) explored the perceptions of multilinguals reflecting on emotional communication in lxs in romantic relationships, concluding that love in an lx is perfectly possible but it adds “some extra challenges,” while love and sex allow partners with different l1s to bridge the inevitable linguistic gaps and to create their own unique multilingual and multicultural relationship. the authors (p. 117) quote the claim made by piller (2002)—in regard to a study of german-english couples—that these days in intimate relationships—including crosslinguistic relationships— communication is key. dewaele and salomidou note that, amongst their own participating couples, one of the partners’ languages often became “the language of the heart” (p. 128) for both, and the females more often adopted the language of the males. we shall see in what follows, however, that this trend is not without exceptions. addressing the issue of hybridity in terms of identity construction, said argued as early as 1999 that “all cultures are involved in one another” and “none is considered to be single and pure, all are hybrid and heterogeneous” (pp. 112–115). nevertheless, partners living in an intercultural relationship, who experience this ‘in-between’ or ‘third place’ of cultures, often do not see themselves as hybrid (bhabha, 1994; bystydzienski, 2011; gonçalves, 2010). exploring hybridity in bicultural relationships in a swiss context, gonçalves (2013) bases her research on bucholtz and hall’s sociocultural linguistic model, which views identity as emergent in social interaction, but emphasizes its sol2 proficiency as a function of cultural identity in interlingual couples 11 cial salience in that identity becomes the social positioning of self and others (bucholtz & hall, 2005, p. 586). bucholtz and hall’s concepts of sameness and difference take a central position in our study—two phenomenological processes that emerge from social interaction. according to the authors (2003, p. 369), sameness allows for individuals to imagine themselves as a group, while difference produces social distance between those who perceive themselves as unlike. in an earlier study gonçalves (2010) re-conceptualizes the saliency of individuals’ situated past identities, positions, and practices and juxtaposes them with individuals’ current situational identities, positions, and practices in order to facilitate their rejection of hybridity, by proposing the terms situated and situational identities within ethnographic studies. situated identity is described as “an individual’s sense of self, which is often characterized as ‘stable,’ ‘fixed,’ and ‘unchanged’ in that it is how individuals consider themselves to be or act inherently” (gonçalves, 2010, pp. 81 ff.). furthermore, situated identities can also refer to how individuals are “seen,” placed or situated by others as certain individuals within a specific context. a situational identity, on the other hand is more flexible, dynamic, temporary and can be constructed by oneself or coconstructed by others (gonçalves, 2010, pp. 81 ff.). having analyzed individuals’ first-order perception of identity in a swiss context, gonçalves concluded that hybridity ultimately means “scrutinizing interpersonal discourse within an intimate community of practice where the positioning of self and other constantly emerges” (2010, p. 86): while it is impossible to account for identity “as a whole,” […] individuals living in a binational relationship come to terms with their hybrid cultural identities by discursively co-constructing this notion and, simultaneously, performing hybridity by drawing on an array of language resources and linguistic features. (gonçalves, 2013, p. 544) finally, it is also interesting to note that some neuroscientists (e.g., aron, fisher, mashek, strong, li, & brown, 2005) have characterized romantic love as not so much a specific emotion as a “motivation state” with respect to an imperative to be with the beloved and to protect the relationship in question. clearly, such an imperative is, among other things, connected to seeking out means of communication and to developing and looking after such means—with obvious implications for skills in relevant languages. david singleton, simone e. pfenninger12 this study data, participants, and site of study semi-structured interviews were carried out in austria (community language german) with five participants (two couples and one male individual) who were in relationships involving different languages and cultures. the couples in question used english as their main language of communication at least at some point in their relationship, whereas the individual male reported german as the overwhelmingly dominant language of his relationship. the participants were carefully selected in regard to sharing essential features such as age and length of relationship at the moment of the interview. while caitlyn (l1 english) and stefan (l2 german) used caitlyn’s native english as their common language, daniela (l1 german) and vratislav (l1 czech) used english as a lingua franca (elf). in kevin’s (l1 english) case, on the other hand, the community language, austrian german, was the language he and his partner (l1 german) used for marital communication. caitlyn and stefan met in south africa, during stefan’s participation in a student exchange program at caitlyn’s home university. after the year-long exchange, the couple moved to salzburg, austria, as stefan already had a secure job and caitlyn had just finished her undergraduate degree at the time. in terms of language practices, the couple speak english exclusively, as caitlyn’s german proficiency is as yet insufficient in order to have a spontaneous conversation. while caitlyn did take a german language class at university for the duration of one semester, she has stated that she stopped taking classes of any form and is now “picking up bits just as she goes along,” which has apparently significantly undermined her progress in german. daniela and vratislav met during vratislav’s business travels to vienna which was daniela’s place of residence at the time. after a short time of practicing a long-distance relationship, daniela moved to prague as she was admittedly “more flexible” due to the conditions of her job as a singer/actress. as neither of the two spoke each other’s native language at the time, the couple have been using english as main language of communication since the start. both individuals show a high english proficiency as both use english on a daily basis as part of their occupations respectively. since living in prague, daniela has been taking czech lessons on a regular basis and is already able to have an unprompted conversation in czech. vratislav has also just started taking german lessons online. his skills are yet at a beginner’s level, as he has only been actively practicing for a few weeks and is not exposed to german on a regular basis. table 1 summarizes the basic information about the above participants. l2 proficiency as a function of cultural identity in interlingual couples 13 table 1 information about the participants couple nl2 elf name caitlyn stefan daniela vratislav nationality south-africa austria austria czech republic native lang. english german german czech age 25 26 27 29 occupation university student (ma) quality/process manager translator, singer, dancer, actress it manager l2 – english english english location salzburg, austria prague, czech republic length of relationship 2 years; 6 months 2 years; 9 months finally, kevin grew up monolingually and monoculturally, learning no languages other than english—even at school—until the age of 16. nevertheless, his local high school did whet his appetite for contact with other languages and cultures by exposing him to encounters with visiting foreign exchange students. on returning to america, he began his tertiary studies, in which he focused on spanish and chemistry. during the late 90s, when he was living in spain, he made the projection that the german language would become dominant in the eu “domestic” market. on the basis of this projection, he decided to learn german by taking part in an exchange program that took him to graz in austria. it was in austria, in his 20s, that he had his “significant encounter.” task and procedure the following questions guided the conversations: 1. do both of you speak each other’s native language on a sufficient level for basic communication? if not, do you understand your partner’s first language? 2. which language(s) do you use? have you and your partner created your own language? 3. do you correct your partner when he/she makes mistakes in his/her second language? 4. do you have any troubles in making yourself understood? 5. how does it make you feel when you talk to native speakers? 6. what do you consider to be stronger: your community language or english as a world language? 7. in how far has the constant exposure to your second language affected your first language use? do you consider this change to be positive or negative? david singleton, simone e. pfenninger14 8. have you noticed any difference in terms of formality and register when using your first and second language? for example, using more advanced vocabulary in one language. 9. are there any holidays/customs/traditions that you share with your partner, which you may have not celebrated before your relationship? 10. do you feel like you have adapted an “austrian way of life”? if yes, please exemplify. this set, however, only functioned as rough guideline, as in all cases a natural, non-scripted conversation between interviewers and interviewees developed. the rationale for this design was twofold: on the one hand, it aimed to elicit self-reported information on the couple’s language practices and language attitudes, and, on the other hand, to yield samples of couple talk (see also piller, 2002). the transcripts were coded manually and divided into four main topics emerging in all the conversations, that is, everyday socio-cultural practices (cultural immersion), l2 learning motivation, identity claims (implicit identity claims, explicit identity claims), and language choice and language practices (incl. couple discourse). for the purpose of this paper, we focus on drivers of second language acquisition, maintenance, and attrition. results and analysis the far-travelling american up to the point of commencing german, kevin had never been persuaded by the merits of formal instructional language learning—perceiving full immersion in the target language to be the only valid methodology. nevertheless, in austria, he found he was able to use his knowledge gained from learning spanish to catalyze his acquisition of german. his oral proficiency developed from the a1 to the c2 (cefr) level within six months (when he was 23–24 years of age). his writing and reading proficiency, by his own account, lagged significantly behind and still does 14 years later. this remarkable progress—and the area in which it occurred—is clearly not solely attributable to his transfer of skills acquired during his struggle with spanish. the extraordinary flowering of his oral proficiency in german—whose phonological, grammatical, and lexical resemblance to spanish is distinctly limited—may more plausibly be explained in terms of the consequences of his “significant encounter.” let us allow kevin now to continue the story in his own words: l2 proficiency as a function of cultural identity in interlingual couples 15 (1) i returned home to finish my undergraduate studies and then returned a year later to get married to my austrian wife. since then, i have been living and working using almost exclusively the german language. my wife and i only spoke german to each other—it was almost as if speaking english was some sort of pseudo-communication. even after my first child was born, we still spoke german. i knew that i had to speak english to her, if she was going to be bilingual, but it didn’t feel “real” to speak english at home or in public with my family. here we see the beginnings of identity being modified through the sedimentation of what bucholtz and hall (2003) call “habitual action.” they (p. 378) argue that although linguistic practice is more often rooted in embodied repetition than in deliberate action, this does not preclude the possibility that it may be the outcome of social agency. the result of what happened following kevin’s “significant encounter” is that he now, according to his colleagues, performs spoken austrian german—which he began, recall, in his twenties—“like a native,” as they say. his almost exclusive use of german in his life for more than a decade clearly has a lot to do with this. another dimension would appear to be that—at least while he was in austria—german was the language he identified with as the authentic medium of self-expression. things have begun to change for kevin more recently: (2) around four years ago, i began an ma in tesol in ireland. at this point i was forced to use english for academic and professional development, which created a turning point for my use of language. i began to speak much more english at home and my wife began also to use some english within our relationship. now i speak predominantly english with my children, but still feel more comfortable speaking german with them in public settings. i have also been working at the university of salzburg teaching english which has forced me to almost exclusively speak english at work. he claims that these changes have had a deleterious impact on his german lexicon and on what he calls his “phonological façade.” it has to be said that this impact has not been registered by the german-speakers around him. even if they are true, the fact that his german reached such a high-water mark appears to be due in the main to the influence of his relationship with his wife, including the influence of this relationship on his language identity, and any decline from that level, because of his increasing use of english, would appear to relate in part to the results of another kind of love—paternal love! without wishing to enter here into the critical period debate, it is perhaps worth reiterating that kevin’s first exposure to german was in his twenties— david singleton, simone e. pfenninger16 long after the critical age is generally said by critical period hypothesis advocates to have expired. the fact that he was able to make such rapid and dramatic progress seems to confirm the view that, whatever our views on the critical period, identity adjustments, induced by love or otherwise, are an extremely important dimension of successful l2 learning in adulthood (cf. skzypek & singleton, 2016; schumann, 1975). the adaptable but thwarted south african for our second case-study we shall again focus on an anglophone who became very attached to an austrian and who moved to austria to be with him. in this case, however, we do not see the very rapid attainment of proficiency in l2 german under conditions of virtually total immersion but a more problematic development in a context where both english and german are at play, and where openness to both cultures on the part of both partners in the relationship is very striking, but where the situation presents some obstacles to the l2 acquisition of german on the part of the english speaker. this second story begins in south africa, where caitlyn, an englishspeaking south-african meets stefan, a german-speaking austrian taking part in a student-exchange program and studying for a year at caitlyn’s home university. at the end of the stefan’s year-long exchange, caitlyn moved with him—her studies incomplete—to austria, where stefan had a secure job waiting for him. the couple spoke (and still speak) english exclusively to each other. while caitlyn did take a german language class at university for the duration of one semester, she has apparently now stopped taking german classes of any form and is, according to her own account, “picking up bits just as she goes along.” it is particularly interesting, and not a little surprising, that neither caitlyn nor stefan shows an unshakeable attachment to their home culture. caitlyn says that when she first moved to austria she was “very much south african” but that now when goes back to south africa she misses aspects of life in austria: (3) in the beginning when i first moved here i was very much south african. […] i’m like that when i’m in south africa, i’ve missed stuff from austria and i’ll miss austrian things. caitlyn refers to herself as “being south african” using the past tense, emphasizing her increasing adaptability and hybridity of her cultural identity. stefan expresses similar sentiments. he says he was never “that proud austrian that just likes austrian things and nothing else. […] [s]ince i have been south africa like, like a part of my heart is there.” l2 proficiency as a function of cultural identity in interlingual couples 17 caitlyn and stefan both, then, evince cultural permeability, which is evident from the way in which they combine elements from both cultures on high days and holidays. thus caitlyn says: (4) yeah, so now we’ve like combined it. so, when we’ve with stef’s parents for christmas we’ll do it on the 24th at night [the austrian way] but then we’ll also do something on the 25th as well [the south african way]. on the language front, however, she reports that going about her daily routine does not necessarily require her to speak german, and that her efforts to communicate in german do not evoke an encouraging response: (5) obviously, the main problem is the language but that’s all up to me to just learn german. it’s harder than i thought and people aren’t as… welcoming with regards to like the german people in the city, if i try and speak german a lot of people are like “no.” they’re not willing to have a conversation with me. like, people our age at the university or stef’s family, they’re willing to talk to me no matter how stupid i sound, but other people aren’t interested really. thus, caitlyn feels that her l2 acquisition benefited from the way she is treated by others. her mention of the willingness of her immediate circle to “speak german no matter how stupid she sounds,” brings us back to stefan’s role in the situation. through the course of the interview, he repeatedly stresses his being perfectly comfortable speaking english. he also speaks in a diminishing way of his own german: “usually i’m not speaking proper german.” he is referring here to his very distinctive austrian accent and to the fact that austrian german contains elements that are not in use in the german of germany. stefan also reports that it is odd for him to speak standard german to caitlyn, “because,” he says, “we met in english and it’s like talking in a foreign language to her… like it feels weird.” this is the nub of the matter; stefan muses that if they spoke more german to each other, caitlyn would learn more, and caitlyn protests that when they visit stefan’s parents they “speak a lot more german, because his mum doesn’t really speak english,” but the fact is that their language, the language of their initial encounters, the language of their first endearments, the language of their entire relationship is english. the fact that—despite caitlyn having moved to a german-speaking country to be with her german-speaking partner—the language through which she has continued to express herself (including her feelings) to him is english, and this is also the language through which he feels most comfortable expressing himself to her. for the purposes of their intimate relationship, german is superfluous. david singleton, simone e. pfenninger18 the case of the elf couple both couples show high degrees of cultural immersion and have explicitly mentioned social conventions they practice in order to actively perform hybridity. strikingly, in both cases this adaptability was stressed by the female participants, who also both left their individual cultural environments in order to move in with their partners: (6) daniela: there are some differences, like, for example, when you celebrate easter there are many different traditions (both laugh). interviewer: can you tell me an example? daniela: no, so in the czech republic at easter the boys go from house to house with a stick and beat the girls! i’m not kidding! and this means the girls will be healthy the whole year. so yeah… in his family they do that but i still get to make my easter nests so it’s okay (both laugh). in sociolinguistic research this tactic is typically referred to as “distinction,” which is the mechanism whereby salient difference is produced (bucholtz & hall, 2003, p. 384). as our example demonstrates, distinction most often operates in a binary fashion, establishing a dichotomy between social identities constructed as oppositional or contrastive. however, example (5) also illustrates that daniela seems to have found compromises in terms of their respective cultural practices and that she seeks to celebrate “the best of both worlds.” open-mindedness towards their partners’ respective native culture thus seems to be present in both female participants, yet it was only when interviewing the elf couple that the influence of language on cultural immersion was explicitly stated. while caitlyn stated that her going about her daily routine does not necessarily require her to speak german (see above), daniela continuously stressed the importance of speaking czech within the city of prague and emphasized her desire to become part of czech culture in connection with her l2 learning motivation: (7) i always think if you want to get to know a culture and want to become a part of it, it is really important to know the language or at least do your best to learn it. therefore, it can be argued that cultural immersion and the cultural hybridity it involves seem to be less affected by the status of the main language of communication within the setting of cultural practices, but plays an essential role regarding the status of the main language of (in this case) english in relation to the community language. the less an individual seems to “get by” using english within the non-native community, the higher the value that is placed l2 proficiency as a function of cultural identity in interlingual couples 19 on the community language with regard to cultural importance. the results somewhat contradict previous elf studies; according to jenkins (2008), for instance, elf emphasizes the role of english in communication between speakers from different l1s and emphasizes that people have something in common rather than their differences. while caitlyn’s social network does not require her to learn german, a different picture emerges for daniela, whose non-native language community is less familiar with the english language. this has resulted in daniela taking czech lessons from the very beginnings of her move to prague: (8) i started with individual lessons from the beginning on when i first moved here, and now i’m doing a course twice a week which actually helps me a lot. so now we talk a lot more czech to each other and i pick up a lot more of the language when we speak to each other. she states that while she and vratislav initially only used english, her motivation in acquiring the community language has resulted in them increasingly including czech into their everyday conversations as a couple. vratislav, on the other hand, has not yet started taking a language class but is planning to do so soon: (9) vratislav: no we don’t speak german because i’m too lazy (laughs). daniela: but he is starting a course really soon! it’s just because we live in prague i need to use czech a lot more than he needs to speak german. vratislav: yes, that’s definitely one of the major reasons why also now speak a lot more czech with each other. daniela: yes, that’s why i have a much bigger motivation to learn czech and i focus more on it so there is not space for german unfortunately. like stefan, vratislav did not have to leave his country for his relationship and was able to continue with his life previous to his intercultural relationship. however, unlike stefan, who openly admitted to his lack of patriotism, vratislav showed the stability that is usually reported in elf couples, referring to his being able to maintain his language practices as they were prior to the relationship to the assurance of his cultural identity: (10) i still speak my native language and i still speak the same way i did before, using english at work. so i don’t think my identity has really changed. i am really czech! (laughs) daniela further emphasizes the importance of the language community to her as their elf, english, appears to be less widely-spoken within their language david singleton, simone e. pfenninger20 community when compared to the austrian community described above. she also explicitly states her partner’s family to be her main motivation behind her process of acquiring czech: (11) my main motivation is not even the people here but mostly his family, because they don’t speak any german or english and i just want to talk to them. with my family and german it’s not that much of a problem but it’s just annoying when he always has to translate everything. concluding remarks piller (2002) points to the crucial importance of the couple’s private language, which she describes as the central element of the relationship, “a glue that binds it together” (p. 222). unlike in some previous research findings (see, e.g., piller, 2001, 2002), however, our couples reported that they did not necessarily stick exclusively to this private language in each other’s presence, deploying another language when circumstances demanded it. the “glue” in the case of kevin’s relationship is german. kevin went to austria with a view to acquiring german, and his partner had little english. accordingly, it was natural and necessary for german to be their language of intimacy, and as a result it became the language with which kevin increasingly identified and which developed into the (for many years) language of his everyday life. the fact that english has entered more into the picture now has to do with the arrival of children and also developments in his professional life. in the case of caitlyn and stefan the “glue” is english, caitlyn’s l1 and a language in which stefan is very proficient; this is the language in which their relationship first began (in an anglophone context) and in which their communication overwhelmingly continues. it also happens that in caitlyn’s milieu in austria she can use english for most everyday purposes, which effectively allows the glue of her relationship also to function as the glue of her day-to-day living. she does, however, try to speak german with stefan’s family. interestingly, in respect of both the above relationships it was the language of the female partner that was adopted as the couple’s “language of the heart.” regarding daniela and vratislav, the “glue” in this instance is the native language of neither, but a language they both know well, english, and in which their relationship began. interestingly, the present trend is for daniela to incorporate more of vratislav’s l1 (czech) into her discourse that for vratislav l2 proficiency as a function of cultural identity in interlingual couples 21 to use daniela’s l1 (german). this is no doubt partly because they are now living in prague and daniela cannot always get by in english in the context of day-to-day living, although she makes much of her desire to be in contact with his family, who have no english or german. references aron, a., fisher, h., mashek, d. j., strong, g., li, h., & brown, l. l. (2005). reward, motivation and emotion systems associated with early-stage intense romantic love. journal of neurophysiology, 94, 327–337. bhabha, h. (1994). the location of culture. london: routledge. breger, r. a., & hill, r. (1998). cross-cultural marriage: identity and choice. oxford: berg. bucholtz, m., & hall, k. (2004). language and identity. in a. duranti (ed.), a companion to linguistic anthropology (pp. 369–394). oxford: blackwell. bucholtz, m., & hall, k. (2005). identity and interaction: a sociocultural linguistic approach. discourse studies, 7(4–5), 585–614. bucholtz, m., & hall, k. (2010). locating identity in language. in c. llamas & d. watt (eds.), language and identities (pp. 18–28). edinburgh: edinburgh university press. bystydzienski, j. m. (2011). intercultural couples: crossing boundaries, negotiating identities. new york: new york university press. dewaele, j.-m. (2013). emotions in multiple languages, 2nd ed. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. dewaele, j.-m. (2016). multi-competence and emotion. in v. cook & li wei (eds.), the cambridge handbook of linguistic multi-competence (pp. 461–477). cambridge: cambridge university press. dewaele, j.-m., & nakano, s. (2012). multilinguals’ perceptions of feeling different when switching languages. journal of multilingual and multicultural development, 34(2), 107–120. dewaele, j.-m., & salomidou, l. (2017). loving a partner in a foreign language. journal of pragmatics, 108, 116–130. gonçalves, k. (2010). negotiating identities and doing swiss in intercultural couples. spell: swiss papers in english language and literature, 24, 75–89. gonçalves, k. (2013). ‘cooking lunch, that’s swiss’: constructing hybrid identities based on socio-cultural practices. multilingua: journal of cross-cultural and interlanguage communication, 32(4), 527–547. hall, s. (1996). introduction: who needs ‘identity’? in s. hall & p. du gay (eds.), questions of cultural identity (pp. 1–17). london: sage. kinsella, c., & singleton, d. (2014). much more than age. applied linguistics, 35(4), 441–462. marinova-todd, s. (2003). comprehensive analysis of ultimate attainment in adult second language acquisition. unpublished ph.d. thesis, harvard university. muñoz, c., & singleton, d. (2007). foreign accent in advanced learners: two successful profiles. the eurosla yearbook, 7, 171–190. papastergiadis, n. (2000). the turbulence of migration. cambridge, uk: polity. david singleton, simone e. pfenninger22 pavlenko, a. (2006). bilingual selves. in a. pavlenko (ed.), bilingual minds: emotional experience, expression and representation (pp. 1–33). clevedon: multilingual matters. piller, i. (2001). linguistic intermarriage: language choice and negotiation of identity. in a. pavlenko, a. blackledge, i. piller, & m. teutsch-dwyer (eds.), multilingualism, second language learning and gender (pp. 199–230). berlin–new york: mouton de gruyter. piller, i. (2002). bilingual couples talk: the discursive construction of hybridity. amsterdam: john benjamins. schumann, j. (1975). affective factors and the problem of age in second language acquisition. language learning, 25, 209–235. schumann, j. (1976). social distance as a factor in second language acquisition. language learning, 26(1), 135–143. skrzypek, a., & singleton, d. (2016). age and identity. in v. regan, c. diskin, & j. martyn (eds.), language, identity and migration (pp. 83–97). oxford: peter lang. david singleton, simone e. pfenninger die gewandtheit in der zweitsprache als resultante der kulturellen identität bei verschiedensprachigen paaren z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g der „liebesfaktor“ spielt immer größere rolle in den forschungen zur erwerbung der zweitsprache. ein beispiel dafür ist piller (2002), die in ihren forschungen die sprache als ein gewisses bindemittel zwischen verschiedensprachigen lebenspartnern untersuchte. marinova-todd (2003) ist zum schluss gekommen, dass es eine wechselbeziehung gibt zwischen dem gewandtheitsgrad in der zweitsprache und dem gemeinsamen leben mit einem muttersprachler. muñioz und singleton (2007) betrachteten ein romantisches verhältnis zwischen den die zweitsprache im späten erwachsenenalter mit erfolg lernenden und den muttersprachlern. gonçalves (2003) dagegen untersuchte die hybridität der partnerschaftlichen beziehung von den von zwei verschiedenen kulturen abstammenden personen. kinsella und singleton (2014) wiederum behaupten, dass die im späten erwachsenenalter eine zweitsprache lernenden, die in sprachtests die den muttersprachlern ähnlichen ergebnisse erreichten, einen lebenspartner hatten, der muttersprachler war. der neueste beitrag von dewaele und salomidous (2017) ist der „liebe […] in einer fremdsprache“ gewidmet, was klarmacht, dass sich gerade diese frage heutzutage im interessengebiet der forscher befindet. der vorliegende aufsatz führt die ergebnisse der kürzlich durchgeführten quantitativen forschung in form einer umfrage an. an der umfrage nahmen fünf personen teil, welche in festen zwischenkulturellen und zwischensprachlichen beziehungen waren. die erreichten daten weisen darauf hin, dass der prozess des zweitspracherwerbs mit seinem affektiven kontext eng verbunden ist. aus den daten folgt darüber hinaus, dass der prozess der identitätsentwicklung durch die kommunikationssprache der lebenspartner bedingt ist. die folgen des prozesses, wie die forscher behaupten, können für den diese sprache als zweitsprache sprechenden partner sowohl hinsichtlich der sprachangehörigkeit als auch der kulturangehörigkeit dramatisch sein. schlüsselwörter: zweitspracherwerb, spracherwerbung, identität, liebe, motivation theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 5 (1), 2019, pp. 113–130 10.31261/tapsla.2019.05.07 łukasz matusz university of silesia in katowice, poland anna maria rakowska university of silesia in katowice, poland self-reported difficulties in learning english as a second language for third-age students in poland a b s t r a c t the problem of teaching english to third-age students is among the issues in elt which have gained increasing attention and interest in recent years. the aim of this paper is to identify difficulties in learning english as a foreign language reported by students taking part in language courses at the universities of the third age in poland. the research is based on the questionnaire distributed among the group of 70 third-age students of english. the results show that the problems the learners report are cantered around their ageand health-related conditions, as well as their general attitudes concerning foreign language learning. it is hoped that the present study will constitute a minor contribution to the study of learning needs and expectations of senior students in poland. keywords: elt, language acquisition, third-age students, learning difficulties introduction the problem of teaching english to third-age students is among the issues in elt which have gained increasing attention and interest in recent years. until quite recently, senior students in many respects were at a considerable disadvantage with regards to developing their language skills. foreign language schools and other educational institutions did not use to offer a lot of classes for older students. in recent years, however, there has been an increasing number of foreign language courses organized for this group of learnars by different institutions, including the universities of the third age in poland. this aphttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-2810-5798 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3237-1781 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.2019.05.07 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2810-5798 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3237-1781 łukasz matusz, anna maria rakowska114 pears to come as a response to the growing demand from third-age students themselves. senior residents in poland prove to be an increasingly self-conscious group of citizens, taking up on different activities and hobbies. many of them have got families abroad, which urges them to be able to communicate with their children, their children’s spouses, and their grandchildren. what is more, in contemporary poland sufficient command of english is increasingly useful even in such mundane activities as everyday communication, reading names of products, services, and brands. many third-age students seem to expect to keep up with the times also in this respect. although nowadays third-age students constitute an increasingly important group of english learners, for a long time their learning needs, learning styles, as well as elt methodology concerning this group of students has been considerably underrepresented in the field of language learning studies. researchers have tended to either focus more on other age groups of learners, or to discuss language teaching methodologies in general, without explicitly stating the needs and difficulties of older learners. there were also tendencies to describe senior students in a rather negative light. lenneberg (1967), for instance, claimed that third-age students were less able to learn a foreign language. nowadays, other researchers have begun to question such claims and have noted that the abilities of third-age students to learn a foreign language are as good as those of younger learners. according to winitz (1981), it is crucial how teachers work with senior students and what methods and techniques are implemented in the process of teaching. according to jaroszewska (2013, pp. 274–275), third-age students during foreign languages courses prefer note making, discussions that help them make the speaking skill more fluent, explanation of problems during each class, as well as individual work. senior learners are also reported to appreciate learning through techniques showing the cultural and social aspect of language, as it helps them express their opinions and make use of their vast life experience in class. moreover, the most interesting and effective courses for third-age students seem to be those ones which implement materials connected with students’ everyday lives and which let them express their own opinions. third-age students are more experienced and, thereby, often more able to clearly express their feelings than younger learners. however, it is crucial to remember that third-age students may have different kind of motivation to learn a foreign language than children and working adults. most seniors have already finished their professional lives; they frequently have no need to learn a foreign language for employment reasons. their motivations for learning a foreign language often include travelling, being able to communicate with relatives or friends living abroad, proving themselves that they can learn no matter how old they are, etc. third-age learners have self-reported difficulties in learning english as a second language… 115 got more time due to their retirement and they frequently intend to fulfill their time as beneficially as possible. it seems, therefore, significant to be able to assure them that language courses are not just for young learners who need to communicate fluently in the modern world. the recent years have brought an increasing interest in the field of teaching senior persons. niżegorodcew (2016) discusses third-age students’ strengths and weaknesses in learning english as a foreign language. she describes how motivation and teacher’s reflection on the course influences students’ learning process. niżegorodcew (2016, p. 89) claims that both affective and cognitive needs in the process of learning a foreign language are significant for senior students. they tend to use their memory and overcome the limitations connected with their age. affective needs appear to be significantly important for this group of learners. students commonly expect patience, understanding, and support from the teacher. what may make the teacher’s work challenging is how to motivate senior students. mikołajczyk (2011) suggests that senior students may be afraid of new experiences as they do not know what to expect and do not experience sufficient emotional stability. this may lead them to being mistrustful toward the teacher and other members of the course. since many seniors reveal a certain learning inferiority complex, a crucial aspect is to show them they are still able to learn a foreign language regardless of their age. grotek and kiliańska-przybyło (2012, p. 112) also describe the importance of emotions during language learning of seniors. third-age students tend to pay more attention to affective factors than physical activities. they typically display high levels of emotional intelligence. grotek and kiliańska-przybyło (2012) pay attention to the fact that most senior students are very sensitive people who need a lot of support during learning a language. moreover, they like sharing their feelings with the teacher and other students. what differentiates senior students from younger learners is how they perceive failures in learning a foreign language. they are focused on their age and, thereby, they tend to take their failures quite personally and emotionally. older learners also require more time during in-class speaking activities. lack of fluency in speaking is strictly connected with searching for proper words or phrases and they may consider this a failure (grotek & kiliańska-przybyło, 2012, p. 122). engaging in a foreign language classroom has been reported to have a beneficial effect in the well-being of senior learners. grzanka-tykwińska and kędziora-kornatowska (2010, p. 30) maintain that being active makes third-age students feel healthier and improve their mental capacity. nevertheless, although they have possibilities to learn a language, fear of failure sometimes is the reason they are not sure whether it is a good idea to start such activity at their particular age. for the reasons described above, another important issue in teaching thirdage students is the awareness of their strengths and weaknesses in the process łukasz matusz, anna maria rakowska116 of learning english. niżegorodcew (2016, p. 90) believes that these two aspects depend not only on students’ age but also on the aims of foreign language learning and the strategies they use. the clue is that students who learn a foreign language for pleasure and to affiliate with other people can be more satisfied with the learning than students who are focused on achievement and success. it can be observed, for instance, that third-age students are not afraid of tests as a factor in their professional development. they are more frequently afraid of them as a possible demonstration of their personal failure. they commonly fear that they are not as effective in the learning process as they would like to be. therefore, it becomes important for the teacher to observe what strengths senior students possess and focus students’ attention on these features in order to improve their self-esteem. the teacher must take into consideration all the facts influencing third-age students and choose proper methods to implement and appropriate roles to fulfill during the course. according to harmer (2000, p. 57), it is crucial for the teacher to make a proper decision. working with senior students requires the teacher to be particularly supportive, as third-age students’ self-confidence is frequently on a lower level compared to younger learners. another important factor which the teacher must take into consideration is older learners’ participation in discussions. senior students do not like being assessed and instructed in a strict way, but they predominantly enjoy being part of modern society. older persons who enroll for third-age language courses do that of their own will. they predominantly look forward to the aspects of their learning which are connected to socializing with other people and maintaining their social activity nonetheless, language courses for senior students come with certain considerable difficulties. it has been reported that such learners have problems with their self-esteem and that the objective problems connected with their age may interfere with the process of learning. the main purpose of this article is to identify the focal areas of self-reported difficulties in learning english as a second language which such students experience. the research is based on the questionnaire survey distributed among students of group courses of english in the context of polish learners. our sincere thanks must go here to those course leaders in different academic institutions who have kindly agreed to allow us to carry out this study with their groups. in particular, we are greatly indebted to monika grotek (the university of the third age at the university of silesia in katowice), who has greatly facilitated our research. it is hoped that the information gathered through the questionnaire analysis will prove to be helpful as a minor step towards a better understanding of the learning needs and difficulties for this particular group of students. self-reported difficulties in learning english as a second language… 117 research aims and methodology the aim of the questionnaire survey was to identify the most common self-reported difficulties in learning english as a second language for third-age students in the context of the surveyed group of polish learners and to provide additional relevant information about the participants of the study. the research tool was a questionnaire distributed between the months of january and march 2017 among the students of english courses organised by different third-age universities in the region of silesia in poland. the questionnaire was distributed in two complementary formats: paper form and electronic version. both versions were identical in the questions asked and their phrasing. the questionnaire was distributed in polish in order to facilitate feedback from students of different levels of english. it consists of the total of 11 questions, including eight closed multiple-choice questions and three open questions. the original paper version of the questionnaire is presented in appendix 1. what follows below is a short explanation of the questions in the study. in question 1 of the questionnaire the subjects are asked to identify their sex: male (mężczyzna) or female (kobieta). the aim of question 2 is to identify the age of the respondents as belonging to one of the four groups (50–55, 56–60, 61–65, 65 and above). question 3 refers to how long the participants have been learning english as a second language. the four available options include: shorter than one year, 1–3 years, 4–6 years, 7–9 years, 10 years and more. in question 4 the subjects are asked to identify the reasons for learning english. they are instructed to choose one or more than one option ranging from the purposes of work, travelling, self-satisfaction, social goals, and others question 5 serves as the main research question of the questionnaire. the participants are asked to mark one of the options referring to the extent to which they agree with 11 language-learning related sentences. the sentences in their english translation are as follows: 1. english is a difficult language to learn. 2. in certain age it is impossible to learn a foreign language well. 3. younger learners are able to learn to communicate faster than older ones 4. older persons can understand language problems better than younger ones 5. i lack patience in learning english as a foreign language. 6. i need a lot of support from the teacher in learning a foreign language. 7. older persons are usually more conscientious about their learning than younger ones. łukasz matusz, anna maria rakowska118 8. it is easier for older persons to understand different language issues due to their life experience. 9. it is easier for me to learn if i have grammar explained to me step-by step. 10. regular language revisions are important for me. for each of the above questions the participant is required to mark one of the following options: • i fully agree • i generally agree • i don’t have an opinion • i generally disagree • i strongly disagree question 6 is a supplementary question for question 5. it is aimed at finding out if the participants have experienced different age-related difficulties or illnesses in connection with their learning. if the answer is in the affirmative, the respondents are requested to specify what types of age related-problems they typically encounter in the process of learning english as a foreign language. questions 7 and 8 are related as the participants are asked to decide which language skills are the most important for them (question 7) and which ones are the most problematic in the learning process (question 8). both questions have the same range of available answer options: • speaking/communication skills • listening skills • reading skills • vocabulary practice • grammar practice • others (please specify: ...............) finally, questions 9–11 serve as three optional open questions in the questionnaire. in question 9 the participants are asked to identify other, previously unspecified, difficulties they encounter in the process of learning english as a foreign language. question 10 is aimed at finding out if the respondents feel discomfort during classes and—if yes—in what situations it typically occurs. finally, in question 11 the subjects are requested to provide 3–4 features which in their opinion characterise a good teacher. the three non-obligatory questions at the end of the questionnaire are meant to provide extra information relevant for the discussion of language learningrelated difficulties. the results of the survey and their analysis are presented below self-reported difficulties in learning english as a second language… 119 results of the survey in total, between the months of january and march 2017 a sample of 70 respondents took part in the questionnaire. all of the participants were students of stationary english courses organized by third-age universities in the region of silesia in poland. there were sixty-four female (91%) and six male (9%) respondents. the participants were all in the broad category of third-age learners: at the age of 50 years old or above: fourteen subjects (20%) between 50 and 55, nine subjects (13%) between 56 and 60, twenty-two subjects (31%) between 61 and 65, and twenty-five subjects (36%) above the age of 66. the reasons for learning english among those persons proved to be quite varied. only six participants (9%) cited the purposes of work, nine subjects (13%) reported social reasons. the majority of the respondents, though, provided the purposes of travelling (45 subjects, 64%) and self-satisfaction (57 subjects, 81%). other reasons for learning a foreign language were cited by five senior students. their answers oscillated around the reasons of socialising (e.g., i like the lessons with our teacher), family matters (i have a family in england), and practical applications of learning (being able to read shop signs, product names, being able to use new technologies, etc.). since the participants were allowed to choose more than one answer, the percentages in question 4 do not add up to 100. what these findings might suggest is that many third-age students in the polish context treat their learning as a social and self-motivating undertaking, most of them being past their professional life, they no longer need to learn for the purposes of work. instead, in their courses they commonly seek elements of socialising, meeting new people, cultivating friendships, and staying active to the old age. these tendencies seem to be even more prominent among the older participants of the study: the six respondents who reported learning english for the purposes of work were all between the ages of 50 and 60. on the other hand, 91% of persons between 61 and 66 and 80% of the participants over the age of 66 reported their own satisfaction as a reason to take up the courses, as opposed to 71% and 78% in the age groups of 50–55 and 56–60 respectively. the motivation connected with students’ self-satisfaction may be connected with increasing self-consciousness of the older generation in poland. as grzanka-tykwińska and kędziora-kornatowska (2010, p. 30) imply, senior students may be aware that learning a foreign language can serve as a factor in slowing down the processes of mental ageing and improving their mental capacities. the results of question 5, the main research question in the study, are presented in table 1. łukasz matusz, anna maria rakowska120 table 1. question 5: analysis survey questions i fully agree. i generally agree. i don’t have an opinion. i generally disagree. i strongly disagree. total: english is a difficult language to learn. 9 (13%) 27 (39%) 14 (20%) 15 (21%) 5 (7%) 70 in certain age it is impossible to learn a foreign language well. 8 (12%) 24 (34%) 9 (13%) 17 (24%) 12 (17%) 70 younger learners are able to learn to communicate faster than older ones. 67 (57%) 17 (24%) 2 (3%) 3 (4%) 1 (1%) 70 older persons can understand language problems better than younger ones. 4 (6%) 20 (29%) 27 (39%) 14 (20%) 5 (6%) 70 i lack patience in learning english as a foreign language. 8 (11%) 17 (24%) 13 (19%) 20 (29%) 12 (17%) 70 i need a lot of support from the teacher in learning a foreign language. 20 (29%) 33 (47%) 6 (9%) 9 (13%) 2 (2%) 70 older persons are usually more conscientious about their learning than younger ones. 16 (23%) 25 (36%) 20 (29%) 6 (9%) 3 (3%) 70 it is easier for older persons to understand different language issues due to their life experience. 7 (10%) 15 (21%) 16 (23%) 23 (33%) 9 (13%) 70 it is easier for me to learn if i have grammar explained to me step-by-step. 32 (46%) 30 (43%) 5 (7%) 3 (4%) 0 (0%) 70 regular language revisions are important for me. 48 (69%) 19 (27%) 2 (3%) 1 (1%) 0 (0%) 70 what follows from the results is that a lot of difficulties reported by thirdage students in the surveyed group originated from their self-consciousness and their attitudes and anxieties concerning foreign language learning. senior learners generally agreed that english was a difficult language to learn. the combined 52% of the respondents either fully or generally identified with this statement. third-age students, however, were not predominantly pessimistic concerning their ability to learn a foreign language. as many as 46% of the participants agreed that at a certain age it is impossible to learn a foreign language well, as opposed to 41% of subjects who disagree with statement 2. only 13% of the respondents said that they had no opinion on this matter. on the other hand, senior students were aware of the language-learning limitations connected with their age. the majority of the subjects (67%) fully self-reported difficulties in learning english as a second language… 121 agreed that younger learners were able to learn to communicate better than older ones. twenty-four percent of senior students responded “i generally agree” to this statement. thus, the combined percentage of the respondents who agreed with statement 3 reaches 91%. this stands in vivid contrast to the combined 8% of the respondents who had no opinion on the matter or disagreed with the statement. the respondents also did not tend to consider their age as an asset for their ability to understand language problems better than younger learners. thirty-five percent of the subjects agreed with statement 4 with 26% disagreeing and 39% undecided. reportedly, the life experience they possess was not felt to be an advantage either, as demonstrated by 43% of the subjects disagreeing with statement 8. what follows is that third-age students tended to be aware of their limitations and problems in the process of learning a foreign language. they revealed certain level of insecurity concerning their learning abilities and tended to think of themselves as subordinate to their younger colleagues when it comes to their foreign language acquisition faculties. perhaps due to these limitations, the subjects also felt that they needed a lot of support from the teacher in the process of learning, as demonstrated by the combined 76% of the respondents agreeing with statement 6. also, the majority of older students appear to find it easier to learn if they have grammar explained to them step-by-step. the combined 89% either fully or generally agreed with this claim, as opposed to the combined 11% who either disagreed or voiced no opinion on the matter (statement 9). what is also important is that regular revisions of the learning material are important for the vast majority of the participants (96%). this suggests that third-age students are also aware of their learning difficulties connected with memory, memorising and retrieving words, expressions and grammatical constructions. on the positive side, however, many of the respondents were of the opinion that older persons were usually more conscientious than younger learners (the combined 59% with only 13% disagreeing as a response to statement 7). also, a significant percentage of senior students (46%) did not think of themselves as lacking patience in learning a foreign language, as opposed to the 34% of the participants who responded in the affirmative to statement 5. as a response to question 6 in the questionnaire, 38 participants (54%) reported experiencing difficulties with learning a foreign language which were related to their age-specific illnesses or conditions, with 32 subjects (46%) answering in the negative. among those who responded in the affirmative, the types of age-related difficulties were significantly consistent: 30 (79%) respondents reported different problems related to memory and concentration (e.g., short memory, problems with memorising language material, concentration difficulties). the categories of hearing difficulties, general health problems and other conditions were each reported by three students (8%). this pertains łukasz matusz, anna maria rakowska122 to the fact that the respondents are aware of the problems of their age, especially the fact that their memory does not work as efficiently as is the case of younger students. the analysis of answers in questions 7 and 8 provides information about the language skills which are important and problematic for the respondents. in response to question 7 as many as 66 participants (94%) reported speaking and communication as the most important language skills. a similarly high percentage (70%, 49 students) was associated with listening skills. reading skills were reported as important by 33 students (47%), while vocabulary and grammar practice were given respectively 17% and 14% (12 and 10 students). the language skills which are most important for third-age students appear to be largely congruent with those which are reported to be particularly problematic. speaking and communication appears to be a problem for 37 participants (53%). an even higher percentage of the respondents (67%, 47 persons) reported listening as a particularly problematic language skill. the following problematic language ability appears to be grammar practice (18 students, 26%) and writing (15 respondents, 21%). the least problematic language skills among those cited by the respondents were vocabulary practice (13 students, 19%) and reading skills (eight respondents, 11%). what follows is that the language skills which are most important for the third-age students taking part in the survey are largely consistent with those which prove to be most problematic for them. interestingly, listening skills were more frequently reported as problematic than speaking and communication skills, which may be due to certain age-related conditions, including hearing deficiencies, in some of the participants. another set of data which is important to analyse here is the participants’ answers to question 9. the question is aimed at identifying other, previously unspecified, areas of difficulties reported by third-age students taking part in the questionnaire. thirty-nine students (54%) reported experiencing such difficulties in the process of learning english, as opposed to 31 participants (46%) who responded in the negative. those who answered in the affirmative often focused on different problems related to memory (e.g., problems with memorising, when i forget important words), problems with pronunciation (e.g., i am not sure if i pronounce something correctly), problems with speaking and communication (e.g., i have problems to communicate in english, i am stressed when i speak in class), and difficulties with listening skills (e.g., i have hearing problems, i find it difficult to understand dialogues from the cd). the summary of the problems reported is provided in table 2. since in questions 7–9 the participants were allowed to choose more than one answer, the percentage values in table 2 do not add up to 100%. self-reported difficulties in learning english as a second language… 123 table 2. question 9: analysis other learning-related problems reported by third-age students (question 11) number of respondents percentage of respondents (%) problems with memory 9 23 problems with pronunciation 8 21 problems with speaking 7 18 problems with listening 6 15 problems with concentration 5 13 problems with grammatical tenses 5 13 problems with sentence forming 2 5 lack of time for studying 2 5 short duration of classes 2 5 others 3 8 total 39 100 the analysis of the results in response to question 9 appears to corroborate the earlier findings of the study. in particular, the language learning difficulties for third-age students surveyed in the questionnaire tend to be connected with their memory/concentration problems, as well as with difficulties with speaking/ pronunciation and listening. this may reflect the objective limitations connected with the age-related conditions these students experience. as a response to question 10, wherein the respondents were asked if they felt discomfort during classes, 26 participants (37%) responded in the affirmative. the analysis of their feedback points to the aforementioned difficulties connected with students’ problems concerning speaking/communication, difficulties with memory and memorisation and problems connected with pronunciation. the detailed results are provided in table 3. what the analysis of the answers to question 10 shows is that the main sources of discomfort among the researched group of students were connected with the problem areas which the respondents reported in other questions, especially in connection to speaking/conversation and listening tasks. finally, the analysis of self-reported difficulties in learning english as a foreign language among the surveyed group of third-age students is complemented by question 11, wherein the students were asked to identify 3–4 features of a good teacher. among the leading characteristics the participants provided were: patience (forty-four students, 61%), ability to pass on knowledge (sixteen students, 22%), leniency/empathy (fifteen students, 21%), communicativeness (twelve students, 17%), kindness (eight students, 11%), professionalism (nine students, 12.5%), positive attitude (six students, 8%), knowledge (six students, 8%), łukasz matusz, anna maria rakowska124 systematicity (five students, 7%), openness (five students, 7%), ability to motivate students (five students, 7%), humour (five students, 7%), good pronunciation (five students, 7%). other characteristics of a good teacher provided by students included the expectations that the teacher be competent (three students), involved in lessons (three students), well-organised (three students), well-mannered (three students) able to match the pace of classes with students’ capabilities (three students), consequent (two students), creative (two students), calm (two students), flexible (one student), able to use different sources of learning materials (one student), able to create good atmosphere for learning (one student), experienced (one student), demanding (one student), willing to speak exclusively in english (one student), competent in audio-video equipment (one student), able to explain grammar well (one student), focused on building students’ self-confidence (one student), respectful of students’ subjectivity (one student). table 3. question 10: analysis other sources of in-class discomfort experienced by students (question 12) number of respondents percentage of respondents (%) speaking/conversation 8 31 listening 5 19 memory problems 3 12 vocabulary practice 2 8 fast pace of classes 2 8 grammar exercise 1 4 pronunciation 1 4 my being unprepared 1 4 when other students speak better english 1 4 different level of english in group 1 4 i’m not sure if i am able to manage to learn english. 1 4 total 26 100 what follows, therefore, is that third-age students taking part in the survey predominantly expected patience and leniency in their teacher, followed by the ability to pass on knowledge and communicativeness. this reveals the picture of many of these students being dependable in their learning, looking for a lot of support and not willing the teacher to be excessively demanding or strict. this, again, may be the result of third-age students in then research group revealing a comparatively lower level of self-esteem and self-confidence when it comes to learning english as a foreign language. self-reported difficulties in learning english as a second language… 125 conclusions the analysis of the survey conducted among a group of polish third-age students of english shows that the self-reported difficulties of the research group fall into two main categories. firstly, there are objective, often healthand agerelated problems that such students experience. most frequently, the subjects tended to complain about the efficiency of their memory, frequent forgetting of words and constructions, problems with memorising and retrieving language material which they had already learnt. as a result, they considered regular revisions of learning material to be of utmost importance. senior students were convinced that they were less able to focus on the lesson than younger students and that they generally required more time to acquire the learning material. another frequent condition reported by this group of learners is the hearing problems. as a result, senior students found activities such as classroom audio listening stressful and difficult. the third-age students also found it problematic to speak in full sentences and use complex language constructions in front of the group. they were unsure of their ability to pronounce words and expressions properly. for many of them, the inability to pick up the appropriate accent was a significant difficulty. the other category of difficulties that the participants reported was connected with third-age students’ attitudes towards teaching and learning a foreign language. senior students in the questionnaire were generally aware of their limitations and drawbacks, including those which resulted from their advanced age and health conditions. they were convinced that younger students were able to learn a foreign language faster and better than persons of their age. also, they felt that they needed a lot of support from the teacher. it was, reportedly, easier for them to learn if they had grammar explained step-by-step and in an accessible way. many senior students required constant reassuring, positive class atmosphere, as they were not confident that they may be able to learn a foreign language at an appropriate level. thus, a constant challenge for the teacher working with such a group was to motivate them, show them the constant progress they were making and creating comfortable and learningconducive environment. the data emerging from the study of self-reported difficulties among third-age students appears to confirm earlier observations of niżegorodcew (2016), grzanka-tykwińska and kędziora-kornatowska (2010), and grotek and kiliańska-przybyło (2012). the learning needs of third-age students are often centred on creating and maintaining positive language learning environment for them. consequently, in working with such groups, among the most important qualities of a language teacher are those soft competence skills which are aimed at supporting and helping. the social skill which was most welcome by łukasz matusz, anna maria rakowska126 the students in the survey was patience. this might be connected with those students’ knowledge and consciousness of their limitations and inadequacies. senior students often learn foreign languages for the purposes of socialising, travelling, contacting their family abroad and for their own satisfaction. the most important language skills which the respondents reported in the study included speaking/communication and listening skills. interestingly, these language skills were also reported as being among the most problematic ones. the research shows significant congruity in answers given by the participants of the study. third-age students in the polish context appear to treat their learning as a social and self-motivating endeavour, as they enjoy the elements of socialising, which grotek and kiliańska-przybyło (2012) discuss. many of those students focus on the positive group-building attitudes and communication-enhancing emotions. from the teacher they expect patience, ability to transfer knowledge, leniency, empathy and good communication skills. at the same time, they are not usually looking for demanding and strict language learning instructors. this is also congruent with niżegorodcew (2016), who suggests that older students often learn a foreign language for pleasure and in order to socialize with their peers. having—on the whole—finished their professional lives, they are not pressed by the demands of their employers or the prospects of promotion. instead, in their courses they search for elements of spending time in a group, meeting new people, the possibilities for cultivating friendships and family ties. at the same time, the growing social consciousness concerning health and well-being of senior citizens in poland allows for the possibility that this group of students are themselves aware of what grzanka-tykwińska and kędziorakornatowska (2010) suggest, namely that regular language courses constitute a factor in slowing down the processes of mental ageing and improving thirdage students’ mental capacities and social well-being. on the positive side, the image of third-age students which emerges from the study is of individuals who are positive towards their learning, as they have willingly opted to take the courses which they participate in. they have positive reasons for learning english, that is, socialising, mental exercise, communicating with their families etc. third-age students appear to be respectful towards their teachers, searching for and emphasizing their positive qualities. they are students who are self-conscious and aware of their limitations and drawbacks. as a result, they tend to be realistic towards their learning prospects and learning process. on the other hand, the research shows a picture of students who are largely dependent on the teacher, persons who are not sure about their ability to learn a foreign language and individuals who expect a significant degree of support and frequent motivation from the teacher. they are persons who reveal a high level of anxiety towards their learning. they feel comfortable with considerable amount of guidance from the teacher and expect a lot of support and reassurself-reported difficulties in learning english as a second language… 127 ance. what appears to be seen in other studies is to what extent this kind of attitude is the result of the objective difficulties of such students experience in the process of learning english and to what extent this is the effect of their earlier learning and schooling experience. those students in the course of their lives have received formal education, and the attitudes they have acquired in the course of their learning may have influenced their current attitudes. what seems to be rather clear and significant is the fact that there is a need for more research into the learning needs of senior learners. the interest in this age group and their methodology, although by all means worthwhile and important, currently appears to be insufficient and not representative of the number of third-age students undertaking courses in different institutions in poland. with the growing life expectancy, the growing self-consciousness of thirdage students and the increasing number of courses for them, there is a need for more vivid interest in the learning needs, difficulties, and expectations held by older learners. it remains to be seen, therefore, what direction further enquiries into the learning needs and difficulties of senior learners in poland will take. references brown, d. h. (2000). principles of language learning and teaching. new york: longman. grotek, m., & kiliańska-przybyło, g. (2012). rola czynników afektywnych w procesie nauki języka obcego przez osoby w wieku senioralnym. in teraźniejszość-człowiek-edukacja, (3/59). wrocław: wydawnictwo naukowe dolnośląskiej szkoły wyższej. grzanka-tykwińska, a., & kędziora-kornatowska, k. (2010). znaczenie wybranych form aktywności w życiu osób w podeszłym wieku. gerontologia polska, 18/1. http://www.edukacja.senior.pl/130,0,nauka-jezykow-obcych-a-wiek,12699.html jaroszewska, a. (2013a). nauczanie języków obcych seniorów w polsce. kraków: wydawnictwo impuls. jaroszewska, a. (2013b). gdzie, jak i dlaczego polscy seniorzy uczą się języków obcych? języki obce w szkole, 4, uniwersytet warszawski. lenneberg, e. h. (1967). biological foundations of language. new york: wiley. mikołajczyk, k. (2011). jak uczą się dorośli, czyli co powinien wiedzieć trener o specyfice kształcenia uczestników szkolenia. e-mentor 2/39. retrieved from: http://www.e-mentor. edu.pl/artykul/index/numer/39/id/831 niżegorodcew, a. (2016). studying english in senior years: a psycholinguistic perspective. in d. gałajda, p. zakrajewski, & m. pawlak (eds.), researching second language learning and teaching from a psycholinguistic perspective: studies in honour of danuta gabryś barker. basel: springer international publishing. winitz, h. (1981). the comprehension approach to foreign language instruction. rowley, ma: newbury house publishers. łukasz matusz, anna maria rakowska128 a p p e n d i x 1 badanie trudności w nauce języka angielskiego u osób w wieku 50+ szanowni państwo, bardzo dziękujemy za zgodę na wypełnienie poniższej ankiety. ankieta dotyczy trudności w nauce języka angielskiego wśród osób po 50. roku życia. składa się ona z 11 pytań. jej wypełnienie zajmie państwu ok. 5–10 minut. badania przeprowadzane są w ramach projektu badawczego prowadzonego w instytucie języka angielskiego uniwersytetu śląskiego. ankieta jest całkowicie anonimowa. zebrane dane zostaną wykorzystane wyłącznie do celów naukowych. 1. proszę zakreślić swoją płeć. • mężczyzna • kobieta 2. ile ma pan(i) lat? • 50–55 • 56–60 • 61–65 • powyżej 65 3. od jak dawna uczy się pan(i) języka angielskiego? • krócej niż 1 rok • od 1–3 lat • od 4–6 lat • od 7–9 lat • 10 lat i więcej 4. w jakim celu uczy się pan(i) języka angielskiego? (można zaznaczyć więcej niż jedną odpowiedź) • dla celów związanych z pracą • dla celów związanych z podróżowaniem • dla własnej satysfakcji • dla celów towarzyskich • inne (jakie?) ……………………………………………………………………. 5. proszę zaznaczyć, w jakim stopniu zgadza się pan(i) z następującymi zdaniami. (proszę zaznaczyć znak x w odpowiednim polu). self-reported difficulties in learning english as a second language… 129 pytania ankietowe zgadzam się w zupełności generalnie się zgadzam nie mam zdania generalnie się nie zgadzam nie zgadzam się w zupełności 1. język angielski jest języ kiem trudnym w nauce. 2. w pewnym wieku nie można się już języka an gielskiego dobrze nauczyć. 3. osoby młodsze potrafią nauczyć się komunikować w języku obcym szybciej niż osoby starsze. 4. osoby starsze potrafią zrozumieć problemy języ kowe lepiej niż osoby młodsze. 5. brakuje mi cierpliwości w nauce języka angiel skiego. 6. potrzebuję sporo wsparcia ze strony lektora podczas nauki. 7. osoby starsze zwykle bardziej przykładają się do nauki niż osoby młodsze. 8. osobom dojrzałym łatwiej jest zrozumieć różne kwestie językowe z powodu większego doświadczenia życiowego. 9. łatwiej jest mi się uczyć kiedy mam wytłumaczoną gramatykę krok po kroku. 10. ważne są dla mnie regularne powtórki językowe. 6. czy odczuwa pan(i) trudności w nauce języka angielskiego związane z dolegliwościami swojego wieku? • nie • tak (jakiego rodzaju?) ………………………………………………………..... 7. jakie umiejętności językowe są dla pana/pani ważne? (można zaznaczyć więcej niż jedną odpowiedź). • umiejętność komunikacji/porozumiewania się • umiejętność rozumienia ze słuchu • umiejętność czytania • umiejętność pisania • ćwiczenie słownictwa łukasz matusz, anna maria rakowska130 • ćwiczenie gramatyki • inne (jakie?): ........................................................................................................ 8. nauka jakich umiejętności językowych sprawia panu/pani najwięcej problemów? (można zaznaczyć więcej niż jedną odpowiedź). • umiejętność komunikacji/porozumiewania się • umiejętność rozumienia ze słuchu • umiejętność czytania • umiejętność pisania • ćwiczenie słownictwa € ćwiczenie gramatyki € inne (jakie?): ....................................................................................................................................... 9. jakie inne trudności odczuwa pan(i) podczas nauki języka angielskiego? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 10. czy odczuwa pan(i) dyskomfort podczas nauki? jeśli tak, to w jakich sytuacjach? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 11. jakie cechy według pana/pani cechują dobrego nauczyciela? (3–4 cechy) ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. cover photo: “big_blue” by max iter (retrieved from www.f lickr.com) copy editing: gabriela marszołek proofreading: joanna zwierzyńska typesetting: marek zagniński electronic version is the original one. the journal was previously published in printed form with the issn 2450-5455 the journal is distributed free of charge issn 2451-2125 published by wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego ul. bankowa 12b, 40-007 katowice www.wydawnictwo.us.edu.pl e-mail: wydawus@us.edu.pl first impression. printed sheets: 9.25. publishing sheets: 11.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 8 (2), 2022, pp. 1–19 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11768 yahya ghelichli https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4659-9672 department of english language teaching aliabad katoul branch, islamic azad university aliabad katoul, iran seyyed hassan seyyedrezaei https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4240-1999 department of english language teaching aliabad katoul branch, islamic azad university aliabad katoul, iran zari sadat seyyedrezaei https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1365-3214 department of english language teaching aliabad katoul branch, islamic azad university aliabad katoul, iran improving student engagement and motivation: perspectives of iranian efl learners a b s t r a c t one critical problem most educators have possibly experienced is that some students drop out of school probably due to loss of enough motivation. research indicates student engagement could not only increase motivation but help to sustain it at high levels. this relationship between these two constructs has already been researched quantitatively in language education. however, little research seems to have been done on exploring the ways of increasing student engagement and motivation in relation to each other using a qualitative design. the present study thus aimed at investigating the ways to improve student engagement as well as motivation with a qualitative design. the participants were 30 male, intermediate efl learners of the iran language institute (ili) in gorgan, iran. these participants, selected through convenience sampling, attended the semi-structured interview sessions voluntarily. the findings of the study led to a model of determinants of student engagement and language learning motivation. these determinants include teacher behavior, teacher personality, and student behavior for student engagement, and teacher, self, and parents for language learning motivation. it is expected the outcomes will be to the benefit of language teachers, language learners, and materials developers. keywords: qualitative study, student engagement, language learning motivation, learner perspective https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11768 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4659-9672 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4240-1999 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1365-3214 yahya ghelichli, seyyed hassan seyyedrezaei, zari sadat seyyedrezaei2 motivation has been a hot topic for research in second and foreign language learning as it is one important factor playing a major role in the students’ success (brown, 2014; dörnyei, 2001; gardner, 2007). loss of motivation is said to be the reason why some students quit school (menken, 2010; parvaresh, 2008). accordingly, investigation into the motivating strategies among efl learners can have benefits for language teachers and learners. moreover, student engagement has been proved to help improve and sustain students’ motivation at high levels (ghelichli et al., 2020). student engagement and motivation to learn have earned research interest for their impacts on both student achievement and dropout rates (greene & miller, 1996; niemiec & ryan, 2009). hence, need arises as to explore ways of promoting students’ motivation and engagement and make them assume ownership of their own language learning. language learning motivation can be defined as how much effort an individual exerts on language learning since the individual wishes for and gains satisfaction through it (gardner, 1985). dörnyei (2005) contended that motivation provides the initial impetus to begin language learning and subsequently accounts for why one continues the tedious process of language learning. dörnyei believed that motivation is connected to all other factors playing a role in second or foreign language learning. in this study, language learning motivation has been informed by self-determination theory (sdt; ryan & deci, 2000), as consisting of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. student engagement, on the other hand, may be defined as “the student’s psychological investment in and effort directed toward learning, understanding, or mastering the knowledge, skills, or crafts that academic work is intended to promote” (newmann, 1992, p. 12). in general, it pertains to involvement in the activities and tasks students do in school (mercer & dörnyei, 2018). reeve (2012) provided a more exact definition for engagement as it “refers to the extent of a student’s active involvement in a learning activity” (p. 150), or a “person’s enthusiastic participation in a task” (reeve et al., 2004, p. 147). research studies have been conducted on student engagement and motivation together in the same study with quantitative designs employing survey questionnaires or experiments (see, e.g., ghelichli et al., 2020; kanellopoulou & giannakoulopoulos, 2020; karimi & sotoodeh, 2019; oga-baldwin & nakata, 2017; reeve & lee, 2014; xiong et al., 2015). however, as o´flaherty and phillips (2015) argued, “[c]onstructs such as engagement are not always easily reduced to measurable items on survey instruments or a reflection of examination performance and so warrant further investigation” (p. 94). in other words, in order to gain deeper understanding of the constructs like motivation and student engagement, other designs and data collection instruments are also needed. accordingly, the novelty of the present study is that it has used another instrument, that is, interviews, and another research design, that is, the qualitative one, to investigate this relationship by inquiring about students’ opinions of improving student engagement and motivation… 3 the ways in which student engagement and language learning motivation could be enhanced. therefore, the significance of this study lies in the fact that it could be one of the first few studies investigating the constructs in question using a qualitative design from the students’ perspectives in the domain of language education. the theoretical framework the present study was based on self-determination theory (sdt; ryan & deci, 2000). sdt has achieved growing recognition as a plausible explanation for human motivation (mcclelland, 2013). employing empirical approaches, deci and ryan (2000) described sdt as an attitude to the student character and motivation, which is composed of three basic, psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. this theory was adopted as the theoretical ground because it includes both constructs of the study—student engagement and language learning motivation. moreover, engagement can be seen in terms of sdt, assuming “students’ active involvement in and reflection on their own learning” (nichols & dawson, 2012, p. 471). to conclude, as reeve (2012, pp. 151–152) maintained, an empirical study on student engagement and motivation can be conducted based on the principal theoretical framework informed by sdt. motivation, according to sdt, is seen as a construct based on the various causes or aims that result in a behavior. the most fundamental division is between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. intrinsic motivation refers to “the doing of an activity for its inherent satisfactions rather than for some separable consequence” (ryan & deci, 2000, p. 56). simply put, one is intrinsically motivated to do something because the action itself brings joy and satisfaction for its doer. in contrast, extrinsic motivation could be seen as “a construct that pertains whenever an activity is done in order to attain some separable outcome” (ryan & deci, 2000, p. 60). in other words, an individual does an activity not for its enjoyment but for its instrumental value. moreover, deci and ryan (2000) defined another similar condition related to the two abovementioned terms, that is, amotivation. amotivation is defined as “a state in which people lack the intention to behave, and thus lack motivation” (deci & ryan, 2000, p. 237). based on sdt, deci and ryan (2000) argued, individuals may be considered to be amotivated “when they lack either a sense of efficacy or a sense of control with respect to a desired outcome” (p. 237). student engagement is also seen as a kind of motivation involving emotional and cognitive processes, which develop gradually (nichols & dawson, 2012). according to sdt, all students, regardless of their age, gender, socioyahya ghelichli, seyyed hassan seyyedrezaei, zari sadat seyyedrezaei4 economic status, nationality, or cultural background, possess inherent growth tendencies (e.g., intrinsic motivation, curiosity, psychological needs) that provide a motivational foundation for their high-quality classroom engagement (deci & ryan, 1985, 2000). the dimensions of student engagement, however, might include various categories and terminologies. four most recent ones, on which the present study has focused, include emotional, behavioral, cognitive, and agentic engagement (reeve, 2012). research description this study aimed to explore the possible ways of increasing student engagement and motivation. the research question of the study was thus as follows: rq: what are the ways of increasing student engagement and language learning motivation from the students’ perspectives in the iranian efl context? methodology participants the participants were 30 male intermediate language learners learning english at the iran language institute (ili), a language institute located in gorgan, iran. following the researchers’ invitation for the interviews, these participants, aged between 14 and 19 years old, attended the interviews voluntarily. their classes met twice a week in the evening. these participants, all native persian speakers, were selected as they were available to the researchers. it needs to be noted that the language learners of the ili adults’ branch are mostly high school students, taking english as a foreign language (efl) courses as an extracurricular activity during their teenage years. data collection instrument and research procedure the semi-structured interview sessions were held in the teachers’ office of the aforementioned institute when the teachers were busy teaching in the classrooms. however, the interviewer, the first author, had organized the interview improving student engagement and motivation… 5 sessions in such a way that no interview was scheduled during the teachers’ tea break between classes. each day ten participants came for the interviews, which were arranged on three non-consecutive days. the interviews were audio-recorded, taking around 15 minutes or so each. all the participants in the interviews had already signed the informed consent forms prior to conducting the interviews. by the end of the third day, the interviewer felt that the data were about to achieve saturation; that is to say, the interviewees seemed to not have any new ideas different from those of the previous participants. on the whole, 30 participants were interviewed, all of whom were interviewed by the first researcher. the names of the interviewees were anonymized in order to keep their confidentiality. data analysis when transcribing the interviews, the researchers did not use verbatim transcription because the focus of the study was not on the syntactic or linguistic analysis of the data, but rather it was on the topic of the discussion. therefore, it was not essential to transcribe every interview in detail; instead, a tape analysis was carried out (dörnyei, 2007). in this approach, according to dörnyei (2007), while the researcher is listening to the recordings, they take notes and possibly mark those parts of the data that could provide more elaborate subsequent analysis. the interviews were conducted in the students’ native language, that is, persian, so the transcription was in persian, too. the translation into english was done at the point of giving codes to what topics the interviewees meant. in order to conduct the data analysis, maxqda software, pro 2018, was used. since the questions were asked to elicit information from the participants regarding the possible ways of motivating and encouraging students in their language learning, a thematic analysis method, a typical qualitative analysis technique used in mixed methods research (creswell & plano clark, 2018), was employed to allow for themes to emerge from the data. the interview data were thus analyzed through open coding for generating initial codes that emerged from the data. these initial codes were then grouped to generate categories or themes using the process of axial coding. the analysis was done to achieve saturation of identified themes and subthemes (creswell, 2012). in the axial coding phase, the codes were put together in the same category or theme based on their connection and relevance. in the last phase, selective coding, the categories were analyzed to see if there existed any possible links between them. finally, the themes were associated together to obtain a tentative model for the study. yahya ghelichli, seyyed hassan seyyedrezaei, zari sadat seyyedrezaei6 validity of the qualitative data validity of the qualitative data could be determined through several strategies, two of which are at least recommended by creswell (2007). accordingly, the present researchers adopted two of the strategies as they are the most popular and cost-effective. the first technique was member-checking, a frequently used strategy in which the researcher takes accounts of the findings such as major themes back to main participants in the study and asks them whether the findings are an accurate reflection of their experiences (creswell & plano clark, 2018, p. 173). the second strategy, as creswell and plano clark (2018, p. 173) explained, was to ask others or peers to examine the data, that is, peer reviewing. in fact, the present researchers asked three faculty members who were familiar with qualitative research and the content area of the study to review the database and the qualitative results using their own criteria. credibility of the findings was secured by member checking, inter-coder agreement, and the academic advisors and supervisor’s auditing (ary et al., 2010; creswell, 2007). therefore, as for the first strategy, member checking, since the classes had been cancelled due to the covid-19 pandemic, the interviewer (i.e., yahya ghelichli) had no way but using the phone to contact the participants. thus, the interviewer obtained the participants’ phone numbers from the staff of the ili and called the interviewees. the interviewer asked them if he understood what the participants meant properly. almost all the participants agreed that the interviewer grasped correctly what they said and what they wanted to convey. second, the interviewer consulted some colleagues of his by asking them to examine the codes and categories or themes that the researchers came up with while analyzing the qualitative data. in so doing, the interviewer took a number of screenshots of the interview texts or transcriptions and emailed them to three of his colleagues. except for a few minor modifications, the interviewer got his colleagues’ approval. in fact, the cases over which there was disagreement were discussed and the concepts were clarified. accordingly, the validity, or trustworthiness and credibility of the qualitative analysis of the data were checked through the ways recommended by creswell (2007), and creswell and plano clark (2018). reliability plays a minor part in qualitative research because the researcher focuses on the value of their subjective interpretations (creswell & plano clark, 2018). improving student engagement and motivation… 7 results and discussion based on the outcomes of the study, it was observed that students enjoyed high levels of engagement because the different dimensions of their engagement were shown to be high. for example, most students said that they would like to engage in class activities, however different their purposes or reasons were. further, when the students indicated interest to welcome challenge, it could mean that they would like to engage in activities that tax their mental capacity. in other words, the students were interested to be involved in tasks which required them to solve a problem. accordingly, these are proofs of high behavioral and cognitive engagement. as for the other two dimensions, emotional and agentic engagement, the students showed high levels of engagement when they agreed with the sample items of each dimension. for instance, regarding emotional engagement, and the question whether they were interested in language learning, one participant, reza said, “i have always been interested in language learning, so my parents enrolled me in language classes of institutes.” likewise, another participant, nader stated “i really enjoy my english classes, especially if i like the teacher.”1 in total, 27 out of 30 students expressed great interest in language learning. as for agentic engagement, the participants were asked whether they expressed their wants and desires in class. about 25 out of 30 respondents stated that they would express their desires and preferences in class. these can thus be viewed as evidence of students’ high levels of agentic engagement. having conducted the analyses of qualitative data, the researchers also came up with several guidelines to increase student engagement and language learning motivation from the students’ perspective. in the interviews, the participants were asked to tell the interviewer their opinions regarding reasons for amotivation and ways of motivating students and increasing student engagement by focusing on their class participation. class participation is said to be the objective manifestation of both behavioral engagement and cognitive engagement (fredricks & mccolskey, 2012). the interviewees mentioned three influential components or determinants of increasing students’ motivation: self, parents, and teacher. in addition, what the interviewees suggested about teachers’ ways of encouraging students to participate in class activities could be categorized into three main themes: teacher behavior, teacher personality, and learner behavior. a schematic representation of the emerged model of the study for promoting students’ motivation and engagement is depicted in figure 1. 1 the participants’ responses are quoted in the original. yahya ghelichli, seyyed hassan seyyedrezaei, zari sadat seyyedrezaei8 figure. 1. the determinants of student engagement and motivation (authors’ own work) teacher behavior student engagement teacher personality student behavior student motivation teacher self parents figure. 1. the determinants of student engagement and motivation (authors’ own work). needless to say that these ideas were made by language learners from their own perspectives, so they may not be as comprehensive as it might be expected. a summary of the participants’ suggestions is presented below. how students can motivate themselves the results of the interviews showed that students need to pursue their interests in order to stay motivated. about half of the interviewees, 14 out of 30 participants, believed that students should follow their interests such as listening to music, watching videos they like, etc. if they desire to be motivated. alternatively, several interviewees believed that they should use the internet to remain motivated: using youtube and listening to podcasts. one participant, rashid posited: i think we should pursue our hobbies like listening to our favorite singers or watching our favorite movies in the original language so that we can keep our motivation at higher levels or even increase this motivation. of course, reading will help as well. others maintained that they need to have communications with their peers and native speakers. another participant, mehdi, expressed: “we need to listen to or watch native speakers speak. so i suggest using youtube to watch such videos. or we can download podcasts and listen to them later on.” finally, some others stated that students should think about their future, language benefits, good grades, and their future goals. improving student engagement and motivation… 9 how parents can motivate their children the findings of the interviews with the participants showed that most participants agreed that parents should support their children. this support can be done financially or emotionally, for example, by showing satisfaction with what their children are doing in language learning. one participant, masoud stated: “sometimes i want to buy an english book or cd. my parents should give me the money to buy it.” other kinds of support include providing conditions, for example, sending the kids to language classes, giving rewards, or taking the kids on trips abroad. another participant, arsham said: i think if parents take their kids on trips to other countries, especially to an english speaking country, their children can become interested in language learning because their children can actually see what benefits knowing a second language may have. parents can also show their support through not being so strict and critical. maziar expressed, “i don’t like it when i fail and my parents put all the blame on me. i need their kindness and help in such a situation.” other interviewees were of the opinion that parents need to encourage their kids to read books or see movies in the original language, or to encourage them to get good grades. the last group believed that parents must talk with their kids about their future and about such topics as the uses, benefits, and significance of knowing a second or foreign language in the present century. this might seem rather unusual since many adults may think that teenagers do not tend to take their advice seriously. hamid stated, “i believe that parents should talk to their kids about the advantages and importance of knowing a second language. such advice, i think, will work in the long term.” how teachers can motivate students teacher’s role is very prominent in motivating language learners. dörnyei (2001) was of the view that teachers play a major part in doing so. however, they need to be equipped with the required skills in order to motivate language learners. as mentioned earlier, in the pilot study, the interview protocol was modified. for example, when the interviewees were asked how the students could be motivated, they talked about three main components: teachers, parents, and students themselves. but whose job is it really to motivate language learners? dörnyei (2001) believed that “it is every teacher’s [responsibility] who thinks of the long-term [emphasis original] development of his/her students” (p. 27). therefore, this is discussed in more details. yahya ghelichli, seyyed hassan seyyedrezaei, zari sadat seyyedrezaei10 one theme most students emphasized was that the teacher should use humor and fun in class. for instance, ali said: i really enjoy the relaxed atmosphere the teacher creates in class. the teacher, for example, can use his sense of humor to make the class fun. in fact, if the class is fun and the atmosphere stress-free, i do want to come to class and learn. similarly, other participants maintained that the teacher should not be strict with them. for example, if students forget to do their assignments, he should not get angry with them. instead, the teacher should understand the student and give him or her a second chance. reza stated: sometimes we’re overloaded with school work and don’t have enough time to do all homework for all sessions. if i feel that i would be blamed for not doing my homework, i may not be very interested to come to class in certain sessions. when probed on this comment, reza continued, “this harshness on the part of the teacher can in the long run result in my being uninterested in language learning.” other behaviors the students may not particularly like about their teacher include negative attitudes toward some students, the teacher’s fearful threats, boring class, and weak class management. another theme that emerged from the interviews was related to the teacher’s content knowledge. they believed that they are interested to attend the classes in which the teacher has broad enough knowledge about the language item or topic in question. mehdi expressed, “when the teacher has a lot of knowledge about language grammar and vocabulary, i’m eager to attend his class because i think i’m not wasting my time.” this extensive knowledge can turn the teacher into an academic authority in whom the students can put trust. and when the students trust their teacher, they could learn more and better (larsen-freeman & anderson, 2013). this learning can in turn lead to an increase in the students’ motivation. simply put, the students must approve of and have trust in their teacher. some other things the teacher can do to make students more interested and motivated include having eye contact with the students, calling them by their names, especially their first names, and moving about the classroom. what most interviewees agreed upon teachers’ way of motivating students was about the teacher’s adoption of useful techniques in his methodology. for example, many believed that the teacher should have fun in class. other suggestions included giving scores to students for their class activities, using l1 in teaching, especially in teaching grammar, using group work, employing games, and applying modern teaching methods. ali posited, “some grammar concepts improving student engagement and motivation… 11 are difficult to understand in english, so i’d like the teacher to use persian at times to explain the point in question.” some others maintained that the teacher should not ask too many questions. in fact, they felt that asking questions may concern them and prevent their participation. some other students were of the opinion that the teacher should involve them in the activities done in class such as class discussions and decision making activities. some suggestions were made about the teacher’s behavior and personality. for example, some students believed that the teacher should have a good rapport with the students and be committed to his or her profession. dörnyei (2001, p. 31) also argued that the teacher behavior and his or her good relationship with the students can motivate them. most of these kinds of suggestions indicated that the teacher should have a good temper and not be strict. another series of suggestions were about what the teacher should do and talk about in class, including the teacher talking about students’ future career, encouraging students by giving them rewards verbally and nonverbally, reminding the students of language benefits, and assigning homework to the students to do in or out of class. regarding assignments, one interviewee, mehdi, had an interesting idea. he stated: teachers must give the students different types of homework to do in class and at home. i think if the homework is the same, there is the possibility that some students might be tempted to copy from each other, so there is no point in assigning homework to the students. some interviewees stated that if the teacher changes his or her teaching methodology for the better, some students may be motivated to study english harder. in other words, they were saying that students’ motivation is connected to the teachers’ style of teaching. in this regard, amir expressed: the teacher’s way of teaching becomes so unintelligible and boring at times. i mean we sometimes can’t figure out what the teacher means. i believe the teacher must be able to change his teaching method when the students are puzzled so that he could attract the students’ attention and help to solve their problems. this is not surprising as dörnyei (2001) also argued that effective teaching is crucial in motivating students. he reasoned that if the teaching methodology lacks clarity and students cannot understand what is being taught, learning motivation is unlikely to thrive. the ways of motivating the language learners mentioned by the interviewees had already been emphasized by dörnyei and csizér (1998) as “ten commandments,” for example, creating a pleasant, relaxed atmosphere in the yahya ghelichli, seyyed hassan seyyedrezaei, zari sadat seyyedrezaei12 classroom, developing a good relationship with the learners, or making the language classes interesting. clearly, it goes without saying that the present study could not cover everything about language learning motivation. in fact, it was not feasible to explore language learning motivation from all aspects. thus, it focused on the roles of three players—teachers, parents, and learners—in motivating language learners. others may have influences on the students’ motivation, which were regarded as being beyond the scope of this study. why some students lack motivation (amotivation) the rationale for incorporating the concept of amotivation in the interview protocol was the notion that if reasons for the language learners’ lack of interest and motivation are identified, they can be better helped to be motivated in language learning. moreover, since amotivation is identified in sdt as another dimension of motivation (ryan & deci, 2000), this topic was also explored by the researchers in the interviews. the reasons articulated by the participants for amotivation could be classified into three categories: educational issues, learner issues, and family issues. as for educational issues, most interviewees believed that students are not motivated because they think language learning is difficult. one participant, shayan, stated, “i think because language learning is difficult, some students are not interested in it. specifically, i myself have problem understanding some grammar points.” other reasons include boring classes, first poor teacher, lack of technology use and interesting materials in the classes, and teacher-centered classes. regarding learner issues, many interviewees stated that because some students are poor in learning, they are not interested in language learning. another reason stated by many was that some students may not know about language uses and benefits. several other interviewees expressed that some students might have had bad experiences in their early periods of language learning. other participants in the interviews enumerated some other reasons such as being aimless, lazy, and shy. as for family issues, most interviewees were of the view that parents’ pressure in sending their children to language classes forcefully could be the main reason for students’ amotivation. alireza said, “some parents send their kids to language classes by force. and since some kids are slow in language learning, they become frustrated and have no motivation to continue at all.” other participants believed that familial problems in not providing the proper conditions for the students’ language learning can account for some students’ amotivation. improving student engagement and motivation… 13 how student engagement can be increased in order to inquire about the interviewees’ opinions regarding the ways of promoting student engagement, they were asked what their opinions were about class participation. class participation, as stated earlier, is viewed as an indicator of behavioral engagement, the most obvious form of student engagement since it is action-oriented (reschly & christenson, 2012). furthermore, skinner and pitzer (2012) reasoned that students’ actions and interactions with the academic tasks may be seen as indicators of student engagement as well. moreover, class participation, according to fredricks and mccolskey (2012), is an indicator of both behavioral and cognitive engagement. to whatever dimension of student engagement they belong, these actions or behaviors boil down to be seen as student engagement on the whole. as mentioned earlier (see figure 1), three main themes related to student engagement emerged: teacher behavior, teacher personality, and learner behavior. regarding teacher behavior, most students believed that in order to encourage students to participate in class activities teachers should consider scores for students’ participation. one interviewee, arad said: teachers can encourage students to take part in class activities by explicitly announcing that any correct answer can have a point or score for the respondent. i feel such incentives can encourage students to participate more in class activities. students are even satisfied with the teacher verbal compliments. other suggestions include selecting students’ favorite topics, asking questions, assigning activities such as presentations to the students, reducing students’ stress, valuing their participation, and not highlighting their mistakes. another participant, asghar stated, “teachers should ask questions of different levels of difficulty so that even poor students can sometimes answer some questions.” as for teacher personality, interviewees believed that the teacher should be fair, cooperative, supportive, active, and energetic in class. one interviewee, taghi argued: the teacher himself should teach energetically and enthusiastically so that the students are encouraged to listen to him attentively and participation is increased. when the teacher has passion for teaching, this can be felt by the students. also, he should treat students in a fair way. they also believed that the teacher should be approachable so that the students can develop a good rapport with their teacher. these two qualiyahya ghelichli, seyyed hassan seyyedrezaei, zari sadat seyyedrezaei14 ties—being approachable and developing relationship—was also suggested by dörnyei (2001) as attributes of an effective teacher. for instance, saeed stated, “i sometimes have questions and need more explanations, but i’m afraid of the teacher.” it implies that students like saeed could raise their questions or ask for more elaborations in class if they had a better relationship with the teacher. still some other participants held that participation in class activities requires providing a few prerequisite conditions. for example, pedram maintained: class activities should be done under the teacher supervision. besides, it’s better to do these tasks in groups so that we can help each other. the teacher should also walk around the class while he’s monitoring the students in case a group needs guidance. on the other hand, given learner behavior, they also believed that learners should be sociable, and have enough knowledge about the topic, and be interested in class participation activities. one interviewee, nader expressed: some students are too shy to ask their questions or volunteer for an activity. i myself should know about the topic in question so that i can take part in the activity. at times, i prefer not to participate because i’m not sure about my answer. other times, i don’t like the topic. since class participation is seen as indicative of student engagement, the interviewees were questioned about how to increase such participation. they focused on the three notions of teacher behavior, teacher personality, and learner behavior, each of which was described in the above lines. in summary, as the findings indicate, it can be inferred that the more engaged the students are, the more motivated they become. when students are engaged, they can enter into friendships and form peer groups with their classmates who are more engaged in school (skinner & pitzer, 2012). in addition, teachers’ reactions to more engaged students are more supportive. analyses of the data indicated that students’ emotional engagement could be measured through their interest in language learning. hence, when students show interest in language learning, it means they are taking pleasure from being in such environments, which will result in an increase in their sense of belonging. in general, when students become more engaged, their sense of belonging becomes stronger (juvonen et al., 2012). and this stronger sense of belonging and ownership will help students to become more motivated to learn (brooks et al., 2012). in short, the increase in the sense of belonging will lead to an increase in the students’ motivational levels. improving student engagement and motivation… 15 based on the results of the present study, one thing teachers can do is assign problem solving activities to their students which help them reach that level of confidence to do the tasks on their own or in the company of others. when students achieve their desired outcomes, they become motivated through the regulation of their actions and behaviors (bandura, 1999). hence, if the students are provided with challenging tasks they would feel efficacious. when students feel more efficacious, according to lam et al. (2012), they would be more engaged in school activities. research has shown that there is a strong positive association between student engagement and self-efficacy (lam et al., 2012). so one way of promoting student engagement is increasing students’ self-efficacy. in other words, if students believe that they are capable of successfully accomplishing a task, they become more engaged. therefore, teachers can adopt instructional practices that help students to master challenging tasks, which will increase students’ self-efficacy. and this increase in self-efficacy, lam et al. argued, will lead to an increase in student engagement in the instructional contexts in which such tasks are provided. according to sdt, when students perceive that their school can meet their psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, they become more engaged in school activities (connell, 1990, as cited in rumberger & rotermund, 2012; fredricks & mccolsky, 2012). hence, school authorities and/or teachers need to provide a school setting where such needs can be met. for example, if teachers create a caring and supportive environment, students’ need for relatedness can be satisfied. the students’ need for autonomy is met when they are given a choice. and their need for competence is met when their self-efficacy is promoted through making them believe achieving the desired ends is possible (fredricks et al., 2004). another way of increasing student engagement is to involve students in learning tasks because such tasks can be inherently satisfying (davis & mcpartland, 2012). when students enjoy doing the task, for example, reading novels in their spare time or as a school task, this pleasure, as davis and mcpartland (2012) put, can result in more motivation. accordingly, when instructional tasks bring pleasure for the students, the level of motivation would be promoted due to the enjoyment and satisfaction obtained from completing these activities. one more thing mentioned by the interviewees to promote student engagement is the teachers’ good rapport with the students. when students have a personal and respectful relationship with the teachers and administrators in a school they are likely to be more engaged (davis & mcpartland, 2012). however, teachers may not know students well unless the class size is small. therefore, it is suggested that the class size be kept small enough for the teacher to know all the students in order to maintain a close relationship with individual students. yahya ghelichli, seyyed hassan seyyedrezaei, zari sadat seyyedrezaei16 the relationship between language learning motivation and student engagement can also be reciprocal. that is to say, if students are motivated, they are more engaged in doing learning tasks (guthrie et al., 2012). similarly, dörnyei (2001) was of the opinion that when students are involved in doing instructional tasks, they become more motivated. he contended that it is the teacher’s job to provide the students with such tasks to increase students’ involvement. teachers need to know that students may be less engaged if they are passively receiving knowledge, for example, when they are listening to the teacher lecturing (yazzie-mintz & mccormick, 2012). thus, teachers should use instructional methods in which they can have students work and learn with peers. in fact, students should be active participants in their own learning. moreover, the most tangible dimension of student engagement is behavioral engagement, in which attendance and homework completion can be observed (fredericks & mccolsky, 2012). however, emotional and cognitive engagements are not directly observable and need to be inferred from the students’ behaviors. conclusion the current study was conducted on the two constructs of student engagement and motivation by using interviews as an instrument for data collection. further studies can employ other methods such as observation to delve more into the linkage of these constructs. in addition, the participants in this study comprised male intermediate efl learners. future studies can focus on language learners of other levels of language proficiency and/or of the opposite gender. to sum it up, as dörnyei (2018) indicated, student engagement can be viewed as a novel, potential research avenue in the domain of language education. references ary, d., jacobs, l. c., & sorensen, c (2010). introduction to research in education (8th ed.). wadsworth cengage learning. bandura, a. 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(2015). the use of f lipped classrooms in higher education: a scoping review. the internet and higher education, 25, 85–95. oga-baldwin, w. q., & nakata, y. (2017). engagement, gender, and motivation: a predictive model for japanese young language learners. system, 65, 151–163. parvaresh, v. (2008). metaphorical conceptualizations of an adult efl learner: where old concepts are impregnable. novitas-royal research on youth and language, 2(2), 154–161. reeve, j. (2012). a self-determination theory perspective on student engagement. in s. l. christenson, a. l. reschly, & c. wylie (eds.), handbook of research on student engagement (pp. 149–172). springer. reeve, j., & lee, w. (2014). students’ classroom engagement produces longitudinal changes in classroom motivation. journal of educational psychology, 106(2), 527–540. https://doi. org/10.1037/a0034934 reeve, j., jang, h., carrell, d., jeon, s., & barch, j. (2004). enhancing students’ engagement by increasing teachers’ autonomy support. motivation and emotion, 28(2), 147–169. reschly, a. l., & christenson, s. l. (2012). jingle, jangle, and conceptual haziness: evolution and future directions of the engagement construct. in s. l. christenson, a. l. reschly, & c. wylie (eds.), handbook of research on student engagement (pp. 3–19). springer. rumberger, r. w., & rotermund, s. (2012). the relationship between engagement and high school dropout. in s. l. christenson, a. l. reschly, & c. wylie (eds.), handbook of research on student engagement (pp. 491–513). springer. ryan, r. m., & deci, e. l. (2000). self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. american psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066x.55.1.68 skinner, e. a., & pitzer, j. r. (2012). developmental dynamics of student engagement, coping, and everyday resilience. in s. l. christenson, a. l. reschly, & c. wylie (eds.), handbook of research on student engagement (pp. 21–44). springer. xiong, y., li, h., kornhaber, m. l., suen, h. k., pursel, b., & goins, d. d. (2015). examining the relations among student motivation, engagement, and retention in a mooc: a structural equation modeling approach. global education review, 2(3), 23–33. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40650725 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034934 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034934 https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066x.55.1.68 improving student engagement and motivation… 19 yazzie-mintz, e., & mccormick, k. (2012). finding the humanity in the data: understanding, measuring, and strengthening student engagement. in s. l. christenson, a. l. reschly, & c. wylie (eds.), handbook of research on student engagement (pp. 743–761). springer. yahya ghelichli, seyyed hassan seyyedrezaei, zari sadat seyyedrezaei die förderung von engagement und motivation bei studierenden: perspektiven der iranischen efl-lernenden z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g das ziel der vorliegenden studie war es, die methoden zur förderung von engagement und motivation bei studierenden aus der perspektive von iranischen efl-lernenden zu unter suchen. hierfür nahmen 30 efl-lernende an freiwilligen semistrukturierten interviews teil. daraus ergab sich ein modell der determinanten für engagement der studierenden und sprachlernmotivation. dazu gehören: das lehrerverhalten, die lehrerpersönlichkeit und das lernerverhalten für das engagement der studierenden sowie der lehrer, das ich und die eltern für die sprachlernmotivation. die ergebnisse der untersuchung können sowohl für sprachlehrer und –lerner als auch für autoren von unterrichtsmaterialien nützlich sein. abschließend wurden die pädagogischen implikationen der studie und ansätze für weiterführende forschung dargestellt. schlüsselwörter: qualitative studie, engagement der studierenden, sprachlernmotivation, lernerperspektive theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (1), 2023, pp. 1/20 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12575 magdalena szyszka https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6843-3238 university of opole, poland context-related beliefs about l2 language learning and teaching of the millennial pre-service efl teachers as a prognosis for future classroom actions a b s t r a c t the qualitative study presented in this paper aimed to collect beliefs about learning and teaching english as a foreign language (efl) from individual representatives of the generation frequently referred to as the millennials. the participants were 47 pre-service efl trainee teachers from four socio-cultural contexts: finnish, israeli, polish, and spanish. their voices have been considered because beliefs are dynamically related to actions and soon the millennial efl teachers may implement them in the course of their teaching. the contextual approach, followed in this research, provided opportunities for discussing similarities and differences in the beliefs of finnish, israeli, polish, and spanish pre-service teachers. the identified similarities lead to outlining a tentative picture of a universal, future, post-pandemic efl classroom. keywords: pre-service language teachers, beliefs, language teaching, language learning research into the beliefs about second or foreign (l2) language learning and teaching processes can be traced back to the 1980s when horwitz (1987) and wenden (1986) sparked scholarly interest in what and how these beliefs relate to language learning success or failure. since then this research has evolved in its methodology and understanding of the key concept. the more traditional approach—the normative approach (barcelos, 2003)—perceives beliefs as stable pre-conceptions rooted in cognition, which are often researched quantitatively. its followers aim to establish typologies of beliefs and their relationships or cause-and-effect outcomes with other variables, such as learning strategies (e.g. yang, 1999; zhong, 2015). more recent approaches position learners’ beliefs as far more multidimensional and multilayered than they have https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12575 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6843-3238 previously been understood (kalaja et al., 2016). the metacognitive approach, for instance, defines beliefs as some type of metacognitive knowledge (wenden, 1998) that is subjective, fallible, relatively stable but subjected to change over time. in line with this approach, “learners do think about their language learning process and are able to articulate some of their beliefs” (barcelos, 2003, p. 17). the data is often collected qualitatively through interviews and selfreports. however, only the contextual approach emphasizes the role of learners’ and teachers’ immediate settings in structuring their beliefs. cultural and contextual factors, for instance education systems in different countries, or distant learning, or teaching in pandemic conditions, can shape and determine a wide range of students’ beliefs about language learning (lee, 2009) and teachers’ beliefs about teaching (gabryś-barker, 2012). moreover, this contextual approach provides a wide range of interpretative opportunities grounded in specific contexts that additionally shape students’ beliefs about language learning and teaching. the qualitative study presented in this paper follows this contextual approach with the aim to collect beliefs about learning and teaching english from preservice efl trainee teachers, representing the young generation frequently referred to as millennials, coming from four socio-cultural contexts: finnish, israeli, polish, and spanish. their voices need to be considered because, as borg (2006) and kalaja and barcelos (2003) state, beliefs are dynamically related to actions. therefore, there is a high possibility that soon the millennial efl teachers will implement their beliefs in the course of their teaching. context-related beliefs about language learning and teaching despite the difficulty in establishing a precise and uniform definition, skott (2014) proposes four core characteristics of beliefs: they refer to an individual’s mental concepts which are subjectively perceived as true; they entail both cognitive and affective aspects that are value-related; they are relatively stable but may change, for instance, as a result of an individual’s personally significant engagement in social practices, such as “their own schooling, their teacher education programs and their collaboration with colleagues” (p. 19); and they are reflected in actions. similarly, kalaja et al. (2016) emphasize the dynamic and emergent nature of beliefs, which, as they underline, are socially constructed and contextually situated. thus, in this study the beliefs of l2 teacher trainees, who are l2 learners at the same time, are operationalized as a form of cognitive but value-related reflection on various aspects of l2 teaching and tapsla.12575 p. 2/20 m. szyszka learning that “relates these to experiences of his or her own or those of others, and assigns these aspects his or her own personal meanings” (kalaja et al., 2016, p. 10). these beliefs are expected to influence future classroom actions (al harthy et al., 2013; borg, 2006; kalaja & barcelos, 2003). in other words, the experiences of schooling and teacher training, shaped by socio-cultural contexts and practices in which individuals have been embedded, are reflected in their beliefs, and these in turn determine how future teachers may approach their own teaching as soon as they start their classroom careers. these assumptions are also in line with kalaja et al.’s (2016) comment that “[i]t is important to study the beliefs held by future teachers as these might turn into mediational means and thus guide their teaching practices in foreign language classrooms once they enter the profession” (p. 129). the contextual approach has been followed in a number of studies on pre-service and in-service teachers’ beliefs about l2 learning and teaching (for an extended overview see barcelos & kalaja, 2011; pusparini et al., 2021). borg (2003) investigated factors and processes underpinning language teachers’ decision-making and pedagogical behaviors in teaching. in his research, context played a role in determining the extent to which teachers teach according to their beliefs. he proposed a framework of contextual factors that co-construct teacher cognitions and beliefs. these included individuals’ schooling, which is associated with subjective classroom experiences; more general contextual factors, for instance, functioning within a specific national education system; professional coursework, depending on the teacher training course content and trainers; and classroom practice, which provides opportunities to confront the existent beliefs with teaching experience. feryok (2010) studied the dynamic nature of language teacher cognition, including beliefs, and found that context had a mediating impact on language teachers’ cognitions and beliefs. chong et al. (2011), for instance, found that teacher trainees in singapore form positive beliefs about a language teaching career because of the high status that the teaching profession holds in this country. in brazil, however, teacher trainees’ beliefs were revealed to be negative because of the undervalued status of a language teacher (barcelos, 2016). overall, the promising outcomes of studies on the role of context in generating beliefs about language learning and teaching justifies the line of enquiry proposed in this paper, which is additionally supported by li’s (2009) statement that “without understanding what the belief system of a learner [and a trainee teacher] is, how it emerges, and how it functions in learning, our knowledge of human learning will be deficient” (p. 38). the contextual approach to researching beliefs provides additional opportunities to compare and contrast the data generated from teacher trainees from various socio-cultural backgrounds, in order to establish which of their beliefs are similar and different. context-related beliefs about l2 language learning… tapsla.12575 p. 3/20 teacher education is dependent on education systems and policies offered in various contexts. more specifically, the approaches to teacher training in finland, israel, poland, and spain vary, which, in turn, might affect teacher trainees’ beliefs. although the detailed analysis of the systems is beyond the scope of this paper, some selected examples of variability in teacher education systems in the four countries are outlined. finland, for instance, is famous for its excellency in teacher education and the high status of a teacher (dolton et al., 2018). having fulfilled competitive entry standards, trainee teachers complete a four-year m.a. program with an additional two-year supervised school practice (malinen et al., 2012). finnish trainee teachers’ core competences are described as an amalgam of knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, and personal characteristics that allow teachers to act professionally and appropriately to the class situation (koster & dengerink, 2008). the english teacher training objectives in israel, included in the professional framework for english teachers 2020 (state of israel ministry of education, 2019), comprise specifications of skills and knowledge needed for an english teacher to function competently and professionally. the teacher training courses provided at higher education institutions relate to seven domains detailed in the document: teacher’s language and disciplinary knowledge, learning theories and the language learner, language teaching pedagogy, assessment, the language learning context, global competences and professionalism. after a four-year study program efl trainee teachers are awarded a bachelor of education degree (b.ed.) and a teaching licence (szyszka et al., 2018). in poland, the qualifications needed to become an l2 teacher are specified in the regulation of the minister of national education (2019). more specific objectives are included in institutional syllabuses detailing knowledge, skills, and social competences enabling students to complete the teacher training courses. teacher education combined with an m.a. degree provides qualifications necessary for teaching at any education level in poland. in spain, the national education legislation provides teacher training requirements for various educational stages. the general and subject-specific competences that trainee teachers develop are included in undergraduate programs for primary school teachers and postgraduate programs for secondary school teachers (fernández & hughes, 2013). the study the present study aims to investigate the narratives of pre-service efl teacher trainees coming from four different socio-cultural and education contexts: finland, israel, poland, and spain in order to identify their beliefs about tapsla.12575 p. 4/20 m. szyszka l2 language learning, l2 teaching and how they view the future efl classroom. for this purpose the following research questions have been proposed: rq1. what are the beliefs about l2 learning of the pre-service efl teachers from finland, israel, poland, and spain? rq2. what are the beliefs about l2 teaching of the pre-service efl teachers from finland, israel, poland, and spain? rq3. what are the beliefs about efl teaching in the future after the covid-19 pandemic situation? participants the participants of the study were 47 efl pre-service teachers who simultaneously studied english at a tertiary level. their age ranged from 20 to 24, with an average of 22.61. they might be referred to as digital natives (prensky, 2001) or new-millennium learners (howe & strauss, 2000), who will soon enter the profession of teaching english as a foreign language. the majority of them (n = 33) came from poland, five of them were finnish, the same number declared they had israeli citizenship and four individuals were spanish. the average length of l2 learning for the sample was 15 years. most of the participants (n = 44) declared they had some sort of l2 teaching experience. for instance, they had completed their teacher training internship at various educational levels: kindergarten, primary and secondary; some of them used to teach in private schools; others gained experience in teaching online. at the time of data collection, they were all enrolled in teacher training programs at their home institutions in finland, israel, poland, and spain. instruments the instrument applied to collect the data was an open-ended questionnaire on the beliefs of pre-service teachers about foreign language learning and teaching, designed for the purposes of this study. this type of tool has been frequently used for investigating beliefs (barcelos & kalaja, 2013; navarro & thornton, 2011; pan & block, 2011; vieira-abrahăo, 2006). open-ended questionnaires aim for rich and detailed answers that frequently change into longer narratives, which provide more in-depth access into teachers’ beliefs and a rich account of the complex contextual factors (kubanyiova, 2012). the questionnaire included a biographical part and seven sets of open-ended questions in english related to the participants’ beliefs about l2 learning and teaching, for example, what are your beliefs about foreign language learning? what is important to learn to be a proficient l2 user? what do you believe is the best context-related beliefs about l2 language learning… tapsla.12575 p. 5/20 method for teaching english? what are your beliefs about being a professional language teacher? what does it mean to you? in november 2020, a set of questions was added: what are your beliefs about teaching english after the covid-19 pandemic situation? how do you think this pandemic experience will change english language teaching in schools? procedure and analysis the data collection instrument was prepared in an online form with the help of google drive. subsequently, a link to the questionnaire was generated and it was published in february 2020. in order to reach the targeted groups, the researcher used personal contacts. the online survey was open till december 2020. to investigate beliefs from the perspective of the pre-service teacher, in a changing teaching situation triggered by the global pandemic, the researcher decided to include in the questionnaire the additional open-ended question regarding beliefs about l2 teaching after the covid-19 pandemic. the data were analysed following the procedures of qualitative research. more specifically, content analysis followed the steps suggested in creswell (2013). this involved: reading the data from the instrument multiple times and identifying themes; coding the themes into significant units and grouping these units into larger categories; and revising the categories repeatedly to check for consistency, cohesion, significance, and repetition. the responses of individual participants were coded with a letter representing the country of origin and the number, for example, f2 is the response of the participant number two from finland, i1 is the response of the first participant from israel, etc. results the responses to the first research question regarding the beliefs about l2 learning were analyzed and categorized into eight groups. examples are provided in table 1. the belief that exposure to the target language in the process of learning is valuable was repeated by 47% participants (22 out of 47) coming from all four contexts. more than a half of the trainee teachers (55%) reported that, apart from linguistic exposure, l2 use was essential in l2 learning by individuals. these beliefs were sometimes supported with examples from the participants’ experiences of learning, for example, tapsla.12575 p. 6/20 m. szyszka i2: first of all you must be exposed to english. i’ve learnt english through songs and movies; p10: [a] big leap happened when i started watching tv shows, playing video games, and looking for information about my interests in english (in other words, using english in context, in situations i was interested in and mattered to me); i1: it’s important to give us [l2 learners] the chance to speak the language in order to master it. we can’t just read and listen. we need to talk. that’s what helped me in the first place. s2: i started learning english at primary school in a traditional way by learning different language skills separately. however, i was taught the most mechanical skills and content (reading, writing, vocabulary and grammar). thus, speaking and listening were less taught to me. personally, i strongly believe that communicative skills are the basis to learn a language. next, the participants (17%) affirmed that the process of l2 learning may be strongly supported by a teacher. for instance, two finnish individuals believed that a teacher as a provider of formal education is important in l2 learning. spanish participants emphasized the affective (e.g., s3 in table 1) and motiva tional role of an l2 teacher, as, for example, expressed by s4: [a teacher] should motivate students because the more motivated they are the more knowledge they will acquire. the belief of one polish pre-service teacher centered around the role of positive feedback given by a teacher in the process of language learning (p34 in table 1). however, none of the israeli respondents mentioned the positive role of an l2 teacher. the next two categories of beliefs concerned affective and motivational aspects of l2 learning, reported by seven and six participants respectively. there were voices underlining the need for a positive atmosphere (e.g., f4), enjoyment (e.g., i5) and building linguistic self-confidence (e.g., p5). motivational factors were present in the beliefs of finnish (e.g., f5), polish (e.g., p34), and spanish (e.g., s4) participants; whereas israeli pre-service teachers did not refer to this openly. context-related beliefs about l2 language learning… tapsla.12575 p. 7/20 table 1 examples of beliefs about l2 learning given by pre-service efl teachers from finland, israel, poland, and spain category examples finland israel poland spain l2 exposure f2: one needs real-life exposure combined with formal teaching. i2: first of all, you must be exposed to english. p16: the contact with language is crucial. s3: watching tv series is an outstanding method to improve [an l2]. l2 use f4: in order to be a proficient l2 user, one has to actually start using the language, both in writing and speaking. i3: i believe practice makes perfect. so in order to be proficient in a language you need to practice it more often. p10: practice and context matter more than formal, explicit instruction. s2: communicative skills are the basis to learn a language. teacher’s role f2: one needs real-life exposure combined with formal teaching. – p34: it is essential to have a positive feedback from the teacher. s3: what really matters is the passion of the teacher. affective needs f4: there needs to be this safe environment where the learners can start putting to practice what they have learnt. i5: i learnt english through songs, movies, reading short stories. all of them were fun […] so teaching must be fun. p5: it is important to learn self-confidence in foreign language conversation. – motivation f5: language learning is most effective when the motivation for it is intrinsic. – p34: it is essential to have great motivation to learn [an l2]. s4: motivation is very important to learn not only english but all the subjects. l2 knowledge – i4: the important thing is to expand your knowledge and try to learn as much vocabulary as you can. p2: it is important to learn vocabulary and grammar. – language learning strategies f3: i think it is important to learn the tools for how we learn new things in a language. – p22: it is important to repeat new things and be systematic. – finally, two more categories—the value of l2 knowledge of vocabulary and grammar and language learning strategies—were identified in the narratives of the participants. as many as two israeli (e.g., i4) and four polish (e.g., p2) pre-service teachers believed that knowing l2 grammar and vocabulary is important in order to be a proficient l2 user. two finnish (e.g., f3) and three polish (e.g., p22) participants expressed their belief in the value of knowing how to learn. tapsla.12575 p. 8/20 m. szyszka the second research question was directed towards beliefs about foreign language teaching. here six categories were identified: preferred teaching method or approach, teacher status, the role of emotions, characteristic features of the good l2 teacher, the need for improved teaching and critical incidents. table 2 presents these categories and examples of the participants’ beliefs regarding rq2. the question regarding the beliefs about the most effective method or approach to l2 teaching revealed interesting context-related differences. preservice teachers from finland opted for flexibility in the choice of methods, with more interest given to task-based teaching and group projects. these beliefs were often rooted in their experiences, for example, f5: the best method for teaching changes, [depending] on the group. but the one i learnt the best with is task-based teaching. f4: in my opinion, task-based language teaching, in general, is very interesting and the most effective way to learn a foreign language. f1: group projects hold students’ interest. israeli participants believed in student-centered and meaningful learning. they emphasized that the teaching approach should be relevant and engaging, for example, i1: [the method] should be relevant to the daily life. i2: [the method] should be student-centred. i3: teaching should activate meaningful learning (through meaningful activities, useful games). a cognitive approach to l2 learning was supported by one polish individual: p19: the awareness of different methods is valuable to assess what works and what doesn’t. in my opinion, cognitive approach is the one that really influenced my teaching. the idea of brain-friendly learning made my lessons more meaningful and creative, which resulted in higher motivation of my students and [their] better remembering. both spanish and polish participants believed that the best method should be communicative, for example, s2: communicative methods, in which students have an active role while learning in a […] contextualised way. context-related beliefs about l2 language learning… tapsla.12575 p. 9/20 p34: i personally believe that the best method for teaching english is based on speaking and active listening […]. ability to speak and listen is the most important in communication in a foreign language. however, there were many voices stating that no single method is best, and the choice depends on both teacher preferences and learners’ needs, for example, p13: it [the method] really depends on the teacher’s both preparation and attitude, and students’ needs as well; p20: [it is fine to] mix all methods [according to] students’ needs and requirements. p32: the teacher should mix all of the methods and approaches in order to get what’s best for students and also give them opportunities to develop different language skills. the next category that emerged in the course of data analysis specified the beliefs regarding the status of a teacher in each context. two finnish participants (f1 and f2) confirmed the high status of the profession in finland. the belief of respect towards the education system was also identified among israeli pre-service teachers (i1 and i3). however, polish and spanish contexts triggered differing beliefs from finnish and israeli participants, for example, p11: teachers in poland are underestimated, s4: [a teacher’s status] should be higher in our society. table 2 examples of beliefs about l2 teaching given by the pre-service efl teachers from finland, israel, poland, and spain category examples finland israel poland spain teaching method/approach task-based l2 teaching, group projects student-centred, engaging, relevant to a daily life, meaningful learning communicative language teaching, meaningful conversations, mixing methods depending on the needs communicative, contextualised, engaging learners teacher’s status f1/f2: language teacher is a respected profession. f3: most people respect teachers but [some] complain that teachers have too good salary, long holidays. i3: i believe in our system. i1: teaching english is an essential job. p1/p11: teachers in poland are underestimated. p2/p7: english teachers have a higher status in poland than other teachers. teaching is a vocation/mission. s4: should be higher in our society. tapsla.12575 p. 10/20 m. szyszka emotions happiness joy pride (regarding learners’ progress), joy, happiness joy, pride, happiness, passion teachers’ characteristic features f3: a guide for others to learn the language and all the wonderful things you can do and learn with it. well qualified; keen on working with other people; creative, innovative, adaptable. i5: responsible (because they educate another generation). p15/p7/p3: teachers should be patient, knowledgeable, inspirational, supportive, progressive. s2: a teacher needs to be a good model. s4/s1: high expertise is important. need for improved teaching f5: my experiences have taught me what not to do. i5: i want to be a different teach er from the ones in my country. i2: i don’t want to teach the way i observed teachers teach. p4: teachers in my country, especially in primary and high schools, are old-fashioned, strict and literalminded. it is very sad. always just books, exams, tests. i definitely do not want to be that ordinary teacher. i’d like to be ”oh she is the teacher who showed me that english is wonderful.” s2: i believe that a professional l2 teacher needs to make the effort of changing what s/he has observed […] in order to improve. several similarities were identified in the beliefs about positive affect in l2 teaching among the participants from finland, israel, poland, and spain, for example, s3: […] when i see that something [that] i have invested my time in is giving results in my students, i feel happy. i5: […] teaching must be fun […]. i want to be a teacher who makes pupils say “we want to learn english all day.” i2: [i want] to make my students love the language although they might not be proficient in english. it means a lot, especially in my [bedouin] society. p3: i enjoy tutoring, and when i see my students get better grades and [are] happy because of it, it makes me happy as well. p4: a professional language teacher is not only a person who instructs or trains others, but a person who makes positive difference in the lives of many, i mean, who inspires and motivates further learning. context-related beliefs about l2 language learning… tapsla.12575 p. 11/20 p15: […] motivating them [learners] to learn is something that brings me joy. p20: a person who is a teacher has to be passionate about what he/she does. f4: i would like to be able to make the learning process as interesting and rewarding as possible […] i want to be a language teacher because i want to give others the same happiness which i have received from education. similar teacher characteristics were identified as important for those who want to enter this profession. these were, among others, high level of linguistic expertise, teaching skills and soft skills, for example, p4: a professional language teacher is someone who provides knowledge, skills and willingness. p6: being a teacher requires a lot of patience and understanding. p9: [teachers] educate the next generation of citizens, not only equipping them with skills and knowledge required as per curriculum, but also social skills, critical thinking; they can influence learners’ approaches to learning. i3: i believe that a teacher should be supportive, a good listener, and [he/she should] encourage his/her pupils to do their best. s2: a professional language teacher needs to be a good model for his/her students in order to expose them to a correct input of the language. f3: being a professional language teacher means that i can be a guide for others to learn the language and all the wonderful things you can do and learn with it. next, in each context-related group of pre-service teachers, there were instances of the beliefs that were rooted in negative experiences of either previous schooling or observation of teachers. individual participants expressed their need for improved teaching in the future (examples in table 2). additionally, some participants described critical incidents which, as they claimed, had changed their beliefs about teaching, for example, i4: discovering the importance of teacher-student relationship (teacher asking ls for opinion). p9: reflecting on a wrong assumption about one student who refused to work on a mother’s day card. s1: english day at school as a motivational tool for students’ l2 communication. tapsla.12575 p. 12/20 m. szyszka although critical incidents seem to be crucial in the development of every teacher (gabryś-barker, 2012), they occurred as a result of single experiences, and because of their individual character, they will not be further analyzed here from the perspective of a contextual approach. the third research question aimed to analyze the beliefs concerning l2 teaching in a post-pandemic situation. as the item regarding the beliefs about post-pandemic teaching was added to the questionnaire at a later stage of data collection, only five finnish and twenty polish participants provided the answers. for this reason, only the main common themes, without regard for context, have been traced and analyzed. participants (ten out of 25 individuals) generally agreed that teaching will involve the use of technology, for example, f3: we will learn to use more digital resources in class. f4: l2 learning in the future after this pandemic could include more technology and virtual possibilities [but] we need classrooms in order to be able to practice our skills. p9: i think the pandemic may bring more tech solutions into classrooms. p12: many teachers will rely on technologies that are currently used in online teaching; [they] will use many interesting things that they have found to engage their students. p14: teachers will be more open to use media, helpful websites, etc. p20: some teachers will more often apply innovative methods of teaching, like using online sources, technical equipment, etc., to improve their methods. three participants believed that distance learning will be continued, though in a changed form, for example, f1: more classes will be held online, e.g. a remote learning friday. f2: more distant learning. p13: society should consider the remote learning strategies in the case another pandemic breaks out. however, some participants (six out of 25) denied any changes, for example, f5: i think that when the covid-19 situation is over, language teaching will be pretty much the same as it was before it. p1: i think no visible changes will occur. context-related beliefs about l2 language learning… tapsla.12575 p. 13/20 interestingly, an individual identified the need for millennial teachers to enter the profession in order to meet learners’ expectations—p15: i think that [the] pandemic has shown that schools may require younger generation of teachers or teachers must be more and more creative in order to motivate ls. another one predicted a new role that a language teacher may be challenged to take in the classroom—p19: maybe teachers will become less important and the influence of the internet as the source of knowledge will be bigger. many individuals (11 out of 25) were concerned about the immediate postpandemic outcomes, such as lowered motivation of learners, their competence levels, and psychological needs for social contacts, for example, p5: i think that the level of not only language learning, but also general knowledge of students will drop significantly. p6: [covid-19 pandemic] may have an impact on the level of motivation and responsibility in students. p16: i believe that students and teachers will appreciate the classes in a school environment. f1: teachers and students are going to appreciate close proximity again. generally, the beliefs regarding teaching in the post-pandemic classroom centered around technology, teaching skills, and affective factors in l2 learners. discussion the beliefs about l2 learning generated data that were assigned to eight categories: value of exposure to the target language, l2 use, the l2 teacher’s supportive role in the process of learning, affective needs, motivation, knowledge of an l2 and language learning strategies. the analysis of the data for the purposes of responding to rq1 disclosed more cross-contextual similarities than differences. the participants frequently reflected upon their own experiences of learning before disclosing their beliefs, which complies with the operational definition of beliefs provided earlier (kalaja et al., 2016). regardless of context, they generally agreed that exposure to language and language use in a communicative and meaningful way are the foundations of l2 learning. the belief in the immense role of exposure and communicative use of the target language goes in line with the input and interaction approach to l2 acquisition (gass & selinker, 2008), which describes l2 learning as a process that moves from linguistic input, understood as exposure to language, through linguistic tapsla.12575 p. 14/20 m. szyszka output, or the production of language, to “feedback that comes as a result of interaction” (p. 317). the last component of the interaction approach was partially reflected in the participants’ responses on the role of an l2 teacher (cf. p34). however, apart from a few instances, the role of feedback was generally neglected in the narratives of the efl pre-service teachers. there were also few participants who believed that positive affect (e.g., joy) and motivation are critical factors, which is widely supported in the psycholinguistic literature (e.g., dörnyei & ryan, 2015). some very tentative remarks regarding context-related differences might be outlined on the basis of the beliefs about the teacher’s role in the process of language learning. finnish individuals held the belief that a teacher, being a representative of the education system, plays an important supportive role in l2 learning; polish beliefs focused on specific teaching skills that help in l2 learning; spanish participants’ beliefs referred to the affective side of an effective teacher. the difference was also visible in the last two categories of beliefs: some finnish and polish pre-service teachers expressed their belief that learning strategies—knowing how—are important, whereas israeli and polish individuals believed in the value of knowing grammar and vocabulary—knowing what. these provisional remarks, however, should be approached with caution because of the scant and unevenly distributed evidence. the beliefs about l2 teaching of the pre-service teachers were grouped into six categories: preferred teaching method or approach, teacher’s status, emotions, characteristic features of the good l2 teacher, and the need for improved teaching. the beliefs about the most effective method or approach to l2 teaching revealed that the pre-service teachers opted for communicative, task-based and learner-centered language teaching, encouraging group projects. as the participants reported, these beliefs were often rooted in their own experiences and compatible with beliefs about the value of l2 use in the process of learning. however, there were also voices favoring the efl teacher’s freedom of choice of method. the beliefs about a teacher’s status reflected contextual differences. the high status of the profession in finland (malinen et al., 2012) was confirmed by the finnish individuals. despite a low score for israel on the teacher status index scale (dolton et al., 2018), israeli participants expressed their respect towards the education system and teaching profession. this might be explained by their cultural background—three of them came from the bedouin minority that limits professional choices for females—and their gratitude for educational opportunities they had received. unlike finnish and israeli participants, polish and spanish held the beliefs that teachers coming from their contexts had low status. next, the affective side of the teaching process was underscored by several participants, regardless of context. they believed that teaching should mostly be associated with positive emotions of joy, happiness, motivation, and passion, which goes in line with a growing body of context-related beliefs about l2 language learning… tapsla.12575 p. 15/20 research into the role of positive psychology in l2 learning (cf. gabryś-barker & gałajda, 2016). such teacher characteristics as high level of linguistic expertise, teaching skills and soft skills were believed to be important for those who wanted to enter the efl teaching profession. these characteristics might be compared with the trainee teachers’ core competences: knowledge, skills, and social competences, included in legislative documents in the four contexts (see section: context-related beliefs about language learning and teaching). finally, the need for improved teaching was voiced by several participants who had shared their negative past classroom experiences and stated that they would act differently in the future. they often declared they would teach professionally in contrast to their past teacher(s). these beliefs were identified in each of the four contexts. similar results were reported by yüksel and kavanoz (2015). the beliefs about efl teaching in the future after the covid-19 pandemic situation might be roughly divided into those referring to technology, describing changes in efl teaching, and those concerning learners’ problems and needs. in general, the distant form of teaching during covid-19 pandemic induces the use of digital resources, which add a different dimension to inclass teaching. for this reason, as several participants of the study believe, a post-pandemic teacher with increased virtual teaching abilities might create a classroom in which more digital tools and resources would be used than ever before. moreover, emotional, post-pandemic effects are clearly identifiable among the beliefs regarding the future efl classroom. low motivation and decreased responsibility for one’s own learning exemplify the negative issues, whereas the need for student-teacher proximity in the real classroom represents the positive beliefs about the future classroom. a tentative picture of a future classroom inspired by the beliefs of the trainee teachers from the four contexts will be drafted in the concluding section. conclusions the aim of this study was to explore the beliefs of the millennial pre-service teachers coming from four different socio-cultural and educational settings: finland, israel, poland, and spain. the findings might help to create a preliminary account of future l2 teaching excellence informed by these beliefs because “individual teachers bring to teaching very different beliefs and assumptions about what constitutes effective teaching” (radwan, 2019, p. 39). nevertheless, acting is not possible without suitable affordances—the possibilities for action that the environment offers to the individual (van lier, 2004, p. 79). therefore, tapsla.12575 p. 16/20 m. szyszka the contexts that the pre-service teacher trainees live and learn in play a role in generating their beliefs about l2 learning and teaching. furthermore, any two disparate contexts definitely offer diverse affordances, based on socio-cultural and education systems. however, despite the contextual differences of the study participants, numerous similarities in their beliefs regarding l2 learning and teaching have been traced. these similarities, in turn, form a database for drafting an image of a universal and cross-contextual future l2 classroom. tentative as it is, the picture of a post-pandemic classroom conducted by a millennial foreign language teacher might be sketched from three perspectives: the teacher, the learner, and technology. first, an enthusiastic and creative l2 teacher with a high level of linguistic knowledge and passion for the target language and culture would create a supportive and motivating environment. the teacher’s main role would be to guide and manage the process of language learning. teaching would entail student-centered communicative tasks and projects that reflect the real life needs of the learners. since the l2 learning process is believed to be supported by ample exposure to the target language, learners would be exposed to linguistic input based not only on the teacher’s model but also on digital resources and multimedia. generally, the internet would be an important provider of linguistic knowledge and input. following from this, the teacher’s role would be to give learners plentiful opportunities to communicate and practice the l2 in a meaningful way. communicative language teaching supported with task-based and project-based language teaching might serve these purposes. apart from the student-centered learning that might take place in the classroom, teachers would occasionally be able to organize remote teaching days as an alternative and motivating form of l2 learning. this picture, however, should be addressed with caution as the scope of data collected does not allow for far-reaching generalizations. moreover, despite the evidence supporting the positive relationship between beliefs and actions (e.g., al harthy et al., 2013; borg, 2006; kalaja & barcelos, 2003), there is no guarantee that the participants of the present study will actually implement what they believe in. despite the limitations of the study, the results provided rich data regarding the beliefs about learning and teaching a foreign language that come from the new generation of pre-service teachers, being trained in four different sociocultural settings. the similarities in their beliefs have been summarized in the form of a tentative picture of the future classroom of a millennial teacher. context-related differences were identified in the participants’ beliefs about the teacher’s role in the process of language learning, preferred teaching methods or approaches and the status of the teacher. these findings may inform and inspire l2 teacher educators and stakeholders whose aim is to bring excellence to the l2 teaching profession that is to serve future generations. context-related beliefs about l2 language learning… tapsla.12575 p. 17/20 references al harthy, s. s. h., jamaluddin, s., & abedalaziz, n. a. 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(2015). the nature of language learners’ beliefs: a half-told story. international journal of english studies, 15(2), 41–60. https://doi.org/10.6018/ijes/2015/2/220061 context-related beliefs about l2 language learning… tapsla.12575 p. 19/20 http://meyda.education.gov.il magdalena szyszka überzeugungen angehender englischlehrkräfte der millennials-generation aus verschiedenen soziokulturellen kontexten über das fremdsprachenlernen und -lehren als prädiktor für künftiges lehrerhandeln im unterricht z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g das ziel der im vorliegenden artikel geschilderten qualitativen studie war es, überzeugungen über das lernen und lehren des englischen als fremdsprache (efl) von einzelnen vertretern der sogenannten millennials-generation zu sammeln und einer analyse zu unterziehen. die teilnehmer der studie waren 47 lehramtsstudenten in vier soziokulturellen kontexten: des finnischen, israelischen, polnischen und spanischen. ihre meinung ist von bedeutung, denn oft sind überzeugungen dynamisch mit handlungen verknüpft, und schon bald können efl-lehrer aus der millennials-generation sie im unterricht umsetzen. der in der studie verwendete kontextbezogene ansatz bot die möglichkeit, ähnlichkeiten und unterschiede in den überzeugungen finnischer, israelischer, polnischer und spanischer lehrkräfte in den fokus der diskussion zu nehmen. die festgestellten gemeinsamkeiten bildeten die grundlage für das konzept eines universellen, künftigen, post-pandemischen efl-unterrichts. schlüsselwörter: lehrerbildung, überzeugungen, soziokultureller kontext, fremdsprachenunterricht tapsla.12575 p. 20/20 m. szyszka theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 8 (1), 2022, pp. 35–52 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.10482 xavier martin-rubió https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9643-9530 universitat de lleida, spain irati diert-boté https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6964-5996 universitat de lleida, spain catalan law and business students in italy: the impact of a stay abroad on fluency and accuracy a b s t r a c t the growing number of english-medium instruction courses offered across europe is increasing the opportunities for student exchanges. this study follows the progress of three students from universitat de lleida after their erasmus experience at three different european universities, two in milano and one in macerata. the students took a monological english oral test before and after their stay abroad, and f luency and accuracy measures have been calculated from it. the students were also interviewed and participated in focus-group discussions. the measures from the two students who went to milano show an improvement in their english level, whereas the student who went to macerata performs even worse on his return. however, the experience from the two students in milano was substantially different from the one who went to macerata. using the ethnographic information and the qualitative data available, we bring forward arguments that can help to account for these different outcomes. keywords: f luency, accuracy, study abroad, additional language learning, englishization, elf student mobility in europe a growing number of universities across europe offer english-medium bachelor degrees. according to maiworm and wächter (2014), the number of english-taught programs in europe drastically increased between 2007 and 2014 in percentages that range between 112% for central west europe (the lowest increase) and 866% for south west europe (the highest increase). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.10482 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6964-5996 xavier martin-rubió, irati diert-boté36 the advantage of this process of englishization of higher education is that it removes linguistic barriers that made student exchanges more difficult in the past. the disadvantages include a domain loss for the local languages (salö, 2014) and the obstacles for integration for incoming students and staff who might be considering a longer stay (martin-rubió & cots, 2016). in this study, we follow the progress of three students from universitat de lleida (udl henceforth), a higher education institution (hei henceforth) situated in catalonia, who spent one or two semesters at another european hei. the three host heis are situated in italy (milano and macerata). the students took an english grammar test and carried out two tasks, one written and one oral, before and after their stay abroad. they also participated in focus group discussions before and after their stay, and were interviewed during their exchange. thus, the study focuses, on the one hand, on the analysis of the measures of accuracy and of the temporal measures of fluency of the oral task; and on the other, on the contextual circumstances of their stay, as self-reported in the group discussions and interviews. fluency and accuracy measurements there is a long tradition in second language acquisition to examine the evolution of fluency, accuracy and complexity in learners’ production as a way to keep track of their learning process. for the present article, only fluency and accuracy are considered. fluency has been defined as “the ability to talk with normal levels of continuity, rate and effort” (starkweather, 1987, p. 12). when speech is constantly interrupted by pauses, continuity is affected; when only a small number of syllables are uttered in a given second, the rate is low; and when the speaker struggles to find the suitable word, an unusual amount of effort is required. accuracy, on the other hand, has been described as “the ability to produce error-free language” (czwenar, 2014, p. 82), although what can count as an error is rather debatable and a subject of controversy. determining the levels of fluency and accuracy depends on, at least, two elements: the task to be developed and the level of language proficiency. apart from these, the level of accuracy might be influenced by the socio-educational context of the speaker, and the level of fluency by the speaker’s personality, such as self-confidence and extroversion (macintyre, dörnyei, clément, & noels, 1998; arnold, 1999), and by personal traits such as speech impairments, like stuttering (fortunatotavares, howell, schwartz, & furquim de andrade, 2017). nevertheless, for the present study, only the task at hand and the language proficiency are the foci of interest. catalan law and business students in italy… 37 different tasks present different demands on the people that engage in them. this can be easily gathered from a task comparison. by way of illustration, we could take the three following tasks: reading a text, describing a comic strip, and participating in a debate. while reading a text, the reader must only process the language written on the page; there is no need to improvise, even though the reader must still make sense of the words in the page. the person reading might produce pronunciation errors, but they would not be responsible for the lexical and grammatical elements in the text; the author of the text would be. when asked to describe a comic strip, one needs to choose what to say, and although the task itself narrows the vocabulary to be employed, one has a larger range of lexical choices than while reading. furthermore, in a monological comic-strip description, the participant has to solve the task in a self-sufficient way. in debates with other people, conversely, one can pick and reuse lexical and grammatical elements from the other participants. additionally, one needs to process the information conveyed by the other participants and decide what to say and how to say it, while simultaneously dealing with issues of taking, holding and yielding the floor. any person, thus, will speak with different levels of fluency and accuracy across these different tasks. language learners at the early stages of their learning processes will evidently struggle to formulate long meaningful chunks, subsequently producing a higher number of pauses in their speech, a portion of which will be situated in the middle of phrases, thus giving the impression to the listeners that they are not fluent (wennerstrom, 2000). as chambers (1997, p. 540) points out, “becoming fluent therefore is […] about pausing less often and pausing at the appropriate junctures in an utterance.” at a phonological level, hieke (1985) argued that fluent speech equals connected speech. when the number of uninterrupted syllables is measured, what is actually being measured is how capable the speaker is of connecting syllables without pausing; this is a great indicator of the progress in the language. this is further exacerbated in english, considering it is a stress-timed language; therefore, the learner needs to learn to connect syllables with an alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables that is different in syllable-timed languages like spanish (leal, 1995). accuracy is intimately-related to the notion of error and mistake. according to brown (2004, p. 216), “a mistake refers to a performance error in that it is a failure to utilize a known system correctly; while an error is a noticeable deviation from the adult grammar of a native speaker, reflecting the interlanguage competence of the learner.” in this case, the adult grammar of a native speaker is taken as the norm, and noticeable deviations are considered errors, whereas performance errors are described as mistakes. in the same vein, canagarajah (2015) argues that errors, unlike mistakes, are systematic and indicate the personal “grammar” of the language user. errors are an integral part in the learning of an additional language, and one good indicator of progress xavier martin-rubió, irati diert-boté38 is precisely the learner’s decrease in the number of errors. errors can be classified as lexical (word choice), phonological (pronunciation), semantic (meaning), syntactic (grammar), and pragmatic (content) errors (jiménez arias, 2004, p. 177). a special focus is placed in this article on pronunciation errors. figure 1 shows one of the two comic strips that our participants had to describe for their oral task. one of the participants used the expression “sequence” three times in the description, but pronounced it as / s̍e.kwens/ rather than the standard / s̍i .ːkwəns/ in all three occasions. it is, thus, not a mistake but a pronunciation error in the sense that the participant probably is unaware of the standard pronunciation of this word. figure 1. comic 1: picnic task (heaton, 1966). while describing the third picture of the strip, the participant says “the boys search the ball/ (0.6) /in.a:̍ prɒk.si̩ meɪt.li̩ es̍ neɪk/.” in the picture, we can see a boy looking for the ball inside the hole, and a snake approaching the hole, so we can imagine he wants to say something like “and a snake is approaching,” but the fact is that the sentence he produces is ungrammatical and that we can only make sense of it all with the help of the picture. focusing on pronunciation accuracy, if we decide he was producing the expressions “approximately” and “snake,” we could identify two pronunciation mistakes. rather than /ə̍ prɒk·sɪ·mət·li/, he generates a secondary stress in the fourth syllables (/a:̍ prɒk. catalan law and business students in italy… 39 si̩ meɪt.li/); he also utters “snake” in three rather than two syllables. moreover, he makes a lexical mistake, since he uses the adverb “approximately” rather that the verb “(to) approach,” and a grammar mistake, because he is using the wrong order and structure. needless to say, significant differences are bound to be found amongst different raters, which is why the two authors of this paper rated the cases independently and then discussed the different positions until a common ground was found. additional language learning at home and abroad the status of english in international communication has progressively gained momentum and its impact upon many societies (including the catalan and the spanish) is much more far-reaching nowadays than a few years ago. the necessity to learn the english language is thus evident, being english one of the central subjects in the catalan curriculum of both primary and secondary education. as an example, catalan students are gradually obtaining higher results in the assessments of basic competences at the end of primary and secondary education (generalitat de catalunya, 2017); nevertheless, those evaluations do not assess oral production, which students believe to be the most problematic area for them (diert-boté, 2016). in order to improve the competence in the english language during compulsory education, it is not uncommon for english learners to attend private language schools, to receive content subjects in english in many high schools— referred to as content and language integrated learning (clil)—and to go abroad, particularly during summer breaks. spending some time abroad is frequently regarded as one of the most effective ways of learning the language of the country where the stay takes place. although not as intensely as in other countries (park, 1997), sending one’s child(ren) to countries like the uk or ireland for two to five weeks during the summer break is generally perceived in catalonia as an effective way to boost the chances to learn english (tragant et al., 2017). when students start a university degree, heis normally offer similar options to help students to keep progressing in the english language. on the one hand, heis usually run language courses through their language centers addressed to two collectives: local students, who study additional languages (mostly—but not only—english); and international students, who can study the host university’s local language(s). for instance, udl offers catalan and spanish courses to international students, and there are several courses of english and other languages at different levels. xavier martin-rubió, irati diert-boté40 on the other hand, the equivalent to clil subjects at university are english for specific purposes subjects (esp) and content subjects taught in english, commonly referred to as english medium instruction (emi). maiworm and wächter (2014, p. 48) analyze the evolution of the number of programs taught in english (etps henceforth) in heis across europe and argue that the nordic region and central west europe are “the pioneers in the implementations and running of etps”; the authors also state that although the growth rates in these regions are below the average, this is only because “further growth becomes more and more difficult” given their leading role in this process. in turn, “the growth rates were highest in south west europe (866%),” although “most south european countries are still at the bottom of the ranking list—despite the impressive growth rates.” spain and italy belong to this south west europe region. several studies (cots, 2013; dafouz & camacho-miñano, 2016; doiz et al., 2014; mancho-barés & arnó-macià, 2017; salaberri-ramiro & sánchez-pérez, 2015) testify to the intensification of the englishization process in spanish heis. particularly at udl, the teaching in english in the academic year 2012–2013 accounted for 4.6%, whereas in the year 2016–2017 it rose to 6.1%. notwithstanding the increase, the percentages of programs in english, and more specifically of students enrolled in such programs, are still very low. ultimately, the third option that heis offer is study abroad programs, most notably the erasmus exchange program, which provides some students with the opportunity to spend one or two semesters at a foreign hei. unlike the summer-break stays discussed above, which normally take place in the uk or ireland, university exchanges cover many different countries. the top destination for udl students, for instance, is italy (udl, 2014). research has shown that study abroad (sa henceforth) benefits second/foreign language acquisition, especially oral proficiency (freed, 1990; ginsberg & miller, 2000). sa programs are naturalistic settings in which students can meet native speakers and thus participate in different communicative situations from those provided in educational settings (i.e., formal classroom learning) (manchón & murphy, 2002); yet, many of these students also enroll in language courses, so the combination of both settings seems to be the most appropriate one to learn a foreign language (llanes & serrano, 2011). although manchón and murphy (2002) mention contact with native speakers, on many occasions, and specially for the present study, native speakers of english are not what students (expect to) encounter in their sa experiences. lecturers, students, and staff generally coexist in an environment in which several languages are employed, but where english is often used as the only available lingua franca. when udl students decide to spend one or two semesters abroad, one of their goals is to improve their english in one of these english as a lingua franca (elf henceforth) settings, which is a feasible goal according to research. kaypak and ortaçtepe (2014) found out that students catalan law and business students in italy… 41 in an sa elf setting showed a shift in focus from accuracy to intelligibility and a higher level of self-efficacy, which led them to engage more frequently in interaction in the target language. in turn, borghetti and beaven (2015) point out that in an elf setting students not only experience lower levels of embarrassment, fear of being judged, and concern about participating in interaction; they also perceive a greater level of accommodation, negotiation, and cooperation strategies on the part of non-native speakers of english. therefore, these non-anglophone countries appear to be suitable places to practice english. koylu (2016) confirms these positive findings, adding the analysis of oral and written fluency, accuracy, and syntactic and lexical complexity to the picture. the participants in the study are turkish students in three different contexts: at home internationalization (ah), stays in countries where the target language is the national language, in this case england (sa) and stays in countries where the target language is not the national language (elfsa), in this case universities in austria, czech republic, denmark, finland, germany, greece, the netherlands, italy, poland, and portugal. koylu (2016, p. 173) identifies different accounts from students studying in countries such as denmark, the netherlands, germany, and finland in relation to those from students in italy or greece, with the different english level of the local residents as an important factor. figures from the eurobarometer (european commission, 2012, p. 23) in relation to the percentage of people in the different eu countries who claim they can hold a conversation in english show a very stark contrast between countries like the netherlands (90%) or denmark (86%), and countries like italy (34%) or spain (22%). there are, however, many other factors, such as the length of stay, the teaching practices of the host hei, the place of residence in the host city, or the network of friends sojourners establish, that also play a big role in the learning opportunities of the exchange students. research questions and methodological aspects the data used for this project come from a mixed methods research project which aimed to analyze the impact of a stay abroad on students from udl. the study consisted of a quantitative part that targeted all the students from udl selected to participate in the erasmus program in the 2013–2014 academic year, and a qualitative part that focused only on those travelling to denmark, italy, and the united kingdom. these three countries were selected because english plays very different roles in them. the 109 students who had been selected to participate in an erasmus exchange during the 2013–2014 academic year were asked to complete a questionnaire, a grammar test, a written task, and an oral xavier martin-rubió, irati diert-boté42 task. twenty-five of those 109 students completed all of it, and three of those 25 students had chosen an hei in italy for the sa. all the students provided their written consent to participate in the research project and the name of the three participants of this study has been replaced to preserve anonymity. beatriu, a business student, went to milano (hei code imilano16) for ten months. she spent a month in venice taking an italian course before travelling to milano. she was placed in a hall of residence on the outskirts of milano, where a great number of spanish erasmus students resided, although she shared a room with a slovakian student until february. alma, a law student, went to a different university in milano (imilano01) and stayed there for five months, from february 2014. she travelled to milano with a friend from lleida (that we will call gertrudis), another law student with whom she shared a room. they stayed in a different hall of residence, this one situated in the center of milano. at first, they mingled with italian students, but ended up hanging out with other mostly spanish erasmus students. they argued it was just easier to do that because they went to the same parties and had the same schedules, whereas many italian students worked and partied less often. they had many german, dutch, and romanian students in the hall of residence with whom they often talked. finally, josep maria, another law student, went to macerata (imacerata01) for six months, although in this case from september 2013. macerata is a much smaller place than milano. his best friends in macerata were two italians, a girl from córdoba (spain) and a greek student who had spent several years in italy and with whom he always spoke in italian. the oral task mentioned above consisted of a comic strip of six different frames that the participants had to describe in less than five minutes after spending up to a minute preparing what to say. two different comics were employed, comic 1 in the pre-tests (see figure 1) and comic 2 in the post-tests (see figure 2). a mistake while implementing the test to josep maria meant that he actually described comic 1 in both the preand post-tests. given josep maria’s performance in the post-test, one can only wonder what the result would have been if comic 2 had been used as originally planned. the six oral stories produced were subjected to a two-phase manual analysis. the first phase analyzed temporal measurements of fluency and measurements of quantity, and the second included disfluency and accuracy measurements. the first phase started with the identification of three types of chunks: silent pauses, filled pauses, and between-pauses units (henceforth bp-units). silent pauses are pauses of 0.25 seconds or longer, and filled pauses include hesitations, laughter or coughing. bp-units are stretches of talk found between silent/ filled pauses and are measured in syllables. a spreadsheet was used to indicate the type of chunk, the length in milliseconds for all chunks, the number of syllables, and the rates of each bp-unit. catalan law and business students in italy… 43 figure 2. comic 2: football task (heaton, 1966). five measures of quantity have been employed. speech time (st) results from adding the time of all the bp-units. ginther et al. (2010, p. 387) define speech time as “speaking time, excluding silent and filled pauses.” in turn, pause time (pt) is calculated by adding the time of all pauses (both silent and filled). total response time (trt) is the number of seconds the participant takes to complete the task and results from adding st and pt. speech time ratio (str) gives us the percentage of time that the speaker spent speaking in relation to the trt. the last measure of production is the number of meaningful syllables uttered. as for fluency, three temporal measures have been used, two devised for this project and the third (msr) adopted from ginther et al. (2010). the first two measure the speech rate, that is, the speed at which the syllables are delivered: the rate of speech time (rost henceforth) results from dividing the total number of xavier martin-rubió, irati diert-boté44 syllables uttered by the st; the average rate per bp-unit (arbpu) results from calculating the speech rate of every bp-unit, and then establishing the average rate of all bp-units. the third measure is the mean syllables per run (msr), which results from dividing the total number of syllables by the number of runs (or bp-units). for the second phase of the analysis, the bp-units in this spreadsheet were copied and pasted into another tab, and four new columns were added. two disfluency and two accuracy measures were chosen: on the one hand, repetitions and false-starts/self-corrections (fs/sc) on the one hand (disfluency); and pronunciation, and lexical and grammatical errors on the other (accuracy). these measures were determined separately by the two authors of this paper, who then compared and discussed their results. we started from a number of rules and guiding criteria, but even so several minor issues emerged during the meetings. for example, a rule to measure repetitions was that all repeated consecutive syllables would be counted. in the case of the utterance “in the_ in the house,” for instance, two repeated syllables were counted because the participant was undoubtedly repeating these syllables. however, in “ha_ had,” the two syllables are different so it was agreed that this would be considered a false-start, as we do not surely know what the speaker intended to say in the first syllable. pronunciation errors were particularly complex to determine. on several occasions, isolating the specific expression was what allowed us to come to a decision. the next two sections deal with the two different kinds of findings. an analysis of the results of the fluency and accuracy measures will be presented in results. results table 1 contains the figures for the six stories produced by the participants before and after their stays in italy. josep maria and beatriu start from very low msrs (3.88 and 3.15 respectively), but whereas beatriu increases to 5.26 msr (a 67% increase), josep maria actually decreases to 3.09 msr (a 20% decrease). alma’s msr increases 120%, from 5.45 to 12.18. alma and beatriu produce many more syllables in their post-stories (90% and 59% increases, respectively), whereas josep maria produces just one more syllable. also remarkably different are the pausing behaviors. str for alma and beatriu remain similar (small increases of 4.2% and 8.9%), whereas josep maria’s str decreases 33.2%. josep maria pauses more than he produces syllables, although we must indicate that there is a pause of more than eight seconds (chunk 62) that is partly responsible for this very unusual measure. speech rates also increase for alma and beatriu, whereas josep maria’s rate is slower in his post-story. catalan law and business students in italy… 45 table 1. quantity, temporal fluency, disfluency and accuracy measures josep maria pre-story post-story alma pre-story post-story beatriu pre-story post-story syllables 101 102 109 207 63 100 st 37.08 40.68 39.43 54.75 24.70 37.54 pt 23.72 59.13 14.32 16.88 14.90 17.76 trt 60.80 99.81 53.74 71.63 39.60 55.30 str 60.98% 40.75% 73.36% 76.43% 62.37% 67.89% rost 2.72 2.51 2.76 3.78 2.55 2.66 arbpu 2.58 2.46 2.63 3.66 2.44 2.65 msr 3.88 3.09 5.45 12.18 3.15 5.26 rep 9.90 6.86 0 0 1.59 7.00 fs/sc 2.97 3.92 0.92 0.97 3.17 6.00 pr e 6.93 0.98 1.83 0 3.17 7.00 l&g e 10.89 17.65 6.42 5.80 14.29 10.00 disfluency measures indicate very different patterns: alma never repeats syllables and produces very few fs/sc; beatriu clearly increases her repetitions and fs/sc in the post-story; and josep maria slightly decreases the number of repeated syllables per 100 syllables and slightly increases in fs/scs. combined with the fluency measures, we see that alma improves a great deal, josep maria performs worse, and beatriu is the one who improves in fluency measures but with more disfluency, which may be indicating that she is more willing to take risks. in pronunciation accuracy terms, josep maria only produces one error in his post-story, but this is due to the very limited number of words he uses. he spends 43 of the 102 syllables he produces in his post-story with the words “and,” “the,” “boy(s),” and “(foot)ball.” he even utters at least one word in italian (acqua), and possibly three more ( per, te and i). we are not sure about these last three because they are also words in catalan. in his pre-story, he makes seven pronunciation errors, but three of them correspond to the way he pronounces “sequence,” a word he does not use in the post-story. in josep maria’s case, and due to a mistake in the protocol, he described the same comic on both occasions, so that a very unusual situation arises: bp09 of his pre-story and bp12 of his post-story are almost identical. in the first he says “in approximately snake” and in the second “and approximately the snake.” we have counted two pronunciation errors in the pre-story (wrong stress in “approximately” and wrong vocalic sound before “s” in “snake”) and one in the post-story (still wrong stress, but this time the vowel has a reason to be there because of the definite article “the” before “snake”). xavier martin-rubió, irati diert-boté46 beatriu produced more pronunciation errors in her post-story, but this is mostly because of the vocabulary in the two stories. four of the seven pronunciation mistakes have to do with voiced final consonants, which she pronounces with total voicelessness (“dog”—three times and “bag”—once); two errors correspond to “mountain,” which she pronounces without the diphthong in the first syllable; and the last corresponds to the wrong presence of an “l” sound in “walking.” in the pre-story, in which she only uttered 63 syllables, there were no words used ending in final “g.” in the pre-story she mispronounced “hole” in two different ways, in fact (first without the diphthong and then without final /l/). so we can actually see some slight improvement in general, and the increase in pronunciation errors could be due to the lack of chances to make the errors. finally, alma makes no pronunciation errors in her post-story, and only two in the pre-story. wrong pronunciation of “hole” (no final /l/) and wrong vocalic sound in “third.” alma produces seven lexical & grammatical errors in her pre-story and 12 in her post-story, but since her post-story is almost twice as long, there is actually an improvement in accuracy (6.42 to 5.80 errors per 100 syllables). beatriu also improves (nine errors in her pre-story and ten in her post-story mean a 30% decrease in the number of errors per 100 syllables). josep maria produces 18 errors in his post-story, coming from 11 in the prestory. given both stories are just one syllable apart in length, accuracy worsens. in the next section, details from the contextual circumstances of the three students’ stay, as self-reported in the group discussions and interviews, will complement the fluency and accuracy analysis. insights from the qualitative data of the study the qualitative data for the italy data sub-set are, on the one hand, focus group discussions, and, on the other, interviews. table 2 provides details about the three group discussions. the reason why there are two post-focus group discussions is that the students who went to macerata did so during the first semester, which means they were back from italy in january already, so the focus group in june would have taken place too long after their return. the three students in the other focus group had just returned from italy, although whereas beatriu had spent a whole academic year in milano, alma and gertrudis had been there during the second semester. the interviews were conducted while the students were in the host heis. two researchers travelled to milano and macerata, and conducted three interviews in milano and one in macerata. alma and gertrudis were interviewed catalan law and business students in italy… 47 together, and the audio recording lasted 40’ 47’’ (int_mi_1). beatriu was interviewed separately, and it lasted 53’ 39’’ (int_mi_2). josep maria was interviewed in macerata, and the audio recording lasts 56’ 58’’ (int_ma_1). table 2 group discussions code date participants time pre-fg 18/06/2013 4 students (including beatriu) + 2 researchers 123 minutes post-fg1s 20/03/2014 3 students (including josep maria) + 2 researchers 53 minutes post-fg2s 17/06/2014 alma, beatriu, and gertrudis + 2 researchers 44 minutes three factors emerge from these groups discussions and interviews. a first factor concerns the starting self-confidence and proficiency level of the students. beatriu could not apply for an erasmus grant in the north of france, as she wanted to, because she did not have the required b1 level of english. she passed the test in june 2013, right before going to italy. however, throughout the interview she expresses her lack of confidence when speaking english. josep maria also starts the stay without the b1 level, whereas alma had a strong b1 and she is the one who benefits the most from the stay. the second element is where they lived and the people they interacted with the most (and the languages in which they did that). beatriu was accommodated in a hall of residence located on the outskirts of milano, which was full of spaniards (something she complains about). however, she shared a room with a girl from slovakia, with whom she had to use english. beatriu saw the need to move to another room to practice more italian and english. in fact, the three participants complained about a great number of spanish students in the program, and they realized that italy was not the best place to practice english, at least for two reasons: the low english level of italians and an excessive number of spaniards. gertrudis even said she practiced spanish (her l1 is catalan, after all). however, alma (and beatriu to a lesser extent) did improve their english, which might be due to the fact that they end up using more english than at home: beatriu with her slovakian room-mate, and alma (and gertrudis) with the german, dutch, and romanian people in their hall of residence. the third element is the nature of the expectations the three students had in relation to their stay. the three students in post-fg1s indicate they expected a higher presence of english in general, and admit they would change their destination if they could go back. josep maria mentions the czech republic and finland as places he would now choose, since at least there he would have an opportunity to practice english and to experience a truly different culture. however, learning italian was also part of the plan. the lessons at the three xavier martin-rubió, irati diert-boté48 universities were conducted in italian, and they had to take oral exams in that language, whereas non-spanish erasmus students took the lessons in english, as most did not have learning italian amongst their goals. alma, for example, improved her english but also learned italian. in the post-focus group she claimed that she would even write “a bit of italian” in her résumé. from josep maria’s post-story, it is obvious he also learnt italian. discussion and concluding remarks most research conducted in sa contexts seem to indicate that oral fluency is benefited from sa, whereas this does not seem to be the case for accuracy, where findings are less conclusive (juan-garau & pérez-vidal, 2007). freed et al. (2004) compared the progress of 28 american students of french studying in three different learning contexts. the authors discovered that determining the amount of time students actually spent using the target language was essential in order to accurately interpret the findings. apparently, the students in the immersion program, who were the ones with the greatest improvements, reported “devoting significantly more time to using french in out-of-class activities compared not only to the students in ah [at home] context but also to those in the sa context” (freed et al., 2004, p. 294). in this line, llanes et al. (2018) suggest that certain individual differences such as motivation and foreign language use in free time (among others) play a role in the language gains students will experience in the different contexts to the point that they can account for the different outcomes. in our case, the two students who went to milano learnt some italian and simultaneously improved their english proficiency. although their immersion in the italian language was high, they also mixed enough with students from different countries and linguistic backgrounds, which may have made an impact on their progress in english. in contrast, the student who went to macerata does not show an improvement in the language. the stay has certainly done little for his english, and his feeling at the end is that his destination was a place similar to lleida (similar weather, food, culture, etc.), and although he has learnt some italian, he would have probably benefited more from a stay in a country further north within europe. the results highlight the many factors contributing to the context of stay abroad (which in turn affect the process of additional language learning) and resonate with findings from other studies like borghetti and beaven (2015), kaypak and ortaçtepe (2014), kalocsai (2009) and koylu (2016). these factors can be the role that english plays in the specific campus and in the town/city/country, the language repertoires of the network catalan law and business students in italy… 49 of friends the students establish, and the attitudes which the different subjects adopt towards the different local languages. some limitations of the study must be pointed out. the oral tests were monological productions in which students had a minute to prepare themselves and then they improvised a short descriptive text. however, what they practiced the most during their stay were dialogical improvisations. in this sense, it would have been interesting to analyze the students’ progress in dialogical productions in english. another limitation of the study is that josep maria was given the same comic on his return, and even though several months had elapsed, this makes the comparison with the other two participants problematic. certainly, it would have been more suitable to follow the same strategy for all the participants. another issue is the small number of participants; this entails that the results must be taken with caution. a final limitation has to do with the monolingual bias of this study. the project as a whole aimed at identifying the impact of the stay on three main areas: language level, intercultural awareness, and feeling of europeanness. although the students participating in the qualitative part of the study were asked about their relationship with the local languages, it would have been very enriching to include tests in the local languages of their host heis to see their progress in those languages. i believe this paper points towards at least two different lines for further research. the first would be new studies comparing preand post-oral productions of not just monological but also dialogical tasks from students engaged in different kinds of methods to improve their english. the second would be a more ethnographic approach to the many factors influencing additional language learning while studying abroad. references arnold, j. 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(2014). language ideology and shifting representations of linguistic threats: a bourdieusian re-reading of the conceptual history of domain loss in sweden’s field of language planning. in a. k. hultgren, f. gregersen, & j. thøgersen (eds.), english in nordic universities: ideologies and practices (pp. 83–110). john benjamins. starkweather, c. w. (1987). fluency and stuttering. prentice hall. tragant, e., serrano, r. & llanes, a. (2017). learning english during the summer: a comparison of two domestic programs for pre-adolescents. language teaching research, 21(5), 546–567. universitat de lleida, 2014. memòria acadèmica del curs 2013–2014. lleida: edicions de la universitat de lleida. http://www.udl.cat/export/sites/universitat-lleida/ca/organs/secretaria/. galleries/docs/memoria-academica/memoria_general_de_la_udl_13_14.pdf wennerstrom, a. (2000). the role of intonation in second language f luency. in h. riggenbach (ed.), perspectives on fluency (pp. 102–127). university of michigan press. xavier martin-rubió, irati diert-boté katalanische juraund wirtschaftsstudenten in italien: die auswirkung eines auslandsaufenthalts auf sprachkompetenzen und ausdrucksfähigkeit z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die wachsende zahl der in ganz europa angebotenen englischsprachigen lehrveranstaltungen verbessert die möglichkeiten des studentenaustauschs. in der vorliegenden studie werden die fortschritte von drei studenten der universitat de lleida nach ihrem erasmus-aufenthalt an drei verschiedenen europäischen universitäten – zwei in mailand und xavier martin-rubió, irati diert-boté52 einer in macerata – analysiert. vor und nach ihrem auslandsaufenthalt nahmen die studierenden an einer monologischen mündlichen englischprüfung teil, bei der ihre sprachkompetenzen und ausdrucksfähigkeit beurteilt wurden. darüber hinaus wurden sie interviewt und beteiligten sich an fokusgruppendiskussionen. die ergebnisse der beiden studenten, die nach mailand gegangen sind, zeigten eine verbesserung ihrer englischkenntnisse, während der student, der nach macerata gegangen ist, nach seiner rückkehr noch schlechter abschnitt. allerdings unterschieden sich die erfahrungen der beiden studenten aus mailand erheblich von denen des studenten aus macerata. anhand von ethnographischen informationen und verfügbaren qualitativen daten wird ein versuch unternommen, die voneinander abweichenden ergebnisse nachzuvollziehen. schlüsselwörter: sprachkompetenzen, ausdrucksfähigkeit, auslandsstudium, fremdsprachenlernen, engischisierung, elf theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (1), 2023, pp. 1/20 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12006 silvie válková https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3481-4478 palacký university in olomouc, the czech republic jana kořínková https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1994-6387 palacký university in olomouc, the czech republic approaches to teaching agreement and disagreement in selected coursebook series a b s t r a c t the article focuses on the explicit teaching of language used to express agreement and disagreement in the popular english language coursebooks english file and navigate. it reviews the current research on teaching various aspects of polite language and politenesssensitive speech acts and analyses and compares the explicitly taught phrases of agreement and disagreement in the two selected coursebook series, as well as the methods of their presentation and the amount of background theoretical information provided to students and teachers to facilitate their proper usage. differences were identified not in the inventories and language representation of the explicitly taught phrases, but mainly in the background support available for students and teachers on their usage. keywords: teaching politeness, politeness-sensitive speech acts, english language coursebooks, agreement, disagreement agreement and disagreement belong to the most common speech events and as such, they have been studied from different perspectives, for example, philosophy (frances & matheson, 2019), contract negotiations (susskind, 2014), managing people (brett & goldberg, 2017), nonverbal audio-visual cues (bousmalis, mehu, & pantic, 2009), in cross-cultural comparison (johnson, 2006; chang, 2009; pattrawut, 2014; farrokhi & arghami, 2017) and also in foreign language teaching (pearson, 1985; bavarsad, eslamirasekh, & simin, 2015; kurdghelashvili, 2015). the present article focuses on agreement and disagreement in foreign language teaching, specifically on how these essential speech acts are explicitly addressed in selected english language coursebook series which are popular in the czech republic. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12006 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3481-4478 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1994-6387 foreign language learners generally find it difficult to perform politenesssensitive speech events (leech, 2014, p. 186) in the language they learn; such speech events, however, belong to the competences students are supposed to master. according to the common european framework of reference for languages (council of europe, 2001, p. 108), politeness conventions and norms are an integral aspect of sociolinguistic competence. teaching and learning sociolinguistic and pragmatic competences is challenging, especially in formal foreign language education contexts. it means being able to read situations and understand what is the right thing to say or do; it means knowing when to speak out and when to remain quiet, when to offer sympathy, when to give compliments, and also, of course, when and how to agree or disagree with others. since students in the czech republic learn english in a context where it is not spoken on an everyday basis, coursebooks remain an essential part of teaching and learning the language and their role in portraying relevant speech situations and speech events is very important. it seems to be a known fact that mistakes in grammar are generally accepted with more understanding on the part of the listener than mistakes in sociolinguistic or pragmatic competences. according to broersma (2001), for instance, native speakers would most probably think that people making such mistakes are ill-mannered, dishonest, insincere or rude. while many polite expressions and phrases might be acquired through implicit learning by means of repeated exposure, items which are frequent and useful should be the focus of explicit teaching and learning (kennedy, 2008). consequently, there is an unnegotiable need to include politeness language and strategies into any foreign language teaching and learning program. the theoretical background of politeness and the list of politeness-sensitive speech events have already been established by researchers. what has not been fully determined is the degree of correspondence between the theoretical findings and their practical application, which also includes the question to what extent commonly used coursebooks help learners develop and shape their understanding of politeness conventions in english. theoretical background our analysis of the currently popular coursebook series has been inspired by leech’s monograph (2014). we decided to follow the set of politeness-sensitive speech events that he uses to exemplify the maxims of the general strategy of politeness. in leech’s view, these maxims (e.g., generosity, tact, approbation, modesty, obligation, agreement, opinion reticence, sympathy, feeling reticence) tapsla.12006 p. 2/20 s. válková, j. kořínková are just variant manifestations of the same super strategy, that is, the general strategy of politeness. in leech’s theory, the politeness-sensitive acts of agreement and disagree ment (leech, 2014, p. 201) represent the maxims of agreement and opinion reticence related to the general strategy of politeness. according to him, in responding to somebody’s opinions or judgements, agreement is the preferred response; it shows consideration for the other person’s opinion or judgement. this is also supported by pearson’s (1985, p. 102) research where, as a response to 1,170 occurrences of expressions of opinion, agreement was used in 137 cases while disagreement occurred in 49 cases. disagreement is seen as a dispreferred reaction. in some cultures (e.g., in japan or china) it may be even considered impolite to present a different opinion from that of one’s supe riors (e.g., lecturer–students). thus, when people disagree, they tend to do it hesitantly, indirectly, or with mitigation (e.g., concessive agreement followed by disagreement yes, but… or partial disagreement introduced by the deliberation signal well…) (pearson, 1985, p. 202). disagreement or dispreference can be, according to levinson (1983, p. 339), also expressed by a pause before replying or by a nonresponse. although the above-mentioned applies generally, there are situations when agreement would be a dispreferred reaction (e.g., i’m getting fat) or, on the other hand, when disagreement is accepted and highly valued (e.g., political parties’ discussions or the discourse of academic debate). agreement and disagreement have already been studied in the context of various languages, language comparisons and also with respect to the degree to which the presentation of the two speech events in certain coursebooks matched that of native speaker use. the results of pearson’s (1985) analysis of native speaker data show that individual expressions of agreement or disagreement appear in six groups referring to different levels of politeness. there are three types of agreement (i.e., equal, upgraded or scaled-down). agreement is equal if the assessment in reaction to an opinion is of the same or a similar level (e.g., yeah. yeah, that’s what i think). if agreement makes the expressed opinion stronger by an intensifier or stronger evaluation, it is upgraded (e.g., yeah right. well, of course. isn’t he cute. – oh, he’s adorable). on the other hand, it is scaled-down if the degree of certainty is lower or evaluation is more moderate (e.g., they’re great. – nice yeah). disagreement is also divided into three types according to the level of politeness (i.e., qualified, different or opposite). qualified disagreement is the “i agree but…” type. the second part usually gives explanation by citing an exception to the previous opinion. different disagreement assigns either different degree of certainty or different characteristics or quality (e.g., he got this country back on its feet. – … before you go further, the thing that got this country back on its feet was wwii). the least polite type is opposite disagreement which, surprisingly, was also approaches to teaching agreement and disagreement… tapsla.12006 p. 3/20 the most frequent type of disagreement in pearson’s data (e.g., chinese food is good. – i don’t think so). the results drawn from pearson’s analysis of naturally occurring data show that agreement and disagreement occur only as optional responses and the preceding context plays an important role. the most typical syntactic form of expressing agreement and disagreement is the declarative sentence. in terms of politeness, agreement contains positive interactional qualities and as such, it is polite. disagreement contains negative qualities and it occurs less frequently when the interlocutors highly value the relationship between them. the comparison of native speaker data and the analyzed coursebooks showed that the expressions of agreement in textbooks were mainly idiomatic (e.g., i’d go along with you. i take your point), which, on the other hand, did not occur in the corpus of conversation among native speakers. the performative verb disagree did not occur in pearson’s data at all, the verb agree occurred more frequently in the coursebooks than in the data. the expressions of disagreement used in the coursebooks did not occur in the data or occurred with very low frequency. pearson (1985) stated that the native speaker intuition of the writers of the coursebooks she analyzed “does not accurately reflect what native speakers actually say in expressing agreement/disagreement” (p. 142). research related to teaching politeness speech acts from textbooks in formal education general coursebook evaluation is particularly important in order to examine possible deficient points in the existing materials and thus give teachers a possibility to enhance the quality of the teaching process by employing different strategies to compensate for the deficiencies. it may give teachers necessary information when selecting the appropriate coursebook as well as familiarize them with the strengths and weaknesses of the chosen material. the history of coursebook evaluation goes back to the 1980s and there exist numerous models, methods, and approaches to coursebook evaluation (e.g., grant, 1987; cunningsworth, 1995; tanner & green, 1998; kayapinar, 2009; abdelwahab, 2013; demir & ertas, 2014). while the criteria considered for evaluation are related to various perspectives—for example, contents, skills, layout, and various practical considerations (ranging from less than twenty to more than a hundred items), pragmatic and sociolinguistic competences have not been traditionally included as a separate aspect to assess. in cases where they are reflected, then it is most probably within the local and target culture criteria. recently, however, intercultural and socio-cultural perspectives seem to be emerging both in general coursebook evaluation (farzaneh, kohandani, & nejadansari, 2014; tapsla.12006 p. 4/20 s. válková, j. kořínková azarnoosh et al., 2018) and in research articles focused on coursebook evaluation of various speech acts (see below). research related to teaching politeness-sensitive speech acts in formal education research related to teaching and learning pragmatics, sociolinguistics or politeness-sensitive speech acts has been approached from various perspectives—for example, whether and to what extent it is in fact possible; which speech acts are covered and how, either in one coursebook or a coursebook series. the effects of pragmatics instruction in foreign language teaching were explored by rose (2005), who concluded that many areas of pragmatics seem to be teachable and that explicit instruction tends to render better or more permanent results. similar conclusions were reached by alcon soler (2005), whose research into learners’ knowledge and ability to use request strategies in english showed that groups of students taught explicitly and implicitly both outperformed the control group, with the former group being at some advantage. the effects of teaching and learning pragmatics in classrooms were also researched by vellenga (2004) who analyzed english as a second language and english as a foreign language textbooks with respect to the use of metalanguage, explicit treatment of speech acts and also metapragmatic information, with the aim to determine the amount and also quality of pragmatic information included. she concluded that “there is a dearth of metalinguistic and metapragmatic information related to ways of speaking in textbooks” (2004) and that learning pragmatics from textbooks is highly unlikely (p. 13). bardovi-harlig and griffin (2005) conducted a pragmatics awareness activity with the aim to determine whether foreign language students can identify pragmatic infelicities and whether they can remedy them. they conclude that intermediate students develop pragmatic awareness even without any specific instruction, that is, they know what to change, however, they have some difficulties with how to change it. “this seems to indicate dual foci for instruction: content and form” (bardovi-harlig & griffin, 2005, p. 411). the first, according to them, is sociocultural, the second depends on the level of linguistic development and it is likely that learners can take advantage of instruction in form. the range of speech acts and the way they are distributed in selected coursebooks were studied by moradi, karbalaei, and afraz (2013). their results show a difference between two series (1,100 different speech acts in one, 275 in the other one) indicating one of them more suitable for teaching pragmatics and communicative functions. alemi and irandoost (2012) focused on two speech act strategies (complaints and compliments) at different levels of the approaches to teaching agreement and disagreement… tapsla.12006 p. 5/20 same coursebook and concluded that although the books were rich in terms of the number of the two speech acts, the presentations strategies were rather limited. in contrast to their results, delen and tavil (2010) demonstrated that complaints, despite being important, were almost ignored in several series of intermediate coursebooks. in the czech context, the sociolinguistic dimension and polite language in selected a1–a2 and c1 popular english coursebooks were researched by babická and nevařil (2015, 2016). they found out that all levels of coursebooks present a number of polite phrases, but these mostly appear in tasks focused on raising awareness of polite communication with a limited space for their production and practice. based on the available research, pragmatics and politeness are mostly considered to be teachable, although the choice of method may influence the effect since the explicit approach seems to generate more favorable results. concerning english language coursebooks, several researchers point out that not all speech acts are given due attention—strategies used to present them sometimes appear limited and not enough space is created for learners’ practice and independent production. more information and an overview of recent research can be found in the publication issues in coursebook evaluation (2018). the authors equip language teachers and researchers with fundamental concepts in book evaluation, including intercultural and socio-cultural perspectives in coursebooks and their evaluation, and also explain how to evaluate the authenticity of conversations in textbooks. research questions and procedure for our analysis, we chose two currently popular coursebook series designed for young adult/adult learners of english for general purposes. these series, english file 3rd edition and navigate, have been used to teach students not majoring in english at the institute of foreign languages at the faculty of education and at the language centre at the faculty of arts of palacký university in olomouc, czech republic. our analysis aimed to answer the following questions: 1. how extensively are the speech acts of agreement and disagreement explicitly covered in the selected coursebooks? is the presentation of these inductive or deductive? 2. how are agreement and disagreement linguistically represented? 3. what background information is made available for students and teachers on the culture-specific politeness norms of agreement and disagreement? tapsla.12006 p. 6/20 s. válková, j. kořínková both sets of coursebooks (13 books in total) were manually searched, first registering the speech act coverage in general, then focusing specifically on explicitly taught language used to express agreement and disagreement. all relevant expressions and phrases were recorded together with their method of presentation. corresponding teacher’s books (13 books in total) were consulted to identify their overall approach to teaching functional language as well as the amount of additional background information provided to teachers on culture-specific issues of expressing agreement and disagreement in english. the obtained data were then compared between the two series of coursebooks. general approach to teaching politeness in the selected coursebooks the overall analysis revealed that the majority of politeness-sensitive speech acts, as defined by leech (2014), were covered by both coursebook series, but not equally. apart from agreeing and disagreeing, the most frequently represented speech acts were advising, apologizing, and requesting. politeness in english file english file comprises a series of coursebooks designed for adults and young adults who want to learn english for general purposes. the series has been in print since 2012 as an updated version of the internationally popular new english file series. the main aim of the course series is to provide “the right mix of language, motivation and opportunity to get students talking” (oxford university press, 2020). it features seven coursebooks in total: beginner (a1), elementary (a1–a2), pre-intermediate (a2–b1), intermediate (b1–b2), intermediate plus (b1–b2), upper-intermediate (b2), advanced (c1). at each level, the authors formulate the main needs of the respective target group of students, which range from being sufficiently motivated to communicate by interesting and varied tasks (a1–a2 levels), through avoiding the plateau and keeping track of progress (b1–b2 levels), to expanding lexis with focus on idiomatic language and appropriate levels of formality (c1 level). acquiring polite language is not presented as an explicit teaching goal. rather, students seem to be expected to pick up the norms of politeness through being exposed to various communicative situations and asked to notice and reproduce certain functional language phrases, paying attention mostly to their pronunciation. approaches to teaching agreement and disagreement… tapsla.12006 p. 7/20 throughout the series, functional language is presented primarily in a special section called practical english (colloquial english in the upperintermediate and advanced coursebooks), which concludes every second unit of each book and is designed to teach students “to survive in english in travel and social situations” (latham-koenig, oxenden, & seligson, 2012, p. 28) and in the last two books of the series to expose them to “completely unscripted authentic spoken english” (latham-koenig & oxenden, 2014, p. 5). all these special sections feature videos of various everyday situations as a framework for introducing useful functional expressions and phrases. the presentation strategy is almost exclusively inductive. students are asked to watch the videos, answer open or true/false questions, notice key social english phrases and then focus on their form while completing ‘fill in the missing words’ tasks. finally, they are asked to act out parts of the presented dialogues and assess their progress in functional language using a check box (in the case of the last two books of the series, they are asked to speak on the topic explored throughout the section). in addition, some politeness-sensitive language is occasionally introduced as a part of speaking or grammar sections of the coursebooks. in such cases, the target expressions and phrases are mostly presented deductively—they are listed in a box marked with a magnifying glass and students are asked to go through them with the teacher and then use them in discussion. in the relevant teacher’s books of the series, the information provided for teachers is almost solely procedural. additional support is primarily offered on how to make an activity more or less demanding or which extra activities can be done with students, while information on culture-specific aspects of the english language is very rare, mostly concerning the nature of a person’s accent. only a few comments on issues regarding politeness were registered (see below). politeness in navigate the navigate series has been in print since 2015 and its authors state they take an innovative approach to language learning founded rigorously on academic principles including research into second language acquisition. the state-of-the-art syllabus is not only based on the latest research, but also on piloting and practical teacher feedback. the navigate series has been based on the oxford 3000 (i.e., a list of 3,000 core words that have been chosen based on their frequency in the oxford english corpus and relevance to learners of english). the whole course is divided into six books: beginner (a1), elementary (a2), pre-intermediate (b1), intermediate (b1+), upper-intermediate (b2), advanced (c1). in terms of politeness, navigate focuses explicitly and in detail on various aspects of speaking, such as appropriately polite language for a given situation tapsla.12006 p. 8/20 s. válková, j. kořínková or tactics for holding the floor in a conversation. in lesson four of every unit, speaking and writing, navigate provides appropriate communication practice for work, study or social life with an emphasis on language production. the lesson also contains two language focus boxes: language for speaking and language for writing. the language for speaking box lists useful phrases that students can use to complete a task about a particular topic. navigate teaches rules mainly inductively. first, learners are given a bank of examples of the rule and only then see a part of the rule and are guided to think about how to complete it. there is evidence that for appropriate rules this works as well, and perhaps better, than giving the rule first (merifield et al., 2015, p. 24). similarly, when teaching appropriately polite language, students are first introduced to various situations in which politeness-sensitive speech events are used and then they are guided to think about how and when particular phrases are used (e.g., they are asked to think about the level of formality of the situation, whether the agreement or disagreement is strong or weak, etc.). afterwards, they can check their answers in the language for speaking box and they are given various tasks to practice new phrases in a conversation. relevant teacher’s books provide additional information about teaching politeness in smart communication boxes. at lower levels, it is suggested that in many everyday situations people react automatically, using set expressions. this is why learners of english need to learn chunks of language including their sound patterns (stress and intonation). they should also be reminded that politeness in the uk and the usa is culturally very important. at higher levels, students learn more complex phrases with the focus on how polite (or impolite) the phrases are and what it is that makes them (im)polite. teachers are advised to remind them that the way of uttering each phrase will have a significant impact on the message they convey (neutral or polite intonation is more effective in communication than using direct language and stronger intonation). results in both coursebook series, language to express agreement and disagreement in spoken communication is explicitly taught from the lowest level and the complexity of phrases is developed from a1 to c1 levels. navigate, unlike english file, also provides some explicit information on agreement and disagreement in written communication. approaches to teaching agreement and disagreement… tapsla.12006 p. 9/20 explicit teaching of agreement and disagreement in english file at the a1–a2 levels (beginner and elementary coursebooks), agreement and disagreement are not treated as separate language functions. simple ways of agreeing and disagreeing are introduced within the grammatical context (e.g., yes, i am/do/can/have). some common phrases (sure!; great idea!; me, too; ok.; no, sorry; no, thanks) are included within the social english phrases lists, together with other basic practical phrases to be used in situations like shopping, booking into a hotel, sightseeing, etc. disagreement is represented by fewer phrases than agreement. no culture specific background information or explanation is provided apart from the fact that “nobody knows for sure what the origin is of the expression ok” (latham-koenig et al., 2015, p. 14). at the b1–b2 levels (pre-intermediate to intermediate plus coursebooks), more phrases expressing agreement and disagreement are explicitly taught in the context of giving opinions (i agree/don’t agree; i’m not sure), responding to plans and predictions (i hope so/not; i think /don’t think so; i doubt it; maybe, etc.), reacting to what people say (you’ve got to be kidding me; i don’t believe it! oh, no!), accepting and rejection suggestions (it’s a great idea; it’s not bad, but…) or debating a topic (i completely agree/partly agree/completely disagree with that). again, no additional information or explanation is provided on how to use these expressions, apart from the model situation they are introduced in. in learning the phrases, students are repeatedly encouraged to pay attention to appropriate intonation, although it is not explained why. students are also asked to translate the phrases to their mother tongue, which can potentially lead to discovering some awareness of culture specific norms, but also depends on the quality of translation and the teacher’s monitoring and input. the upper-intermediate coursebook (b2) does not supply students with any new phraseology related to agreement or disagreement, but just reminds them briefly of the useful language they have learned at the previous levels (lists of phrases in the useful language box) to support speaking activities. however, at one point the book provides brief information that it is important to use friendly intonation while responding to what someone says, so as not to sound unfriendly or uninterested (latham-koenig, 2014, p. 5). in the advanced coursebook (c1), students are presented an overview of expressions for agreeing and disagreeing in the speaking section of the introductory lesson. nine basic phrases are categorized in to three types: agreeing (i totally agree; that’s just what i think, too; absolutely!), half agreeing (i see your point, but…; i see what you mean, but…; i agree up to a point, but…) and disagreeing (i’m not sure i agree with you; i’m afraid i don’t really agree; i don’t really think you’re right). at this point, it is explained to the students that british people avoid using strong expressions of disagreement, but rather try tapsla.12006 p. 10/20 s. válková, j. kořínková to soften their disagreement by half-agreeing or by using softening expressions like i’m afraid, i’m not sure) (latham-koenig, oxenden, & lambert, 2020, p. 5). no further supportive information is provided in the teacher’s book, students are only asked to drill the phrases with focus on the appropriate intonation and sentences stress, and then use them in a discussion over the given controversial topic. no more space is devoted in the book to the explicit teaching of agreement and disagreement. agreement and disagreement in navigate the a1 level includes agreement phrases in everyday phrases (tea? yes, please) and also in response to a request (yes, thank you; of course; sure. no problem). the reason for this is, as stated in the smart communication box of the teacher’s book, that disagreeing, that is, saying no politely is more complex. a simple no is considered very hard and direct (both in the uk and the usa), so teachers should rather suggest using sorry to mean no (particularly if someone asks for your help). the a1 level also develops agreement and disagreement in connection with grammar—the usage of short answers in present and past tenses, going to, would like, etc. in spoken and written mode (e.g., when writing thank-you notes to react to invitations). at the a2 level, agreement and disagreement are dealt with when teaching how to make suggestions, arrangements, requests, and when expressing opinions (yes, i’d love to; yes, that’s fine; no, i’m sorry but… i’m afraid not). in the smart communication boxes for teachers, it is again stressed that it is common to start with an apology when you give a negative reply, for example, to a request (i’m afraid in writing and sorry in speaking). polite intonation is emphasized too; students are advised to focus on how the intonation goes up to show they are being polite. the b1 level teaches additional and more complex phrases with similar emphasis as at the previous level—that it is generally considered more polite to give a more detailed reason why you, for example, cannot accept something than to simply say no. polite intonation is taught and practiced again. agreement and disagreement are introduced as part of teaching how to invite, make arrangements and respond to opinions (sounds…!; yeah, i agree; that’s a good point; true, but what about…; i take your point but…). levels b1+ and b2 focus on agreement and disagreement directly. students are taught phrases of strong and weak agreement and disagreement. they are reminded to be polite even if they do not agree, and are informed how important intonation is. they are warned that saying rubbish! is a very strong form of disagreement and that disagreeing politely in english is usually a question of being indirect (using softeners, e.g., actually,…; well,…, apologizing for approaches to teaching agreement and disagreement… tapsla.12006 p. 11/20 disagreeing, for example, sorry, but…, or sounding less certain than you really are, for example, i’m not sure about that). at the advanced level c1, teachers are again advised to focus on students’ ability to agree and disagree politely and to lead a balanced discussion in order to reach some conclusion in formal negotiations. to manage conversations, students are given some typical phrases to agree (i see what you mean; i suppose you’re right), to agree strongly (i couldn’t agree more), to disagree (i don’t think i’m with you there; i don’t see that at all), and to disagree strongly (i totally disagree with you). while students practice the phrases, teachers are advised to comment on their effective usage. for informal negotiations, phrases like i could go along with that; i’m happy with that for agreeing and frankly, i’m not really happy with that for disagreeing are introduced. both in formal and informal negotiations, students are advised to sound tactful and supportive of their negotiating partners. language of agreement and disagreement explicitly introduced in english file and navigate agreement thirty-one explicitly introduced phrases of agreement were recorded in the english file coursebooks and 41 in the navigate coursebooks. surprisingly, only a small proportion of these was presented in both series in an identical form. this common core of language explicitly taught to express agreement included the following phrases: absolutely/absolutely! i agree. i completely agree. i suppose so/i suppose… maybe. no problem. of course/of course! sure. that’s just what i thought. that’s right. yeah/yeah, … yes, i am/can/do/have. yes, of course. tapsla.12006 p. 12/20 s. válková, j. kořínková the remaining 18 expressions presented in english file and 28 in navigate were completely different or phrased partly differently. the modifications that we noticed varied in character: the navigate coursebook introduces more phrases that are rather tentative (e.g., i guess so, i suppose…) and more frequently include modal verbs (e.g., i think you could be right; that’d be great as opposed to i think you are right; that’s great in english file). the grammatical means to express more distant agreement were also used more commonly in navigate (e.g., that’s just what i thought/was thinking as opposed to that’s just what i think in english file). in terms of the length of the phrases used to express agreement, english file teaches more shorter ones (e.g., yeah; ok.), which, in comparison with those in navigate (e.g., yes, please; yes, thank you; that’s fine with me) may in some contexts sound less friendly or even curt. in agreement with pearson’s (1985) findings, we can say that the phrases explicitly taught in the two coursebook series were mainly declarative sentences with some usage of exclamations (four in navigate, six in english file). although some idiomatic phrases were introduced in our coursebooks (i could go along with that; i guess so, you’ve got a point there), they were rather infrequent. this is in contrast with pearson’s data, which showed that idiomatic forms of agreement constituted the most common type in the analyzed coursebooks, where they appeared, in fact even more frequently than in conversations among native speakers. we also decided to categorize the recorded phrases of agreement into the groups suggested by pearson, that is, equal, upgraded, and scaled-down. the results show that both navigate and english file make use of equal agreement (57.5% and 49% respectively) most frequently, which corresponds with pearson, who finds this type of agreement crucial for english language learners. our coursebooks differ, however, in the proportion of upgraded and scaled-down types. in navigate, the upgraded type constituted 18% of all phrases and the scaled-down type 24.5%, while in english file upgraded agreement was more frequent (35%) than scaled-down (16%). these outcomes are in accordance with the already mentioned findings, that is, navigate tends to teach phrases that are more tentative and distancing. disagreement thirty-one explicitly introduced phrases of disagreement were recorded in the english file series and 36 in the navigate series. the common core of language explicitly taught to express disagreement included only the following six phrases: i agree up to a point, but… i don’t/can’t agree. approaches to teaching agreement and disagreement… tapsla.12006 p. 13/20 i don’t think… i totally disagree. no, thanks. you can’t be serious! in comparison with agreement, the difference between the number of phrases explicitly introduced in english file and navigate is not so high. the number of common phrases, however, is lower than in the case of agreement (six common phrases for disagreement, 13 for agreement). what is surprising is the fact that the number of phrases taught to express disagreement in both coursebooks is not significantly lower than the number of phrases for agreement, despite the fact that disagreement is considered a dispreferred reaction. similarly to the expressions of agreement, navigate introduces more tentative phrases for disagreement (i’m afraid i can’t…) or partial disagreement phrases (yes, but…; i take your point, but…). the phrases presented in navigate also include more modal verbs (i can’t agree vs. i don’t agree) as well as softeners (like actually or well) to make the phrases sound less certain than the speaker really may be. the phrases presented to students in english file tend to be shorter and they usually do not include giving reasons for disagreement, which is, on the other hand, considered important in navigate, where a simple no is understood as very hard and direct. this is also the reason why some phrases for disagreement taught by navigate are preceded by an apology (sorry, but…), while in english file we did not find such a formulation of disagreement. as with the expressions of agreement, the phrases explicitly taught for disagreement were mainly declarative sentences with some examples of exclamations (two out of 36 in navigate, six out of 31 in english file). whereas pearson (1985) reported zero occurrence of the performative verb disagree in the data of native speakers, in our corpus of phrases this verb appeared in five different phrases. when trying to categorize the phrases for disagreement into the groups identified in pearson’s research, we found out that it was not as easy as with the phrases of agreement, which were distinguished by the type of modification (upgraded or scaled-down). the categories of disagreement are based on a larger context, that is, qualified disagreement (yes, but… type) gives some explanation, usually by citing an exception; different disagreement assigns different degrees of certainty, characteristics or quality. without a larger context, it was not possible to categorize the isolated phrases we recorded into the two aforementioned groups; therefore, we were only able to identify the phrases that clearly express the opposite type of disagreement, that is, such phrases that stand in opposition to the assessment made by the prior speaker. although this is the least polite form of disagreement, in pearson’s data, it appeared to be the most frequent type in native speaker communication. in our corpus, this tapsla.12006 p. 14/20 s. válková, j. kořínková type of phrase constituted 61% of disagreement phrases in navigate and 65% in english file, which supports pearson’s findings. conclusions two language coursebooks, english file and navigate, frequently used for teaching english to young adults and adults in the czech republic, were analyzed and compared with regard to the explicitly taught language of agreement and disagreement. it was found that the coursebooks take a partially different approach to teaching politeness, including agreement and disagreement, with a potential effect on the development of students’ pragmatic competence. differences were identified mainly in the areas of language representation and in the amount of background theoretical information provided for both teachers and students, so that the various agreement and disagreement phrases are able not only to be memorized, but also used appropriately in relevant situations. our first question inquired into the extent of expressive coverage of the speech acts of agreement and into the methods of their presentation. we found out that although both coursebook series explicitly presented a certain number of phrases used for these purposes at all levels, only navigate at one point explicitly teaches agreement and disagreement in written communication. most expressions and phrases of agreement and disagreement are presented in the context of more general language functions such as giving opinions, responding to plans and predictions, accepting and rejecting suggestions and invitations, or debating a topic. agreement and disagreement as a separate topic is included in the coursebooks b1+ and b2 in the navigate series and in the c1 coursebook in the english file series. as for the methods of presentation, english file introduces phrases expressing agreement and disagreement deductively in the form of language boxes, if part of the speaking sections, and inductively as part of video sequences, if part of the practical/colloquial english sections. in the presentation, students are almost always reminded to notice and copy the appropriate intonation and to translate the phrases into their mother tongue, which is of questionable benefit, because the translations do not have to be pragmatically accurate. in navigate, their presentation is predominantly inductive and tends to be accompanied by pragmatic information that includes not only reminders to use friendly intonation but also information about sociolinguistic appropriateness. students see the usage of various phrases in different situations and they are expected to notice when and how those phrases are used. the language for speaking box then provides them with answers before they practice the given phrases in a conversation. in the approaches to teaching agreement and disagreement… tapsla.12006 p. 15/20 smart communication boxes, teachers can find additional information about the cultural importance of politeness, level of formality, etc. our second question concerned the variety of the explicitly taught language for agreement and disagreement. in agreement with previous research, this language was mostly represented primarily by simple declarative sentences and occasionally by exclamations. the common core of phrases introduced in exactly the same form in both coursebook series is relatively small (13 phrases for agreement and only six phrases for disagreement). english file introduces less variety of phrases, especially to express agreement. the phrases taught in navigate are not only more numerous, but they also seem to be more varied—expressing subtler, less direct forms of response for agreement or disagreement. the most striking difference between the two coursebook series was identified in the amount of background information provided for students and teachers on the culture-specific politeness norms of agreement and disagreement. in english file, such information was extremely rare, as if the authors of the series took it for granted that all teachers using the coursebooks were sufficiently able to explain the appropriate context of usage of the individual phrases. this is hardly the case, especially where the phrases are introduced deductively, without the context of a communicative situation. in contrast, navigate provides teachers in smart communication boxes with additional information about the cultural importance of politeness, level of formality and other relevant information from the very basic level a1, explaining, for example, the intricacies of disagreement right at the beginning of students’ communication endeavors (saying no in english is more complex, it is usually accompanied by an apology or explanation). polite intonation is not only mentioned but also fully explained at all levels, with the aim to teach students that sounding polite, tactful, and supportive is very important. out of the two analyzed coursebook series, navigate, claiming an innovative approach to supporting english language learning in young adults and adults, clearly seems to be a better choice for acquiring appropriate politeness strategies (including those to express agreement and disagreement), which is perceived as an important goal of english language teaching. of course, any coursebook is only a tool and the resulting pragmatic competence of students also depends on their teacher’s personal input and on the nature/amount of practice and authentic language input both in and outside the english lessons. further research should be concerned with identifying to what extent the usage of a particular coursebook is reflected in the actual student pragmatic competence. tapsla.12006 p. 16/20 s. válková, j. kořínková references abdelwahab, m. m. 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(2015). the sociolinguistic dimension in elt coursebooks. in c. haase, n. orlova, & j. c. head (eds.), elt: new horizons in theory and application (pp. 15–30). cambridge scholars publishing. oxford university press. (2020). english file, 3rd ed. retrieved from https://elt.oup.com/ catalogue/items/global/adult_courses/english_file_third_edition/?cc=cz&sellanguage=cs& mode=hub pattrawut, c. (2014). a cross-cultural pragmatic study: politeness strategies and realizations of the strategies used to perform student-lecturer multiple disagreements by native speakers of thai and english. journal of educational and social research, 4(1), 147–158. https://doi.org/10.5901/jesr.2014.v4n1p147 pearson, e. (1985). agreement and disagreement: a study of speech acts in discourse and esl/ efl materials. (m.a. thesis). university of hawaii at manoa. retrieved from http://hdl. handle.net/10125/38616 rose, k. r. (2005). on the effects of instruction in second language pragmatics. system, 33, 385–399. tanner, r., & green, c. (1998). tasks for teacher education. longman. vellenga, h. e. (2004). learning pragmatics from esl & efl textbooks: how likely? tesl-ej, 8(2). retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej1068091.pdf susskind, l. (2014). good for you, great for me: finding the trading zone and winning at win-win negotiation. public affairs. coursebooks appleby, r., adkins, j., griggs, k., tomlinson, j., & wyatt, r. (2015). navigate b1+ intermediate teacher’s guide. oxford university press. appleby, r., walker, s., & wyatt, r. (2016). navigate c1 advanced teacher’s guide. oxford university press. bartram, m., & pickering, k. (2016). navigate c1 advanced coursebook. oxford university press. dummet, p., & hughes, j. (2016). navigate a1 beginner coursebook. oxford university press. dummet, p., hughes, j., & wood, k. (2015). navigate a2 elementary coursebook. oxford university press. krantz, c., roberts, r., griggs, k., & lambrick, g. (2016). navigate b2 upper-intermediate teacher’s guide. oxford university press. tapsla.12006 p. 18/20 s. válková, j. kořínková https://elt.oup.com/catalogue/items/global/adult_courses/english_file_third_edition/?cc=cz&sellanguage=cs&mode=hub https://elt.oup.com/catalogue/items/global/adult_courses/english_file_third_edition/?cc=cz&sellanguage=cs&mode=hub https://elt.oup.com/catalogue/items/global/adult_courses/english_file_third_edition/?cc=cz&sellanguage=cs&mode=hub https://doi.org/10.5901/jesr.2014.v4n1p147 http://hdl.handle.net/10125/38616 http://hdl.handle.net/10125/38616 krantz, c., & norton, j. (2015). navigate b1 pre-intermediate coursebook. oxford university press. krantz, c., & roberts, r. (2016). navigate b2 upper-intermediate coursebook. oxford university press. latham-koenig, c., & oxenden, c. (2013). english file: intermediate: student’s book with dvd-rom. oxford university press. latham-koenig, c., & oxenden, c. (2014). english file: upper-intermediate student’s book. oxford university press. latham-koenig, c., & oxenden, c. (2015). english file: beginner student’s book. oxford university press. latham-koenig, c., & oxenden, c. (2019). english file: pre-intermediate student’s book. oxford university press. latham-koenig, c., oxenden, c., & boyle, m. (2015). english file: intermediate plus student’s book: with test and assessment cd-rom. oxford university press. latham-koenig, c., oxenden, c., & lambert, j. (2015). english file: advanced student’s book. oxford university press. latham-koenig, c., oxenden, c., lambert, j., lowy, a., & garcía, b. m. (2015). english file: advanced teacher’s book. oxford university press. latham-koenig, c., oxenden, c., lambert, j., & garcía, b. m. (2015). english file: intermediate plus teacher’s book. oxford university press. latham-koenig, c., oxenden, c., lowy, a., garcía, b. m., & boston, p. (2013). english file: intermediate teacher’s book with test and assessment cd-rom. oxford university press. latham-koenig, c., oxenden, c., lowy, a., & garcía, b. m. (2014). english file: upperintermediate teacher’s book. oxford university press. latham-koenig, c., oxenden, c., lowy, a., & garcía, b. m. (2015). english file: beginner teacher’s book. oxford university press. latham-koenig, c., oxenden, c., & seligson, p. (2012). english file: elementary student’s book. third edition. oxford university press. latham-koenig, c., oxenden, c., & seligson, p. (2012). english file: elementary teacher’s book: with test and assessment cd-rom. oxford university press. latham-koenig, c., oxenden, c., seligson, p., & hudson, j. (2019). english file: pre-intermediate teacher’s book. oxford university press. meldrum, n., aish, f., lambrick, g., smith, w. j., & wyatt, r. (2015). navigate a2 elementary teacher’s guide. oxford university press. merifield, s., homes, l., walker, s., & wyatt, r. (2015). navigate b1 pre-intermediate teacher’s guide. oxford university press. merifield, s., & rézmüves, z. (2016). navigate a1 beginner teacher’s guide. oxford university press. roberts, r., buchanan, h., & pathare, e. (2015). navigate b1+ intermediate coursebook. oxford university press. approaches to teaching agreement and disagreement… tapsla.12006 p. 19/20 silvie válková, jana kořínková ansätze zum unterrichten von zustimmung und ablehnung in ausgewählten kursbuchreihen z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g der artikel konzentriert sich auf die explizite vermittlung von sprachformen zum ausdruck der zustimmung bzw. ablehnung in den populären englisch-kursbuchreihen english file und navigate. dabei wird ein überblick über die aktuelle forschung zum unterrichten verschiedener aspekte der höf lichkeitskompetenz und höf lichkeitssensibler sprechakte geschaffen. des weiteren werden die explizit vermittelten ausdrücke der zustimmung und ablehnung in den beiden gewählten kursbuchreihen sowie die methoden ihrer präsentation und der umfang der theoretischen hintergrundinformationen, die schülern und lehrern zur verfügung gestellt werden, um ihre richtige verwendung zu erleichtern, analysiert und miteinander verglichen. unterschiede wurden nicht in bezug auf den inhalt und die sprachliche repräsentation der explizit vermittelten ausdrücke festgestellt, sondern vor allem hinsichtlich der hintergrundunterstützung, die schülern und lehrern zur verfügung steht. schlüsselwörter: unterrichten von höf lichkeitskompetenz, höf lichkeitssensible sprechakte, englisch-kursbücher, zustimmung, ablehnung tapsla.12006 p. 20/20 s. válková, j. kořínková theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 8 (2), 2022, pp. 1–23 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11862 luca cilibrasi https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8262-0542 faculty of arts, charles university, prague daniela marková https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5641-614x faculty of arts, charles university, prague the development of language skills in speakers of english as an additional language what matters more, daily use or age of onset? a b s t r a c t while seminal work identified age of onset to l2 as a core predictor of l2 learning in naturalistic environments, recent research has shown that other variables, such as language use, are more important than an early age of onset in predicting l2 attainment in speakers who learn the second language primarily in school. in this study, we investigated whether the acquisition of vocabulary and the development of overall proficiency in english as l2 can be predicted more faithfully by daily language, intended as daily share of l2 use in comparison to l1s, or l2 age of onset. to explore this issue, we analyzed a large public dataset of 650 speakers (de bruin et al., 2017), in which participants were native in spanish and/or basque and spoke english as an additional language. participants were previously assessed on their vocabulary skills using the lextale task and on their overall proficiency using a semistructured interview. language skills were then added to a linear regression model where age of onset and daily use of english were treated as predictors. our results show that, in this dataset, use is a better predictor of language skills (both lexical knowledge and overall proficiency) than age of onset. keywords: bilingualism, age of onset, language use, english as l2 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11862 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8262-0542 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5641-614x luca cilibrasi, daniela marková2 age of onset and language use proficient l2 late learners can one learn a second language proficiently if exposure starts later in life? this general question delimits one of the main problems in second language research, it is a recurrent doubt for people interested in language learning, and it is the leitmotif of this article. in this study, we specifically investigate the differential role of two variables that are expected to be predictors of second language learning: age of onset to the second language and amount of daily language use. we will try to understand how the two variables interact with each other, and which one is a better predictor of language skills, in a group of adult speakers of english as an additional language. we will analyze a large dataset that was kindly provided by angela de bruin, a researcher based at the university of york, and which includes the linguistic performances of 650 people tested in spain in the basque country. all of these participants are native speakers of spanish and/or basque and all speak english as an additional language. the role of age of onset in l2 learning a common assumption in laypeople’s discourse on education is that an early onset of exposure to a second language is crucial to attain native-like proficiency (blom & paradis, 2016; pfenninger & singleton, 2019). this notion is, however, mostly not corroborated by data (muñoz, 2006; pfenninger & singleton, 2019), it appears to be true only for some domains of language (herschensohn, 2013), and it appears to interact with a number of other variables in complex ways (birdsong, 2018). this section describes this multifaceted picture. generally speaking, age of onset is shown to be a crucial predictor for the language attainment of children emigrating to a new country. as larson-hall (2008) notices, this is not accidental, and it is probably due to the fact that extensive language immersion triggers implicit learning, a type of learning that may be more dependent on developmental factors than explicit learning. one domain that seems to be particularly affected by age of onset is phonology (sebastian-galles & bosch, 2005; herschensohn, 2013). phonology is the first linguistic domain to be acquired during childhood, and it is thus no surprise that age of onset to the second language affects the development of its phonology (kuhl, 2004; guasti, 2017). studies show that children that are exposed to the second language from birth are the only ones that manage the development of language skills in speakers of english… 3 to achieve native-like performance in phonological tasks in primary school (see, e.g., kovelman, baker, & petitto, 2008, on mexican children emigrating to the us) and similarly, adults that are exposed to a second language from birth are the only ones that perform like natives in fine-grained tasks of phonetic discrimination (pallier, bosch, & sebastián-gallés, 1997). in other words, even when speakers are very proficient in a second language, very subtle phonological differences due to the age of onset to l2 can still be recorded using experiments, and these have long-lasting effects. age of onset effects are, however, more controversial in other domains of language. some studies do show age of onset effects in grammatical learning, even if these do not seem to appear across the board. mcdonald (2000), for example, showed that age of onset to the l2 has long-term effects on grammatical knowledge, but these effects are modulated by the l1. in her study, groups of early and late sequential adults who emigrated to the united states were compared to monolinguals in their grammatical performance. the language of testing was english, and the l1 of the bilingual speakers could either be spanish or vietnamese. age of onset showed to be a main predictor of grammatical performance, with different effects in the spanish and the vietnamese groups. for the spanish group, the late sequentials performed poorly in a number of structures, including: past tense, plurals, third person, present progressive, auxiliaries, articles, yes/no questions and wh-questions. for the vietnamese group, instead, difficulties were found in both early and late sequentials, though while for the early sequentials difficulties were limited to the traits that differ between english and vietnamese, for the late sequentials the difficulties were more generalized (similarly to what was found for the spanish late sequentials). in other cases, the report of age of onset effects appears to be modulated by the system used to measure them. for instance, abrahamsson and hyltenstam (2009) investigated a large sample of spanish-swedish bilinguals and assessed their proficiency with two different systems. participants in this study had a wide range of ages of onset (and life backgrounds), going between one and 47 years of age, and all of them identified as bilinguals. the first assessment consisted in the evaluation of their proficiency in swedish, performed by a group of swedish native speakers. this first analysis showed that the vast majority of speakers that were exposed to swedish before 12 were perceived as native speakers by the swedish judges, while the majority of those that were exposed to swedish after 12 were perceived as non-native. however, once the early learners were assessed with a battery of swedish language tasks, none of them (including the early sequentials, exposed at the time of nursery) did perform within the native-like range. in a study investigating a sample of unprecedented size (over 600,000 people), hartshorne, tenenbaum, and pinker (2018) tried to understand whether difficulties related to age of onset emerge linearly with time, or if there are luca cilibrasi, daniela marková4 thresholds and cutting-off points. in their study, l2 speakers of english (with a wide variety of l1s) were assessed in a number of grammatical structures via online quiz. the subjects’ age of acquisition was included in a model aiming at identifying any sharp decline in acquisition related to the age of onset. their result suggests that people that were exposed to english after the age of 17 were extremely less likely to attain good performance in the language, but the model also showed a less abrupt but consistent decline taking place as early as at the age of three. while these findings are important and do suggest a role of age of onset in second language learning, several studies have shown that age of onset may not be an actual contributing factor of the different learning trajectories just described, and in some cases, age of onset may even be a confounding variable (birdsong, 2018). first, one assumption in research that describes age of onset as a main predictor of language learning is the idea that there are maturational changes in our brain that make language acquisition natural at early ages, and gradually more difficult with time (stemming from classic work on the critical period, lenneberg, 1967). when this idea is carefully put under scrutiny, it appears to be untrue to some extent. a biological description of brain development is beyond the scope of this article, but a few concepts may be outlined: evidence does suggest that brain plasticity is higher in younger learners, meaning that younger individuals’ brains are overall more prone to adapt to new cognitive skills (mundkur, 2005; trettenbrein, 2017). however, increasing evidence shows that individual differences in brain plasticity can be extreme, with some individuals showing negligible signs of reduced plasticity over time (wong et al., 2012; paradis, tulpar, & arppe, 2016). the reasons behind these differences are yet to be fully understood, but the notion that there is a linear and regular correlation between time and cognitive decline is to be at least reconsidered. additionally, the maturational account of age of onset effects has been critically reduced in new research approaches, as it appears that there is no decline in linguistic resources in late childhood, nor after puberty, and actually some aspects of cognition related to language may become sharper with time (blom & paradis, 2016). second, in experimental settings where multiple predictive variables are considered, it appears that the best predictor of second language learning success is to be found in socio-affective factors (birdsong, 2018) and environmental factors (blom & paradis, 2016), rather than age of onset. in other words, what seems to be predicting success is how the speakers experience the language and not how early they are exposed to it (birdsong, 2018), and speakers that are motivated and emotionally involved in their second language learning tend to be successful at any age. often, second language learning in children with an early age of onset does indeed have the characteristic of being emotionally the development of language skills in speakers of english… 5 important for the child, and thus an early age of onset does often correspond to successful second language learning. however, age of onset is not necessarily the key contributing factor of success, but a confounding variable. some studies show that a late age of onset can still result in proficient learning if the motivation is high (muñoz, 2006). finally, a plethora of studies show that there are complex interactions between age of onset effects and the role of quantity and quality of exposure, meaning that a later age of onset but a better quality and quantity of exposure may still result in proficient second language learning (birdsong, 2018). the next section will discuss this variable in detail the role of language use in l2 learning according to a number of researchers (e.g., larson-hall, 2008; muñoz, 2006; unsworth et al. 2011; paradis et al., 2017; cadierno et al., 2020), a large amount of language use and exposure is an even more important parameter than an early age of onset to attain proficiency in the second language, particularly when considering learners that rely primarily on classroom instruction. according to this view, people who are exposed to a second language late in their life but use the language frequently can acquire it at a near-native or even native-like level, compensating for effects of late age of onset. unsworth et al. (2011), for example, have shown that the acquisition of complex grammatical phenomena (in this case gender in dutch/greek bilingual children) depends very closely on the amount of input that people have received and produced, rather than on their age of onset to these structures. similarly, research conducted by paradis et al. (2017) shows that the production of complex syntax by children speaking english as l2 is better predicted by the amount of exposure to the language, rather than by the age of onset. more specifically, children with a late age of onset but large exposure showed to rapidly develop good performance with complex structures, at a learning rate that even surpasses that of l1 learners. similar findings were obtained by cadierno et al. (2020) in a comparison of children with matched exposure but different onset. using a semi-longitudinal design, the authors analyzed the linguistic development of young danish learners of english (growing up in denmark) with different ages of onset but the same length of formal instruction in english as a second language. according to their findings, the older students (their age of onset being 9–10 years) outperformed the younger students (with the age of onset being 7–8 years) in receptive grammar as well as receptive vocabulary, with the advantage of lexical ability being traceable even two years after the onset of english exposure, and the advantage in their grammatical skills growing over time. interestingly, the authors suggest that, in the danish context, this finding is related to luca cilibrasi, daniela marková6 accumulated exposure that children get outside the classroom, with older children having a few more years of exposure to movies, series and games in english. a study by larson-hall (2008) investigated whether these reflections extend to second language learners that rely uniquely on language exposure in the classroom (something relevant for our study, since in spain exposure to english outside of the classroom is generally limited). in this study, several groups of second language learners (japanese, with english as l2) with varying ages of onset were assessed on grammatical and phonological tasks. the study showed complex interactions between exposure and age of onset: while an earlier age of onset did have a significant role in predicting attainment, this revealed to be true only for learners who were exposed to english for a significant amount of time weekly, and thus as an early age of onset, per se, was not the core predicting variable. a long-term and large-scale (2,000 participants) study conducted by muñoz (2006) on catalan-spanish learners of english is particularly revealing of these patterns. in this study, four groups of learners were followed for ten years during their development of english. these learners had different ages of onset: age eight, age 11, age 14, and age 18+. number of hours of classroom exposure to english was carefully assessed for all individuals, and then included in the models analyzing the data. two interesting findings emerged from this study: first, contrary to maturational accounts predicting a cognitive (or at least psycholinguistic) decline over time, the older learners were the fastest learners, and the trend then proceeded accordingly, with adolescents going faster than children. second, regression analyses showed that number of classroom hours was a significant predictor of language attainment for all groups. together, these two findings suggest that second language attainment may be predicted by classroom exposure rather than age of onset, with minimal advantages for an early age of onset. these parameters, as already outlined in the previous section, additionally interact in complex ways with other variables, such as motivation and the general cognitive development of the learner. a recent study by pfenninger and singleton (2019) confirms yet again these claims. in this study, english attainment of a large cohort of swiss high school students was assessed in a 5-year longitudinal study. crucially, results showed that intensity of exposure was a better predictor of success than age of onset. the notion of language exposure is closely tied to the notion of language use: when people are exposed to a language in an interactive environment, this corresponds to a larger amount of language use (where use is a notion that includes both perception and production of a second language). studies on second language use as a predictor of language skills are less common, but their findings go in the same direction (this is not surprising, since exposure and use are correlated variables). a study by amuzie and winke (2009) the development of language skills in speakers of english… 7 shows that amount of language use is a main predictor of language attainment and self-perceived proficiency in students who travel to the united states for programs of second language immersion. similar findings were obtained for learners of japanese travelling to japan (dewey, bown, & eggett, 2012) and learners of arabic travelling to jordan and morocco (dewey, belnap, & hillstrom, 2013). finally, even if these claims mostly stem from research on learners that rely on classroom exposure, some studies on immigrants point in the same direction as well. a large-scale study of adolescent immigrants coming from several countries (china, mexico, haiti, and dominican republic) to the united states, investigated the role of language use in their english attainment after seven years from the arrival (carhill, suárez-orozco, & páez, 2008). in this study, learners were asked to evaluate their share (in percentage) of use of english in an average day. additionally, they were asked to specify how much of this share was in formal and informal contexts. these values, together with additional metadata, were then used to predict english scores. the results showed that use of english was a main predictor of language scores, with a fundamental role being played by use in informal contexts. in an epistemological paper, tsimpli (2014) tried to integrate the apparent contradiction between age of onset and language use findings. by analyzing a large number of studies, her work suggests that the roles of age of onset and exposure vary depending on the structure under scrutiny: for some structures, the so-called late structures, exposure and use are the fundamental predictors, while for the so-called early structures, age of onset is a better predictor. the division in early and late structures is a reference to monolingual development, where certain structures are acquired very early, and others are acquired much later. the order of verbs and objects, for example, is acquired by children within the first two years of life (and it surfaces in their very first multi-word utterances). inflectional morphology, instead, is acquired much later, starting around three years and lasting for several years (with some considerable variability depending on the language under scrutiny). when it comes to second language acquisition, tsimpli (2014) argues that the proficient acquisition of structures that fall into the “early” box is heavily dependent on age of onset, while the acquisition of structures that fall into the “late” box is heavily dependent on use and exposure. the pattern described by tsimpli in her epistemological article was confirmed experimentally by ågren et al. (2014) in a longitudinal study testing a variety of structures, divided in early and late, in a group of swedish-french bilingual children. importantly for the current research, tsimpli’s work indicates that these two parameters (onset and use) have separate roles in second language acquisition, and thus deserve to be analyzed as separate predictors. in this study, we addressed this important and complex relationship by investigating the roles of age of onset and language luca cilibrasi, daniela marková8 use in a large sample of english l2 learners having spanish and/or basque as l1. the notion of use adopted here is that of “daily share of english,” similarly to carhill, suárez-orozco, and páez (2008). methods research question, hypothesis and design research question: are language skills in speakers with english as an additional language better predicted by age of onset or by daily use of english? hypothesis: daily language use is more important than age of onset for the acquisition of both vocabulary and overall proficiency. thus, our prediction is that, in this sample, daily language use will be a better predictor of linguistic attainment. design: to answer this question, we completed two multiple regressions on a dataset of speakers having english as additional language, in which age of onset and daily use were treated as predictors, and two different measures of language skills were treated as outcome variables. the predictors (age of onset and daily use) were assessed with a questionnaire. as explained in the participants section, age of onset was coded based on a question assessing the age at which speakers started being in consistent contact with english (this meant, for most, the start of english training in school). daily use was instead coded by asking speakers to specify the amount of share (in percentage), on an average day, of their use of english in comparison to spanish and basque. the predicted variables were overall language proficiency, assessed with a semi-structured interview, and lexical knowledge, assessed with the english version of the lextale. these two variables are described in detail in procedure section. participants the data of this dataset (known as the best dataset) were collected by de bruin et al. (2017). the study of de bruin et al. (2017) was submitted to the bcbl ethics committee and it received favorable opinion. consent forms for each participant were collected and are stored in a secure location. permission to use the dataset was granted in written form by dr. de bruin to the first author of this manuscript. for a more detailed description of the assessment procedure, the development of language skills in speakers of english… 9 please see their reference. we report here some descriptive information provided by the authors: a sample of 650 (435 female) participants completed several tasks assessing language proficiency. their ages varied between 18 and 50 years (mean = 25, sd = five years and seven months). at the time of assessment, the highest level of education obtained ranged from high school to university, with the majority of participants (80%) having attained a higher level of education (professional, university or postgraduate). more specifically, 380 subjects had a university bachelor’s degree, 69 had a postgraduate university degree, 73 had a diploma in professional training (completed after high school), and 128 had a high school diploma. all participants at the time of assessment lived in spain, in the basque county, and identified as native speakers of spanish and/ or basque, and second language learners of english. self-perceived proficiency, described on a scale from zero to ten, was highest on average for spanish (9.2), and slightly lower for basque (8.03). english, described as a second language, obtained on average a score of 6.1. socio-economic measures (except for education) and data relative to occupation were not collected. all participants learned basque and spanish in the first years of life (mean age of onset for spanish = eight months, sd = one year and six months; mean age of onset for basque = one year and eight months, sd = one year and ten months). onset of exposure to english was on average at a later age (mean age of onset for english = six years and four months, sd = two years and six months), but all participants reported acquiring english at or before 12 years of age. subjects were assessed by de bruin et al. (2017) with a number of tasks provided in all three languages. procedure participants in this study were assessed with a number of tasks, and they additionally provided a self-perceived measure of their proficiency, language use and age of onset. we introduce here the measures and procedure used to assess these linguistic skills and metadata. the entire dataset was created over a period of 18 months, from january 2015 to june 2016. participants first registered and completed the questionnaire aimed at gathering the metadata. then, they completed the lextale tests, using an online website developed for this aim. finally, they came to the research center, where they individually completed the picture-naming tests and underwent the semi-structured interview initially, all subjects were asked to self-rate some parameters of their linguistic skills, by completing a questionnaire adapted from the language experience and proficiency questionnaire by marian et al. (2007). through this questionnaire, participants were asked to: luca cilibrasi, daniela marková10 1. self-evaluate their proficiency in each language on a scale from zero to ten. specifically, they were given the following instruction: on a scale from zero to ten, indicate your personal perception of your proficiency level for language x (ten being the highest score). 2. express the time they are exposed to each of the three languages in given day in percentage terms. specifically, participants were given the following instruction: indicate the percentage of time that you are exposed to each of the languages. the sum of the percentages has to be 100%. 3. state the age of first exposure to each language. lexical knowledge was assessed combining a set of three lexical decision tests, one for each language: lextale (lemhöfer et al., 2012), lextale-esp (izura et al., 2014), and a basque version of lextale developed for the purposes of the study by de bruin et al. (2017). all participants completed the three variants of lextale (spanish, basque, & english) online. the order of the lextale tasks was spanish-basque-english. sixty items (40 words, 20 nonwords) were introduced to the participants in the english version of the test and subjects were asked to click on the appropriate button to show whether or not the item was an established english word. finally, to measure overall language proficiency in each language, all subjects were interviewed and subsequently scored on a likert-like scale by “a multilingual linguist with experience in assessing language proficiency” in a “semi-structured” interview (de bruin et al., 2017, p. 2). the english interview score, and the english lextale score are chosen as outcome variables for this study, and the two tasks will then be described in more detail in the next section. tasks interview the interviews were conducted by de bruin et. al. (2017) and the data collected were made available for further research. the interview procedure was as follows: in each of their three languages, participants completed a brief semi-structured oral proficiency interview adapted from the structured oral proficiency interview format (isbell & winke, 2019). this five-minute interview was targeted at assessing the participants level of proficiency in spoken output, and more specifically their ability of producing different grammatical structures. it consisted of a series of questions that varied in complexity and required the interviewee to use multiple types of grammatical structures (e.g., questions prompting different tenses in the participant’s response). subjects were asked to answer questions revolving around a few core topics: the development of language skills in speakers of english… 11 1. presentation: who are they? where are they from? when did they start learning each of the languages they know? what did they study? why? [completed in basque]. 2. hobbies: sports, music, art, dance, ... [completed in english]. 3. know bcbl: how did they get to know the bcbl? [completed in english]. 4. (optional): what do they do during the weekend? [completed in english]. 5. (optional): say something about a film or any current or remarkable news [completed in english]. 6. (optional): .... the interview was performed and analyzed by a group of linguists with high expertise in english who were fluent speakers of basque and spanish. each participant was assessed by one linguist (following directions from gollan et al., 2012), but a total of four linguists with previous scientific knowledge in evaluating linguistic competence participated in the process. a likert-like scale from one (lowest level) to five (native or native-like level) was used to score the result. in summary, according to de bruin et al. (2017), the semi-structured interview design makes it a valid measure of oral proficiency and language profile knowledge, the questions asked “ranging in difficulty and requiring the participant to use different types of grammatical constructions” (de bruin et al., 2017, p. 3). lextale lextale, an abbreviation for “lexical test for advanced learners of english,” is a performance-based assessment of l2 lexical knowledge in advanced l2 learners of english which offers an alternative to self-ratings of proficiency. this assessment is widely employed in l2 vocabulary knowledge research as an approximate indication of lexical knowledge and, to a smaller extent, as a prompt of general proficiency (lemhöfer & broersma, 2012). its main advantage over other tests is the rapidity of the testing. the test has been designed to be employed in psycholinguistic experimental studies and is intended for adult learners of english who began with the formal instruction at school around 10–12 years of age and have been using english on a daily basis ever since (e.g., to read articles, watch tv shows, etc.). it is a short free online test (available from: www.lextale.com) which usually takes approximately five minutes to complete; the examined learner is presented with 60 items (the ratio of words to non-words is 2:1) and is required to answer in an affirmativenegative manner (y/n) whether the items presented are actual existing english words or non-words (opting for a “no” when in doubt). the existing words occurring in the task are very rare, they have “a mean frequency of between www.lextale.com luca cilibrasi, daniela marková12 1 and 26 (mean: 6.4) occurrences per million according to the celex database” (lemhöfer & broersma, 2012, p. 329), meaning that it is highly improbable that the examined learner would know all of these words. three methods of scoring are employed when assessing the results of the lextale test: 1. a percentage correct measure adjusted for the unequal proportion of words and non-words by averaging the percentages correct for these two item types. as the authors explain (lemhöfer & broersma, 2012, p. 329) this measure is a “simple percentage correct measure, but corrected for the unequal proportion of words and non-words by averaging the percentages correct for these two item types. this way, a yes bias (creating high error rates in the nonwords) would be penalized in the same way as a no bias would (causing high error rates for words), independently of the different numbers of words versus nonwords.” 2. δm is a value ranging from zero to one which takes into consideration the total sum of yes answers, and false alarms (non-words which elicited a ‘yes’ answer, marked f ) when calculating the actual number of hits (existing words which elicited a ‘yes’ answer, marked h). this scoring method is based on signal detection theory (sdt) and offers a more complex way to reflect the participant’s guessing behavior (huibregstse et al., 2002) by incorporating the concept of sophisticated guessing (guessing which does not occur randomly but rather as a result of the participant’s uncertainty about a particular item) into its design. 3. isdt is the last scoring method used in lextale; this formula, developed by huibregstse et al. (2002), is again based on sdt. this method takes into consideration that there are actually four answers in y/n question format (“hit” = ‘yes’ in case of a real word; “correct rejection” = ‘no’ in case of a non-word; “miss” = ‘no’ in case of a real word; “false alarm” = ‘yes’ in case of a non-word). the isdt formula is more advanced than δm in accounting for sophisticated guessing and, in addition, it takes into account “individual response style” (the individual’s tendency to lean towards either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ when in doubt) (p. 230). while all methods provide control for guessing effects, the first scoring revealed to be in addition the most accurate of all in measuring language skills, leading to higher correlation coefficients with language scores of various kinds, including assessments such as the quick placement test and a number of translation scores (lemhöfer & broersma, 2012). for these reasons, the “average correct” measure is now used as default in the scoring of lextale, and it was thus used in the current sample. the development of language skills in speakers of english… 13 data analysis descriptive statistics for predictors and outcome variables are provided in table 1. following the guidelines of hair et al. (2010) and byrne (2010), all variables are to be considered normally distributed based on the values of skewness (smaller than two) and kurtosis (smaller than seven). daily use presents a relatively high value of kurtosis because a few subjects declared a significantly higher level of daily use in comparison to the rest of the group. however, these subjects are not many, and this is why we still observe a mean of 11.15 with a standard deviation of 9.36. in total, 42 subjects out of 650 declared a daily use of 30% or higher, while the remaining 608 declared a value between 0% and 29%. age of onset presents instead a very symmetrical distribution, with the most common age of onset occurring at the age of 6.37 (six years and four months), roughly corresponding to the start of schooling in spain. data were analyzed in r using multiple regression analysis, in order to assess the role of the two independent variables (daily language use and age of onset to english) in predicting the outcome variables (lex-tale and interview score). multiple regression was chosen because it is the most effective system to understand the relationship between predictors and outcome variables when the model is carefully constructed from theoretical considerations (hoyt, imel, & chan, 2008). since the dataset contains one datapoint for each subject (for each task), it was not possible to include random effects in any model, and a traditional regression was chosen instead. table 1 descriptive statistics for predictors and outcome variables age of onset daily use lex-tale interview mean (sd) 6.37 (2.49) 11.15 (9.36) 66.75 (9.23) 3.32 (0.94) min-max 0 – 12 0 – 70 41.25 – 71.25 0 – 8 skewness-kurtosis 0.45 – 0.10 1.63 – 5.47 0.56 – 0.84 –0.22 – –0.35 regressions were run using the function lm() in r, from the stats package (r team, 2017). factors were compared using a forced entry method. with this method, all factors are entered simultaneously and are given the same weight. the method thus gives a reliable estimate of the importance of each factor in predicting the outcome variable (field at al., 2012). the models used are the following: lm1 (formula = interview-score ~ use * aoo, data = best) lm2 (formula = lex-tale ~ use * aoo, data = best) luca cilibrasi, daniela marková14 the choice of predictive factors is theory-based: this study aims at assessing the roles of daily language use and age of onset as predictors of proficiency scores, and as such daily language use and age of onset were included in both models as predictors. the interaction between these factors was also included, based on its theoretical relevance (use may show to be more or less important according to the age of onset). both models offer a good fit for the data, with lm1 showing an f (646) = 21.3, p < .001, and lm2 showing an f (646) = 28.45, p < .001. this measure of fit compares the model used to a hypothetical model with no predictors (so-called intercept-only model), and the results indicate that there is a significant difference, implying thus that the models used manage to capture patterns in the data. both models offer a medium correlation coefficient according to cohen’s guidelines (cohen, 1988), with r = 0.3 for lm1 and r = 0.34 for lm2, indicating that both models account for a medium amount of variance, or, in other words, that both models offer a medium level of explained variation. results are presented in the two tables below. p-values are automatically provided by r when running the function lm(): table 2 results from the regression model predicting the interview score estimate se t p intercept 61.190 1.456 42.003 <.0001 use 0.328 0.098 3.333 0.0009*** aoo 0.372 0.210 1.774 0.076 use:aoo –0.006 0.014 –0.478 0.632 table 3 results from the regression model predicting the lextale score estimate se t p intercept 2.981 0.145 20.472 <.0001 use 0.032 0.009 3.328 0.0009*** aoo –0.009 0.021 –0.473 0.636 use:aoo 0.0005 0.001 0.397 0.691 our analysis shows that, in both cases, only use is a significant predictor of language skills, with p < .001 in both models. this relationship is shown visually in the scatterplots below. while the scatterplots representing the relationship between age of onset and language skills are relatively flat, the scatterplots representing the relationship between the amount of use and language skills are both steep (figures 1 and 2). this means that while age of onset does not have a significant effect on language skills, daily use does have a significant the development of language skills in speakers of english… 15 effect, with larger amounts of daily use leading to higher language scores (ascending trending line). figure 1. scatterplots age of onset-interview score & daily use-interview score figure 2. scatterplots age of onset-lextale score & daily use-lextale score discussion daily use as a predictor of language skills the best dataset is a large dataset which allows for the profiling and characterization of different sorts of multilingual subjects from the basque country (who speak spanish and/or basque and have varying proficiency levels in english) by combining several measurements of their language skills (de bruin et al., 2017). our study analyzed this dataset to investigate whether overall proficiency and lexical knowledge in english are better predicted by age of onset or by daily language use. two different outcome measures were adopted: the output of the lextale task and the score obtained on a semi-structured interview. in short, our analysis shows that daily use is a better predictor than age of onset of both lextale and interview scores. this finding contributes to a long-lasting debate as to whether it is more important to be exposed to the second language early or to be exposed to it for luca cilibrasi, daniela marková16 many hours a day (even if the age of onset is later in life). our data suggests that daily use may be more important than age of onset, at least in the sample currently analyzed. our findings are consistent with studies that show that use is a better predictor than age of onset in second language learning (carhill, suárez-orozco, & páez, 2008; larson-hall, 2008; muñoz, 2006; unsworth et al. 2011; paradis et al., 2017). the current study extends this line of work in that it investigates a specific type of measure of language use, which is daily share. this measure was previously used to predict language skills in immigrants (carhill, suárez-orozco, & páez, 2008), but not to predict attainment in second language learners who use english as an additional language while being immersed in their native language (in their native country). this simple measure of language use, that can be obtained with one unique question in a questionnaire, appears to be a highly significant predictor of language attainment. this measure does not necessarily indicate that daily use is the reason for language attainment. a high share of daily use of a language might indicate, or be related to, motivation and attitudes toward the language, factors that are shown to be crucial for second language learning, particularly when learners rely primarily on classroom instruction (blom & paradis, 2016; birdsong, 2018; pfenninger & singleton, 2019). while it is not possible to clearly separate use from socio-affective factors, it is possible to make a comparison between age of onset effects and daily use effects. the fact that age of onset does not predict attainment in this sample complements previous work that has given similar results. the large-scale study of muñoz (2006), for example, also investigated spanish learners of english in spain, and similarly concluded that age of onset was not a predictor of success, while input was. the study of paradis et al. (2007) investigating the acquisition of grammatical structures in french-english bilinguals, also showed that input was a better predictor than age of onset. the study of unsworth et al. (2011), investigating greek-dutch bilinguals showed that input was a better predictor than age of onset for the acquisition of complex structures (such as grammatical gender), as described in epistemological work by tsimpli (2014). similar results were obtained with second language learners of other languages (dewey et al., 2012; dewey et al., 2014; bown & eggett, 2012). in summary, when input and age of onset are included in the same model and compared, it appears that input can have a more important role in predicting attainment than age of onset. our findings contribute to this body of research these claims may seem in contradiction with studies that show that age of onset is a crucial predictor of language attainment (mcdonald, 2000; abrahamsson & hyltenstam, 2009; hartshorne, tenenbaum, & pinker, 2018). however, it should be stressed that these studies did not make a direct comparison between use and age of onset in each given model (as we did). often, an early age of onset is correlated to a large amount of use, without one actuthe development of language skills in speakers of english… 17 ally influencing directly the other (birdsong, 2018; babatsouli & ball, 2020). thus, showing the presence of age of onset effects does not undermine the role of use effects if these are not included in the same model. however, there are also many cases in which an early age of onset does not correspond to extensive use, and it is thus important to characterize the differential effects of use and age of onset, because they may have rather different roles when they do not correlate (tsimpli, 2014). in other words, we do not deny that in many cases an early age of onset corresponds to higher results in language attainment, especially if the sample analyzed consists of children that emigrated to a new country, but we suggest that these results may be due to additional exposure that children with an early age of onset might receive (babatsouli & ball, 2020), or possibly to socio-affective factors related to early exposure to a language (birdsong, 2018). in both cases, such findings reduce the validity of maturational accounts, and contribute to the growing body of evidence showing that a late age of onset can correspond to proficient learning, given the right conditions (paradis et al., 2017; blom & paradis, 2016; pfenninger & singleton, 2019). the lack of simple age of onset effects may be interpretated within the realm of brain development and brain plasticity research. despite the fact that generally speaking brain plasticity is stronger in younger children (mundkur, 2005), our results and other findings of this kind (blom & paradis, 2016), suggest that there is no detectable decline in cognitive language skills related to age in older children and young adults, particularly when the object of analysis is explicit learning. kinds of language skills in this study, language use appears to be more important than age of onset in predicting language skills. this finding is confirmed with two different tasks: a semi-structured interview and a version of the lextale assessment. it is interesting to observe an advantage of use over onset in both these tasks, since they measure rather different aspects of linguistic knowledge: the semistructured interview taps into various components of grammar and as such offers a good estimate of overall language proficiency (de bruin et al., 2017), including comprehension and use of complex structures. lextale, on the other hand, offers a quick measure of vocabulary knowledge (lemhöfer & broersma, 2012). further analyses of these tasks may offer some additional characterization of what they measure, and the current section attempts at doing so. a semi-structured interview is a flexible method that can be quite successful in assessing a speaker’s general proficiency. particularly, semi-structured interviews offer a way to approach participants individually, while also upholding a recurrent interview structure. upon a closer look at the interview luca cilibrasi, daniela marková18 questions used in this study, it is reasonable to say that these indeed elicit various grammatical structures, as stated by de bruin et al. (2017), and most predominantly different tenses. some tenses may be represented more than others: for example, the answers elicited by the first question seem to focus mainly on simple present and past tenses. other questions are more flexible and allow for elicitation of a more varied set of structures. the topics of the interview are described rather broadly, which allows for additional questioning by the experimenter when they feel the need to further verify the participant’s employment of a certain structure. the resulting score, marked on a proficiency scale (from one to five), thus, reflects a multi-component assessment, which allows for a relative in-depth inspection of the participant’s proficiency. this statement is supported by the agreement between the interview scores and the rest of the measures (such as self-perceived proficiency), which indicates the “pragmatical” validity of the interview. lextale, being a widely used test, has received considerable attention in the literature. the most intuitive interpretation of lextale is that of a lexical assessment. this idea was evaluated by lemhöfer and broersma (2012) by testing two experimental groups (dutch and korean speakers of english) with lextale and comparing the acquired data against self-rating scores and word translation test scores (from l1 to l2 and vice versa). the data show that lextale scores correlate with the translation scores more closely than with self-rating scores, and consequently suggest that lextale may be primarily an indicator of lexical knowledge. in some cases, lextale has been used as a measure of general proficiency. a study by nakata et al. (2020) investigated correlations between a wide range of linguistic measures. the study employed lextale, vocabulary size test (vst), toefl itp (as a measure of general proficiency), a translation task, and self-ratings of speaking, writing, reading, and listening with an additional self-rating of vocabulary knowledge. the correlation of vst and lextale scores verified lextale to be a better predictor of lexical knowledge than any form of self-rating (speaking, writing, reading, listening, and vocabulary knowledge). however, lextale was also found to be a better measure of lexical proficiency than self-ratings, showing a high correlation with the toefl scores. as the authors put it, lextale was demonstrated to be an “approximate measure of english vocabulary knowledge and, to a lesser extent, general proficiency” (p. 335). the fact that, in the current study, language use appears as a better predictor than age of onset with both these outcome measures, offers some material for reflection. according to tsimpli (2014), use is expected to be a better predictor than age of onset particularly when the outcome measure is a so-called late structure. late structures are those that are acquired later during development, and that require substantial grammar-external and even language-external resources to be comprehended and used. are the outcome variables adopted in the development of language skills in speakers of english… 19 this study a measure of late-structure development? in the case of the interview, we may reasonably assume so. the semi-structured interview supposedly assesses explicitly the use of complex language and, more specifically, the use of a variety of grammatical structures (de bruin et al., 2017). it is thus indeed expected that use will be a better predictor than age of onset for this variable. in the case of the lextale task, the answer is less obvious. vocabulary knowledge is something that can hardly be classified as either early or late, since the acquisition of the lexicon (in both l1 and l2) is a process that starts with the initial stages of learning and virtually never stops. however, given the correlations between lexical knowledge and overall proficiency, the answer may be positive also in this case. beyond these reflections, our analyses have clear practical relevance for theories concerning the acquisition of english as a second or additional language. our results in fact suggest that the acquisition of english as an additional language is possible also when the age of onset occurs later, and that a large share of daily use can overcome the difficulties related to a later age of onset, consistently with findings from a growing number of studies (carhill, suárez-orozco, & páez, 2008; larson-hall, 2008; muñoz, 2006; unsworth et al. 2011; paradis et al., 2017; pfenninger & singleton, 2019; cadierno et al., 2020). the implications for students are clear: speakers need to use the second (or additional) language as much as possible to obtain high proficiency levels, and, by doing so, they may even overcome in performance speakers that were exposed to a second language since early childhood (paradis et al., 2017). in the meantime, it should be stressed that these outcome measures (the interview and lextale) are not an exhaustive measure of language skills. acquisition in other domains might be more dependent on an early age of onset. as discussed in the introduction, phonology (for example) might not show native-like development with a late age of onset, even when daily use is very high (pallier et al., 1997; kovelman, baker, & petitto, 2008; herschensohn, 2013). further research is needed to ascertain to what degree the findings we report here for interview scores and lextale scores can be extended to other linguistic domains. conclusion in conclusion, this study showed that daily language use is better than age of onset in predicting vocabulary and general proficiency in a sample of english learners who are natives in spanish and/or basque. this finding is consistent with the growing body of evidence showing that quantity and quality of exposure are among the main pillars of second language attainment (larson-hall, luca cilibrasi, daniela marková20 2008; muñoz, 2006; unsworth et al. 2011; paradis et al., 2017; pfenninger & singleton, 2019), and suggesting that previously reported age of onset effects are not uniquely related to brain development trajectories (mundkur, 2005), but to correlations between age of onset and other environmental and socioaffective variables (blom & paradis, 2016; birdsong, 2018; pfenninger & singleton, 2019). compliance with ethical standard informed consent: permission to use the dataset was granted in written form by dr de bruin to the first author of this manuscript. the study of de bruin et al. (2017), consisting in the collection of this dataset, was submitted to the bcbl ethics committee and it received favorable opinion. consent forms for each participant were collected and are stored in a secure location. the statement from de bruin (2017) original paper reads: “this study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of bcbl ethics committee with written informed consent from all subjects. all subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the declaration of helsinki. the protocol was approved by the bcbl ethics committee.” disclosure of potential conflicts of interest: we declare no conflict of interest regarding the publication of this study. research involving human participants and/or animal: this study does involve human participants. references abrahamsson, n., & hyltenstam, k. 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(2012). linking neurogenetics and individual differences in language learning: the dopamine hypothesis. cortex, 48(9), 1091–1102. http://www.r-project.org the development of language skills in speakers of english… 23 luca cilibrasi, daniela marková die entwicklung der sprachkenntnisse bei lernenden des englischen als zusatzsprache. was ist wichtiger: der tägliche sprachgebrauch oder das alter bei erwerbsbeginn? z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g in dem vorliegenden beitrag wird untersucht, ob der wortschatzerwerb und die entwicklung der allgemeinen sprachkompetenz im englischen als zusatzsprache mehr durch den täglichen sprachgebrauch oder auch durch das alter bei erwerbsbeginn geprägt werden. hierfür wurde eine zahlenmäßig große gruppe von 650 probanden (der datensatz wurde freundlicherweise von de bruin et al., 2017, zur verfügung gestellt) einer analyse unterzogen, die spanische und/oder baskische muttersprachler sind und englisch als zusatzsprache (drittsprache) verwenden. die wortschatzkenntnisse der probanden wurden eingangs mit einem lextale-test und ihre allgemeine sprachkompetenz mit einem semistrukturierten interview beurteilt. danach wertete man ihre sprachkenntnisse mittels eines modells aus, in dem das alter bei erwerbsbeginn und der tägliche sprachgebrauch als prädiktoren behandelt wurden. die ergebnisse zeigten, dass in dem analysierten datensatz der tägliche sprachgebrauch ein besserer prädiktor für sprachkenntnisse (sowohl in bezug auf die lexik als auch auf allgemeine sprachkompetenz) als das alter bei erwerbsbeginn war. schlüsselwörter: zweisprachigkeit, alter bei erwerbsbeginn, täglicher sprachgebrauch, englisch, hypothese der kritischen periode contents preface (danuta gabryś-barker, adam wojtaszek) articles liliana piasecka when “grass was greener”: longplay album covers and learning english a retrospection luca cilibrasi, daniela marková the development of language skills in speakers of english as an additional language what matters more, daily use or age of onset? anna borkowska the relationship between age-advanced learners’ in-class willingness to communicate in english, intrinsic motivation, classroom environment and teacher immediacy—a pilot study yahya ghelichli, seyyed hassan seyyedrezaei, zari sadat seyyedrezaei improving student engagement and motivation: perspectives of iranian efl learners hyang-il kim investigating the roles of the four sources of self-efficacy beliefs in an efl listening context mahzad karimi, elahe ghorbanchian effects of adjunct model of instruction on eap learners’ reading comprehension skill danial babajani azizi, nourollah gharanjik, mahmood dehqan the effects of mobile-mediated explicit and implicit feedback on efl learners’ use of english prepositions aleksandra szymańska-tworek mentoring as professional development for mentors contents4 reviews joseph lo bianco, larissa aronin (eds ) (2020) dominant language constellations: a new perspective on multilingualism springer — by bessie dendrinos larissa aronin, eva vetter (eds ) (2021) dominant language constellations approach in education and language acquisition springer — by lisa marie brinkmann style guide for the authors theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (1), 2023, pp. 1/31 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12468 eva maria luef https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2362-2422 charles university in prague, the czech republic pia resnik https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0948-9546 university college of teacher education vienna/krems, austria phonotactic probabilities and sub-syllabic segmentation in language learning a b s t r a c t high phonotactic probabilities are known to exert a facilitative effect on word learning in children and adults in their first language. the present study was designed to investigate the role of phonotactic probabilities when learning a foreign language. focusing on austrian and korean learners of english, we investigated two hypotheses related to phonotactic frequency effects: (1) high-frequency segments have more deeply entrenched phonetic representations, with more automatized pronunciation patterns, rendering phonetic learning of homophonous segments more difficult; (2) high-frequency segments are associated with higher phonetic variability in the first language, which can facilitate phonetic learning in a foreign language. additionally, the locus of phoneme/ bigram frequency effects was analyzed in relation to left-branching and right-branching syllable structure in german and korean. we found that proximity to english voice-onset time is correlated with phoneme and bigram frequencies in the first language, but results varied by learner group. sub-syllabic segmentation of the first language was also shown to be an inf luential factor. our study is grounded in research on frequency effects and combines its central premise with phonetic learning in a foreign language. the results show a tight relationship between first language statistical probabilities and phonetic learning in a foreign language. keywords: austrian german, english as a foreign language (efl), frequency distribution, korean, sub-syllabic segmentation https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12468 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2362-2422 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2944-0942 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0948-9546 tapsla.12468 p. 2/31 eva maria luef, pia resnik background phonotactic probability is defined as the position-specific frequency of segments and segment combinations (vitevitch, 1997; vitevitch & sommers, 2003) and is thus a measure of how frequent (and probable) particular segments of words and sequences of phonemes are (vitevitch & luce, 1999). different phonotactic constraints apply to different languages and (first and foreign) language learners accumulate knowledge on phonotactic probabilities based on experience (weber & cutler, 2006). high-frequency phonotactic combinations serve an important purpose in word recognition, as words including such combinations are generally recalled faster and more accurately (frisch, large, & pisoni, 2000; luce & large, 2001; vitevitch, armbruster, & chu, 2004; vitevitch & luce, 1998). high phonotactic probability has not only been linked to more rapid word learning in adults but also in child language acquisition (storkel, 2001; storkel & maekawa, 2005; storkel & rogers, 2000). the advantage in word learning involving high-probability phonotactic combinations could result from strengthened cognitive representations of the frequent phonotactic combinations (bybee, 2007). storkel (2001), for example, suggested that high phonotactic probability segments also influence the formation of semantic representations and the association between semantic and lexical ones, thus furthering learning. while some studies have linked phonotactic probabilities to word learning in general (e.g., storkel, armbruster, & hogan, 2006), less is known about phonetic learning. based on previous work on word frequencies, several predictions can be inferred regarding frequency and probability effects in relation to phonotactic combinations. it has been shown that high-frequency words may be more deeply engrained in linguistic memory, and thus have more entrenched phonetic patterns (bybee, 2007; levy & hanulikova, 2019; pierrehumbert, 2001; schweitzer et al., 2015). the special role of high-frequency distributions of particular words in connection to phonological changes has long been acknowledged in studies on linguistic change (bybee, 2002; phillips, 1984; pierrehumbert, 2001). under certain circumstances low-frequency words may be phonetically more malleable and thus more prone to sound change than high-frequency words (phillips, 1984, 2006; todd, pierrehumbert, & hay, 2019). an alternative hypothesis describes high-frequency words as having larger exemplar clouds, that is, being associated with more phonetic variation in the speaker’s mind (levy & hanulikova, 2019; schweitzer et al., 2015). this implies that speakers have more numerous and diverse phonetic targets associated with each high-frequency speech sound. low-frequency sounds have smaller exemplar clouds and thus show less phonetic variability (levy & hanulikova, 2019). the crucial difference between these hypotheses is whether high-frequency rates limit or increase variability, and this has implications phonotactic probabilities and sub-syllabic segmentation… tapsla.12468 p. 3/31 not only for sound change but also for language learning. while the abovementioned studies focused on the word level, similar tendencies may be at work at the segmental level. lexical frequency rates and phonotactic probabilities have shown to be correlated (storkel & maekawa, 2005) in english, allowing the cross-fertilization of theories in the two strands of linguistic investigation. what is suggested for phonological change may also apply to foreign language learning of novel phonetic detail in a known phonotactic combination (i.e., cross-linguistic phonotactics). when learners of a foreign language encounter a high-frequency phonotactic combination that is similar to one in their first language (e.g., /bi/), they may either be phonetically limited by their first language, or they may have access to a highly variable phonetic inventory and thus be better able to approximate the foreign-language phonetics. in contrast, low-frequency phonotactic combinations in the first language may be either more malleable to phonetic learning due to their shallow cognitive entrenchment, or learners may have a smaller phonetic inventory and face more difficulty in finding a suitable pronunciation. the two hypotheses lead to very different predictions with respect to how learners can acquire the phonetics of phonotactic combinations in the foreign language. the following study focuses on learners of english as a foreign language (efl) and investigates how phonotactic probabilities of utterance-initial segments in their first languages (korean, german) impact phonetic learning of the cross-linguistic variants of the combinations in english. korean and german are typologically different languages, and one key difference concerns the structure of the syllable. while syllable universals have been hard to define, the general outline of onset-rhyme (i.e., right-branching syllables) and body-coda (i.e., left-branching syllables) is an accepted categorization (berg & koops, 2010; j.-y. kim & lee, 2011). the difference between the two types is the linkage strength between the initial segments. whereas the onset-rhyme structure separates the initial phoneme from the rhyme in closed syllables, the body-coda system binds the initial phoneme and the following vowel together (j. kim, 2015). for instance, a syllable such as /ban/ would be perceived with /b/ separate from /an/ in the german onset-rhyme structure, whereas in the korean body-coda structure, /ba/ would go together and /n/ would be perceived as a separate entity (see figure 1). berg and koops (2010) and kim (2015) speculate whether the leftand right-branching preferences found across korean and english are also related to phonotactic dependencies between segments. how robustly the nucleus vowel is formed in phonetic memory in connection with either the onset or the coda is unclear at the moment. phonotactic probabilities have been shown to have an effect on the perception and processing of syllable structure, with korean speakers being better at processing the onset and nucleus of a syllable rather than only the initial phoneme (j. kim, 2015; j. kim & davis, 2002; witzel, witzel, tapsla.12468 p. 4/31 eva maria luef, pia resnik & choi, 2013). the sub-syllabic characteristics of korean indicate that initial bigrams are a crucial unit in speech processing in the language. in german, the initial segment may be more influential. figure 1 sub-syllabic structuring in right-branching and left-branching syllables (j.-y. kim & lee, 2011) syllable onset rhyme nucleus coda right-branching left-branching syllable body coda onset nucleus the present study analyzes phonotactic probabilities of word-initial phonemes and bigrams (or biphones) in english, korean, and german, and relates them to phonetic learning of english as a foreign language in speakers of korean and german. the following two inter-linked research questions are posed: 1. are high-frequency phonotactic combinations more difficult to adapt through learning than low-frequency phonotactic combinations? 2. does sub-syllabic structure play a role? specifically, is koreans’ efl speech more strongly impacted by initial bigram frequencies, while germans’ efl speech is more strongly influenced by initial phoneme frequencies? two groups of efl learners, korean first language (l1) users from seoul and austrian speakers of l1 german, are compared in terms of phonetic learning of voice onset time in word-initial fortis and lenis plosives in english. confounding factors that may influence phonotactic probability and/ or wordinitial voice onset time (vot), such as lexical frequency rates, neighborhood density, english phoneme and bigram frequency, and efl phoneme and bigram frequency are considered in the analysis. phonotactic probabilities and sub-syllabic segmentation… tapsla.12468 p. 5/31 voice onset time in english, korean and austrian plosives english distinguishes two phonation types of plosives, commonly referred to as “lenis” and “fortis” (or “voiced” and “voiceless”). in utterance-initial position, american english lenis plosives are phonologically voiced, phonetically voiceless and unaspirated, with a mean vot range of 8 to 17 msec. (chodroff, godfrey, khudanpur, & wilson, 2015). the utterance-initial fortis plosives are phonologically and phonetically voiceless and aspirated, with a mean vot range of 65 to 120 msec. in american english speakers (berry & moyle, 2011). in other positions, including word-initial but utterance-medial, american english plosives are more likely to have voicing (davidson, 2016). regional differences in vot have been noted, with speakers from southern states displaying a tendency to pre-voice word-initial lenis plosives (hunnicutt & morris, 2016; morris, 2018). lenis vots of speakers from southern british english (e.g., london) range from 10–22 msec. (sonderegger, 2015), but speakers from scotland may show significant pre-voicing of up to 100 msec. (watt & yurkova, 2007). british english fortis vots most frequently range between between 50 and 100 msec. for northern england and scottish speakers (docherty, watt, llamas, hall, & nycz, 2011) but are shorter for southern england speakers, ranging between 35–75 msec. (sonderegger, 2015). there is significant overlap between british and american english voice onset times, and both are different from austrian german and korean in certain respects. the terms lenis and fortis are also used to describe the two phonation types of german plosives. german shows no voicing of plosives in wordinitial position and has longer vots of lenis plosives than english. southern german (including austrian) plosives differ from northern/ middle german and a near-merger of word-initial fortis-lenis contrasts in some articulatory positions complicates the pattern (moosmüller & ringen, 2004; moosmüller, schmid, & brandstätter, 2015). aspiration is absent (moosmüller, 1987; siebs, de boor, moser, & winkler, 1969) and contemporary austrian lenis plosives are characterized by short vots, while fortis plosives show no aspiration in bilabial, little aspiration in alveolar and strong aspiration in velar position (luef, 2020). in younger austrian speakers, who are in the process of phonetically splitting the near-merger, mean lenis vots range between 4 and 13 msec., while fortis plosives show an average range of 33 to 68 msec. korean shows a three-way distinction in plosives (lax or lenis, aspirated, and tense, see j. y. kim, 2010; shin, kiaer, & cha, 2013). the so-called fortis plosives in korean usually refer to the tense category (e.g., [p*], characterized by very short vot), and are thus not equivalent to the germanic fortis plosives. the korean lenis plosives are phonologically voiceless and show mean vot values of approximately 55 to 70 msec.; the aspirated plosives are phonologitapsla.12468 p. 6/31 eva maria luef, pia resnik cally voiceless, with long vot values between 70 and 80 msec. (kang, 2014; silva, 2004, 2006). a merger of lax and aspirated plosives in all three articulatory positions has led to vot overlap of phrase-initial lenis and aspirated plosives (jucker & smith, 2006; silva, 2006). recent studies have shown that the vot ranges for lax stops have increased, while those for aspirated ones have decreased, with the vot difference between these two categories reducing accordingly (chang & kwon, 2020). this change in korean has implications for the realignment of the korean and english stop categories, with both lax and aspirated stops approximating the vot ranges associated with english voiceless stops, as schematized in figure 2. while the korean plosive merger has obscured phonetic distinctions between lax and aspirated plosives, the f0 distinction at the onset of the following vowel has been amplified: the f0 values for aspirated stops are higher than those of lax stops, a trend that has led to distinct tonal levels (kang, 2014). the vowel environment of a word-initial plosive can have influences on vot duration in different languages (esposito, 2002; grassegger, 1996; klatt, 1975; moosmüller & ringen, 2004; mortensen & tøndering, 2013). vowel height plays a role here and constricting the air passage through the vocal tract (such as when raising the tongue) will lead to a delay in voice onset time (fischer-jørgensen, 1980). thus, high vowels will cause vot to be prolonged, while low vowels cause it to be shortened. figure 2 mean vot values of short-lag vot (lenis, lax) and long-lag vot (fortis, aspirated) in american english (based on berry & moyle, 2011, and chodroff et al., 2015), austrian german (based on luef, 2020), and korean (based on kang, 2014 and silva, 2004, 2006) the mapping of austrian and korean plosives onto english ones is phonetically complicated. austrian lenis and american english lenis can be regarded as corresponding; however, austrian fortis only has small overlaps with american english fortis. the korean lenis category ranges within the austrian fortis category, with significant overlaps with american english fortis phonotactic probabilities and sub-syllabic segmentation… tapsla.12468 p. 7/31 plosives. korean aspirated plosives range within the american english fortis plosives. while phonetic mapping of the three languages is difficult, grapheme mapping is clear. german and english graphemes of lenis and fortis plosives are identical and german readers of english will immediately map them correspondingly. a widely used language romanization system in south korea (“revised romanization of korean”/ 국어의 로마자 표기법) transcribes the word-initial lenis plosives <ㅂ>, <ㄷ>, and <ㄱ> as <b>, <d>, and <g> and the aspirated plosives <ㅍ>, <ㅌ>, and <ㅋ> as <p>, <t>, and <k> (note: tense plosives are transcribed with double consonants, e.g., <bb>). here, grapheme correspondences between korean and american english lenis and aspirated/ fortis categories are established and may guide korean readers of english in their mapping of plosive correspondences. the present study tests phonetic learning of korean and austrian learners of english and is based on reading stimuli. therefore, grapheme mapping is expected to be influential in the process. austrian learners certainly map their lenis and fortis contrasts onto the english lenis/fortis distinction, and korean learners may be more inclined to map their lenis onto the english lenis and their aspirated contrasts onto the english fortis category. according to the ucla phonological segment inventory database (see maddieson, 1984), plosive consonants (especially fortis) are among the most frequent phonemes in languages world-wide (also see everett, 2018). even though individual languages utilize them to different degrees, their articulatory and perceptual ease makes them pervasive to the human language capacity (ohala, 1983). from such a universal view of phonological complexity (e.g., romani, galuzzi, guariglia, & goslin, 2017), it could be assumed that differences between their individual frequency rates may not lead to significant differences in foreign language learning.1 in usage-based accounts of language acquisition and development, phonemic frequency generally plays a role, with different predictions resulting for production and perception of phonemes (bybee, 2001). studies have shown that vot contributes to transfer effects in second language learners (e.g., schoonmaker-gates, 2015; skarnitzl & rumlová, 2019), suggesting an effect of language-specific phonological patterns, which impede or facilitate phonological learning in a second language. 1 we are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out. tapsla.12468 p. 8/31 eva maria luef, pia resnik methods participants and procedures speakers whose first language was korean (n = 22, male: 5; female: 17) and austrian german (n = 21, male: 3; female: 18) were recruited in their home countries in the cities seoul and vienna, respectively, for a sentencereading task in their foreign language english. participants were students whose ages ranged from 19 to 27 (mean = 23.2), and who were enrolled in foreignlanguage programs at their respective universities (seoul national university, university of vienna), where admission required english proficiency levels of b2 or higher according to the common european framework of reference for languages (council of europe, 2018). the majority of students were in advanced years of their program, some of them in graduate programs. they primarily reported using their first languages in their daily lives but were highly exposed to american english through online media and, in the case of koreans, by american pronunciation teachers (ahn, 2011). austrian students of english may be exposed to british english to a higher degree, having travelled to great britain or being tutored by british pronunciation teachers. all participants were first informed about the recording procedures (but not told about the objective of the study) and their rights as participants. after having given their consent, they completed a survey that collected demographic information and details about the participants’ linguistic habits (e.g., first language, dialect, exclusion of speech impediments). the participants were paid for their participation and the experiment took place between november 2018 and june 2019. the study compared two experimental groups but no control group was included in the experimental design. the sentence-reading task consisted of 86 short english sentences or phrases (mean words per sentence = 6.3, sd = 2.1) which were read once at a comfortable speed and in the same order by each participant. the sentences were typed with a word processor and printed on a piece of paper that was given to each participant. each sentence contained a target lexeme with a word-initial plosive consonant in sentence-initial position (e.g., ‘buffaloes are large animals’ or ‘cats are active at night,’ see supplementary material table a1 for the list of carrier sentences), resulting in similar prosodic/rhythmic structure of the sentences. participants were not familiar with the sentences and phrases before the start of their reading and were asked to assess the level of difficulty afterwards in their first language by speaking aloud the terms for ‘easy,’ ‘medium,’ and ‘difficult’ (sino-korean: ‘ha’: 하, ‘jung’: 중, ‘sang’: 상; german: ‘leicht,’ phonotactic probabilities and sub-syllabic segmentation… tapsla.12468 p. 9/31 ‘mittel,’ ‘schwer’). by uttering a korean or german term after each sentence/ phrase, we attempted to minimize habituation effects. the order of word-initial plosive appearance was shuffled so that no consecutive sentences started with the same plosive. all target lexemes had the primary stress on the first syllable. each plosive type (lenis/lax and fortis/aspirated variants of bilabials, alveolars, and velars) appeared in word-initial bigrams with high vowels ([i, ɪ]), mid ([e, ɛ, æ]), and low vowels ([ɑ, ʌ, a]). we grouped the vowels according to height in order to account for the vot differences in relation to vowel height. each bigram combination appeared a minimum of four times, resulting in each plosive type appearing at least 14 times throughout the sentence-reading task. for instance, the bigram [di, dɪ] started the five sentences ‘deans of colleges have to work long hours,’ ‘dishwashers are too expensive for me,’ ‘deals in the business world are hard to make,’ ‘differences in opinion should not be expressed,’ and ‘dill is an herb used for italian cooking.’ sentences belonging to the same bigram class (e.g., lenis alveolar + i/ɪ) were spaced apart at a minimum of ten sentences. all sentences were semantically unrelated to their neighboring sentences and no phonological neighbors in target words were presented in consecutive sentences. cases of deviant phonology (e.g., [ʤɪl] instead of [ɡɪl]) or stress placement (e.g., ‘dessert’ instead of ‘desert’) were removed from the sample. the possible difference in isochronous temporal patterns between korean (lee, jin, seong, jung, & lee, 1994) and german (port, 1983) was negligible in the present study as only sentence-initial syllables with primary stress were the focus of analysis. the participants’ speech was recorded with a zoomh4n digital audio recorder with an attached sennheiser me67 microphone. speech was sampled at 44.1 khz at 16-bit depth, and was subsequently saved and stored as .wav files. target lexemes were cut manually from the audio stream and saved as separate files, which were later processed with the open-source acoustic software praat (boersma & weenink, 2019). overall lexeme duration as well as the duration of the word-initial vots were manually annotated on two different tiers in the program that allowed automated extraction of the durations (in seconds) via a script. the start of each lexeme/vot was marked at the burst of the stop (abramson & whalen, 2017); the end of vot was determined at the onset of glottal pulsing (settings: 100-600 hertz for women and 75 to 300 hertz for men, vogel, maruff, snyder, & mundt, 2009). the majority of words (78%) ended in alveolar fricatives (of which 97% were <s>, voiced or unvoiced) and here the end point was marked when the frication had ceased (i.e., the nearest zero crossing) as visible on the waveform and spectrogram. in the case of plosives (10%), nasals (7%), liquids (3%), or vowels (2%) constituting the final phonemes of the target lexemes, the end point was determined when the waveform cycle had ceased and the sound had completely faded. tapsla.12468 p. 10/31 eva maria luef, pia resnik vot was normalized for speech rate by calculating a measure of syllables per second on 5% of each participant’s speech (= eight sentences per participant taken from the middle of the reading texts; the sentences were the same for each participant). this value was then multiplied with vot (in seconds) and later converted to milli-seconds by multiplying it by 1000. approximately 7% of the data was coded for reliability by a second observer and pearson’s r along with the root mean square error (rmse) were calculated to see whether the two coders agreed on (a) overall word duration and (b) start of vot (= initial burst). for word durations, an excellent r value of .99 (rmse = .023) and for vot durations, an acceptable r value of .71 (rmse = .014) are reported. variables vot distance in order to determine the degree of similarity of the korean and austrian learners’ vots to those of native english speakers, vots of american english speakers were extracted from the timit corpus, a collection of sentences read by american english speakers from different dialect regions, which is widely used in the phonetic sciences (garofolo et al., 1993). even though american english vots show socio-phonetic and regional stratification (see, e.g., lipani, 2019), the present study will focus on average vots across the variety of american english speakers. we identified sentences starting with nouns with initial bigrams that were the focus of our study (see participants and procedures). primary stress had to be on the first syllable (n = 146). we measured vot in the identical way as described for the efl learners. due to an underrepresentation of the sentence-initial bigrams b, d, and g plus [i, ɪ], d and g plus [e, ɛ, æ], selected recordings of the american radio show “this american life” (https://www.thisamericanlife.org) were added to the corpus (n = 21). after identifying speakers whose biographical information (e.g., age) were available, bigrams representing the initial segments of sentence-initial nouns were manually cut from the .wav files that were downloaded from the website of the show. acoustical measurements followed the procedures as outlined for the efl learners and the timit corpus. speech rates of each american english sentence in the timit corpus were calculated (syllables per second) and each vot was normalized for speech rate. see appendix table a2 for more information on the american english speaker data. the phonetic distance between the korean/austrian vots to the american english target vot spaces was assessed by calculating the mahalanobis distance (kartushina, hervais-adelman, frauenfelder, & golestani, 2015), which computes the distance of a test point from the distribution mean by considering the covariance matrix (martos, muñoz, & gonzález, 2013). the mahalanobis phonotactic probabilities and sub-syllabic segmentation… tapsla.12468 p. 11/31 distance takes into account natural variability in speech production by calculating the number of standard deviations from a learner’s vot to the mean of the target spaces (computed per plosive type) derived from the american english speakers, along each principal component axis of the target spaces (kartushina et al., 2015). a mahalanobis distance of 0 indicates that a learner vot value is at the mean of the target space. after analzying z-scores of mahalanobis distance scores and removing those over three standard deviations, the highest mahalanobis distance in the present study was 14.21. frequency variables frequency rates of korean initial phonemes were taken from shin, kiaer, and cha (2013) who based their calculations on the yonsei korean language dictionary and the standard korean language dictionary in combination with the slilc spoken language information lab corpus (shin, 2008). to determine the frequency rate of plosive-plus-vowel bigrams in word-initial position in korean (which are not included in shin et al., 2013), we used the korean corpus of the leipzig corpora collection/ deutscher wortschatz corpus, comprising over 109 million tokens and over seven million types extracted from korean newspapers between 2011 and 2019 (goldhahn, eckart, & quasthoff, 2012). we analyzed the first 100 types of each specific bigram (collapsing the nearly merged 애 and 에), noted down their token frequencies, and divided the token frequencies by the overall tokens of the corpus. frequencies of word-initial german phonemes and bigrams were calculated using clearpond for german (germanpond, marian, bartolotti, chabal, & shook, 2012), which is based on the subtlex-de corpus, a corpus of movie and tv subtitles that is considered an excellent corpus for spoken german (brysbaert et al., 2011). austrian german differs from middle/northern german; however, the majority of german corpora include only small portions of bavarian and/or austrian varieties. in order to establish the applicability of the germanpond resource for austrian data, the only available austrian language corpus was compared to clearpond to see whether austrian and german lexical frequency rates are correlated and clearpond can be used to analyze austrian speech data. the anno corpus of the austrian national library (“austrian newspapers online,” http://anno.onb.ac.at) is a collection of 20 million pages of austrian newspapers and magazines published between 1527 to 2014. it is the only sizable corpus of austrian german. there is a corpus of spoken austrian german, the grass corpus (schuppler, hagmueller, moralescordovilla, & pressentheiner, 2014); however, it contains only spoken language and a limited number of speakers and tokens that can be analyzed with it. in the anno corpus, the uninflected target words were searched between the tapsla.12468 p. 12/31 eva maria luef, pia resnik time period of 1950 and 2000 and the number of occurrences were noted down. as this corpus does not include a total token number but only gives the number of newspapers/magazines for a search period, token frequency was calculated per newspaper/magazine. for example, the word bank (engl. ‘bank’) occurred 652 times within the corpus, which was constituted of 3,124 newspapers and magazines for the respective time period. frequency was calculated by dividing 652 by 3,124. this resulted in a lexeme frequency of 0.21 for bank. next, uninflected target words were searched in germanpond and their frequencies were extracted. the database underlying the german clearpond calculators is the subtlex-de corpus. the frequency values obtained from the anno and clearpond corpora were z-scored, and then checked for correlations. they were correlated (pearson’s r = 0.65) and thus reliability of the germanpond resource for austrian speech was assumed. vots of efl learners may be influenced by frequencies of items in the learned language. thus, word-initial phoneme and bigram frequencies of efl were calculated and compared to the frequency rates from the native languages. we used different efl corpora from which we calculated the phoneme and bigram frequency rates for the efl learners of korean or german language background. for the korean learners of english, the “icnale/ international corpus network of asian learners of english corpus” (ishikawa, 2013) was used. we calculated the frequency rate of word-initial phoneme and bigrams of the sub-corpus spanning only korean learners of english by dividing the overall occurrences of the phoneme and bigrams by the number of tokens of the korean corpus (= 246,879). for the austrian learners of english, data was extracted from two corpora, the “louvain international database of spoken english interlanguage” or lindsei (gilquin, de cock, & granger, 2010) and the “giessen-long beach chaplin corpus/glbcc” (jucker et al., 2006). we selected materials produced by speakers whose first language was german and determined initial phoneme and bigram frequencies by dividing the overall occurrences of the word-initial phonemes and bigrams by the corpus tokens (combined corpus size = 489,270). clearpond for english (marian et al., 2012) was used to obtain english lexical frequency rates of the target words, initial plosive and initial bigram frequency rates. in addition, neighborhood density (i.e., number of phonological neighbors of the english target words differing by one phoneme) was calculated, as this variable plays an important role in lexical processing of first and foreign languages (fricke, baese-berk, & goldrick, 2016). syllable frequencies were not calculated as the majority of word-initial syllables of the stimuli do not appear in korean or german (e.g., ‘bath,’ ‘dance’). this was due to the fact that many target words were monosyllabic (e.g., ‘bills,’ ‘banks’) and, thus, syllable frequency would be conflated with lexical frequency. phonotactic probabilities and sub-syllabic segmentation… tapsla.12468 p. 13/31 all phoneme and bigram frequency variables (l1, efl, english) were first log transformed [log(x+1)] (to account for zero values in the data) and then rescaled to range between 0 and 1 in order to account for the different frequency distributions of phonemes and bigrams in the fortis and lenis category and per learner group. this allowed a direct comparison between koreans and austrians and between lenis and fortis consonants. statistical analyses first, a collinearity diagonistic was run on the independent variables (with the r packages “performance” and “car”) and correlation coefficients and variance inflation factors were computed (see table 1). table 1 correlation matrix of fixed effects (correlations are indicated in bold) l1 phoneme frequency l1 bigram frequency efl phoneme frequency efl bigram frequency english phoneme frequency english bigram frequency english lexical frequency english neighborhood density l1 bigram frequency –0.06 efl phoneme frequency 0.03 0.07 efl bigram frequency 0.14 0.32 0.29 english phoneme frequency 0.22 –0.05 –0.27 –0.13 english bigram frequency –0.07 –0.02 0.001 –0.11 –0.46 english lexical frequency 0.0 0.01 0.02 0.58 –0.12 –0.16 english neighborhood density 0.03 0.03 0.02 0.08 –0.02 0.04 –0.23 english neighborhood frequency –0.02 0.003 0.002 –0.03 0.11 0.02 –0.21 –0.62 tapsla.12468 p. 14/31 eva maria luef, pia resnik english phoneme frequency was shown to be correlated with english bigram frequency, and neighborhood density was correlated with neighborhood frequency. for each correlated pair, the first principal component (pc1) was computed via principal components analysis in order to combine the two variables into one that can account for the majority of the variability of the two variables (salem & hussein, 2019). the first principal component (pc1) of “english phoneme frequency” and “english bigram frequency” was correlated negatively at –0.71 with each of the two variables and explained 75% of the data variability. the combination variable was termed “english phoneme/bigram frequency.” pc1 of “neighborhood density” and “neighborhood frequency” (termed “neighborhood density/frequency”) was correlated with each of the original variables at –0.7 and was able to account for 86% of the data variability. a series of linear mixed models was then calculated (bates, maechler, bolker, & walker, 2014), with the dependent variable being the mahalanobis distance scores of the learners and the fixed effects being (1) l1 phoneme frequency and (2) l1 bigram frequency. as control variables we entered (3) efl phoneme frequency, and (4) efl bigram frequency, (5) english phoneme/ bigram frequency, (6) english lexical frequency rate, and (7) neighborhood density/frequency. as random effects (intercepts) we included ‘subject’ and ‘word.’ to keep type i error at the nominal level of 0.05, we included the maximal random slope structure (all fixed effects) per subject and per word (barr, levy, scheepers, & tily, 2013). different models were computed with the korean and the austrian data. as an overall test of the effect of the fixed effects, we compared the full model with a respective null model lacking the fixed effects (but being otherwise identical to the full model) using a likelihood ratio test (dobson, 2002; forstmeier & schielzeth, 2011). we also tested the significance of individual fixed effects by comparing the full model with a respective reduced model lacking the effect to be tested. due to low variance inflation factors, collinearity did not appear to be an issue (field, 2005; quinn & keough, 2002). the models were implemented in r (r studio team, 2020) using the function lmer of the package lme4 (bates et al., 2014). the sample size for the models was 3,590 tokens, involving 86 types, and 43 speakers. figures were created with the r packages “interact” and “ggplot2.” phonotactic probabilities and sub-syllabic segmentation… tapsla.12468 p. 15/31 results american english speakers generally showed shorter vots before low vowels (see table 2). the same pattern was true for korean and austrian learners of english, and these results are in agreement with previous literature on the influence of vowel height on vot (mortensen & tøndering, 2013). table 2 speech-rate-adjusted lenis vots (in milliseconds) of the american, korean, and austrian speakers of english for each bigram (means, standard deviations) in total, 21.8% of koreans’ and 38.5% of austrians’ vots had a mahalanobis distance of less than 1, which is close to the benchmark targets of the american english vots for their respective plosive types. fortis plosives generally showed larger distances from the american english vots and the lenis plosives of the learners were closer to the american english phonetic spaces (see figure 3). vot distances of the lenis plosives were larger in korean speakers, a fact that can be explained by the larger phonetic distance between korean lenis and american english lenis vots. in addition, vot distances of koreans’ /k/ also exceeded those of the austrians. both learner groups achieved the best vot results for /g/. the largest mahalanobis distances and variability in distances were measured for /p/ in both koreans and austrians. lenis b d g ɑ, ʌ, a e, ɛ, æ i, ɪ ɑ, ʌ, a e, ɛ, æ i, ɪ ɑ, ʌ, a e, ɛ, æ i, ɪ american english 53.1±39 75 ±23 116±32 84±11 109.8±38 177.8±55 118.2±37 293.3±218 160.3±43 korean efl 38±37 27±29 41±70 46±36 44±36 61±48 52±51 65±53 116±84 austrian efl 77±88 78±65 53±29 96±47 81±37 87±39 106±54 108±41 107±58 fortis p t k ɑ, ʌ, a e, ɛ, æ i, ɪ ɑ, ʌ, a e, ɛ, æ i, ɪ ɑ, ʌ, a e, ɛ, æ i, ɪ american english 353±36 256±92 244±14 270.6±59 262.5±59 237.3±39. 262.9±29 243.2±41 263.7±53 korean efl 147±94 124±91 148±111 180±99 154±92 230±199 150±117 225±120 215±111 austrian efl 169±103 169±85 117±95 163±126 163±125 250±123 242±106 257±117 265±96 tapsla.12468 p. 16/31 eva maria luef, pia resnik figure 3 mahalanobis distance per plosive type and first language background korean results results showed that koreans’ vot distances were influenced by l1 bigram frequencies but not by l1 plosive frequencies (see table 3 and figure 4). lower bigram frequencies facilitated smaller vot distances to the american english model. table 3 results of the korean linear mixed effects models predictors estimate se t χ2 p (intercept) 3.13 0.87 3.22 l1 plosive frequency –3.1 0.8 –3.9 1.21 0.27 l1 bigram frequency 0.46 0.1 5.7 8.48 0.004** efl plosive frequency 0.35 0.97 0.37 0.03 0.87 efl bigram frequency 2.88 0.58 4.89 10.31 0.001** english plosive/bigram frequency (pc1) –2.93 0.43 –6.72 22.9 <0.001*** english lexical frequency –0.15 0.14 –0.9 2.14 0.34 english neighborhood density/ frequency (pc1) 0.13 0.24 0.56 0.29 0.58 phonotactic probabilities and sub-syllabic segmentation… tapsla.12468 p. 17/31 figure 4 low bigram frequencies in korean facilitated phonetic learning in wordinitial bigrams in fortis and lenis plosives in addition, efl bigram frequencies and english plosive/bigram frequencies had an effect on vot distances in the korean learners (see table 3), with the latter showing the opposite effect on vot distances than l1 and efl bigram frequencies: high-frequencies in the interaction variable of english plosives and bigrams led to smaller vot distances in the korean learners. austrian results vot distances of the austrian learners were affected by the frequency of the word-initial plosive in austrian german (l1 plosive frequency), but not by l1 bigram frequencies (see table 4 and figure 5). high-frequency plosives showed more english vots than low-frequency ones. table 4 results of the austrian linear mixed effects models predictors estimate se t χ2 p (intercept) 2.95 0.27 10.9 l1 plosive frequency –1.89 0.24 –7.9 46.79 <0.001*** l1 bigram frequency –12.1 6.5 –1.8 3.09 0.08 efl plosive frequency 2.1 0.46 4.4 14.46 <0.001*** efl bigram frequency 1.04 0.28 3.7 11.63 <0.001*** english plosive/bigram frequency (pc1) –1.17 0.26 –4.57 21.54 <0.001*** english lexical frequency –0.2 0.1 –2.02 8.82 0.003** english neighborhood density/ frequency (pc1) 0.13 0.15 0.88 6.16 0.013** tapsla.12468 p. 18/31 eva maria luef, pia resnik figure 5 austrian learners produced better approximations of american vots when german phoneme frequency of fortis and lenis plosives was high efl plosive and bigram frequencies also had an effect on austrians’ vot distances, with low frequencies being indicative of shorter phonetic distances. high english plosive/bigram frequencies also had a measurable effect and minimized vot distances. words of high lexical frequency rate and words residing in sparser and lower frequency neighborhoods also showed improved vot scores. discussion the experiment conducted for the present study followed two investigative threads. first, we analyzed the role of phonotactic probability of initial phonemes (plosives) and phoneme combinations (bigrams: plosive plus vowel) on phonetic learning of voice-onset time in learners of english as a foreign language (efl). two competing hypotheses were tested: (1) high frequency rates of l1 segments slow down phonetic learning, and (2) high frequency segments have larger and more variable exemplar clouds, equipping phonotactic probabilities and sub-syllabic segmentation… tapsla.12468 p. 19/31 a speaker with more phonetic variability, and thus facilitating phonetic learning. we were specifically interested in analyzing the influence of the phonotactic probabilities that exist in the first language of efl learners (korean, german), as well as the influence of those probabilities formed through exposure to efl of the two learner groups. second, we tested whether sub-syllabic units play a role in phonetic learning and hypothesized that right-branching german syllable structure would influence phonetic learning of phonemes, while left-branching korean syllable structure would influence the learning of bigrams. thus, highfrequency german word-initial phonemes were expected to interfere with the learning of phonetic detail of equivalent structures in efl in the austrian group. in koreans, high frequency rates of word-initial bigrams were proposed to be influential. the results show that frequency rates of word-initial segments were predictive in how far learners had progressed in their acquisition of english vots: high l1 frequencies affected phonetic learning in austrian learners, while korean learners were influenced by low l1 frequencies. sub-syllabic segmentation was also shown to have an impact. in general, the austrian learners’ english was influenced by a wider variety of factors analyzed in the present study. neighborhood density and lexical frequency rate of target words were shown to have effects on vot distances in austrians but not in koreans. the closer phonetic distance between english and german could play a role in this. concerning the first hypothesis, we found evidence that low-frequency items in the first language facilitate phonetic learning in english as a foreign language in korean learners. in contrast, austrians relied on high-frequencies to improve their english vots. these findings do not neatly fit into one of the proposed hypotheses. the austrian results could be explained in the context of the exemplar-based hypothesis, where speakers have more numerous and diverse phonetic targets associated with high-frequency speech segments. when producing a novel sound in a foreign language, the austrian learners may have a greater choice of phonetic patterns (or exemplars) for pronunciation. the korean learners showed better vot approximation to the american english model when frequencies of the respective segments in their l1 korean were low. here, the less automatized phonetic patterns associated with low-frequency bigrams may enable the phonetic learning process. the discrepancy between austrians and koreans could be related to the learning potentials that are different for each learner group. austrians’ vots were generally closer to the english model on the distance scale, whereas koreans’ vot generally showed greater distances. when phonetic distances are small, the numerous phonetic competitors associated with the high-frequency segments could help hone in on the exact target. when phonetic distances are large, learners may have to ignore their l1 phonetic repertoire and acquire novel phonetic patterns in order to produce good approximations of a phonetic target. low frequency rates tapsla.12468 p. 20/31 eva maria luef, pia resnik could facilitate that process, as they provide conditions where only a few and less deeply engrained phonetic targets exist, making it easier to adopt a new variant that is independent of the pre-existing phonetic variants. the second hypothesis of sub-syllabic structure having an impact on phonetic learning in a foreign language was supported by our results. due to leftand right-branched syllable structures differentiating the languages, we predicted koreans to be mainly influenced by bigram frequencies, while austrians to be mainly influenced by phoneme frequencies of their first languages. these expectations were borne out by the results, and koreans’ vots were shown to be affected by bigram frequencies of l1 korean, whereas austrians’ vots were affected by l1 german plosive frequencies. the differences in cognitive linking of segments in language users’ minds may be reflected in the differences in locus of frequency effects in efl. in sum, vot distance reduction (i.e., more l1-user-like pronunciation of plosives) was most successful in cases where the first language probabilities of segments and segment combinations were low in korean and high in austrian german. furthermore, in koreans, distance reduction was largest when l1 korean bigram frequency was involved, whereas in austrians the reduction was largest when l1 german phoneme frequency was involved. this points to a role of sub-syllabic units in the cognitive processing of phonological features of a foreign language. for better interpretation of the findings presented here, some limitations of the study should be considered. carrier sentences differed in terms of subject phrase complexity and consequently higher rhythmic variability. in addition, a few cases of secondary stress on the initial syllable of a target word (such as in “punctuation” and “pizzerias”) might have contributed to differences in vot values. in general, the phonetics of vot are heavily influenced by a variety of factors, including language experience (stoehr, benders, van hell, & fikkert, 2017), gender (koenig, 2000), biological (hormonal) causes (whiteside, hanson, & cowell, 2004), fluency of speech production (beckman, helgason, mcmurray, & ringen, 2011), and dialectal region of origin in korea (cho, 2005) and austria (moosmüller, 1987). in addition, the large inter-individual variation that is generally recorded in vot measurements (e.g., allen, miller, & desteno, 2003) renders experimental designs complicated when trying to control for all of these factors. future studies could compare l1 and l2 vots per person (paired data design) to document the exact vot changes in a speaker switching from their first to their second language. a more detailed and separate investigation of the fortis and lenis categories may also yield interesting results that can qualify some of the findings presented here. phonotactic probabilities and sub-syllabic segmentation… tapsla.12468 p. 21/31 conclusion the results of the present study indicate that phonotactic probabilities in the first language exert influence over phonetic learning in a foreign language. sub-syllabic structuring contributes to this effect by providing different segmental combinations where the frequency effects unfold. in sum, our findings suggest an interaction between the statistical probabilities arisen in the first language, their cognitive entrenchment, and phonetic learnability in a foreign language, which is mediated by sub-syllabic segmentation of the first language. acknowledgements the study was approved by the internal review board of seoul national university under irb no. 1710/002-002. this work was supported by the ministry of education of the republic of korea and the national research foundation of korea (under grant nrf-2018s1a5a8028985 awarded to e. m. l.). we would like to thank yaejin jang and jong-seung sun without 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(2013). the locus of the masked onset priming effect: evidence from korean. the mental lexicon, 8, 339–352. tapsla.12468 p. 26/31 eva maria luef, pia resnik eva maria luef, pia resnik phonotaktische wahrscheinlichkeiten und subsilbische segmentation im fremdsprachenerwerb z u a m m e n f a s s u n g es ist bekannt, dass hohe phonotaktische wahrscheinlichkeiten das erlernen von wörtern in der erstsprache erleichtern. die vorliegende studie wurde konzipiert, um die rolle phonotaktischer wahrscheinlichkeiten beim erlernen einer fremdsprache zu untersuchen. im fokus standen österreichische und koreanische englischlernende. gegenstand der untersuchung waren zwei hypothesen, die mit phonotaktischen frequenzeffekten in zusammenhang stehen: (1) hochfrequente segmente haben tiefer verwurzelte phonetische repräsentationen mit automatisierten aussprachemustern, was das phonetische lernen von homophonen segmenten erschwert; (2) hochfrequente segmente sind mit einer höheren phonetischen variabilität in der erstsprache verbunden, was das phonetische lernen in einer fremdsprache erleichtern kann. darüber hinaus wurde der ort der phonem-/bigramm-frequenzeffekte in bezug auf die linksund rechtsverzweigte silbenstruktur im deutschen und koreanischen analysiert. dabei wurde festgestellt, dass die nähe zur englischen voice onset time mit den phonem-/ bigramm-frequenzen in der erstsprache korreliert, allerdings variierten die ergebnisse je nach lernergruppe. die subsilbische segmentation der erstsprache erwies sich ebenfalls als maßgebender faktor. die studie stützt sich auf die forschung zu frequenzeffekten und kombiniert deren grundannahme mit dem phonetischen lernen in einer fremdsprache. die ergebnisse zeigen einen engen zusammenhang zwischen den statistischen wahrscheinlichkeiten der erstsprache und dem phonetischen lernen in einer fremdsprache. schlüsselwörter: österreichisches deutsch, englisch als fremdsprache (eaf), frequenzverteilung, koreanisch, subsilbische segmentation a p p e n d i x t a b l e a 1 carrier sentences with sentence-initial plosives/bigrams 1. touch screens are very useful nowadays. 2. buffalos are large animals. 3. gardening can be fun. 4. tellers have to work long hours. 5. gettysburg is a town in pennsylvania. 6. desk jobs can be boring. 7. puff adders are very dangerous. 8. tummy ache in little kids should not be underestimated. 9. beavers live in lakes and rivers. 10. gum ruins your teeth. phonotactic probabilities and sub-syllabic segmentation… tapsla.12468 p. 27/31 11. cupboards in the kitchen need to be fixed. 12. deans of colleges have to work long hours. 13. pack horses have to be very strong. 14. cats are active at night. 15. gills of fish can look different ways. 16. customs is an agency responsible for collecting tariffs at the airport. 17. pucks are the balls of ice hockey. 18. death by car accident. 19. pictures of tom can be found everywhere in this house. 20. text writing is a central feature of this class. 21. garry is his first name. 22. bathrooms are green nowadays. 23. tusks of elephants can be quite long. 24. battles of world war 2 included the one at normandy. 25. duffel bags are convenient for travelling. 26. passion for sports runs in my family. 27. kitties are little cats. 28. dish washers are too expensive for me. 29. kerosene is fuel for jet engines and lamps. 30. geese can swim. 31. bees make honey. 32. dust gathers easily in the corners of apartments. 33. bats live in hollow trees. 34. tim is my brother. 35. peanuts can be bad for your health. 36. dance balls are old-fashioned. 37. custard recipes are typically milk-based. 38. buck is his nickname. 39. deals in the business world are hard to make. 40. gifts are given for christmas. 41. tea ceremonies are known from japan. 42. guesswork is the process of making a guess when you do not know all the facts. 43. pumpkins are my favorite vegetable. 44. dusk is the time before the sun rises. 45. buddy systems for language learning are a great invention. 46. gut microbes are important for your health. 47. pieces of the cake are in his hair. 48. cutlery can be bought at the supermarket. 49. tins have to be recycled. tapsla.12468 p. 28/31 eva maria luef, pia resnik 50. pillows can be expensive in this store. 51. geckoes are little reptiles. 52. deserts are defined as dry lands. 53. ‘pancake-house’ is open today. 54. kings of england. 55. buns for burgers can be very soft. 56. guns are used for killing people. 57. punch contains a lot of sugar. 58. teak wood comes from the rainforest. 59. bundles of joy. 60. guests are not welcome at my house. 61. pills are generally prescribed by your doctor. 62. differences in opinion should not be expressed. 63. punctuation marks need to be inserted. 64. telegrams are not used anymore nowadays. 65. chemicals in your clothes are bad for your skin. 66. bishops work for the church. 67. tussles should be avoided! 68. cans have to be recycled. 69. bills just keep piling up. 70. gutters can be found on the street. 71. ducks live in lakes and ponds. 72. tennis players need to have strong muscles in their arms. 73. cups you can find in the upper left shelf. 74. pepper can be spicy. 75. duds are expensive to buy. 76. “killerbird” is the name of a movie. 77. ticks carry lots of diseases. 78. pets are not allowed in the apartments. 79. kids have to go to school. 80. dill is an herb used for italian cooking. 81. beach houses were affected by the hurricane. 82. tests will not be written this semester. 83. gears in the car are for shifting. 84. banks reliably store your money. 85. decks of cards. 86. kiss for you, kiss for me. phonotactic probabilities and sub-syllabic segmentation… tapsla.12468 p. 29/31 a p p e n d i x t a b l e a 2 corpora (t = timit, tal = this american life), carrier sentences, and speaker information of american speakers nbr. bigram corpus sentence nbr. of speakers (m, f) mean speaker age 1 b + ɑ, ʌ, ɒ t barb’s gold bracelet was a graduation present. 1, 1 31 2 t bob found more clams at the ocean’s edge. 1, 0 28 3 t bob papered over the living room murals. 4, 1 34.6 4 t barb burned paper and leaves in a big bonfire. 3, 3 29.8 5 t butterscotch fudge goes well with va-nilla ice cream. 1, 0 30 6 b + e, ɛ, æ t bagpipes and bongos are musical instruments. 5, 2 31.7 7 t beverages are made from seeds the world over. 1, 0 27 8 t basketball can be an entertaining sport. 3, 3 29.8 9 b + i, ɪ t beer, generally fermented from barley, is an old alcoholic beverage. 1, 0 27 10 t biblical scholars argue history. 3, 4 25.3 11 tal beers are $2.50. 1, 0 40 12 d + ɑ, ʌ, ɒ t ducks have webbed feet and colorful feathers. 7, 0 35.1 13 d + e, ɛ, æ t death reminds man of his sins. 0, 1 24 14 t dances alternated with sung or spoken verses. 0, 1 35 15 tal dad, are you doing ok? 0, 1 41 16 tal dad, i’m so sorry i always used to say you were stinky. 0, 1 41 17 tal dad? 1, 0 50 18 tal dan was born in south bend in 1946, same year as the club. 1, 0 40 19 tal dan told me he thinks that it wasn’t what obama said. 0, 1 39 tapsla.12468 p. 30/31 eva maria luef, pia resnik 20 d + i, ɪ t differences were related to social, eco-nomic, and educational backgrounds. 0, 1 25 21 tal deanna got a postcard of him that year when her family went to universal. 0, 1 33 22 tal deanna called her aunt rose from the basement, distressed. 0, 1 33 23 tal dishwasher pete, a real live dishwasher. 1, 0 38 24 tal dish out of water. 1, 0 38 25 tal dishwashers are invisible to most res-taurant customers. 1, 0 30 26 g + ɑ, ʌ, ɒ t gus saw pine trees and redwoods on his walk through sequola national forest. 4, 3 35.7 27 g + e, ɛ, æ tal gamblers in dixon’s lab will inevitably say that the near misses are closer to a win than a loss. 0, 1 43 28 tal gambling’s wrong. 1, 0 55 29 tal gary did not want to become a football player. 1, 0 60 30 tal gary is a comedian today. 1, 0 60 31 tal gary, they will kill you. 1, 0 49 32 tal ghetto hoochie mama. 1, 1 27 33 g + i, ɪ tal geese were on the other side of this area when i was talking. 1, 0 42 34 tal geese are nasty. 0, 1 64 35 tal geeks move in. 1, 0 38 36 tal geese are laying. 1, 0 56 37 p + ɑ, ʌ, ɒ t publicity and notoriety go hand in hand. 3, 3 25.5 38 t palm oil protects the surfaces of steel sheets before they are plated with tin. 1, 0 44 39 t pa don’t care about the kid. 0, 1 26 40 p + e, ɛ, æ t penguins live near the icy antarctic. 5, 2 30.5 41 t pam gives driving lessons on thursdays. 1, 2 40 42 p + i, ɪ t pizzerias are convenient for a quick lunch. 5, 2 32.8 43 t people never live forever. 1, 0 25 44 t + ɑ, ʌ, ɒ t tugboats are capable of hauling huge loads. 5, 2 28.1 45 t todd placed top priority on getting his bike fixed. 6, 1 29 phonotactic probabilities and sub-syllabic segmentation… tapsla.12468 p. 31/31 46 t + e, ɛ, æ t technical writers can abbreviate in bibliographies. 6, 1 29.7 47 t tetanus could be avoided by pouring warm turpentine over a wound. 0, 1 27 48 t + i, ɪ t tim takes sheila to see movies twice a week. 2, 5 32 49 t teaching guides are included with each record. 0, 1 26 50 k + ɑ, ʌ, ɒ t carl lives in a lively home. 7, 0 30.8 51 t cottage cheese with chives is delicious. 4, 2 26.5 52 t coffee is grown on steep, jungle-like slopes in temperate zones. 4, 3 29.2 53 k + e, ɛ, æ t calcium makes bones and teeth strong. 4, 3 37.1 54 t castor oil, made from castor beans, has gone out of style as a medicine. 1, 0 45 55 t cattle which died from them winter storms were referred to as the winter kill. 0, 1 28 56 k + i, ɪ t kindergarten children decorate their classrooms for all holidays. 6, 1 34.4 theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 5 (1), 2019, pp. 43–54 10.31261/tapsla.2019.05.03 krystyna warchał university of silesia in katowice, poland humour in professional academic writing (with some implications for teaching) a b s t r a c t professional written academic genres are not typical sites of humour, especially in their final, published forms. in this paper, it is argued that academic discourse as construed today not only does not preclude humour in written research genres but—in some text segments or in response to specific communicative needs—is perfectly compatible with it. in particular, the discussion focuses on these occurrences which engage the reader and contribute to the writer-reader rapport: humorous titles, humorous comments or asides, personal stories, and literary anecdotes. it is also suggested that making university esl/efl students aware of the fact that “serious” writing tasks do offer some room for humour may draw their attention to the human face of academic writing, that is, to the interactive, dialogic, and personal aspects of written academic communication. keywords: humour, english for academic purposes, academic writing, professional academic genres humour in academic settings: an introduction professional written academic genres are not typical sites of humour, especially in their final, published forms. indeed, studies on humour in academic contexts have largely focused on academic speech. for example, lee (2006) examines humour in the michigan corpus of academic spoken english (micase), nesi (2012) analyses laughter episodes in the lecture component of the british academic spoken english corpus (base), fernández polo (2014) carries out a multimodal analysis of conference presentations to identify episodes of humour or non-seriousness in the talks, and ruiz-madrid and fortanetgómez (2015) discuss the humorous potential of autobiographic references in https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8422-4911 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.2019.05.03 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8422-4911 krystyna warchał44 plenary lectures. the problem of humour in academic writing is addressed by skalicky et al. (2016), who examine the potential of certain linguistic features to act as predictors of playfulness, but their study focuses on undergraduate student writing, that is, on “school genres” (johns & swales, 2002, p. 14; see also johns, 1997) rather than on professional text types. in this paper, it will be argued that academic discourse as construed today not only does not preclude humour in written research genres but—in some text segments or in response to specific communicative needs—is perfectly compatible with it. it is also suggested that making university esl/efl students aware of the fact that “serious” writing tasks do offer some room for humour may draw their attention to the human face of academic writing, that is, to the interactive, dialogic, and personal aspects of written academic communication. the examples quoted below come from published english-language texts by both native and non-native speakers of english: articles and monographs, all of them subject to editorial peer-review procedures.1 the functions of humour vary with the type of humour and the context in which it occurs. it is used to improve, to avoid face threats, and to bring relief from tension, stress, and anxiety, but also to attack, inflict harm, and destroy. as nash puts it: for many of us, it is more than an amiable decoration on life; it is a complex piece of equipment for living, a mode of attack and a line of defence, a method of raising questions and criticizing arguments, a protest against the inequality of the struggle to live, a way of atonement and reconciliation, a treaty with all that is wilful, impaired, beyond our power to control. (nash, 1985, p. 1) in many settings, including academic contexts (see, e.g., lee, 2006; nesi, 2012; fernández polo, 2014; ruiz-madrid, & fortanet-gómez, 2015), it helps create positive atmosphere, break the ice, bring people closer together, and grab the attention of the audience. its potential as a social lubricant and an attention-grabber has also been noticed in the school environment, in particular, in a foreign language classroom. the use of humour in second and foreign language teaching and learning has been found to offer many benefits. for example, minchew (2001) shows the effectiveness of playful classroom activities in exploring vocabulary and developing the awareness of style. in a recent study, solska (2019) demonstrates that some forms of humour can be used as a powerful teaching tool in grammar instruction at advanced levels. apart from its use as an instrument 1 fillmore (1967) appeared in e. bach and r. harms (eds.), proceedings of the texas symposium on language universals. texas: holt, rinehart and winston. humour in professional academic writing… 45 in language teaching, humour has been found to build classroom rapport and to foster individual learning outcomes. in particular, it has been observed that humour “brings students and teachers together” (mcmahon, 1999, p. 70), helps create positive classroom environment (minchew, 2001, p. 59), lowers learners’ anxiety, increases their motivation for learning (heidari-shahreza & heydari, 2018), and, as tuncay (2007, p. 2) points out, “makes both teaching and learning far more memorable for all concerned.” making students aware of the fact that elements of non-seriousness can be successfully used in professional written academic communication may contribute to the demystification of academic writing, which, while inevitable at virtually all stages of education, too often seems to be perceived as purposefully abstruse, depersonalised, and stilted. before considering academic communication as a potential site of humour, an important caveat must be made. identification of playfulness or tongue-incheek comments in texts whose main purpose is not amusement of the reader is not an easy task. firstly, unlike jokes, such episodes are, in a vast majority of cases, not self-contained but closely tied with the non-humorous co-text, which makes them more difficult to single out. secondly, the perception of humour is subjective. what elicits humorous reaction from one individual on one occasion may not be perceived as funny or diverting by another, or even by the same person in a different set of circumstances (chiaro, 1992, p. 5). even if we are cautious to maintain the distinction between humour comprehension and appreciation, as advised by dynel (2009, p. 8), identification of a passage as humorous in an essentially non-humorous text often relies on individual reaction to it, which again is dependent on the disposition, knowledge, and prior exposure to similar texts on the one hand, and on various context-dependent factors on the other, such as, for instance, the main purpose of reading or listening and the time pressure. examples quoted below reflect my own reading. another potential problem is the apparently self-explanatory distinction between intended and unintended humour (raskin, 1985, p. 27). in practice, it may often be difficult to tell whether the humorous effect produced by an utterance or passage was, from the sender’s perspective, purely accidental or, conversely, strategic. considering the type of communication discussed—written, professional, peer-reviewed, and revised—it is reasonable to assume that whenever humour appears, it is part of the author’s strategy and is expected to enhance text effectiveness. the rest of the paper is organised in the following way: the next section discusses two models of academic communication, drawing attention to those functions and features that appear compatible with humour. the section that follows focuses on elements of non-seriousness both in the titles of scholarly publications and in the (main) text: in the form of asides, personal stories, and anecdotes. the final section offers some conclusions. krystyna warchał46 academic discourse the belief that academic communication does not go with humour (skalicky et al., 2016) draws on the traditional view of academic discourse, according to which language used for communicating scholarship serves merely as a tool— transparent, objective, and impersonal—for reporting bare facts and transmitting thus obtained knowledge to others, with the aim of obtaining a faithful representation of an objectively given reality. this view, with the writing scholar virtually absent from the text, is grounded in the classical aristotelian distinction between three fields concerned with arguments: logic, dialectic, and rhetoric, where logic is concerned with examining the formal links between premises and conclusions of arguments, dialectic with evaluating the soundness of arguments through criticism, and rhetoric with studying their persuasive potential (walton, 2007, p. 7). of the three, rhetoric was treated with suspicion and reserve, and dialectic lost much of its significance in the enlightenment, which introduced a new model of scientific reasoning, where, as walton (2007, p. 13) puts it, “theorems were to be rigorously deduced from self-evident axioms by deductive logic.” this change in thinking about science imposed the view of scholarly language as an instrument of passing information in an objective, depersonalised way, reporting rather than generating knowledge, and virtually ignored the communicative aspect of scientific pursuits and the social context of knowledge production. in contrast to this traditional perspective, however, there is the more recent approach according to which academic activities are fundamentally interactive and interpersonal (see, e.g., hyland, 2000, 2001, 2005, 2010), with the aims of scholars going beyond describing the small fraction of reality with which they are concerned and including such elements as taking a stance towards other texts and points of view and convincing the reader that the text is worth reading, the methodology flawless, the data reliable, and the conclusions well supported. as swales (1990, p. 175) observes, acts of reporting on the research done are in fact “complexly distanced reconstructions of research activities, at least part of this reconstructive process deriving from a need to anticipate and discountenance negative reactions to the knowledge claims being advanced.” writing science is thus much closer to a dialogue with other scholars on the one hand, and a projected reader on the other, than to a monologue account of facts and procedures. this dialogue with the reader and other members of the academic discourse community (swales, 1990) is propelled by two antagonistic forces: the search for consensus and the need for disagreement. on the one hand, to have their contributions recognised as academic, scholars must work within a certain consensus, which implies not only a certain level of shared knowledge but humour in professional academic writing… 47 also shared beliefs as to what is a legitimate academic problem, what counts as scientific data, and what forms of argumentation are recognised as valid and appropriate. on the other hand, to publish their findings, they must create a research space through academic criticism, by offering a new perspective, or by presenting some data so far ignored or unavailable (swales, 1990; see also myers, 1989; hyland, 2000; martín-martín & burgess, 2004; hunston, 2005). in other words, to be publishable, an academic contribution should indicate some faults, discrepancies, or omissions in previous studies, which it seeks to amend, explore, or fill in. if criticism helps create a research space in which new knowledge claims are presented, then consensus provides the background against which these new claims can be received as plausible and sound. this rhetorical perspective on academic communication makes at least some room for humour. firstly, there is the turn to the reader, whose attention, interest, and appreciation the writer seeks. secondly, there is awareness of important others—the authors of the works the writer refers to in order to situate his or her contribution in the research field. this involves the need to reconcile academic criticism with such values as politeness, respect for fellow academics, spirit of cooperation, and at least professed priority of the development of the discipline over personal career. in what follows, i will attempt to show how humour can serve some of those aims. in particular, the discussion will focus on these occurrences which engage the reader and contribute to the writer-reader rapport: humorous titles, humorous comments or asides, personal stories, and literary anecdotes. elements of humour in published research genres the aim of this section is to discuss elements of non-seriousness in published academic texts, drawing attention to their pragmatic functions in various text positions. the analysis is based on examples drawn from two monographs, two chapters, and four journal articles published in english throughout the past fifty years in the following disciplines: (applied) linguistics, literary theory, and translation studies. all the texts were subject to peer and editorial reviews. the material is limited, which reflects the fact that humour in academic writing is still a rare phenomenon (although, as this paper attempts to show, not at all incompatible with academic discourse) and that elements of non-seriousness in texts which are essentially non-humorous are notoriously difficult to identify using text analysers. although some linguistic features have been demonstrated to function as predictors of humour in digitalised text corpora, skalicky et al. (2016) point out that such analyses are usually conducted on short text samples and not neces krystyna warchał48 sarily prove successful with more complex forms of humour. in the present case, manual analysis seemed the only reasonable choice. as noted in the introductory section, taking into account the type of texts (academic, professional, serious, and reviewed), it is assumed that the humorous effect produced was planned and used strategically to further the writers’ goals. the following subsections focus on elements of non-seriousness in titles, on humorous comments and personal stories embedded in the text, and on literary anecdotes, here used as an introductory move. the title the title provides a “situational frame” (duszak, 1998, p. 129) for the entire text, thus setting the reader’s expectations towards it and facilitating interpretation. it is also the first part of the text with which readers come into contact. it is on the basis of the title that they decide whether the article corresponds to their academic interests and whether it is likely to be interesting. as swales and feak (2004, p. 205) put it, authors realise that a research paper “will be known by its title” and that “a successful title will attract readers while an unsuccessful one will discourage readers.” elements of humour or wordplay are sometimes used in titles to seduce the audience, as in (1)–(5). (1) the care and maintenance of hedges (skelton, 1988) (2) what ‘must’ and ‘can’ must and can mean (kratzer, 1977) (3) the case for case (fillmore, 1967) (4) different strokes for different folks: disciplinary variation in academic writing (hyland, 2007) (5) short people got no reason to live: reading irony (fish, 1983) the title in (1) introduces a relatively early article concerned not with gardening but with hedging in discourse, and arguing for more attention being devoted to teaching the use and function of qualifying expressions to non-native students writers. it is based on lexical ambiguity, with hedge, the ambiguity trigger, going well with care and maintenance under both interpretations. example (2) involves a wordplay founded on the opposition between mention and use— the paper discusses the meanings of two modals, must and can, within the framework of possible worlds semantics. wordplay based on polysemy underlies example (3), with case being used as part of the academic phraseme the case for and as a grammatical term. the two-part title in (4) plays with registers: the proverb in the first “catchy” part (‘different things appeal to different people,’ oxford dictionaries online, 2017) brings associations with folk wisdom and grandma’s common sense, which are considered as extraneous to western science, if not necessarily wholly incompatible with it. the second, academic humour in professional academic writing… 49 part of the title demonstrates the validity and aptness of this unconventional opening. example (5) is structurally similar: the first part is a line from a song by randy newman, blatantly incompatible with academic register and, broadly speaking, academic standards in being not only colloquial but also chauvinist. the second part of the title provides justification for its beginning: newman’s song was received as an insult despite his attempts to explain that his intention was not to ridicule short people but, conversely, to reveal the absurdity of all forms of prejudice. thus, it provides a real-life example of misread irony. in all these cases, elements of humour capture the reader’s attention, provoke curiosity, and raise interest in the content of the article. playful comments and asides humorous comments and juxtapositions used in the body of text may help to keep readers focused by deautomatising reading, keep them engaged by provoking a spontaneous reaction, and provide additional gratification in the form of amusement. this reader-oriented function is illustrated in examples (6)–(9). (6) still others turned to psychology and explained that while newman perhaps thought that he was free of prejudice, his song displayed his true feelings, feelings he had hidden even from himself. in short (a phrase that should, i suppose, be used sparingly in this paper), rather than providing a point of clarity and stability, newman’s explanations (not heard as explanations at all, but as rationalizations or lies) merely extended the area of interpretive dispute. (fish, 1983, pp. 175–176) (7) clearly there is both real assurance and confident ease in this writing which perhaps comes with experience. i haven’t been able to study diachronic changes in this corpus, but it is widely believed that the options open to established researchers are probably much wider than those available to beginning ones; a phenomenon john has referred to as “young turk” versus “old fart” approaches (swales, 2002). (hyland, 2008, p. 147) (8) there is a time in the career of every academic when you are supposed to have authored a monograph. although it is not an official requirement, it fits into the general “publish or perish” adage. the main problem with this, in my view, is the need to find proper balance between trying to publish mediocre works that have not been devoted enough blood, sweat and tears, and aspiring to create an opus magnum, something a scholar can genuinely be proud of as a pinnacle of his/her academic achievement. (bartłomiejczyk, 2016, p. 7) krystyna warchał50 (9) a simple frequency count of content words throws up items which might lead us to identify john in a ‘name-the-linguist’ parlour game. the top eight content items are: research, genre(s), english, discourse, language, academic, writing and students. (hyland, 2008, p. 145) example (6) comes from the opening paragraphs of “short people got no reason to live: reading irony” by stanley fish, an article quoted in the discussion of non-serious titles in section the title. the humorous parenthetical remark refers to a standard academic metatextual phraseme in short, which forms a pseudo-cohesive tie with short people and the title of the song that served as a source of inspiration for the author. the comment in (7) humorously encapsulates the idea of posited differences between discourse practices applied by novice and experienced academic writers using metaphorical (young turk) and strongly colloquial (old fart) labels. if the comments in (6) and (7) are inessential (they may be omitted from the text without major information loss), the ones in (8) and (9) are not parenthetical but form the core of the argument. in (8), the contrast between working at a low effort level on the one hand, and endless revising and polishing on the other, is boosted by the juxtaposition of the emphatic, emotional phrase blood, sweat and tears (itself an unlikely choice in an academic work) and the latin expression for masterpiece—formal, marked, and suggestive of spectacular achievement, grandeur, and triumph. example (9), drawn from a corpus analysis of john swales’s academic style, refers playfully to the possibility to use lexical frequency analysis to identify the principal research themes and, in this way, the author of the texts analysed. the humorousness of this fragment is based on the juxtaposition of two spheres of life: science on the one hand, and leisure and social life on the other. personal stories the humorous potential of autobiographic references—or “personal anecdotal humor” (minchew, 2001, p. 62)—in academic settings has been recognised by minchew (2001) and ruiz-madrid and fortanet-gómez (2015), who report that they are used to keep the attention of the audience, build a sense of shared identity, and maintain a friendly, relaxed atmosphere. examples (10) and (11) demonstrate their effectiveness in published professional academic texts. (10) my late grandmother was particularly sensitive to the use of asymmetrical ty as a face threat. she made a point of never addressing others with this form, and whenever she was addressed as ty by someone who intended to emphasise the power distance, she pretended to construe this as an invitation to a more friendly relationship and immediately humour in professional academic writing… 51 addressed her interlocutor as ty, too. this was normally a very effective strategy to save her face by making the other person quickly switch to the polite form pani. sometimes, the interlocutor was too embarrassed or perhaps too thick-skinned to do this, in which case the relation continued as a symmetrical one. (bartłomiejczyk, 2016, p. 136) (11) my own early attempt to be a full member of the [philatelic] community were not marked by success. early on i published an article in the [philatelic] journal which used a fairly complex frequency analysis of occurrence—derived from applied linguistics—in order to offer an alternative explanation of a puzzle well known to members of the hksc [hong kong study circle]. the only comments that this effort to establish credibility elicited were “too clever by half” and “mr swales, we won’t change our minds without a chemical analysis.” (swales, 1990, p. 28) examples (10) and (11) recall episodes of the writer’s family history and the writer’s early publishing experiences, respectively. it is worth noting that apart from their humorous nature, both play an important function with respect to the content. example (10), placed in a footnote, helps to clarify the significance of the t/v distinction in polish and its possible effects on the perceived politeness or impoliteness of forms of address; (11), in turn, illustrates the bumpy process of earning membership in a discourse community and learning its communicative conventions. by sharing with the reader some of the author’s personal experiences, they establish a certain rapport that goes beyond a scholar-to-scholar exchange, keep the problems discussed close to life, and introduce a welcome change from serious, technical exposition. (literary) anecdotes an anecdote or a fragment of a literary text may be used as an introduction to a problem, that is, at the beginning of a text, presumably to interest the reader in the topic, promise enjoyable reading rather than a dry, technical style, and ensure that the audience is well-disposed towards the text from the outset, as shown in example (12). (12) in one of my favourite novels, the hundred-year-old man who climbed out of the window and disappeared by jonas jonasson, there is an episode in which the main character, swede allan karlsson . . . , ends up in moscow, having dinner with stalin, the boss of the soviet security lavrenty beria, and the head of the soviet nuclear programme yury popov. apart from the aforementioned, at the table sits “a little, krystyna warchał52 almost invisible young man without a name and without anything either to eat or to drink”—the interpreter, and the others pretend he is not there at all, although he makes the friendly conversation possible in the first place. during the dinner, the amicable atmosphere is suddenly completely spoiled as allan quotes an inappropriate, imperialist poet, and stalin flies into a fury. allan is immediately accused by his moody host of being a filthy capitalist and a long tirade results, which ends as follows: ‘i’ve been thinking,’ said allan. ‘what,’ said stalin angrily. ‘why don’t you shave off that moustache?’ with that the dinner was over, because the interpreter fainted. . . . the episode from jonasson’s amusing novel illustrates very wellthe main question i will try to answer in this study: except fainting, what can the interpreter do when s/he is required to voice a statement that may likely offend the addressee . . . and is, in fact, intended to do just this? (bartłomiejczyk, 2016, pp. 9–10) example (12) comes from the introduction to a book that studies the ways in which interpreters deal with face threats in political contexts. it grabs the reader’s attention, illustrates (if somewhat hyperbolically) the significance of the problem, and produces the impression that the author is presumably not only a competent scholar but also a clever writer. concluding remarks the purpose of this paper was to demonstrate that although they are not typical sites of humour, written, professional, career academic genres do introduce its elements to attract the reader and to increase the text’s effectiveness. elements of humour in titles instantly catch the readers’ attention and provoke curiosity, which means that the reader is more likely to read the rest of the text. used in the main text, they deautomatise reading and engage the reader emotionally by provoking a spontaneous reaction. humorous autobiographical references build the writer-reader rapport and may provide a valuable, real-life exemplification of the problems discussed. finally, a literary anecdote may function as a lead-in to the topic, signalling the main problem and promising an interesting reading. all these elements work for the ultimate success of the text, encouraging the reader to start reading and to continue, making the main humour in professional academic writing… 53 point of the discussion more memorable, and leaving the reader with the impression that the text was well written and well-worth reading. drawing students’ attention to these not very frequent but very effective mechanisms may help overcome the fear of writing they often experience at the beginning of their academic lives, dismantle the detrimental stereotype of academic communication as necessarily stilted, dull, and pompous, and bring a welcome element of fun into the academic writing class. references chiaro, d. (1992). the language of jokes. analysing verbal play. london: routledge. duszak, a. (1998). tekst, dyskurs, komunikacja międzykulturowa. warszawa: pwn. dynel, m. (2009). humorous garden-paths: a pragmatic-cognitive study. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing. fernández polo, f. j. (2014). native and non-native speaker interpersonal skills at conferences: managing self-mentions and humour. in a. łyda & k. warchał (eds.), occupying niches: interculturality, cross-culturality and aculturality in academic research (pp. 163–178). cham: springer. heidari-shahreza, m. a., & heydari, s. (2018). humor-integrated language learning: a teacher’s and student’s perspective. tesol journal: e376. retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.376 hunston, s. (2005). conf lict and consensus: construing opposition in applied linguistics. in e. tognini-bonelli & g. del lungo camiciotti (eds.), strategies in academic discourse (pp. 1–15). amsterdam: john benjamins. hyland, k. (2000). disciplinary discourses: social interactions in academic writing. harlow: longman. hyland, k. (2001). bringing in the reader: addressee features in academic articles. written communication, 18(4), 549–574. hyland, k. (2005). metadiscourse: exploring interaction in writing. london: continuum. hyland, k. (2010). constructing proximity: relating to readers in popular and professional science journal of english for academic purposes, 9, 116–127. johns, a. m. (1997). text, role, and context: developing academic literacies. cambridge: cambridge university press. johns, a. m., & swales, j. m. (2002). literacy and disciplinary practices: opening and closing perspectives. journal of english for academic purposes 1, 13–28. lee, d. (2006). humor in spoken academic discourse. nucb journal of language, culture, and communication, 8(3), 40–68. martín-martín, p., & burgess, s. (2004). the rhetorical management of academic criticism in research article abstracts text, 24(2), 171–195. mcmahon, m. (1999). are we having fun yet? humor in the english class. the english journal, 88(4, march), 70–72. minchew, s. s. (2001). teaching english with humor and fun. american secondary education, 30(1, fall), 58–70. myers, g. (1989). the pragmatics of politeness in scientific articles. applied linguistics, 10(1), 1–35. krystyna warchał54 nesi, h. (2012). laughter in university lectures. journal of english for academic purposes, 11(2), 79–89. nash, w. (1985). the language of humour. london: longman. oxford dictionaries online. (2017). oxford: oxford university press. retrieved from: https:// en.oxforddictionaries.com/ raskin, v. (1985). semantic mechanisms of humor. dordrecht: d. reidel publishing company. ruiz-madrid, n, & fortanet-gómez, i. (2015). a multimodal discourse analysis approach to humour in conference presentations: the case of autobiographic references. procedia – social and behavioral sciences, 173, 246–251. skalicky, s., berger, c. m., crossley, s. a., & mcnamara, d. s. (2016). linguistic features of humor in academic writing. advances in language and literary studies, 7(3), 248–259. solska, a. (2019). puns as tools for teaching english grammar in a university context. in d. gabryś-barker (ed.), challenges of foreign language instruction in the university context. katowice: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego. swales, j. m. (1990). genre analysis: english in academic and research settings. cambridge: cambridge university press. swales, j. m., & feak, c. b. (2004). academic writing for graduate students. a course for nonnative speakers of english. ann arbor: the university of michigan press. tuncay, h. (2007). welcome to hell: humour in english language learning. online document. accessed 30.11.2018. retrieved from: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed499225.pdf walton, d. (2007). media argumentation: dialectic, persuasion, and rhetoric. cambridge: cambridge university press. primary sources bartłomiejczyk, m. (2016). face threats in interpreting. a pragmatic study of plenary debates in the european parliament. katowice: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego. fillmore, c. j. (1967). the case for case. prepared for the texas symposium on linguistic universals, 13–15 april 1967. on-line document. accessed 18.08.2011. retrieved from: http:// www.eric.ed.gov/ericwebportal/detail?accno=ed019631 fish, s. (1983). short people got no reason to live: reading irony. daedalus, 112 (winter), 112–191. hyland, k. (2007). different strokes for different folks: disciplinary variation in academic writing. in k. flottum (ed.), language and discipline perspectives on academic discourse (pp. 89–108). newcastle: cambridge scholars publishing. hyland, k. (2008). ‘small bits of textual material’: a discourse analysis of swales’ writing. english for specific purposes, 27, 143–160. kratzer, a. (1977). what ‘must’ and ‘can’ must and can mean. linguistics and philosophy, 1(3), 337–355. skelton, j. (1988). the care and maintenance of hedges. elt journal, 42(1), 37–43. swales, j. m. (1990). genre analysis: english in academic and research settings. cambridge: cambridge university press. jan pikhart university of prešov, slovakia on non-native speaker e-mail communication from a genre perspective a b s t r a c t: the author has investigated a corpus of informal e-mail messages produced by upper-intermediate czech learners of english. the method of analysis draws upon biber and conrad (2009) employing primarily a qualitative analysis as part of the author’s dissertation. first of all, the paper touches upon such descriptive terms as style, register, and genre. secondly, the paper presents the results of an analysis of genre features including deviations. in the concluding part, the article outlines implications for practice. k e y w o r d s: genre; register; style; second-language writer introduction one of the challenges for non-native speakers represents the task of learning appropriate style, register, and genre. this could be attributed to a lack of language intuition (e.g., crystal & davy, 1969). working on the assumption that the issues of style, register, and genre tend to be a stumbling block for non-native speakers of english, the author has investigated a corpus of informal e-mail messages. the e-mails were produced by upperintermediate czech learners of english. first, the paper touches upon such descriptive terms as style, register, genre, and deviation. second, the paper outlines the method of analysis and delves into the situational characteristics. third, it presents the results of an analysis of genre features (genre markers) and discusses their deviations. the method of analysis draws in part upon biber and conrad (2009) and employs primarily a qualitative analysis. the preliminary results from the selected genre markers under investigation do not corroborate the assumption that most second language writers of english should have substantial difficulty in applying the appropriate genre markers. theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 2 (1) 2016, pp. 25–39 26 jan pikhart however, it is important to underscore that every text is situation-bound as well as situation-determined. to reiterate, the present study aimed at conducting a genre marker analysis. the author has investigated a mini-corpus of informal e-mail messages produced by czech learners of english. it presents the results of an analysis of genre features (genre markers) and their deviations, employing a qualitative analysis. to this end, the author has investigated a corpus of fifty-seven informal written scripts (e-mails), with a total of 10,383 words. the e-mails were written by czech learners of english in answer to one of the cambridge exam rubrics with the aim of finding out whether second-language writers of english have considerable difficulty in applying appropriate genre conventions. it should be mentioned at the outset that the corpus gathered for the present study bore certain drawbacks. only 57 e-mails were under investigation in a circumscribed context. this could affect the nature of any interaction. the mini-corpus is clearly biased towards an exam writing setting. generalization is not the purpose of this study; rather, the aim is detailed genre marker analysis of the e-mail messages written by non-native speakers of english. the theoretical framework note on register, genre, style, and deviation. the study of stylistics is of great importance and relevance for language learners. yet it is a complex task. the complexity can be well-illustrated by looking at the key concepts of stylistics such as register, style, and other closely related concepts, for example, genre. although there is at present a fairly extensive body of literature on the three descriptive terms, there is still little agreement on the concepts (cf. biber & conrad, 2009; enkvist et al., 1964; fowler, 1996; urbanová, 2005). in reviewing the literature and textbooks in sociolinguistics and stylistics the concept of register generally appears to fall into two main groups. holmes (2001, p. 246) holds that the term register can be understood in two ways. in a narrower sense, the term is applied to refer to the specific vocabulary employed by various occupational groups as exemplified below. or it is used in a broader sense and associated with such situational parameters as addressee, setting, mode of communication, task or topic. for some scholars (e.g., romaine, 1994) the term register is confined to the specialized language of like-minded people. in other words, it only refers to occupational varieties. similarly, wardhaugh (2002, p. 51) refers to registers as “sets of language items associated with discrete occupational and social groups.” in a similar vein, register is then understood as a speech variety used by special groups of 27on non-native speaker e-mail communication from a genre perspective people, for example lawyers or tennis players, distinguished by a number of distinctive features such as grammatical structures (e.g., impersonal constructions in legal english) and vocabulary (e.g., love, van) in tennis terminology. it must be stressed, however, that these definitions are difficult to accept because the concept of register is strongly tied up with situations of use rather than a specific professional or social group. other authors, therefore, (e.g., halliday, 1978) stress the language variation and selection in a specific social situation and context with specific functions of language in those contexts. examples include: legal register, scientific register, medical register, etc. according to bhatia (2009, p. 389) register refers to a functional use of language to suit a particular configuration of contextual factors of mode, field, and tenor of discourse, while style refers to an individual’s use of language. lee (2001, p. 11) points out that crystal and davy (1969) tend to use the term style in the same way most other people use register—that is, to refer to particular ways of using language in particular contexts. in examining discourse, another theoretical concept is worthy of consideration. it is the notion of genre. the concept of genre is nonetheless highly problematic. for lee (2001, p. 37), the two terms (register and genre) are the most confusing and are often used interchangeably, especially due to the fact that they overlap to some extent. swales (1990, p. 4), for instance, states that “…the relationship between genre and the longer established concept of register is not always clear.” in recent years, genre analysis has enjoyed immense popularity and attracted the attention of a large number of scholars engaged in various fields (see e.g., bawarshi & reiff, 2010; swales, 1990; 2004), who have been prompted by various motivations for the research. in particular, the last decade has witnessed increasing attention to the notion of genre and its application in language teaching and learning. the interest was driven by a dual purpose to understand the relationship between language and its contexts of education (hyland, 2002, p. 113). the term genre has been defined in a variety of ways in the field of linguistics and much interesting research has been done on genres in more specialized varieties. according to mccarthy (2001, p. 112) “most linguists working in the area accept the notion of genre as norm-governed social activity that manifests linguistic and non-linguistic behavior to varying degrees of institutionalizations.” for hyon (1996) and others, for example hyland (2002), genre theorists and practitioners fall into three chief camps. they do not need to be seen as being mutually exclusive but complementary to each other. first is the sydney school, based on the systemic functional work of halliday, which has developed research and well-established pedagogies. it focuses on primary, secondary, and adult education (see e.g., hyon, 1996); second, the english for specific purposes (esp) camp represented by swales (1990). it particularly focuses on non-native speakers of english in tertiary education. finally, the new rhetoric 28 jan pikhart (nr) group, especially north americans, for whom genre knowledge has been considered to be primarily social, embedded in the community and context of writer and audience (hyon, 1996, pp. 693–722). as the name of this group suggests, it is composed of rhetoricians and composition theorists who have been very well trained in rhetorical theory and composition studies. the nr group draws primarily from l1 perspective and makes no reference to second or foreign language studies. the research of the nr centers on investigating the ideological, social, and physical surroundings in which genres are produced. it also focuses on studying the ways in which genres evolve, are negotiated, and fall out of favor. consequently, the nr rhetoricians claim that texts used in classroom study are not authentic any more when they are taken out the original contexts and purposes. in agreement with lewandowski (2010, p. 69), perhaps the most convincing explanation of the three descriptive terms (register, style, and genre) was offered by biber and conrad (2009). the authors make the point that style, genre, and register refer to three different angles or perspectives on text varieties. that is, the same text can be analyzed from all three perspectives. the perspectives vary in terms of: (a) the text for analysis; (b) the linguistic analysis for the text; (c) the distribution of these characteristics within the text; (d) the interpretation of the linguistic differences. more specifically, the register perspective is made up of a combination of an analysis of linguistic characteristics, that is, typical lexical and grammatical characteristics. the analysis centers on lexicalgrammatical characteristics that are always functional and which are common in a text variety with analysis of the situation of the use of the variety. biber and conrad (2009, p. 2) explain that “the underlying assumption of the register perspective is that core linguistic features, for example, pronouns, verbs, are functional. in effect, particular features are commonly used in association with the communicative purposes and situational context of texts.” whilst a register is a set of linguistic variations that are context-dependent, genre perspective, by contrast, encompasses the description of the purposes as well as the situational context of a text variety. its linguistic analysis concentrates on the conventional structures used to construct a complete text within a text variety, such as the ways informal e-mails tend to start or end. the same is true of the layout or physical organization on the page. genre features are not usually pervasive. rather, they are conventional and occur once in a text. in this connection, the two authors speak of genre markers. genre markers are clear signals of the type of text and “the distinct expressions and devices that are used to structure a text from a particular genre” (biber & conrad, 2009, p. 54). some genres (spoken or written) tend to be highly structured. these are, for example, religious speeches and formal business letters. in fact, they frequently contain fixed formulaic genre markers which occur in a fixed order. as mentioned above, written conventions are, as a rule, readily identifiable at the beginning and end 29on non-native speaker e-mail communication from a genre perspective of texts. by contrast, other kinds of texts are less rigidly structure in this respect. to mention one example, informal e-mail messages and informal letters can show greater variation in the use of conventions. moreover, because the purposes and other contextual factors of the two may be closely related, they may contain the same genre markers. finally, in terms of style perspective, its linguistic focus is not functionally motivated by the situational context. rather, style features reflect aesthetic preferences that are associated with particular authors (biber & conrad, 2009, p. 2). the features of style are not necessarily functional. however, they are preferred due to their aesthetic value. to reiterate, according to biber and conrad (2009) the same text can be analyzed from register, genre, and style perspectives as shown and summarized in table 1 with regard to the text, linguistic characteristics, distribution of linguistic characteristics and the interpretation of linguistic differences. table 1 defining characteristics of register, genres, and style defining characteristics register genre style textual focus sample of text excerpts complete text sample of text excerpts linguistic characteristics any lexico-grammatical features specialist expressions, rhetorical, organization, formatting any lexico-grammatical features distribution of linguistic characteristics frequent and pervasive in texts from the variety usually once-occurring in the text, in a particular place in the text frequent and pervasive in texts from the variety interpretation features serve important communicative functions features are conventionally associated with the genre: the expected format, but often not functional features are not directly functional: they are aesthetically valued source: biber and conrad (2009, p. 16). furthermore, style can be defined as a choice of linguistic means: as deviation from a norm perspective, as recurrence of linguistic forms, and as comparison. generally, deviation is a “noticeable difference from what is expected, especially from expected standards of behavior” (tárnyiková, 2002, p. 116). consequently, deviation is sometimes associated with irregularity. if irregularity is creative and unexpected, then it may be referred to as deviation. this is particularly true of literary stylistics where deviation is associated with the studies of a writer’s individual style. in linguistics, it can be understood as linguistic usage which departs from normal expectations of the language. that is, deviation does not need to be ungrammatical or contrary to any rules. seen from this perspective, deviation is not viewed as binary oppositions—deviant vs. non-deviant—but rather in terms of “scales/clines ranging from non-deviant to deviant language 30 jan pikhart manifestations” as suggested by tárnyiková (2002, p. 118). the concept of deviation is equally relevant for the esl/efl domains. this is because it brings up the notion of idiolect and uniqueness of individual utterances of second language learners and the choices they make. methods of analysis. the current study has employed a quantitative approach and the e-mail analysis, as mentioned above, builds primarily on the comprehensive framework suggested by biber and conrad (2009). however, i have decided to modify the framework to a certain extent. more specifically, biber and conrad (2009, p. 47) advocate a register analysis which is dependent upon three steps. 1. a description of the situational characteristics of the register, e.g., participants, relations among participants, channel, production circumstances, setting, communicative purposes, topic. 2. an analysis of the typical linguistic characteristics of the register. 3. identification of the functional forces that help to explain the reason why those linguistic features tend to be associated with those particular situational characteristics. the analysis of situational characteristics is deemed to be an essential point of departure for the linguistic analysis. this is because a register is closely tied to a specific situation. it has a specific communicative purpose. it is for this reason that i attempt to follow biber and conrad (2009) and describe, firstly, the situational characteristics of the e-mails under investigation. the second step includes a lexico-grammatical analysis of register features. this type of analysis is equally important but is beyond the scope of this paper. finally, the authors assert that “it is useful to add an analysis of genre features when undertaking a register analysis in order to describe the text variety more fully” (biber & conrad, 2009, p. 69). taking genre perspective on board, the discussion is confined to an analysis of the situational characteristics and selected genre features (genre markers) including genre marker deviations. genre markers a quantitative genre analysis of conventionalized patterns of language use was applied. that is, the four selected genre characteristics—genre markers of the e-mail messages—were subjected to close examination in relation to three levels of formality (formal, neutral, informal): • starting/opening of the e-mails/salutation, e.g., hey john; 31on non-native speaker e-mail communication from a genre perspective • ways of expressing thanks, e.g., acknowledging the e-mail or cheers for your e-mail; • pre-closing formulae, e.g., looking forward to your reply; • ending/closing of the e-mail, e.g., all the best. for the purposes of the quantitative investigation of the conventional, formulaic genre markers, a genre marker table depicted below (table 2) was developed. table 2 is composed of four columns and differentiates three levels of formality—formal, neutral, and informal. in examining each e-mail, an appropriate box with an appropriate genre marker was completed. to illustrate, table 2 provides a number of genre markers with a set of prime examples. the section with examples serves the purpose of illustration and therefore it does not provide or aim to provide an exhaustive list of all possible genre markers which may appear in real-life e-mails and those under investigation. further, it should be mentioned that the range of styles available to the writer is a continuum. the terms formal, informal, and neutral are treated here as a useful but inevitable simplification for the present research. table 2 genre markers genre markers formal ———————————— (polite, distant, indirect) neutral ———————————— (semi-formal) informal ———————————— (friendly, personal, casual, direct) opening email e.g. dear mr/mrs x, dear x,/hello x, hi, hi x, john (name only), nothing thanking e.g. thank you very much for your email … thank you for your email … thanks/thanks a lot for your email. cheers for your email … pre-closing formulae e.g. i look forward to/ i am looking forward to … i’m looking forward to … looking forward to … closing email e.g. yours faithfully/ yours sincerely, yours ever, best wishes,/regards best/see you,/cheers, tom (writer’s name only), love, hugs … data collection procedure. all materials (informal e-mails) were gathered in the period 2009–2010 at the end of the semester as part of a mock examination. the written instructions were based on one of the practice fce exam rubrics. subsequently, a corpus of fifty-seven e-mail messages, with a total of 10,383 words, was compiled. all of the analyzed e-mails were complete texts of 130–200 words in length. since linguistic features tend to vary across a register depending upon the situational characteristics, different relationships between the participants and the primary purposes of e-mail, i decided to examine one type of transactional e-mail, a sub-register. all e-mails were written by czech learners of english at upper-intermediate level of proficiency in answer to the 32 jan pikhart same task as part of the first certificate in english examination in which the writer is asked to provide the target reader, a friend, with the requisite provision of information and written in an appropriate (informal) style for the situation. analysis situational characteristics. in keeping with biber and conrad (2009), i shall begin by describing the participants and relations among participants involved in the study. participants and relations among participants. the category of participants (addressor and addressee) is self-explanatory. virtually every text is produced by someone and attributed to someone. for example, personal e-mail messages and personal letters tend to be addressed to an individual but can, of course, be addressed to multiple individuals. social characteristics of the person (e.g., age, sex, level of education, social class) producing a text can have a profound effect on language choices. similarly, the role of on-lookers must be taken into account in making language choices. the consideration of the social role and personal relationships among participants is important as well. in many cases the participants are socially equal, for example, friends or classmates exchanging e-mail messages. participants can also have different degrees of shared knowledge. for example, the description of your leisure time activities may vary depending on whether you are talking to your best friend or a stranger. in contrast with real-life e-mail messages in which the interaction can be immediate (or spread over days or weeks), the degree of interactiveness is in this research situation low. this is because the reader is not meant to reply at all. the two participants are said to be friends and are thus socially equal. the addressors are easily identifiable; they were young adults of czech nationality between the ages of 18 and 25. also, it must be noted that they were all students at the time of the beginning of the investigation. the students all took part in an intensive course and sat for the fce mock-examination (pomaturitní studium) as part of their studies. as for the gender of the participants, there were 41 females and 16 males in total. they all had been classified as being at the intermediate level of proficiency. moreover, the majority of the learners had studied english as a foreign language previously at a secondary school in the czech republic. most of them graduated with a pass in english, and czech is their mother-tongue. in sum, the writers formed a homogenous group in terms of age, language level and learning background, nationality, and profession. 33on non-native speaker e-mail communication from a genre perspective regarding the intended reader, that is, addressee, their social role and personal relationship to participants: as based on fce instructions, the informal e-mail message was essentially intended for a peer (a foreign friend), namely, for an individual reader. the writers were therefore expected to produce a personal e-mail using an informal or neutral register as well as appropriate genre markers, for example. the participants (authors of the e-mails) were, however, fully aware of the fact that the personal e-mail messages would be read by the examiner(s). the role of the on-lookers ought to be taken into consideration, and admittedly, cannot be ignored. it may be argued that the role of on-lookers is even more significant than that of an unknown addressee. in short, the influence of both should be recognized. in considering an appropriate sampling, i decided to follow a homogenous sampling strategy. that is, all the participants were young czechs adults who participated in the same type of language program, were of upper-intermediate level of proficiency, and completed the mock test in identical exam conditions. it is felt that the focus on a homogenous group of czech learners at a specific level of proficiency will be of benefit for present and prospective research studies. channel, production circumstances and setting. generally, channel refers to the distinction between spoken and written language—speech vs. writing. the production circumstances are connected with the channel of communication. for instance, casual conversations usually allow very little time for planning, while written texts have greater editing possibilities. it must be noted that, in this study, the e-mail messages were not typed but handwritten. moreover, the e-mails were produced in a very specific public setting, that is, in exam-like conditions at the elvis language school. in addition, the e-mail messages were written within the required time limit and the exam was held in a public setting. therefore, the time and place were equally shared by all of the test-takers. the writers had some time to plan what they were going to write—that is, the e-mails allowed opportunity for quick planning, editing, deleting, and revision. admittedly, the setting (i.e., the time and place of interaction) including the type of channel, might have had a considerable impact on language choices. for instance, it may be argued that the language produced is not natural and was not written in natural conditions. while acknowledging that these specific means of expressing language can have a certain degree of influence upon the linguistic forms that the writers employed, it could also be argued that every text arises in a specific context, often with various and even hidden purposes and interests. communicative purposes and topic. communicative purposes can be very general, for example, narrating or reporting past events, and relatively easy to identify. one parameter related to purpose is factuality. does the ad34 jan pikhart dressor intend to convey, for example, factual, information, personal opinion or speculation or a mix of them? the final parameter concerns the expression of stance which includes both personal attitudes and epistemic stances. topic can be of a very open or very specific category and this is of importance in making lexical choices. but it has no impact on the grammar of a language register. the e-mails under investigation combined several communicative purposes. the general communicative purposes of the e-mails were to convey four pieces of factual information (factuality) and to express personal opinion on a recent visit made by a friend and a future visit to the same friend. in other words, the e-mails were not only task-focused but interpersonal as well. more specifically, the purposes of the e-mails under study were to briefly inform the friend (tom) about a more-than-three-hour delay on the way home (1), to tell tom and perhaps describe which photos the writer likes best (2), to tell tom about a found watch and about the place where it was found (3), and to tell tom where the writer prefers to stay and why (4). this involved brief description and explanation of the problems, description of the photos and the watch, and giving holiday preferences. in terms of the topic, the instructions and e-mail combine the topics of the recent visit to a friend and upcoming mutual holiday plans. genre markers analysis. the linguistic features analyzed as part of a quantitative analysis included conventionalized patterns of language (genre markers) with regard to the level of formality. as is well-known, the use of conversational traits in written texts is connected with informality. by contrast, formality is tied to non-conversational and impersonal registers. while there is general agreement as to the conventions of very formal registers, there is greater variation in informal registers. still, informal e-mails tend to adopt a lively and engaging style. they maintain a clear sense of address to a specific person. also, they may include opening and closing salutations. as stated in the description of the situational characteristics, the writers under investigation form a homogenous group. the group may be regarded in a sense as a community with its own norms and conventions and ways of writing/speaking that are frequently taken for granted. it was therefore found relevant to examine the presence or absence of consistent textual conventions. the act of greeting implies that a social encounter is taking place (searle & vanderveken, 1985, p. 216). and it is one of the aspects in e-mail communication. in fact, in the view of numerous scholars (e.g., abbassi & chen, 2005; bunz & campbell, 2002) openings and closings rank among the most salient structural features of an e-mail message and they encode social information. also, they can be viewed as certain norms that structure and regulate conversations (cf. baron, 2000). for instance, it is sometimes suggested that beginning an e-mail with a proper greeting shows friendliness and indicates the beginning of the message. at the same time, as previous research (e.g., baron, 1998; 35on non-native speaker e-mail communication from a genre perspective biber & conrad, 2009) has demonstrated, e-mail writers often dispense with conventional opening and closing routines. they are thus regarded as optional and conventional rather than compulsory and functional. this applies to both written and spoken varieties. for instance, everyday conversations do not often employ minimal conventions (biber & conrad, 2009, p. 70). the acts of greeting and thanking the addressee formed the core of the study. in examining the e-mails from the genre perspective, the following textual conventions under investigation were used by the subjects. the majority of the e-mails under study begin with a friendly opening salutation hi + first name followed by a comma (hi tom, 59%), (hello+ first name, 17%), and (dear + first name 14%). other, more casual opening expressions are far less frequent, such as hey tom, hi buddy, name only, and nothing, amounting to 9% in total. considering the data in greater detail, no severe violation in terms of the level of formality was observed. this is equally supported by the fact that the vast majority of the openings were followed by a comma, which generally implies a friendly, familiar, and sociable tone. as far as the function of the opening salutations is concerned, the present results indicate that they are still widely used; not only are they conventional but also functional as they seem to open up a “conversation”; and the most common ones (hi, hello) evoke a conversational tone. yet it must be noted the use of openings is strongly endorsed in the learning and testing materials. in other words, learners are encouraged to use genre markers. as far as the ways of expressing thanks are concerned, i first present the results of the optional thank-you-for-your-e-mail expressions (acknowledging the e-mail). the most common expression is the friendly thanks for your e-mail (35%) followed by the neutral or slightly semi-formal thank you for your e-mail (25%). thirty-two percent of the samples did not acknowledge the e-mail at all. rather, the writers began by explaining the reason as to why they arrived home late, complimenting and/or expressing their delight with the return journey. in addition to acknowledging the e-mail, the writers in response to one of the tasks had a chance to express their thanks for photographs. the vast majority of the writers (70%) opted for more pragmatic and immediate evaluation of the photographs (e.g., the photos are very nice, beautiful…, etc.) without any thanks whatsoever. other writers expressed their thanks explicitly by using such expressions as thanks for your photos (21%), thank you for the photo (7%), and 2% of the writers resorted to i thank you also. twenty-four percent of the writers used the explicit pre-closing formulae i’m looking forward to seeing you, while 16% of them opted for a slightly more formal expression, i look forward to see(ing) you, and 7% of them did not use pre-closing formulae. more casual expressions such as i’m dying to see you, (less formal) looking forward to you were used by 7% of the writers. the results show other expressions such as write me soon, have a nice/great time/ 36 jan pikhart week/time, but they were far less common. overall, the optional pre-closing formulae caused difficulty in terms of the structure and phrasal verb choice. in the students either confused phrasal verbs, for example, i am looking for your e-mail (29), i’m really looking after your e-mail (25), or misapplied for an infinitive structure, e.g., i look forward to see you (47). i’m looking forward to see you (42). finally, one writer struggled with spelling, i.e., i’m daying to see you (42). it is also apparent that the closings of the e-mails varied considerably, ranging from casual see you (soon), bye, or no closing, to the more intimate love. amongst less frequent closings expressions included yours, take care, with love, best wishes, and other informal closings such as hugs, lots of love, your loving friend. only one e-mail ended with the semi-formal best regards. similarly, one e-mail used a rather formal closing, yours sincerely. genre markers deviations and a comparison. before proceeding to discuss the results from the quantitative data analysis of the selected genre markers, it is necessary to recall that using statistical data in relation to deviation from any social norms is problematic. as we know, when the students avoid norms and apply less acceptable or unacceptable genre markers, we tend to conclude that there is something wrong with the piece of writing. however, there are at least four problems with this reasoning. to begin with, the use of genre markers in particular and appropriate register in general may vary enormously across cultures. the second problem lies in the historical variation. while some genre features have been employed extensively in the past, this may no longer be the case today. for instance, some types of business events have a tendency to be more informal today than in the past. the third problem is controversial. in many cases, including here, what is socially and linguistically acceptable or unacceptable has been established by groups with social power. last but not at all least, recognizing genre conventions may be viewed as a learning process in students’ development. it is, therefore, not only associated with age, gender, and culture but also the level of proficiency of the learner. the results from the quantitative data analysis of the selected genre markers show no frequent violations in terms of the level of formality in general. rather, regarding the choice of formality, it was found that the optional preclosing formulae caused difficulty, especially the structure and phrasal verb choice, for example, i am looking for your e-mail (29), i’m really looking after your e-mail (25), or incorrect an infinitive structure, for example, i’m looking forward to see you (42). in other words, the selected genre markers under investigation were marked by a large number of structural deviations rather than by frequent deviations from appropriate level of formality. in addition to the genre markers, inappropriate formality was found to be a feature linked to 37on non-native speaker e-mail communication from a genre perspective individual cases; it was not found to be characteristic of the majority of the e-mails under study. rather than consistently useing of less acceptable expressions, and a very formal style throughout, most of the students commited occasional lapses. considering the data and comparing them with those of native speaker studies, some similarities as well as differences can be observed. for example, biber and conrad (2009) investigated approximately the same number of e-mails addressed to one of the authors. according to their findings, among the opening and closing salutations of e-mails written by their friends and family members (all native speakers), there was a strong preference for name only opening and closing expressions, followed by frequent hi (name) or first name only. similarly, e-mail-signatures where a first name is used sometimes introduced with an expression of personal affection, for example, love, hugs (biber & conrad, 2009, p. 188) were commonplace. conclusion respecting the above, several observations need to be made about the nature and functions of the aforementioned genre markers. although genre markers are not primarily functional, their contribution cannot be ignored. first, the study shows that the genre markers under investigation are not pervasive in the texts. according to biber and conrad (2009) genre markers have a tendency to occur at a particular point in the texts, most commonly at the beginning and end of the text. in general, the opening and closing expressions were conventional. other distinctive genre marker features often signaled a shift of a topic (cf. swales’s concept of moves). second, it seems that the genre markers tend to evoke a “small talk.” as a rule, rather than conveying information genre markers help to open, maintain and close conversation. their role foregrounds the contact. not only is their role phatic but conventional as well. as a consequence, the layout of the e-mails and the use of salient genre markers in boundaries bear similarities to a traditional (conventional) letter. all this seems to be particularly true of opening and closing formulae. yet the thanking formulae were not found to be hollow polite phrases. rather the use of these expressions seemed to show a genuine interest; the genre markers contributed substantially to the development and flow of the “conversation.” moreover, the use of these expressions helped the reader make sense of the text. overall, the genre markers evoked turn-taking, guided the reader, and geared the texts towards a dialog. additionally, it is worth recalling that every text is situation-bound as well as situation-determined. thus the specific context and situation in which a particular text is used have a considerable effect on its information structure and 38 jan pikhart its formal properties. and this, of course, also applies to the pieces of writing in this study. contrary to expectations, the results of the selected genre markers do not corroborate the assumption that most second-language writers of english should have substantial difficulty in applying the appropriate level of formality in the genre markers under investigation. but the results must be interpreted with a degree of caution. given the task instructions and extensive practice and attention in modern teaching and learning material, the results of the genre markers were relatively predictable. while certain difficulties have been attested to genre marker lapses by individual writers, the problem merits further investigation. for instance, it would be beneficial to look at these considerations and challenges in a less circumscribed context (e.g., chat exchanges, e-forum postings, text messages), where a lack of intuition cannot be compensated for by such memorized genre markers as opening and closing lines. references abbassi, a., & chen, h. (2005). applying authorship analysis to extremist-group forum messages. ieee computer society, 20, 67–75. baron, n. (1998). letter by phone or speech by other means: the linguistics of e-mail. language and communication, 18. elsevier science ltd. baron, n. (2000). alphabet to e-mail. london: routledge. bawarshi, a., & reiff, m. (2010). genre: an introduction to history, theory, research and pedagogy. indiana: parlor press. bhatia, v. (2009). the handbook of world englishes. b. kachru, y. kachru, & c. nelson (eds.). singapore: blackwell publishing. biber, d., & conrad, s. (2009). register, genre, and style. cambridge: cambridge university press. bunz, u., & campbell s. (2002). accommodating politeness indicators in personal electronic mail messages. paper presented at the association of internet researchers’ 3rd annual conference maastricht. the netherlands, october 13–16. crystal, d., & davy, d. (1969). investigating english style. london: longman. enkvist, n., spencer, j., & gregory, m. (1964). linguistics and style. oxford: oxford university press. fowler, r. (1996). linguistic criticism. 2nd ed. oxford: oxford university press. halliday, m. (1978). language as social semiotic. london: edward arnold. holmes, j. (2001). an introduction to sociolinguistics. harlow: pearson education. hyland, k. (2002). genre: language, context, and literacy. in annual review of applied linguistics. cambridge: cambridge university press, 113–135. hyon, s. (1996). genre in three traditions: implications for esl. tesol quarterly, 30, 693–722. lee, d. (2001). genre, registers, text types, domains, and styles: classifying the concepts and navigating a path through the bnc jungle. language learning & technology, 5(3), 37–42. 39on non-native speaker e-mail communication from a genre perspective lewandowski, m. (2010). sociolects and registers—a contrastive analysis of two kinds of linguistic variation. investigationes lingusticae, 4, 60–79. mccarthy, m. (2001). issues in applied linguistics. cambridge: cambridge university press. romaine, s. (1994). language in society: an introduction to sociolinguistics. oxford: oxford university press. searle, j., & vanderveken, d. (1985). foundations of illocutionary logic. cambridge: cambridge university press. swales, j. (1990). genre analysis. cambridge: cambridge university press. swales, j. (2004). research genres: explorations and applications. new york, cambridge university press. tárnyiková, j. (2002). from texture to text. 3rd ed. olomouc: univerzita palackého. urbanová, l. (2005). is stylistics a controversial branch of language study? brno studies in english, 54, 73–84. wardhaugh, r. (2002). an introduction to sociolinguistics. oxford: blackwell. jan pikhart zu e-mail-kommunikation von nicht-muttersprachlern vom standpunkt einer gattung aus z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g der verfasser untersuchte das korpus von e-mail-nachrichten, die von tschechischen schülern der höheren mittelstufe englisch geschrieben wurden. er bediente sich dabei der von biber & conrad (2009) formulierten voraussetzungen der qualitativen analyse. der erste teil des beitrags konzentriert sich darauf, die termini: stil, gattung und register zu klären. der zweite dagegen beinhaltet die ergebnisse der analyse von generischen merkmalen, darunter der zu beobachtenden abweichungen. im dritten zusammenfassenden teil schlägt der verfasser vor, seine untersuchungsergebnisse in weiteren forschungen auszunutzen. cover photo: “big_blue” by max iter (retrieved from www.f lickr.com) copy editing: gabriela marszołek proofreading: joanna zwierzyńska typesetting: edward wilk copyright © 2016 by wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego all rights reserved issn 2450-5455 (print edition) issn 2451-2125 (digital edition) published by wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego ul. bankowa 12b, 40-007 katowice www.wydawnictwo.us.edu.pl e-mail: wydawus@us.edu.pl first impression. no. of copies: 100 + 50. printed sheets: 7.75. publishing sheets: 9.0. offset paper grade, 90 g. price 20 zł (+ vat) printing and binding „totem.com.pl” sp.k. ul. jacewska 89, 88-100 inowrocław preface we resolved to start publishing this journal thinking that despite the fact that poland has a strong position in second language acquisition research and that quite a large number of monographic publications in this area come out every year—often published abroad with multilingual matters or springer, among others—yet there is no academic research-oriented journal devoted to the theory and practice of sla which would be widely available to polish academia. the other existing journal, studies in second language learning and teaching published by adam mickiewicz university (kalisz-poznań), emphasizes the role of classroom-oriented research, and so its particular focus complements this new journal by presenting foreign language pedagogy and its classroom applications. the origins of our journal also lie in the success of the international conference on second/ foreign language acquisition which has been organized for almost thirty years by the institute of english at the university of silesia. it gathers together each year many polish and foreign academics and focuses on often un-researched issues and fairly new trends in sla. papers falling within the leading theme of each conference are usually edited and published in the form of a monograph, but there are also many studies presented in research areas not directly related to the main theme. since many of these are of a high academic standard, we resolved to open a channel for their publication, alongside other original articles and submissions. we believe that our new journal will serve an important need in projecting new and interesting research in sla. this is the third issue of our journal, which is published bi-annually and consists of articles submitted to us directly or solicited (by invitation). each text is peer-reviewed in a double blind referring process by referees of the editorial board and beyond. the editorial board consists of both polish scholars and foreign experts in the area, and represents the wide range of research interests of its members. all updated information on the journal is available on its new website at www.journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/tapsla. like the previous issue, preface6 which was published in the first part of 2016, this issue of the journal is also available in electronic form. we hope that this journal to some extent fills a gap in the polish journal publishing market and that it will be of interest to researchers working in the field of second language acquisition. we would like to invite polish and foreign academics to share their scholarly research with us by submitting their work to the theory and practice of second language acquisition journal, which is published by the prestigious polish academic publisher, wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego (university of silesia press). the present issue consists of articles in various areas of sla and also research in multilingualism, supplemented with two papers strictly related to aspects of foreign language teaching. in the incessant quest for recognition of the true role of motivation in foreign language learning, mirosław pawlak offers another interesting perspective, viewing the motivational system as encompassing a vital component of integrativeness, which is analyzed relative to three dimensions: an ideal self, an ought-to self, and l2 learning experiences. this intriguing insight, which results from a qualitative study, reveals a number of additional factors which take part in the shaping of motivational background. ingrid bello-rodzeń recognizes the role of new technologies and the development of the blogosphere as increasingly important factors in promoting and shaping multilingualism, not just in the bloggers themselves, but in their children, whose multilingual development often becomes the main theme of their narratives. the theme of modern technologies used in communication is also addressed in the paper by anna turula, who focuses on the application of it devices to the teaching of a foreign language. as the text reveals, a new realm of opportunities, but also problems, emerges at the meeting point between the digital and the real worlds. in a world of massive migrations, problems encountered by migrant children deserve special attention. one such problem is selective mutism, which affects a much bigger proportion of immigrant children than was initially assumed. the longitudinal case study by lindsey r. leacox, margarita meza, and tammy gregersen demonstrates the positive outcomes of pet-assisted therapy, against the background of music therapy and laughter therapy, offering some interesting implications and conclusions. in the context of changing views on the significance of the native-speaker as a language model, influenced by english as a lingua franca methodology, the study by aleksandra szymańska-tworek confronts the recent methodological trends with the opinions of pre-service teachers of english. it turns out that while they are ready to embrace multicultural diversity, they are quite reluctant to accept too much linguistic variability in the teaching materials. preface 7 we can never predict exactly where our second language skills are going to prove useful. sometimes a unique ability or proficiency in a rarely practiced genre can boost our value as a much sought-after employee. several interesting hints on how to develop the uncommon skill of composing obituaries english are offered by grzegorz cebrat, who decided to translate the results of his indepth discourse analytic study into a practical teaching procedure. we hope that this issue of our journal will generate interest in its readers for the variety it offers as well as innovative topics presented by the contributors. danuta gabryś-barker adam wojtaszek articles theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 5 (2) 2019, pp. 11–23 10.31261/tapsla.7554 gessica de angelis trinity college, dublin, ireland the bilingual advantage and the language background bias a b s t r a c t the idea that bilingualism can give us an advantage in life is of great interest to the scientific community, due to its significant positive implications for healthcare and education. in recent years, several scholars have provided evidence in favour of the so-called bilingual advantage or benefit, which suggests a positive association between bilingualism and cognitive development. in order to understand whether the claim is fully warranted, this paper examines the evidence in support and against the existence of the possible bilingual benefit for individuals. following a brief discussion on the use of the terms bilingualism and multilingualism in the literature, this paper aims to provide a summary of the possible advantages and disadvantages currently associated with prior language knowledge in the mind, highlighting some of the possible reasons for the different results that have been reported. in addition, this paper proposes that there are inconsistent experimental results due to a language background bias, which refers to the widespread failure to classify prior language background in a consistent and suitable manner in empirical research. the paper ends with some suggestions for future research that can help us move forward and increase our understanding of the bi-/multilingual advantage as a broader phenomenon. keywords: multilingualism, bilingualism, bilingual benefit, cognitive development introduction the bilingual advantage or benefit refers to the range of benefits speakers of two languages seem to display when they go through the process of language learning or when they carry out tasks that are cognitively demanding and/or require a great deal of attention. the idea that bilingualism can give us an advantage in life is naturally of great interest to the scientific community https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7498-3474 http://doi.org10.31261/tapsla.7772 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7498-3474 gessica de angelis12 due to the significant positive implications for both healthcare and education. in recent years, the existence of an advantage for bilingual and multilingual speakers has been widely debated in academic papers as well as in newspapers, television, and social media. as a result of these activities, there is now a much broader awareness of the importance of language learning for children from a very young age and all the way through life. learning a language early in life is believed to be a great achievement and an added value in itself. while it has become more common for people to link bilingualism with some type of benefit for the individual, several questions have simultaneously been raised. as a result, there is now some disagreement about the extent to which bilinguals and multilinguals can be argued to be truly blessed with the long list of advantages that is attributed to them. the primary aim of this paper is to examine these issues more closely. this paper begins with a brief discussion of the inconsistent use of the terms bilingualism and multilingualism in the literature and why more clarity is relevant for our understanding of the bilingual benefit as a general phenomenon. then a summary of the evidence of advantages and disadvantages that are associated with prior language knowledge in the mind will be covered, which will highlight some of the possible reasons for the different results reported in the literature and will introduce the language background bias in empirical research. this paper will then conclude with some suggestions for future research that can help researchers and learners move forward and increase their understanding of the bi-/multilingual advantage as a broader phenomenon. bilingualism and multilingualism: a terminological concern in recent years we have seen the growing trend of using the term multilingualism to refer to both bilingual (two languages) and multilingual speakers (more than two languages). within areas on societal multilingualism such a broad use might make sense, but the same cannot be said about research on individual multilingualism, as additional accuracy is typically required. the topic of the present paper―the possible effects of prior language knowledge on learning―is a good example of how important this distinction can be for research on individual multilingualism. in order to examine the association between the languages acquired and the benefits arising from having become bilingual or multilingual, it is imperative that we make explicit reference to the number of languages an individual is familiar with. the presence of two languages in the mind, as opposed to three the bilingual advantage and the language background bias 13 or four, the different proficiency levels achieved in these languages, and the frequency of use in daily life may well make a difference for the individual are indeed argued by some authors who claim the increase in benefits to be dependent upon the number of languages known (perquin et al., 2013). therefore, a lack of distinction between bilinguals and multilinguals makes it virtually impossible for us to ask specific questions about the amount of language knowledge stored in the mind and its influence on cognitive development. for these reasons, the terms bilingual and bilingualism within this paper are strictly used to refer to speakers of two languages and phenomena associated with two languages, while multilingual and multilingualism are used to refer to speakers of three or more languages and phenomena associated with a minimum of three languages in the mind. review of the literature our current understanding of the advantages and disadvantages associated with prior language knowledge and cognitive development remains quite limited to date for two main reasons. firstly, the literature is largely based on studies that compared monolingual with bilingual speakers, therefore claims about multilingual speakers are often hypothetical rather than empirically-based. secondly, research has mostly focused on executive function (ef)―a relatively narrow field of enquiry which investigates the cognitive processes that allow us to make a decision, reach a goal, obtain information, make plans, and so forth. these processes are typically examined in controlled laboratory settings. in the literature, we find a long list of studies on the advantages associated with prior language knowledge and ef, but there are other studies which show disadvantages or no advantages at all. these positions are reviewed in the next two sections below. advantages the core claim that we find in the literature is that bilingualism improves executive function (ef), therefore there is a set of cognitive processes that help us carry out a number of different tasks in our daily lives. under the umbrella term of ef, we find studies on the processes that control what we pay attention to and how we suppress irrelevant information. ef also includes research on gessica de angelis14 the speed at which we switch between concepts, notions, and ideas, and there are other studies on the amount of information we can hold in our minds for short periods of time (working memory). some of these functions are believed to be used simultaneously when we carry out complex cognitive tasks such as planning, reasoning or problem-solving. over the years bilingual speakers have been argued to show a number of different type of advantages in relation to ef (for a good review, see adesope et al., 2010). some of these include advantages in relation to information inhibition and attentional control (bialystok et. al, 2004; carslon & meltsoff, 2008; martin-rhee & bialystok, 2008), the ability to switch between different sets of information (bialystok, 1999; bialystok & martin, 2004), improved working memory (carslon & meltsoff, 2008) visual processing and perception (chabal, schroeder, & marian, 2015; wimmer & marx, 2014), phonological awareness (bialystok, majumder, & martin, 2003) and stuttering (kornisch et al., 2017). age is often under scrutiny as learning patterns naturally change as we grow, and benefits are believed to start early in life and last during our lifetime (bialystok et al. 2004; carlson & meltzoff, 2008; clare et al., 2016; filippi et al., 2015, fischer & schweizer, 2014; kazemeini & fadardi, 2016; gold, johnson, & powell, 2013; gollan et al. 2011; lazaruk, 2007; mårtensson et al., 2012). while most studies examine behaviour at a single-point in time, some researchers are instead focusing on changes over time. an example is ansaldo et al. (2015) who compared bilinguals’ control abilities taking age into account. the authors found that older bilinguals and monolinguals seem to display a similar level of interference, but they also seem to achieve control using different neural substrates, suggesting more profound neural changes as we grow. the positive influence of bilingualism has been further associated with alzheimer’s and dementia (gollan et al., 2011). while we know that bilingualism does not prevent the illness, it seems to delay the onset of its symptoms of about four to five years (alladi et al., 2017; bialystok et al., 2007), which is a significant amount of time for those affected. advantages are further argued to apply to those who are literate as well as illiterate in one of the languages, suggesting that education alone may not be a sufficient explanation for bilinguals’ performance (alladi et al., 2017). among the factors of interest to applied linguists and educators are language proficiency and language distance, as these factors are typically associated with differences in monolingual and bilingual behaviour and have implication for language acquisition and language development. moreover, multilingual speakers frequently have different proficiency levels in their non-native languages, which creates a pressing need for researchers to understand the following: when the benefit might start, under what conditions, and how benefits may adjust to rapidly fluctuating proficiency levels. the bilingual advantage has been argued to grow as bilingual proficiency grows, as shown for instance in a study on the bilingual advantage and the language background bias 15 the increase of translation equivalents over a 7-month period (crivello et al., 2016). the benefit has also been linked to advantages in language learning as well as mathematical learning in multilinguals (dahm & de angelis, 2017), and the advantages seem to arise even when there is minimal language distance between the two languages known to the speaker (antoniou et al., 2016). a recurrent explanation for the bilingual benefit (see bialystok et al., 2004) is that bilinguals develop an increased ability to deal with conflict and distractions because of the frequent switching between their languages. the switching experience is argued to improve their ability to complete tasks associated with ef, to increase their ability to keep languages apart and to help them develop better working memories for storage and processing. most of the studies mentioned above focus on specific cognitive processes associated with ef, and the specificity of these processes is such that it is sometimes difficult for us to fully extrapolate the potential implications for language learning or other types of learning. future applied research may give us additional insights on the relevance of these benefits for learning as a broader cognitive activity. disadvantages or no advantages kenneth paap and his colleagues are major advocates of the view that there are no bilingual advantages that can be associated with ef. the researchers attempted a replication of bialystok et al. (2004) study which originally compared monolinguals (english l1) and bilinguals (tamil-english) using the simon task, but they were unable to obtain similar results. to investigate the matter further, the authors carried out a number of other experiments, but the evidence found did not provide additional support for the existence of a bilingual advantage (paap & greenberg, 2013). paap, johnson, and sawi (2015) further claim that 80% of the tests carried out after 2011 show null results or are based on small samples, and discuss the need to introduce more rigour in terms of processes, procedures, and analysis, while advocating the use of bigger samples. similar arguments appear in von bastian, souza, and gade (2016), who also believe early effects may be task-specific and confined to small samples. an area that requires further research relates to the role of proficiency and degree of bilingualism in ef. as is commonly known, language knowledge is not something that individuals either have or do not have, plenty exists in between, and studies that group participants according to language background are already showing the importance of these factors for ef. gathercole et al. (2014), for instance, tested several measures of ef on balanced bilinguals and gessica de angelis16 monolinguals in wales and found that there was an occasional advantage for those dominant in the language being tested rather than for bilinguals. their results call for increased attention towards proficiency levels and the need to monitor language background more thoroughly. similar suggestions appear in kousaie et al. (2014) who recommend that future researchers move forward by focusing on the differences between language groups. other studies conclude that the bilingual advantage does not exist or it is restricted to very specific conditions and circumstances (arizimendi et al., 2018; dunabeitia et al., 2014; papageorgiou et al., 2018). some of these studies claim an advantage for monolinguals (folke et al., 2016). bilinguals have additionally been shown to have more difficulties than monolinguals when accessing low-frequency words (runnqvist et al., 2013), and it is a well-known fact that ease of retrieval is linked to language proficiency and frequency of lexical access. while the evidence against the existence of a bilingual advantage is beginning to grow, firm conclusions remain premature at this stage. in the literature, there is a general call for results to be interpreted with more caution (goldsmith & morton, 2018; hartsuiker, 2015, klein, 2015; morton, 2010; paap, johnson, & sawi, 2016). some scholars even go as far as dismissing the existence of the benefit in its entirety, labelling it as a sheer myth and describing it as an “insufferable mixture of excessive claims and weak evidence” (morton, 2014, p. 929). why so many conflicting results? the literature shows evidence that is both in favour and against the existence of a bilingual advantage for cognitive development and several explanations have been discussed to explain the inconsistencies. this section reviewed current explanations and argued for the existence of a bias that is too frequently overlooked in empirical research: the language background bias. publication bias de bruin et al. (2015) present arguments which emphasise how only studies with positive results tend to be published while those with negative or no results are more likely to remain unpublished. the authors maintain that this difference generates a publication bias which creates a false impression of the overall significance of the published results. to test the hypothesis, the authors monitored 13 years of conference abstracts on the bilingual benefit and ef (from 1999 to 2012) and checked how many of those studies were ultimately published. those with positive results were indeed published the most, while the bilingual advantage and the language background bias 17 those with negative or no results were published the least, and they argued that this difference did not have anything to do with sample size or test type. immigration bias fuller-thomson and kuh (2014) have put forward the argument that bilinguals taking part in ef research are usually immigrants who should be regarded as a self-selected group, as those who migrate to build a new life for themselves are usually the most motivated and the most intelligent individuals. while this explanation might be plausible in some contexts with large concentrations of recent immigrants, it is very difficult to extend to most bilingual and multilingual contexts around the world where multilingualism is the result of different ethnicities sharing the same space for a long time. perquin et al. (2013), for instance, found evidence in favour of the bilingual benefit in a study on dementia and the aging population of luxembourg, a context where the multilingualism of its inhabitants has been the norm for decades and cannot be considered the result of recent immigration. the literature also presents the opposite argument, that there is a recurrent association between immigration and disadvantages in education as children with an immigrant background are typically linked to poor performance in school (miller & warren, 2011). language background bias i believe in the existence of another type of subject-selection bias which is largely underestimated that can have a major impact on overall results: the language background bias. the language background bias relates to the widespread failure to classify prior language background in a consistent and suitable manner in empirical research (see also de angelis, 2017). scholars typically assume that low proficiency background languages do not play a major role in bringing about benefits for the individual and accordingly classify participants on the basis of their “fluent” languages. most people, however, have knowledge of other languages in addition to their mother tongue and are not “fluent” in all of their languages. forming groups that are not homogenous in terms of language background introduces a significant bias in empirical research. if fluency is the core criterion for subject selection, one can easily understand how true monolinguals may be grouped together with those who have knowledge of non-native languages but are not fully fluent in those languages. all participants would be labelled as “monolinguals” even though some of them might be bilingual or even multilingual. we already have evidence that even a few years of exposure gessica de angelis18 to a non-native language can influence the acquisition of subsequent languages (bardel & lindqvist, 2007; de angelis, 2007, 2018; rast, 2010) which is further reason for us to exercise some caution when embracing methodological practices that might be convenient but are not fully reliable. a great deal of research on the bilingual benefit comes from canada and the work of ellen bialystok, for instance, and while bilingual fluency is not widespread, one does wonder how many monolingual canadians can be found in a bilingual country where every adult is likely to have been exposed to either english or french as a second language in school. the same can be said about many other contexts around the world. for example, most young adults in the us will have studied some spanish as a foreign language in school, and in most european countries foreign languages are typically introduced in primary school. nowadays, true monolinguals are in fact difficult to locate, particularly in non-english speaking contexts. the studies published over the past few decades did not use common subject selection criteria, and decisions for subject inclusion were typically informed by subjective beliefs about the amount of prior language knowledge that makes, or does not make, a difference in performance. conflicting findings are often associated with inconsistent methodological practices, and if we consider the small amount of information usually available on subjects’ prior language background in the published literature, the likelihood that a language background bias was introduced in many of the studies’ designs is quite strong. there are probably a number of other competing reasons that can help researchers explain discrepancies in the results. first, generalizations from past research may have been far too ambitious for the current level of understanding of the phenomenon and perhaps more caution would have been in order. second, from a methodological perspective researchers have been comparing results from studies that used different types of tasks and, as just mentioned, whose participants’ language backgrounds have been classified in an inconsistent manner. these two facts alone are a good recipe for inconsistencies to emerge. participants have typically been grouped according to a broad set of different criteria, including origin, education, ses, immigrant status and cultural background. benefits may well arise from a combination of different factors, and it is quite possible that bilingualism is only one of them rather than the only factor involved. further research is required to evaluate this possibility and examine additional variables in isolation. looking ahead the purpose of this paper was to evaluate how feasible it is for researchers to claim the existence of a bilingual benefit for cognitive development on the the bilingual advantage and the language background bias 19 basis of our current understanding of the subject matter. the paper reviewed several studies that provided evidence in support as well as against the existence of a bilingual benefit, highlighting a number of methodological and procedural concerns which suggest that considerably more work needs to be done in order to clarify the matter in the future. on the whole, some caution must be taken as the research progresses. if this debate about the benefits of bilingualism is to be moved forward in a meaningful way, then it is advisable to conduct large-scale studies, preferably longitudinal, that make use of similar or comparable batteries of tests, perhaps across different labs and different locations. in order to avoid incurring in the language background bias, participants also need to be classified by paying more attention to all the languages they speak, not just the ones in which they are fluent. there is simply no point for researchers continue to compare bilinguals with monolinguals, if the so-called monolinguals have knowledge of other languages as well, or the bilinguals are perhaps multilinguals. bilinguals and multilinguals speak different languages at different proficiency levels and make use of their languages in different contexts and for different purposes, and the creation of fictitious categories that do not take into account the participant’s actual background knowledge does not help researchers advance in any way. how can we claim that language knowledge provides an array of benefits if we do not even take that very knowledge into account in a systematic manner? discrepancies arise when the same phenomenon is assessed using different criteria and different methodologies. in my view only additional methodological rigour will provide more clarity on the phenomenon and will allow us to identify the potential application of the benefit for bilingual and multilingual adults and children in healthcare and educational settings. references adesope, o. o., lavin, t., thompson, t., & ungerleider, c. 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(2015). bilingual advantages in executive functioning either do not exist or are restricted to very specific and undetermined circumstances. cortex, 69, 265–278. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2015.04.014 paap, k. r., johnson, h. a., & sawi, o. (2016). should the search for bilingual advantages in executive functioning continue? cortex, 74, 305–314. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex .2015.09.010 papageorgiou, a., bright, p., periche tomas, e., & filippi, r. (2018). evidence against a cognitive advantage in the older bilingual population. quarterly journal of experimental psychology. doi: 10.1177/1747021818796475 perquin, m., vaillant, m., schuller, a. m., pastore, j., dartigues, j. f., lair, m. l., & diederich, n. (2013). lifelong exposure to multilingualism: new evidence to support cognitive reserve hypothesis. plos one, 8(4), 1–7. rast, r. (2010). the use of prior linguistic knowledge in the early stages of l3 acquisition. iral, international review of applied linguistics in language teaching, 48, 159–183. runnqvist, e., gollan, t. h., costa, a., & ferreira, v. s. (2013). a disadvantage in bilingual sentence production modulated by syntactic frequency and similarity across languages. cognition, 129(2), 256–263. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.07.008 von bastian, c. c., souza, a. s., & gade, m. (2016). no evidence for bilingual cognitive advantages: a test of four hypotheses. journal of experimental psychology, 145(2), 246–258. doi: 10.1037/xge0000120 wimmer, m. c., & marx, c. (2014). inhibitory processes in visual perception: a bilingual advantage. journal of experimental child psychology, 126, 412–419. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2014.03.004 gessica de angelis überlegenheit zweisprachiger personen und sprachlich bedingte einschränkungen z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die ansicht, dass die zweisprachigkeit uns einen lebensvorteil verschaffen kann, stößt bei forschern auf sehr großes interesse, weil sich daraus sehr positive implikationen ergeben, die im gesundheitsund bildungswesen ausgenutzt werden können. in den letzten jahren verwiesen zahlreiche studien auf die beweise, die von der so genannten überlegenheit zweisprachiger personen zeugen, und auf die vorteile, die aus der zweisprachigkeit resultieren. dies lässt auf einen zusammenhang zwischen der zweisprachigkeit und der kognitiven entwicklung schließen. um besser zu verstehen, ob sich diese behauptung in der praxis bewährt, sollten in diesem beitrag solche argumente untersucht werden, die für und gegen die überlegenheit der zweisprachigkeit bei einzelnen personen sprechen. nach einer kurzen diskussion über die verwendung der in der literatur präsenten begriffe der zweisprachigkeit und mehrsprachigkeit fasst der beitrag die belege für die vorund nachteile zusammen, die http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.07.008 the bilingual advantage and the language background bias 23 derzeit mit dem vorhandensein des früheren sprachwissens im kopf verbunden sind, wobei mögliche gründe für diskrepanzen in den forschungsergebnissen herausgestellt und sprachbezogene einschränkungen diskutiert werden. der beitrag wird mit hinweisen für weitere forschungen abgeschlossen, die unser verständnis für solch ein umfassendes phänomen wie die überlegenheit einer zweisprachigen person vertiefen und verbessern können. schlüsselwörter: mehrsprachigkeit, zweisprachigkeit, sich aus der zweisprachigkeit ergebende überlegenheit, kognitive entwicklung theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 8 (1), 2022, pp. 11–34 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11514 sonja babic https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1004-3090 university of graz, austria sarah mercer https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2558-8149 university of graz, austria astrid mairitsch https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9885-3399 university of graz, austria johanna gruber https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3355-7748 university of graz, austria kirsten hempkin https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4035-0665 univerza v mariboru, slovenia language teacher wellbeing in the workplace: balancing needs a b s t r a c t teachers who experience high wellbeing in their workplace teach more effectively, have better relationships with learners, and high attainment among their learners (mason, 2017). to understand what contributes to language teacher wellbeing, we examined the three pillars of positive psychology (seligman, 2011) and drew in particular on work in positive organizational scholarship (cameron & spreitzer, 2012) to explore institutional and personal factors which teachers perceived as inf luential for their wellbeing. the paper reports on insights from 15 language teachers in 13 different countries. this sampling technique ensured a diverse set of perspectives on this topic. data were gathered through in-depth, semi-structured interviews which were analyzed using thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2006). the analysis revealed five main themes the teachers perceived as relevant for their wellbeing including workplace culture, social relationships, sense of meaning and purpose, language teacher status, and physical wellbeing. the findings highlight that wellbeing is not just a personal and subjective phenomenon, but it is also collectively and socially determined. the study concludes with a ref lection on implications for practice, policy makers, and school leaders as well as a consideration of issues of individuality to address in future research. keywords: language teacher wellbeing, workplace, positive organizational scholarship, job satisfaction https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.11514 sonja babic, sarah mercer, astrid mairitsch, johanna gruber, kirsten hempkin12 introduction wellbeing has become a topic of increased global interest (calvo et al., 2012; cho, 2014), particularly during the global pandemic in 2020 (macintyre et al., 2020; zacher & rudolph, 2020). in several countries, it has even formed the basis of economic policy. for example, new zealand has adopted the happiness index, india has introduced the ease of living measurement in 2019, and bhutan has utilized the gross national happiness (gnh) since 2008. in a survey conducted in the uk during the 2020 lockdown, a yougov poll found that eight out of ten people in the uk would want the government to highlight health and wellbeing more (harvey, 2020). this growing awareness of the importance of wellbeing generally has also been witnessed within education. for example, the oecd (2019) and pisa (2015) have included measurements of learner wellbeing since 2015, and countries such as finland (government of finland, 2018), and the republic of ireland (government of ireland, 2019) have incorporated wellbeing initiatives into key education policies. language teaching is no exception to this trend of growing interest in wellbeing. most notably, there has been a recent increase in studies focusing on the wellbeing of language teachers within language education (e.g., hiver & dörnyei, 2017; mercer & gregersen, 2020; moskowitz & dewaele, 2019; ončevska ager & mercer, 2019) including papers published during the covid-19 pandemic (e.g., macintyre et al., 2020). the language teaching profession is often plagued by high levels of stress, growing burnout rates, and unfavorable work conditions, which can consequently lead to language teachers across the globe leaving the profession (swanson, 2008). it seems that sustaining energy, commitment, motivation, and maintaining optimal levels of wellbeing over time has become increasingly challenging for teachers across the globe (day & gu, 2010; sulis et al., in preparation). therefore, it is now more important than ever to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the factors that influence teachers’ sense of wellbeing in order to better understand how institutions and educational systems can best support teachers in their professional roles and help them thrive. in this study, we explore the language teachers’ perspective on factors which positively influenced and supported their wellbeing as language professionals. we placed a particular focus on the perceived contribution of organizational and school contextual factors given that most research to date has tended to emphasize the individual and personal traits affecting wellbeing with less consideration of context-specific characteristics. indeed, macintyre highlighted that, apart from positive experiences (and emotions) and positive character traits, “positive institutions have been the least well studied” (2016, p. 5). therefore, given that “wellbeing emerges from a blend of personal and language teacher wellbeing in the workplace… 13 professional factors as well as contextual factors, in particular, our perception of our environment” (mercer & gregersen, 2020, p. 3), we accounted for personal but focused particularly on institutional factors that seem to contribute to the wellbeing of language teachers and promote the quality retention of these language professionals. literature review what is wellbeing and why is it important? to understand wellbeing, seligman’s (2011) perma framework has been widely used. it encompasses five wellbeing components: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishments. the perma model stems from positive psychology (pp) which suggests there are three pillars of wellbeing: positive experiences, positive individual traits, and positive institutions. the positive-experiences pillar is concerned with one’s satisfaction with the past, happiness in the present, and hope for the future. positive individual traits refer to characteristics that typically lead to a fulfilling life, such as courage, perseverance, and the capacity to love. finally, positive institutions deal with the systemic designs and strengths that are integral in developing and maintaining flourishing communities (seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000). these suggest that when investigating wellbeing, it is important to understand all three strands and the interplay between these, as wellbeing emerges from the dynamic interaction of personal and contextual components in people’s lives. wellbeing is not only “valuable because it feels good, but also […] because it has beneficial consequences” (diener & seligman, 2004, p. 1). studies have shown that higher levels of wellbeing are associated with increased levels of happiness and productivity (krekel et al., 2019), higher income, social awareness, and connectedness (diener & seligman, 2004), better social equity (white, 2010), and physical health and longevity (diener & seligman, 2004; lyubomirsky et al., 2005). given the number of scientifically proven benefits, we believe that improving people’s wellbeing should become key aim of researchers, policy makers, and other relevant stakeholders for all social groups, but especially teachers who are known to work in a highly stressful profession but who can also influence learner wellbeing. indeed, experiencing higher levels of wellbeing is not only beneficial for teachers but also for their students (roffey, 2012). teachers who enjoy high wellbeing teach more creatively (bajorek et al., 2014), cultivate better relationsonja babic, sarah mercer, astrid mairitsch, johanna gruber, kirsten hempkin14 ships in the classroom (devries & zan, 1995), attain higher levels of achievement among learners (briner & dewberry, 2007), and have fewer discipline problems (kern et al., 2014). finally, physically and mentally healthy teachers can better “cope with the daily challenges of teaching languages” (mercer & gregersen, 2020, p. 1). in sum, wellbeing is a key factor contributing to good teaching practice. factors affecting teacher wellbeing teacher wellbeing can be affected by numerous factors, including how the individual teachers feel and think about their work (sulis et al., in preparation). some of these factors encompass, for example, self-efficacy (wyatt, 2018), resilience (gu & day, 2007), and optimism (e.g., luthans, youssef-morgan, & avolio, 2015). however, wellbeing is not only determined by personal characteristics and psychological states, it is also influenced by social and contextual factors including a number of institutional factors. for example, positive organizational factors enhancing teacher wellbeing typically include positive social relations with administrators, parents, and colleagues (butt & retallick, 2002), a supportive school climate (day et al., 2007), and teachers identifying with the school’s values (skaalvik & skaalvik, 2011). organizational factors known to adversely affect teacher wellbeing include discipline issues (skaalvik & skaalvik 2011), excessive workload (smithers & robinson, 2008), potential for interpersonal conflicts (skaalvik & skaalvik 2007), role conflict and ambiguity (travers & cooper, 1996), lack of adequate resources and facilities (aldrup et al.,2017), responsibility for evaluation (kyriacou, 2001), and accountability demands (rogers, 2012). other threats to teacher wellbeing, in many countries, include negative media depictions of the teaching profession, which further lower already fragile teacher morale (mccallum & price, 2010). understanding language teacher wellbeing teaching has been identified as one of the most stressful occupations globally (ingersoll, 2011). record numbers of teachers in general (borman & dowling, 2008), and language teachers in particular, are choosing to leave the profession (chang, 2009; worth et al., 2017). key factors foregrounded by mason (2017) that contribute to language teacher attrition include heavy workload within foreign language teaching programs, detrimental legislation, a lack of institutional support, a lack of appreciation and respect, and low linguistic self-efficacy. language teacher wellbeing in the workplace… 15 language teachers face a number of challenges unique to language teaching (piechurska-kuciel, 2011). in terms of the psychological factors, for example, they typically experience a heightened emotional burden in their work due to the personally meaningful content and interpersonal relations in language classroom (golombek & doran, 2014). language teaching and learning are “inherently emotional endeavours” (king & ng, 2018, p. 141) and teaching languages thus requires increased emotional understanding from the teacher in comparison to other subjects (king & ng, 2018). another psychological challenge is foreign language anxiety (horwitz, 1996), as some teachers may have to manage their own insecurities in the target language, while also dealing with the anxieties of their learners. in terms of social and contextual factors, languages have relatively low status compared to other school subjects and are undervalued within some schools and societies (mason, 2017). moreover, language teachers, especially those working in the private sector, may experience precarious working conditions such as income insecurity, zero-hour contracts, and an untenable workload (macintyre et al., 2019; walsh, 2019; wieczorek, 2016). in this study, we seek to explore and better understand both the personal and contextual factors that contribute to language teacher wellbeing with an aim of drawing attention to individual and systemic strategies which could be employed to support teacher wellbeing. to do this, we draw on pp, which is a branch of psychology that looks at how and why people flourish in life (e.g., seligman, 2011) and what makes life most worth living (seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000). pp is concerned with “positive experiences like happiness and engagement, positive traits like character strengths and talents, positive relationships like friendship and love, and the larger institutions like family and school that enable these” (peterson et al., 2008, p. 20). typically, work in pp has tended to focus largely on the first two pillars of wellbeing (positive experiences and individual traits) with notably less work examining the role and nature of positive institutions. to ensure a thorough consideration of the final pillar as well as the other two dimensions of wellbeing, we take a deliberate positive organizational scholarship (pos) approach (cameron & spreitzer, 2012). pos refers to the study of factors that positively influence workplace culture and thriving work conditions within organizations and institutions (cameron & caza, 2004). pos is a scientific, theory-based and rigorous investigation of the factors that positively influence workplace culture and thriving work conditions within organizations and institutions (cameron & caza, 2004). furthermore, it focuses on “positive processes, on value transparency, and on extending the range of what constitutes a positive organizational outcome” (caza & caza, 2008, p. 21). to gain further knowledge into the school ecologies and aspects that facilitate flourishing of language professionals, as perceived by professionals themselves, sonja babic, sarah mercer, astrid mairitsch, johanna gruber, kirsten hempkin16 we employed pos principals in our research. in this way, we hope the study will ensure balance in the consideration of both individual as well as institutional factors affecting wellbeing. methodological design research questions this paper aims to investigate language teacher perspectives on personal and institutional factors that they feel contribute to their wellbeing in relation to the workplace and seeks to answer the following research question: what factors on a personal and institutional level do language teachers feel affect their wellbeing? the study was designed to explore diversity and engage with a range of teachers in various settings in order to generate a broad understanding of the possible factors involved in teacher wellbeing across institutional and cultural contexts. as such, the sampling procedure was designed to be as widely encompassing as possible. procedure participants in this study were recruited via the researchers’ social media networks, such as twitter and facebook, as well as through email contacts. social media platforms were used to share the call for participation with the international audience. the main advantage of this sampling method was to expand the geographical scope of this project and not limit it to one specific country. we encouraged anyone who received or saw the call to forward it to their networks, which has created a snowball effect (goodman, 1961). given the positive psychology-informed approach, this study was designed to only examine those language professionals’ perspectives who felt that their current workplaces support their wellbeing. this was also ethically a desirable approach to ensure people were able to focus on the aspects that benefited their wellbeing, without an undue focus on the detrimental factors. as such, the call for participation specifically looked for efl teachers who felt that, on the whole, their institution is a positive place to work in terms of their wellbeing. we asked for participation from teachers who identified as follows: • i am currently teaching efl. • on the whole, my institution is good for my wellbeing. language teacher wellbeing in the workplace… 17 as a next step, all participants were sent a link to a short biodata questionnaire to contextualize their responses. this questionnaire comprised items about participants’ demographics as well as questions about their teaching situation, for example, information about the institution they were working at, the type of teaching contract they had, and any additional work responsibilities they had to fulfill. as a next step, participants were asked for an interview at a time and date of their convenience. the consent sheet was also sent to the teachers before the interview to read and sign. it outlined the purpose of the study, what is expected from them, how data will be used and stored, and it assured anonymity and confidentiality. due to the variety of geographical locations of the participants, all interviews were conducted online (through skype, wechat, whatsapp or facebook messenger). the interviews were transcribed by the team members. during transcription, any real names and places were removed or changed to protect participants’ identities. all the interviews were transcribed for content, including anything which contributed to meaning such as pauses, laughter, and sighs. the audio files were deleted immediately following transcription. context and participants in this study, 15 participants from 13 different countries volunteered to participate. these include argentina, indonesia, ukraine, turkey, slovakia, belarus, hungary, poland, serbia, nicaragua, china, two participants from japan, and two from slovenia. fourteen participants were female and one was male. the participants were working in various educational institutions and four participants identified as language school owners as well as teachers. they were of different ages (between 30 and 50 years old) and in different career phases. their teaching experience ranged between nine months and 26 years. the majority (n = 13) of the participants were working full time, whereas two teachers were employed part time. nine teachers had permanent contracts, five temporary, and one participant was working on zero-hours contract. further details about participants’ demographic and contextual information can be found in table 1. all participants have been given a pseudonym to protect their identity. sonja babic, sarah mercer, astrid mairitsch, johanna gruber, kirsten hempkin18 ta bl e 1 pa rt ic ip an ts ’ de m og ra ph ic a nd c on te xt ua l in fo rm at io n or de re d al ph ab et ic al ly b y th ei r co un tr y of r es id en cy p ar tic ip an t g en de r a ge c ou nt ry t he y ar e cu rr en tly w or ki ng i n e du ca tio na l in st itu tio n d ur at io n of cu rr en t em pl oy m en t p ar t tim e/ fu ll tim e em pl oy m en t ty pe o f co nt ra ct e le na fe m al e 46 a rg en tin a p riv at e la ng ua ge s ch oo l (s ch oo l ow ne r) 17 y ea rs fu ll tim e p er m an en t d ar ja fe m al e n/ a b el ar us u ni ve rs ity o r ot he r te rt ia ry i ns tit ut io n 9 ye ar s p ar t tim e te m po ra ry b ao fe m al e 30 c hi na u ni ve rs ity o r ot he r te rt ia ry i ns tit ut io n 11 m on th s fu ll tim e p er m an en t li li fe m al e 50 h un ga ry p rim ar y sc ho ol , gr am m ar s ch oo l, an d un iv er si ty o r ot he r te rt ia ry i ns tit ut io n 26 y ea rs fu ll tim e p er m an en t s ar i fe m al e 44 in do ne si a u ni ve rs ity o r ot he r te rt ia ry i ns tit ut io n 5 ye ar s fu ll tim e p er m an en t t ho m as m al e 34 ja pa n u ni ve rs ity o r ot he r te rt ia ry i ns tit ut io n 9 m on th s fu ll tim e te m po ra ry n ik o fe m al e 47 ja pa n u ni ve rs ity o r ot he r te rt ia ry i ns tit ut io n 9 ye ar s fu ll tim e p er m an en t a bi ga il fe m al e 38 n ic ar ag ua n on -g ov er nm en t or ga ni za tio n 2 ye ar s p ar t tim e te m po ra ry o liw ia fe m al e 43 p ol an d u ni ve rs ity o r ot he r te rt ia ry i ns tit ut io n 2 ye ar s fu ll tim e te m po ra ry ta tja na fe m al e 47 s er bi a p riv at e la ng ua ge s ch oo l (s ch oo l ow ne r) , an d un iv er si ty o r ot he r te rt ia ry i ns tit ut io n 21 y ea rs fu ll tim e te m po ra ry m in a fe m al e 39 s lo va ki a p riv at e la ng ua ge s ch oo l (s ch oo l ow ne r) 10 y ea rs fu ll tim e z er oho ur co nt ra ct e m a fe m al e 38 s lo ve ni a u ni ve rs ity o r ot he r te rt ia ry i ns tit ut io n 6 ye ar s fu ll tim e p er m an en t h an a fe m al e 45 s lo ve ni a u ni ve rs ity o r ot he r te rt ia ry i ns tit ut io n 18 y ea rs fu ll tim e p er m an en t a yl a fe m al e 40 tu rk ey u ni ve rs ity o r ot he r te rt ia ry i ns tit ut io n 15 y ea rs fu ll tim e p er m an en t o ks an a fe m al e 36 u kr ai ne p riv at e la ng ua ge s ch oo l (s ch oo l ow ne r) 9 ye ar s fu ll tim e p er m an en t language teacher wellbeing in the workplace… 19 research instruments fifteen in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted to encourage a conversational manner between the researcher and the participant, while, at the same time being guided by predetermined questions to create comparable content (dörnyei, 2007). semi-structured interviews also hold the advantage that participants are offered the chance to discuss topics they feel are important and which can deviate from the interviewer’s questions (dörnyei, 2007). these semi-structured interviews were based on a protocol which encompassed eleven sections covering the teachers’ career trajectory, general information about their workplaces, physical space and resources, organizational structure, workplace culture, social relationships, autonomy, opportunities for professional development, work-life spillover, institution in its larger socio-cultural system, and overall statements about their general wellbeing. each interview lasted between 45 minutes and one hour. a corpus of 108 836 words was generated. data analysis to analyze the data, we followed a thematic analysis approach (braun & clarke, 2006). to familiarize ourselves with the data, each researcher individually began the analysis by reading, commenting, and memoing on the transcripts. during this process, we met twice for discussions as a team to share ideas and generate initial code list. the interviews were coded in atlas.ti. three researchers coded four interviews each, and one coded three interviews. in the third group meeting, we compared and discussed the code lists, which we then combined into one set of codes (n = 38). this list included categories, such as social relationships, teacher autonomy, workplace culture, physical wellbeing, societal appreciation, pay, and continuing professional development. the interviews were revisited in light of this shared code list and any anomalies or exceptions were added and discussed with the whole team. throughout the coding process, a joint notebook for memos was created, which was shared via google docs between the authors. finally, in a fourth group meeting following the final wave of coding, the list of codes was grouped into themes which reflected the main issues across the data. these themes were workplace culture, relationships, sense of meaning and purpose, language teacher status and physical wellbeing, which served as the basis of the structure in the findings section. sonja babic, sarah mercer, astrid mairitsch, johanna gruber, kirsten hempkin20 limitations to recruit participants for the study, the call was shared on the authors’ social media and via personal contacts. naturally, this means volunteers stem from those who are active on social media and are possibly familiar with the work of the authors. this may suggest a bias to those with an interest in language teacher wellbeing. as such, they may be more aware and conscious of factors affecting wellbeing than other teachers, although there was no particular evidence of this in the data. in this study, participants self-identified as working in educational institutions that they felt contributed positively to their wellbeing. typically, this perspective is subjective and the same workplace would perhaps be described differently by other employees in these institutions. however, it is the subjective perspective on the institutional factors which enhance their wellbeing which is at the heart of this study. finally, we are aware that the paper could have gotten a different perspective had we included teachers who find their work conditions stressful and negative for their wellbeing. however, our research design encompassed and focused solely on teachers who identified their institutions as having a positive influence on their job satisfaction and overall wellbeing. findings the findings section comprises five major themes that emerged from the data as affecting participants’ wellbeing either positively or negatively: workplace culture, social relationships, sense of meaning and purpose, language teacher status, and physical wellbeing. workplace culture workplace culture typically “refers to the deep structure of organizations, which is rooted in the values, beliefs, attitudes, practices, norms, customs, and assumptions held by organizational members and that characterize a workplace environment” (wentling & thomas, 2009, p. 27). in this study, the most prominent aspects of the workplace culture mentioned by participants comprised the workplace atmosphere, support systems, autonomy, hierarchical structures, and the workplace as a physical space. the majority of the participants (n = 14) described their workplace atmosphere as generally positive, open, friendly, and welcoming, which they felt language teacher wellbeing in the workplace… 21 was important for their wellbeing. thirteen participants particularly highlighted colleagues who are motivated, eager to learn, and help each other. for example, thomas felt that staff members of the university were professional and positive and were, together, “rowing in the right direction.” niko, a teacher from japan, is a particularly interesting example of how the workplace atmosphere can be influenced by the behavior and attitude of the staff members. she explained that, in the past, she had worked with male teachers who “had the power” and had created a toxic work environment for her; however, since these teachers retired, the work atmosphere in niko’s institution became pleasant and enjoyable—when “hard ones left the job at the university […], we created quite a better atmosphere.” another feature of a positive work climate according to these teachers was when institutions encouraged staff members to be autonomous and to openly voice their beliefs. in particular, six participants stressed that the staff opinions “matter” to the institution and that they felt teachers were involved in making important decisions related to the institutional policies. for example, darja mentioned that her institution valued her opinion, as well as the opinion of her colleagues and students. she explained that the dean arranges meetings once a month in which student representatives participate together with university teachers. similarly, thomas referred to the program development at his institution as a “bottom-up approach” where he could share his ideas and influence certain decision-making. however, hana’s portrayal of her institution was a unique example of a lack of open communication and ways in which it influences staff members: i think that [the dean] doesn’t take into consideration that we are human beings, we are all academics and she cannot treat us like bags of something, push us around, right? people? i don’t think they really want to express their opinions, some of them don’t even dare. she further mentioned that the hierarchical structure in her university has developed into a “talk-down management” in which the decision-making is only reserved for the dean. in contrast, other participants (n = 14), explained that the hierarchy in their respective institutions exists, but describe it as, “more of a flat structure” (tatjana). the physical space of the participants’ workplace cultures also appeared to play a role in their wellbeing. eleven participants mentioned that they were generally satisfied with the physical space, which they referred to in terms of green spaces, cleanliness, and sports areas, as well as resources, such as technology, teaching materials, comfortable furnishings and staff rooms with sufficient office equipment. for example, bao explained how the physical space of her university affected her wellbeing positively: sonja babic, sarah mercer, astrid mairitsch, johanna gruber, kirsten hempkin22 i feel the positive effect of the physical environment, for example, in my university […], there’s a very beautiful small forest, it’s very green and a lot of benches, so i like to bring my phone there and […] time spent there makes me refreshed. interestingly, four participants reported on poor work conditions in terms of physical space. lili explained that her school “has not been renovated, maybe ever. […] it’s in a very bad shape. literally the walls are crumbling, the wires, the electric system, it sometimes just catches fire, so, it’s really in very bad need of renovating.” however, despite the negative aspects of the physical space, on balance, these participants still felt positive overall about their workplace, implying other factors played a more significant role. social relationships relationships at the workplace were a prominent topic among all the participants as seen above in respect to workplace culture. oksana explained that she enjoys working in her school because, “the team is wonderful, the people are very positive” and she added, “this is a positive place, we enjoy being here, together.” in another example, lili said she and her colleagues love spending time together and any issues that might arise they resolve as a team. eight participants reported that they have formed true friendships with some of their colleagues. abigail said that with two colleagues she became “friends outside the office.” having supportive relationships seems to have positively influenced the participants (n = 12) and appear to be crucial for their wellbeing. however, three teachers explained that dysfunctional relationships with their colleagues can have a negative effect on their wellbeing. in particular, mina said, “if the relationships in the workplace are not working well, that stresses me the most.” hana, for example, explained that the unity between teachers was lost and, consequently, the overall satisfaction among the colleagues significantly decreased. she recalled multiple incidents in which her colleagues showed a lack of collegiality. in this way, the quality of relationships between colleagues can either bolster or hinder their wellbeing. another important aspect for eleven participants was their relationship with their boss. the other four participants were school owners themselves and felt that they were creating a positive and supportive work climate for their employees. ten participants referred to their bosses as being motivating (e.g., ayla and sari), open for discussion and suggestions (e.g., lili and niko), full of understanding (e.g., abigail), and friendly and approachable (e.g., ema and niko). bao explained that her boss was “very supportive” and “when you get something or achieve something, you can feel she is very happy for you, […], language teacher wellbeing in the workplace… 23 this happiness is contagious, and you can feel like you are really supported.” as mentioned in the previous section, only one participant, hana, was dissatisfied with her superiors who she felt were mistreating their employees and did not value their opinions. an equally important aspect of the workplace was participants’ relationships with their students. overall, all participants were especially proud of this relationship. they described it as friendly and trusting (e.g., lili and oksana), understanding and respectful (e.g., abigail), caring (e.g., elena and bao), close (e.g., sari and oliwia), and humorous (e.g., ema and tatjana). thomas depicted the reciprocal relationship between teachers and students in his institution: most of the students are really, really passionate, we challenge them a lot but they kind of rise to the challenge each time, and i think that […] they feed a lot off the teachers’ professional enthusiasm for the course, and then the teachers feed so much more off the students, so you have this kind of virtuous cycle of positivity. sense of meaning and purpose eleven teachers in this study specifically reported seeing a purpose and meaning in their jobs, especially in educating the next generation. for example, elena explained: this is all for me. this is the idea. we work for education and for young people, especially for young people. we want to open young people’s minds, to open their minds to fly […] and to be happy, to be full of dreams. building learners’ knowledge and seeing them grow gave these eleven teachers sense of meaning. tatjana said: what brings me satisfaction is when i see progress in students and when they are enjoying what they are doing here at school […], these things make you really satisfied and […] when i close the door at night and i go home, i really feel it was a good day. elena reported on a student who won a scholarship and thanked elena for believing in her, “‘i owe this especially to you because you believed in me and my dreams.’ i started crying. imagine. because i say ‘well, this was my aim when i opened this school.’” this filled elena with pride and joy, knowing that she has made a difference in this student’s life. eleven participants in this study reported on feeling positive about the fact that they are making sonja babic, sarah mercer, astrid mairitsch, johanna gruber, kirsten hempkin24 a difference “leaving a mark on someone’s life, a positive one” (hana). in line with a perma perspective on wellbeing (seligman, 2011), it can be seen that having a sense of meaning and purpose appeared fundamental for these teachers’ wellbeing in the workplace and in life more broadly. language teacher status in this study, we specifically asked participants to comment on their perception of the status of language teachers in their resident countries. twelve teachers reported that the teaching profession in their respective countries is low and underappreciated. ayla expressed that teachers in turkey “are not respected” and felt that this was generally “the problem of education.” she further added: “the education issue is the only thing that every person in my country can comment on. everyone is an expert in that issue, everybody has an idea, but nobody asks the real teachers, the real workers of that sector.” ayla believed that teachers are “not well paid”; a fact which was also highlighted by eight other participants. lili said that, in hungary, the media typically report that teachers get “a huge raise every year. i mean, that’s what’s in the media, but that’s not true, but somehow they manage to communicate it in a way that half the country thinks that teachers are overpaid.” in addition, elena said that she had “suffered a lot” and that being underpaid caused other teachers in argentina to become demotivated: “they don’t want to do anything because they say there is no sense in anything because we are not well-paid.” interestingly, only three participants, who came from japan and china and were employed at universities, reported on high teacher status in their respective countries and institutions. one participant, bao, explained that the status of teachers in china is very high, although this is not reflected in their salaries. similarly, niko said that [s]ocial appreciation of university faculty in japan is quite high, so it is really appreciated, especially at top universities […]. so, i feel very much appreciated in social settings and money-wise, of course, i would like to get more, but i really have enough, and i appreciate what i have. two participants explained that although they are not content with their salaries, they see their work as meaningful beyond the financial issues. for example, hana said that, “salaries are not enough, but we have other advantages” and bao mentioned that “money is just an amount, one of the dimensions, that’s it.” language teacher wellbeing in the workplace… 25 physical wellbeing five participants explicitly mentioned that the absence of physical health affected their work and overall wellbeing. for example, niko explained that, in the past, when she lived far from her campus, she “wasn’t able to manage to cook […] and it caused a lot of health problems.” however, she moved “closer to the campus” and added: “i am cooking for myself, so i think i have a good balance.” hana mentioned “problems with [her] heart,” and oksana said that she suffered from back pain. perhaps the most eye-opening example of how overall wellbeing can be influenced by physical health and contextual factors was portrayed by abigail. she explained that she experienced burnout which she attributed to too many deadlines, her former boss who was unsupportive, frequent travelling, and a generally hectic lifestyle: we had a social political crisis in the country that burst in april and hasn’t ended yet […]. i had no idea what was going to be, i just went every step, one after the other, and personally, i got a lot of physical effects. you know the symptoms, you know your stressors, and you know how it shows up in your body, but i had something new. by the end of the year, like a month before finishing everything i just couldn’t, i almost couldn’t get out of bed one day. i just couldn’t move my arms anymore […] it was a most terrible experience i had, and i ended up going to the hospital. other participants (n = 7) showed an awareness of the importance of remaining physically healthy and reported on employing several strategies such as taking care of nutrition, spending time in nature, making sure they were physically active and doing sports and meditation. for example, bao said: “exercise is really helpful both for physical and mental health, especially when you feel tired, exhausted and you are just running.” thomas explained that he goes “for a little bike ride round the forest. […] this is just a very relaxing place to go.” finally, oliwia said: “when i’m stressed, […] i do yoga and i do meditation and without it, i would be a different person.” discussion this study examined the perspectives of language teachers on the factors that seemed to have supported their wellbeing in relation to the workplace. in particular, we looked for efl teachers across institutional contexts and countries, who felt that their workplaces were generally positive for their wellbeing. sonja babic, sarah mercer, astrid mairitsch, johanna gruber, kirsten hempkin26 five main themes perceived as relevant for professional wellbeing dominated the data across settings and participants: workplace culture, social relationships, sense of meaning and purpose, language teacher status, and physical wellbeing. interestingly, all participants talked about the relevance of their lives beyond the workplace, including most notably physical health. this highlights the importance of considering teachers’ lives from a holistic perspective when examining their wellbeing. day and gu (2010) refer to the ‘blurry boundaries’ between different teachers’ life domains and highlight that wellbeing does not stem just from one isolated area of a person’s life. indeed, as the spillovercrossover model (bakker & demerouti, 2013) makes clear, there are permeable boundaries across an individual’s life domains and experiences in each domain influence each other. our sense of wellbeing emerges from the interaction of experiences in all areas although these are potentially weighted differently by an individual according to the relative importance of the respective domain for their overall sense of wellbeing (robertson & cooper, 2011). in this study, the analysis showed that although the participants rated their workplaces as positive for their wellbeing (hence their participation), it did not mean these places were perceived as being perfect. instead, the teachers flourished despite potential problems in the workplace. dodge, daly, huyton, and sanders (2012) suggest that wellbeing can be conceived of as a ‘see-saw’ with individuals balancing challenges to their wellbeing with resources available (e.g., personal, social, and material). this implies that teacher wellbeing can fluctuate according to the relative weighting of positive resources to draw on, balanced against negative factors and demands challenging their wellbeing. in other words, if the sense of positivity outweighs the significance for the individual of the negative factors, the overall sense of wellbeing can be balanced as positive without denying potential negative influences. as was evinced in these data, certain factors are important for everyone, but some factors more or less, important for each individual. for example, abigail’s experience of burnout makes clear that when one’s health is severely damaged by stress in the workplace, then no matter how significant other factors may be, nothing else really matters; wellbeing is at zero. in other words, her experience highlights that basic physical needs must be met first and foremost, otherwise other factors affecting wellbeing remain merely a luxury. from the perspective of the researchers in the field of positive psychology, it was heartening to see, in this specific instance, that the majority of the teachers in this study were aware of the importance of physical health and took conscious steps to protect and enhance their wellbeing in physical terms such as by attending to sleep, nutrition, and exercise. the factor which was consistently emphasized as important by all participants was the workplace culture. as evinced in these data, this can be conveyed through communication structures within an institution, the degree of autonomy language teacher wellbeing in the workplace… 27 given to staff, the level of personalization, the shared values of staff, and the attention to the care and quality of physical space among others (fernet et al., 2014). all of these participants tended to see their workplace culture as positive with a friendly atmosphere and motivated colleagues. however, different facets of the workplace culture were rated differently by individuals. for example, hana reported on the lack of democratic procedures and autonomy, whereas lili was dissatisfied with the physical space. yet, for these participants, despite these issues, they retained an overall sense of positive workplace culture. the research and theory of “person-organizational fit” (o’reilly et al., 1991) can help us to understand this finding. this model suggests that the degree of wellbeing/stress experienced by an individual depends on how well they as an individual ‘fit’ with the conditions in that organization. this is important to appreciate as it emphasizes that it is not only the objective conditions that matter, but it is also their relative importance for an individual and how the two fit together that is defining. in other words, two people working under the same conditions can experience their wellbeing in that organization differently. it is the interaction of the personal, individual, and subjective experience of objective conditions that lead to an emergent sense of wellbeing. related to the workplace culture is the importance of social relationships in the workplace including relationships with colleagues, students, and director or principal. while this was critically important for all the participants, not all participants enjoyed positive relationships, most notably, hana who felt a lack of unity and community across colleagues and an especially challenging relationship with leadership. relationships have been shown to be critically important for teacher wellbeing (kinman et al., 2011). for example, hargreaves (2001) examined emotional dynamics between teachers and their colleagues. he conducted 53 interviews with elementary and secondary school teachers in canada and found that teachers who work together, are in good relations, and support and value each other typically try to avoid conflicts and have more harmony in the workplace. indeed, morrison (2004) shows that having a friend at work can enhance one’s satisfaction with the workplace. another dominant theme across all the data was having a sense of purpose and meaning in one’s work; however, this may be a double-edged sword for teacher wellbeing. it could imply that some teachers are willing to tolerate poor working conditions, including low remuneration (e.g., hana and bao), as they rated that aspect of their job on balance as less important for them than the positivity gained from helping learners to succeed. there are studies at all levels of education (primary, secondary, and tertiary) which show that educators’ intrinsic motivation and dedication to the profession often means they work beyond what is expected of them (ballet & kelchtermans, 2009). this is potentially one contributory factor to the high levels of burnout which characterize the profession. interestingly, this finding cautions against the value of so-called objective list theories of wellbeing that sonja babic, sarah mercer, astrid mairitsch, johanna gruber, kirsten hempkin28 refer to a “catalog of goods required for a well lived life” (jayawickreme et al., 2012, pp. 329–330). what is needed for an individual to flourish in the workplace may vary considerably and it emerges from the interaction of personal perspectives on contextual factors. however, a vital word of caution is needed here. it is imperative that basic existential needs must be met, and teachers should receive just and fair remuneration and working conditions. their intrinsic motivation and dedication to the profession must never be exploited by policy makers and/or owners or heads of schools. the issue of precarity in the elt profession suggests that, sadly, this is not always the case (walsh, 2019). finally, an interesting factor was the role of teacher status in the respective countries. this factor came out as the least positive for the majority of participants—only the teachers in china and japan felt that their work and profession were esteemed but yet also not especially well remunerated. it is interesting to note that research has shown that professional status can affect teacher wellbeing (troman, 2000), and yet, overall, these teachers retained a positive sense of wellbeing despite the low status assigned to their chosen professions. notably, most of them complained about poor salaries which they felt did not reflect their qualifications and investment of time and energy. again, on balance, for this group of teachers, although this situation is somewhat dispiriting, the other positive factors outweighed on balance, and they felt that they were still flourishing in spite of these societal and institutional conditions. conclusion this study has examined the perspectives and experiences of language teachers who feel that their respective institutions contribute positively to their wellbeing. they were interviewed to explore the kinds of factors in their organizations and their own experiences which they felt supported their wellbeing. it was found that a number of key factors not just restricted to the workplace in isolation emerged and these were not always reported on in positive terms, despite the participants’ overall conclusion that their situation in their workplace was positive for their wellbeing. this led us to reflect on the relative importance of various factors for individuals and the personal wellbeing needs of individuals where the positivity of certain factors could outweigh the negative effects of others. the study has a number of implications for practice. investing in the quality of staff relationships and opportunities for staff to connect socially would seem prudent given the strong emphasis throughout the data on a positive climate in the workplace. despite the tolerance displayed by these specific individuals, language teacher wellbeing in the workplace… 29 there is also a need to address the issues they raise about payment and the quality of physical space and resources provided. while they were merely a source of dissatisfaction for these participants, we know from research that for other individuals, they could contribute to them leaving the profession (borman & dowling, 2008; karsenti & collin, 2013; kelchtermans, 2017). teachers are qualified professionals who typically exhibit great dedication to their chosen career, and their expertise and professionalism should receive the recognition in esteem and financial terms that they deserve throughout educational systems across the globe. language teaching specifically has in part been characterized by precarity and poor working conditions (mercer et al., 2016; wieczorek, 2016) and the field must collectively consider how to counter these conditions for educators (mercer, 2021). with the experiences of online and remote teaching during covid-19, there has been a further awakening and acknowledgement of the incredible work done by teachers and the centrality of their wellbeing for good practice (arvisais et al., 2020; macintyre et al., 2020). it is hoped that this public and state recognition will remain even once the crisis has passed as will the emergent research agenda on teacher wellbeing. a concern raised by this study is that teachers’ intrinsic motivation, commitment, and sense of purpose drawn from their work should not be exploited and utilized as an excuse explicitly or implicitly not to directly support teacher wellbeing and work conditions in systemic practical terms. wellbeing is never the sole responsibility of the individual, but it is very much the responsibility of institutions and communities to provide the best conditions to enable each individual educator to thrive in their professional roles. when teachers flourish in the workplace, everyone benefits including the learners. references aldrup, k., klusmann, u., & lüdtke, o. 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(2020). individual differences and changes in subjective wellbeing during the early stages of the covid-19 pandemic. american psychologist. advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/amp0000702 sonja babic, sarah mercer, astrid mairitsch, johanna gruber, kirsten hempkin wohlbefinden der sprachlehrer am arbeitsplatz: bedürfnisausgleich z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g lehrkräfte, die sich an ihrem arbeitsplatz wohlfühlen, unterrichten effektiver, haben bessere beziehungen zu lernenden und erzielen höhere leistungen bei ihren studenten (mason, 2017). um zu verstehen, was einen einf luss auf das wohlbefinden der sprachlehrer hat, wurden drei säulen der positiven psychologie (seligman, 2011) untersucht. dabei stützten sich die autoren insbesondere auf das konzept von positive organizational scholarship (cameron & spreitzer, 2012), um institutionelle und persönliche faktoren zu erforschen, die von den lehrkräften als maßgebend für ihr wohlbefinden wahrgenommen werden. in der studie werden erfahrungen von 15 sprachlehrern aus 13 verschiedenen ländern präsentiert. die gewählte stichprobenmethode bietet eine umfassende betrachtung des themas. die daten wurden in ausführlichen, halbstrukturierten interviews erhoben und mittels der thematischen analyse (braun & clarke, 2006) ausgewertet. die analyse ergab fünf hauptaspekte, die von den lehrkräften als relevant für ihr wohlbefinden erachtet werden, darunter arbeitsplatzkultur, soziale beziehungen, sinnstiftung, status als sprachlehrer und körperliches wohlbefinden. sonja babic, sarah mercer, astrid mairitsch, johanna gruber, kirsten hempkin34 die ergebnisse machen deutlich, dass wohlbefinden nicht nur ein persönliches und subjektives phänomen ist, sondern auch kollektiv und gesellschaftlich bestimmt wird. die studie schließt mit überlegungen zu den auswirkungen auf die praxis, politische entscheidungsträger und schulleiter sowie zu den fragen der individualität, die in der künftigen forschung zu berücksichtigen sind. schlüsselwörter: wohlbefinden der sprachlehrer, arbeitsplatz, positive organisational scholarship, arbeitszufriedenheit theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 4 (2), 2018 wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego • katowice 2018 editors-in-chief danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia in katowice adam wojtaszek university of silesia in katowice language editor david schauffler university of silesia in katowice editorial board janusz arabski (university of silesia, katowice/vistula university, warsaw) larissa aronin (oranim college of higher education/trinity college, dublin) jasone cenoz iraqui (university of the basque country, donostia – san sebastian) halina chodkiewicz (maria curie-skłodowska university, lublin) gessica de angelis (trinity college, dublin) anna ewert (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) tammy gregersen (university of northern iowa, cedar falls) ulrike jessner schmid (university of innsbruck, innsbruck) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities/university of warsaw) jolanta latkowska (university of silesia, katowice) peter macintyre (cape breton university, sydney) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, cracow) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) miroslaw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz/state school of higher professional education, konin) ewa piechurska-kuciel (university of opole, opole) andrzej porzuczek (university of silesia, katowice) david singleton (trinity college, dublin/university of pannonia, veszprem) eva vetter (university of vienna, vienna) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, łódź) maria wysocka (university of silesia, katowice) this publication is indexed in the following databases: ceeol, polindex (pbn), worldcat, public knowledge project index, oai-pmb data provider registry, bazhum, mla directory of periodicals, erih plus uznanie autorstwa – użycie niekomercyjne – bez utworów zależnych 4.0 międzynarodowe attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives 4.0 international contents preface (danuta gabryś-barker, adam wojtaszek) 5 articles sarah mercer, peter macintyre, tammy gregersen, kyle talbot positive language education: combining positive education and language education 11 katarzyna budzińska positive institutions: a case study 33 anna michońska-stadnik the classroom learning environment and its influence on selected aspects of foreign language attainment—insights from students 55 ana aldekoa gure ikastola en tres languages: the teaching and learning of trilingual oral expository skills by means of a didactic sequence 73 beata webb, alicia vallero developing learning environments for blended and online learning 93 achilleas i. kostoulas, sarah mercer reflections on complexity: tesol researchers reflect on their experiences 109 reviews katarzyna ożanska-ponikwia (2018). personality and emotional intelligence in second language learning (cambridge scholars publishing)—by danuta gabryś-barker 131 anna borowska (2017). avialinguistics. the study of language for aviation purposes (peter lang)—by adam wojtaszek 137 style guide for authors 145 cover photo: “big_blue” by max iter (retrieved from www.flickr.com) copy editor: gabriela marszołek technical editor: barbara arenhövel proofreader: luiza przełożny typesetting: edward wilk copyright © 2016 by wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego all rights reserved issn 2450-5455 (print edition) issn 2451-2125 (digital edition) published by wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego ul. bankowa 12b, 40-007 katowice www.wydawnictwo.us.edu.pl e-mail: wydawus@us.edu.pl first impression. no. of copies: 100 + 50. printed sheets: 7.5. publishing sheets: 10.0. offset paper grade, 90 g. price 20 zł (+ vat) printing and binding expol, p. rybiński, j. dąbek, spółka jawna ul. brzeska 4, 87-800 włocławek theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (2), 2023, pp. 1/26 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12621 ewa tołoczko https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2451-7242 liberal arts department american university of the middle east, kuwait diagnostic abilities of novice teachers a b s t r a c t this paper discusses diagnostic abilities of novice teachers of english as a foreign language in poland as demonstrated through analyzing critical incidents (cis). a case study, designed to explore patterns and regularities in cognitive processes that practitioners activate to examine disorienting situations in their educational context, provided evidence of effective mental work of beginner teachers at the verbal and conceptual levels. specifically-structured written reports on what the instructors considered critical moments in their teaching practice served as a tool to verbalize how they represent, interpret, and value phenomena in the fl classroom by activating and integrating various sources of professional knowledge. the data analysis, which included both identification of the character of mental representations the subjects stimulated during the recall as well as higher order thinking operations on these representations, led to the conclusion that the inexperienced teachers show a degree of efficacy to register relations and variation in classroom realities, to problematize the unproblematic, to take position on matters, and to formulate relevant feedback for their future didactic moves. this encourages a hypothesis that teachers’ diagnostic abilities are not necessarily determined by the current state of their professional expertise and that limited classroom experience does not suppress adequate cognitive and affective responses to problems in beginner practitioners. keywords: novice teachers, diagnostic operations, critical incidents, cognitive processes the conceptualizations of what makes an expert language teacher have evolved over the years along with the mainstream methods in tefl. while decades ago teachers were assumed to be “doers” whose highly competent controlling behavior in class was decisive for effective language learning, more recently, the quality standards in formal instruction shifted the gravity towards teachers’ thinking, namely their observant and analytical abilities that allow them to navigate essential adjustments to the specificities of educational context (burns, edwards, & freeman, 2015; gabryś-barker, 2012; boshuizen, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12621 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2451-7242 tapsla.12621 p. 2/26 ewa tołoczko bromme, & gruber, 2004). much of the current view of novice teachers remains unchanged, though, and predominantly focuses on their underdeveloped capacity to efficiently respond to emerging challenges. indeed, research demonstrates that it is accumulated classroom experience that mostly supports teacher learning and brings newcomers from the periphery of the professional group to its core (farrell, 2007; borg, 2006; day, 2004; hargreaves, 2003; richardson, 1996). the study reported in this paper adopted a cognitive perspective on expertise, which holds that a degree of cognitive energy deliberately expended to (1) recognize nuances in observed events, (2) define problems, (3) integrate relevant mental resources for controlled reasoning about their causes, and (4) exercise professional judgment about their significance for fl learning is equally important in reorganizing knowledge representations (tripp, 2012; tsui, 2005; bereiter & scardamalia, 2003; freeman 2002; rogers, 2002; johnson, 1998). sternberg and horvath (1995) long proposed to fully accept unexpected configurations of attributional similarities between beginner and advanced practitioners. the attribute of insight is one such category, within which variances among its members are determined by demonstrated cognitive abilities, not years of practical experience. in this view, it is reasonable to assume that novices, who are yet to build a repertoire of mental models of classroom situations to help them regulate and accelerate their strategic behavior, might still be capable of conducting diagnostic operations and evaluating both problems and their responses to them (perry, 2003). in principle, whether classroom events induce teachers’ critical analysis or not depends on how they represent them mentally. the cognitive processes involved in constructing representations include perception, attention, and memory, but meaning-making is additionally motivated and influenced by prior knowledge, beliefs, moral standards, emotions, and other context-dependent psychological factors. the occurrences in class recognized by practitioners as perplexing, upsetting, or intriguing are highly likely to prompt conceptual work channeled into finding a rational explanation of what happened and reducing the sense of cognitive dissonance (guerra & wubbena, 2017). the purpose of this study was to investigate mental effort put by efl instructors in diagnosing critical incidents in teaching. specifically, the acts of diagnosing, verbalized by the participants in written reports, were expected to reveal how they review available evidence, reason, and formulate professional claims about disturbing situations they had encountered in the class. the results exposed some characteristics of good diagnosticians in the least experienced participants. what follows is an overview of the diagnostic abilities as perceived in cognitive psychology. next, the study and its findings are discussed with regard to the identified characteristics. the concluding part of this paper offers recommendations for teacher training and suggestions for further studies into novices as experts. diagnostic abilities of novice teachers tapsla.12621 p. 3/26 identifying effective diagnosing diagnosing is a process of problem-solving, which requires that reasoners explicitly define a gap in their current knowledge and manipulate existing mental representations to establish relationships between them, draw causal inferences, formulate rules, and propose solutions that optimally fill the gap (strasser, 2010; thagard, 2005; pretz et al., 2003). these computational operations produce change in teachers’ cognitions, that is, revised understandings of instructional principles and classroom phenomena, the application of which will affect their didactic behaviors in the future. the first and necessary condition for effective diagnosing is comprehensive evidence, on the basis of which instructors will hypothesize about the origins of events and interpret their meaning (johnson, 1998). this foundation for reasoning consists of physical and non-physical manifestations of information, including not only the parameters of the learning context, but also the actions, thoughts, and emotions the teacher showed him/herself. situational awareness (sa), defined as increased attention that enables the individual to distinguish constituents of critical incidents (endsley, 1995), has been observed to grow in both more and less experienced professionals through simulationand reflection-based training (salminen-tuomaala et al., 2020). the finding supports a fundamental principle of information processing that perception and attention are controlled processes in their part, hence unrelated to one’s professional status. novice instructors can successfully regulate these processes and discriminate elements of classroom situations, just as experienced teachers do (rogers, 2002). tripp (2012) claims that it is the openness to “competing ways of seeing” (p. 27) that increases teachers’ sensitivity to subtleties of the circumstances and enables them to proceed with legitimate analysis of events. affective thoughts about distressing events occur naturally in the recall process. in the literature, the attributes of emotion have been recognized as part of our remembering selves and as such are embedded in personal narratives (goldie, 2000). if the attention is largely captured by subjective perceptions and feelings, a picture of a past situation might get contaminated, and so its further analysis. an emotionally intelligent approach to one’s experiences involves subduing rather than fueling affective responses to retrieved memories, which makes biases cognitively manageable (jagtap & guaro, 2016; gross & thomson, 2007). mcmanus (2011) emphasizes that emotional literacy raises our self-awareness but is impossible to develop without situational awareness. the second constituent of diagnosing—the identification of causal forces behind events—involves systematizing and classifying the collected information. the ability to think, that is, to acquire and manipulate concepts, is the fundamental aspect of human intelligence and cognition, not the prerogative of tapsla.12621 p. 4/26 ewa tołoczko experts, although organizing mental representations as hierarchical knowledge structures available for continuous verification has been accepted as a characteristic of expertise across domains (holyoak, 2005). mollon (2000) explains that in order to reasonably hypothesize, we need to turn what is preor subconscious into our explicit understanding of reality. this prevents us from acting upon a feeling of knowing and instead mobilizes our mental resources to surface the conceptual foundation for our actions, to seek congruence between thought and behavior, and to produce an important learning outcome (alexander et al., 2011). psychological studies indicate that individual differences in cognitive capacity (working memory, intelligence, executive functions, or inhibitory control) and previously established understandings determine how we validate premises we operate on, map connections between knowledge representations, and formulate propositions about observed phenomena (kottmeyer, van meter, & cameron, 2020; gray & holyoak, 2019). on the other hand, kahneman’s (2011) dual-processing model of the brain, in which system 1 generates intuitiondriven associations while system 2 makes the higher-order computational effort in problem-solving situations, demonstrates the limitations of human reasoning. it has been argued that system 2 is inclined to boil down analogical processes to heuristics (west, toplak, & stanovich, 2008). according to kahneman (2011), this inclination reveals systematic errors in the thinking mechanism and might have a detrimental impact on one’s professional growth, for mental shortcuts freeze rather than revise personally-held systems of beliefs (schraw & robinson, 2011; eysenck & keane, 2010; martin, 2009). the assumption is hence encouraged that if extensive experience and retentive memory does not prevent people from a cognitive bias, inexpert practitioners are not radically different from their senior counterparts. those who deliberately activate the doubter (system 2) and ask probing questions about their experiences are likely to reduce potential shallowness of performed analysis, that is, to minimize inaccuracies in establishing causal relations between events (tripp, 2012; tsui, 2005). also, they might gain a better understanding of what beliefs, principles, moral standards, and values make up their personal theories about tefl (borg, 2003). logical reasoning does not manifest through searching for ultimate truths. on the contrary, bereiter and scardamalia (2003) call it a “make-it-better” heuristic, which aims at improving ideas, opening problems, assessing actions, and exploring possibilities for further considerations. the ultimate stage of effective diagnosing is building claims about fl teaching and learning. according to tripp (2012), formulating professional judgments about the state of affairs is a matter of making “expert guesses” (p. 125), which manifest teachers’ knowledge, in-depth inquiry, and wisdom. the verifiable nature of those guesses resists the pressure to always provide diagnostic abilities of novice teachers tapsla.12621 p. 5/26 accurate assumptions, yet it encourages systematic re-evaluation of available evidence, established understandings, and workable solutions. tripp’s typology of judgments includes four kinds of conclusions teachers arrive at in their daily practice, the characteristics of which differ with regard to the length of processing, source of orientation, and outcome (table 1). table 1 four kinds of professional judgments (tripp, 2012) practical diagnostic reflective critical source of understanding professional expertise reasoning personal values and beliefs professional expertise and reasoning length of processing short prolonged short/prolonged prolonged outcome workable solutions to problems increased awareness of one’s own decisions attitudes verified standards and knowledge representations while practical judgments are informed by application of professional expertise and represent instant answers to classroom problems, diagnostic judgments are based on prolonged reasoning and examination of one’s own didactic moves. reflective judgments identify the influence of personal beliefs on one’s performance, and critical ones aim to verify the current knowledge, including its subjective dimension. good diagnosticians adopt all the strategies to interpret the meaning of emerging difficulties and to take a competent position on matters. as research demonstrates, regular structured attempts to break down meaningful events (critical incidents) and to articulate legitimate rationalizations can help inexperienced teachers acquire the ability as early as during pre-service training programs (gabryś-barker, 2012). on the whole, research on the cognitive work of diagnosis, and novice teachers thinking and acting expertly in particular, is rather limited. in johnson’s (1996) case study, for example, an inexperienced instructor reflected in a personal journal on her didactic experiences (mostly failures). the novice was capable of recognizing, analyzing, and evaluating her teacher-centered methodology in a surprisingly transparent and informed manner. she could explain not only why ignoring questions from her students (the approach she conceptually disapproved of) served as the easiest way to ensure that the lesson content be covered as planned, but also how it affected the learners. gatbonton (2008) compared in her study the verbal recall of what novice and experienced instructapsla.12621 p. 6/26 ewa tołoczko tors were thinking about while teaching, and she concluded that the pedagogical knowledge activated by the beginners was similar to that of seniors, especially with regard to such categories as procedure and comprehension check, progress review, or students’ prior knowledge. finally, tripp’s (2012) training program in ar for australian educators demonstrated that novice practitioners promptly developed cognitive competence to raise pertinent questions about problematic situations they had faced in the classroom, to make reasonable inferences about their potential causes, and to construct critical evaluation of the events. in doing so, some outperformed their more experienced counterparts. clearly, more empirical data is required to understand how entry-level instructors formulate judgments about fl instruction and what these judgments are primarily fueled by. sternberg and horvath (1995) reasonably argue that as long as the same criteria are applied to measure the performance of early and late-stage practitioners, they will naturally expose deficiencies in the former. instead, it is recommended to examine what cognitive resources novices can successfully activate and integrate to evaluate classroom events and their own didactic behavior. study methodology the case study, the results of which are presented below, sought to distinguish regularities in the way teachers of english perform diagnostic operations, that is, respond cognitively to classroom circumstances that they recognize as potentially decisive for a better understanding of english teaching and learning. the study was based on the assumption that critical incidents, considered as problem situations, stimulate operations on mental representations, including rules, concepts, images, analogies, and emotions. these operations lead to causal inferences and indicate both the sources and relevance of knowledge activated for this purpose. consequently, the research questions aimed to determine: 1. how the participants mentally represent problem situations; 2. what sources of professional knowledge and abstract constructs they integrate to analyze these situations; 3. what reasoning skills they exercise to identify the causes of critical incidents; 4. what types of claims/judgments they build as a result of the diagnosing process. written reports, in which the participants described, analyzed, and evaluated critical incidents in their teaching settings over a period of time, constituted the elementary units of inquiry and the source of both qualitative and quantitative data. the examination of the material was hence guided, on the one hand, by diagnostic abilities of novice teachers tapsla.12621 p. 7/26 the idiosyncrasies of content communicating teachers’ thoughts at the three stages of the task, and, on the other hand, by the frequency of occurrences of distinguishing features across the texts. the process of collecting data exceeded two years and resulted in a total of 73 reports, 33 of which were generated by novice teachers (t1:10; t2:11; t3:11). participants there were seven study participants: polish teachers of english as a foreign language. they were all qualified instructors; however, their classroom experience ranged from a couple of months to 17 years. the division into entry-stage (t1, t2, t3: less than two years of teaching practice) and middle/late-stage professionals (t4, t5, t6, t7: more than five years of teaching practice) precisely reflected the age composition of the group (20s vis-à-vis 30s/40s). recruited from different work environments, including primary, secondary, and higher state education as well as an english language school, the participants remained in a professional relationship with the researcher. in her capacity as director of studies, the latter supervised the work of t1, t2, and t3 in a private educational establishment, where they landed their first efl positions. t2 and t3 were university graduates in english studies with adequate methodological practicum granted, while t1 held an ma in applied linguistics at durham university, uk, and was new to the polish schooling system. she lived and studied in the usa until, in her mid-twenties, she decided to return to her polish roots and teach english in her birthplace. a unique cultural background that she represented was a relevant factor contributing, as discussed below, to her execution of the diagnostic task. procedure each of the participants was instructed to write at least ten reports aimed at diagnosing critical incidents (cis) in their teaching contexts within the stretch of a school year. the concept of critical incidents (problem situations) was introduced to every teacher, and guidelines how to navigate the search provided: — think of a situation which distracted you from work as it disagreed with accepted norms, a didactic challenge which you managed/failed to handle on the spot; — something upsetting, amusing, insulting, exciting, or embarrassing that you have noticed, done, or heard as a teacher; — an event or a lesson procedure that you distinctly remember although it was your usual teaching routine; tapsla.12621 p. 8/26 ewa tołoczko — a classroom episode that aroused your curiosity; — or a moment of realization that your knowledge about teaching english as a foreign language was inadequate for the situation. the options above show that the participants had a free choice from positive and negative teaching experiences. two samples, related to a successful and upsetting occurrence in the classroom, were analyzed at the introductory stage of the study, with the emphasis placed on their distinct structure: (1) description of the event, (2) its analysis, and (3) professional judgment. in this respect, the following outline was supposed to assist the teachers throughout the task: description — present the background of the incident; — summarize events, your (re)actions and emotions; — point to the critical moment. analysis — identify the problem (assign professional concepts/categories to the parts of the incident / establish causal relationships between them); — specify the question(s) which the incident brought up; — name your responsibility; — think of alternative scenarios for the incident and its outcomes. judgment — evaluate the significance of the incident vis-à-vis your expertise in efl teaching as acquired through your teacher training, english learning and teaching experience, the subject literature, personal theories, or colleagues; — construct feedback for future reference in your teaching practice. to prevent potential influences on the study outcomes, interventions into the process of report writing were kept to a minimum. still, three updates were received from the teachers after two, five, and nine months into their work. this way, the participants had a chance to raise questions or communicate concerns. the individual contributions to the study were completed upon receiving electronic submissions from the teachers, which, as signaled above, took much longer than expected/planned. data analysis the content of the reports went through a few stages of segmentation. first, based on the writers’ lexical choices and their prevalence, it was determined what kinds of situations attracted the participants’ attention to be represented as critical incidents. for example, expressions like a drama started, or it was a real let-down, as opposed to the students were mesmerized by my idea, or it was a rewarding experience, indicated negative and positive experiences respectively. the initial stage of analysis also included the thematic diagnostic abilities of novice teachers tapsla.12621 p. 9/26 categorization of critical incidents, namely aspects of teaching they covered. the identified common areas of focus were: (1) the participants’ didactic decisions/behavior, (2) their observations of learners/colleagues, and (3) feedback they received from learners, their parents, and supervisors. second, mental constructs and concepts that the teachers relied on in their diagnostic task were established by using gatbonton’s (2008) methodology of breaking sentences into so-called thought units. thought units in this study refer to language chunks (words, phrases, or clauses) communicating complete ideas, and so were termed meaningful thought units (mtus). those were examined at both functional and conceptual levels. the functional labeling of mtus corresponded to the structure of the participants’ task, namely describing, analyzing, and evaluating critical incidents, whereas the conceptual identification of mtus was based on the nature of representations and consequently categorized as cognitive (c), imagery (i), and affective (a) constructs. the cognitive mtus were analyzed for evidence of professional orientation. this resulted in recognizing several broad categories commonly related to in the reports, such as procedural and conceptual knowledge, context, feedback, past experience, knowledge of students, search for understanding, self-critique, selfknowledge, beliefs, and problem areas. the sentence below provides a sample of how segmentation and processing of the collected material was executed. teacher: 1in class, i made them repeat the wrong pronunciation many times, description mtu (the teacher recalls what she did) + cognitive mtu (procedural knowledge—the teacher is aware of her didactic choices to manage the learning content). teacher: 2which means its auditory representation was created and stored, even if temporarily. analysis mtu (the teacher interprets her action) + cognitive mtu (conceptual knowledge—the teacher understands the linguistic consequences of her mistake for the learners; she logically links the frequent repetition of a word with the possibility of learning its wrong form). with regard to emotionally loaded thoughts in the participants’ reports (affective mtus), the analysis was narrowed to the intensity of identified units. average and strong representations were assigned 1.0 and 2.0 respectively. their classification was based on discourse analysis, where, for example, the statement i was trembling all over my body with excitement and joy was granted 2.0 while i was impressed by their work merely 1.0. tapsla.12621 p. 10/26 ewa tołoczko lastly, the categorization of the material, supported by nvivo qsr application, opened up possibilities to analyze it. for example, it was observed that t2 repeatedly referred to learners’ behavior in his reports. the comments he made in ci1: at the end of the lesson, one of the boys was quite frustrated, ci5: i saw they wanted to be noticed, ci8: the boy realized he was actually good at english and apparently he appreciated the praise, and ci10: she said nothing, but i could tell she did not buy my explanation appeared analogous in that they revealed the teacher’s tendency to pressurize his perceptions of students’ behavior into absolute certainty, although they were based on his subjective impressions. the trajectories of teachers’ thoughts were investigated so as to establish how practitioners proceeded from outlining problem situations, to determining causal relations between their constituents, developing conclusions based on identified premises, and assessing one’s own decisions. this allowed for inferences about the teachers’ understanding of classroom realities and their judgments as impacted by their professional knowledge as opposed to their personal values, attitudes, or preferences. statements like i’m positive that the boy was used to being rebuked by his teachers and parents all the time, and he expected the same from me, or getting mentally ready for a challenge brings peace to heart were recognized as reflective thoughts rested on personally-held systems of beliefs, the propositional value of which was rather unsubstantiated. by contrast, an mtu such as the effectiveness of note-taking is dependent to some extent on the way the information is organized on the board/slides was classified as demonstrating a didactically justified claim that a chaotic and accidental use of the whiteboard is of doubtful assistance to the process of language learning. to determine the character of professional judgments the participants formulated, tripp’s (2012) typology, discussed above, was used as the benchmark, including practical, diagnostic, reflective, and critical evaluations. results as discussed above, the effectiveness of the diagnosing process at each of its stages rests upon a range of abilities, a level of which might show variances in and among practitioners. the areas of diagnostic competence identified in the novice study participants regarded all aspects of the task execution, such as establishing mental representations of events (research question 1), integrating sources of professional knowledge (research question 2), applying higher-order thinking strategies (research question 3), and formulating critical judgments about one’s experiences (research question 4). the examples below illustrate that beginner teachers show potential as diagnosticians. two instances per diagnostic abilities of novice teachers tapsla.12621 p. 11/26 person will be discussed, yet the acquired data provides further confirmation of the desired features in the novice instructors. teacher 1 mental representations the series of critical incident (ci) reports composed by t1 was characterized by an exceptionally suppressed expression of feelings. the number of emotionally-loaded thought units she communicated at both the description and analysis stages of diagnosing were the lowest of all (table 2). table 2 the distribution of affective mtus in the descriptive and analytical segments of critical incidents reports of t1 (bolded red) versus the other participants, including beginner and experienced practitioners the descriptive segment of ci reports the analytical segment of ci reports affective mtus (%) 13,4 5,3 6,5 4,5 17,2 21 11,7 26,8 12 31,4 14,7 10 16,8 10,8 similarly, the intensity of these units scored the lowest at the respective phases of the task performance (figures 1 and 2). figure 1 t1’s affective thought units in description tapsla.12621 p. 12/26 ewa tołoczko figure 2 t1’s affective thought units in analysis while comments reflecting factual and imagery content in other participants’ reports were commonly intertwined with their attitudes towards learners, their behaviors, observed problems, and reached decisions, t1 placed the focus on how the events unfolded and why (cognitive mtus), rather than what affective states they evoked in her (affective mtus). the critical incident (ci6) presented below constitutes evidence of what might be considered the teacher’s emotional detachment. the underlined section indicates the only affective reaction the situation provoked in the instructor: one of the crucial elements of english teaching is the materials that are used in the classroom because they are one of the main driving forces behind learning. everything that teachers use to teach language could be considered as teaching material. the different types of materials available for classroom use is a vast topic and the following teaching reflection is focused on the textbook as a base for language teaching, in contrast with the potential of authentic materials. at the beginning of the school year i needed to evaluate and choose textbooks for each one of the courses at our school. when analyzing different textbooks, the main framework i used was the approach and methodology of the textbook. methodological factors were the main guidelines i used to evaluate the validity of the textbook. topics and realia were secondary. one of the main aspects i paid attention to was the way in which language (grammar and vocabulary) is presented in the textbook. for example, i looked at whether or not grammatical structures are preceded by exposure to language in use, such as texts and activities oriented diagnostic abilities of novice teachers tapsla.12621 p. 13/26 at non-linguistic themes with the language elements implied in it. i also considered the elements of practice and whether or not students are given enough controlled practice of the grammar structures before they move to free practice and language use in freer speech. also, the presence of tasks with non-linguistic goals was crucial because i perceived it as a necessity to activate the language taught. methodology factors were pivotal. finally, i chose the cutting edge for most of my adult groups. as the course progressed, one of the lessons in the elementary/pre-intermediate group was designed around a grammar point. the aim of the instruction was to enable the students to use the present simple 3rd person singular forms of verbs correctly and fluently. it was supposed to be a speaking lesson with a non-linguistic task. the lesson was preceded by typical gram mar lessons where students were exposed to texts with the desired grammar point in it. they had plenty of exposure to the language as i considered it a crucial factor. practice activities followed to give students a chance to use the grammar point in controlled activities and to focus on the form. for the following lesson i prepared a speaking task to activate the language and enable the students to use it freely. students were first given a listening task where they focused on how others did the same task, so the students were given a base (willis, 1996). they listened to a textbook audio recording where different people analyzed holiday course adverts and chose various courses for their friends, according to their friends’ likes and dislikes. the following is an example of an extract from the text-script: maybe the sailing course is good for her because she likes spending time outside and she always goes swimming on fridays. students had a proper listening task where they had exposure to the language use and they also had a chance to analyze the language forms used by the speakers to complete the task. next, the students were given the speaking task. they first read some course adverts. then they listened to some textbook characters talking about their hobbies, likes, and dislikes. the aim of the task was for the students to decide on the best course for each character, as a group. as stated in willis’s framework (1996), the task had a non-linguistic goal, but was likely to activate the grammar point. during the task completion i was surprised by how reluctant my students were to complete the task and they weren’t engaged in the task at all. i tried to prompt them, and i simplified the task by breaking it into smaller steps. for example, i asked the students to first list the likes and dislikes of each of the characters. then i asked them to come up with one course for one of the characters and then to agree or disagree on it with other students. however, it did not change anything. my students were evidently bored and failed to engage in the task. according to my perception of the situation, the students failed to engage in the task because they did not see the point of tapsla.12621 p. 14/26 ewa tołoczko talking about some fake characters from the textbook. they seemed to find it pointless to choose a holiday course for people they don’t know, or even for people that do not exist. as a teacher, i failed to take into consideration the fact that authenticity of classroom materials is a major motivational factor for esl students (dörnyei, 2001). i considered the methodological factors of textbook design over the authenticity of audio materials. i disregarded the fact that affect is as important as effective teaching methods in class (arnold, 1999). in a spur of the moment, i adapted the speaking task and told the students to talk about their own likes and dislikes in pairs. then they were supposed to choose a holiday course for one another and present their ideas for the class, instead of choosing it for artificial people from the textbook. i did this based on the assumption that personalizing content in the elt classroom is crucial for language acquisition (krashen, 1981). as a result of this change, the students were more eager to complete the task and seemed to have found the need to actually use the language in class. therefore, such situation could carry a conclusion that authenticity of materials could be of higher value in the elt classroom than effective methodological approach. factors responsible for such an unusual strength of emotional retrieval remain unknown, but it seems reasonable to speculate that her cultural and educational background, as mentioned earlier, played a role in forming quite uncommon perceptions of classroom realities. the increased load of affective remarks towards the end of the ci series might be accidental if not related to the scale of fiascos t1 chose to diagnose in ci8, ci9, and ci10. these depicted her desperate yet vain attempts to maintain control over a class of eleven-year-old football players, full of overwhelming vitality, according to the teacher. a gradual change was observed in the character of those mtus, though. laconic lexical choices, which the instructor frequently used in the initial reports, such as fail and failure, were replaced now with the use of language that labelled her specific didactic behavior, for example frantic decision, hysterical move, unnecessarily apologetic. it might be that t1 reached a point in the study where she found the umbrella terms insufficiently defining. although it is undetermined to what extent the minimal emotional load of the descriptive and analytical parts of t1’s reports was strategically regulated, information processing freed of affective tension gave the instructor an advantage to approach the selected incidents in a less cognitively distorted manner. in this respect, her diagnostic performance can be viewed as much more effective when contrasted with the distribution of affective mtus in the reports of her beginner counterparts (figures 3 and 4). diagnostic abilities of novice teachers tapsla.12621 p. 15/26 figure 3 t2’s (left) and t3’s (right) affective thought units in description figure 4 t2’s (left) and t3’s (right) affective thought units in analysis concept building—a source of professional orientation as discussed earlier, concept building constitutes the foundation for analytical operations within the diagnostic task. when examining classroom events, t1 regularly referred to general professional categories, including lesson planning, procedures, learners’ prior knowledge, comprehension check, and many more. in this regard, as illustrated in figure 5, she ranked the highest among the beginner participants, and the third highest of all. figure 5 three types of learning paths identified for t1 vis-à-vis the other study participants tapsla.12621 p. 16/26 ewa tołoczko the instructor also made attempts to establish her own understanding of such aspects of the teaching/learning process as learner autonomy or accuracy/ fluency duo. one outstanding example of framing a concept can be found in a report regarding a desperate act of the teacher tearing a young learner’s test in front of the class in response to the boy’s naughty behaviour. recognized as highly turbulent and unprofessional, the incident caused the young practitioner to contemplate teacher authority. the following excerpt shows the verbalization of her reflective thoughts: the lesson i learned was not to avoid injustice. it was an obvious piece anyway. i realized that the teacher is not only expected to register and respond to events in class, but also see her own behavior as a component of the lesson, which, when controlled, might actually achieve more than hysterical pedagogical moves. it does not belong to the category of planning and acting upon what has been planned, and hence can be easily overlooked. however, allowing the negative emotions to grow inside and vent eventually is like excusing myself as an imperfect human being yet not accepting others as such. the fact i am a teacher does not give me ultimate power. quite the opposite, the master, by definition, has reached the point in development where he can accept much more than non-masters because he can see and understand more. yes, on june 4th, 2015, i decided to become a master one day. the passage demonstrates the teacher’s ability to not only explicitly and meaningfully refer to such abstract constructs as injustice, controlled behavior, emotion release, or power, but also to incorporate them into the conceptual basis of her newly set professional goal—mastery. to see this ability surface in a young instructor’s narrative proves her both a mature professional and an active learner. teacher 2 reasoning processes it was observed that in his 11 analyses of critical incidents, t2 effectively identified premises and built valid claims about three classroom situations, one of which appeared to be a highly-delicate multi-dimension issue. it concerned compromised honesty and integrity of the teacher after he (1) lied to a student about the meaning of an advanced lexical item he was not familiar with, (2) “died” of total embarrassment, (3) managed to recover emotionally, and (4) once more failed to admit his wrong when the student confronted him publicly in the following class. diagnostic abilities of novice teachers tapsla.12621 p. 17/26 the line of reasoning t2 verbalized in the ci10 exemplifies an impressive interpretative work, where the instructor proceeded along the time/space developments and contemplated the following unobservable cause-effect relationships within the situation: — well-deserved humiliation; — his ego behind the act; — the perspective of the learner; — potential damage inflicted on her; — alternative scenarios; — expectations held by different efl ages and levels; — teacher reputation. the exploration of these constituents and their configurations, which covered 15 out of 33 meaningful thought units (mtus) of the report, allowed t2 to point to his fear of being unmasked as incompetent as the major problem area and to conclude that it is the teachers’ transparency, shortcomings in their professional knowledge included, that significantly benefits the learning process on both ends: my university teacher used to say that transparency is a merit in the profession. it is not a shame not to know all the answers as long as you make systematic effort to learn. you are a person whose car would not start on a winter morning, who had a sleepless night because of heavy road works outside the window, who failed to remember about his mother’s birthday, or who has just got engaged and brings tons of emotions to class. you are a person who knows things and does not know things. your students should see you happy and unhappy. your students will believe you then. this is what she used to say. this thought was like a blow on my head. how illuminating! while in the majority of his cis, t2 tended to apply heuristics and simplify both reasoning and judgment, the conceptual elaboration performed in this case, paired with the closing reflective thought above, demonstrated a remarkable degree of higher order thinking. defining experiences and learning outcomes the way t2 interpreted critical incidents and their outcomes attracted special attention during the data analysis. the instructor admitted his didactic failures in ten out of 11 ci reports. in general, his distressing experiences related to critical feedback he received from his superiors or students (these are symbolized in table 3 as f–); disturbing observations he made in and outside the classroom (o–); and his compromising didactic actions (a–). for example, he chose to diagnose his misjudgment of learners’ manners, ignorance of cefr, tapsla.12621 p. 18/26 ewa tołoczko an immature response to personal needs communicated by an adult student, or a deep anxiety provoked by a conversation with a teenager’s parent. the reports were abundant in emotionally loaded expressions which straightforwardly reported fault in his personal insecurities or inexperience. the instances range from: i had no idea what structures in use draw a line between b1 and b2; i found myself in trouble; i blushed like a teenage boy; i felt so embarrassed and i was angry with myself; to i was making fool of myself. table 3 the occurrence of positive and negative (–/+) incidents in t2’s reports including actions, observations, and feedback (aof) ci/1 ci/2 ci/3 ci/4 ci/5 ci/6 ci/7 ci/8 ci/9 ci/10 ci/11 t2 f– f– a– a– a– a– o– a– a– a– a+ in seven of these cases, though, the teacher pictured positive outcomes and new habits he developed in the wake of highly upsetting occurrences. an illustrative example is his ci11, which reveals how the instructor’s complete dependence on the textbook in lesson planning (1) stopped him from adjusting the lesson content to his students’ interests and prior knowledge, (2) provoked their unfavorable reactions, and (3) forced the teacher to spontaneously modify the in-class activities. t2 realized that it was a huge mistake to think that a meticulously planned chapter in the book will do the thinking for us and that both recommended ideas and our own designs must be approached critically unless we think of teaching as a source of easy money. alongside, he was more than happy to discover that he was able to fix the problem after the learners’ rolled eyes opened his. it is unidentified whether the realization that alternative didactic choices could bring more effective learning outcomes did amend the teacher’s mindset and actions permanently. still, his analytical thought processes could denote the contextual mode of reflection, which, as advocated by taggart and wilson (1998), examines the relationship between how things work in real life and how they presumably should work. attention redirected to the system of knowing potentially benefitted the young teacher in that he initiated the cognitive activity which aimed to realize his objective—adaptation of behavior (zimmerman & schunk, 2011). this also presupposes an open-minded approach of the teacher to his didactic decisions and their assessment. it is true that the study navigated the participants towards emotionally loaded events in their classroom practice as the content for systematic inquiry; however, they all had absolute discretion as to how their considerations were handled. t2’s (sub)conscious choice to see unpleasant experiences as an diagnostic abilities of novice teachers tapsla.12621 p. 19/26 impetus for improvement and encouraging feedback for future developments indicates that the practitioner’s perceptions are an integral part of information processing and learning, which is consonant with golombek and johnson’s (2004) research findings emphasizing the catalytic role of attitude in teacher professional growth. t2 steered his mental processing from his current didactic understandings towards more expert cognitions, namely, informed assumptions about fl teaching and learning that might assist his problem-solving and decision-making processes in the future. teacher 3 controlled search for workable solutions one of t3’s ci reports regarded methodological concerns she had while teaching in a local state school. the problems the instructor identified within the first few months of service were the following: — she “had to” use rigid and unapproachable grammar terminology to present the teaching material to her young learners; — she established insufficiently clear lesson objectives; — she handed in the inept format of homework (ex. 1, 2, 3/p. 7 workbook). her deliberate search for more effective alternatives took a year and involved participating in conferences and studying relevant literature. she consulted her experienced fellow teachers as well but found their input rather useless due to their “conservative and outworn views” on state-school fl instruction. the teacher’s exploratory efforts resulted in a re-discovery of formative assessment, which prompted her to revolutionize her conduct. she personalized lesson contents, customized class routines, employed the “can do” strategy for defining learning outcomes, and implemented a creative idea of “revision jar” for short consolidation-oriented activities the kids enjoyed doing on a regular basis. what can be justifiably considered as a symptom of expertise in t3’s experience is her responsive attitude to what she recognized as a didactic challenge. the fact that she was committed to tax herself and engage in methodological inquiry might be called early idealism, which maynard and furlong (1995) defined as increased eagerness among novice teachers to understand and improve their practice. she might as well demonstrate disposition to maximize processing operations on the existing models of situations so as to transform her professional knowledge. her active investment of cognitive resources in problematizing and redefining didactic tasks is a distinct expert quality. formulating critical judgments the same novice instructor was observed to make four attempts at formulating critical judgments within the scope of 11 reports (figure 6). one of them tapsla.12621 p. 20/26 ewa tołoczko demonstrates an exceptional transparency of her diagnostic effort. it regards the concluding remarks about the reprimand she gave a kid for highlighting content in the notebook. by order of the teacher, the use of colours was strictly limited to her written feedback, so the girl violated a cardinal class rule. the pupil’s explanation that colours helped her study made the teacher realize how doubtful was the validity of the norm she excitingly applied to her classroom. even more importantly, she identified that the source of her tacit conceptualization was the approach adopted by her own teachers, which she thoughtlessly replicated. her words lucidly illustrate that the incident brought the values which prompted her behavior to her attention and critical examination: thanks to this situation, i came to my senses. it made me realize that i set the rule which would make my life easier (while checking their notebooks) and not theirs. it was totally unreasonable and not well-thought. it might have been because when i was a student my teachers used to say: red is a color for teachers! nobody dared to disobey this command. i might have subconsciously fallen into a trap of setting similar principles. rules are extremely important but only when they serve a didactic purpose. in this case, the principle was pointless. the student gave me a lot to think about. i spent days pondering over her response: but it helps me… the novice teacher successfully navigated her mental work towards a critical judgment by recognizing and evaluating the standards upon which she acted. her mental effort resulted in a transformed understanding of the role of rules in the fl classroom. figure 6 the occurrence of the four kinds of judgments in the novice teachers’ ci reports diagnostic abilities of novice teachers tapsla.12621 p. 21/26 figure 6 shows that all of the inexperienced study participants attempted to go beyond instant workable solutions to the problems they encountered (red line) and recognition of their emotional responses to these problems (green line). while these types of professional judgments involve rather limited processing power, the justification of didactic choices (yellow line) and verification of the validity of the underlying principles require sound logical reasoning. t3 and her beginner counterparts’ reports provided evidence of controlled mental work on their existing knowledge, which counts as diagnostic effort as well as readiness for further professional growth. discussion the characteristics of good diagnosticians were identified in inexperienced teachers of english in the study of diagnosing critical incidents. the qualitative and quantitative analysis of empirical data showed that the three beginners were intellectually capable of steering their attentional processes and generating various types (cognitive, affective, imagery) of mental representations of problematic situations. they stimulated multiple sources of knowledge, professional categories, and abstract constructs in search for a better understanding of these situations. finally, they established causal relationships between events and made effort to articulate critical feedback for their future didactic reference. the collected data is valid as it provides evidence on the existence of qualities in the novice participants that enable them to successfully execute command over their own cognitions. the findings extend the previous research by gatbonton (2008) in that they point at overlapping features among experienced and inexperienced practitioners and support sternberg and horvath’s (1995) hypothesis about the potential variances in the profiles of fl teachers, including the facility in novices to effectively diagnose problems, that is, to optimally represent, categorize, conceptualize, and define disturbing classroom events. the major limitation of the study regards its scope and hence insufficient amount of empirical material to confidently establish patterns/regularities in the participants’ reasoning. this prevents generalizations and theory building about cognitive faculties of beginner instructors. also, doubts might be raised about written recall as a reliable research procedure due to its subjectivity. indeed, the process of thought verbalization is biased to a degree, yet it remains one of very few alternatives to study teachers’ cognitions. discourse as personal as practice-based accounts communicates how a conscious human being interacts with the unexpected, responds to stimuli, uses schemata to rationalize thoughts and actions, makes elements of the story fit together, and adopts a subjective tapsla.12621 p. 22/26 ewa tołoczko stand on (professional) life (goldie, 2000). in this sense, it operates as a consistent instrument for externalization of the unobserved dimension of instruction, which legitimizes observations and interpretations it prompts. besides, the conditions under which the participants performed the diagnostic task could not be more natural. the teachers referred to occurrences that constituted their customary classroom practice, including planning, instructing, problem-solving, and reflecting. the situations whose meaning they chose to understand with the aid of structured analysis reveal the reality that researchers do not have access to. reasonably, further work is encouraged to fully address the challenging questions about the levels of expertise in novice teachers. numerous aspects of their behavior should be placed under investigation. it is yet to determine, for example, what psychological factors can successfully mediate the development of mechanisms for entry-level instructors to enhance cognitive processes in light of their deficient classroom experience. equally fascinating could be comparative studies on larger groups of pre-service teachers engaged in narrowfocus cognitive tasks, for example material design, which can result in recognition of strategies “expert” (good) trainees implement in action. the significance of such research effort lies in the fact that professional competence detected in learners should receive adequate response from teacher trainers. practical implications for tefl education arise from the results yielded by this study. diagnostic abilities, which essentially include search for, application, and evaluation of relevant information in both the external and internal environments, can be successfully enhanced in teacher training programs through simulation and scaffolding. although it is recognized that higher order processing is largely dependent on the stability and distinctiveness of the accumulated knowledge, effectively navigated structured practice of analyzing what choices the trainees make, why, and what consequences they might have for the learners can serve as a tool to promote the pursuit of broader understanding of the teaching/learning process. at the same time, diagnosing problems as a hands-on rather than conceptual dimension of teacher education might result in teachers-to-be surfacing and exploiting their cognitive and affective strengths and weaknesses. as dörnyei (2001) claims, teacher learning is largely based on context-confined feedback, which often determines one’s efforts to develop professionally. the influence of the training stage should be then both formative and stabilizing as it offers beginner instructors not only sheltered conditions to make, realize, and rectify didactic mistakes, but also a unique opportunity to build a sense of teacher identity that draws on observed/detected capacities, not deficiencies. diagnostic abilities of novice teachers tapsla.12621 p. 23/26 conclusions the concept of expertise in teaching has been challenged in the literature, especially the assumptions that the professional growth is linear and that accumulated experience provides a secure foundation for excellence (bereiter & scardamalia, 2003; tsui, 2005). non-experts are not uncommon among efl teachers with several years of classroom conduct. neglected language skills, technological illiteracy, or fossilized instructional practices are just a few problems that can easily go unnoticed under the label of “seniority.” at the same time, intellectual vigor, emotional maturity, informational resourcefulness, high perceptiveness, strong self-awareness, and other attributes that entry-level teachers potentially bring into the classroom on top of their professional training are overlooked. it is important, therefore, that an objective scholarly approach to didactic competence examines all its diverse manifestations, including outstanding performance of novices. the paper postulates that it is justifiable to refine the benchmarks against which expertise in teaching is measured and to recognize that cognitive distinctions exist within, not only among, practitioners. a representation of excellence should essentially embrace the interaction of constructive and destructive forces behind teacher learning at every stage of their career. this includes the search for and acknowledgement of diagnostic abilities in novices, whose professional development might be influenced in a degree by recognition they receive from early years in the profession. references 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(2008). heuristics and biases as measures of critical thinking: associations with cognitive ability and thinking dispositions. journal of educational psychology, 100(4), 930–941. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0012842 zimmerman, b. j., & schunk, d. h. (eds.) (2011). handbook of self-regulation of learning and performance. routledge. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/edu0000374 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/edu0000374 https://doi.org/10.5430/jnep.v10n4p83 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0012842 tapsla.12621 p. 26/26 ewa tołoczko ewa tołoczko diagnostische kompetenzen von angehenden lehrkräften z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g im vorliegenden beitrag wird die frage der diagnostischen kompetenzen im englischunterricht im hinblick auf die reaktionen angehender lehrkräfte auf kritische vorfälle im klassenzimmer behandelt. der erste teil beleuchtet die hauptkomponenten des diagnostischen prozesses, wobei ihre universellen, nicht spezifischen eigenschaften in den vordergrund gestellt werden. die nachfolgend beschriebene fallstudie bestätigt auf grundlage einer analyse von berichten über kritische vorfälle, die von drei angehenden lehrkräften erstellt wurden, dass der mangel an praktischer erfahrung und somit an etablierten kognitiven schemata einer effektiven definition, interpretation bzw. bewertung von herausfordernden unterrichtssituationen nicht im wege steht. die angeführten beispiele für das beobachtete verhalten der probanden, die sich auf ihre konzeptionellen bemühungen, didaktischen entscheidungen und formulierten bewertungen beziehen, manifestieren die merkmale effektiver diagnostiker. abschließend kommt die autorin zu dem schluss, dass das derzeitige verständnis von professionalität im englischunterricht, das normalerweise erfahrenen praktikern diagnostische kompetenzen zuschreibt, revidiert werden muss. die erforschung von professionellen einstellungen und handlungen bei angehenden lehrkräften kann indes dazu dienen, ihr didaktisches potenzial freizusetzen und dadurch im allgemeinen die qualität des unterrichts zu verbessern. die lehrerausbildung sollte daher ein erweitertes psychologisches modul miteinbeziehen, dessen aufgabe es wäre, das eigene erfolgreiche und erfolglose handeln im unterricht zu beobachten und mit dem verfügbaren wissen zu analysieren. schlüsselwörter: angehende lehrkräfte, diagnostische prozesse, kritische vorfälle, kognitive prozesse preface we resolved to start publishing this journal thinking that despite the fact that poland has a strong position in second language acquisition research and that quite a large number of monographic publications in this area come out every year—often published abroad with multilingual matters or springer, among others—there is yet no academic research-oriented journal devoted to the theory and practice of sla which would be widely available to polish academia. the existing journal, studies in second language learning and teaching published by adam mickiewicz university (kalisz–poznań), emphasizes the role of classroom-oriented research and so its particular focus complements the new journal by presenting foreign language pedagogy and its classroom applications. the origins of our journal also lie in the success of the international conference on second/foreign language acquisition which has been organized for almost thirty years by the institute of english at the university of silesia. it gathers together each year many polish and foreign academics and focuses on often un-researched issues and fairly new trends in sla. papers falling within the leading theme of each conference are usually edited and published in the form of a monograph, but there are also many studies presented in research areas not directly related to the main theme. since many of these are of a high academic standard, we would like to open a channel for their publication, alongside other original articles and submissions. we believe that our new journal will serve an important need in projecting new and interesting research in sla. this journal will be published bi-annually and will consist of articles submitted to us directly or solicited (by invitation). each text will be peerreviewed in a double blind referring process by referees of the editorial board and beyond. the editorial board consists of both polish scholars and foreign experts in the area, and represents the wide range of research interests of its members. all updated information on the journal will be 6 preface made available on the institute of english (university of silesia) webpage at www.ija.us.edu.pl (via a special link) and the journal webpage at http:// www.journal.us.edu.pl/index.php/tapsla. the present inaugural issue consists of articles in various areas of sla and also research in multilingualism. the thematic spread of this issue ranges from the texts relating purely to linguistic aspects of second language acquisition/ learning in different contexts and at different levels to issues of the identity of those involved in the process of foreign language learning, teachers and learners. in future we also intend to compile special issues which will be thematicallyoriented. we hope that this journal will to some extent fill a gap in the polish journal publishing market and that it will be of interest to researchers working in the field of second language acquisition. we would like to invite polish and foreign academics to share their scholarly research with us by submitting their work to the theory and practice of second language acquisition journal published by the prestigious polish academic publisher, wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego (university of silesia press). danuta gabryś-barker adam wojtaszek cover photo: “big_blue” by max iter (retrieved from www.flickr.com) copy editor: gabriela marszołek technical editor: barbara arenhövel proofreader: luiza przełożny typesetting: edward wilk copyright © 2015 by wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego all rights reserved issn 2450-5455 (print edition) issn 2451-2125 (digital edition) published by wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego ul. bankowa 12b, 40-007 katowice www.wydawnictwo.us.edu.pl e-mail: wydawus@us.edu.pl first impression. no. of copies: 100 + 50. printed sheets: 10.0. publishing sheets: 12.5. offset paper grade, 90 g. price 20 zł (+ vat) printing and binding expol, p. rybiński, j. dąbek, spółka jawna ul. brzeska 4, 87-800 włocławek theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 5 (1), 2019, pp. 137–142 10.31261/tapsla.2019.05.09 danuta wiśniewska, action research in efl pedagogy: theory and analysis of practice. poznań: wydawnictwo naukowe uam, 2013, isbn: 9788323226123, 414 pages broadly understood as a process of inquiry, action research is firmly grounded in current social needs, connecting theory with practice, encouraging and stimulating reflection and researcher engagement, and enhancing multidisciplinary research. it transpires, then, that action research in efl pedagogy: theory and analysis of practice by danuta wiśniewska may constitute an important contribution to the development and understanding of studies on groups, structures, and organizations, especially in relation to the context of teaching english as a foreign language. with its multitude (636 entries) of source texts and 128 papers collected for the needs of analysis, it appears to be the first monograph that incorporates such an in-depth analysis of action research, both from the theoretical and empirical perspectives. as the title suggests, the book can be treated as a solid theoretical reference source devoted to action research in the context of foreign language teaching and teacher training. however, it also centers on the analysis of practical aspects of the research carried out by teachers. the focus of the monograph is deeply grounded in academic research, though it is not only limited to the professional education of the teacher. it comprises a vaster perspective, from education management and political economy, to pragmatic philosophy and social development. the extensive tome comprises 414 pages, 362 of which constitute a consolidated text that is divided into theoretical and empirical parts that reflect on the research carried out for the purpose of understanding the research design in question. https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.2019.05.09 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en ewa piechurska-kuciel138 chapter one includes a discussion of the concept of action research presented from the point of view of its historical development, typology, and main methodological aspects. this part of the volume allows the reader to understand fully the specificity of the concept under scrutiny, presented against the background of related terminology. the author then studies origins of action research from a historical perspective, as built upon the works of lewin. the examination of the role of social sciences in legitimizing the application of this research method allows for comprehending its real value, which consists in taking action in order to produce desired effects (research through intervention). this is clearly visible in the earliest developments in this field, limited to the research carried out in the united kingdom, australia, and poland. the next part of the chapter focuses on theoretical aspects, starting from the typology of action research that elaborates on various approaches to action research. it moves on to its methodology, where the process, models, and methods are presented. naturally, action research has its drawbacks, among which validity can be placed. hence, this aspect of action research was reliably addressed, scrutinizing the dissemination of action research, viewed as its central component warranting transparency in research procedures. having discussed the theoretical background of action research, in chapter two the author describes the main research context, that is, the efl teacher pedagogy. among the selected issues, teacher knowledge and reflection are presented. although the discussion of reflection appears slightly limited, the author certainly manages to conjoin the areas of knowledge, practice, and research. yet, the prominent place in the chapter is rightfully taken by the discussion of teacher research competence. departing from defining the concept of teacher research, the author, aware of its constraints, skillfully stresses the importance of contextuality of educational practice for adequate research. the ways in which teachers engage in research are also commented upon, which leads to the culminating point in the chapter: a discussion of the approaches to teacher research. here, aside from reflection on the most common studies carried out by teachers, self-study of teaching and teacher education as a reasonably new approach is highlighted, discussing studies done by teacher-educators on their own teaching and research. chapter three presents the theoretical considerations on action research in efl pedagogy as a logical consequence of the material included in the previous two chapters. it describes the way action research is implemented in efl pedagogy “as a means of teacher development and a tool for solving problems concerning the teaching and learning of english” (p. 109). the first focus is on the theoretical aspects of the issue, including its definitions, typology, and approaches and functions of action research in this field. it is made clear that the social sciences are regarded an important source of this valuable research tradition, which is continued by practitioners in the efl classroom and beyond. danuta wiśniewska, action research in efl pedagogy… 139 obviously, there are problems reporting the findings from action research due to the marginalization of this research method. nevertheless, the benefits connected with disseminating its findings are numerous; hence, there is a need to follow a rigorous procedure in order to validate its results. the final part of this chapter is devoted to a review of efl action research from the perspective of themes and methods. part two of the monograph includes the results of the practice of action research performed by teachers, based on a corpus of 128 studies published in academic and teacher journals worldwide. the purpose of chapter four, which can be viewed as introductory, is to elaborate on the rationale of this part of the volume because, as the author rightfully suggests, knowledge about action research in the efl field is biased and has not been systematized. however, due to an increased interest in studying scientific research practice, action research has been gaining popularity despite its complex, confusing, and frequently challenging character. aside from a description of the main methods that the author has chosen for the analysis of the selected action research practice, there is a concise description of the corpus. it is unfortunately unclear how the journals have been selected. the most relevant part of the chapter is devoted to an examination of the scope and nature of action research in the efl field. it concentrates on its three interrelated features: teaching, researching, and reporting. as they correspond to the main stages of the research process, the analysis of action research publications can be divided into three larger stages: pre-empirical, empirical, and post-empirical, which are included in the three consecutive chapters. chapter five is strictly devoted to the analysis of the pre-empirical phase presented in the discussed studies. here, the author’s primary focus is directed to the exposition of the role of basic background issues involved in action research at this stage. thus, the primary aspect to be taken into consideration is the teaching/research context, a crucial criterion in conducting and reporting action research. the next factor of paramount importance in this phase is the description of research participants, especially the relationship of the researcher to the partakers. aside from the role the participants play as sources of knowledge, it is the researcher’s position in the research that requires explication. next, the reasons for carrying the study need to be described, whether internally or externally. the outline of research aims is another important issue because it determines the type and conduct of the research. as the author suggests, the identification of purposes should reveal the real aims pursued by efl teachers in their teaching practice. finally, there are research areas and topics that render information on teachers’ professional interests and problems. following this theoretical background, the next part of the chapter analyzes these key pieces of information (following the sequence presented above) in the journal publications outlined in the previous chapter. it turns out that for the most part ewa piechurska-kuciel140 the participants were mere subjects of the study, even when the researcher was part of the context. the research areas and topics were primary related to the teachers’/researchers’ context, and mostly stemmed from the teachers’ position and institutions’ curricula. the analysis of the empirical stage is undertaken in chapter six. as in the previous chapter, there is a clear theoretical overview of the categories that are analyzed followed by a presentation of the findings from the abovementioned papers. the primary construct under consideration is the method and description of units of the analysis. here, the description of researchers’ conceptualization of action research is considered. efl practitioners may depend on theory, empirical observation and life experience. in the next step, the focus shifts to the rationales for using action research as a research method. research design used in action research usually centers on actual components, instead of prescribed ones, with a research question organizing the design. the question that instigates the research may arise from different sources, theoretical, professional or private. the data collected in action research may be of qualitative or quantitative nature and may need to be examined from the perspective of its types, functions, sources, and roles. as far as usefulness of action research is concerned, it is important to identify which usefulness aspects are most significant to researchers. the last factor included in the analysis is utilization of results. it was the author’s intention to find out if the research results had any consequences for practice. as the most important outcomes of the extensive analysis of the empirical stage of action research presented in the selected publication have shown, action researchers are teachers who constructed their knowledge of this research design from literature. the most frequent design implemented in the studied publications was a single cycle of action research, which was most probably affected by time constraints and resource limits. finally, conducting action research turned out to produce more elaborate consequences, exceeding simple solutions to classroom problems. chapter seven focuses on the final, post-empirical stage of the action research process. as in the previous chapters, it opens with theoretical considerations of the researched issues. the main point of interest here is how the structures of the analyzed articles provide information about the reported action research. the specific topics include article sections and their headings, their macro-structure, and moves representing action research and its procedures. it appears that, similarly to other research papers, most action research publications include all the necessary components. moreover, many teacher researchers were revealed to locate their practical problems in the existing state of knowledge, despite the presumed practical nature of action research. a considerable variety in the action research papers in efl pedagogy is identified, which may be attributed to journal diversity, authorship, and readership. danuta wiśniewska, action research in efl pedagogy… 141 the focal point of chapter eight is the analysis of training programs in action research in the efl field, among which there is a description of the author’s own three-year study of teaching action research on foreign language teacher trainees. first, there is a description of the few written accounts of action research courses performed in poland and abroad. their usual approach was to include a theoretical overview of action research, encouraging students to conduct their own action research projects in genuine efl classrooms either on a regular basis or as part of their teaching practice. yet, the greatest part of the chapter was devoted to a description of the author’s project, whose role was to design and evaluate action research training that might be included in an efl methodology course. the participants were three consecutive groups of third year students of regular efl methodology classes. the results of the study proved that the students gained basic knowledge of action research and its procedures, which enabled them to understand teaching and their learners better. what is more, they considered using action research for the purpose of their bachelor’s thesis. in future, they might also take advantage of this research design to boost their creativity and curiosity. unfortunately, the description of the study and its implications appears sketchy, despite the author’s adherence to her own model. sadly, this part of the volume, unlike its other sections, leaves the reader unsatisfied due to its brevity the final chapter provides a general discussion, concluding remarks, and further directions of action research. the author, aware of the possible drawbacks of this research design, argues in favor of the research design as a valuable instrument in teacher training, improvement, and life-long learning. the comments on the practical application of action research in efl pedagogy are neatly organized into the three-phase division of stages of action research. the critical analysis of basic trends is accompanied with suggestions and recommendations. as far as further directions are concerned, it is made clear that additional inquiry into action research is needed to place it within broader philosophical frames. the volume is concluded with a bibliography of more than 600 entries, followed by a list of the articles analyzed, appendices with journal sources, two questionnaires used in the author’s own empirical research, a list of tables and figures, and a two-page abstract in polish. the book, as the author suggests, derives from humanistic psychology and constructivism, which can clearly be seen in the ways the results of her own study are interpreted, the selection of research aims, criteria of analysis, and their explanation. also, the application of the qualitative research method allows for the examination of deductive categories deriving from the research questions, as well as inductive ones connected with the individual, idiosyncratic characteristics of the research sample and the study context. among the most important advantages of the work is its subject matter. it constitutes a relatively new research area that is necessary to contemporary education with its focus ewa piechurska-kuciel142 on reflectivity, autonomy and life-long learning. the author demonstrates unsurpassed knowledge of the theoretical issues connected with action research, discussed against the broad background of social and second language acquisition studies. with its bibliography, the book is not only an appropriate reflection of the theoretical investigation connected with action research, but also a rich corpus of empirical texts presenting diverse contexts and research aims. moreover, the design, implementation, and evaluation of the author’s original program of teaching action research in efl methodology courses deserve praise because they enable teacher trainees to be more reflective, stimulated, and creative in their future work. finally, the author has shown great ability in organizing and systematizing knowledge of theoretical and empirical models and considerations and conclusions in neat tables and diagrams that make difficult material easy to follow. aside from its strengths, action research in efl pedagogy suffers from several drawbacks in content, structure, and editing. the author’s own empirical study is greatly condensed, undermining the real importance of her research, which has significant consequences for teacher trainees. the scope of the volume gives room to a multitude of strands, but some get out of control. for the sake of clarity, it would be better to focus on the most important, hierarchically organized themes. also, the selection of action research publications appears unorganized, which detracts from the depiction of research results. as to the volume’s structural disadvantages, it appears that the empirical part of the tome is not homogenous. the inclusion of the analysis of publications implementing action research and programs of teaching, together with the author’s original research, greatly impedes the formulation of a clear conclusion the reader cannot always easily decipher or follow the author’s intentions. the editing of the volume, on the other hand, seems careful and elaborate, though saves a few grammatical and stylistic mistakes accompanied by several bibliographical errors. however, such typos are inevitable in such a large book, hence their presence can easily be ignored. overall, action research in efl pedagogy is a very good work. the author has managed “to contribute to the state of the art regarding action research in efl pedagogy and to raise awareness of these aspects of action research which require further examination” (pp. 12–12?). additionally, her meticulous craftsmanship, eye for detail, and genuine interest in student-teacher progress make the book a valuable acquisition for anyone with an inquisitive mind. the book is highly recommended not only for efl teacher trainees and their instructors, but also for all teachers of english who help others excel. by applying action research, teachers have a greater chance making a different future. ewa piechurska-kuciel university of opole, poland https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6690-231x https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6690-231x theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 2 (1) 2016 wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego • katowice 2016 editors-in-chief danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia adam wojtaszek university of silesia language editor david schauffler university of silesia editorial board janusz arabski (university of silesia, katowice/vistula university, warsaw) larissa aronin (oranim college of higher education/trinity college, dublin) jasone cenoz iraqui (university of the basque country, donostia – san sebastian) halina chodkiewicz (maria curie-skłodowska university, lublin) gessica de angelis (trinity college, dublin) anna ewert (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) tammy gregersen (university of northern iowa, cedar falls) ulrike jessner schmid (university of innsbruck, innsbruck) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities/university of warsaw) jolanta latkowska (university of silesia, katowice) peter macintyre (cape breton university, sydney) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, cracow) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) miroslaw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz/state school of higher professional education, konin) ewa piechurska-kuciel (university of opole, opole) andrzej porzuczek (university of silesia, katowice) david singleton (trinity college, dublin/university of pannonia, veszprem) eva vetter (university of vienna, vienna) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, łódź) maria wysocka (university of silesia, katowice) contents preface (danuta gabryś-barker, adam wojtaszek) . . . . . . . . 5 simone e. pfenninger, david singleton the age factor in the foreign language class: what do learners think? . 7 jan pikhart on non-native speaker e-mail communication from a genre perspective . . 25 jean-marc dewaele, peter macintyre, carmen boudreau, livia dewaele do girls have all the fun? anxiety and enjoyment in the foreign language classroom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 teresa maria włosowicz multilingual processing phenomena in learners of portuguese as a third or additional language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia code-switching practices among immigrant polish l2 users of english . . 87 beata grymska new conceptualizations of language aptitude—the potential of working memory in second language acquisition (sla) . . . . . . . . . . . 103 theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (2), 2023, pp. 1/28 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12609 sylwia scheuer https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8772-1051 sorbonne nouvelle-paris 3 university, paris, france céline horgues https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6957-7332 sorbonne nouvelle-paris 3 university, paris, france “three months on, i still sound like an anglophone”: tales of success and failure told by english and french tandem partners a b s t r a c t this paper reports on two ways in which success and failure can be operationalized and quantified in a non-institutional l2 learning context such as language tandem setting. we draw on the sitaf database, where we gathered 25 hours of video-recorded conversations held by 21 pairs, each consisting of a native speaker of english and a native speaker of french. the tandems performed collaborative tasks in both languages, thus giving each participant ample opportunity to be both the ‘expert’ and the ‘novice’ (learner) part of the dialogue. the tandem partners met regularly and autonomously outside of the recording sessions, and making progress in their l2 was one of their declared goals. two possible measures of success in achieving this goal are: (1) the quality and quantity of learner uptake which followed the expert’s corrective feedback (cf) during the recorded conversations. significant differences between the two l1 groups were observed: while 52% of the cf given by the native french speakers met with total uptake, over 52% of the english cf generated no uptake at all; (2) the participants’ own narratives of progress, as both the experts and the learners, obtained through questionnaires they filled out at the end of the program. our study aims to contribute to the discussion on the stakes of successful l2 informal learning (with a focus on the acquisition of l2 pronunciation) by adopting a perspective which combines learners’ spoken output data and learners’ perceptions of their own language learning activity. keywords: corrective feedback, tandem learning, uptake, phonetic development https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12609 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2451-7242 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6957-7332 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2451-7242 tapsla.12609 p. 2/28 sylwia scheuer, céline horgues tandem learning is a type of non-formal1 learning environment which is often used for its potential to promote l2 linguistic and cultural acquisition. more specifically, in face-to-face tandem, l2 (foreign or second language) learners from two different l1s (first languages) collaborate mainly through spoken interactions in their two languages in the hope of developing their l2 language and (inter)cultural skills (brammerts & calvert, 2003). the benefits of tandem learning identified by previous research include improving communicative competence, developing intercultural competence, increasing motivation and developing confidence in speaking a target language (see wakisaka, 2018, for a recent summary). tandem learning allows for reciprocity and overall symmetry in the relation between the native speaking (ns) and the non-native speaking (nns) partner, as both participants help each other out at different points in the tandem exchange. indeed, both participants forming a tandem pair take on two complementary roles: the position of l2 learner or novice when speaking in their l2, but also the role of the relative expert when the conversation switches to their l1. in the past few decades, various problems associated with the notion of native speaker have been raised by numerous scholars (e.g., jenkins, 2000; escudero & sharwood smith, 2001; dewaele, 2018; slavkov et al., 2022), with paikeday (1985) describing it as “a convenient fiction.” in this paper, we make use of the simple labels ns and nns precisely for the sake of convenience, since they well reflect the roles performed by the two partners, and they are the terms associated with the historical tenets of tandem partnerships (brammerts & calvert, 2003; o’rourke 2005). moreover, these are the statuses that each participant identified with when entering the tandem program (see the methods section), declaring themselves as a ns of english and a nns of french, or vice versa. however, we do not subscribe to the idealized views that are sometimes attached to these concepts. importantly, we do not take native speakers to be the sole proprietors of l1 language expertise or competence; we consider them to be relative expert users of their first language (and relative experts on some aspects of their l1 cultures), and we do not assume they have a full grasp of their l1. finally, we do not equate native speakership with monolingualism, as most tandem participants in our study are indeed multilingual users. the development of language skills in the l2 is an explicit motivation for teachers to organize such tandem programs and for their l2 learners to take part in them. for example, o’rourke (2005, p. 434) presents tandem learning as “an arrangement in which two native speakers of different languages communicate regularly with one another, each with the purpose of learning 1 schugurensky (2000) and cedefop (2014) propose non-formal learning as a half-way house between formal learning (higher degree of explicitness in learning/teaching and in institutional integration) and informal learning (mostly implicit, disconnected from educational institution and generally unintentional from the learner’s perspective). “three months on, i still sound like an anglophone”… tapsla.12609 p. 3/28 the other’s language.” yet, while improving one’s l2 language skills is a set objective for participating in a tandem program (and often an explicit expectation expressed by learners), it is not always easy to attest that it is indeed the tangible outcome of tandem learning practice. if tandem learning favors actual l2 development, it would be interesting to find indication of this development in tandem speech data. our research analysis thus revolves around the possible evidence and measures of l2 acquisition success in the course of face-to-face tandem interactions. to that end, we will focus on the fruitful cooperation between the l2 learner and their ns interlocutor in error treatment sequences such as: ns’s corrective feedback > nns’s uptake. we will therefore investigate interactional sequences involving learner uptake following the ns’s corrective feedback, showing how the two participants’ roles go hand in hand, and putting the learner’s (re)active role in the limelight. we also want to connect this to the metacognitive dimension of representations of success or failure expressed through the learners’ introspective and declarative metadata. since we have two different language-culture profile participant groups (the francophones and the anglophones), it will also be interesting to investigate if the two groups show similar uptake patterns, both in their actual productions and their representations. the research questions our study aims to address are: – do interaction speech data and learners’ introspective data align in the pictures they give of l2 learning success during tandem exchanges? – can differences be observed between the two language-culture groups in these two measures of learning success (uptake in speech and learner representations)? literature review since we are interested in looking at the language features effectively learnt by nns participants thanks to their ns partners’ input during their tandem interactions, it is necessary to first consider how previous researchers have operationalized the key concepts for our analysis such as corrective feedback (cf), learner uptake, and related terms such as modified output and repair, and assessment of successful l2 development. as a foreword, we deem it important to stress that most of these concepts were initially posited and described for the fairly “traditional” learning context of formal language instruction and not for the semi-naturalistic, non-formal setting of tandem exchanges between l2 learners, where a teacher is absent. classroom interactions between the teacher and the l2 students have long framed the theoretical perspective and typoltapsla.12609 p. 4/28 sylwia scheuer, céline horgues ogy for describing such phenomena (e.g., lyster & ranta, 1997; gass, 2003; mackey, 1999, 2006; el tatawy, 2002; sheen, 2006), although some more varied learning contexts are now being explored (nassaji & kartchava, 2021). some methodological adaptations will necessarily have to be made when transferring previous categories and typologies (which, as lyster and ranta (1997) explain, were conceptualized for the needs of a particular database) into the specific learning environment of non-informal and semi-naturalistic ns-nns tandem interactions (see our methods section). corrective feedback (cf) corrective feedback is synonymous with the term negative evidence, that is “the type of information that is provided to learners concerning the incorrectness of an utterance” (gass, 2003, p. 225). one of the pivotal pieces of research on corrective feedback is that proposed in lyster and ranta (1997), where the authors define seven categories of cf moves at the disposal of language teachers: (i) explicit correction, (ii) recast, (iii) clarification requests, (iv) metalinguistic feedback, (v) elicitation, (vi) error repetition, (vii) multiple feedback (combination of two or more of the above). recasts can be defined as “the teacher’s reformulation of all or part of a student’s utterance, minus the error” (lyster & ranta, 1997, p. 46). they are reported by many studies to be the preferred cf strategies, although their corrective power or effectiveness is often contested (lyster & ranta, 1997; lyster & saito, 2010; sato & loewen, 2018; saito, 2021). this is especially the case when compared with cf moves which are more explicit (e.g., explicit correction or metalinguistic comments), or through which the learner actively generates the target form instead of relying on the teacher’s provision thereof (elicitation, error repetition, clarification requests, which have been described as output-prompting). learner uptake, modified output, and repair lyster and ranta (1997) define uptake as “a student’s utterance that immediately follows the teacher’s feedback and that constitutes a reaction in some way to the teacher’s intention to draw attention to some aspect of the student’s initial utterance (this overall intention is clear to the student although the teacher’s linguistic focus may not be” (lyster & ranta, 1997, p. 49). this phenomenon can also be referred to as “other-initiated self-repair” by other authors (e.g., schegloff, jefferson, & sacks, 1977; as cited in lyster & ranta, 1997). however, it does not cover cases where learners spontaneously repair their own speech without being prompted by their interlocutor (self-initiated self-repairs, also “three months on, i still sound like an anglophone”… tapsla.12609 p. 5/28 called self-corrections). they seem to put absolute (albeit momentary or local) success at the center of their distinction between two key categories: repair (= learner’s correct reformulation of the initial error after cf) and needs-repair. lyster and ranta define repair as referring to “the correct reformulation of an error as uttered in a single student turn and not to the sequence of turns resulting in the correct reformulation; nor does it refer to self-initiated repair” (lyster & ranta, 1997, p. 49). their other main category, needs repair (nonconformity with the target form), is rather large and encompasses many different situations ranging from: simple acknowledgement, different error, same error, hesitation, off target, partial repair (see the reproduction of the error treatment sequence in figure 1). in lyster and ranta’s model, however, it is unclear in what way learner reactions such as acknowledging, repeating the same error, hesitating, producing an off-target response reveal that for the l2 learner “the teacher’s overall intention is clear” as these responses could also be found in normal, conversational/discursive moves (backchannelling for example). figure 1 lyster & ranta’s (1997, p. 44) error treatment sequence tapsla.12609 p. 6/28 sylwia scheuer, céline horgues egi (2010) later emphasized that not all types of learner uptake responses are equally predictive of l2 development. sharing the concern expressed by ellis, basturkmen, & loewen (2001) for investigating what may constitute “successful uptake” or not, she therefore refines lyster and ranta’s typology by dividing their umbrella needs repair category into three subcategories: needs-repair modified, needs-repair unmodified, needs-repair acknowledgment. she also stresses the importance of regrouping uptake responses around the key distinction between modified output (which she defines, after mackey 2007, as “generally entail[ing] the learner’s modification of a problematic form that invited feedback”; egi, 2010, p. 2) and unmodified output (absence of modification of the problematic form by learner in the case of needs-repair unmodified, needs-repair acknowledgement). her 4a/4b distinction level is reproduced in figure 2. figure 2 egi’s (2010, p. 8) coding system assessing success in l2 learning through cf-uptake sequences some studies have suggested a link between (certain types of) uptake and l2 learning (lyster & ranta, 1997; egi, 2010). however, the analysis of uptake responses cannot necessarily be taken to be a direct measure of l2 development. the relation between learners’ uptake responses and their learning outcomes is fairly complex and indirect. egi (2010, p. 4) summarises this methodological issue with the following disclaimer: “three months on, i still sound like an anglophone”… tapsla.12609 p. 7/28 the use of immediate uptake as a learning measure may be called into question in light of various discoursal constraints on its occurrence, a weak (or unclear) relationship between immediate uptake and sla, delayed responses, and indications that the effects of feedback may be delayed. still, there are some theoretical arguments and empirical evidence that suggest a potential link between learner responses and l2 development. quality of learner uptake is therefore important to take into account when determining its potential for conducing to learning, especially since the gradations in uptake quality are revealing of “varying degrees of cognitive effort involved in the production of uptake, and they may be differentially related to learning outcomes” (egi, 2010, p. 5). in line with the noticing hypothesis (schmidt, 1990; mackey, 2006), the role played by learners’ “noticing of” or “paying attention to” their interlocutor’s cf and to the mismatch between their erroneous output and the target-like form is posited as an essential factor ensuring l2 acquisition. egi (2010, p. 2) summarizes this as follows: “learners’ responses often have been viewed as a cognitive window to their mental activities; a number of sla researchers have interpreted learners’ responses as a signal that they have noticed feedback.” researchers like lyster and ranta (1997), mackey, gass, & mcdonough (2000), egi (2010) have used the stimulated recall technique to investigate learner post hoc interpretation of cf and motivations behind their uptake responses, for example to explore their ability to identify the corrective intent, identify the correct form and the mismatch with their erroneous output. for instance, egi (2010)’s participants watched the video clips of their interactions with the l2 teacher and gave introspective interpretations for their responses to cf. this technique led these authors to reveal the relative ineffectiveness of recasts for prompting successful uptake, in particular because recasts are too implicit and learners therefore often miss their corrective purpose, as evidenced in their post-test declarations. another traditional technique for gauging l2 development is to have learners perform language tests before and after a controlled intervention or treatment carried out by a teacher, often in comparison to a control group. this technique is particularly adapted to laboratory experimentations or a classroom setting but it is less suited to semi-naturalistic settings such as ns-nns informal conversations. tapsla.12609 p. 8/28 sylwia scheuer, céline horgues methods the sitaf2 corpus a detailed presentation of the sitaf project’s experimental design (tasks, participants, instructions, questionnaires) is offered in horgues and scheuer (2015). in total, our corpus consists of around 25 hours of video-recorded, face-to-face interactions held by 21 pairs of native-french speaking and nativeenglish speaking tandem participants. speakers the participants were all students enrolled at sorbonne nouvelle university (france), aged between 17 and 22. none were balanced english-french bilinguals.3 the 21 native french-speaking students (coded f01 to f21) were undergraduate english language specialists for the most part. the 21 englishspeaking students (coded a01 to a21) were international mobility students who came from various english-speaking countries (usa, canada, uk, ireland, and australia). each participant declared either english or french as their l1 in the registration questionnaire. for convenience’ sake, we refer to their partner’s l1 (french or english, as appropriate) as their l2, even though it could actually be their l3 or l4.4 four anglophones declared being early simultaneous bilinguals in a language other than french (one english/spanish, one english/lebanese, one english/catalan, one english/irish). only one francophone declared being an early bilingual (french/french creole). most participants also reported having learned another additional language (e.g., chinese, spanish, italian, german, hebrew), so these tandem participants were highly multilingual users overall. sessions and tasks the speakers were recorded on two occasions: in february (session 1) and again in may 2013 (session 2). in between these two recording sessions, the tandem pairs met autonomously for weekly tandem conversations (12 meetings on average; not recorded). in the two recording sessions, they performed the same three tasks (in the two languages randomly sequenced). two of these tasks were communication activities (semi-spontaneous speech): game 1 (liar-liar, a storytelling activity where the l2 learner tells a story containing three lies that the 2 spécificités des interactions verbales en tandems anglais-français [characteristics of english/ french spoken tandem interactions]. 3 none of them had a parent who was a native speaker of the l2, or had been to an l2 immersion school in their childhood. 4 that, however, was rare: the language was an l3 for two anglophones and one francophone, and an l4 for one anglophone. “three months on, i still sound like an anglophone”… tapsla.12609 p. 9/28 ns interlocutor has to identify by asking questions) and game 2 (like minds, a debating activity where both participants share their opinion on a potentially controversial subject before determining the degree of like-mindedness between them). the third activity was a reading task (text: the north wind and the sun read in l2 english and in l2 french). the reading by the nns was explicitly monitored in session 1 (i.e., the ns partner was invited to intervene to help the nns improve their reading; this collaborative sequence was followed by a second reading of the passage by the nns); and in session 2 the nns performed a simple (unmonitored) final reading of the same passage. analysing relative uptake success in the sitaf corpus for the sake of this particular study, we analyzed cf-uptake sequences (uptake moves by the nns learner following each corrective feedback instance performed by their ns interlocutor) in the semi-spontaneous tasks of the sitaf corpus (game 1 and game 2 in the two languages, in the two recording sessions). this represented about 15 hours of audio-visual speech analyzed for this study. we also analyzed cf in the reading task (two sessions; focus almost exclusively on pronunciation) for comparison. our analysis of cf in this corpus (quantity, focus, strategies) was presented in previous publications (horgues & scheuer, 2014; horgues & scheuer, 2018; scheuer & horgues, 2020). in these analyses, we defined cf as the production of verbal negative evidence by ns participants in reaction to a non-target-like form (or absence of form) produced by their nns partner, thus making it more target-like. we also draw on lyster and ranta (1997)’s typology for cf moves, which we adapted, as some strategies were never used by the nns in our corpus (certainly because they seem to be the prerogative of professional language teachers and would create a sense of hierarchy, something that tandem participants generally want to avoid). for example, we discarded categories which are irrelevant to our specific interactional context as they are absent, that is, metalinguistic comments without provision of the correct form, elicitation, error repetition. we therefore simplified lyster and ranta’s categorization around four main cf types: (i) recast, (ii) clarification request, (iii) explicit correction and/or metalinguistic comment, (iv) mix (equivalent to what they termed “mix”). we also relied on lyster and ranta (1997)’s approach to uptake as the nns’s verbal response following corrective feedback provided not by the teacher but by the nns tandem partner. however, unlike these authors, we do not consider that any possible type of uptake response is informative for exploring l2 developmental potential. we believe this is particularly important when looking at the acquisition of l2 phonetics and phonology, where practice at pronouncing the target sound form plays an essential role in learners’ internalization tapsla.12609 p. 10/28 sylwia scheuer, céline horgues of the l2 auditory and articulatory gestures. more precisely, we consider that categories such as “acknowledgement,” “repetition of same error,” “new error,” “hesitation,” and “off-target” are responses which do not attest clearly enough that the learner is reacting to their interlocutor’s corrective intent. we therefore labelled “repetition of the same error” or “new error” or “off target” as failed uptake (egi’s unmodified needs-repair). in the absence of explicit verbalizing of a modified output attempt, we grouped cases of simple “acknowledgment,” “hesitation,” “no response” under the umbrella category no uptake5 since we consider there is no tangible (i.e., verbal) evidence that the learner has grasped the corrective function their interlocutor’s feedback had. our perspective is therefore more in line with egi’s (2010) key distinction between modified output and unmodified output. indeed, we consider that the learner’s attempt at modifying their output signals that they have somewhat grasped the didactic function of the ns’s corrective feedback (as opposed to a simple conversational function) and that their attention has somewhat been drawn to the gap between their initial (erroneous) output and the target form. thus, we will concentrate on uptake moves which clearly reveal some verbal attempt, by the nns learner, at modifying their erroneous output, as signaled by corrective feedback from their ns interlocutor. whether the corrected form is first produced by the ns (through input-providing cf such as recast or explicit correction, for example) or emerges from the nns (student-generated repair for lyster & ranta, 1997) does not matter in our treatment of what counts as noteworthy uptake. whether their attempt at modifying their output actually results in conforming with the target form completely or incompletely is not a determining factor in our general treatment of uptake cases either. in a bid to obtain a more accurate picture, however, we do distinguish between partial uptake (uptake responses which result in an imperfect correction towards the target or model form where only one feature is corrected but not others, equivalent to lyster and ranta’s partial repair, or egi’s modified needs-repair) and total uptake (where the modified form represents a reasonably complete correction in conformity with the target form; lyster and ranta’s and egi’s repair). notably, we discarded some of lyster and ranta’s categories ( peer-repair or topic continuation by peers) as they are irrelevant in the context of a ns-nns dyadic interaction, which is very different from the classroom setting where the l2 learner is surrounded by fellow students. here is the uptake typology we have used in our analysis of the ns-nns informal interactions in the sitaf corpus: i) total uptake: reasonable conformity to the target form given by the ns expert, for example: 5 the previously mentioned authors reserve the term no uptake for cases where there was no response, or there was a change of topic, on the part of the learner. they thus include simple acknowledgements—labelled needs repair—in the general uptake counts. “three months on, i still sound like an anglophone”… tapsla.12609 p. 11/28 (nns) and i fall [talking about a past event] (ns) oh, you fell! (nns) yeah, i fell. ii) partial uptake: only part of the correction proposed by ns was implemented by the learner, for example: (nns) … à madrid, dans le centre du, de espagne, de l’espagne … [in madrid, in the centre of the (m.sg), of spain, of the (f/m.sg) spain] (ns) au centre de l’espagne [at the centre of the (f/m.sg) spain] (nns) oui au centre au centre d’espagne [yes at the centre at the centre of spain].6 iii) failed uptake: nns reacted to cf but failed to produce the model form, as in: (nns) on meadow [*ˈmiːdəʊ], big meadow [*ˈmiːdəʊ], so when you’re… (ns) a meadow [ˈmedoʊ]? (nns) yeah, sort of meadow [*ˈmiːdəʊ], not mountain, but… iv) no uptake: no observable verbal reaction to the cf, as in: (nns) j’ai dansé sur le table avec autres [i danced on the (m.sg) table with others]. (ns) sur la table [on the (f.sg) table] (nns) oui, c’était, c’était fou, mais… [yes, it was, it was crazy, but…]. the above examples also illustrate the variety of language areas that were targeted in the native speakers’ corrective interventions: morphosyntax (grammar), vocabulary, pronunciation, or any mix of the above. we are primarily interested in uptake emerging in the direct sequence following feedback provision (subsequent speech turns). however, uptake success may also be recorded in terms of permanency and stability over time, which we could only analyze through the course of one conversation, or by comparing the two recording sessions, separated by the three months’ interval ((non-)permanency of uptake, delayed uptake effects). the analysis of the various instalments of the reading task in the corpus allows for the comparison of how, over time, the same (controlled) speech material is produced by the nns following their ns partner’s cf provision (comparison between the first and second reading in session 1, and the final reading in session 2). however, our experimental protocol does not permit the application of this systematic longitudinal comparison to the semi-spontaneous (uncontrolled) speech data (games 1 and 2). indeed, the re-occurrence of any problematic language issue at different points in time was only incidental and this un-systematicity prevents any quantitative analysis of the temporal aspect of uptake in this portion of the corpus. 6 the nns reproduces the correct preposition (au, and not her initial incorrect one, dans) but omits the definite article l’ (which, in french, blurs the f-m gender distinction before a word starting with a vowel, such as espagne). tapsla.12609 p. 12/28 sylwia scheuer, céline horgues exploring learners’ tales of success and failure through their written questionnaires upon finishing recording session 2, all tandem participants completed two written questionnaires (see the english version in the appendix). the general questionnaire aimed at eliciting introspective declarative data on the learners’ impressions about their tandem experience in general (benefits, corrective feedback practices and preferences, self-assessed progress). the second questionnaire focused on their representations of phonetic issues related to their tandem practice (attitudes towards and communicative impact of foreign accent, phonetic development, etc.). in the general questionnaire, questions 15 and 16 (quoted in full in the appendix) will be of particular interest when exploring the participants’ representations of success and failure in their l2 acquisition through tandem practice. they concern, respectively, self-reporting the perceived degree of improvement in different domains, and self-reporting the evolution in speaking confidence. in the pronunciation and tandem questionnaire, question 19 is particularly revealing as it provides information about the participants’ representation of success or failure in relation to their l2 pronunciation during tandem exchanges. it is worth noting that, contrary to other types of studies mentioned before (e.g., lyster & ranta, 1997; egi, 2010; mackey et al., 2000), we could not organize stimulated recalls due to the unavailability of our participants (especially mobility students) after the end of the academic year. results quantifying uptake success we identified 492 corrective feedback instances in the portion of the sitaf corpus under investigation, that is, in both recording sessions, in both communicative games, in both languages. however, there was a dramatic difference between the two language conditions: the english section7 accounted for only 156 (31.7%), and the french one for the remaining 336 (68.3%), tokens. this sharp contrast, highly significant ( p < .005), is visually presented in figure 3. 7 that is, the conversations held in english, where the nss were the anglophones, and the nnss were the francophones. analogously, the french section refers to the french conversations, where the ns/nns roles were reversed. “three months on, i still sound like an anglophone”… tapsla.12609 p. 13/28 figure 3 amount of cf in the english vs french conversations the two language conditions also showed significant differences in terms of immediate uptake success. in both, the two intermediate categories presented in a previous section—partial and failed uptake—jointly accounted for just over 10% of all cf instances. the remaining 90% showed either total or no uptake: in other words, in the overwhelming majority of cases the nns tandem partners either produced the (reasonably) correct l2 form, or did not detectably react to the cf at all. these two extremities of the spectrum, however, were distributed very differently in the english as opposed to the french conversations. while 52.6% of the corrective feedback found during the english conversations met with no uptake on the part of the french participants (nnss) at all, total uptake occurred in just 36.5% of instances. in the french tasks the figures were almost identical, except in reverse order: it is total uptake that accompanied the ns’s corrective endeavors in 52.4% of cases, with 36.9% of cf tokens going unnoticed or—not necessarily deliberately—ignored (no uptake on the part of the nnss, i.e., native english speakers). these divergent patterns are illustrated in figure 4. figure 4 relative share of total vs. partial + failed vs. no uptake in the two language conditions (english conversations and french conversations) tapsla.12609 p. 14/28 sylwia scheuer, céline horgues needless to say, the boundaries between the respective categories can be rather fluid. since our use of the term uptake relates to any observable attempt by the nns at modifying their original utterance in reaction to cf, the most salient line of demarcation on the uptake continuum is that between no uptake and the remaining three types. if viewed in this way and considered jointly for both language conditions, the results can be interpreted optimistically: uptake of some sort occurred in the case of as many as 58.1% of corrective instances, that is, more often than it did not. it has to be borne in mind, however, that the respective figures were of a significantly different order for the english and the french conversations. success and failure through participants’ tales: questionnaire answers as previously mentioned, the tandem participants’ answers to three questionnaire items will be considered, in a bid to provide another measure of their perceived l2 learning success. question 15 in the general questionnaire working in tandem with your partner allowed you to improve your knowledge and skills in which of the following domains? the perceived improvement was shown on a 0–5 scale, separately for each of the following five domains: culture, pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, general ease of expression. the results (group averages) are given in table 1. table 1 perceived (self-declared) improvement following the tandem program english nss french nss (a) culture 3.62 3.29 (b) pronunciation 3.36 3.05 (c) grammar 2.90 2.57 (d) vocabulary 3.95 3.67 (e) ease of expression 4.24 3.95 once again, the data obtained from the anglophone and the francophone participants show both striking similarities and noteworthy differences. the hierarchy formed by the five dimensions is identical for the two groups: (e) > (d) > (a) > (b) > (c). that means that both cohorts noted, on average, the biggest improvement in the area of ease of expression and the smallest in that “three months on, i still sound like an anglophone”… tapsla.12609 p. 15/28 of grammar. out of the three specific language domains targeted by this question—pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary—it is vocabulary that emerged victorious. interestingly, it was also by far the most frequently targeted area during the corrective episodes discussed earlier in the paper, accounting for 52.5% of all cf tokens in the english, and 49% in the french, part of the corpus (scheuer & horgues, 2020). however, there is a dissimilarity between the two language groups when it comes to the extent of their perceived improvement. on all five dimensions, the native english speakers tended to feel they had made better progress than their french counterparts, although the differences fail to reach the threshold of significance. question 16 in the general questionnaire evaluate your confidence in speaking [l2] before beginning your tandem meetings and after, on a 0–10 scale, separately for each point in time. there was a very highly significant perceived improvement in the case of both language groups: on average, by 2.9 points for the anglophones and by 2.24 points for the francophones. yet again, it is the former cohort that reported a greater benefit, even though the difference is, again, non-significant ( p < .057). question 19 in the pronunciation questionnaire speaking with your partner and receiving advice from them have helped you to improve your pronunciation. out of the 5 options to be picked from, the moderately optimistic one—some aspects of my pronunciation—was the overall winner. it garnered 12 hits from the french nss and 8 from the native english speakers. the latter score (8) was matched by that obtained by the most enthusiastic option (yes, most aspects of my pronunciation), which was chosen 5 times by the native french participants. reassuringly, in neither language group was the answer definitely not circled at all. discussion two possible measures of success in tandem l2 learning are proposed in this paper: (1) the amount of learner uptake immediately following corrective feedback offered by the ns tandem partner, and (2) participants’ self-reports of success or failure, in the form of their answers to the questionnaires administered at the end of the tandem program. both sets of analyses have yielded results which point to the prevalence of success over failure, even though these conclusions need to be qualified in various ways. tapsla.12609 p. 16/28 sylwia scheuer, céline horgues the typology and definition we adopted for uptake—total, partial, failed or no uptake—shows a graduated success-failure continuum. uptake of some degree accompanied a total of 58.1% of all cf tokens. however, there was a sharp difference between the relative uptake success shown by the l2 french and the l2 english learners: while 63.1% of cf met with some observable reaction on the part of the learner8 during the french conversations, this figure drops to 47.4% during the english exchanges (figure 4). this tendency for the native english speakers to attain greater uptake-related success in l2 than their french counterparts was matched by their more optimistic assessment of learning progress made during the program, as per the post-recording questionnaires. while both language-culture groups reported improvement in all the areas under investigation (vocabulary, grammar, etc.), this impression was stronger in the case of the anglophones. it is not difficult to trace a connection between the two measures, which may explain why it was the english nss who seemed to enjoy an advantage on both counts. they received significantly more corrective feedback than their french partners, which must have promoted the feeling that they actually learned something. if cf is frequent, its saliency may be enhanced and it is also probably easier to develop the habit of reacting to it. if, on the other hand, it occurs only rarely, its recipients may be more prone to miss its corrective function since they are not primed for it. this abundance of feedback in the french conversations did not, however, undermine the anglophones’ self-assessed confidence in speaking their l2. a substantial enhancement of that confidence was reported by both language groups, although—yet again—the french nss tended to be somewhat less enthusiastic, with the difference between the two cohorts almost reaching a statistically significant level. interestingly, the confidence boost was not universal, since one of the native english participants actually reported regression in that domain, by 2 points on a 0–10 scale. it has to be borne in mind, however, that questionnaires of this type only tend to convey the participants’ subjective impressions and representations, which may not be reliable reflections on the actual learning progress and should therefore be treated with caution, especially if comparisons are made between groups characterized by divergent cultural and scholarly traditions. while the first of the proposed measures of success—uptake amount—may be considered less subjective of the two, it is naturally not without its problems, either. one issue, already discussed in the section assessing success in l2 learning through cf-uptake sequences, concerns the very validity of treating uptake as indicative of progress in the language acquisition process. just because the learner correctly repeats the model form provided by the ns 8 it was the native english participants that were the learners (and therefore, the cf receivers) during the french conversations, and vice versa. “three months on, i still sound like an anglophone”… tapsla.12609 p. 17/28 does not automatically mean that the form has been, or will be, internalized, since “we cannot ignore the possibility that they parroted the recasts with no true understanding” (egi, 2010, p. 16). conversely, lack of any verbal reaction to the cf does not necessarily equal lack of noticing: the feedback may have a delayed effect on the shape of the learner’s interlanguage. to quote egi (2010, p. 16) again, “[g]iven that responses to recasts are not discoursally required, learners may not always choose to respond to the recasts or may respond only subvocally.” not being able to tap into the learners’ awareness and intentions through stimulated recalls is a methodological limitation of our study. this technique would have given us some supplementary introspective data about the participants’ post-recording interpretations of the functions of certain speech moves observed in the corpus. also, the link between cf/uptake sequences and l2 development may be language area sensitive. while total immediate uptake of a syntactic or lexical structure may not deserve to be hailed as actual progress, we think that the situation is rather different for pronunciation. even “simple” parroting of the ns-generated form testifies to the nns’s ability to mobilize the corresponding articulatory gestures, giving them the motor practice facilitating further l2 learning. as noted by saito (2021, p. 422), the benefits of pronunciation recasts can be further enhanced in a learning context involving “communicatively important and salient features,” which is largely the case with the sitaf conversation tasks. the other—related—issue regards uptake permanency. even if uptake goes beyond the plain on-the-spot parroting (i.e., the learner repeats the model form meaningfully), its long-term effect cannot be taken for granted. it would be highly enlightening to be able to systematically verify how the learners reproduced the previously “uptaken” forms later in the recording cycle. however, the fact that games 1 and 2 featured semi-spontaneous speech—the participants were given specific conversation topics but those topics were different in the two recording sessions—makes such systematic comparisons impossible. partial insight into this matter, meanwhile, can be gleaned from the reading task, where the same text was used in sessions 1 and 2 (see section sessions and tasks). our analysis of the pronunciation uptake in the english task (horgues & scheuer, 2014) suggested, rather predictably, a quantitative deterioration over time. calculated in relation to the cf provided during the first (monitored) reading, the combined amount of total and partial uptake dropped between session 1 and 2. this decrease, however, was not statistically significant, and it still left the overall figure at 73.3%. in other words, nearly ¾ of the pronunciation errors corrected by the ns during the first reading were eliminated—partially or totally—by the nns learner during the final reading, three months later. from the point of view of l2 learning success, this is a fairly encouraging result. tapsla.12609 p. 18/28 sylwia scheuer, céline horgues conclusion the tales told both by the sitaf uptake results and by the participants themselves are certainly tales of success rather than failure, even if this success is naturally relative, subjective and far from universal. the two measures of success that we explored in this paper both interact with and complement one another: more corrective feedback tends to lead to—proportionally—more uptake, which tends to enhance self-confidence and a sense of achievement experienced by the learner. a boost in confidence in speaking l2 is a success in itself, even in the absence of immediately available tangible evidence of improved accuracy of l2 structures under scrutiny. among other things, it is bound to lead to a reduction of foreign language anxiety, which in turn is beneficial for successful communication on many different levels. the analysis of our cf-uptake data could undoubtedly be refined in the future, for example by exploring possible interactions between various variables, such as cf type and uptake type, task type and uptake type, or effects of partner-generated repair vs. learner-generated repair (not discussed here) on the permanency of uptake. another future perspective may concern a refinement of the description of the quality of uptake, through drawing a distinction between simple repetitions and incorporation repetitions of the model form. contrary to what lyster and ranta (1997) seem to imply by conflating the two, we think that the latter type—where the learner incorporates the form into their own personal phrasing—is a more reliable sign of the l2 development progressing. last but not least, we would like to investigate cases of no opportunity for uptake, where “the ns immediately continued on with the ongoing or another conversational topic without giving the learner a chance to respond to the recast” (egi, 2010, p. 8). following egi, such episodes could be coded accordingly and therefore be removed from the no uptake category, thus providing a more accurate reflection on the learners’ reactions to corrective feedback. language learning in tandem with a native partner is an excellent way of progressing in one’s l2 in a friendly, collaborative environment. in such a setting, focus-on-form episodes occur incidentally during communicative, focus-on-meaning activities. the sitaf tandem program bore fruit, both in terms of learner uptake success and—potentially even more importantly—selfreported progress and overall satisfaction. the latter was self-estimated to be at the level of 9.2/10 by the native english and the native french participants alike (question 17 in the general questionnaire). it was therefore a highly positive experience, despite the fact that, rather unsurprisingly, at the end of the three-month program some difficulties still remained, and anglophones still sounded like anglophones.9 9 this statement draws on the answer given by an english ns to the last question in the tandem and pronunciation questionnaire. “three months on, i still sound like an anglophone”… tapsla.12609 p. 19/28 references brammerts, h., & calvert, m. 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(2018). face-to-face tandem and etandem: differences that inf luence the maintenance of tandem learning activities. revista do gel, 15(3), 42–57. sylwia scheuer, céline horgues „nach drei monaten klinge ich immer noch wie ein anglophoner”: erfolgsund misserfolgsgeschichten von englischund französischsprachigen teilnehmern an einem tandemprogramm z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g im vorliegenden artikel werden zwei möglichkeiten beschrieben, wie erfolg oder misserfolg in einem nicht-institutionellen fremdsprachenlernkontext, und zwar in einem sprachtandem, operationalisiert und quantifiziert werden kann. dabei wird auf die sitaf-datenbank gestützt, wo 25 stunden videoaufnahmen mit gesprächen von 21 paaren („tandems“), jeweils bestehend aus einem englischen und einem französischen muttersprachler, gespeichert wurden. die teilnehmer wurden bei gesprächen in beiden sprachen aufgenommen, so dass jeder von ihnen die möglichkeit hatte, sowohl als „experte“ als auch als „anfänger“ (lernender) zu agieren. die tandempartner trafen sich regelmäßig und autonom auch außerhalb der aufnahmesitzungen miteinander und eines ihrer erklärten ziele war es, fremdsprachenkenntnisse zu erweitern. zwei mögliche maßstäbe für die erreichung dieses ziels waren: (1) der grad der absorption (uptake) des korrigierenden feedbacks (corrective feedback) vom expertenpartner. in dieser hinsicht wurden signifikante unterschiede zwischen den beiden sprachgruppen festgestellt: während 52% des von französischen muttersprachlern “three months on, i still sound like an anglophone”… tapsla.12609 p. 21/28 gegebenen feedbacks von ihren englischsprachigen partnern vollständig absorbiert wurden, blieben mehr als 52% des in englisch gegebenen feedbacks bei ihren französischsprachigen partnern wirkungslos. (2) die selbstberichte der teilnehmer über die erzielten fortschritte, sowohl aus der sicht von experten als auch von anfängern. die berichte wurden durch fragebögen erhoben, welche die partner nach dem dreimonatigen tandem-lernprogramm ausfüllten. die analyse der antworten auf die gestellten fragen zeigt ein hohes maß an zufriedenheit unter den teilnehmern, sowohl in bezug auf die fortschritte in bestimmten domänen der fremdsprache (wortschatz, aussprache usw.) als auch auf die allgemeine sprachfertigkeit. dabei war der angegebene zufriedenheitsgrad bei den englischsprachigen teilnehmern etwas höher als bei den französischsprachigen teilnehmern. schlüsselwörter: korrigierendes feedbacks, fremdsprachenlernen im tandem, absorption (uptake) a p p e n d i x general tandem questionnaire (english-speaking participants)10 university year: concentration/major: 1. number of tandem meetings with your partner since the january 31, 2013, meeting: ……… did you find the number of meetings to be (circle your answer)…: insufficient / sufficient / too frequent? 2. how often did you meet your tandem partner? (circle your answer): twice per week / once per week / once every other week / once every 20 days/ once per month did you find the frequency of meetings to be (circle your response)…: insufficient / sufficient / too frequent? 3. on average, how long did your tandem meetings last? 30 mins / 1hour / 1h30 / 2 hours / more than 2 hours 4. what percentage of time was spent speaking french in your tandem conversations? [ 0 / 10 / 20 / 30 / 40 / 50 / 60 / 70 / 80 / 90 / 100 ] % of the time 5. what percentage of time was spent speaking english in your tandem conversations? [ 0 / 10 / 20 / 30 / 40 / 50 / 60 / 70 / 80 / 90 / 100 ] % of the time 10 the french participants received equivalent versions in french. tapsla.12609 p. 22/28 sylwia scheuer, céline horgues 6. over the semester, have you had the opportunity to converse with other french speakers: daily / several times a week / once a week / a few times over the semester / no explain: 7. during your tandem conversations: always almost always often sometimes almost never never you begin the meeting in the same language (which language: ...............) you start speaking in one language at the beginning of the conversation and then switched to the other language you speak in one of the two languages most of the time you speak one language at one meeting and the other language at the next meeting you switch from one language to the other throughout the conversation (for example when there was a comprehension problem) you don’t mix languages, except to ask specific vocabulary or grammar questions other (explain): 8. during a conversation in a foreign language, if you have doubts about how to express something or if you have problems expressing yourself (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation): always almost always often sometimes almost never never you stop and explain your problem in the foreign language you stop and explain your problem in your native language you continue to speak and wait for your partner to react “three months on, i still sound like an anglophone”… tapsla.12609 p. 23/28 9. when you make a mistake in french: always almost always often some times almost never never your tandem partner corrects you your tandem partner corrects your vocabulary your tandem partner corrects your grammar your tandem partner corrects your pronunciation 10. when your tandem partner makes a mistake in english: always almost always often sometimes almost never never you correct them you correct their vocabulary you correct their grammar you correct their pronunciation 11. when your partner tells you something in english: always almost always often sometimes almost never never you listen and try not to interrupt you listen and ask questions so as to help the conversation going on you interrupt your partner when you cannot understand what is said you interrupt your partner when they makes a mistake 12. did you notice any differences in your partner’s conversational habits that would be linked to their culture? yes/no if yes, explain: 13. have ever helped your partner in their academic work? yes/no tapsla.12609 p. 24/28 sylwia scheuer, céline horgues 14. has your partner ever helped you in your academic work? yes/no 15. working in tandem with your partner allowed you to improve your knowledge and skills in which of the following domains? (circle your answer) 0 = no improvement 5 = much improvement – culture 0 1 2 3 4 5 – phonetics/pronunciation 0 1 2 3 4 5 – grammar 0 1 2 3 4 5 – vocabulary 0 1 2 3 4 5 – general ease of expression 0 1 2 3 4 5 16. evaluate your confidence in speaking french before beginning your tandem meetings and after: 0 = less confident 10 = more confident before: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 after: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 17. on a scale of 0 to 10, how was your experience with working in tandem with your partner? (circle your answer) 0 = the most negative 10 = the most positive 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 18. what is your overall impression of your tandem conversations? (obstacles encountered, benefits gained) tandem and pronunciation questionnaire (english-speaking participants) when speaking with your tandem partner in english: 1. do you adapt the way you speak to them? yes / no. if so, what changes do you make? “three months on, i still sound like an anglophone”… tapsla.12609 p. 25/28 yes no i speak more slowly i articulate more clearly i speak louder my intonation is clearer my vocabulary is more simple i use more straightforward sentence structure i use shorter sentences 2. now choose one of the terms below to describe your tandem partner’s accent [in english]: very strong / quite strong / moderate / quite slight / slight / very slight / no accent at all 3. what do you think about the french accent in english as a rule: 4. i correct my partner’s pronunciation (circle one of the following): systematically, whenever i hear a mistake / almost always / often / sometimes / only when they ask me to / only when they ask me a specific question about a particular word / hardly ever / never 5. i prefer to correct my partner’s pronunciation (circle one of the following): on the spur of the moment / at the end of their sentence / when they’ve finished saying what they have to say / at the end of our tandem session 6. what exactly do you correct when it comes to your partner’s pronunciation? yes no please give examples: their intonation the rhythm of their english their word stress the speed at which they speak their consonants tapsla.12609 p. 26/28 sylwia scheuer, céline horgues their vowels their general fluency other: 7. when you don’t correct your partner’s pronunciation, it’s because: yes no their mistakes are too small it would be impossible to correct all their mistakes you don’t want to make your partner feel uncomfortable you don’t want to interrupt the flow of their ideas you don’t think it’s polite to correct or to interrupt your partner you don’t like it when other people correct your mistakes when you’re speaking you don’t think correcting them would be helpful you can understand them despite their mistakes your partner doesn’t take your corrections on board you can’t hear their mistakes 8. your partner’s pronunciation in english prevents you from understanding them in english …….% of the time: 0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% please provide specific examples from your tandem experience: 9. the advice you have given your partner has helped them to improve their pronunciation (circle): i haven’t noticed any changes / yes, most of aspects of their pronunciation / some aspects of their pronunciation / no, not really / no, definitely not say what has improved: list any remaining difficulties: 10. which pronunciation problems annoy you the most [in english by french speakers] even if they don’t hinder actual comprehension? when you’re speaking with your partner [in french]: 11. would you say that your accent is: “three months on, i still sound like an anglophone”… tapsla.12609 p. 27/28 very strong / quite strong / moderate / quite slight / slight / very slight / no accent at all 12. what do you think about the english accent in french in general? 13. what aspects of french pronunciation do you think you still need to improve? 14. your partner corrects your pronunciation (circle one of the following): systematically when they hear a mistake / almost always / often / sometimes / only when i ask them to / only when i ask them a specific question about a word / hardly ever / never 15. your partner prefers to correct your pronunciation (circle one of the following): on the spur of the moment / at the end of my sentence / when i’ve finished saying what i have to say / during the tandem assessment session 16. what does your partner correct about your [french] pronunciation? yes no please give examples your intonation the rhythm of your french your word stress the speed at which you speak your consonants your vowels your general fluency other: 17. how often does your partner correct your pronunciation? yes no too often because it interrupts the flow of conversation too often because it makes you feel uncomfortable very often but you find it helpful from time to time and you’re okay with that tapsla.12609 p. 28/28 sylwia scheuer, céline horgues rarely and you think it’s a shame hardly ever, which is fine because you don’t like being interrupted when you’re speaking 18. your pronunciation [in french] prevents you from making yourself understood by your partner …..% of the time 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 0 please provide specific examples: 19. speaking with your partner and receiving advice from them have helped you to improve your pronunciation (circle): i haven’t noticed any changes / yes, most aspects of my pronunciation / some aspects of my pronunciation / no, not really / no, definitely not say what has improved: list any remaining difficulties: theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 1 (1) 2015 wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego • katowice 2015 editors-in-chief danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia adam wojtaszek university of silesia language editor david schauffler university of silesia editorial board janusz arabski (university of silesia, katowice/vistula university, warsaw) larissa aronin (oranim college of higher education/trinity college, dublin) jasone cenoz iraqui (university of the basque country, donostia – san sebastian) halina chodkiewicz (maria curie-skłodowska university, lublin) gessica de angelis (trinity college, dublin) anna ewert (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) tammy gregersen (university of northern iowa, cedar falls) ulrike jessner schmid (university of innsbruck, innsbruck) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities/university of warsaw) jolanta latkowska (university of silesia, katowice) peter macintyre (cape breton university, sydney) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, cracow) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) miroslaw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz/state school of higher professional education, konin) ewa piechurska-kuciel (university of opole, opole) andrzej porzuczek (university of silesia, katowice) david singleton (trinity college, dublin/university of pannonia, veszprem) eva vetter (university of vienna, vienna) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódz, łódz) maria wysocka (university of silesia, katowice) contents preface (danuta gabryś-barker, adam wojtaszek) . . . . . . . . 5 jolanta latkowska how relevant is the sapir-whorf hypothesis to contemporary psycholinguistic research? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 larissa aronin, vasilis politis multilingualism as an edge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 dorota owczarek advanced fl students’ self-perception of their language identity . . . . 51 xinyue cécilia yu the acquisition at the interface of ditransitive constructions in mandarin chinese by french adult learners . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 priya ananth, masaaki kamiya the effect of prosody on disambiguation: a case of universal quantifier and negation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 arzu ünel, meryem mirioğlu syntactical modifications in teacher talk of native and non-native speakers in efl classrooms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 tammy gregersen aligning who i am with what i do: pursuing language teacher authenticity 143 simone e. pfenninger university of zurich, switzerland david singleton university of pannonia, hungary the age factor in the foreign language class: what do learners think? a b s t r a c t: the present paper analyzes beliefs about the age factor of learners of english as a foreign language (efl) with different starting ages (early vs. late starters), in different grades, that is, at the beginning (year 7) and at the end of secondary school (year 12) with different levels of efl proficiency (high achievers vs. low achievers). the sample for the study was drawn from a larger sample of 200 secondary school students who were part of a longitudinal study, undertaken in switzerland between 2008 and 2015. from this sample we selected 10 early starting high-achievers, 10 early starting low-achievers, 10 late starting high-achievers, and 10 late starting low-achievers. a qualitative analysis of language experience essays written at the beginning and at the end of secondary school revealed that learners with different starting ages, in different grades, and with different levels of proficiency displayed different beliefs about the age factor. the overall lack of age effect on fl achievement found in our previous studies may be explicable in terms of a number of affective factors (e.g., disengagement of the early starters due to language practices of the classroom) and contextual factors (e.g., transition from english in primary school to english in secondary school). k e y w o r d s: starting age, language experience essays, learner beliefs, motivation, individual differences introduction in a previous longitudinal study of ours (see pfenninger & singleton, 2016), we addressed the question of the relationship and interaction between long-term foreign language (fl) achievement and motivation in learners with different starting ages. the results revealed that the late starters were able to catch up very quickly (i.e., within six months in secondary school) with the performance theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 2 (1) 2016, pp. 7–23 simone e. pfenninger, david singleton8 of the early starters, who had an advance of five years of english instruction in primary school, with respect to a range of oral and written measures, and that they were able to remain on a par with the early starters until the end of obligatory schooling in switzerland. the overall lack of effect of starting the fl at an earlier age on fl achievement was able to be accounted for with reference to a number of theoretical, affective and contextual factors. on a theoretical level, as has been pointed out in myriad classroom studies, the long-term advantage conferred on most learners by an early start in a naturalistic language learning context may not be found in an fl learning context (see e.g., the reviews in lambelet & berthele, 2015; muñoz & singleton, 2011; singleton & ryan, 2004). with reference to possible reasons for the “kick start” of the late starters in the initial stages of fl learning and the general lack of age-related differences, our results indicated that for the late starters, motivation was more strongly goaland future-focused at the first measurement, while the motivation of the early starters was predominantly influenced by (present and past) cumulative experiential factors. since future selves—but not present selves—had a strong impact on the fl achievement, we have argued that the late starters were able to profit from their orientations at the beginning of secondary school. however, the value of investigating motivation from a purely quantitative perspective may seem somewhat limited and tangential. for instance, the quantitative analyses can shed relatively little light on the needs and experiences of early and late learners (e.g., how their motivation shapes and is shaped by specific events in primary school and secondary school), and it does not reveal why the influence of motivation operates as it does. it was also not always straightforward to figure out from the questionnaires used in pfenninger and singleton (2016) to what extent events, actual or imagined, were incorporated into the self-concepts of the learners, which makes a qualitative analysis of the learners’ stories indispensable. in this article, it is our goal to use the qualitative data gathered from our focal group of 40 participants to explore aspects of the quantitative study that could not be quantified, that is, learners’ perceptions, thoughts, and opinions. we are particularly interested in beliefs about the age factor elicited via language learning essays written by efl learners with different aos (early vs. late starters), in different grades (in year 7 at the beginning and in year 12 at the end of secondary school), and with different levels of efl proficiency (high-proficiency vs. low-proficiency learners). such a qualitative dimension allows analysis to get right down to the individual level, to take note of very personal circumstances, attitudes, and quirks that would not otherwise figure in the reckoning, and to arrive at a “flavor” of learners’ perceptions and reactions which is very often very much needed when it comes to constructing a true-to-life interpretation of the quantitative data. the age factor in the foreign language class… 9 background a common view in research on the relationship between biological age and l2/fl learning motivation is that younger learners show significantly better attitudes toward learning english than older learners (see e.g., cenoz, 2004; macintyre et al., 2002; nikolov, 1999), which kanno (2007) attributes to psychological and educational factors. for instance, younger learners are known to have a natural tendency to respond enthusiastically to new challenges in contrast with the self-consciousness that afflicts adolescents when performing in an l2 (driscoll, 1999). however, one has to be cautious when generalizing from the fact that primary school beginners seem to demonstrate more positive attitudes to speaking an l2 than secondary learners. for instance, the quality of instruction might affect the strength of the motivation-outcome relationship negatively, for example, when the learners start off very enthusiastic (as it is often the case in the primary school classroom) but the teaching approach is not adequate (cf. csizér & dörnyei, 2005) or the teachers lack the necessary language skills. in the zagreb project 1991, for instance, mihaljevic djigunovic (1993) observed that the 336 seven-year-old children who participated in the study did not list fls (english, french, and german) among their favorite school subjects, possibly because games and other kinds of play, which constituted a large part of the l2 curriculum, bored them. in mihaljevic djigunovic and krevelj (2010) we read that under less than ideal conditions (large groups, two lessons per week, unqualified teachers), which is the current reality in many european contexts, young learners soon start to develop negative attitudes to fl learning. in ushioda’s (2013, p. 7) view, such an early dislike can have damaging consequences for long-term learning, as the first contact with the fl may be decisive for the young learners’ aptitudes and motivation for the rest of their lives (cf. singleton & ryan, 2004, pp. 206–211)—a hypothesis which will be further analyzed in this paper. early adolescence, on the other hand, is typically associated with a period of flux and uncertainty—a period when learners “struggle to achieve a coherent sense of self” (lamb, 2012, p. 19). sometimes older learners are described as having a tendency to reject the school system in general, or they might be less motivated by the use of more traditional and less active methods in high school (e.g., tragant, 2006). marinova-todd, marshall, and snow (2000) suggest that most adult learners are less successful language learners because they fail to engage in the tasks with sufficient motivation, commitment of time or energy, and support from the environments in which they find themselves to expect high levels of success. this, however, does not explain late starters’ fast learning rates in the initial stages of l2 acquisition that are so often described (see e.g., muñoz, 2006): older starters profit from an initial short-term advantage, that is, simone e. pfenninger, david singleton10 they experience a faster rate of learning (e.g., of morphosyntactic development) than younger learners in the initial stages. this phenomenon is often ascribed to their cognitive advantages at testing. however, there is also a motivational dimension to this picture. the general impression is that late starters seem to feel the urge to achieve proficiency quickly. snow and hoefnagel-höhle (1978) hypothesize that the superior initial performance by late starters (and thus older learners) is perhaps due to the greater academic demands placed on these learners by the schools, creating higher levels of motivation in them than in younger learners to learn the language necessary for success in school. tangential to motivation, attitudes, and learners’ beliefs, for example, preconceived ideas about the age factor and early vs. late fl programs can affect learners’ approach to language learning, but at the same time, new experiences can lead to changes in attitude and approach (see moyer, 2014). in other words, because of learning experiences, feedback relating to the development of fl skills, and other salient events in the course of primary and secondary school, attitudes towards the age factor are likely to be re-evaluated and consequently reformulated as well as revised. since “the earlier the better” or “the later the better” are specific beliefs that can be allocated to a set of beliefs that horwitz (1988) called “difficulty of language learning,” which includes beliefs about the time investment necessary to become fluent in language learning difficulty, we believe this is an emerging area of interest in age-related research, albeit still grossly under-researched. methodology participants and procedure. the present study is part of a larger, longitudinal investigation conducted in switzerland between 2008 and 2015 on the effects of age and age-related factors, during a period when there coexisted for some time students who were subject to one or the other of two educational policies that were implemented before and after the swiss conference of cantonal ministers of education issued a new set of guidelines for foreign language (fl) instruction throughout switzerland (see edk, 2004). 200 swiss secondary school students (89 males and 111 females) took part in the longitudinal component of this project, all of whom had similar characteristics: they had the same biological age, the same l1 (swiss/standard german) and additional fl (french), and the same ses, schools, classes and teachers, thereby allowing us to isolate the influence of starting age (and co-occurring amount of target language exposure) at the level of efl competence attained at the beginning and at the end of secondary school in german-speaking switzerland. the participants the age factor in the foreign language class… 11 belonged to two ao groups: the early classroom learners (henceforth ecls) were instructed according to the new model and learned standard german from first grade onwards, english from 3rd grade onwards and french from 5th grade onwards, while the late classroom learners (lcls) were instructed according to the old system without any english exposure at primary level, learning only standard german from first grade and french from 5th grade onwards. they were tested at the beginning and at the end of academically oriented high school when they were 13 and 18 years old respectively. for this qualitative analysis, we selected a focal group of 20 early learners and 20 late learners from those 200 who had participated in the quantitative phase. early and late learners were selected according to scores on a range of fl proficiency tests at times 1 and 2 (listening comprehension task, oral proficiency tasks, productive and receptive vocabulary tasks, argumentative and narrative essays, grammaticality judgment task, see pfenninger, 2014a; 2014b; pfenninger & singleton, in prep.). following muñoz (2014), the criterion for selection into the high achievement groups (early or late start) was a score in the 75th percentile on all tasks. the criterion for selection into the low achievement groups (early or late start) was a score in the 25th percentile on all tests. furthermore, the high-achievers all had grades at or above 5 (6 being the highest grade). following these grouping variables, we ended up with four groups of 10 participants, each of which was tested at the beginning and at the end of secondary school (time 1 and time 2 respectively), amounting to a representative sample of 40 students: 10 early learners, high achievement (elh); 10 early learners, low achievement (ell); 10 late learners, high achievement (llh); and 10 late learners, low achievement (lll). this procedure enabled us to study different groups within the design, that is, early vs. late starters, younger vs. older students, and the most successful learners vs. the least successful learners in the sample. task and procedure. we asked our participants to write a 200-word language experience essay so that we could directly hear from these students in their own words what it was like to start studying a fl relatively early and relatively late respectively. we chose this task because exploring participants’ own perspectives through certain forms of introspection, such as reflective writing, can help us understand which (contextual) elements may be relevant to motivation in a given classroom. ushioda (2009, p. 216), for example, writes that “individual difference research can tell us very little about particular students sitting in our classroom, at home, or in the self-access center, about how they are motivated or not motivated and why.” while student perspectives have occupied a central position in social constructivist approaches to education (e.g., brooks & brooks, 2000; larochelle et al., 2009) as well as in the advocacy of autonomy in the classroom (e.g., cotterall & crabbe, 2008; little, simone e. pfenninger, david singleton12 2007; ushioda, 2009; 2011), individualized approaches to age research are still scarce (but see muñoz, 2014). thus, in order to give a better account of the interaction of ao and other (often hidden) variables such as attitudes and beliefs, we used language experience essays, which were supposed to elicit: (a) the participants’ reflections on their experience of multiple fl learning at the beginning and at the end of secondary school; (b) the participants’ affect for fls and english in particular; and (c) participants’ beliefs about the age factor at the beginning and at the end of secondary school. the use of these essays was based on the idea that, on the one hand, learners’ beliefs are—consciously or unconsciously—gleaned from past experiences, and, on the other, learners’ beliefs have an influential role in learning outcomes and achievement (see e.g., gregersen & macintyre, 2014). in that respect, these essays come close to the individual difference research tradition which uses interviews to identify differences among learners to establish why and how such differences may lead to differential linguistic attainment (dörnyei, 2005); on the other hand, they also share some traits with the language experience interview, which is designed to elicit students’ reflections on their own internalized experience of language learning (e.g., benson & lor, 1999; polat, 2013). we provided loose guidelines for the writing. these stated, “you should write about your feelings, thoughts, opinion, motivation as well as any experiences with regard to the early or late introduction of multiple foreign languages.” no specific length was set. the first test series was administered after six months of efl in secondary school, that is, after 440 hours (ecls) and 50 hours of instruction (lcls) respectively. the second data collection took place five years (680 hours) later. at no point were early starters mixed with late starters in the same class. results high-achievers vs. low-achievers. we begin our analysis by concentrating on retailing highvs. low-proficiency learners’ perceptions and perspectives at time 1 with regard to the age at which their instruction in efl had begun. there was something of a trend at the beginning of secondary school for learners to be positive about the age that they themselves had started learning english. the early high achievers came out fairly uniformly at time 1 with sentiments like the following: the age factor in the foreign language class… 13 (1) i wouldn’t begin instruction too early. and not too late either. finally, we need all these languages in everyday life. so i think primary school age is ideal for starting them. (07_elh2_f_ger) (2) ‘the earlier the better’. we should learn foreign languages early because our brain learns a foreign language faster when we’re children. (07_elh3_m_ger) at time 1 the late high achievers tended, on the other hand, to support the pattern of starting english at a later age—the regime that had been in force during their own school years: (3) i think the system is fine as it is [i.e., as it was!]. (07_llh7_m_ger) (4) i personally don’t think it’s good to begin learning too early … but i think of course that learning shouldn’t begin too late, so beginning english at 12 or 13 i think is exactly right. (07_llh10_f_ger) at time 1 the late low achievers also tended to support the pattern of starting english later, which they themselves had experienced: (5) i had french from 5th class in primary and english from secondary. i think it’s good only to have one language to begin with … i find french harder than english, and so i think it’s good only to have french at first. (07_lll2_m_ger) (6) i think it’s too early to learn english in 2nd class. an 8-year-old child very probably still doesn’t understand grammar. he/she at that time has other things in his/her head. i think it’s not relevant to be already learning english this early. (07_lll4_m_ger) the exception at time 1 to the expression of satisfaction with what had been experienced was the tenor of the comments offered by the early low achievers, who were clearly less than charmed by their encounter with english in primary school (see examples 7–10): (7) english is already there in 2nd class, i find that a bit early. at the beginning, i understood nothing… (07_ell1_m_ger) (8) i had difficulties. but i think this was because of my former teacher, she taught us the same stuff again and again and we somehow stayed where we were. for that reason, i was very much at a loss when i got to secondary. (07_ell13_f_ger) (9) in primary school our teacher even still spoke german, but here at xxx the teacher only speaks english. (07_ell10_f_ger) simone e. pfenninger, david singleton14 (10) i had english for the first time in 2nd class (primary school). actually, we really didn’t get much out of it. (07_ell6_f_ger) at time 2 the early high achievers showed less unanimity than previously in regard to their assessment of the value of early english instruction. at time 1 it will be recalled, the views expressed were overwhelmingly favorable; when the learners in question were older the picture was rather more complex. opinions supportive of early english were still in evidence: (11) it’s hardly the case that children who have english instruction from second class in primary school, can speak the language fluently after four years. in my opinion, however, it’s not primarily a matter of making as much progress as possible, but much more a matter of getting a feel for the language. so, for example, in relation to pronunciation and intonation. (12_elh6_f_ger) some more nuanced, more skeptical views also appeared, however: (12) with the help of simple games and songs in a foreign language a small vocabulary can be built up. but i remember how in early years the learning was unconcentrated and slow. at secondary level it progressed really fast. (12_elh9_m_ger) (13) anyway i must say from my own experience that the children in the way they learn these days only learn a couple of words in another language and nothing else. and the real learning of language in relation to the system begins only at secondary level, when you learn sentence construction and basic grammar. as at this point you mostly already have contact with the english language outside school, this is of course easier. but what you’ve learnt in the primary school you can’t really use. so the teaching of a foreign language at this level is unnecessary. (12_elh1_m_ger) the early low achievers were, if anything, even more skeptical about early english at time 2 than they had been at time 1, as examples (14)–(15) illustrate: (14) in my opinion, the early ‘learning’ of foreign languages … isn’t meaningful. first, really because they (the students) don’t learn anything, but are only killing time and get demotivated for foreign languages. besides this, day by day they lose motivation for school, as this additional, unnecessary teaching asks too much of many students. (12_ell1_f_ger) the age factor in the foreign language class… 15 (15) nowadays children are learning numerous languages earlier and earlier. the earlier the better runs the motto. but is that really of any use? in my opinion, this development is rather bad. from personal experience i can say that e.g. learning english in the primary school brings you practically nothing. (12_ell2_m_ger) amongst the late-starting high-achievers, at time 2, as at time 1, the overwhelming trend was approved for the late start in english that they had experienced. a lone voice talked about the benefits of an early start in this age of globalization: (16) … it’s hardly surprising that schools should if at all possible bestow on every child the advantage of multilingualism—and indeed as early as possible. children can put up with more than we think! (12_llh2_m_ger) the others in this subgroup were definitely not convinced that the change to primary-school english had been a good idea for their successors. they remained content with their own late-starting path (see examples (17)–(18)). (17) actually, it seems to be doubtful how great the usefulness is of teaching foreign languages as early as the second class of primary school in regard to how sensible it is already to be introducing a foreign language at this very early stage in a child’s development. (12_llh1_f_ger) (18) as a child i always envied my brother, who had english as early as the second class of primary school. it seemed to me that because of that he was a step ahead of me and therefore superior to me. … but looking back i don’t see this advantage as so big any more. within half a year i had in the 2nd year of secondary school the same level of english as my brother. (12_llh6_m_ger) the late low achievers at time 2 on the whole remained as satisfied as they had been at time 1 with the late english regime they had experienced, and as skeptical as they had been with regard to the idea of the introduction of english at primary level. the odd voice was raised in support of early english: (19) the idea … they start with is that a child has less trouble to learn a language than adults. … therefore i think that it’s fundamentally not a bad idea to begin to learn foreign languages as early as in the childhood years. (12_lll10_f_ger) simone e. pfenninger, david singleton16 the large majority of comments, however, took a negative line with regard to early english, as the following examples show: (20) my little brother has had early english since second class, but till now he still can’t perform better than i can. he is now in the 1st class of secondary school. i don’t think it’s worth it to learn a foreign language as early as just eight years old. (12_lll1_m_ger) (21) i don’t believe that early english is an especially sensible model. in the first couple of years the children anyway learn almost nothing in early english, and also when i look at the teaching materials, i can clearly see that after a year in secondary school i was at the same level as the children who had been taught in the early english programme for about 3 years. (12_lll7_f_ger) early vs. late starters. in general, it seemed that the ecls had to deal with a range of challenging aspects of fl learning and fl-related experiences at the beginning of secondary school, such as difficulty adjusting to the new teaching style. they indicated that, apart from the, as it were, intrinsic qualities, favorable or otherwise, of the early english experience, there seemed to be a host of difficulties associated with the perceived lack of congruence as regards the primary level and the secondary level of education. specifically, the ecls pointed to the (perceived) inefficiency of early fl instruction, they criticized the choice of language of instruction at primary school, and thus lamented the repetition in secondary school, as illustrated in (22)–(24): (22) at primary school i didn’t learn the technique of learning in english. but now at secondary school i have to learn most of it, because i have to catch up with everything, above all i must learn to learn! (07_elb55_f_ger) (23) at primary school, i found, we only learned vocab, but not rules. here it’s very different, we learn to write sentences and so on. i would have liked it better if we had learned grammar earlier. (07_elb81_m_ger) (24) for example, until 6th grade we were allowed to spell the way we wanted, e.g. the word the as de, and it wouldn’t be counted as wrong. in secondary school, suddenly correct spelling was expected, as well as some knowledge of grammar, which is something we’d never looked at before. (07_elb39_m_ger) examples (22)–(24) illustrate that many of our participants reported that the work was getting harder at secondary school. some participants felt disillusioned because they received lower grades on their assignments or because they felt unfamiliar with the expectations of english at secondary school. many of the the age factor in the foreign language class… 17 students felt that too much emphasis on communicative practice left too little time for grammar. as we have seen in the examples above, the lcls seemed content on the whole with the conditions of their later start. younger vs. older students. finally, the interval between time 1 and time 2 is so large that one might expect some changes to have occurred in learners’ perspectives in this period. indeed we have already seen evidence in our discussion of the focal group of such a change of perspectives especially in relation to the early high achievers’ perception of the early experience of learning other languages. these kinds of changes are in evidence in the sample at large. the following quotation (25), for example, talks about the experience of looking forward to the prospect of encountering a new language in primary school followed by the disillusionment of failing to make the progress expected. it relates this explicitly to the age question. (25) i can still remember well when i began to learn french in 5th class. i had been looking forward to this immensely and was very motivated to learn everything. but today when i look at old tests from this time, i can see that i didn’t learn anything. i got almost everything wrong, despite intensive learning and even got a 5 [on a scale from 1 to 6, 6 being the best]. now i’m still hopeless in french and much better in english and spanish. two languages that i started to learn somewhat later. therefore i don’t believe it’s better to have children learn languages earlier. despite their enthusiasm they won’t get much out of it, as they’re at that stage simply not as receptive as they would need to be. (12_llh3_m_ger) on the other hand, at a different level and in the shorter term, it is possible for learners to notice in themselves a growing desire to learn languages as more become available. this seems to be the kind of change being talked about in what follows: (26) actually i think it’s good that we learn several languages simultaneously. you get to want more, once you’ve understood. i certainly have the inclination to learn more! (07_elh2_f_ger) the durability and solidity of this kind of change may be in some doubt. it may be significant that the above remarks are associated with the early high achievers’ initial (and in many cases temporary) enthusiasm of time 1. simone e. pfenninger, david singleton18 discussion what did we learn, then, from giving these learners a voice concerning how they felt about the age at which they had started being exposed to english at school? we learned that for the most part the late starters were content with and positive about their late start, and that those who had been able to compare themselves with early starters (e.g., younger siblings) did not find themselves at a disadvantage from beginning english later. amongst the early starters we found differences between the high achievers and the low achievers. at time 1 the mood amongst the high-achieving early starters was very buoyant; many of the positive opinions expressed, though, seemed to be based on ‘received wisdom’ about the desirability of beginning english instruction early. at time 2, views were mixed; a number of high-achieving early starters referred to their disappointment with the actual experience of early english. the pattern of perceptions voiced by the early low achievers was overwhelmingly negative at both time 1 and time 2. the expression of negative attitudes towards fls and the learning environment at time 1 is a striking result for the early starters, as it is one of the main goals of early english in switzerland to make the learners aware of the role english plays in the world and to raise their cultural awareness. from the qualitative analysis it became clear that various factors seemed to contribute to the disengagement of the early starters and might be responsible for the observed lack of enthusiasm for engaging with english in school. these might include a lack of belief in the efficacy of in-school learning environments among learners (see also henry, 2014) and a relationship between not liking the teacher and not liking the subject (see also taylor, 2013). resistance also appears to have arisen from a discrepancy between the learners’ expectations of ‘good teaching’ and the pedagogical practices of the teacher. it also seemed that the ecls had to deal with a range of challenging aspects of l2 learning and l2-related experiences at the beginning of secondary school, such as difficulty adjusting to the new teaching style. some participants felt disillusioned because they received lower grades for their assignments or because they felt unfamiliar with the expectations of english in secondary school. many of the students felt that too much emphasis on communicative practice in primary school left too little time for grammar. this is also what cenoz (2004) observed. she found significant differences in favor of late starters when it came to the fl learning motivation of learners who were in the same school year (4th secondary) but who had received different amounts of instruction. cenoz hypothesized that this might have been related to the differences in input and methodology between primary school and secondary school: the earlier starters “experience a more grammar-based approach after they have the age factor in the foreign language class… 19 moved to secondary school and this contrast between the two methodologies may affect their motivation” (214). the ecls’ dissatisfaction with early english and the transition from english in primary to english in secondary school is problematic in several respects. norton (2014), who takes a poststructuralist view of motivation and resistance in a classroom, points out that a student can be highly motivated and eager to learn english in general, but that if the language practices of the classroom make a learner unhappy or dissatisfied, the learner may resist participation in classroom activities, or become increasingly disruptive. this position finds support from ushioda (2014), who points out that social-environmental conditions that undermine learners’ sense of competence will generate forms of motivation that are less internalized, less integrated into the self or aligned with its values, and more externally regulated by environmental influences, pressures, and controls: “if the learning challenge is too great and students do not feel competent to undertake it, they will not develop any intrinsic motivation for doing so and will feel that they are acting under coercion (i.e., lacking autonomy if obliged to try)” (135). the reports in this study also confirm the influence of the teacher (in our case particularly the primary school teacher) which has been documented abundantly in the sla literature (e.g., noels et al., 1999; taylor, 2013; ushioda, 2011). lamb and budiyanto (2013) explain that if the teachers do not have any personal experience of anglophone culture, english will be taught and learned as a “values-free body of knowledge conveyed via official textbooks” (26) and the students might become more oriented towards practice for local and national exams. in a similar vein, anxiety can result from the classroom situation (see e.g., horwitz et al., 1986). for many students, the learning of english is not an enjoyable activity in itself, but one which they have been required to persist at for many years in primary school with negligible levels of success. conclusion this study aimed at gaining insights into beliefs about the age factor of efl learners with different starting ages, in different grades, and with different levels of efl proficiency. the comparison of the profiles of the four participant groups revealed certain distinctive characteristics that distinguish the early starters from the late starters, the high-achievers from the low-achievers, and the younger students from the older students. at time 1, early high achieving starters in english tended to value the importance of their early experience of english in primary school. early low achievers in english as well as late starters in english in general were much more diffident regarding early second simone e. pfenninger, david singleton20 language instruction. at time 2 the attitudes of these latter groups had not altered markedly. the attitude of the early high achievers, on the other hand, had moved away from the enthusiasm for primary school language instruction evidenced at time 1, and showed signs of being affected by disappointment with the effectiveness of such instruction. another noteworthy result is that the early starters in this project seemed to have lost much of their optimism and motivation when they made the transition from english in primary to english in secondary school. besides the problematic issue of streaming (see pfenninger & singleton, 2016), this finding raises the question as to whether the skills that are acquired in primary school are adequately measured and accredited in secondary school. thus, the overall lack of age effect on fl achievement may be explained with reference to a number of affective and contextual factors. the fact of this overall absence of an advantage for younger fl beginners in schools (not just in this study but generally and worldwide) has very far-reaching implications, which to date educational policy-makers have seemed intent on ignoring. the contribution of learners’ own perspectives on this issue may perhaps add a little pressure to the clear requirement for a response to research findings in this area. what is called for in the first instance is some attempt to radically improve and enrich the primary school experience of foreign languages, as well as some serious attention to the disconnection between the primary and secondary level treatment of foreign languages. if such measures fail substantively to change the situation–as well they might–the notion of rethinking the place of foreign languages in the primary curriculum will in the longer term be impossible to resist. acknowledgments. the writing of this article was supported by a research grant of the university of zurich, grant fk-15-078, to simone e. pfenninger. this grant is hereby gratefully acknowledged. we are greatly indebted to the students and teachers for their enthusiastic participation and support. also, we are grateful to johanna gündel for her research assistance, as well as to the editor for her helpful comments and suggestions. any remaining errors remain our own. references benson, p., & lor, w. 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(2014). context and complex dynamic systems theory. in z. dörnyei, p. d. macintyre, & a. henry (eds.), motivational dynamics in language learning (pp. 47–54). bristol, buffalo, toronto: multilingual matters. the age factor in the foreign language class… 23 simone e. pfenninger, david singleton der altersfaktor im fremdsprachenunterricht: was meinen die schüler? z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g der beitrag untersucht die mit dem altersfaktor verbundenen einstellungen der englisch als fremdsprache lernenden schüler, die in verschiedenen altersgruppen mit dem lernen beginnen (frühe anfänger vs. späte anfänger), in verschiedenen klassen englisch lernen (angefangen von siebenjährigen bis zu zwölfjährigen schülern) und verschiedene spracheinstufung vertreten (schwache vs. erfolgreiche schüler). zu versuchszwecken verwendeten die verfasser die stichprobe von den groß angelegten forschungen, die in der gruppe von 200 oberschülern, als einem teil der in der schweiz in dem zeitraum 2008–2015 durchgeführten längsschnittstudie, durchgeführt wurden. aus der probe wurden 10 erfolgreiche frühanfänger, 10 schwache frühanfänger und 10 schwache spätanfänger gewählt. die ergebnisse der qualitativen analyse, die anhand der von den schülern am anfang und am ende der lehre in der oberschule geschriebenen aufsätze durchgeführt wurde bewiesen, dass die schüler welche in verschiedenem alter, in verschiedenen klassen und mit verschiedener spracheinstufung mit ihrem fremdsprachenunterricht anfangen, sehr unterschiedlich den altersfaktor beim unterricht beurteilen. die ursache dafür, dass das alter das erfolgreiche spracherwerb nicht beeinflusst, was auch unsere früheren untersuchungen bestätigten, liegt wahrscheinlich sowohl in den die lernqualität beeinflussenden faktoren (z.b.: unzureichende hingabe des lehrers daran, die frühanfänger in der klasse zum lernen zu motivieren) als auch in kontextuellen faktoren, wie z.b.: der wechsel von dem in der grundschule zu dem in der oberschule unterrichteten englisch. theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 5 (1), 2019, pp. 93–112 10.31261/tapsla.2019.05.06 liliana piasecka opole university, poland foreign language students’ perceptions of their identity learning another language is like becoming another person. haruki murakami a b s t r a c t foreign language learning involves cognitive, affective, and social functioning of the persons involved in this experience. as a social practice, it is also related to the learners’ perceptions of their identity, specifically to their language identity which refers to the relationship between one’s sense of self and the language used to communicate. this implies that using a system of communication, the speaker develops a new sense of self that remains in a dynamic relation with other senses of self, based on (an)other language(s) the person knows. language learners’ identity is no longer defined as fixed and stable but as “complex, contradictory and multifaceted” (norton, 1997, p. 419). it is dynamic because learners enter into various discourses and negotiate their position within different communities of practice. language both shapes and is shaped by identity of its users. this article discusses how students of english as a foreign language perceive the role of this language in their construction of selves/identity. first, postmodern conceptualisations of identity and identity categories are presented along with their relevance to the field of second language acquisition. second, selected empirical studies pertaining to adult immigrant contexts, foreign language contexts, and study abroad contexts are brief ly reported. then the results of an empirical study on the students’ of english (n = 83) perceptions of their identity in the context of foreign language learning are introduced. the study revealed that most of the participants realise complex relations between language learning and their identity and are aware of the effects that studying english (as well as other foreign languages) has on them. english gave them new possibilities in life, allowed them to communicate with people worldwide and make friends with them. they have new and interesting prospects for the future. it affected their personality by making them more open-minded and tolerant of otherness the knowledge of english gives the students power, prestige, and opportunities to live and work in a changing world of complex social relations. keywords: foreign language learning, postmodern identity, investment, study abroad https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3474-3235 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en http://10.31261/tapsla.2019.05.06 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3474-3235 liliana piasecka94 introduction interest in identity in the context of second language learning and teaching has been gathering momentum since firth and wagner (1997) observed that second language acquisition (sla) research should focus not only on cognitive language processes but it should also view language in a social and contextual perspective, thus broadening the traditional approach to sla. they were sceptical about perceiving language users as native or non-native speakers, and made a point that native and non-native speakers have many identities, which is “a nonissue in sla” (p. 292). responding to their dissatisfaction with the dominant perspectives in sla, gass (1998) argued that the relevance of identity for language learning needs to be documented. indeed, this has been done. first, research on identity puts the language learner in a broad social context. second, power relations in this context have an impact on language learners’ variable contact with target language communities. third, there is a mutual relationship between the construction of individual identity, social practices, and resources which all may positively affect language learning. fourth, what drives individuals to learn a language is not only motivation but also commitment to learning that has been termed investment. and finally, learners may imagine or desire communities to which they would like to belong so they have a more varied range of identities in the future (kanno & norton, 2003; norton, 2013, norton & toohey, 2011). block (2007b) observes that the interest in identity and sla resulted from the realisation that focusing on language and cognition was not sufficient to understand complex relations between second language learning and social ramifications in which it was anchored. this, in turn, has been connected with teaching language for communication, which requires interaction, and interaction itself requires participation in various social exchanges embedded in diverse sociocultural contexts. moreover, growth in global mobility due to economic upheavals towards the 1980s made individuals change places and styles of living, which inevitably lead to questions concerning their identity. the development in information technology made multimodal communication possible, easy, and cheap, and, what is more, it also allows the individuals to assume virtual identities that may depart from their real life identities (kramsch, 2013). such sociopolitical and socioeconomic phenomena as globalization, consumerism, reconstruction of postcolonial and postcommunist national identities, or transnational migrations caused by wars, among others, imply complex relations between languages and identities (pavlenko & blackledge, 2004). research on identity and sla has bloomed since the 1990s and interesting relationships between identity and language learning processes have been identified (norton & toohey, 2011). foreign language students’ perceptions of their identity 95 the paper focuses on the current understanding of identity that is founded on postmodernist thinking and has been accepted by many language and identity researchers. then major research areas pertaining to identity issues are discussed. finally, an empirical study on identity in the context of foreign language learning and use is presented and discussed. identity in sla research current approaches to language and identity in sla are deeply rooted in poststructuralist theories of identity and associated with the work of bakhtin, bourdieu, foucault, and weedon. christine weedon (1997), for example, sees the value of language practices in positions associated with individual and group identity. concerned with subjectivity, weedon observes that language is the site where it is constructed. she understands subjectivity as “the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual, her sense of herself, and her ways of understanding her relations to the world” (1997, p. 28). the relations to the world are crucial because they shape individuals and are shaped by them (norton & toohey, 2011). individuals are allowed (or not allowed) to participate in discourse, in dialogic encounters with others in which they create their meanings in a specific social context although they may be limited by the fact of using language as a tool that had been used before (bakhtin, 1981). participation in activities involving language use conditions the emergence of dynamic language knowledge or competence (hall et al., 2006). bourdieu (1977) argues that language symbolically represents the relationship between identity and power since language users are placed in a larger social network, and the perception of their utterances depends on their place in this network, in the social context as “speech always owes a major part of its value to the value of the person who utters it” (p. 652). the speakers’ position in the social context may empower or marginalize them but since they need “not only to be understood, but to be believed, obeyed, respected, distinguished” (norton, 2006, p. 503), they have to struggle for the right to speak. in addition, the language user’s perception of the world and their activity in it are shaped by what they have lived through so far. since they have experienced the world based on inequality and dominance, different power relations will be reflected in their interpersonal interactions with others (menard-warwick, 2005). relevant to the present discussion is bourdieu’s (1991) concept of cultural and symbolic capital. cultural capital refers to “knowledge, skills and other cultural acquisitions, as exemplified by educational or technical qualifications,” while symbolic capital refers to “prestige or honor” (1991, p. 14). these are liliana piasecka96 complemented by linguistic capital that involves language varieties valued by a given society. these forms of capital are unequally distributed in a society and therefore tensions arise in the situation when one variety, for example the standard language which is the language of education, competes with the learnes’ language used locally. linguistic capital, that is the knowledge of the standard or official language, may be insufficient to let the language users (e.g., immigrants) access the cultural and symbolic capital and thus to build power relations in the community, to have the voice, the right to speak, to hear, and to be heard. also foucault’s (1984) concern with social relations that are regulated mostly by language—the power itself—has been included into theories focused on language and identity (menard-warwick, 2005). taking the tenets of postructuralism into consideration, identity in sla context may be defined as “the way a person understands his or her relationship to the world, how that relationship is constructed across time and space, and how the person understands possibilities for the future” (norton, 2013, p. 4). norton emphasises that future is “central to the lives of many language learners, and is integral to an understanding of both identity and investment” (norton, 2013, p. 4). the idea of “investment” derives from bourdieu’s writing and refers to the learner’s desire or the lack thereof, to engage in social practices of the target language community to get access to symbolic capital that will increase their cultural capital and social power. in other words, commitment to learning the target language is necessary if the learner is to engage in the practices of the largest language community and thus to develop their linguistic capital (norton, 2013). identity categories postmodern theories have placed identity within a broad sociocultural and sociohistoric context. while modern conceptions of identity defined it as fixed and homogeneous, from the postmodern perspective it is fragmented, contested, complex, multifaceted, and dynamic (norton 1997; block 2007a), “fluid, context-dependent and context-producing, in particular historical and cultural circumstances” (norton & toohey, 2011, p. 419). identity is complex because it operates in many dimensions of human life such as ethnicity, race, nationality, migrant status, gender, social class, and language. ethnic identity is characteristic of cultural groups with a common history, descent, beliefs, and practices, language, and religious beliefs. it is “a form of collective identity” (puri, 2004, p. 174) based on cultural ties. similarly, national identity is also based on shared history, descent, belief system, practices, foreign language students’ perceptions of their identity 97 language, and religion. however, these are associated with a nation state, and not with a cultural group. racial identity, in turn, refers to biological or genetic make-up, that is, racial phenotype. migrant identity refers to the identity of people who left their home countries and moved to other countries where they settled. it includes classical immigrants who settled in the new country and never considered returning to their old country, but also expatriates who voluntarily decide to live abroad, however, they may return to their home country whenever they want. there are also transmigrants who share ethnic, religious, or national identities or geographical places of origin, and who have settled in a new country but decided to keep economic and cultural ties with their homeland, creating formal and informal networks that create “transnational social spaces” (block, 2007a, p. 33). in contrast to classical immigrants, transmigrants’ cultural and personal loyalties are not bound with the new country. thus, migrant identity refers to whether migrants decide to live in a new country as classical migrants, expatriates, or transmigrants. gender identity is no longer conceived of as biologically determined and stable, but as socially constructed and dynamic (e.g., bulter’s idea of gender as performativity, 1999). gender identity, then, is based on the “nature of conformity to socially constructed notions of feminities and masculinities, as well as orientations to sexuality and social activity” (block, 2007a, p. 43). the concept of social class identity has also been revised due to changing conditions of life. it was traditionally associated with “wealth, occupation, education and symbolic behaviour (e.g., language, clothing, pastimes)” (block, 2007a, p. 37). it is now represented by economic, cultural, symbolic, and social capital, the concepts deriving from bourdieu’s theories. in addition, social classes were traditionally divided into upper, middle, and working class (the division based on occupation). however, changes in economy at the end of the twentieth century have altered working conditions both for manual workers and for university professors. according to reich (1991), three new classes related to occupation can be identified, that is, in-person servers, routine producers, and symbolic analysts. the division is based on the type of work and the presence of consumers of this work. thus, in-person servers, for example teachers, secretaries, bus drivers, or hairdressers, perform repetitive tasks in the presence of the consumers of their work. routine producers, that is, blueand whitecollar workers, are also involved in repetitive tasks, but they perform them in the absence of the consumers of their work. symbolic analysts control the other two classes, they identify and solve problems. they are highly skilled and very well educated and they become more and more a part of an international “socioeconomic and intellectual elite” (block, 2007a, p. 39). eventually, there is language identity. it is defined as “the assumed and/or attributed relationship between one’s sense of self and a means of communicaliliana piasecka98 tion which might be known as language (e.g., english) a dialect (geordie) or a sociolect (e.g., football-speak)” (block, 2007a, p. 40). this relationship may take three forms, that is, language expertise, language affiliation, and language inheritance (rampton, 1990, in block, 2007a). expertise concerns proficiency in the use of a means of communication that allows the speaker to be accepted by other speakers of this variety of language. affiliation is related to attitudes and feelings about a given form of communication whereas inheritance is about being born into a family or a community that uses a given form of communication. in addition, language identity may also be interpreted as “acts of identity,” which means that all utterances simultaneously point to the speaker’s identity and to its ethnic, national, gender, and social class dimensions. in other words, producing an utterance, the speakers disclose other aspects of their identity language identity is about relationship to language and speech communities as well. language communities adhere to standard and normative forms whereas speech communities are characterized by the actual use of language. it involves communication that is not limited to linguistic means such as accent, pronunciation, morphological, syntactic, and lexical choices. verbal communication is supported by other multisensory non-verbal elements, for example by hairstyle, clothes that one is wearing, or facial expressions (block 2007a). identity is also related to audibility, both in the first and in the second language. it derives from the right accent and social and cultural capital that allow the speaker to be accepted as a member of a community of practice. this aspect of language identity is particularly relevant to second language acquisition contexts that characterize immigrant populations around the world (piasecka, 2012). the above considerations do imply that identity is complex and operates on many levels that interact dynamically. as far as language identity is concerned, it indicates other dimensions of identity. when people use or learn to use more than one language, other identities are performed. although some aspects of their identity remain stable, for example: race, gender (though this may be contested) or social class, others, for example, language or migrant identities change as a result of using another language. to reiterate, language identity is about the relationship between one’s sense of self and the language used to communicate. this implies that using a system of communication, the speaker develops a new sense of self that remains in a dynamic relation with other senses of self, based on (an)other language(s) the person knows. and this is one of the reasons for using the quotation opening this article. foreign language students’ perceptions of their identity 99 second language identities second language identities can be analysed in three contexts, that is, adult immigrant contexts, foreign language contexts, and study abroad contexts (block, 2007a). selected empirical studies pertaining to these three contexts are briefly reported in the following sections. adult immigrant contexts as far as adult immigrant language learners are concerned, large scale studies were conducted in europe, the u.s., and canada. european science foundation carried out a longitudinal study that aimed to analyse fossilized interlanguages along with processes and factors involved in second language acquisition. the study was carried out in five countries over the period of five years, and included five target languages, six mother tongues and ten interlanguages (perdue, 1984, in norton, 2013). the researchers also wanted to find out how immigrants interact with target language speakers in a broader sociopolitical context. this issue is particularly relevant to the present discussion as interaction is indispensable for the development of communicative competence. successful communication between native and non-native speakers of the language depends on the negotiation of meaning which brings about mutual understanding and supports language learning. the findings show that adult immigrants are often discriminated and therefore they have a limited access to social interaction. when they interact, they struggle to understand native speakers though native speakers are not concerned whether the learners understand. immigrants learn to communicate in difficult sociocultural contexts, with limited l2 proficiency and assymetrical power relations (bremer et al, 1993, 1996, in norton, 2013). hispanic immigrant women from rockhill’s study (1987a, 1987b) on literacy were very ashamed about not knowing english and not being able to communicate in this language efficiently. they blamed themselves for not making enough progress although they lived in difficult social and material conditions and they were primarily concerned about making the lives of their children and husbands successful. their needs such as education and literacy in english were of secondary importance. norton (2013) argues that their learning, exposure to, and opportunities to practice english were shaped mostly by their identities as women. norton (2013) carried out a case study of five immigrant women in canada to “develop an enhanced understanding of the relationship between identity and language learning” (p. 86). the women were good language learners as liliana piasecka100 evidenced by the fact that they participated in a diary study. yet, they felt marginalized because they were immigrants and this marginalization was a cause of problems and difficulties when they were communicating with target language speakers. one of women wrote “i feel comfortable using english with people i know and have confidence with” (norton, 2013, p. 95). moreover, these women had problems with finding jobs matching their qualifications, which made their access to the cultural, symbolic, and linguistic resources of the target community more difficult. the selected studies briefly discussed above show that adult immigrants invest and are motivated to learn the target language but their learning is shaped and shapes complex social, professional, and cultural relations. living in a new country entails challenges to their identity constructed by their native languages. often, the new socio-economic context changes class membership so in the new country the immigrants enter a social class that is lower when compared to their native country social class. in addition, some immigrants working in a new social context have to cope with the duties imposed by the fact that they are responsible for maintaining home and family life, which—along with a low level of education—limits their participation in l2 courses (goldstein, 1996) and thus has an impact on their emerging new subject positions. study abroad contexts american colleges and universities offer students of foreign languages an opportunity to study abroad for a semester or a year. although study abroad is challenging in terms of language knowledge and cultural differences, it allows the students to practise their language skills in real life conditions and thus to develop their communicative competence. however, many other issues emerge with respect to this form of study. kinginger (2009) points to the learner’s identities, desires, and motives along with a wide range of encounters which involve communication and thus provide opportunities for language learning. two studies reported below show how these encounters may differ. analysing the diaries of american students studying russian in russia, and the scores they received on oral proficiency interview, polanyi (1995) found gender differences in listening and speaking skills scores. young males improved more than young females after the study abroad period. the researcher explains this difference by the behaviours of russian males who expect some kind of sexual favours from their foreign female interlocutors, which discourages the latter from interacting with them and makes them feel uneasy about the sexual overtones in the interactions. the purpose of kinginger’s (2004) study was to present the history of a foreign language learner and to show how foreign language learning experience foreign language students’ perceptions of their identity 101 reconstructs identity. she describes alice, an american learner of french, who went to france to study the language and culture to become more refined. for her, france was romantic, full of monuments of the past, inhabited by refined and elegant people. the france she encountered was far from her idealised picture and she had to revise her image of the country. she also invested a lot of time and energy to establish informal interpersonal relations with french students and, due to her persistence, not only did she develop her knowledge of french, but she became more goal-oriented, she built social relations, and became more interested in “sophisticated topics” (e.g., politics) and, having completed college education, she changed her social class. in europe, the international student exchange program called erasmus+ allows many young people to study abroad to improve language skills, to gain self-confidence and independence, and to discover and learn about a new culture (http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/opportunities/students_en). the erasmus impact study (2014) demonstrates that studying abroad has positive effects on employment opportunities of the program participants due to, among others, soft skills developed during their time abroad. it also refers to europeanisation and internationalisation of students’ identity. sigalas (2010) wanted to find out whether study abroad within the erasmus program and interpersonal contacts established during the stay promote a european identity. it appeared that although program participants socialized with other europeans, their contacts with host country students were limited and their european identity was not strengthened. on the other hand, increased socializing with europeans had a positive average influence on european identity american students feel uneasy about heterosexual relations abroad, but this is not a problem for erasmus students abroad. they are more experienced travellers who are more aware of what they may expect when studying. they do not exhibit an enhanced national identity, which was observed in american students abroad. block (2007a) explains that the difference may stem from the fact that european students have more experience traveling and staying abroad, whereas americans are “relatively unseasoned and even naïve travelers on their first—and quite likely last-ever—extensive sojourn outside the us” (p. 180). foreign language learning contexts studies concerning identity and foreign language learning are less numerous than the ones addressing adult immigrant and study abroad contexts and they focus rather on subject positions related to formal educational settings (block, 2007b). lantolf and genung’s (2003) study, for example, reports the foreign http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/opportunities/students_en liliana piasecka102 language learning experience of a person (actually, it was genung, pg) who enrolled in the course of mandarin and was not satisfied with the manner in which the langauge was taught, nor with the way the teachers reprimanded the students for not being properly prepared for class, thus humiliating them and creating a hostile classroom atmosphere. what mattered in the course were good grades but not learning how to use the language, so pg, though frustrated, worked to achieve this goal, which was in contrast to her understanding of what is involved in language learning. mcmahill (1997) reports how japanese women participating in “grassroots feminist english classes” (p. 612) worked on their subject positions. the course was focused both on language development and discussions of such problems as discrimination on the job market, women rights, ethnic identity, and personal histories of the participants. by talking about these problems through the medium of english, the women moved from the position of language learners to the position of those who are concerned about the important issues in their lives piasecka (2012) designed a study to find out whether polish students of english at the tertiary level realise the possible influence of this language on their sense of self and on their construction of identity. the study involved 39 participants, eight from a foreign languages teacher training college, 19 undergraduate second year university students of english and 12 graduate university students of english. they wrote how learning and studying english at tertiary education institutions influenced who they are. the results show that studying english affects the participants’ identity by enhancing their self-confidence, broadening their minds and providing them with greater job opportunities. cross-cultural communication allows them to know other people, to develop knowledge of languages and of other cultures, which results in a greater openness to otherness and supports tolerance. they realise they can stay and work abroad, finding an alternative to what they can do in their home country. because of the knowledge of a foreign language, they also have access to various sources of information, which makes them more informed and critical about various opinions and viewpoints. their language identity appeared dynamic and multifaceted. the knowledge of english gives the students power, prestige, and opportunities to live and work in the globalized world a similar study, which may be regarded as an extension of the 2012 study, was carried out in 2018 with a purpose to investigate identity issues in the context of studying english. it is reported in the following section. foreign language students’ perceptions of their identity 103 how foreign language students perceive their identity—the study the aim of the study was to find out how students of english perceive the role of this language in their construction of selves/identity. since increasing numbers of international students decide to study at polish universities, there was an opportunity to include them in the study and collect their opinions and ideas about the impact of foreign language learning on their sense of self. therefore, the research questions formulated for the purpose of the study are: research question 1: does learning english (and other foreign languages) influence the learners’ identity? research question 2: if it does, what is this influence? altogether, 83 students participated in the study. there were 60 undergraduate (ba) university students of english philology (46 females, including three ukraininan students, and 14 males). the youngest student in this group was 17, the oldest—21. they knew from two to six languages. eight graduate university students of english philology (seven females, one male) were between 22 and 25 years old (mean 23.25 years) and they knew from two to four foreign languages. ten erasmus students, undergraduate and graduate level, english philology (seven females, three males) came from turkey, greece, and spain, they were between 19 and 22 years old and they knew two or three languages. five doctoral students were enrolled in the english philology applied linguistics program (four females, one male), and their age varied (from 24 to over 40). thus, second language identities involved two contexts, that is, study abroad contexts (erasmus+ students and ukrainian students) and foreign language contexts (polish students of english philology; cf. block, 2007a). it has to be taken in account, however, that for all the participants english was a foreign language. the participants were asked to answer the following questions in writing: how has the knowledge of english (and other foreign languages) influenced the sense of who you are? your identity? your style of living? your activities in the present? your prospects for the future? they wrote the answers to the question during classes held by the researcher. polish students could write in the language they felt most confident with (polish or english) but foreign students did not have the choice—they had to write in english because the researcher did not know their native languages. they were advised to use between 150–200 words. when the texts were collected, it appeared that all were written in english. the texts were then analysed to identify the effects of l2 learning on the students’ selves. the researcher read all the papers, paying attention to lexical phrases used to decribe the influences (or the lack thereof), made a list of the liliana piasecka104 influences described by the participants and counted the frequency of individual occurrences. this allowed the researcher to create thematic categories. for example, when the answers were “thanks to english i’m learning about other cultures” (1), or “knowledge of english affects us in a good way, we understand other people better, and also their culture” (2), or “ i’m open-minded to other cultures” (3), they were assigned to the category “developing knowledge and understanding of other cultures,” except example (2) which also shows the positive impact of the knowledge of a foreign language on one’s identity. eventually, the participants’ opinions were grouped into nine categories and rank ordered. in addition, the results were analysed according to the level of studies and by the students’ country of origin (erasmus+ students). also, the most representative opinions related to the participants’ perceptions of self were selected and they are presented in the results section. results fourteen participants (16.9 per cent) declared that learning english had no effect on their sense of self although they noted positive effects of learning english on many aspects of their life. sixty-nine participants wrote that learning english gave them new possibilities in life, allowed them to communicate with people worldwide and make friends with them. it also gave them new and interesting prospects for the future. the effects of learning english on the participants’ perceptions of their identity (categories) are listed below. the numbers in the parentheses show the frequency of the views for each category, found in the data: – ability to communicate with speakers of other languages, both at home and abroad (40). – greater job opportunities and finding a way of life (becoming a teacher/ interpreter/ translator or any other profession involving the proficient use of english; possibility to live and work abroad) (35). – entertainment—watching films, listening to songs, playing online games— also an opportunity to learn and understand the language (21). – enhanced self-confidence, especially underscored by females (21). – travel (15). – making friends with foreigners because of the ability to communicate in english (12). – developing knowledge and understanding of other cultures (11). – choice of studies (9). – openness to otherness (5). in the majority of cases the participants showed awareness about the effects that studying english (as well as other foreign languages) has on them. excerpts foreign language students’ perceptions of their identity 105 from some texts are given in what follows. the texts appear as they were written by the participants. the first section presents texts that highlight connections between language and identity (a), whereas the second section focuses on texts that do not find any connection between language and identity (b). all the opinions have been presented in the original. a. english has influenced my identity. the knowledge of english influenced me a lot. thanks to english i’ve become more confident and open to people ... i don’t have language barriers any more. ... it shapes me.... i feel clever and intelligent (a 20-years-old undergraduate female student). it helped me understand the complexity of the world, that i am a part of the global society. also, that people living far away are not so distant if you know their language. ... i don’t want to stop developing my language abilities, i’ve started learning spanish but in the future i want to learn french and japanese. ... so the knowledge of foreign languages has had a great impact on my life and my identity (a 19-years-old undergraduate male student). in my opinion, every experience affects us in a good way and the knowledge of english too. it is said that every language means one human being so how many languages we learn we can develop our characteristics. ... we can understand other people better, ... their culture. ... we can be more developed and open-minded (a 22-years-old erasmus+ female student from turkey). the knowledge of english opened me a lot of doors to work and learn (a 21-years-old erasmus+ female student from spain). i believe the knowledge of english influenced me to a great extent in many areas of my life. ... english shaped my identity as i believe that by learning a language you become more open to other cultures and beliefs (a 19-yearsold erasmus+ male student from greece). the knowledge of english allowed me to interact with people from different countries and with different backgrounds. this connection made me understand and experience things i wouldn’t be able to do if i didn’t know the language. for example, the integration with other students during my erasmus+ experience (a 24-years-old graduate female student). learning english has influenced my identity immensly. my life has been revolving around the english language since my adolescence. ... i must admit that without learning english i would not do what i am doing now liliana piasecka106 and i would not be the person that i am now. when abroad i do not feel ashamed or confused as i know i have no problems in communication with the locals. ... the fact that i have two englishmen in my closest family also forced me to improve my english (a phd female student). b. no connection between english and identity. i think that knowledge of english didn’t influence me that much. maybe only in that i can watch films in english, i can communicate with people who know english and that it helped me in chosing the thing i want to study (a 19-years-old undergraduate female student). there wasn’t much influence in the sense of my life just because i know english. i didn’t change my style of living or activities. it may influence my prospects for the future because i hope and i want to make money from it (a 19-years-old undergraduate male student). having the knowledge of english affects my life in positive way. actually i am happy while i am speaking because speaking english was my dream and i am living this dream. ... to be honest, it doesn’t change my identity because my daily life is nearly same. when i saw people who need help, i was helping (a 22-years-old erasmus+ male student from turkey). the knowledge of english and other languages does not influence the sense of who i am. however, it allows me to read english texts so i don’t have to look for translations (a 23-years-old graduate male student). discussion the students’ perceptions of their identity vis á vis foreign language learning and use can be discussed from the social point of view, from the point of view of cultural knowledge as well as from the point of view of personal growth. most of the participants are aware of the mutual relationship between language and identity and of the crucial role of language with respect to the positions they can assume in various spheres of life (research question 1). these relations vary and affect many aspects of the participants’ life and functioning (research question 2). the participants value social bonds, which is why they underscore the importance of communication with foreigners both at home and abroad. they also want to make friends with foreigners. the ability to communicate in a foreign language empowers them—they can have an interesting job at home but they can also work abroad. by communicating, they develop interpersonal relations with speakers of other languages, thus increasing their cultural capital which allows them to understand their relationship to the world. foreign language students’ perceptions of their identity 107 they decided to study english at the university because they know english. therefore they write that their future is also related to english—they realize their employment opportunities both at home and abroad increase due to the fact that they know this language. in the light of the postmodern theories of identity it may be observed that they develop their subjectivity understood as participation in a variety of activities that allow them to interact with other users of the language (norton, 2013). this participation is possible since they have accumulated linguistic capital that gives them access to symbolic and cultural capital. the knowledge of english allows access to different ways of entertainment which is also a way to knowledge because both language use and language growth are involved. the participants also refer to experiencing culture(s) connected with foreign languages they learn. this has an impact not only on their knowledge but also on their personality. they declare that by learning a foreign language and experiencing its culture/s, they become more open and tolerant to otherness and difference, they feel clever and intelligent. they are not ashamed or confused about not being able to communicate with foreigners. communicating in a foreign language builds their self-confidence. in consequence, they can cope with new and challenging situations. interestingly, the enhanced understanding and contact with (an)other language(s) and its/their cultures is more frequently voiced by erasmus and ukrainian students than by poles. the metaphor of doors used by one of the foreign students implies that learning a foreign language opens new possibilities and gives learners access to knowledge and other nonmaterial resources. the case of students who declare that learning and using english has had no impact on their sense of self is quite intriguing. as the excerpts from their texts show, they realise that the knowledge of english lets them perform many activities that would not be possible if they had not known the language. they can watch films in english, communicate in english, be a student of english, they can read texts in english and have good job prospects in the future. yet, they do not feel their identity has been influenced by the knowledge of english. such reasoning may have resulted from their idea of identity as the core, the essence of who they are, probably static and impervious to changes. this may be a kind of ego, a kind of “me” which makes a person unique regardless of languages they speak. but it is only a speculation. gender differences were found in the data. females were more concerned about their personality and thus pointed to the openness, tolerance, and the increase of self-confidence as the effects of using a foreign language. males, on the other hand, did not seem to care that much about these influences. instead, they focused more on job prospects. during the analysis it also appeared that perceptions of self are related to age, nationality, and student status. undergraduate first year polish students, liliana piasecka108 young and enthusiastic, are more communicatively oriented, which suggests that social relations are important for them. this should not be surprising when the social context is taken into account. at the time of data collection they had been students for half a year and in the process of understanding what is involved in this position. they were constructing their student identity on the basis of their own beliefs and attitude to life, but they also relied on observations, conversations, and discussions with others. graduate students, older, more experienced and aware of their social positioning as students, realise that communication is important but they are also concerned about their future careers and self-confidence in near future they will graduate from the university and enter the job market where skills and self-confidence are valued assets erasmus+ students are interested mostly in discovering and understanding other cultures. they usually keep the company of their compatriots and other erasmus+ students (cf. sigalas, 2010) but they rely on their polish contacts when such problems as an appointment with a doctor or administrative matters have to be handled doctoral students—older than the other groups, most experienced, qualified and employed in various places—are more reflective. few remember the communist days in poland when there was a shortage of goods and a very limited access to sources of information other than the communist media. all acknowledge that english influenced them immensely—it allowed them to perceive life from different perspectives and let them find a place in the society. certain changes may be identified when the results of this study are compared with piasecka’s 2012 study. both studies were carried out in the university context, both addressed identity issues of foreign language students but—which is self-evident—the participants were different. in both studies the participants highlight the importance of knowing a foreign language for relations with others (communication, getting to know others, being a student) and personality development (enhanced self-confidence, openness, tolerance of otherness, job opportunities). however, there are differences with respect to knowledge. in the current study the participants point to the knowledge of other cultures but do not imply that the knowledge of a foreign language allows them to better understand their own culture and language. neither do they write about access to information but they point out to sources of entertainment. such a change may be due to the omnipresence of the internet along with easy access to it through mobile devices, for example. the participants might have become so used to this manner of obtaining information that they perceive it as something natural and self-evident definitely, the context in which this study was conducted differs from the studies on immigrant adult identities in that the participants do not experience social unequality, marginalization or loss of social position because of the foreign language students’ perceptions of their identity 109 insufficient knowledge of the language though they may experience these but for other reasons, which is beyond the scope of this paper. erasmus+ and other foreign students seem to enjoy studying abroad. they stay abroad for a semester or two, and then they return to their home universities to complete their education. although they may have problems concerning accommodation, health care or insufficient understanding of local traditions, they can always rely on the help and assistance of local students. according to norton (2013), identity is about how people understand their relationship to the world along with their possibilities for the future. identity is also about constructing these relations. the participants of the study are aware of what is involved in being a foreign language student, what they can gain and what they can do in the future. as proficient foreign language users, they have a wide range of possibilities concerning their present activities and future employment. through interactions with others by the medium of english they construct their identities of open-mindedness, tolerance, and understanding of other cultures conclusion most research on identity and language learning takes place in adult immigrant contexts (e.g., norton, 2013; perdue, 1984; rockhill, 1987a, 1987b) but some researchers are also concerned about study abroad contexts (e.g., kingringer, 2004; polanyi, 1995; sigalas, 2010). although foreign language learning has not been a hot issue in identity research, nevertheless, it also has effects on learners’ perceptions of their identity. foreign language learning usually takes place in formal educational settings in which foreign languages have the status of compulsory school subjects and the languages learned are not the means of communication of the society. yet, they may be used to communicate with foreigners met in the streets or in the social media. moreover, schools are the sites where the negotiation of identity occurs daily, especially in adolescence any language a person speaks has some effects on their identity. learning a new language at school is like accumulating cultural and symbolic capital that is necessary in developing one’s understanding of the world and oneself. it is an investment into one’s present and future (norton, 2013). the participants of the study reported in this paper realise that the knowledge of english gives them power, prestige, and opportunities to live and work in a changing world of complex social relations. to understand others, they need to be open-minded and tolerant. the participants indicated that their open-mindedness and tolerliliana piasecka110 ance increased as a consequence of learning english. thus, their identity is dynamic and shaped by what they do. as regards the participants who claim that their identity was not affected by learning a foreign language, the perception of their language identity is in contrast to the activities they perform through the medium of english. possibly, for them identity is fixed, coherent, and stable, unaffected by what they do, that is, their performativity. postmodern identity is deeply rooted in a range of social practices of individuals. since these practices vary, the individuals take different roles in these practices, they use language in various interactions, they occupy different positions in discourse. on the one hand, their language identities are dynamic and multilayered, on the other, they also include fixed, essential elements relating to cultural and biological characteristics (bucholtz, 2003). references bakhtin, m. (1981). the dialogic imagination: four essays by m. m. bakhtin. austin: university of texas press. block, d. (2007a). second language identities. london, new york: continuum. block, d. (2007b). the rise of identity in sla research, post firth and wagner (1997). the modern language journal, 91, focus issue, 863–876. bourdieu, p. (1977). the economics of linguistic exchanges. social science information, 16(6), 645–688. bourdieu, p. (1991). language and symbolic power. j. thompson (ed.). (g. raymond & m. adamson, trans.). cambridge, ma: harvard university press. bremer, k., broeder, p., roberts, c., simonot, m., & vasseur, m.-t. (1993). ways of achieving understanding. in c. perdue (ed.), adult language acquisition: cross-linguistic perspectives (vol. 2, pp. 153–195). cambridge: cambridge university press. bremer, k., roberts, c., vasseur, m.-t., simonot, m., & broeder, p. (1996). achieving understanding: discourse in interculrural encounters. london: longman. bucholtz, m. (2003). sociolinguistic nostalgia and authentification of identity. journal of sociolinguistics, 7(3), 398–416. butler, j. (1999). gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. london: routledge. european comission (2014). the erasmus impact study. effects of mobility on the skills and employability of students and the internationalisation of higher education institutions luxembourg: publications office of the european union. firth, a., & wagner, j. (1997). on discourse, communication, and (some) fundamental concepts in sla research the modern language journal, 81(3), 285–300. foucault, m. (1984). the order of discourse. in m. shapiro (ed.), language and politics (pp. 108–138). new york: new york press. gass, s. (1998). apples and oranges: or why apples are not oranges and don’t need to be. a response to firth and wagner. the modern language journal, 82(1), 83–90. goldstein, t. (1996). two languages at work: bilingual life on the production floor. new york: mouton de gruyter. foreign language students’ perceptions of their identity 111 hall, j. k., cheng, a., & carlson, m. (2006). reconceptualizing multicompetence as a theory of language knowledge. applied linguistics, 27(2), 220–240. http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/opportunities/students_en kanno, y., & norton, b. (2003). imagined communities and educational possibilities: introduction journal of language, identity and education, 2(4), 241–249 kinginger, c. (2004). alice doesn’t live here anymore: foreign language learning and identity reconstruction. in a. pavlenko & a. blackledge (eds.), negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts (pp. 219–242). clevedon, england: multilingual matters. kinginger, c. (2009). language learning and study abroad. a critical reading of research basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. kramsch, c. 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(2012). identity and language: a foreign language learning perspective. in e. piechurska-kuciel & l. piasecka (eds.), variability and stability in foreign and second language learning contexts (pp. 116–133). newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishers. polanyi, l. (1995). language learning and living abroad. in b. freed (ed.), second language acquisition in a study abroad context (pp. 271–279). amsterdam: benjamins. puri, j. (2004). encountering nationalism. oxford: blackwell. rampton, b. (1997). displacing the ‘native speaker’: expertise, affiliation, and inheritance. elt journal, 44, 97–101. reich, r. (1991). the work of nations. new york: vintage. rockhill, k. (1987a). literacy as a threat/desire: longing to be somebody. in j. gaskill & a. mclaren (eds.), women and education: a canadian perspective (pp. 315–331). calgary, alberta: detselig enterprises ltd. rockhill, k. (1987b). gender, language and the politics of literacy. british journal of sociology of education, 18(2), 153–167. http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/opportunities/students_en liliana piasecka112 sigalas, e. (2010). cross-border mobility and european identity: the effectiveness of intergroup contact during the erasmus year abroad. european union politics, 11(2), 241–265. weedon, c. (1997). feminist practice and poststructuralist theory. 2nd ed. oxford: blackwell. preface we resolved to start publishing this journal thinking that despite the fact that poland has a strong position in second language acquisition research and that quite a large number of monographic publications in this area come out every year—often published abroad with multilingual matters or springer, among others—yet there is no academic research-oriented journal devoted to the theory and practice of sla which would be widely available to polish academia. the existing journal, studies in second language learning and teaching published by adam mickiewicz university (kalisz-poznań), emphasizes the role of classroom-oriented research and so its particular focus complements the new journal by presenting foreign language pedagogy and its classroom applications. the origins of our journal also lie in the success of the international conference on second/foreign language acquisition that has been organized for almost thirty years by the institute of english at the university of silesia. it gathers together each year many polish and foreign academics and focuses on often un-researched issues and fairly new trends in sla. papers falling within the leading theme of each conference are usually edited and published in the form of a monograph, but there are also many studies presented in research areas not directly related to the main theme. since many of these are of a high academic standard, we would like to open a channel for their publication, alongside other original articles and submissions. we believe that our new journal will serve an important need in projecting new and interesting research in sla. this is the second issue of our journal, which is published bi-annually and consists of articles submitted to us directly or solicited (by invitation). each text is peer-reviewed in a double blind referring process by referees of the editorial board and beyond. the editorial board consists of both polish scholars and foreign experts in the area, and represents the wide range of research interests of its members. all updated information on the journal is available on its new 6 preface website at www.journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/tapsla. starting with the present issue, the journal is also available in electronic form. we hope that this journal to some extent fills a gap in the polish journal publishing market and that it will be of interest to researchers working in the field of second language acquisition. we would like to invite polish and foreign academics to share their scholarly research with us by submitting their work to the theory and practice of second language acquisition, published by the prestigious polish academic publisher, wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego (university of silesia press). the present issue consists of articles in various areas of sla and also research in multilingualism. the thematic spread starts with texts related to selected sociolinguistic variables (age and sex), followed by studies of non-native speaker e-mail communication and code-switching practices among immigrants in the uk, and a more theoretically-oriented paper delving into the theoretical conceptualizations of language aptitude. the final paper represents the multilingual dimension of psycholinguistic investigations. danuta gabryś-barker adam wojtaszek theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 3 (1) 2017 wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego • katowice 2017 editors-in-chief danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia adam wojtaszek university of silesia language editor david schauffler university of silesia editorial board janusz arabski (university of silesia, katowice/vistula university, warsaw) larissa aronin (oranim college of higher education/trinity college, dublin) jasone cenoz iraqui (university of the basque country, donostia – san sebastian) halina chodkiewicz (maria curie-skłodowska university, lublin) gessica de angelis (trinity college, dublin) anna ewert (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) tammy gregersen (university of northern iowa, cedar falls) ulrike jessner schmid (university of innsbruck, innsbruck) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities/university of warsaw) jolanta latkowska (university of silesia, katowice) peter macintyre (cape breton university, sydney) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, cracow) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) miroslaw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz/state school of higher professional education, konin) ewa piechurska-kuciel (university of opole, opole) andrzej porzuczek (university of silesia, katowice) david singleton (trinity college, dublin/university of pannonia, veszprem) eva vetter (university of vienna, vienna) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, łódź) maria wysocka (university of silesia, katowice) uznanie autorstwa – użycie niekomercyjne – bez utworów zależnych 4.0 międzynarodowe attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives 4.0 international contents preface (danuta gabryś-barker, adam wojtaszek) . . . . . . . . 5 dorota lipińska the influence of age and l2 on third language acquisition in a corporate environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 katarzyna bańka an analysis of higher education systems of teaching chinese as a foreign language in poland and china . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 elżbieta gajek ict as material culture in call . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 salama embark saleh some libyan efl university students’ attitudes towards using authentic materials for reading classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 teresa maria włosowicz english language attrition in teachers: questions of language proficiency, language maintenance, and language attitudes . . . . . . . . . 75 maria stec multimodality of cultural content in elt materials for young learners . . 101 salama embark saleh university of sabratha, libya some libyan efl university students’ attitudes towards using authentic materials for reading classes a b s t r a c t this study investigates the attitudes of 100 libyan english foreign language (efl) university students towards using authentic reading materials. the quantitative data of this study were collected through a close-ended questionnaire. the majority of the students believed that exposing foreign language (fl) learners to authentic materials has a positive impact on developing their reading skills and on enhancing their awareness about target language culture. however, they emphasized the importance of introducing these materials in small portions and the need for promoting teachers’ and students’ motivation and interest in these materials. despite the challenges and the difficulties that may impede the process of introducing authentic study material in the fl classroom, it represents a valuable and useful resource for teachers in motivating students and developing their language proficiency. keywords: efl, elt, authentic materials, fl classroom background of the study learning language for communication implies its purpose, that is, the ability to use l2 successfully in the outside world. therefore, it is worth considering whether it is textbooks or authentic materials that better realize it. the language learning materials used in the context of foreign language classrooms represents a fundamental tool for language learning development. the type of materials used can also have an obvious effect on enhancing learners’ motivation, stimulating their interest and increasing their active participation in learning activities. for this reason, the materials should be carefully theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 3 (1) 2017, pp. 61–75 salama embark saleh62 selected to respond to learners’ needs and interests. therefore, foreign language pedagogy is increasingly focusing on the functional use of language and most of language programs are now designed on functional basis. thus, the use of authentic materials becomes a standard practice nowadays. accordingly, the task of instructors in language classrooms is to look for materials that closely reflect the language students will encounter outside the classroom. although the artificial grammar practice, drills, exercises, and reading and listening texts found in common textbooks are necessary, students still need to be exposed to the same typical language used by native speakers. in this regard, harmer (2001) believes that only authentic materials will ‘genuinely’ improve listening and reading skills. language learners’ attitudes have been reported as an influential factor for developing language learning (gardner, 1960; gardner & lambert, 1972; harmer, 2001; otte, 2006; soliman, 2013). gardner and lambert believed that mastering a second language is not only influenced by the mental competence or language skills but also on learners’ attitudes and beliefs towards the target language. positive attitudes can also improve the process of language learning by influencing the learners’ behaviors and beliefs towards the language and can help in exploring their tendency to acquire that language. devitt et al. (1988) referred to the widespread belief of linking the favorable attitude and the high level of motivation with second language learning success. therefore, authentic materials with real-world language and contact with culture of the target language can make learning enjoyable and motivating. this suggests that understanding foreign language learners’ attitudes towards the use of authentic materials is an essential step for a successful application of this practice in classrooms. elt in libya english language enjoys high status in libya. in the libyan educational system, it is a compulsory subject and students start learning it since grade five (age 10). the aim of teaching english is said to be developing students’ communication skills. the english textbooks currently applied in elementary and secondary schools are decided by the ministry of education. they have been designed and published by the garnet publication in the uk in 1999. the content of these textbooks focuses on communication skills and is learner-centered as well as it includes a variety of authentic language materials, especially for reading classes (phillips et al., 2002). some libyan efl university students’ attitudes… 63 at the university level, english language continues to be a compulsory subject for all study disciplines. although libyan universities are centrally managed by the ministry of higher education, these universities enjoy some autonomy in making decisions for setting their own plans and programmes. teaching staff members also enjoy some degree of autonomy in designing their courses. for example, they are free to select or design the materials they teach. however, they have to follow a predetermined set of criteria and academic grading for assessing students. faculties of arts and education have english departments with four-year study programs. reading is taught as a subject in these departments and the instructors use a variety of authentic and nonauthentic materials. a research was carried out by e. m. soliman (2013) to investigate the attitudes and beliefs of benghazi (gareuness) university efl teachers regarding the use of authentic reading materials. these teachers were found to be positive about using these materials and emphasized the need for applying authentic texts along with coursebooks as a tool for developing students’ communicative competence. review of literature this section focuses on the debate in the literature on using authentic reading materials in foreign language classrooms. the definition of authentic materials there seems to be a lack of consensus about the definition of authenticity in the field of language education. widdowson (1983, p. 30) believes that “authenticity is a term which creates confusion because of a basic ambiguity.” harmer (2001) described authentic texts as “materials which are designed for native speakers; they are real texts; designed not for language students, but for the speakers of the language.” peacock (1997) defined authentic materials as materials that have been produced to fulfil some social purpose in the language community. nunan (1999, p. 126) referred to authentic materials as “spoken or written language data that have been designed by native speakers for some real purpose of their own rather than using language produced and designed for the classroom.” gilmore (2007, p. 98) reported that this concept has been used to refer to the function of a task, the materials being used or the people taking part in the learning process, task or communicative act. salama embark saleh64 examples of authentic materials are video clips, recordings of authentic interactions, songs, posters, tv commercials, extracts from television, radio and newspapers, tourist information brochures, signs, maps and charts, photographs and pictures, timetables and schedules (peacock, 1997; nunan, 1999). sherman (2003) offers detailed explanation for how authentic videos can be used in the language classroom. the successful use of these types of authentic materials depends on teachers’ and learners’ understanding of their role in the realization of authenticity. these roles were described by van lier (1996, p. 128) in the following manner: authenticity cannot be achieved through introducing authentic materials and tasks into classroom, rather, by considering it as a goal that teachers and students have to work towards, consciously and constantly. in other words, authenticity is the result of acts of authentication by students and their teacher. advantages of authentic materials using authentic language materials for language learning in the foreign language classroom has many advantages. according to hyland (2003, p. 94) authenticity in a foreign language classroom will increase learner motivation and thus improve the learning results. in addition, melvin and stout (1987, p. 55) state that learners who work with authentic materials have an interest in the language because they know what it can enable them in the future. this can lower the degree of anxiety when learners face new situations in the target language (moya, 2000). nunan (1999, p. 27) suggested bringing the content and the subject matter to students’ life and enabling them to make important connections between the classroom and the outside world. authentic materials are considered by peacock (1997, p. 45) as a bridge between the classroom and the real world. exposing learners to real language which is rich in context and culture is another advantage of using authentic materials (martinez, 2002, p. 67) and triggers the process of natural language acquisition (hwang, 2005, p. 3). this opportunity cannot be provided through artificial texts in coursebooks as they are normally modified to meet the learner’s current level (tylor, 1994). authentic materials provide language learners with models of target-like language use which can promote their ability for using the language in real life situations (hyland, 2003, p. 94). moreover, authentic books, articles, and newspapers contain a wide variety of text types and language styles which cannot be easily found in conventional teaching materials. this can encourage reading for pleasure especially if students are involved in selecting the authentic materials. offering teachers the freedom to select samples of authentic materials to teach from can support a more creative approach to teaching (peacock, 1997; nunan, 1999; gilmore, 2007). some libyan efl university students’ attitudes… 65 disadvantages of authentic materials using authentic materials in foreign contexts is not always a safe adventure. therefore, careful consideration should be given to any possible challenges or drawbacks before introducing them into these contexts. for example, language used in the authentic texts can be too difficult for learners at lower levels. this may decrease their motivation and lead to poor learning. it is obvious that authenticating language lessons is a hard work for both teachers and students. moreover, teachers may not be eager to use authentic materials as finding suitable selections and developing effective learning activities to meet the pedagogic purposes can be time-consuming. creating the authentic tasks and activities for using the authentic materials in classrooms is more problematic (van lier, 1996, p. 126). therefore, some teachers tend to ask students to apply specific tasks such as learning by heart with the authentic materials. language learners’ and teachers’ different understandings of the term “authentic” is another issue for consideration. it is very likely that two language learners see the same task as either authentic or inauthentic. this can create confusion inside the language classroom around the materials and the tasks. van lier (1996, p. 128) points out that the teacher’s own desire to make the learning more authentic might stimulate authenticity in the students as well. the vocabulary included in authentic texts may not be relevant to learners’ immediate needs, which may decrease their interest in learning them (hainess, 1995, p. 63) and the grammatical structures included in authentic texts can be too difficult and too demanding for the students (peacock, 1997, p. 148). moreover, the use of authentic recordings may involve the risk of exposing learners to different accents which can cause some confusion about pronunciation. the methodology this study aimed to explore the attitudes of a hundred libyan efl university students’ attitudes about using authentic materials in their reading classes. it was an attempt to answer the following research question: what are the attitudes of libyan efl university students about using authentic materials in their reading classes? an attitudinal questionnaire was designed for collecting data for this purpose (see appendix). the questionnaire consists of 12 statements describing the advantages and disadvantages of using authentic materials for developing language learning. these statements were drawn from the literature (see 1, 3, and 4) and were written in a simple language. the participants were asked to salama embark saleh66 tick the option which matches their attitude from a scale including: strongly disagree, disagree, uncertain, agree, and strongly agree. the sample of this study consists of a hundred libyan efl university students randomly selected from two english departments in two colleges of education in two universities (tripoli university & zawia university). they were mostly female (91%) with a similar social and cultural background. the data of this study were collected in april 2014. by this time, the researcher was lecturing in these two colleges and this helped in the process of contacting the participants. the hundred questionnaires were distributed by the researcher who offered some explanations to the participants and all the copies were returned complete. results the results of this study are presented in table 1. the figures represent the frequency in the participants’ responses to each statement in the questionnaire. the responses to each item, that is, strongly disagree (sd), disagree (d), uncertain (u), agree (a), and strongly agree (sa), were calculated and presented in numbers. as the aim of the study is to find out the nature of the participants’ responses (positive/negative), no variables were involved in this statistical analysis. the responses (da) and (d) were combined together and will be later referred to as negative attitudes whereas the responses (sa) and (a) were combined together referring to positive attitudes. the response (u) indicates the participant’s uncertainty about the statement. table 1 students’ responses to the statements of the questionnaire no. statement sd d u a sa 1. using authentic material develops learners’ awareness of cultural aspects of the target language 0 0 2 32 66 2. using authentic materials enhances learners’ motivation 34 27 8 18 13 3. using authentic materials increases the number of active vocabulary of the target language 4 5 12 37 42 4. using authentic materials is useful for developing aural language skills 0 2 18 48 32 5. using authentic materials develops listening comprehension skills 21 33 11 16 19 some libyan efl university students’ attitudes… 67 6. using authentic materials develops reading skills 14 38 7 31 10 7. using authentic materials develops writing proficiency 56 19 3 9 13 8. the grammatical structures of authentic materials are complex for learners to cope with 4 12 22 28 34 9. using authentic materials develops learners’ communication skills 9 22 17 22 30 10. authentic materials benefit students with advanced levels more than students with low levels 0 4 11 62 23 11. authentic materials are useful for developing target language pronunciation 23 19 8 22 28 12. it is easy to find suitable authentic materials for different pedagogical purposes 24 56 8 6 6 table 1 shows that the participants’ attitudes towards the statements of the questionnaire vary considerably from one statement to another. the majority of the participants (98) were positive about the importance of using authentic materials for developing language learners’ understanding of the aspects of target language culture. as many as 61 of the respondents were not positive about enhancing learners’ motivation as a result of being exposed to authentic materials, whereas 31 were positive and eight students were not certain. the attitudes of 79 students were positive about using authentic materials for developing learners’ active vocabulary of the target language. nine participants did not agree on this statement and 12 of them were not certain. eighty students believed that learners’ aural skills can be developed through exposure to authentic materials, while eight of them were not certain about this notion and only two disagreed about it. fifty-four students did not agree that using authentic materials develops learners’ listening comprehension abilities, whereas 35 of them agreed. only eight students were not sure about this notion. fifty-two students did not think that using authentic materials develops reading skills, whereas 41 of them thought that they do. seven of the participants were not certain about this idea. seventy-five students believed that using authentic materials has no a significant impact on developing writing proficiency, whereas 22 of them believed it has. only two students were undecided. regarding the complexity of the grammatical structures used in authentic materials, 62 students agreed on this statement, whereas 16 of them think they are not difficult for learners to cope with. surprisingly 22 students were not certain about their attitude towards this issue. the students hold different attitudes about the impact of using authentic materials on developing communication skills, as 52 of them agreed with this statement, whereas 31 others did not. seventeen students were not sure about this issue. the majority of the students (85) believe that advanced table 1 continued salama embark saleh68 students can benefit more from authentic materials than those with low level command of english. only four students did not agree with this idea and 11 of them were uncertain about it. fifty students believe that target language pronunciation can be developed through exposure to authentic materials, whereas 42 did not believe so. only eight students were undecided. as many as 80% of the students believe in the difficulty in finding suitable authentic materials for different pedagogical purposes, whereas 12 of them think it is easy to find proper materials for achieving different purposes. only eight students were not sure about this issue. discussion this study focuses on exploring the attitudes of 100 libyan university students towards using authentic materials. investigating learners’ attitudes is a significant factor in developing language learning (gardner & lambert, 1972). the results indicated that the participants hold positive and negative attitudes according to their estimation of the advantages and disadvantages of using authentic materials for developing fl learning. the confusion about the term “authenticity” makes it difficult to identify the attitudes of language learners about using authentic materials in fl classrooms. for example, is it only enough to expose learners to authentic texts to achieve authenticity or is it also important to present these materials in authentic tasks? guariento and morley (2001, p. 349) suggested that the learning tasks should also be authentic. hyland (2003, p. 94) argues that it might be difficult to fulfill the original communicative purpose as materials are still used in a classroom environment. nevertheless, the appropriate use of authentic materials is useful even within an inauthentic situation. this confusion makes the participants uncertain about many aspects of authentic materials and their usefulness for developing students’ language proficiency. their attitudes were positive for some advantages of using authentic materials, negative and uncertain about some others. using authentic materials develops language learner’s awareness about cultural aspects of the target language. sherman (2003, p. 12) explains that “authentic material is so important for language learning” that he considers it as “a window into culture.” the language and style used in these materials offer the opportunity to understand how the language is used by its native speakers in terms of style, pronunciation, structures, and expressions. therefore, language learners’ understanding of target language culture should be enhanced through exposing them to authentic texts and materials. this exposure can promote some libyan efl university students’ attitudes… 69 learners’ awareness about using the target language in its real contexts which cannot be provided through simplified texts. it can also increase learners’ active vocabulary of the target language and develop their listening language skills (miller, 2005). reading skills and listening comprehension abilities can be also improved by means of authentic materials (maxiam, 2002; otte, 2006). the participants were not positive about the idea of introducing authentic materials for lower levels foreign language learners. they might think about the complexity of the structures and vocabulary used in these materials which make it hard for learners to cope with. they might also think about the native speaker’s accent used for recorded materials which might not be easily understood by beginners. it may be more useful if lower levels learners are exposed to simplified materials with non-native teacher provided that he/she has a high level of language proficiency. guariento and morley (2001) recommended using authentic materials at the upper-intermediate level. however, maxiam (2002) reported that their sample members were able to benefit from authentic texts irregardless of their level. exposing lower level learners to authentic materials may result in decreasing their motivation due to the difficulty they may encounter in dealing with these study resources. the majority of the students did not think that using authentic materials can result in developing their writing proficiency. however, such an exposure will have a positive impact on developing their writing skills and understanding of the different writing styles and registers. morton (1999, p. 182) claimed that “students need to learn the register (through exposure to authentic reading texts) that is appropriate for their own essays. for this, there is no substitute for authentic academic texts which can develop students’ ability to master basic rhetorical devices.” carter and nunan (2001) emphasized the importance of authentic materials for raising learners’ awareness of grammatical, lexical and, most importantly, stylistic features. only by applying authentic materials, fl learners can learn more about how the target language is used for different genres and functions. although there is a widespread belief in the literature about the positive impact of using authentic materials on enhancing learners’ motivation to learning (krashen, 1982; sherman, 2003; gilmore, 2007), the majority of the participants were not positive about this issue. this could be attributed to their accountability for the difficulty they may encounter in dealing with study resources. their failure to understand complex structures and expressions used in authentic texts may increase their anxiety and decrease their motivation and interest in these materials. it can be also attributed to their thinking of the target language culture as strange and biased. unless teachers succeed in enhancing learners’ motivation towards the target language, introducing authentic materials into foreign language classrooms may not be a successful practice. salama embark saleh70 conclusion using authentic materials has a positive impact on developing language learning. it develops language learners’ awareness of the cultural aspects of the target language. it enhances learners’ motivation and develops their reading and comprehension skills. unlike simplified language materials, authentic materials offer the opportunity for understanding how the target language is used by its native speakers in real life situations. this can prepare language learners for coping with similar situations and can reduce their anxiety for using the language in these situations communicatively. as learners may develop negative attitudes towards the culture of the target language because they consider it strange, it is important to increase their awareness that learning this culture does not mean accepting it. it is also important to introduce authentic materials in small portions in order to account for the difficulty students may encounter in coping with them. the participants of this study were generally positive about using authentic materials for language learning. therefore, and despite the challenges and difficulties may be associated with using them in libyan university english classes, it is recommended to be introduced into these classes as it can have a positive impact on developing students’ language proficiency. it represents a valuable resource for language teachers in providing useful input for their students. references carter, r., & nunan, d. (2001). the cambridge guide to teaching english to speakers of other languages. cambridge: cambridge university press. devitt, s., d. little, & singleton, d. (1988). authentic texts in foreign language teaching: theory and practice. dublin: authentic language learning resources ltd. gardner, r. (1960). motivation and second language acquisition: the socio-educational model. city: publisher. gardner, r., & lambert, w. (1972). attitudes and motivation in second language learning. rowley, ma: newburn house. gilmore, a. (2007). authentic materials and authenticity in foreign language learning. language teaching, 40(2), 97–118. guariento, w., & morley, j. (2000). text and task authenticity in the efl classroom. elt journal, 55(4). 347–353. haines, s. (1995). for & against authentic materials. the modern english teacher, 4(3), 60–64. harmer, j. (2001). the practice of english language teaching. 3rd ed. london: longman. hwang, c. c. (2005). effective efl education through popular authentic materials. asian efl journal, 7(1), 6, 1–10. some libyan efl university students’ attitudes… 71 hyland, k. (2003). second language writing. cambridge: cambridge university press. krashen, s. (1982). principles and practice in second language acquisition. oxford: oxford university press. martinez, a. (2002). authentic materials: an overview. retrieved from http:// www.metu.edu. tr/~kilickay maxim, h. (2002). a study into the feasibility and effects of reading extended authentic discourse in the beginning german language classroom. the modern language journal, 86(1), 20–35. melvin, s., & stout, f. (1987). motivating language learners through authentic materials. in w. m. rivers (ed.), interactive language teaching (pp. 44–56). cambridge: cambridge university press. miller, m. (2005). improving aural comprehension skills in efl, using authentic materials: an experiment with university students in niigata, japan (unpublished master’s thesis). university of surrey, guildford, uk. morton, r. (1999). abstracts as authentic material for eap classes. elt journal, 53(3), 177–182. moya, m. (2000). using authentic materials in the foreign language classroom to meet the needs of sojourners. accessed may 13, 2014. retrieved from http//www.caleuche,com /lily?thesis,htm nunan, d. (1999). second language teaching and learning. boston: heinle & heinle publishers. otte, j. (2006). real language to real people: a descriptive and exploratory case study of the outcomes of aural authentic texts on the listening comprehension of adult esl students enrolled in an advanced esl listening course. dissertation abstracts international, 67(4), 1246b. peacock, m. (1997). the effect of authentic materials on the motivation of efl learner. elt journal, 51(2), 144–156. phillips, t., tankard, f., phillips, a., lucantoni, p., tankard, a., & tabor, c. (2002). english for libya: secondary 4 specialization-language and society. teacher’s book b. uk: garnet publication. ltd. sherman, j. (2003). using authentic video in the language classroom. cambridge: cambridge university press. soliman, s. (2013). libyan teachers’ attitudes and believes regarding the use of efl authentic materials within reading lessons at universities levels in libya. international journal of learning & development, 3(5), 121–129. taylor, d. (1994). inauthentic authenticity or authentic inauthenticity. tesl-ej, 1 (2). accessed june 12, 2013. retrieved from http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/tesl-ej/ej02/a.1.html van lier, l. (1996). interaction in the language curriculum. awareness, autonomy & authenticity. new york: longman. widdowson, h. g. (1983). learning purpose and panguage use. oxford: oxford university press. widdowson, h. g. (1990). aspects of language teaching. oxford: oxford university press. salama embark saleh72 salama embark saleh die einstellung der libyschen studenten zur benutzung des authentischen materials im unterricht in erfassung des geschriebenen textes z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die vorliegende studie konzentriert sich auf die einstellung der libyschen studenten der englischen philologie zur anwendung des authentischen materials im unterricht. quantitative daten wurden mittels eines mehrfachauswahlfragebogens gewonnen. die meisten befragten sind der meinung, dass sich die arbeit am authentischen material auf die entwicklung der lesensfähigkeit in der fremdsprache bei den diese fremdsprache lernenden positiv auswirkt und dass sie zur erweiterung deren kenntnisse in der zielsprachekultur beiträgt. diese studenten betonten auch, es sei von bedeutung, dass dieses material in kleinen mengen eingeführt und die motivation und das interesse am authentischen material sowohl bei den studierenden als auch bei den lehrern verstärkt werden sollten. trotz aller herausforderungen und probleme, welche die einführung des authentischen materials im fremdsprachenunterricht erschweren könnten, ist es ein wertvolles und nützliches werkzeug für lehrer, die ihre studenten noch mehr motivieren und deren sprachliche gewandtheit vervollkommnen möchten. some libyan efl university students’ attitudes… 73 a p p e n d i x students’ responses to the statements of the questionnaire no. statement sd d u a sa 1. using authentic material develops learners’ awareness of cultural aspects of the target language 2. using authentic materials enhances learners’ motivation 3. using authentic materials increases the number of active vocabulary of the target language 4. using authentic materials is useful for developing aural language skills 5. using authentic materials develops listening comprehension skills 6. using authentic materials develops reading skills 7. using authentic materials develops writing proficiency 8. the grammatical structures of authentic materials are complex for learners to cope with 9. using authentic materials develops learners’ communication skills 10. authentic materials benefit students with advanced levels more than students with low levels 11. authentic materials are useful for developing target language pronunciation 12. it is easy to find suitable authentic materials for different pedagogical purposes theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 6 (2), 2020, pp. 87–105 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.7714 arkadiusz rojczyk acoustic-phonetic laboratory, university of silesia in katowice andrzej porzuczek acoustic-phonetic laboratory, university of silesia in katowice detection of non-native speaker status from backwards and vocoded content-masked speech a b s t r a c t this paper addresses the issue of speech rhythm as a cue to non-native pronunciation. in natural recordings, it is impossible to disentangle rhythm from segmental, subphonemic or suprasegmental features that may inf luence nativeness ratings. however, two methods of speech manipulation, that is, backwards content-masked speech and vocoded speech, allow the identification of native and non-native speech in which segmental properties are masked and become inaccessible to the listeners. in the current study, we use these two methods to compare the perception of content-masked native english speech and polish-accented speech. both native english and polish-accented recordings were manipulated using backwards masked speech and 4-band white-noise vocoded speech. fourteen listeners classified the stimuli as produced by native or polish speakers of english. polish and english differ in their temporal organization, so, if rhythm is a significant contributor to the status of non-native accentedness, we expected an above-chance rate of recognition of native and non-native english speech. moreover, backwards content-masked speech was predicted to yield better results than vocoded speech, because it retains some of the indexical properties of speakers. the results show that listeners are unable to detect non-native accent in polish learners of english from backwards and vocoded speech samples. keywords: accent detection, non-native accent, content-masked speech, vocoded speech, backwards speech introduction non-native speech is usually easily detected not only by native speakers but also by most non-native speakers of a language. accent identification may https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7328-5911 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6398-2150 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en arkadiusz rojczyk, andrzej porzuczek88 be important for legal (e.g., forensic analyses in speaker identification), sociological and pedagogical reasons. previous research on accentedness in a nonnative language has shown that most efl learners (e.g., waniek-klimczak, porzuczek, & rojczyk, 2013) as well as l2 learners prefer to suppress foreign accent traces in order to approach native-like pronunciation patterns. their motivation may range from signalling higher language competence in their speech to avoiding problems or even discriminatory attitudes in some language communities (anisfeld, bogo, & lambert, 1962; arthur, farrar, & bradford, 1974; lippi-green, 1997; ryan & carranza, 1975; schairer, 1992). suppressing heavy foreign accent also helps speakers to appear more credible to listeners (lev-ari & keysar, 2010), which improves interpersonal communication in both professional and private affairs. although non-native accent detection is a relatively easy task, it is not clear how various individual cues contribute to its recognition. such knowledge may help efl learners to approach the process of learning pronunciation in a more systematic way. there is evidence that segmental/subphonemic deviations from native speech, such as substitutions, insertions or deletions (see munro, derwing, & burgess, 2010) are the primary cues to foreign accent (flege & port, 1981; kolly, boula de mareüil, & dellwo, 2017). prosody is also an important factor investigated by researchers, especially intonation, despite its variability across speakers (mennen, 2004; trofimovich & baker, 2006). the temporal properties of speech, or rhythm, form another individually variable cue to accent identification (tajima, port, & dalby, 1997; white & mattys, 2007). fluency is indicated by riggenbach (1991) and derwing, munro, and thomson (2008), while raupach (1980) points out to articulatory rate, which is supported by munro and derwing (2001), who found that digitally accelerated speech is rated as more native-like. finally, there are also extralinguistic parameters of speech that are said to facilitate accent recognition, such as voice quality (laver, 1980), related to long-term laryngeal and supralaryngeal setting, which is often carried over from l1 articulatory habits (esling, 2000; wilson, 2006) as well as and ethnic vocal tract differences (andrianopoulos, darrow, & chen, 2001). needless to say, the listener also has access to the lexical and grammatical structures used by the speaker, which may alone clearly indicate their native or non-native status. for this reason, researchers use content-masked speech, such as vocoded and backwards speech in order to investigate individual cues to foreign accent. backwards speech retains the temporal properties of the sample in terms of syllable length variation as well as voice quality, intonation (pitch variation), and rhythm understood as the timing relations between prosodic units (black, 1973; van lancker, kreiman, & emmorey, 1985; ramus et al., 2000; toro, trobalon, & sebastián-gallés, 2003; munro et al., 2010). with regard to segmental information, according to black (1973), fricatives and detection of non-native speaker status from backwards… 89 nasals are perceptible, unlike glides or laterals, or vowel quality in general. vocoded speech, in turn, displays intensity variation, with the salient peaks corresponding to syllable nuclei (kolly & dellwo, 2013; kolly et al., 2017). the rhythm of utterances is thus observable as the temporal distribution of intensity peaks. vocoded speech retains no intonation in terms of pitch variation and there remain scarce spectral characteristics of speech, depending on the vocoding parameters. table 1 compares features provided by backwards, vocoded, and natural speech. table 1. potential foreign accent cues in two types of content-masked speech speech characteristics backwards vocoded natural segmental degraded no yes pitch variation yes no yes intonation no no yes vowel duration yes no yes phrasal rhythm no yes yes voice quality yes no yes previous studies in this section we report the findings provided by recent studies using the two methods. the discussion provided by munro et al. (2010) suggests that the speech characteristics observable in backwards-masked speech are usually sufficient for the identification of familiar voices and may also help listeners recognize a foreign accent. the results of their experiments show above chance levels of foreign (mandarin, cantonese, and czech) accent detection in backwards speech samples. these experiments have also shown a moderate effect of speech rate. the influence of pitch has not been ruled out although no statistically significant differences were observed for monotonized and randomlyspliced backwards speech samples, which made it impossible for listeners to use pitch and temporal properties as possible cues to foreign accent. the authors also admit that the results were not sufficient to assess the role of individual voice quality in accent evaluation kolly and dellwo (2013) and kolly et al. (2017) investigated how temporal and rhythmic cues alone can be used to identify frenchand english-accented german speech in a number of tasks, including sasasa-speech, 1-bit requantized speech, 6-band noise vocoded samples and in recordings where native segments arkadiusz rojczyk, andrzej porzuczek90 were transplanted into sentences featuring non-native speech unit timing. the authors found that only monotone sasasa-speech, displaying the timing of alternate voiced and voiceless speech intervals alone (fourcin & dellwo, 2009) was insufficient for listeners to make accent judgments, while they performed above-chance levels in tasks using the 1-bit-quantized and noise vocoded samples. the latter, only offering listeners access to the temporal characteristics of syllable beats, proved to be more problematic than the former, where the listeners were able to perceive segment durations. the current study this study deals with the detection of polish-accented content-masked speech. the content is masked by means of (1) reversing the acoustic signal and (2) four-band white-noise vocoding of the recorded samples. in particular, we want to find out whether native english and polish listeners can detect polish-accented speech on the basis of temporal cues or rhythm alone. rhythm is operationalized in our experiment as vowel length variation which can be measured in natural and backwards speech as rate-normalized standard deviation from mean vowel duration using varcov (white & mattys, 2007) and a similar measure, vowel reduction quotient (vrq), calculated individually by dividing the speakers mean unstressed vowel duration by mean stressed vowel duration (porzuczek, 2012). obviously, both varcov and vrq values are identical for natural and backwards speech. vocoded speech samples do not reveal vowel duration but it is possible to measure the time intervals between consecutive syllable peaks (vowel mid-points), still perceptible to listeners, and calculate their variability, using varcopeak (dellwo, 2012). thus manifested temporal speech organization is the only auditory cue that the listeners may rely upon in their judgments. backwards speech, though characterized by the same varcopeak quotients, cannot be rated with respect to rhythm since the reversed prominence distribution becomes meaningless. in effect, in vocoded speech we can observe the rhythm roughly understood as syllable length variation, but this property is inaccessible in backwards speech, which, in turn, features vowel length variation, pitch variation and range, and some spectral (segmental) information. following the results from previous studies, we hypothesize that with respect to predicted ceiling efficiency of polish-accented speech recognition, listeners may still show an above-chance level of judgment efficiency in the case of both types of content-masked speech samples. detection of non-native speaker status from backwards… 91 materials the speakers were three male native users of standard southern british english (ssbe), aged approximately 20, 40, and 60 (e1, e2, e3 respectively), and three polish second-year students of english (p1, p2, p3) aged 20, one female and two males, recruited at the institute of english, university of silesia in katowice, poland. their proficiency, confirmed by regular curriculum tests, was b2 to c1 in the common european framework of reference for languages (cerfl). the learners’ target pronunciation model was also ssbe, typical of polish efl education system. they had detectable segmental, rhythmic, and prosodic features of polish-accented english. all speakers were asked to read a short passage of 124 words describing theft in a shop (alexander, 1967). the recording took place in a sound-proof booth in the acoustic-phonetic laboratory at the university of silesia. the signal was captured at 44,100 hz (24-bit quantization) through a headset dynamic microphone sennheiser hmd 26 fed by a usbpre2 (sound devices) amplifier. the test materials included three phrases extracted from the passage: – that the shop assistant was her daughter (10 syllables; mean duration = 1,558 ms); – she chose one of the most expensive dresses in the shop (14 syllables; mean duration = 2,474 ms); – the temptation to steal is greater than ever before (14 syllables; mean duration 2,682 ms). these phrases were selected, because their syntactic and prosodic structure provided contexts for the greatest expected rhythmical variability between native and polish-accented productions. more specifically, they include several strings of two and three consecutive reduced syllables, which strongly contribute to the prototypical english stress-timing. the phrases were normalized for intensity (70 db) and duration. the mean phrase duration was calculated for all speakers and each phrase was digitally stretched or compressed to the mean using pitch synchronous overlap and add (psola) in praat (boersma, 2001). importantly, although psola temporal manipulation alters raw durations of individual segments, it retains their proportional durations, thus maintaining the rhythmical structure of the phrases. at the same time, it rules out the possibility that slower productions will be rated as non-native irrespective of their rhythmical properties, because speaking rate has been shown to significantly influence native/non-native accent ratings (munro & derwing, 2001). the backwards-masked phrases were created by digitally reversing the natural phrases, using the ‘reverse selection’ in praat. the vocoded phrases were created using praat script. noise vocoding relies on extracting amplitude envelopes from several frequency bands to modulate white noise in those arkadiusz rojczyk, andrzej porzuczek92 frequencies (shannon, zeng, kamath, wygonski, & ekelid, 1995). most of the spectral information critical for accent identification, such as vowel quality or voicing, is degraded or completely absent and listeners have access only to speech rhythm represented by syllable beats in the form of white noise pulses (cummings & port, 1998; kolly & dellwo, 2014; lee & todd, 2004; tilsen & arvaniti, 2013). the actual degree of spectral degradation depends on the number of bands in vocoding. as reported by kolly and dellwo (2014), 6-band noise vocoded speech retains some spectral information that allows discrimination of vowels. on the other hand, 3-band noise vocoded speech degrades all spectral information that may facilitate identification of individual segments. importantly, kolly et al. (2017) showed that 6-band noise vocoded speech carries enough spectral information for listeners to identify frenchand english-accented german above chance even if durational cues are absent due to duration transplantation. on the other hand, 3-band noise vocoding did not allow any identification of frenchand english-accented german from durational cues (kolly & dellwo 2014). as a result, we decided to use intermediate 4-band noise vocoding of the test phrases. the perceptual impression was a sequence of white noise pulses without any clearly identifiable properties of vowels and consonants. figures 1 and 2 show the natural and vocoded phrase that the shop assistant was her daughter figure 1. spectrogram of the natural phrase that the shop assistant was her daughter figure 2. spectrogram of the 4-band noise vocoded phrase that the shop assistant was her daughter detection of non-native speaker status from backwards… 93 using varcov and vrq for natural and backwards speech, we indicated the different rhythmic tendencies in native and polish-accented speech. these are illustrated in figures 3–5 below. vrq figures have been multiplied by 100 for more direct comparison with varcov. figure 3. varcov and vrq values for natural and backwards speech in that the shop assistant was her daughter. figure 4. varcov and vrq values for natural and backwards speech in she chose one of the most expensive dresses in the shop arkadiusz rojczyk, andrzej porzuczek94 figure 5. varcov and vrq values for natural and backwards speech in the temptation to steal is greater than ever before. the values indicated by arrows are untypical of the group the speaker represents. the untypical varcov and vrq quotients observed in participants e2 and p2 performing phrase (t), indicated by vertical arrows, made these samples potentially interesting in the context of the study, by suggesting the opposite status of the speakers. varcopeak has proved to be even more robust in separating polish-accented from native english samples (figure 6), with the exception of speaker e2 reading the phrase that the shop assistant was her daughter figure 6. varcopeak values for vocoded speech in that the shop assistant was her daughter (assistant), she chose one of the most expensive dresses in the shop (chose), and the temptation to steal is greater than ever before (temptation). detection of non-native speaker status from backwards… 95 procedure the online experiment was designed using script in psytoolkit (stoet, 2010, 2017). the stimuli were blocked into vocoded, backwards, and natural. the blocks were presented in a fixed order so as to (1) expose the listeners to the most difficult task of identifying the vocoded speech at the beginning, and (2) to avoid carry-over influences from natural speech to vocoded and backwards speech. the stimuli in each block were randomized for each listener. the experiment started with collecting personal information, followed by three familiarization trials, each trial representing one of the three speech types. in every experimental trial, the listeners played a phrase by clicking on a ‘play’ button. the re-play option was not limited and the listeners were allowed to listen to each phrase as many times as they needed. all acoustic stimuli were accompanied by orthographic transcripts to allow access to the semantic content by parsing the acoustic information and thus facilitate the processing of temporal patterns (davis, johnsrude, hervaisadelman, taylor, & mcgettigan, 2005). after stimulus exposure, the listeners had to decide if they had heard a native speaker by clicking on ‘yes’ or ‘no’ buttons. they also had to indicate the certainty of their response on a 1–5 linear confidence scale by answering a question ‘how sure are you?’ from 1 ‘not at all’ to 5 ‘very much.’ figure 7 shows the experiment interface figure 7. the experiment interface. altogether, there were 54 trials (6 speakers x 3 phrases x 3 speech types). the mean duration of all completed sessions was 18.5 minutes. the listeners were informed to use headphones or loudspeakers at a comfortable listening level arkadiusz rojczyk, andrzej porzuczek96 participants two groups of listeners were recruited to participate in the study. sixteen native speakers of english, ten females and six males, who were recruited using social media. fourteen of them reported british and three american accent. another group were 14 advanced learners, 11 females and three males, recruited from the fifth year of the major english program at the institute of english, university of silesia in katowice. their proficiency in english ranged from c1 to c2 in cerfl, confirmed by regular curriculum tests. out of the 30 recruited participants, only 14 completed the whole experiment. we will discuss the reasons for such a low completion rate in the discussion section. we decided to include only the participants that had attended to all 54 trials. as a result, the analysis was carried out using the data from eight native speakers and six polish advanced learners of english. the native speakers were five females and three males with the mean age of 36.6 years. british accent was indicated by six and american accent by two speakers. the advanced learners of english were five females and one male with the mean age of 24.1 years. three of them claimed to be teachers of english. none of the listeners reported any speech or hearing disorders. analysis and results listeners’ responses were transformed to an a’ sensitivity value (donaldson 1992, 1993), which derives from the signal detection theory (green & swets, 1966). it quantifies responses in terms of hits and false alarms. a value of 1 indicates perfect sensitivity and a value of 0.5 indicates performance at chance level. a value of 0 shows systematic confusion of all stimuli. initially, we planned to compare the performance of native speakers and advanced learners to see if there are significant differences between the two groups. however, due to the fact that only 14 listeners had completed all the trials, we ran independent-sample t-tests for each speech type to find if the results for the two groups might be pooled. the tests showed that the advanced learners did not perform differently from the native speakers in all three speech types: vocoded speech [t(12) = 1.68, p = .12], backwards speech [t(12) = .62, p = .55], natural speech [t(12) = 1.46, p = .17]. consequently, we will analyse the data as collected from one group. the mixed model anova was designed with listener as a random effect and performance as a fixed effect (experimental level vs. chance level). the chance level was set at a’ m = .05. the dependent variable was a’ calculated for each listener and speech type. this model estimates the variance of random factors by constructing sums of squares and a cross products matrix for independent variables using satterthwaite’s method of denominator synthedetection of non-native speaker status from backwards… 97 sis (luke, 2017; searle, casella, & mcculloch, 1992). the analyses revealed that the vocoded stimuli were not identified significantly above a chance level (m = .50; se = .05) [f(1, 13) = .002, p = .96]. the mean confidence rating on a 1–5 scale with 1 ‘not certain at all’ and 5 ‘very much certain’ was 2.39 (se = .09). the backwards-masked stimuli were not identified above chance level either (m = .59; se = .05) [f(1, 13) = 4.03, p = .07]. the mean confidence rating was 2.85 (se = .08). predictably, natural speech was identified highly accurately (m = .96; se = .01) [f(1, 13) = 2402.7, p <.001], with the mean confidence rating of 4.6 (se = .04) (figure 8). figure 8. mean a’ scores for vocoded (vocod_acc), backwards (back_ acc), and natural (natur_acc) speech. in order to explore more thoroughly the obtained results, we calculated the proportion of identification as native speaker for each speaker used in the experiment. the purpose was to investigate between-speaker variation to see if there were native speakers who were observably identified more frequently as non-native speakers and, by analogy, if there were polish speakers who were more frequently identified as native speakers. we suspected that the listeners’ global inability to identify the native/non-native status of the speakers may have arkadiusz rojczyk, andrzej porzuczek98 been contributed to by variation in individual speaker’s scores. for the vocoded speech, the one-way anova with speaker as an independent variable and proportion of identification as a native speaker as a dependent variable was not significant [f(5, 12) = .77, p = .58]. figure 9 shows the values for each speaker. figure 9. proportion of identification as a native speaker in vocoded speech. although between-speaker variation was not significant, two patterns emerge from the data. firstly, one native speaker (nat 2) was identified as native less frequently than the other two. secondly, error bars indicate relatively large deviations from the mean in all speakers except for nat 1. the same analysis for the backwards-masked speech revealed significant between-speaker variation [f(5, 12) = 3.14, p = .049]. figure 10 presents the values for each speaker. the results of this task show that two speakers stand out from the general confusion pattern. nat 2 and pol 2 were more correctly identified as native and non-native speakers respectively. strikingly, two other native speakers, nat 1 and nat 2, were reported to be native speakers only 43% and 45% of the time. finally, as discussed earlier, measures of temporal variability such as varcov, vrq and varcopeak separated polish-accented and native phrases detection of non-native speaker status from backwards… 99 fairly robustly, so we ran pearson correlations of those measures with the proportion of identification as a native speaker to find if they predicted the listeners’ decisions in individual test phrases. table 2 shows that none of these measures were significantly correlated with the listeners’ performance in any of the three test phrases, indicating that the listeners were insensitive to temporal variation captured by these measures. figure 10. proportion of identification as a native speaker in backwards-masked speech. table 2 correlations of rhythm measures with the proportion of identification as a native speaker for each test phrase backwards speech vocoded speech phrase varcov vrq varcopeak r p r p r p assistant –.09 .86 .17 .75 –.17 .74 chose .11 .83 –.14 .80 –.17 .74 temptation .04 .04 .09 .88 .35 .50 arkadiusz rojczyk, andrzej porzuczek100 discussion in the present paper, we report findings that (a) polish-accented and native english are not identified above-chance level from 4-band noise vocoded stimuli, (b) polish-accented and native english are not identified above chance level from backwards-masked stimuli. in the following, we will relate the current results to the previously reported results. speech vocoding in accent recognition was used by kolly and dellwo (2014). they found that french-accented german and english-accented german could not be recognized above chance from 3-band vocoded speech samples and from 6-band vocoded samples without a speech transcript. however, above-chance performance was observed for 6-band vocoding with transcripts. it must be remembered that 3-band vocoding completely degrades the segmental make-up of speech, while 6-band vocoding may leave some spectral information about the quality of individual sounds. more recently, kolly et al. (2017) showed that 6-band noise vocoded speech carries enough information for listeners to identify frenchand english-accented german even when temporal cues are eliminated by means of duration transplantation, which further confirms that 6-band vocoding does not sufficiently degrade spectral cues. the contribution of the current study is that we used 4-band vocoding, which is not as degrading as 3-band vocoding, but is more effective in masking spectral cues than 6-band vocoding. the explanation for the current results that polish-accented and native english were not identified successfully may be that 4-band vocoding is as degrading as 3-band vocoding and thus listeners are not able to separate polish-accented and native english by syllable peaks only, without access to any spectral information. backwards-masking was used by munro et al. (2010), who found that listeners distinguished native from non-native speech at above-chance levels with mandarin, cantonese, and czech l2 speakers. the effect was robust enough to emerge from stimuli as short as one word as well as from randomly-spliced and monotone stimuli. the authors concluded that the listeners may have had access to the remnants of some sub-phonemic features or voice quality. in the current study, we provided the listeners with longer stimuli (more than seven words) and with authentic intonational contours and yet polish speakers were not detected above chance. the difficulty with relating the current results with those in munro et al. (2010) is the degree of accentedness that may be different between the tested groups. in the case of mandarin and cantonese speakers, it may be assumed that their accentedness was relatively high, because speakers of those languages are characterized by strong deviations from a native norm in segmental and prosodic realizadetection of non-native speaker status from backwards… 101 tions. consequently, their successful detection may have been contributed to by their high degree of accentedness. on the other hand, czech speakers, because of typological similarity of polish and czech, should be more comparable to polish speakers; however, they were still successfully distinguished from native speakers with the mean a’ score of .805. a possible explanation for the differences between the current study and the previous studies is that this is the first study to test listeners outside a laboratory setting. the listeners in this study performed the task at home, using their own audio equipment, which means that the level of surrounding noise and specific parameters of the signal may have been different across listeners. this fact may have been responsible for the observed lower detection accuracy in this compared to the previous studies. however, it is not warranted to claim that the experimental conditions were not sufficiently optimal, because the mean a’ score for natural speech was .94, which indicates that our listeners were able to detect non-native speakers highly effectively without content masking. although laboratory conditions allow full control over the quality of stimulus delivery, it must be remembered that natural accent detection occurs in the real world, outside laboratory conditions, and still listeners perform highly effectively. if vocoded and backwards-masked speech provides sufficient cues to the speaker status, we should expect above-chance performance in and outside laboratory setting. a methodological issue we want to raise is the level of engagement of listeners in tasks with content-masked stimuli. in this experiment, out of 30 recruited participants only 14 completed the whole session. we contacted some of them to ask for their motivation to quit before the experiment was finished. they reported that the blocks containing vocoded and backwards stimuli were confusing, irritating, and that, in their opinion, making a decision made no sense, because the signal contained no information about the speaker status. for this reason, although the statistics have been calculated on the basis of fourteen participants’ responses, the information gathered from the remaining sixteen and the sheer fact of their withdrawal after some unsuccessful attempts to complete the task are clearly indicative of their inability to recognize the speaker’s status, and in this way these respondents also contribute to the study and confirm its general results. although detection of speaker status from vocoded and backwards-masked speech was not overall successful, there was observable between-speaker variation in detection rate, especially in backwards speech. this may suggest that speakers may differ in robustness of individual acoustic cues that may or may not be masked. one of such cues, as suggested by munro et al. (2010), may be voice quality, which is left intact in backwards speech. future studies should attempt to directly correlate acoustic measures of speakers’ global voice quality with accent detection arkadiusz rojczyk, andrzej porzuczek102 conclusions the major limitation of the study is the fact that despite extensive research into speech rhythm, the notion still remains without a clear definition that would allow precise, objective description. the measures that we have employed, varco and vrq, may be criticized for not taking into account the non-temporal properties of rhythm, especially those related to prominence. on the other hand, they appear to be fairly efficient in separating nonnative from native speech. another problem is that any instrumental rhythm measures are sensitive to rather frequent timing deviation from prototypical values, which do not necessarily affect the listeners’ accent judgements. to eliminate this type of variation, the experiment should include a large amount of stimuli, which in turn would make it even more strenuous for participants. bearing the limitations in mind, we argue that our study provides some new data concerning non-native accent detection. the results of the experiment show that neither native speakers nor polish learners of english, who can easily recognize regular foreign-accented english speech samples, are able to detect native or non-native english accent from 4-band noise vocoded speech or backwards-masked speech. none of the tested rhythm measures of temporal variability, such as varcov, vrq, and varcopeak, were correlated with the listeners’ performance. even though these rhythm measures are fairly robust for non-native accent detection, the speech characteristics that they refer to are not sufficient on their own for the listeners to identify the speaker’s status. the general conclusion is thus that the rhythmic properties of speech alone, preserved in vocoded speech, or the temporal properties understood as syllable length variation together with voice quality, preserved in backwards speech, are not sufficient cues to foreign accent identification. this conclusion further implies that fl learning, which tends to focus on language detail more often than l2 acquisition, should not go too far in isolating individual aspects of pronunciation for classroom practice. although focus on selected features of speech may be beneficial, the teacher must be aware that some of them may only perform their linguistic functions properly in interaction with other pronunciation components. the findings may therefore contribute to the debate on the approach to the relations between segments and prosody in foreign language teaching. detection of non-native speaker status from backwards… 103 references alexander, l. g. 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(2007). calibrating rhythm: first language and second language studies journal of phonetics, 35, 501–522. detection of non-native speaker status from backwards… 105 arkadiusz rojczyk, andrzej porzuczek erkennung eines fremden akzents in der vokodierten und rückwärts gerichteten sprache z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die studie befasst sich mit der erkennung eines fremden akzents in der englischen vokodierten und rückwärts gerichteten sprache. beide verarbeitungsverfahren eliminieren eine semantische information und teilweise (rückwärts gerichtete sprache) oder vollständig (vokodierte sprache) eine spektralinformation, während die rhythmischen merkmale der sprache beibehalten werden, die als differenzierungsgrad der dauer von prosodischen einheiten verstanden werden, die zur unterscheidung von proben des einheimischen und fremden akzents dienen könnten. an der untersuchung nahmen englische muttersprachler und polen teil, die diese sprache auf fortgeschrittenem niveau gebrauchen. die ergebnisse zeigten, dass weder engländer noch polen in der lage sind, einen fremden akzent in den verarbeiteten sprachproben nur aufgrund der zeitlichen verteilung der akzente (vokodierte sprache) und des differenzierungsgrades der länge von prosodischen einheiten (rückwärts gerichtete sprache) zu erkennen. schlüsselwörter: akzenterkennung, nicht-muttersprachlicher akzent, rückwärts gerichtete sprache, vokodierte sprache theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 5 (2) 2019, pp. 75–93 10.31261/tapsla.7564 agnieszka ślęzak-świat university of silesia, poland complementarity of reading from paper and screen in the development of critical thinking skills for 21st-century literacy a b s t r a c t the skill of reading undergoes dramatic changes due to the change of reading interface readers are exposed to. readers who want to be active participants of knowledge society need to perceive it as more than just a receptive skill. the study aims to assess the condition of homo legens, diagnose what kind of reading interface preferences characterize 21st-century readers, how they respond to texts considering reading both digitally and in print, accepting or viewing critically the underlying ideology of the text. the analysis of the collected data attempts to determine if the reported preferences are conducive to the development of critical thinking skills for 21st century literacy, which include understanding complex ideas, evaluating evidence, weighing alternative perspectives and constructing justifiable arguments. keywords: literacy, screen vs. paper reading, note-taking, critical thinking skills, digital literacy. literacy under construction the act of reading is a fairly recent learned behavior that uses the neural circuits initially developed for language, coordination, and sight. taking into consideration recent finding of the remains of homo sapiens in morocco dating back to 300,000 bc (gibbons, 2017) and the danube script from 5th millennium bc in central europe, it can be roughly estimated that literacy accompanies homo sapiens in only 2% of its evolution. as wolf (2010, p. 3) claims we were https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0940-0532 http://doi.org10.31261/tapsla.7772 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en agnieszka ślęzak-świat76 never born to read, but our neural circuits recycled to do so from cortical areas that were originally devoted to different functions like spoken language and encoding visual objects (daheany, 2009, p. 121). for centuries literacy remained a skill limited to a small number of people (12.05% in 1800) who were associated with power, prestige, and intellectual elite. it has taken over 200 years to reverse the ratio of the illiterate (14.70%) to literate population and to become more democratic. the last two centuries again constitute just 2% of homo legens evolution, which gains its momentum now. at present, it is the 85.3% of global population who may identify themselves as homo legens, this dramatic change is illustrated in figure 1, which presents literacy for the period 1800–2014. 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 [%] literate world population illiterate world population figure 1. literacy for the period 1800–2014 (data based on roser & ortizospina, 2018). what is more, at present over 54% of global population are active internet users (www.statista.com), which can be compared to the literacy level in 1990. it is interesting whether readers’ interface preferences will keep pace with the development of technology and the internet. more and more people have access to the electronic media; yet, irrespective of their reading purposes their reading comprehension both in l1 and l2 is often impaired. it may result from the fact that they have not developed sound skills to comprehend a paper written text. as vidal-abarcal, mañá, & gil (2010) emphasise the sound reading skills developed form reading a paper text support the location of relevant information in digital texts. location is impaired because of the distractions present in the hypertexts, which do not leave cognitive resources for viewing critically the complementarity of reading from paper and screen… 77 underlying ideology of the text. that is why salter (2018) emphasises the importance of developing different set of skills: digital literacy and navigation skills. the development of digital literacy and navigation skills would contribute to the increase of critical thinking which is the ultimate goal of tertiary education. as far as the skills of a critically thinking reader are concerned, they are best summarised by schumm and post (1997) who divide them into: basing judgements on evidence, asking penetrating questions and evaluating ideas, distinguishing between opinions and facts, and reflecting on ideas. the important factor underlying all of the above-enumerated skills is time and concentration which in case of reading from the screen are decreased. however, the study by wu and chen (2011) shows that students have an intuitive understanding of how best to find, comprehend and retain the text, as majority of tertiary students will begin their research using screen-based text (benefiting from advanced search functions and the like), and then after having chosen the appropriate text will often print it to be able to better digest the text. as salter (2018) indicates, we are all on a journey of finding a balance between reading on paper and reading electronically. the fundamental assumption of the study is the increase in electronic reading preference and a wider range of application of electronic tools supporting the reader, which result in the development of most important skill at the tertiary education level–critical thinking. as critical thinking skills involve an ongoing questioning of takenfor-granted assumptions (santos & fabricio, 2006), the aim of this work is to examine the existing interface preference of the readers and show how find ing balance between interfaces inf luences development of critical thinking skills. we acknowledge that there are considerable discussions among the researchers as to what can be defined as a critical thinking skill, however, for the purpose of our study we employed only four major ones. the first skill involves comprehending complex ideas, undeniably only after having comprehended an idea one can proceed to asking penetrating questions. then, the two skills of basing judgements on evidence and evaluating ideas indicated by schumm and post (1997) are combined into a single skill of evaluating evidence. finally, distinguishing between opinions and facts and constructing justifiable arguments are examined to see which interface is the most conducive to their development. reading from paper versus reading from screen the major difference between paper versus screen reading is the fact that reading from paper is a linear experience involving concentration and emotional agnieszka ślęzak-świat78 engagement (durant & horava, 2015) and screen reading is a multi-layered experience (walsh, 2016), as electronic documents allow readers to leave one resource and explore a range of alternative resources (anderson-inamn & horney, 2007). the other areas of difference involve: preferences, manipulation, eye-fatigue and movement, as well as comprehension. reading interface preference as the concept of ‘digital natives’ has been debunked by bennett, maton, and kervin (2008), it cannot be assumed that all students are comfortable with technology. the correct generalisation would involve the assumption that different students will display different media skills. ramirez leyva (2006) proved that nearly 80% of 687 surveyed students preferred to read text on paper as opposed to a screen in order to “understand it with clarity,” and nicholas and lewis (2008) showed that when it comes to reading a book, even millennials (generation born between 1980–2000) prefer print. text navigation and manipulation one of the reasons of a strong paper interface preference may result from the fact that reading has to be considered not only an intellectual but also a physical activity. the implicit feel of where you are in a physical book turns out to be more important than we realized (sellen & harper, 2002), and the smooth feel of paper and the rich colors of illustrations are largely lost in e-book reproductions (paul, 2013). yet another aspect of physicality involved in reading is indicated by jabr who emphasises the physical aspect of it claiming that text is a tangible part of the physical world we inhabit; turning the pages of a paper book is like leaving one footprint after another on the trail—there’s a rhythm to it and a visible record of how far one has traveled. all these features not only make text in a paper book easily navigable, they also make it easier to form a coherent mental map of the text. (2013, p. 100) additionally, jabr (2013) claims that modern screens and e-readers fail to adequately recreate certain tactile experiences of reading on paper that many people miss and prevent people from navigating long texts in an intuitive and satisfying way. the study such as mangen, walgermo, and brønnick (2013) suggests that the ability to identify your passage through a text in a tactile way is important to learning, and wästlund et al. (2005) prove that scrolling requires complementarity of reading from paper and screen… 79 a reader to consciously focus on both the text and how they are moving, and it drains more mental resources than turning a page, which is a simpler and more automatic gesture. eye movements and fatigue yet another reason of a strong paper interface preference could result from the fact that less attention is needed when reading from paper. gudinavičius (2016) suggests that less attention is needed to read from paper in comparison to any size or type of screen. fatigue, being the physical aspect of reading, also cannot be overlooked as far as reading is concerned. jeong (2012) in the study regarding eye fatigue proves that students had significantly greater eye fatigue after reading e-books than after reading paper books. as regards eye movement, thanks to eye-tracking technologies, zambarbieri and carniglia (2012) show that reading from paper and screen do not differ significantly in terms of oculomotor behaviour. the discomfort that people feel when reading from a screen, rather than paper, is described by gerlach and buxmann (2011) as “haptic dissonance,” which is explained as an unfamiliarity with the feel of e-books compared to print books. comprehension dillon (1992), reviewing literature on reading from paper versus screens concludes that comprehension of material is not negatively affected by interface it is presented on; however, having well developed single-text comprehension skills (acquired in reading for paper) improve navigation and make readers less distracted by misleading cues (salmerón, cerdán, & naumann, 2015). kaufmann and flanagan’s (2016) study proves that using computer screens for learning worsened abstract thinking (e.g., recalling why some events occurred), but improved recall of concrete details (e.g., recall of dates of certain events). several studies show that misleading cues such as task switching tend to impair learning and decrease comprehension of digital texts (kirschner & van merriënboer, 2013). agnieszka ślęzak-świat80 description of the study the study focuses on basic concepts referring to paper versus digital reading aiming to determine general reading and studying interface preferences of the first year students of english department. furthermore, it is also interesting to check the need to print electronically available materials and the interfaces students found most conducive to remember new information. as far as paper/ screen preferences of a critically thinking readers are concerned, they will be analysed in the following categories: understanding complex ideas, evaluating evidence, weighing alternative perspectives, and constructing justifiable arguments. table 1 age and gender of study participants students’ age and gender 19 20 21 22 23 24 f m paper 1 44 16 1 1 2 57 8 paper/screen 1 4 1 5 1 screen 4 2 2 the subjects of the study are 75 first year students at the university of silesia in katowice, poland (57 females and eight males). the age range of study participants is 19–24, falling into three groups of students preferring either paper, paper/screen, or just screen (table 1). the data collection tool employed in the study includes a questionnaire with 41 questions. the subjects filled in the questionnaire on april 25 and may 9, 2018. results and analysis subjects’ preferred reading interface one of the crucial aims to find out in the study related to students general reading interface preferences. in figure 2, which presents the subjects’ answer concerning their preferred medium for reading, it is clear that the percentage is strikingly higher for paper, which confirms findings from previous studies by ramirez leyva (2006), and nicholas and lewis (2008). complementarity of reading from paper and screen… 81 87 8 5 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 [%] paper-oriented subjects paper/screen-oriented subjects screen-oriented subjects figure 2. subjects’ preferred reading interface. subjects substantiate their answers with the following comments, which are presented according to the interface they preferred.1 paper (55)—it’s better for my eyes (17), i focus better (14), i like to touch real paper (13), more convenient (10), it’s easier to make notes (6), i like the smell of pages (4), i don’t get tired easily (4), i like traditional way of reading (3), more practical (2), it’s easier to remember important things (2), it’s easier to understand issues presented in books (2), it enables me to go through pages faster, i feel more engaged, it feels more real; paper/screen (6)—it doesn’t make any difference to me; screen (4)—less tiring for eyes, option of changing fonts and i can take it anywhere, i can easily organise my materials and take them anywhere with me, it’s more convenient. a we can see, the paper-oriented readers seem to be more aware of the processes underlying reading, indicating not only to convenience, which was most highlighted by screen-oriented subjects. the paper-oriented students take into consideration the processes of remembering, comprehension as well as the sense not included in the studies so far, that is, the sense of smell. it is important to note that previous studies do not indicate that sense of smell is essential as far as reading is concerned. 1 all the answers have been given in the original spelling. agnieszka ślęzak-świat82 interface preferred for studying another point of interest is interface chosen by students for studying. here the results overlap with their general reading preferences, that is why only their substantiations for their choices are presented. they are presented according to their reading interface preference as well as the following features: facilitated focus and recall, fatigue, proximity, manipulation, and studying effects, which are all enumerated by paper-oriented subjects (55). facilitated focus and recall: i don’t like learning from the electronic devise; when studying i prefer to print stuff, it helps me remembering things; when i study for a test i prefer to make source notes on computer then i print them; it’s easier to remember it but sometimes i just look at my phone (when i don’t want to waist my time); i prefer paper than screen; if i used electronic version i would get easily distracted; they’re more reliable (usually); i feel like they are more trustworthy; i focus on the most important facts and the screen distracted me; nothing else distracts my attention; i can focus better on them; it’s better for me because i can easily focused on what i am reading; i can focus more, when i study from paper sources. fatigue: it’s better because i don’t make my eyes tired. proximity: i prefer to learn from my notes because i have all close to me. manipulation: i can mark important sentences and make notes; it’s better cause i take notes and circle things i have problem with; important information can be highlighted; we are given many handouts on paper; i can make notes and focus later on them; i like touching paper and making notes when necessary; i can make notes on them, highlight, underline them; i usually highlight the most important information and it is easier for me to learn it later; i like to highlight and write information on the side; i can make notes; paper because i can make notes; i can make notes on it; sources on paper are handy and i can highlight or underline most important pieces of information; of course i refer to the sources on paper because it’s more convenient for me and thanks that i could add my own notes to the notes on paper; i can underline some important things for example; i can write on a page of paper; i can use markers and find key words; i can easily highlight the most important informations. i can make notes underline things highlight them; i can make notes at the same time which helps me remember it better; i have my sources on paper not on screen; it’s easier way to remember things; i can change them by writing everywhere; it is more comfortable having notes on paper and reading it in bed for example; i have everything organized so i have easy access to them; i can highlight sources and make notes next to the next. i prefer the sources on paper because i can take notes on it; i can easily highlight the most important info; because i can mark a lot of different things, underline the most complementarity of reading from paper and screen… 83 important thing; it’s easier to make notes; on paper because i prefer notes which are made by myself; because i do a lot of notes and i can take them everywhere; i can underline important facts, write my thoughts; i like to write on a handouts; i borrow some books for the library; it’s easier to make notes on them + they are more reliable; on paper – i can highlight whatever i want and it is easier to focus; i can highlight the most important information; i like taking notes on paper i work on; if they are available; i’m able to take notes on paper and highlight information; paper – i study by making notes. studying effects: i tend to learn faster and more efficiently when reading a paper version of the test; i learn the most by writing on paper & reading it later; i think is easier to learn; i prefer sources on paper because it help me learn enough good; i learn easily from paper; i learn better and can focus better while looking at paper i can make notes on paper; because it is more comfortable to learn from the paper notes; it is easier for me to learn from paper, i can’t explain it. as far as paper-/screen-oriented subjects’ comments (6) are concerned, it was difficult to categorize them, which is why they are only randomly listed here: i use both paper and digital sources; it’s a habit from the past; it depends in what form i have it; only if that’s necessary; it’s hard to get it currently it’s easier to learn from the sources from the internet on screen; i prefer using sources on screen. screen-oriented subjects’ comments (4): when i study i prefer the fastest ways to find proper informations, sources; i write notes in the electronic version; i find informations on the internet; it’s easier to find any informations on computer. the most important factor which makes students choose paper refers to manipulation. the reason of their choices can be motivated by the strong inclination to avoid “haptic dissonance” and to feel familiarity with the print books and the ease of taking hand-written notes is the most salient factor in manipulation of the text. the results obtained from the screen-oriented students show that studying for them is mere information finding. the frequency of printing electronic materials the next question refers to the frequency of printing electronic materials and the reasons why the students actually did it. figure 3 presents the collected data. the results here are not univocal as paper-/screen-oriented subjects are also indicating the habit of printing the available electronic materials. the most numerous group constitute subjects who always print electronic materials, substantiating for their choices with the following arguments. agnieszka ślęzak-świat84 always: always, because i prefer to write on my notes, always. i learn better that way; always. because i can make notes; always. because i like to have paper version; always. i hate reading on computer screen; everyday; it is convenient to read and learn from paper sources; i prefer reading on paper, because it’s more comfortable for me, i can add my own annotations on paper; i always print because it is need for classes; i always print what i have to read; almost all the time because it is more comfortable for me to have things on paper; always; always because i hate reading on screen i do not do it if i do not have to; very often because i don’t like reading on screen; very often i like have copies in hand; always, because i want to make notes and i prefer reading on paper; almost always because i have to have this on my lessons; always it is the easy form to learn for me; i always print because it’s more practical. for me; almost always because i like physical contact with things; always because i prefer to have paper version; always when its obligatory; almost all the time, it’s easier; almost always, it is easier for me to focus and i do necessary notes; i print everything i can; always because i prefer reading form a paper; because i prefer reading on the paper; because i prefer reading on paper; everyday; it happens daily i believe. 0 1 24 4 35 50 33 17 100 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 never hardly ever sometimes often always [%] paper-oriented subjects paper/screen-oriented subjects screen-oriented subjects figure 3. the frequency of printing electronic materials. often: almost always, i prefer reading on paper, almost always, because i can then make notes more freely; quite often, because it’s cheaper than buying books; often, 70% i prefer reading on paper; almost always – i don’t like 0 1 24 4 35 50 33 17 100 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 never hardly ever sometimes often always [%] paper-oriented subjects paper/screen-oriented subjects screen-oriented subjects complementarity of reading from paper and screen… 85 reading in the screen; often because it is easier and more practical; i usually do, because it helps me to focus on what i’m reading; almost always, because i like to hold paper in my hand; i print it very often because it is obligatory to the uni; very often because i prefer text on a paper; very often because is more convenient; if it’s short – often; in 70% of the situation, when i had to take notes or when it’s obligatory; often to organize it better; most of all; very often. i want to have notes physically, because of no access to laptop and low memory in smartphone; very often because it’s easier for me to read from paper and more comfortable; very often, for my class; quite often, because i like collecting materials; as often as can. because i prefer to read on paper; pretty often, because it’s easier for me to read on paper. sometimes: only print material readed during classes; when i have to understand something profoundly; because i like reading on the paper; only if i have to mark some things; it depends; i print something when i need to read – always; everytime i have classes; few times in a week, because there are materials for school; i print what i have to read after classes at the university or before exams; sometimes it depends on a subject; usually i print things which are need to the university; sometimes if it’s obligatory for school; sometimes, i print it when i want to note sth on the text; i like to have it with me if i want to read it; i have to bring it to uni; before exams & when a teacher asks to do it; only if i need it for classes because of notes i’d take. hardly ever: not too often, i don’t like wasting paper on stuff i can read on screen, i don’t cause paper is expensive. never: i don’t own a printer(x3), never. the action of printing the materials required for studying is the link connecting the two media, showing that students naturally find ways of developing interaction patterns between two media in question. from these results it is clear that the major reason for printing out the electronic texts is the same subjects provided in their preferred reading interface, it is a strong need for manipulating and alternating the original layout of the text. self-perceived ability to remember the information read on screen another question refers to the ease of retrieval of the information presented electronically in which students are supposed to indicate why they think it is conducive to their retrieval of new information. the answers to the question are presented in figure 4 in high, low or no difference category. it is important to highlight that none of the paper-oriented subjects indicated that information presented on the screen was conducive to the retrieval of new information. low: i can’t focus at all, i can’t stay focused; not really, but if that would be the case, it would be only because i don’t make notes on scree; dunno, this agnieszka ślęzak-świat86 is how i am, how god created me; i don’t know; i can’t focus while reading on screen; there are other distractions that way (facebook etc.); coz i can’t make notes; i don’t know why; when i try to read on screen, i can’t remember anything; it doesn’t matter if i read sth on screen or paper; i’m easily distracted while reading on screen; i don’t like reading on screen, because it is disturbing me; because i tired after half hour; because things i read on screen stay in my mind for a short period of time; i don’t like reading on screen; because i don’t like reading on screen; sometimes i forget what i’ve been reading immediately after i’ve read it, no. because i can’t focus on the information but on fb messages, i need writing those information; my eyes are tired; i couldn’t concentrate on the text, which i read on screen; because of having only files is smartphone which has small screen; i don’t know why; i do not use e-books; the paper is more physical for me; i don’t like reading things on screen; because a lot of thing burn me; i cannot focus on screen because i always distract myself by doing some other things; i don’t know, maybe because i prefer paper; because reading on screen makes me tired quickly; because i can’t remember where i learned about sth; because i’m distracted; it’s too bright and the font’s too small; i can’t make notes and focus properly; i can’t easily focused when i have to read something on the screen; i think this method of learning is distracting; i feel tired when i spent my time in front of 0 100 0 33 0 67 100 0 0 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 high low no difference [%] paper-oriented subjects paper/screen-oriented subjects screen-oriented subjects figure 4. self-perceived ability to remember the information read on screen. high: i don’t know; yes. because i’m totally the cyber type of person who really remember info from the screen… complementarity of reading from paper and screen… 87 no difference: it doesn’t matter which material i read; no. i think it’s the same or worse; i don’t think there is a difference; i think it is a matter of feeling comfortable); no opinion; no, it’s same for me; no difference. the paper-oriented readers seem to be more strategic as they intentionally avoid distractions and attempt to provide for themselves an environment that would be most conductive for learning. they are also more aware and observant as far as their memory functioning is concerned. critical thinking skills the last set of questions regards critical skills involving understanding complex ideas, evaluating evidence, weighing alternative perspectives and constructing justifiable arguments. subjects’ preferred interface for understanding complex ideas is illustrated in figure 5. as the results show, the majority of subjects choose paper for comprehension of complex ideas, which indicates their intuitive understanding of how to use note taking, graph drawing, and highlighting possibilities, which are offered by manipulation of paper, to their best advantage. 85 67 75 2 13 33 25 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 paper paper/screen screen [%] paper-oriented subjects paper/screen-oriented subjects screen-oriented subjects figure 5. interface chosen for understanding complex ideas. as far as interface preferred for evaluating evidence, the results, which are quite surprising, are shown in figure 6. agnieszka ślęzak-świat88 75 67 75 2 0 0 23 33 25 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 paper paper/screen screen [%] paper-oriented subjects paper/screen-oriented subjects screen-oriented subjects figure 6. interface chosen for evaluating evidence. the slight decrease in paper preference by subjects who are paper-oriented can be observed in the results, the surprising answers are yielded by both paper/ screen and screen-oriented subjects, as their choices do not involve paper/screen option. this is the element that might be due to their lack of expertise in doing research and this is the element that will hopefully be developed when writing their ba and ma projects. 83 33 75 17 67 25 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 paper paper/screen screen [%] paper-oriented subjects screen-oriented subjects figure 7. interface chosen for distinguishing between facts and opinions as well as constructing justifiable arguments. complementarity of reading from paper and screen… 89 as regards assessing subjects’ preferences as far as distinguishing between facts and opinions and constructing justifiable arguments are concerned, the interface chosen is either paper or screen without the option of both. that is why only the two of them are presented in figure 7. the results in this area are polarised in that subjects either choose paper or screen, which indicates the fact that switching between links may appear difficult and attention draining. in this particular question it appears to be surprising as it can be assumed that distinguishing between facts and opinion would automatically involve the shift between available media. on the whole, it can imply the flaw of the question asked, which for further study should be divided into two questions, namely, distinguishing between facts and opinion as a separate question, and another one for constructing justifiable arguments. it is the construction of justifiable arguments that could have biased the answer to the question as paper is associated by subjects with greater reliability. it would be interesting to investigate how students’ critical thinking skills develop during the course of their tertiary education training and how their views on application of both interfaces change. conclusions and further study suggestions from the results presented above, several conclusions can be drawn. the first one does not support our initial assumption concerning the increase in paper/screen orientation of the readers caused by the rapid development of technology. on the contrary, since ramirez leyva’s (2006) study there is a 7% increase in paper preference in ours. despite the fact that our study suffers from the limitation connected with a considerably small number of subjects, we might speculate that such increase in paper preference might be due to the olfactory determinant that readers are not aware of, but subconsciously strongly attached to. there is only one subject who reported to like the smell of pages and it has not been mentioned in previous studies but deserves to be further investigated. it would also be interesting to view students preferences longitudinally and examine if they change during the course of their studies. writing ba and ma projects constitutes a powerful tool for teaching thinking skills and students will certainly benefit from accessing and utilising electronic tools available for doing research. the next conclusion that can be drawn from our study is that the instant access to any material one wishes surprisingly neither contributes to a rocketing foreign language learning results nor contributes to the development of critical thinking. on the above basis, it can also be concluded that teachers cannot take agnieszka ślęzak-świat90 for granted that students know how to function in knowledge society. that is why teachers should be aware of students’ preferred reading interface and their teaching techniques have to be based on real science, not rumour or mythology. the mere indication of the differences between e-reading and paper reading can constitute a powerful awareness raising tool. as the results show, subjects seem to have the intuitive understanding of how best to find, comprehend, and retain the text, as they start looking for data on-line and then print them out for in-depth studying, this intuitive understanding has to be reinforced by an overt digital literacy training. in addition, our findings provide insight into students’ overconfidence regarding what they really understand when they read from digital interface. as the results show, it is the screen-oriented group who makes greatest number of mistakes, especially in cases of language irregularities (that first have to be noticed to be stored), for example informations (original spelling). teaching them to be mindful in their digital reading (for instance, by writing down key words from the text and sharing them with their mates in social media) may facilitate learning, which is yet another skill that has to be overtly trained and developed. our results on the interface preference as far as the facility of remembering information are broadly consistent with the results regarding students’ preferred reading interface, again indicating strong paper orientation. what is also apparent from the results obtained is the fact that digital reading is not the sort of reading likely to nurture the critical thinking. that is why developing digital literacy skills should go hand in hand with the development of critical thinking skills. the data collected in the study clearly indicate that both paper and screen-oriented students do not use the full potential offered by reading texts in an electronic version, as for most of the critical thinking skills they chose paper interface. however, as far as basing judgement on evidence is concerned, digital texts read from the screen, no matter how distracting they may be, provide hyperlinks, which if used strategically and in a disciplined way are an indispensable tool for collecting data. with reference to the component of evaluating evidence, it is possible to assume that asking penetrating questions, which is instantaneously at students’ fingertip when using search engines, will be facilitated by a simple print out of core ideas/materials. future studies could fruitfully explore the issues of weighing alternative perspectives and constructing justifiable arguments with reference to the fact that electronic text approaches new issues, offering visual clues allowing the reader to switch between hypertext and videos. the fact is that students need to be trained in both paper and digital literacy skills, to complement and use the potential available in both interfaces. the academic performance of paper, paper/screen, and screen-oriented groups of subjects constitutes an interesting further research suggestion so as to check which of the groups uses their preferences to their complementarity of reading from paper and screen… 91 best advantage. further studies should investigate the issue of improving students digital literacy by means of developing basic computer skills in the area of electronic annotation mechanism. looking forward, further research concerning changes the reading skill undergoes will provide a sound base for the development of the congruent pattern of interaction between paper and screen interface, as they both have a great 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(2012). eye movement analysis of reading from computer displays, ereaders and printed books. ophthalmic physiol opt. 32(5), 390–396. agnieszka ślęzak-świat zur entwicklung der lesefertigkeit im 21. jahrhundert: komplementarität der papierund elektroschnittstelle z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die lesefertigkeit unterliegt eindeutigen veränderungen, weil die lesenden den zugang zu texten nicht nur in gedruckter, sondern auch in elektronischer form haben. eine der fragen, die in diesem beitrag erörtert werden, betrifft die präferenzen der lesenden in bezug auf die (papieroder elektro-)plattform, aus der sie den text lesen. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=zambarbieri d%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=22882151 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=carniglia e%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=22882151 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22882151 complementarity of reading from paper and screen… 93 die durchgeführte studie zielt darauf ab, homo legens, insbesondere studierende der englischen philologie aus dem ersten jahr, hinsichtlich ihrer präferenzen, lernweise und ihrer kritischen einstellung zu einem sowohl in gedruckter als auch in elektronischer form verfügbaren text zu bewerten. die analyse der gesammelten daten ermöglicht es eindeutig, auf den text in gedruckter form zu verweisen, die durch die überwiegende mehrheit der befragten (87%) als eine bevorzugte plattform für die übermittlung eines textes bezeichnet wird, was auch die ergebnisse der zuvor durchgeführten untersuchungen bestätigt. die beobachtung der veränderungen in der dynamik der präferenzen von texten, die in gedruckter und elektronischer form zugänglich sind, trägt zur schaffung eines optimalen interaktionsmusters dazwischen bei, wodurch auch die fähigkeit zum kritischen denken verbessert wird. die künftigen forschungen sollten sich darauf konzentrieren, wie digital literacy unter verwendung der papierschnittstelle als ausgangspunkt erfolgreich entwickelt werden kann. schlüsselwörter: literacy, lesen vom bildschirm vs. lesen von papier, notizen machen, kritisches denken, digital literacy katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia university of bielsko-biała code-switching practices among immigrant polish l2 users of english a b s t r a c t: the present paper aims to present a mixed method study on code-switching practices among l2 users immersed in the l2 culture. code-switching practices were measured among 62 polish l2 users of english who had immigrated to the uk and ireland and reported using english on an everyday basis. the informants of the study were to fill in an online questionnaire and answer an open question concerning situations in which they switch from their l2 to l1 most frequently. quantitative analysis showed that age and self-perceived l2 proficiency were both linked to the frequency of code-switching. qualitative analysis of the results revealed that the participants reported code switching mostly in emotionally charged situations as well as when discussing personal topics with known interlocutors. the results of the study are in line with some quantitative studies (dewaele, 2010) as well as some autobiographical findings (grosjean, 2010; pavlenko, 2004; wierzbicka, 2004) and shed some more light on the complex notion of bilingualism and code-switching. k e y w o r d s: code-switching, bilingualism, immersion, l2 use introduction a language is not a code for encoding pre-existent meanings. rather, it is a conceptual, experiential and emotional world. shifting from one code to another is not like shifting from one code to another to express a meaning expressible equally well in both these codes. often, the very reason why a bilingual speaker shifts from one language to another is that the meaning that they want to express ‘belongs’ to the other language. (wierzbicka, 2004, p. 102) language switching or code-switching is described as occurring most often in a bi-multilingual context (altarriba & heredia, 2008). literature reports varitheory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 2 (1) 2016, pp. 87–102 88 katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia ous types of code-switching, such as inter-sentential switching, which occurs outside the sentence or the clause level; intra-sentential switching, which occurs within a sentence or a clause; tag-switching of either a tag phase or a word, or both; or intra-word switching, which occurs within a word itself, such as at a morpheme boundary (li, 2000). li (2007, p. 15) states that it has become clear from previous research that “code-switching is not necessarily the sign of a problem, but rather the illustration of the skilled manipulation of overlapping sections of two or more grammars.” he asserts that there is “virtually no instance of ungrammatical combination of two languages in code-switching, regardless of the bilingual ability of the speaker” (li, 2007, p. 15). it is important to note that in the process of code-switching two languages do not play the same role, as one language sets the grammatical framework, whereas the other provides items to fit into that framework. therefore, it is not a simple combination of two sets of grammatical rules but the grammatical integration of one language into other (li, 2007). at the same time, li (2007) suggested that bilinguals who have different proficiency levels in their two languages or who are speaking two typologically different languages can not only engage in code-switching, but also vary it according to their needs, as there might be different reasons behind the process. one of the reasons might be the fact that “certain notions or concepts are simply better expressed in the other language … the word or expression in the other language adds a little something that is more precise than trying to find an equivalent element in the base language” (grosjean, 2010, p. 53). another reason for code-switching, according to grosjean (2010, p. 54), is to fill a linguistic need for a word/expression that requires lengthy explanations in the base language. however, he mentions that despite different reasons possibly influencing code-switching it is important to remember that it follows very strict constraints and is implemented by bilinguals who are competent in their languages (grosjean, 2010, p. 56). sociocultural studies on code-switching view it both as a method of organizing a conversational exchange and as a means of making knowledge of the wider context in which conversation takes place relevant to an ongoing interaction (nilep, 2006). according to myers-scotton (1993), each language in a multilingual community is associated with particular social roles, termed “rights-and-obligations.” by speaking a particular language, participants signal their understanding of the current situation, and particularly their role within the given context. therefore, by using more than one language, speakers may initiate negotiation over relevant social roles. nevertheless, myers-scotton (1993) assumes that speakers must share, at least to some extent, an understanding of the social meanings of each available code in order to be able to negotiate it. if no such knowledge of social norms existed, interlocutors would have no basis for understanding the significance of particular code choices (cf. nilep, 2006, p. 11). in line with myers-scotton (1993), wilson (2008) suggests that 89code-switching practices among immigrant polish l2 users of english social interaction is a performance during which we present ourselves in particular roles. she claims that the new roles adopted by foreign language users require preparation in terms of appearance and manner in order to influence the audience and that they carry a warning that the foreign language user may have doubts about their presentation of self. therefore, it might be noted that the choice of different languages to express, for example, different emotions (dewaele, 2006; wierzbicka, 2004) whether conscious or otherwise, suggests that each language enables individuals to present themselves in different ways (wilson, 2008, p. 27). heredia and altarriba (2001) claim that some words match the context “better” in the other language, such as in the case of carino, a spanish word that has a connotation of liking but does not have a single english equivalent. therefore, if two spanish-english bilinguals are speaking in english, and then use this spanish word, it provides a much richer and deeper understanding than a weakly corresponding english word (altarriba, 2003). code-switching is also claimed to be a “textualization cue” which signals parts that need to be interpreted differently from the rest of the conversation (chan, 2004, cf. altarriba & heredia, 2008). dewaele (2010) points to the fact that code-switching can signal that the speaker is reporting someone else’s speech; it can also serve to highlight particular information, indicate a change in the speaker’s role, qualify a topic or single out one person as the addressee. dewaele’s (2010) quantitative analysis reveals that self-reported code-switching is most frequent when discussing personal or emotional topics with known interlocutors (friends or colleagues) and is significantly less frequent when talking about neutral topics to strangers or to larger audiences. he suggested that this may be simply due to the fact that once the speaker knows which languages the interlocutor has mastered, information that is typically shared by friends and colleagues, the speaker may choose to resort to code-switching to establish a common multilingual identity, or to create specific illocutionary effects. dewaele (2010) also found that the topic of conversation is significantly linked to the frequency of self-reported code-switching. more specifically, the frequency of self-reported code-switching was found to be much lower when speaking about neutral topics compared to personal or emotional topics. it could be hypothesized that code-switching might not only provide enrichment to bi/multilingual communication but can also enable the speaker to express a concept or emotion that does not have an equivalent in the other language, provided the collocutors share knowledge of the same languages. in the case of communication in the l1 or l2 which does not have equivalent relevant concepts or emotions, the speaker faces difficulties in expressing thoughts or emotions in that language, as it feels distant and unemotional (ożańskaponikwia, 2013). wierzbicka (2004) reflects on such situations and describes this phenomenon from her own experience in being unable to use english, her l2, to talk about her little granddaughter: 90 katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia i just can’t find english words suitable for talking about my little granddaughter. it is not that i am not familiar with the register of english used for talking about babies but i feel that this register does not fit the emotional world to which this baby belongs for me. no doubt, one reason is that polish was my first language and that as such it is imbued with an emotional force that english doesn’t have for me. but this is not the only reason. another reason is that polish words that i could use to talk about my baby granddaughter do not have exact semantic equivalents in english and therefore feel irreplaceable. (wierzbicka, 2004, p. 100) in light of the above, wierzbicka’s reports concerning language and codeswitching are in line with heredia and altarriba’s (2001) view that words fit the context ‘better’ in the other language. similarly, fishman (1965, p. 69) reflects on language choice in different situations: not only do multilinguals frequently consider one of their languages more dialectal, more regional, more sub-standard, more vernacular-like, more argot-like than the others, but in addition, they more frequently associate one of their languages with informality, equality, or solidarity than the other. as a result, one is more likely to be reserved for certain situations than the other. equally, pavlenko (2004) describes switching into russian, her l1, to signal more intense affect, be it positive and negative. similarly, a number of studies on code-switching have established that bilinguals may code-switch to mark an affective stance. in this regard, speakers may switch to their l1 to signal intimacy or to express their emotions, and to the second language to mark distance, an out-group attitude, or to describe emotions in a detached way (dewaele, 2004; pavlenko, 2004). nevertheless, the use of l1 as the ‘intimate’ language and l2 as the language of detachment might not always be the case. dewaele (2010) states that sometimes l2 or lx can become the most emotional language, and this was the case for participants in his study who reported shifts in language preference linked to new partners or simply to the fact of having moved to a different country and, subsequently, having acculturated to the new language and culture. feedback also showed considerable variation between individuals, with cultural background playing an important role in the perception and use of emotional language. fishman (1965, p. 69) comments on the topical regulation of language choice that: certain topics are somehow handled better in one language than in another, in particular multilingual contexts. this situation might be brought about by several different but mutually reinforcing factors. thus, some multilingual speakers may “acquire the habit” of speaking about topic x in language x 91code-switching practices among immigrant polish l2 users of english partially because that it the language in which they were trained to deal with this topic, partially because they may lack the specialized terms for satisfying discussion of x in language y, partially because language y itself may currently lack as exact or as many terms for handling topic x as those currently possessed by language x, and partially because it is considered strange or inappropriate to discuss x in language y. this is later presented by wierzbicka’s (2004) and pavlenko’s (2004) selfreports of language switching, which also point to the social structure and the cultural norms of a multilingual setting and the role they might play in language switching in particular social or cultural contexts. in the light of the research presented above, it could therefore be stated that code-switching might depend on the sociocultural context of the interaction (dewaele, 2010; panayiotou, 2004), as well as the topic (altarriba & heredia, 2008; dewaele, 2010; fishman, 1965) and its emotional force (dewaele, 2010; pavlenko, 2004; wierzbicka, 2004). study design the present study is a part of a larger online survey on perception and expression of emotions by polish l2 users of english (ożańska-ponikwia, 2013). detailed description of questionnaires addressing code-switching is provided below. research questions. the present study is to address the following research questions: 1) what variables might influence code-switching among the immigrant group of polish l2 users of english? 2) what are the code-switching practices among researched polish l2 users of english who are exposed to l2 language and culture? it could be speculated that such variables as self-perceived l2 proficiency and length of stay in a foreign country might influence code-switching among polish l2 users of english. it was hypothesized that informants of the present study will report codeswitching from l2 to l1 mostly in emotionally charged situations. participants. the informants of the study were 62 polish l2 users of english. two thirds were females and one third were males. their age varied from 17 to 58 years, with two thirds of the sample being in their twenties, almost one forth being in their thirties, and the remaining 10% being in their forties 92 katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia or fifties (n = 97, mean = 29, sd = 7.9). more than half of the informants held a ba, 8% had an ma, 8% had received secondary education, and more than one quarter reported receiving vocational education (n = 97, mean = 3.4, sd = 1). as far as l2 proficiency is concerned: 1% reported beginner level, 3% rated themselves as pre-intermediate, 15% as intermediate, one third as upper-intermediate, and nearly half as fluent (n = 95, mean = 4.2, sd = 0.89). half of the participants had lived in the uk and ireland for up to 12 months, one quarter reported living there from 12 to 24 months, and the remaining 23% had lived in the uk and ireland between 24 and 324 months (n = 97, mean = 25.7, sd = 47). selection and recruitment. the aim of the present study was to find a heterogeneous group of informants that would fulfill the requirement of immigrating to the uk or ireland and using l2 on an everyday basis. it is important to mention that the focus of the study was on the exposure to foreign language and culture, rather than on command of the l2, even if they are closely related. another aim, as mentioned by ożańska-ponikwia (2012; 2013) when approaching particular groups of participants there was an attempt to capture the responses of a broader group than only ‘young adults enrolled in the universities where the researchers work’ (dewaele, 2005, p. 370), who are likely to represent a narrower range of ages, ability, and linguistic background (wilson, 2008, p. 115). consequently, a snowball sampling procedure was used. for this reason, volunteers were recruited in different ways including advertising the questionnaire on various conferences, on the linguist lists and through polish societies in both the uk and ireland. procedure and data gathering. the informants of the study were to fill in an online questionnaire on perception and expression of emotions in the l1 and l2. however, for the purpose of this discussion only the analysis of participants’ self-reports concerning code-switching practices will be presented. instruments. two instruments were used: a personal background questionnaire and questions concerning code-switching practices. below detailed presentation of both instruments is presented. personal background questionnaire. the personal background questionnaire comprised ten questions that allowed the researcher to gather the data concerning age, gender, self-perceived l2 proficiency, length of stay in an english-speaking country (lgs), and educational level. in addition to the variables described above, it also elicited data on participants’ self-perceived command of other foreign languages but only 6% of the sample reported some basic command of such languages as russian, french or spanish. 93code-switching practices among immigrant polish l2 users of english questions concerning code-switching. the questionnaire contained two items designed to provide a detailed insight into the process of code-switching practices among bilinguals and l2 users of english. the first question was “do you ever change the language of the conversation from english (l2) into polish (l1)?” this question was scored on a 5-point likert scale requiring participants to choose between 1—not at all, 2—occasionally, 3—sometimes, 4—often, or 5—very often. after choosing one of these five options, the respondents were presented with an open clarification question: “in what situations do you change the language of the conversation from the l2 to l1?” both questions were presented in participants’ l2. data analysis quantitative data analysis. all participants of the study (n = 62) answered the question “do you ever change the language of the conversation from english (l2) to polish (l1)?” marked on the five-point likert scale from 1—not at all to 5—very often. 15% of the respondents claimed to never change the language of the conversation from l2 to l1, 30% reported doing so occasionally, almost one quarter admitted to switching language sometimes, and the remaining 31% selected the options ‘often’ (11.4%) or ‘very often’ (20%). in order to analyze these results in a more detailed statistical manner a correlation analysis was introduced. it showed that frequency of the code-switching was related only to age (r = 0.216, p < 0.05) and self-perceived l2 proficiency (r = –0.233, p < 0.05). that could suggest that self-reported code-switching takes place mostly among younger participants with lower self-perceived l2 proficiency. it was interesting to see that the length of stay in a foreign countr was not a significant factor in this correlation. nevertheless, another statistical analysis revealed that it was correlated with self-perceived l2 proficiency (r = 0.213, p < 0.05), which could suggest that it influences the process in a non-direct way, and that the interplay between the measured variables is quite complex and nuanced. qualitative data analysis. a majority of the researched sample (n = 54) provided answers to the open question: “in what situations do you change the language of the conversation from l2 to l1?” which were analyzed qualitatively with the use of inductive category development (mayring, 2001). the criterion of definition was derived from the theoretical background and research question. following this criterion the material was worked through and categories were deduced. later these categories were revised and reduced to main categories and analyzed in terms of frequencies. detailed data analysis is presented below. 94 katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia as a result of the content analysis four sub-groups of answers emerged: 1—known interlocutors, 2—emotions, 3—inability to translate into l2, 4—inner speech. a detailed description of the frequency of occurrence of each sub-group of answers is presented in table 1. table 1 answers to the question “in what situations do you change the language from l2 to l1?” categories frequency % known interlocutors 31 57.4 emotions 16 29.6 inability to translate 5 9.3 inner speech 2 3.7 total 54 100.0 as can be seen in the table, participants reported changing the language of conversation from l2 to l1 most frequently in the presence of known interlocutors, with 57% of all answers. the second biggest reported sub-group was emotions (30%). meanwhile, the remaining 13% of answers were distributed between two categories of inability to translate into l2 (10%) and inner speech (3%). examples of participants’ answers are presented below. language switch from l2 to l1—detailed presentation of findings. all responses to the code-switching question were carefully analyzed and categorized into four sub-groups. a detailed analysis of the qualitative data from all these categories is presented below. presence of known interlocutors. the majority of statements concerning language change from l2 to l1 (57%) referred to the presence of known interlocutors. informants reported that they would change the language of the conversation in order to clarify, translate or explain something in the l1. when i can see that my friends don’t get what’s going on i often switch to polish to explain or translate. it’s quicker this way. (male, 24, secondary education, lgs 64 months) my husband is polish and his english is good but he often interrupts while code-switching to polish and asks for clarification. i didn’t feel it’s right among our english friends so asked him to explain in english that he doesn’t understand and wants me to translate. even if i switch to polish from time 95code-switching practices among immigrant polish l2 users of english to time i feel that when everyone knows why, it’s acceptable. (female, 34, ma, lgs 45 months). when i see that someone has problems with english in everyday situations i often translate or explain in polish. it happens very often not only with strangers but with my polish friends as well. (male, 22, secondary education, lgs 24 months) it’s funny; i live in ireland and have an irish partner but use polish at work with my colleagues all the time. (male, 25, ba, lgs 34 months) from the examples presented above, it could be concluded that language switch situations occur because of a vocabulary deficiency or low l2 proficiency. it is interesting that some informants consider it wrong frequently to use one’s l1 in the presence of the l2 speakers who do not understand given the language. this would suggest that adhering to social rules is very important; if these are violated, this needs to be explained to and approved by the l2 speakers. emotions. thirty percent of answers concerning language switch from l2 to l1 report that it occurred in the context of expressing positive and negative emotions and enjoyment: when i want to express what i feel i find it impossible to use english. when i really want to say how i feel i need to use polish. (male, 25, ba, lgs 24 months) i know english, and i know how to express what i feel in english; however, it’s just not what i feel and i need to use polish. my partner tries to understand my polish emotions, but since he is english, he finds it a bit difficult. well, how can you understand something you have never experienced? (female, 30, ba, lgs 64 months) expressing emotions in english is possible, but when you really want to let other people know what’s going on only polish words seem to be right. i hate translating my emotions into english as it seems that i feel something totally different. (female, 28, ba, lgs 50 months) my partner is english but i prefer to say ‘kocham cię’ instead of ‘i love you’. he was even joking that when i said ‘tak’ instead of ‘yes’ when he was proposing that meant way more than ‘yes’. he got used to my polish way of expressing affection. (female, 32, ma, lgs 76 months) for most of the time at home or at work i operate in english but even so i use polish in everyday situations in order not to be understood. sometimes 96 katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia when i’m arguing with my partner i start to use polish to tell him what i think of him. it’s safe as i’m not hurting his feelings and at the same time venting my anger. (female, 23, ba, lgs 43 months) sometimes i switch to polish to express my anger/frustration. i prefer not to be understood so i do that in polish. (female, 22, secondary education, lgs 28 months) at work i find myself changing to polish as no one understands. (male, 24, secondary education, lgs 32 months) these observations indicated that expressing emotions in the l2 seems to be a difficult task. participants claimed that they cannot fully express themselves in the l2 as they lack specific concepts in english that could correspond with polish emotion words. however, foreign language proficiency is not the main factor as the majority of informants considered themselves fully fluent in the second language. it could therefore be speculated that some emotions and emotion words are specific to a given language and that expressing them by means of another language is not always possible, or that it changes the meaning of the emotion. some participants also use their l1 for venting negative emotions or expressing their true feelings without hurting someone else’s feelings. it could be suggested that living with two languages, which are so distant in terms of expressing emotions, results in a compromise between the two social scripts: the english script that avoids hurting someone else’s feelings and being considerate and thoughtful, and the polish one which avoids controlling and suppressing emotions. some informants claimed to switch to l1 when expressing their enjoyment: sometimes when i’m having fun i switch to polish it just seems more natural. (female, 30, ma, lgs 43 months) i can’t imagine watching a football match and reacting and commenting in english. it’s unnatural. it’s the same when i have fun with my friends, doesn’t matter whether polish or english, all the exclamations are in polish. i can’t control it as controlling it ruins the fun. being natural is being polish. (male, 45, ma, lgs 87 months) my friends even learned all little exclamations of joy and fun! they know that i really have fun when i switch to polish. (female, 28, ba, lgs 48 months) these observations might suggest that at moments of enjoyment, such as while watching a football match, informants feel it is inappropriate to use l2, as they do not feel comfortable with it. they feel more at ease expressing the 97code-switching practices among immigrant polish l2 users of english joy of the moment in their l1. it could also be speculated that strong positive states are encoded in the l1 and thus participants find it impossible to fully enjoy themselves without being able to express that in the l1. inability to translate into l2. almost 10% of responses were categorized as inability to translate into l2. most of informants in this group reported shifting to l1 due to a lack of appropriate vocabulary that they could use in their l2: i often change to polish when there’s no word that would mean the same in english. there are many such words staring from food (national cuisine) and ending on expressing emotions. i find it better to use a polish word than to use a translation because it feels kinda right. i know that it might not be appropriate but what can you do? you either express it in polish or not express it at all. i prefer the first option. (female, 27, ba, lgs 34 months) i know english well but sometimes i lack the professional vocabulary that i know in polish but not in english and need to use polish equivalent. well, it’s easier to use l1 as i know exactly what i am to do and i feel more self-confident. (male, 24, ba, 24 months) this might suggest that for some informants it is impossible to find l1 equivalent in the l2. in such situations they opt for l1 in order to express themselves, even though it might be socially inappropriate. inner speech. it is interesting to note that some informants responded to the question “in what situations do you change the language of the conversation from l2 to l1?” by understanding change in self-directed speech as an instance of departure/shift from l2: i have quite good english and i’m studying in england but even if i talk fluently in english i talk to myself in polish as if all the mental processes were conducted solely in polish. when i do simple counting out loud i always do that in english; however, when i have to do some serious calculations i’m unable to do that in english and i always use polish, even if i am to do it out loud. it seems that my brain is not able to perform any more complicated tasks when ‘receiving instructions’ in english. (female, 29, ba, lgs 34 months) some reports state that using l1 in the act of talking to oneself is treated as shifting from the l2 but, on the other hand, some participants claim to be unable to use l2 for inner speech. it is interesting to note that some informants were very self-aware and able to notice such subtle changes as changes in their 98 katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia inner speech while performing mental processes. this would suggest that living in the non-native country implements l2 as the language one would use to talk to oneself. departure from this language choice, even in mental processes, is regarded as an instance of language switch from the l2 to l1. discussion our first research hypothesis stating that self-perceived l2 proficiency and length of stay in the uk and ireland might influence code-switching among polish l2 users of english was only partially confirmed. quantitative data analysis showed that both age and self-perceived l2 proficiency correlated with the frequency of code-switching reported by informants of this study. it could be noticed that younger and less proficient l2 users tend to code-switch more often than their older and more proficient colleagues. another important finding was that the exposure to a foreign language and immersion in its culture was not directly linked to code-switching. it influenced self-perceived l2 proficiency, which was shown to be one of the variables correlating with the frequency of code-switching, but no direct influence of the length of exposure to a second language code-switching was found. qualitative data analysis was included as it is believed that incorporation of participants’ views and insights might shed some new light on the interplay of language, culture, and emotions (dewaele, 2008; pavlenko, 2008). the research hypothesis was partly confirmed as the informants reported code-switching from l2 to l1 in emotionally charged situations, but at the same time also pointed to a number of other situations in which they most typically code-switch from l2 to l1. among such situations were: the presence of known interlocutors, inner speech, and not being able to find an appropriate translation in the l2. however, 30% of informants pointed out that code-switching from l2 to l1 occurs most often in emotionally charged situations. it could be noted that from their perspective some emotions are untranslatable; secondly, it doesn’t ‘feel right’ to use l2 in some situations (as switching to l1 conveys more emotional intensity, be it positive or negative); and thirdly, in some instances l1 is used in order to vent emotions and avoid hurting someone else’s feelings. these findings support those of dewaele (2010) and grosjean (2001). dewaele states: i have argued that a highly emotionally aroused speaker might become more self-centered and momentarily diverge from the shared language. grosjean (personal communication) suggests that the complementarity principle could also explain, in part, which language is used when expressing emotions (i.e. 99code-switching practices among immigrant polish l2 users of english does the bilingual have the vocabulary needed to do so in the “wrong” language?). he thinks that a lack of vocabulary may force bilinguals to revert to the other language when expressing their emotions. it is also possible that the emotion vocabulary is present in both languages, but that the speaker may be aware of the nonequivalence of emotion concepts in both languages. a realization that the emotion concepts in the weaker language may be incomplete (pavlenko, 2008a), combined with possible gaps in the prototypical scripts, may push the speaker to switch to the language in which emotion concepts are more complete, where the emotionality and valence of an emotion word—or an emotion-laden word—are known and where they will have the intended illocutionary effects (dewaele, 2008b; 2008c). this would explain why many participants said that their stronger language felt more appropriate to convey a strong emotion in. (dewaele, 2010, p. 210) it can be speculated that in the present study, living with two languages which have such distant norms in terms of the expression of emotions, resulted in a compromise between the two social scripts for expressing emotions; the english one which avoids hurting someone else’s feelings for being considerate and thoughtful, and the polish one which avoids controlling and suppressing emotions (hoffman 1998; wierzbicka, 1999). results of this study showed that informants reported code-switching most often in the presence of known interlocutors and while expressing emotions. the quantitative analysis of a similar code-switching study by dewaele (2010) revealed that self-reported code-switching was most frequent when talking about personal or emotional topics with known interlocutors (friends or colleagues) and was significantly less frequent when talking about neutral topics to strangers or to larger audiences. dewaele (2010) suggested that the reasons for this might be quite simple. once the speaker knows which languages the interlocutor understands—information that is typically shared by friends and colleagues—the speaker may choose to resort to code-switching to establish a common multilingual identity, or to create specific illocutionary effects. the analysis of the narratives confirmed the general trends uncovered in the quantitative analyses, while adding rich information concerning the reasons for code-switching and self-perceived difficulties in expression of emotions in the l2. the qualitative data analysis showed that self-reported code-switching from l2 to l1 was more frequent in the context of a discussion of emotional topics with interlocutors who shared the knowledge of both l1 and l2 with respondents. dewaele (2010) additionally states that the typical preference for the l1 for communication of emotion can enter into conflict with the need to maintain the dialogue in the l2 because the interlocutor might not share the speaker’s l1. such instances were also noted in the narratives of the informants of the current study. one participant reported expressing love in the l1 even if the partner does not share 100 katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia the knowledge of that language. she comments that her partner knows what she means and that it is more emotional and important for her to express it in her l1. this is reminiscent of pavlenko’s (2004) comments concerning her own experiences of code-switching between russian and english. she states that switching to russian, her l1, would imply that she is serious about the things she’s discussing. dewaele (2010) notes that strong emotional arousal might either activate a background language or wreck its inhibition, thus allowing the background language to temporarily become the output language. this instance of code-switching would thus be non-strategic and probably uncontrolled. it therefore seems that strong emotions can disturb the balance of the language modes, leading to increased code-switching (dewaele, 2010) especially from l2 to l1. dewaele (2010) further suggests that a multitude of situational and pragmatic variables can be linked to code-switching and that additional factors may become relevant, such as the perceived emotional strength of words and expressions in the different languages, the degree of emotionality of the topic under discussion, and the amount of control that the speaker retains over language choice. the analysis of informants’ narratives concerning difficulties in expressing emotions in the l2 led to the conclusion that the greatest difficulties are faced while expressing negative emotions in stressful situations. in this regard, dewaele (2010) suggests that: a highly socialized lx user may be perfectly capable of communicating emotions in an lx, feeling both competent and confident in using it, but it takes years before the positive language characteristics and emotional strength of swearwords in the lx will equal those of the l1. participants confirmed that it is often only after decades of living in an lx environment that they dared to use some of the swearwords in that language, and even then only the mild ones. feedback also showed considerable variation between individuals, with cultural background playing an important role in the perception and use of emotional language. (dewaele, 2010, p. 218) conclusions the present study shows that the relationship between language and culture is very complex and nuanced with different variables influencing various aspects of code-switching. quantitative analysis of the present study shows that frequency of code-switching researched among polish l2 users of english was related to such variables as age and self-perceived l2 proficiency. at the same time, qualitative data analysis presents some interesting insights into the 101code-switching practices among immigrant polish l2 users of english process, showing that a qualitative approach and focusing on the respondents’ perspective might also provide some useful data that could explain the reasons behind code-switching practices of polish immigrants to the uk and ireland and shed some more light on this complex process. references altarriba, j. 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(2006). expressing anger in multiple languages. in a. pavlenko (ed.), bilingual minds: emotional experience, expression and representation (pp. 118–151). clevedon: multilingual matters ltd. dewaele, j.-m. (2008). dynamic emotion concepts of l2 learners and l2 users: a second language acquisition perspective. bilingualism: language and cognition, 11, 173–175. dewaele, j.-m. (2010). emotions in multiple languages. basingstoke: palgrave-macmillan. fishman, j. a. (1965). who speaks what to whom and when? la linguistique, 2, 67–88. grosjean, f. (2001). the bilingual’s language modes. in j. nicol (ed.), one mind, two languages: bilingual language processing (pp. 1–22). oxford: blackwell. grosjean, f. (2010). bilingual: life and reality. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. heredia, r. & altarriba, j. (2001). bilingual language mixing: why do bilinguals code-switch? current directions in psychological science, 10, 164–168. hoffman, e. (1998). lost in translation: a life in a new language. vintage: london. li, wei. (ed.) (2000). the bilingualism reader. london: routledge. li, wei. (ed.) (2007). the bilingualism reader. (2nd ed.). london: routledge. mayring, p. (2001). combination and integration of qualitative and quantitative analysis. forum: qualitative social research, 2 (1), art. 20. accessed may 2012. retrieved from http://www. qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/1-01/1-01mayring-d.htm. myers-scotton, c. (1993). social motivations for code-switching: evidence from africa. oxford: clarendon press. nilep, ch. (2006). ‘code switching’ in sociocultural linguistics. colorado research in linguistics, 19, 1–22. ożańska-ponikwia, k. (2012). what has personality and emotional intelligence to do with ‘feeling different’ while using a foreign language? international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism, 15 (2), 217– 234. 102 katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia ożańska-ponikwia, k. (2013). emotions from a bilingual point of view. personality and emotional intelligence in relation to perception and expression of emotions in the l1 and l2. newcastle: cambridge scholars publishing. panayiotou, a. (2004). switching codes, switching code: bilinguals’ emotional responses in english and greek. journal of multilingual and multicultural development, 25(2 & 3), 124–139. pavlenko, a. (2004). stop doing that, ia komu skazala!: emotions and language choice in bilingual families. journal of multilingual and multicultural development, 25 (1, 2/3), 179–203. pavlenko, a. (2008). emotion and emotion-laden words in the bilingual lexicon. keynote article. bilingualism: language and cognition, 11 (2), 147–164. wierzbicka, a. (1999). emotions across languages and cultures: diversity and universals. cambridge: cambridge university press. wierzbicka, a. (2004). bilingual lives, bilingual experience. journal of multilingual and multicultural development, 25 (2 & 3), 94–104. (preface to the special edition on “bilingualism and emotions” edited by jean-marc dewaele and aneta pavlenko). wilson, r. j. (2008). ‘another language is another soul’: individual differences in the presentation of self in a foreign language. unpublished doctorial dissertation. birkbeck college, university of london. katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia der sprachcodewechsel bei den englisch sprechenden polnischen immigranten z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g der vorliegende beitrag bezweckt, die ergebnisse der forschungen über den sprachcodewechsel (code-switching) bei den eine fremdsprache sprechenden darzustellen. die mit code-switching verbundene verhaltensweise wurde in einer gruppe von 62 in großbritannien und irland lebenden und alltags englisch sprechenden polen untersucht. die befragten sollten im internet einen fragebogen ausfüllen und offene frage beantworten, in welcher situation sie während der konversation am häufigsten die sprache vom englischen ins polnische wechseln. die mengendatenauswertung zeigte auf, dass das alter und die gewandtheit des fremdsprachengebrauchs die frequenz des sprachcodewechsels stark beeinflussten. die qualitative auswertung dagegen ließ erkennen, dass die befragten die sprache besonders in den durch emotionen gekennzeichneten situationen oder in den mit gut bekannten personen geführten gesprächen über private sachen wechseln. die hier angeführten ergebnisse decken sich mit früheren mengenauswertungen von code-switching (dwaele, 2010), als auch mit quantitativer analyse (grosjen, 2010; pavlenko, 2004; wierzbicka, 2004). theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 5 (2) 2019, pp. 95–113 10.31261/tapsla.7658 maría begoña ruiz cordero university of castilla-la mancha, spain assessing english writing skills of students from bilingual and non-bilingual schools in castilla-la mancha, spain a comparative study a b s t r a c t the teaching of foreign languages and the use of clil (content and language integrated learning) methodology is hugely popular in spain nowadays. many families are interested in this type of academic training because they are convinced the academic results are positive, but the question is whether it is in fact the case that foreign language level increases. the aim of this study was to analyse the different level of english writing skills of 4th grade students from both compulsory bilingual and non-bilingual secondary schools in castilla-la mancha (spain). from the results of the study, we were able to examine whether bilingual programs help students improve their english writing skills as well as to compare the results obtained by bilingual schools in castilla-la mancha with those developed in other spanish, or even european, regions. keywords: bilingual teaching, effectiveness, writing skill, compulsory secondary education introduction most bilingual programmes follow a clil (content and language integrated learning) methodology nowadays. the interest and credibility of this educational approach, well justified by mohan in 1986, have increased over the last few years due to its usefulness as a means of learning another language in a natural way. the establishment of subjects taught in a foreign language through this methodology, focused more on the subject content learning than on language learning itself, is spreading increasingly throughout spain. several scientists https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5800-1765 http://doi.org10.31261/tapsla.7772 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en maría begoña ruiz cordero96 such as mehisto, marsh, and frigols (2008), coyle, hood, and marsh (2010), and marsh (2013), highlight the innovative power of this approach, even though its effectiveness varies depending on the context in which it is being developed. there are numerous studies on the assessment of the use of clil methodology in the acquisition of foreign language communicative competence. most of them show beneficial results (lasagabaster & ruiz de zarobe, 2010; jiménez catalán & ruiz de zarobe, 2009; villarreal & garcía mayo, 2009; gallardo del puerto et al. 2009; san isidro, 2010; hughes & madrid, 2011). also, they revealed that bilingual programmes can help students raise their foreign language knowledge level. nevertheless, do 4th grade compulsory secondary education students who attend bilingual programme state schools in the autonomous community of castilla-la mancha get better results in the assessment of their english language writing skill than those who attend non-bilingual programme state schools? our research focused on answering this question. throughout this paper several ideas have been discussed, namely, the first section introduces the origin of bilingual programmes in castilla-la mancha and presents the nature of the research. it explains the type of students involved, the tasks those students had to perform, and the place where these tasks were performed. the second section presents and analyses the results obtained in the test. the next section provides the comparison of the data with other spanish and european regions where similar research has been developed. finally, conclusions of our study regarding students’ writing skills have been presented. theoretical background bilingual teaching in castilla-la mancha started in 1996 with the intro duction of the british council-mec project in seven pre-school and primary education schools in addition to seven secondary education schools. the autonomous community established its own bilingual teaching programme (order 07/02/2005) with the creation of 36 “european sections” in 2005. this initiative coincided with the beginning of other bilingual programmes in monolingual spanish regions, such as madrid, extremadura, and andalucía, which started to develop their own bilingual programmes the same year (nieto moreno de diezmas & ruiz cordero, 2018). the last of these regions, for example, introduced a plurilingual development program through the order boja 05/04/2005. afterwards, the regulation of bilingual teaching was modified in 2014 through the order 16/06/2014. subsequently, the “european sections” were called “linguistic programmes.” this regulation, which still applies, establishes three types of linguistic programmes: (1) introduction programmes, in which the assessing english writing skills of students from bilingual and non-bilingual… 97 content subject is taught completely in the foreign language; (2) development programmes, in which only two content subjects are taught in a foreign language; (3) excellence programmes, in which three content subjects are taught in the foreign language and at least one of the teachers must show proof of a c1 language level according to the european framework. however, the new decree 47/2017 became effective in the school year 2018/2019. its aim is the implementation of a unique programme through which pre-schools and primary schools can teach content subjects using the foreign language they determine. the amount of time they have to do so is no less than 200 minutes in each of the levels of pre-primary education grades, and between 25% and 50% of the daily schedule in each of the primary education grades. the amount of time devoted to this way of teaching in secondary school varies from 30% to 50% of the daily schedule. additionally, this law applies in high schools and in basic professional training (medium and higher level grades), where the amount of time allotted to learning content subjects in the chosen language of the school varies from 20% to 50% of the total daily schedule in each of the grades. the number of bilingual schools has increased since the commencement of bilingual programmes. cur rently, the goal of the above-mentioned new rule is to incorporate bilingual teaching in all non-university grades in castilla-la mancha. in fact, castilla-la mancha had 599 linguistic programmes established in 520 primary and secondary schools in the school year 2017/2018. these linguistic programmes are distributed among the five regions that make up the autonomous community and are as follows: toledo, with the highest number of linguistic programmes, followed by ciudad real, albacete, cuenca, and guadalajara. the foreign language most frequently used in the bilingual teaching programmes in castilla-la mancha is english. out of the 599 linguistic programmes in the school year 2017/2018, 562 programmes were conducted in english, 34 programmes in french, one programme in italian, and two programmes in german (figure 1). figure 1. percentage of linguistic programme languages in castilla-la mancha in the 2017/2018 school year. source: author’s own elaboration. english 93.8 %; 562; 94% french 5.6%; 34; 6% german 0.3%; 2; 0% italian 0.1%; 1; 0% english 93.8 % french 5.6% german 0.3% italian 0.1% maría begoña ruiz cordero98 study methodology the present study intended to test and compare the level of english writing skills of 4th grade students of compulsory secondary education state schools (hereafter as cse) with and without linguistic programmes in castilla-la mancha (spain). once the main objective of this paper was defined, the following research questions were addressed: 1. is the level of english writing skills of compulsory bilingual secondary schools students higher than the one of those attending non-bilingual secondary schools in castilla-la mancha (spain)? 2. do the bilingual programs help students improve their english writing skills? 3. are the results obtained in castilla-la mancha (spain) similar to those developed in other spanish and european regions? to carry out the study a few interesting methodology ideas have been explained. first of all, the characteristics of the participants taking part in this study have been outlined. secondly, we focus on the way in which the schools these students attend have been chosen. next, a description of the instrument (the writing test the students in 4th grade cse take, from both bilingual and non-bilingual schools, as well as the assessment criteria adopted to reach these results) has been provided. with the information obtained from this analysis, we were able to answer the research questions. participants two hundred and one 4th grade cse 15and 16-year-old students took part in this test. seventy-three of them receive bilingual tuition in secondary education schools, whereas 128 attend non-bilingual secondary education schools. the students’ cultural and socioeconomic levels vary, regardless of the fact whether they come from rural or urban areas. the students were asked to complete a writing test (see section instruments). they belong to eight different secondary education state schools in the auto nomous community of castilla-la mancha. four of the secondary schools have bilingual linguistic programmes and the remaining four do not. bearing in mind that the students attend schools that offer different linguistic programmes, we were able to test the different foreign language writing skill levels of the two groups of students. all the participants were tested anonymously, as they provided their class number only, and, what is more, they were unaware that the tests would be used for research. they thought it was just assessing english writing skills of students from bilingual and non-bilingual… 99 to know their english level. as a result, the test was completed in a relaxed, non-pressurised manner. as far as the tested students’ previously acquired english language knowledge is concerned, it must be highlighted that all the students attending bilingual programme secondary education schools come from primary education schools with bilingual systems operating from, at least, 3rd grade primary education. therefore, these students are considered “bilingual” as for eight years their language of instruction was english and, in fact, they had three times more english than their counterparts in non-bilingual programme schools. this implies that, apart from the subject of english language, the bilingual programme school students have attended, at least, two other content subjects where english is the medium of instruction through a clil methodology. according to some of the students’ teachers, many of these students also attend private english lessons outside school. in contrast, such private english tuition after school for those students attending non-bilingual schools is minimal, even though it is important to mention that most students have access to resources at home, such as the internet, allowing them constant contact with english. these data were supplied by teachers from the schools partaking in this research. secondary schools some students from eight high schools were chosen randomly to be tested on english language writing skills in castilla-la mancha. the schools’ participation in this project has been voluntary. therefore, it is a randomized sample in which four bilingual schools decided to participate in the study. the four high schools concerned were matched to other non-bilingual high schools with similar features (depending on the type of students, sociocultural level, rural or non-rural area, size and proximity to the schools). instruments the instrument used has been a writing test. the writing test was designed to test the level of the writing skill of a few students in 4th grade cse from castilla-la mancha. the level of the assignment was that of pet (preliminary english test), which is equivalent to an intermediate level of english language. the test, which can be seen in annex i, is consistent with the b1 level of the cefr (common european framework of reference) as shown in table 1. we asked for help with the “english language assessment” for the completion of this test in the school year 2017/2018 with the aim of making the data collection as objective as possible. this is the linguistic assessment supplier maría begoña ruiz cordero100 ta bl e 1 c am br id ge l an gu ag e a ss es sm en t te st s an d th ei r co rr es po nd in g c e f r l ev el s assessing english writing skills of students from bilingual and non-bilingual… 101 that relies on the biggest research team exclusively devoted to the development and control of the quality of their tests. in table 1, which is seen as follows, both the tests developed by this institution and their level according to the cefr can be seen. the test the students took included three activities: – the first activity (annex 1: writing. part 1). the student has to rewrite a sentence using the word provided. – the second activity (annex 1: writing. part 2). students are asked to write a postcard to their friend sam, with whom they have just spent a few days, telling him how the trip back home was, what they enjoyed the most from their time together and inviting him to visit them. the length of words can be between 35 and 45 words. the third activity (annex 1: writing. part 3). the students must choose one of the two topics. these topics were: answering a friend’s letter you have received in which he or she asks you for help writing about a special day people celebrate in your country, and/or writing a story in the past tense starting with “jo looked at the map and decided to go left.” the length of words must be around 100. the examinees had an hour to complete the three activities, and they could get up to five points for each one. therefore, the maximum score they could get in this writing category was a total of 15 points. next, the criteria used to assess the writing activities have been listed in table 2. table 2 assessment criteria used to grade the writing activities assessment criteria (each activity) criteria mark relevant content 5 points maximum communicative 5 points maximum organization and use of linking words 5 points maximum language: correct use of vocabulary and grammar 5 points maximum the total mark for each of the writing activities adds up to 20 points. these 20 points are reduced to their equivalent to a maximum of 5 points for each writing activity. it could be argued that this cambridge assessment test does not show the writing skill knowledge level of either bilingual or non-bilingual school students, either because they have not been trained to complete it or because the test has not been designed according to the clil methodology. nevertheless, this statement is not applicable in either of the students’ groups because all the learners are required to improve their writing skill through writing activimaría begoña ruiz cordero102 ties in compulsory secondary education as is stated in their foreign language learning study programme, no matter whether they attend bilingual or nonbilingual schools. this means that all the students should be trained for this type of writing test. results once the 201 tests with each of their three writing activities (see annex i) were finished and checked according the assessment criteria mentioned above, the english language writing skills results for the bilingual and non-bilingual school students in castilla-la mancha were determined. the number of writing activities that meet the established criteria and, at the same time, the average mark of students who exceed these criteria in bilingual and non-bilingual schools are detailed in table 3. table 3 writing activity assessment criteria results writing activity results type of school / writing criteria relevant contents communicative organization and use of linking words language: vocabulary and grammar bilingual 1 23 students 9 10 5 6 bilingual 2 23 students 22 22 15 12 bilingual 3 17 students 4 5 3 2 bilingual 4 10 students 6 7 2 2 average 56.16% 60.27% 34.24% 30.13% non-bilingual 1 41 students 6 12 5 5 non-bilingual 2 28 students 6 8 4 4 non-bilingual 3 37 students 5 6 4 4 non-bilingual 4 22 students 16 19 7 7 average 25.78% 35.15% 15.62% 15.62% assessing english writing skills of students from bilingual and non-bilingual… 103 looking at table 3 carefully, it is clear that there was a higher number of writing activities done by students who come from bilingual schools. these english language writing activities showed more relevant content, higher communicative achievement, better organization, more correct usage of linking words and more varied and accurate vocabulary and english grammar. this can be seen, for example, in the bilingual students’ use of the passive voice and conditional sentences. accordingly, 56.16% of bilingual school students were able to create english language writing activities with relevant content versus 25.78% among non-bilingual school students. as far as communicative achievement is concerned, it is evident that the results obtained are high among both bilingual and non-bilingual students. however, the results are higher in the bilingual school students’ activities (60.27% bilingual school students versus 35.15% nonbilingual school students). with reference to organization and the use of linking words and language, that is, english vocabulary and grammar criteria, the results obtained are low in both types of schools. notwithstanding, the bilingual school students english language writing activities were better organized and had a greater command of english vocabulary and grammar than those done by non-bilingual school students. the most remarkable difference, according to the criteria related to organization and use of english, was that a very low number of non-bilingual school students used linking words correctly. moreover, most non-bilingual school students’ organization was poor, as a substantial number of them (73%) wrote only a few sentences without any connections. the different results can be seen in figure 2, which also helps confirm that the bilingual school students’ writing activity levels in castilla-la mancha surpass those of non-bilingual school students’ levels from the same region in all the assessed criteria. ’ 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 relevant contents communicativeness organisation and linking words vocabulary and grammar bilingual school students non-bilingual school students figure 2. bilingual and non-bilingual school students’ writing activity comparison. maría begoña ruiz cordero104 once the results were assessed and bearing in mind the assessment criteria used, we were able to ascertain the final mark of the english language writing activity each of the assessed schools obtained. students in a bilingual school got an average mark of 51.7 points out of 100 points, whereas nonbilingual school students’ average mark was 37.4 points out of 100, as can be seen in table 4. even though the bilingual school students’ mark is not very high (51.7 out of 100 points), it can be seen that the difference between them is 14.3 points. this information is very important since it implies a substantial difference between bilingual and non-bilingual school students. this is explained later. table 4 writing activities final marks type of school writing skill bilingual 1 47.5 bilingual 2 74.5 bilingual 3 36.2 bilingual 4 48.6 total 51.7 non-bilingual 1 35.3 non-bilingual 2 24.4 non-bilingual 3 24.3 non-bilingual 4 65.9 total 37.4 as the results obtained by the bilingual school students were not very high (51.7 points out of 100 points), we decided to make a comparison of the average marks and the median (the value representing the central position of an organized list of data). to do so, we need to calculate the standard deviation (sd) which is shown in table 5. as we can see, both results are similar (2.73011 and 2.77870), which indicates that the results are equally distributed among the average marks. after analysing average and medians, and with the goal of checking whether our study obtained data are significant or not, we went on to study the results the students achieved through the spss statistical test in order to compare all the average marks of all groups, bilingual or otherwise. the tool used to carry out this study was the independent sample t-student with the average marks which the bilingual and non-bilingual school students achieved in their english assessing english writing skills of students from bilingual and non-bilingual… 105 table 5 average, medians and standard deviation table (n is the number of bilingual and non-bilingual school students) type of school writing bilingual average 5.3741 n 73 sd 2.73011 median 5.5000 non-bilingual average 3.5266 n 128 sd 2.77870 median 3.2500 writing skills activities. table 6 shows that the comparison of the average marks obtained reveals that bilingual school students get results 1.8 points higher than the average marks achieved by the non-bilingual school students, whose p = 0.05. the significance, or level of certainty we show in our statement, is provided by the p-value. in fact, this figure reveals the difference between 1 and the pvalue. as this test was done with a p-value of 0.05, the results we obtained show that the certainty we state for the average comparison is that of 0.95 or 95%.1 table 6 independent simple t-test of the average marks obtained by the bilingual and non-bilingual school students t-test of the average marks leven’s test for the equality of variances test t for the equality of average f sig. t gl sig (bilateral) average difference difference standard error 99% confidence interval lower higher writing similar variances have been accepted .274 .601 4.562 199 .000 1.84755 .40498 .79429 2.90080 similar variances have not been accepted 4.584 152.106 .000 1.84755 .40302 .79626 2.89884 1 bear in mind that it can never be 100% true as that would be a universal truth, which does not exist in probability. maría begoña ruiz cordero106 thus, it can be said that the difference found between the english language writing skill of bilingual and non-bilingual school students comes to 1.8 out of 10 points, which is equal to 18%. these results support the fact that the difference between english language writing skills of bilingual and non-bilingual school students in the community of castilla-la mancha are statistically significant. nonetheless, we consider that the bilingual school students’ mark is low (51.7 out of 100 points) if we bear in mind the considerably high number of hours they are exposed to english language through english and content subjects included in the clil methodology. in addition to this, the mark is also low if we compare it to the results obtained by students in other autonomous communities different from castilla-la mancha. comparison of the results obtained in the autonomous community of castilla-la mancha to other spanish and european regions once the english language writing skill results in castilla-la mancha were analysed, we then compared them to similar studies carried out in other regions of spain and other europen countries. on the one hand, with reference to studies carried out in spain, san isidro (2009) accomplished a study in galicia similar to ours in which he focused on secondary school students. san isidro found a difference between bilingual and non-bilingual school students who achieved a writing skill level of 21.3%. this difference is similar to the one we found in our research. jiménez catalán & ojeda alba (2008) tested the english language vocabulary production of 86 6th grade primary education students belonging to clil and non-clil state-financed private schools in logroño, la rioja. the students from bilingual schools achieved an average mark of 4.54 out of eight points, compared with those from non-bilingual schools with an average mark of 3.63 out of eight points. once again and consistent with our findings, the bilingual school students got higher marks than non-bilingual school students. in terms of morphosyntax, research by villareal et al. (2009) must be taken into consideration. this study also confirms the results of the clil students’ marks in relation to non-clil students’ marks as far as tense and agreement are concerned, but not in all the assessed morphological signs. on the other hand, there are some analyses such as that by lorenzo et al. (2009) in andalucía who studied 1320 primary and secondary education students, 754 of whom attended bilingual programme schools and 448, non-bilingual assessing english writing skills of students from bilingual and non-bilingual… 107 programme schools. these studies highlight the positive impact on the level of competence for both the bilingual school students’ command of their mother tongue and the foreign language. in fact, the mark they got in the foreign language test was an average 24% higher than the non-bilingual school group’s mark (travé, 2013, p. 382). however, in terms of english language writing skills, this study is surprising because bilingual school students from andalucía had a lower command in written skills, especially those attending primary schools. additionally, we consider that these results are consistent with whittaker’s (2010) findings in the autonomous community of madrid. this study confirmed that bilingual school students’ writing can improve, but over time. in the same way, a number of studies that verify that english language writing skills are not developed in a meaningful way in clil contexts have led researchers, such as dalton-puffer (2011, p. 187), to hypothesize about the existence of a general writing competence which depends more on students’ maturity than on the type of education institution in which students learn a foreign language. we can state that the 4th grade cse bilingual students’ writing skills have not improved a great deal in castilla-la mancha (even though they already have a certain cognitive maturity), because they scored only 51.7 out of 100 points on the assessment we made based on the cambridge model. país vasco is another spanish autonomous community that has been the focus of a number of research studies on bilingual and non-bilingual students’ different english language levels. lasagabaster (2008) and ruiz de zarobe (2010), for example, carried out a few studies whose results demonstrated that bilingual school students get higher marks in productive skill tasks such as writing. this is in contrast to dalton-puffer’s theory, which states that a clil methodology enhances receptive skill tasks. navés & victori’s studies (2010) in cataluña demonstrate that the language level of students who learn through a clil methodology in their 8th grade exceed the language level of students who do not learn through such methodology in a higher grade (9th grade), including in writing skills (sylvén, 2013, p. 301). at the european level, it is important to mention loranc-paszylk’s research (2009) in poland. the level of competence among students studying the subject of european integration history in the international relations degree was analysed through clil methodology, as the course was done in english. academic writing and reading were studied within integrated learning contexts for two semesters. the sample included 17 clil students and 35 students who learnt through their mother tongue, polish. once again, the benefits of integrating the foreign language and content in a determined subject were made clear after the english language writing skill test, which matches the results of our investigation. similarly, a report by nikula (2005) in finland showed that clil students exceed non-clil students’ foreign language command. despite the fact that the maría begoña ruiz cordero108 study does not break the communicative skills down, the former student group felt more confident than the latter when using the foreign language concerned. in germany, klippel (2003) and zydatiss (2007) also asserted that, linguistically speaking, clil methodology is highly beneficial. however, a couple of studies do not share these findings and have not found this type of methodology so advantageous. in fact, christiane dalton-puffer’s studies in austria (2007) demonstrated poorer results in writing skill level. similarly, in sweden, sylvén (2004) concluded that what is really important in the foreign language learning process is the amount of exposure to that language outside the school context instead of learning through a clil methodology. furthermore, lim falk (2008) supported this study and purported that students’ interaction in clil lessons is more limited than in non-clil lessons (sylvén, 2013, pp. 301–320). conclusion the aim of this study was to examine whether cse 4th grade students attending bilingual programmes in state schools in castilla-la mancha obtained better results in english language writing skills than students attending nonbilingual schools. moreover, we also wanted to make a comparison between these results and those of students from other spanish, and even european, regions in similar studies. as a result, following analysis of the data and comparisons made between the regions of galicia (s. isidro, 2009), la rioja (jiménez catalán & ojeda alba, 2008), andalucía (lorenzo et al. 2009), madrid (whittaker, 2010), país vasco (lasagabaster & ruiz de zarobe, 2010), cataluña (navés & victori, 2010), poland (loranc-paszylk, 2008), and finland (nikula, 2005), it can be said that students who attend bilingual schools achieve better results in writing skills activities than those who do not. statistically, even though the bilingual school students’ results in castillala mancha are not very high—57.1 out of 100 points—they are 18% higher than the non-bilingual school students’ results. the reasons why these results are different are various. first of all, students in secondary education attend bilingual programme schools voluntarily (bruton, 2011). normally, they get higher marks than their counterparts in english language activities (grisaleña, campo, & alonso, 2009), which is clearly an advantage. secondly, it must be kept in mind that this study was carried out among students in their last grade of secondary education. thus, we cannot forget that, as dalton-puffer (2011, p. 187) explains, writing skill competence is acquired on a long-term basis and is more dependent on the learner’s maturity than on the type of foreign language instruction received. next, there is no doubt about the fact that clil assessing english writing skills of students from bilingual and non-bilingual… 109 methodology (mehisto, marsh, & frigols, 2008; coyle, hood, & marsh, 2010; marsh, 2013) and the frequent exposure to english language help students improve their communicative competence in this language. therefore, according to this information, the bilingual school students’ grades are higher than the non-bilingual school students’ grades. to conclude, even though we have made clear that the english language writing skill levels of bilingual school students are indeed higher than those of non-bilingual school students’, it is necessary to highlight the need for improvements in the implementation of bilingual education programmes in castilla-la mancha (nieto moreno de diezmas & ruiz cordero, 2018). it should be the case that students who attend this type of foreign language programme get better results, given that they have been studying english language through a clil methodology for over eight years, thus, their exposure to the english language has been three times higher than that of their counterparts in non-bilingual school programmes (moya guijarro & ruiz cordero, 2017). while it is recognized that in spite of the fact that the development of bilingual programmes is not an easy task (goodman, 2007), castilla-la mancha must now reconsider how bilingual programmes in schools can be improved in order to maximize their efficacy. references barrios, m. e. 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(2018). influencia de la política educativa de centro en la enseñanza bilingüe en españa. madrid: mecd-british council, secretaría general técnica, ministerio de educación, cultura y deporte. restrepo, a. p. m. (2012). metodologías para la enseñanza de lenguas extranjeras. hacia una perspectiva crítica. revista universidad eafit, 46(159), 71–85. ruiz de zarobe, y. (2010). written production and clil: an empirical study. in c. daltonpuffer, t. nikula, & u. smit (eds.), language use and language learning in clil classrooms (pp. 191–210). amsterdam: john benjamins publishing co. ruiz de zarobe, y. (2011). which language competencies benefit from clil? an insight into applied linguistic research. in y. ruiz de zarobe, j. sierra, & f. gallardo del puerto (eds.), content and foreign language integrated learning, (pp. 129–153). berne: peter lang. san isidro, x. (2009). galicia: clil success in a bilingual community. in d. marsh, p. mehisto, d. wolff, r. aliaga, t. asikainen, m. j. frigols-martin, s. hughes, & g. langé (eds.), clil practice: perspectives from the field (pp. 4–13). jyväskylä. jyväskylä: university of jyväskylä. san isidro, x. (2010). an insight into galician clil: provision and results. in d. lasagabaster & y. ruiz de zarobe (eds.), clil in spain: implementation, results and teacher training (pp. 55–78). newcastle: cambridge scholars. sylvén, l. k. (2013). clil in sweden––why does it not work? a metaperspective on clil across contexts in europe. international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism, 16(3), 301–320. doi: 10.1080/13670050.2013.777387 travé gonzález, g. (2013). un estudio sobre las representaciones del profesorado en educación primaria acerca de la enseñanza bilingüe. revista de educación, 361, 379–402. villareal, o., & garcía mayo m. p. (2009). tense and agreement morphology in the interlanguage of basque/spanish bilinguals: clil versus non-clil. in y. ruiz de zarobe & r. m. jiménez catalán (eds.), content and language integrated learning. evidence from research in europe (pp. 157–189). bristol: multilingual matters. whittaker, r., & llinares, a. (2009). clil in social science classrooms: analysis of spoken and written productions. in y. ruiz de zarobe & r. m. jiménez catalán (eds.), content and language integrated learning. evidence from research in europe (pp. 215–234). bristol: multilingual matters. maría begoña ruiz cordero112 a n n e x 1 writing test • writing part 1 1. last year, niko was shown how to play basketball by his older brother. niko’s older brother……………………..him how to play basketball last year. 2. niko joined a basketball team three years ago. niko has been in a basketball team ………………………3 years. 3. niko practises at a stadium quite near his house. niko’s house is not very………………….from the stadium where he practises. • writing part 2 you have just returned from a week’s holiday staying at the home of your british friend, sam. write a card to your friend. in your card, you should: – tell sam about the journey back to your home – say what you enjoyed more about your stay – ask sam to visit you write 35–45 words on your answer sheet. • writing part 3 write an answer to one of the questions in this part. write your answer in about 100 words on your answer sheet. – question 7: this is a part of a letter you receive from an english friend. for my homework project i have to write about a special day that people celebrate in your country. which special day should i write about? what information should i include? now write a letter to your friend. write your letter on your answer sheet. – question 8: your english teacher has asked you to write a story. your story must begin with this sentence: jo looked at a map and decided to go left. write your story on your answer sheet. assessing english writing skills of students from bilingual and non-bilingual… 113 maría begoña ruiz cordero bewertung der schreibfertigkeit im englischen bei den lernenden der zweisprachigen und nicht zweisprachigen schulen in der region kastilien-la mancha, spanien eine vergleichsstudie z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g fremdsprachenlernen und clil-methoden (content and language integrated learning) sind derzeit in spanien sehr beliebt. viele familien interessieren sich für diese art der bildung, weil sie von ihrer wirksamkeit und effizienz überzeugt sind. vor diesem hintergrund ist zu überprüfen, ob das lernen, das auf der gleichzeitigen vermittlung von inhalten im bereich der unterrichteten fächer und der elemente einer fremdsprache beruht, das niveau der fremd sprachenkenntnisse von denjenigen erhöht, die daran teilnehmen. ziel dieser studie ist es, das unterschiedliche niveau der schreibfertigkeit im englischen bei den schülern der vierten klasse der oberschule zu analysieren, die das sowohl zweisprachige als auch nicht zweisprachige pf lichtprogramm für die oberschulen in der region kastilien-la mancha (spanien) realisieren. die forschungsergebnisse lassen feststellen, ob zweisprachige programme den lernenden helfen, ihre fertigkeit des schreibens (der textkomposition) im englischen zu entwickeln, sowie die ergebnisse, die durch zweisprachige schulen aus der region kastilienla mancha erzielt wurden, mit denen anderer schulen in spanien oder anderen europäischen gebieten zu vergleichen. schlüsselwörter: zweisprachiger unterricht, effizienz, schreibfertigkeit, obligatorische schulbildung in der oberschule theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (1), 2023, pp. 1/26 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12691 monika kusiak-pisowacka https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4043-9144 jagiellonian university, cracow, poland exploring fl readers’ metacognitive beliefs: narrations from learner diaries a b s t r a c t metacognition is a complex construct widely investigated in sla studies, also those that focus on reading skills and reading comprehension. ample research points to metacognition as a strong predictor in developing foreign language reading skills, thus promoting metacognitive strategies in fl education is highly recommended. this paper presents a report on a study in which polish fl learners kept a diary for a period of one month and wrote comments in reference to the reading classes in which they participated. the data obtained from the students’ narrations allowed to examine the learners’ metacognitive beliefs defined in the study as knowledge about cognition, consisting of three components: person knowledge, task knowledge, and strategy knowledge (flavell, 1981). the diary data were analyzed in a global narrative way, which enabled the researcher to examine a complex character and a dynamic nature of metacognition in relation to the reading lessons. the findings underline a double role that learner diaries played in this study: as a research tool useful in investigating learners’ metacognition and an effective task that seemed to facilitate the learners’ ref lection skills. keywords: metacognition, strategy training, reading strategies, diaries, student beliefs metacognitive strategies “appear to have ‘ecological validity’; that is, they are recognizable components in ‘real-life situations’” (brown, 1980, p. 454). when one checks the outcomes of an activity against certain criteria of effectiveness or common sense, one applies a metacognitive strategy. although metacognition seems to be such an omnipresent aspect of everyday life, researchers have found it rather fuzzy and difficult to define. the present article discusses metacognition in relation to reading skills. plenty of different frameworks have been developed for the purpose of investigating this contract; however, they all seem to resonate with flavell’s (1978, 1981) conceptualizations of metacognition. at the beginning, the paper analyzes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12691 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4043-9144 the models suggested by flavell in 1978 and 1981, and proceeds to revise several examples of reading studies that drew on flavell. next, the paper presents an overview of metacognition studies into differences between effective and less effective fl/l2. the last section of the theoretical part discusses several models of reading strategy training. the empirical part of the article is a report on a study which has explored polish students’ metacognitive beliefs as revealed by the learners in the diaries they kept during a reading strategy training. the training involved explicit strategy training, raising learners’ metacognitive awareness, and developing their interactive skills. the analysis of diary data brought interesting results and implications concerning educating fl readers and conducting further metacognition studies. literature review metacognition and its various conceptualizations the term “metacognition” was first defined by flavell in 1978 as a result of his studies in the field of educational psychology. in a nutshell, metacognition means “knowledge that takes as its object or regulates any aspect of any cognitive endeavor” (cited in baker and brown, 1984, p. 353). this concept encompasses two aspects of metacognition: knowledge about cognition and regulation of cognition. in 1981, flavell extended his view of metacognit ion and suggested a model consisting of metacognitive knowledge, meta cognitive experiences, strategy use, and cognitive goals. in this section, the later perspective is discussed in more detail as it was implemented in the study. knowledge about cognition is defined by baker and brown (1984) as “a person’s knowledge about his or her own cognitive resources and the compatibility between the person as a learner and the learning situation” (p. 353). regulation of cognition involves self-regulatory strategies used by the learner when performing a task, such as checking the result of any learning action, planning one’s next step, monitoring the effectiveness of any attempted action, as well as testing, revising, and evaluating one’s learning strategies. regulation of cognition is present in the conceptualization developed by paris and lindauer (1982), who explored three categories in the context of reading: evaluation, planning, and regulation. evaluation involves analyzing task characteristics and one’s personal abilities that can effect comprehension. planning entails selecting particular strategies which can help the reader to reach the aims that have been set earlier. regulation is a process of monitoring and redirecting one’s activities during the course of reading to reach the desired goals. tapsla.12691 p. 2/26 m. kusiak-pisowacka in the later version of metacognition developed by flavell (1981), knowledge of cognition has been extended into the concept of metacognitive knowl edge. metacognitive knowledge is the knowledge we possess about ourselves, the tasks we are to perform and the strategies we apply. in the literature, it is usually called person, task, and strategy knowledge. knowledge about tasks is usually related to task difficulty, for example, texts with unfamiliar words may be more difficult than those with familiar vocabulary. knowledge about strategies involves the ability to choose the strategies that may appear more useful in particular situations, for example, previewing the title of the articles may aid comprehension. flavell (1981) stresses the fact that these three variables, that is, person, task, and strategy knowledge, are highly interactive. for example, while completing a summary task a reader invents a topic sentence and, by doing so, employs a combination of task and strategy knowledge. flavell (1985) discusses an important question whether metacognitive knowledge is declarative or procedural. he assumes that metacognitive knowledge is qualitatively similar to any other kind of knowledge, for example, knowledge about computers or elephants. therefore, he claims that some metacognitive knowledge is declarative, and some is procedural. in fact, the concepts of declarative and procedural knowledge in relation to cognitive knowledge have been adopted by several researchers, among others, cross et al. (1983), paris et al. (1983), desoete and roeyers (2003), veenman (2005). for example, in their study on strategic reading, cross et al. (1983) categorized cognitive knowledge in three ways: declarative, procedural, and conditional. declarative knowledge about reading includes information about one’s individual knowledge as a learner and awareness of the factors that might affect reading ability. procedural knowledge reflects an awareness and management of cognition, including knowledge about strategies. finally, conditional knowledge is knowledge of why and when to use a given strategy. person, task, and strategy knowledge, identified by flavell (1981) as compo nents of metacognitive knowledge, serve as a base for metacognitive experiences, another component in flavell’s (1981) metacognition model. metacognitive experiences may occur before, during and after reading. the before-reading knowledge relates to person knowledge, for example, learners’ awareness about their strengths to perform the task; the during-reading knowledge can be strategy information, that is, knowledge about how to perform the task; the after-reading knowledge is task information, namely, knowledge about the difficulty of the task. flavell (1981) claims that metacognitive experiences are likely to occur when cognition processes fail. such cognitive failures may be noticed or not by the learner. when they are detected (e.g., by the feeling of confusion in performing a task), metacognitive experiences may lead to the activation of metacognitive knowledge and, consequently, help to solve the detected problem. however, when the reader is not aware of their cognitive failure, exploring fl readers’ metacognitive beliefs:… tapsla.12691 p. 3/26 this situation may be followed by metacognitive failure. for example, we may be reading a text daydreaming, gradually understanding less and less without realizing what is happening (markman, 1981). in other words, metacognitive experiences function as insights or perceptions that one experiences during cognition and can serve as “quality control” checks that can induce readers to revise their cognitive goals. the next component in flavell’s (1981) conception of metacognition is strategy use, which involves applying cognitive and metacognitive resources. flavell (1979, as cited in garner, 1988) assumes that “cognitive strategies are involved to make cognitive progress, metacognitive strategies to monitor them” (p. 20), thereby emphasizing the interrelation of cognitive and metacognitive strategies. the last element in the model, cognitive goals, seems to be the most practical. for example, in reading a text accompanied by questions, the goal could mean performing a concrete task to find information in the text necessary to answer a specific question. summing up, in flavell’s (1981) model all the components of metacognition form a sequence and can prompt each other. metacognitive knowledge serves as a basis for metacognitive experiences, which in turn invoke the use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies, and encourage the learner to revise their metacognitive knowledge and cognitive goals. metacognition in reading although the term “metacognition” may be relatively new, this type of knowledge in relation to reading has been recognized since the beginning of the 20th century (e.g., dewey, 1910; huey, 1968; thorndike, 1917). dewey calls for inducing reflective thinking in reading, which today may be named metacognitive training. thorndike defines reading as reasoning; he describes understanding a paragraph as similar to a math problem: “it consists of selecting the right elements of the situation and putting them together in the right relations […] [the mind] must select, repress, soften, emphasize, correlate and organize, all under the influence of the right mental set or purpose or demand” (thorndike, 1917, p. 329, as cited in brown, 1988). all the enumerated authors emphasize the role of metacognition in reading. one of the aims of metacognition studies has been to explore differences between effective and less effective readers. as regards reading in l1, numerous studies point to certain differences in metacognitive knowledge and strategy use between the two groups of readers. the results of fl/l2 research are reminiscent of l1 reading studies. more skilled fl readers demonstrate greater awareness of the reading process (geladari & konstantinos, 2010). they are more consistent and effective in monitoring their reading (yang & zhang, 2002). tapsla.12691 p. 4/26 m. kusiak-pisowacka in fact, a significant positive correlation between strategy use and reading achievement has been found (rastegar et al., 2017; yang & zhang, 2002; zhang & seepho, 2013). more effective readers are more sensitive to inconsistencies in the text and respond to them appropriately (yang & zhang, 2002). they also show more effective self-evaluation skills and use a wider range of “top-down” strategies (kusiak, 2001). devine (1988), hosenfeld (1977) and wang et al. (2009) point to a crucial role of perceptions that fl readers hold of reading and themselves as readers and explain the relationship between readers’ perceptions and their performance. successful readers view reading more as a meaningoriented process than a decoding exercise. they also show more confidence in their abilities. not surprisingly, in comparison with l1 studies, the results of fl/l2 studies underline the importance of readers’ language competence in reading. zhang (2002) found that more advanced learners demonstrated greater awareness of the strategies they use in reading. to sum up, studies into the features of good and poor readers have resulted in interesting results. they gave rise to numerous investigations concerning the effectiveness of strategy training, whose aim is to equip learners with “good reader” knowledge and skills. strategy training studies into fl/l2 reading instruction provide evidence that strategy instruction can bring promising results. training can enhance reading performance (carrell et al., 1989; dabarera et al., 2014). it can result in developing an appropriate use of reading strategies (fung et al., 2003). the instruction was found successful in sensitizing students to the facilitating role of top-down strategies (kusiak, 2001; salataci & akyel, 2002) and improving learners’ self-evaluation skills (kusiak, 2001). strategy instruction was also effective in raising strategy awareness (brown et al., 1996; dabarera et al., 2014). in esl pedagogy, several instructional models have been found effective, for example, the cognitive academic language learning approach—calla (chamot & o’malley, 1986) and the forsee approach—communication, cognitive academic language development and content instruction in the classroom (kidd & marquardson, 1994). in the instruction, the self-control stage is implemented by encouraging learners to evaluate their work by means of learning strategy logs and checklists. both programs proved successful in developing students’ content knowledge, language proficiency, and learning strategy use. the calla was effective in developing fl reading comprehension as demonstrated by cubukcu (2008), and nejad and mahmoodi-shahrebabaki (2015). exploring fl readers’ metacognitive beliefs:… tapsla.12691 p. 5/26 it is important to emphasize that contemporary strategy instruction has taken a social turn; reading motivation and engagement have attracted research attention as factors contributing to reading achievement. koukourikou et al. (2018) investigated the effectiveness of collaborative strategic reading (csr), which drew on reciprocal teaching (palincsar & brown, 1986) and cooperative learning, and found this teaching perspective successful in developing reading performance of fl students. collaborative techniques recommend developing peer interaction, for example, by involving students in group discussions about reading strategies (hennessey, 1999). this way of teaching helps students to develop “metacognitive” discourse and is likely to provoke conceptual conflict, which in turn can assist learners in the construction and refinement of their concepts and attitudes (i.e., metacognitive knowledge). changes in this area of metacognition prepare learners for the next step in their metacognitive development—the integration of metacognitive knowledge with regulation of cognition (schraw & moshman, 1995). other examples of contemporary reading strategy instruction are conceptoriented reading instruction (cori), which was applied in elementary and middle school classrooms, for example, by guthrie & klauda (2014) and wigfield et al. (2014), as well as the engagement model of reading comprehension development suggested by guthrie and klauda (2016). in the engagement model, reading comprehension is viewed as the consequence of an extended amount of engaged reading, which is defined as motivated, strategic, knowledge driven, and socially interactive. taboada barber & klauda (2020, p. 28) assume that reading motivation produces reading engagement, which promotes achievement. that is, when students set reading goals, value reading, and believe in themselves as readers, they more willingly and fully engage in reading activities. in turn, consistent, active reading engagement helps individuals build the varied cognitive processes requisite to deep reading comprehension. as a summary of the interrelated dimensions of the model, the acronym smile has been suggested. the letters stand for the following aspects of reading practice: s for sharing or the social dimension; m for me, or the referent of the selfefficacy dimension; i for importance, a key aspect of the value dimension; l for liking, which reflects the intrinsic dimension; and e for engagement, which comes last as a product of each of the preceding dimensions but also engendered by additional specific supports. (guthrie & wigfield, 2017, p. 28) tapsla.12691 p. 6/26 m. kusiak-pisowacka since this model was implemented in the strategy training which is the core of the study presented in this paper, it will be discussed in more detail in the empirical section of this text. the study participants and the context of the study the subjects in the study were 60 secondary school students of efl. they participated in a reading strategy training, which took place over eight lessons of 45 minutes each. the students’ competence in english was at the b1 level, as was measured by the learners’ teacher based on the syllabus and the tests administered before the training. in the course of their education, the learners had already been exposed to some forms of strategy training that had the features of blind training.1 the training the training which was conducted by the author of this paper was inspired by the engagement model of reading comprehension (guthrie & klauda, 2016). the main aims of the instruction were: (1) to present or revise a selection of strategies readers can use when dealing with different types of texts; (2) to create a variety of opportunities so that students can practice the strategies and reflect on themselves as readers; (3) to create a positive classroom atmosphere in which the participants would be willing to share their opinions and observations; (4) to introduce basic terms connected with the strategies discussed. the principles, goals, and content of the training are presented in table 1. they are organized according to the acronym smile suggested by guthrie and wigfield (2017, p. 28). it is important to note that the following activities presented in table 1 were completed by the learners at two stages, that is, first individually, then in pairs or groups: semantic mapping of expository text structures (carrell et al., 1989), activating background knowledge by means of the etr, that is, experience, text, relationship method2 (carrell et al., 1989), making predictions 1 blind training, as described by brown et al. (1986), does not require learners’ strategic consciousness. students are instructed what to do (which corresponds to their declarative knowledge of strategies), but are given no explanation why they should perform certain tasks. 2 the etr consists of three stages. at the experience stage, learners discuss their knowledge and experiences related to the text to be read, for example, on the basis of the title of the text. exploring fl readers’ metacognitive beliefs:… tapsla.12691 p. 7/26 and developing monitoring skills by means of the directed reading-thinking activity3 (stauffer, 1969), answering reading comprehension questions, guessing the meaning of unknown vocabulary, making inferences and cohesion awareness exercises. it was believed that the learners would be prepared for this kind of instruction and that the training would motivate the participants to express their reflection in their diaries. table 1 the smile aspects of the strategy training aspects of the training aims examples of activities s – sharing – to encourage cooperation among students; – to show students that “shared” reading can mean deeper and less difficult reading. – reciprocal teaching (palincsar & brown, 1986); writing a diary; sharing observations about the way of reading; thinking aloud when working on a text in a group; observing the reading of the peers; students’ generated questions. m – me – to foster students’ reading selfefficacy by making texts more “reader friendly”; – to foster students’ feelings of success by suggesting a variety of strategies. – writing a diary; think aloud exercises; observing one’s reading; self-questioning strategies; guided discovery and metaphorbased activities. i – importance – to make learners reflect on the importance and usefulness of reading; – to develop positive attitudes to the strategies recommended in the training. – discussions about the role of reading in education and everyday life; discussions about the usefulness of the strategies practiced, e.g., study strategies, such as underlining and note taking; advance organiser exercises; discovery activities. l – liking – to create a supportive classroom atmosphere; – to give learners a choice, e.g. in texts and homework tasks. – giving the students a choice: (1) a variety of texts: essays, blogs, narrative; (2) homework tasks; (3) partners in groupwork activities. e – engagement – to enhance learners’ reflection on their development as readers. – class discussions. at the text stage, students read the text. at the relationship stage, they seek relationships between the content of the text (as developed at the text stage) and their outside knowledge and experience (as discussed at the experience stage). 3 the directed reading-thinking activity consists of three steps. first, students are encouraged to make predictions about the text on the basis of the title of the text, headings, etc. then, learners read the text part by part and evaluate their predications. at the final step, students read the whole text again and by referring to the text explain if their predictions were correct or not. tapsla.12691 p. 8/26 m. kusiak-pisowacka aims of the study the study aimed to explore metacognitive beliefs that the participants of the training expressed in their diaries. it was assumed that metacognitive beliefs correspond to metacognitive knowledge, which is reflected in its three components, that is, person knowledge, task knowledge, and strategy knowledge as defined by flavell (1981). in the present study, the term “metacognitive beliefs” refers to the following beliefs: (1) beliefs in relation to the learners (bl): the beliefs that the students revealed about themselves and other students as fl learners and readers as well as their opinions about the learning process in general and about reading; (2) beliefs in relation to the tasks (bt): the learners’ opinions about the tasks they performed during the training as well as the students’ knowledge concerning the information and resources they needed to complete the activities; (3) beliefs in relation to the strategies (bs): the learners’ opinions concerning the strategies that were recommended to the students during the training as the resources that they may apply when reading texts. the study sought to answer the following research questions: (1) what are the students’ beliefs in relation to the learners themselves (bl) as expressed in their diaries? (2) what are the students’ beliefs in relation to the tasks they performed during the training (bt) as expressed in their diaries? (3) what are the students’ beliefs in relation to the strategies presented during the training (bs) as expressed in their diaries? research method the diary method is the main methodology used in the present study. a diary study involves asking people to keep a regular record of their experiences and activities in which they are involved (bartlett & milligan, 2015). diaries can be used in a variety of disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, medicine, economics, and second language acquisition. in sla “[d]iary studies are case studies in which language learners or teachers keep an intensive journal using introspection or retrospection and self-observation over a period of time” (mckay, 2009, p. 235). when diarists are l2 learners, data can provide valuable insights into affective factors, learning strategies, motifs, and perceptions concerning the process of learning—“facets of the language learning experience which are normally hidden or largely inaccessible to an external observer” (bailey & ochsner, 1983, p. 189). it is worth noting that despite undeniable advantages, diaries can pose problems such as difficulties in analyzing subjective data and the reluctance of informants (dörnyei, 2007; wilczyńska & michońska-stadnik, 2010). exploring fl readers’ metacognitive beliefs:… tapsla.12691 p. 9/26 in sla, research diaries have been used for a number of purposes, which can be categorized into three groups: pedagogical purposes, course evaluation, and research (howell-richardson & parkinson, 1988). however, as observed by mckay (2009), there are not many published studies that have utilized diaries as a research technique to explore l2 learning and teaching, the fact which makes a comparison of research findings difficult. although in the last decade in sla studies, the diary technique has been gaining popularity, there is still a need for more research especially in relation to metacognition of l2 readers, the gap which the author of the present study intends to address. in relation to metacognition, diaries have been used mostly for pedagogical purposes, usually as a teaching technique to raise learners’ and teachers’ self-awareness and self-reflection. in the present study, diaries served two purposes—as a tool to raise learners’ reflection and as a research technique to collect data on students’ beliefs concerning their metacognitive knowledge. diaries were distributed to the students before the training. they took the form of traditional notebooks and contained a short introduction and some prompt sentences. the introduction and the prompts were in the learners’ native language, that is, polish (below a translated version of the prompts is presented). the students were asked to write their comments at home and sign their diaries with nicknames. a: i think during this lesson i have learnt ……………….. b: i consider it ………………… (necessary, unnecessary, interesting, boring) because ……………. c: it is a pity i have not learnt …………………. d: other comments …………………. analysis of diary data following the advice of pavlenko (2007), to obtain a comprehensive interpretation of the data, three aspects of the diaries were examined: (1) the content, that is, what the informants reported; (2) the context, that is, where they reported, and (3) the form, that is, how they reported. as regards the content, diary data can be analyzed in two ways: an analytical one, which can allow for detailed quantitative calculations of strategies reported by subjects, and a global narrative way, which provides researchers with qualitative data and enables them to examine motivational and attitudinal factors (oxford & leaver, 1996). in the present study, the latter approach was adopted. thematic analysis of the content took two steps. the first one entailed reading the entries and deciding which type of metacognitive beliefs the data under inspection reflected: those related to learners, tasks or strategies. the second step involved rereading all the tapsla.12691 p. 10/26 m. kusiak-pisowacka fragments concerning one type of metacognitive beliefs and identifying themes which reoccurred in them. the examination of the form of diaries focused on the structure of the entries and the elements of the language used by the students which were considered crucial in the analysis of the content of diaries. as regards the context of diaries, in the interpretation of the results, two factors were taken into account: the learning background of the informants (a macro-level factor) and the location in which writing diaries took place (a micro-level factor). results general comments on the form and content of the diaries thirty out of 60 students submitted the diaries after the training. the participants of the training were asked to write diaries in polish; while some did so in english. the diaries varied in content, form, and length; some took the form of reflective diaries, others—short notes. it seems that 22 diaries were kept systematically; entries were written after each meeting. eight diaries seem incomplete; some were written as summative reflections after the training, the others included very sparse comments. the length of one comment concerning one lesson or one two-lesson meeting varied from 250 words to one short sentence; the average was approximately 50 words per comment. the average length of a diary was approximately three a5 pages. a preliminary analysis of the content of the comments showed that although not all the students explicitly answered the prompt questions provided in the instruction, the prompts must have directed their reports. an analysis of the content is presented below; it is organized according to the three components of metacognition specified in the research questions: beliefs in relation to the learners (bl), beliefs in relation to the tasks (bt), and beliefs in relation to the strategies (bs). the analysis is illustrated with samples taken from the students’ diaries. the structure of the entries and the language used by the informants are discussed as well. beliefs in relation to the learners (bl): research question #1 in the diary data, a number of themes were identified related to this type of metacognitive knowledge. most of them illustrate the learners’ opinions concerning various aspects of the training and demonstrate in what way the training encouraged the students to reflect on their learning and themselves as learners. the themes are discussed in detail below. exploring fl readers’ metacognitive beliefs:… tapsla.12691 p. 11/26 the training as a surprising experience. it seems useful to start this discussion with the following diary entry: during the first lessons i was surprised that there is someone who is interested in how i (and others) learn; what was even more interesting is why someone is doing it.4 the quotation shows that the learner was aware of one of the main aims of the training, which was to encourage the learners to reflect on certain aspects of reading and to raise their awareness about how they learn. comments about the students’ learning appeared at the very beginning of their diaries. the training as a factor enhancing the learners’ understanding of the reading skill. an ample amount of data is related to the students’ learning. it is possible to distinguish several types of students. the first type are those who claimed that the training had enhanced their understanding of what reading texts involves. some students realized that the way of reading they had applied before the training was inefficient; this opinion is demonstrated in the following entry. i think that the first classes revealed before me a completely new discovery how one should read english texts. this fact really surprised me. till then i had been almost certain that my failures were due to not knowing single words of a text. therefore, i didn’t work hard enough to provide correct answers to reading comprehension questions. till then none of my english teachers had shown me any clues how to cope with this problem. there were students who wrote that before the training they had never reflected on the way they read. they expressed their opinions in relation to the activities they had performed during the training, which is shown in the quotations below. personally, i have never thought about such exercises, but now i will try to make up for it. besides, i have never realized that the way texts are organized […] may help to answer reading comprehension questions. the training as an unnecessary practice of previously learnt skills. there were students who claimed that the training had not taught them anything new. they had already been familiar with the techniques presented to 4 for the sake of this paper, the entries that the learners produced in polish were translated into english. tapsla.12691 p. 12/26 m. kusiak-pisowacka them and found it difficult to relate them to their learning. in many cases, the students wrote as if in the name of the whole class, probably with the intention of strengthening their personal point of view. for some examples, see the entries below. during the first lessons i was surprised that there is someone who is interested in how i am familiar with everything that you tried to present to us. it’s a pity but after 5 minutes of the lesson i gave up. i realized that i would not benefit from this lesson. […] we are 18 years old. you should realize that we can read with understanding in a satisfactory way. relating the training to previous learning experiences. the students related the training to their former learning experiences. some students saw the training as a completely new learning experience; they complained that their regular school classes lacked direct instruction on how to read english texts. the other learners stressed the fact that the training activities were similar to the english courses or private lessons that they were attending or had attended before. several students explained that they did not find reflective activities particularly helpful as it was sufficient for them to read texts without being aware of how they did so. the following entries illustrate this finding. i’d like to write about us analyzing the steps of reading during answering the reading comprehension questions. well, during my short life i have been forced quite a few times to do similar analyses (also when attending various language courses) and nothing has ever come of it (perhaps because there was never any continuation). i do realize that understanding the main idea of the text is important, and only then details and message of every paragraph—but i never think about such things when i read a text. i simply read it and try to understand. reporting on the process of learning during the training. the students reported on the process of learning they experienced during the training. very often they began their diary entries with describing the class activities in which they were engaged. then, the students focused on the reading strategies that the tasks aimed to demonstrate (it is an aspect of students’ metacognition classified as strategy knowledge, which will be discussed later). the students also described what they thought they were learning when completing the tasks, for example, beginning to pay attention to certain aspects of reading, learning how to read faster, improving certain skills, etc. in many cases, the students diagnosed their learning difficulties, evaluated their skills and reflected on possible remedies, which can be seen in the two examples presented below (written by exploring fl readers’ metacognitive beliefs:… tapsla.12691 p. 13/26 the same student). the comments indicate that the training was successful in encouraging the students to reflect on the difficulties they encountered when reading texts. i had slight difficulties about the titles; i didn’t know, i was not sure if the sentence i wanted to select would reflect the content of the whole text. i still don’t know which things are more crucial, and which are less crucial. what distracts me is the fact that i don’t understand the meaning of all the words in a text. disagreeing with the advice suggested during the training. in some cases, the comments took the form of personal judgements, for example, the students took issue with the “theories” suggested by the teacher. this is reflected in the entries presented below. reading a text and then writing a map to this text is perhaps interesting as a task itself. but nobody really does it every time one reads a text, anyway i don’t do it. i don’t agree with the theories announced during the lesson. i think it makes no sense. reflections on the sense of improvement and success. some of the students reflected on their feelings of improvement and success. they felt that the aspects of reading they had found difficult before seemed easier. many students reported that the activities helped them to improve concentration during reading. the learners saw a positive impact of the training on their sense of confidence. it was attributed to certain tasks and the overall atmosphere of the training. in some diaries, it is possible to observe how the students evaluated their progress in the course of the training and how their evaluation evolved. the quotations below are taken from the diary of the same student. i manage to understand more and more at the lesson. i’ve done the homework well. it proves that i’m managing to understand more and more. at the beginning i couldn’t. i’m disappointed with the results of the test. i liked this lesson a lot. i participated in it more actively than usual. i’ve managed to do the homework without any problems. i’m proud of myself. tapsla.12691 p. 14/26 m. kusiak-pisowacka beliefs in relation to the tasks (bt): research question #2 this component of metacognition knowledge is reflected in the comments in which the students referred to the activities conducted during the training. the learners were able to describe the activities they performed; they were also able to successfully identify and name the aims of the activities. they commented on the difficulty of the tasks and reflected on the abilities they needed to perform the tasks efficiently. there were students who did not find the advice concerning skillful reading useful and, in a persuasive way, explained their point of view. a more detailed examination of this part of the students’ metacognition knowledge is presented below. commenting on the tasks. two forms of comments were identified. in the first one, the learners focus on the task they found representative of the whole lesson, which is followed by an explanation as to why they found this activity useful in their learning. in the second type, the students narrow down their report to the skill that, in their opinion, a particular lesson helped them to practice. the examples are provided below. i think that the exercises with cartoons and sentences help to ignore details in reading texts. i learnt how to answer the questions in a direct way, without beating about the bush. the link between theory and practice. there were comments that concern what some students called “the link between theory and practice.” the entries reflect the learners’ views on the usefulness of the tasks in real-life situations. the learners commented on the reading strategies (often called by them “principles”) that were modelled in the tasks. some students related the “principles” to their own abilities and described the situations in which the strategies can be applied. a few examples of such comments are presented below. the most important thing i learnt at this lesson is the fact that in most texts the first paragraph is the most crucial one. i consider this piece of information very useful, because it facilitates reading and helps to understand a text faster. i think that during the lesson i learnt how to pay attention to so called details in a completely unknown text. i regard it as very useful when one has to deal with a big amount of information, e.g., during a visit in a foreign country. it makes such attempts fast and skillful. exploring fl readers’ metacognitive beliefs:… tapsla.12691 p. 15/26 the way of taking notes is a kind of task that requires from everyone a maximum amount of concentration on a text. what is necessary is a sort of creative thinking, which helps to analyze notes in an efficient and skillful way. there were students who criticized the training because of its overly theoretical character. they claimed that the “theories” presented during the training were not fully developed in the tasks. the two extracts produced by the same student are an example of this opinion. taking notes in a graphical way could be very useful. i think, however, that we should learn more about how to do such notes. we saw the examples of such notes, now it would be good to see a text which was used to produce such notes. we could see some pattern which can be used to take notes in this way. it could make life easier. all the things that i lacked last time were done today! well done! these comments indicate that the students distinguished two aspects of their knowledge of english: theoretical and practical. it is also clear that the students were aware of the link between the two. the usefulness of the skills practiced. the students found the training helpful in developing reading skills, writing (e.g., taking notes) and speaking (e.g., planning a speech). also, some more general cognitive skills were mentioned such as creative and logical thinking. in most of the diaries, the students emphasize the usefulness of the strategies practiced for school tests and exams, for example, the secondary school leaving exam or fc exams. arguing with the advice suggested during the training. in many cases, the students argued with what they thought the classes had sought to teach them, as demonstrated in the following extracts. i do understand that the topic is important in reading, but in 80% of the cases it has nothing to do with the content of a text. only in 20% a topic goes with the content of a text—it is in the case of serious texts, scientific texts, and sometimes articles. a good text has a topic only slightly connected with itself; and it is possible to understand a topic only after reading a text, and sometimes even this can be difficult. therefore, i think that paying attention to a topic and then to the content of a text may lead to irreparable results; i.e., incomplete comprehending of the text. tapsla.12691 p. 16/26 m. kusiak-pisowacka it is true that a title can give us certain clues, but it also creates in our mind certain inclination about the passage, the effect which i consider a mistake. it limits our horizons in a very peculiar way; it narrows our imagination regarding the idea expressed in the title. this inability to move our fantasy is restricted by the ideology of reading with understanding (practiced before). when a clever reader is not able to immerse in a text in a free and complete way (because of the earlier limitations), one loses a lot. and it is how […] (not clear in the diary) evaluations about the purpose and meaning of a text are made. the last extract is a very clear example of how the student reacted to one of the lessons and how the reading strategies presented in class challenged their “philosophy of reading.” the comment is a response to the lesson about skimming, for example, identifying the topic of a text before reading the text in a more detailed way. it is interesting to observe the author’s emotional involvement in their “fight” with the arguments presented during the training. beliefs in relation to the strategies (bs): research question #3 this component of metacognition knowledge is reflected in the comments in which the students referred to the strategies presented by the teacher. the students’ bs along with the language used in the diaries are discussed below. language used by the students to write about the strategies. when writing about the tasks, the learners pointed to the strategies presented during the training. the students named the strategies; the words that they used to refer to the reading strategies are: “principles,” “techniques,” “methods,” “ways,” “mechanisms,” and “strategies.” another way of writing about the strategies was recalling them in a general way, that is, “we learnt how to find important information.” the students used a rich range of metalanguage; words such “main idea,” “topic,” “synonyms,” “main message” or “content,” “details,” “text organization,” “context,” “key words,” etc. it is worth noting that english terms were used also in the diaries written in polish, which could be due to the fact that the classes were conducted in english. opinions about the strategies. all the students expressed their opinion about the strategies; they either accepted or rejected them—in both cases the students explained their views, usually in relation to their abilities and learning experiences. two examples of such comments are provided below. exploring fl readers’ metacognitive beliefs:… tapsla.12691 p. 17/26 i think that it’s useful to give names/titles for texts. if i’m able to give the title, it means that i know what the text is about. mind-mapping a text is a stupid method. it may make taking notes more effective, but it is very uncomfortable to use it to repeat the information expressed by means of it. one loses the sequence and logical links and relationships among the facts. evaluating one’s abilities and specifying problems. the students reflected on their abilities to cope with certain aspects of reading and evaluated their progress. some students extrapolated to other out-of-training reading situations. it is worth highlighting that vocabulary knowledge was reported as the most common factor causing problems in comprehending texts. for an example of such opinions, see the entry below. i experience difficulty in catching the main message expressed in the answers. i find it easier to formulate the main idea in my own words. however, there are texts that are really difficult. i think my difficulties are connected with not understanding key words. discussion and conclusions the diaries elicited rich information, which enabled the author to answer the research questions concerning the students’ metacognitive beliefs in relation to the learners themselves (bl), the tasks (bt) and strategies connected with the training (bs). as regards bl, the results of the analysis show that the learners differed in their views on reading in a fl. for some students, the training was a kind of eye opener as it created a unique opportunity to “discover” new learning techniques. it seems that the learners appreciated the techniques recommended; they expressed an opinion that reading english texts requires complex skills and using strategies can facilitate this process. there was another group of students that treated reading as a skill that they simply apply when they want to understand a text; in their opinion, strategies are “fuss,” which they do not need. the students who did not show much enthusiasm about the training seem to demonstrate the features of fluent readers, whose reading behavior grabe and stoller (2002) explain in the following way: tapsla.12691 p. 18/26 m. kusiak-pisowacka using strategies effectively does not typically involve conscious decisions on the part of the fluent reader. strategic readers are able to verbalize consciously the strategies that they use when asked to reflect, but they usually do not think consciously of these strategic choices because they have used them effectively so often. (p. 82) in other words, a possible reason behind the learners’ dissatisfaction with the training is the fact that, as more experienced readers, they had already been using the strategies suggested during the training. it seems that bringing strategies into consciousness was not what they would have expected from this kind of training. the data point to another important preference concerning reading. for many learners, it is vocabulary that plays a key role in reading comprehension. similarly, not knowing vocabulary in the text is a common problem reported by many learners. it suggests that for some students, vocabulary knowledge is one of the most important aspects of fl competence that they would like to develop. a possible explanation of this finding could be the influence of the students’ learning background, namely, not many opportunities to get engaged in awareness-raising activities and to test the effectiveness of this type of learning. while lexical exercises, also those that accompany reading comprehension tasks, are popular in an efl classroom, strategy-based tasks are still rare. when it comes to the research questions which concern bt and bs, the analysis revealed that comments on the tasks and those regarding the strategies intertwine. therefore, in this discussion the findings reflecting both aspects of students’ metacognitive knowledge are presented together. the diaries show that the students were able to identify the objectives of the tasks that they were asked to complete. they were also able to identify and name the strategies that the training demonstrated. the learners evaluated the difficulty of the tasks and discussed the effectiveness of the strategies involved in the tasks. there are several skills that the learners emphasized as resources which they utilized while performing the reading tasks. apart from vocabulary knowledge, they stressed the importance of the skill of concentration, the use of creative thinking and analytical reasoning. as regards the usefulness of the strategies presented, it seems that it is not possible to point to one strategy evaluated by all the learners as the most helpful. this finding indicates that strategy knowledge is individual. different students can approve of different strategies for different reasons. as regards the information and resources the students used in order to complete the tasks, some learners found it very beneficial to draw on their earlier learning experiences. they recalled similar tasks that they had performed in their school or out-of-school learning. it seems that this group of learners took exploring fl readers’ metacognitive beliefs:… tapsla.12691 p. 19/26 the “high road” of learning (in contrast to the “low road”), which according to chamot and o’malley (1994) means recognizing similarities between familiar tasks and new tasks, and being able to utilize the strategies that one used to apply in the past. it is probable that among the participants of the training, there were also learners who took the “low road”; they did not remember the previous use of strategies and viewed them as new ones. it is worth adding that the process of diary keeping offered the learners an opportunity to verbalize their strategy use; this unique experience could have equipped them with the metacognition knowledge necessary to recognize familiar situations and strategies in their future learning, as suggested by paris and winograd (1990) and pressley et al. (1992). it was interesting to observe the learners’ emotional engagement with what the training had to offer, especially to follow changes in the reactions and attitudes throughout the training. for example, students who at the beginning did not understand the purpose of the classes changed their attitudes during the training. to sum up, the following conclusions can be drawn: 1. the training encouraged the learners to reflect on themselves as learners and participants of the classes as well as the activities in which they were engaged. 2. the diary proved to be an effective elicitation technique. 3. the students differed in their opinions related to the effectiveness of the training, which may reflect the fact that they were at different levels of reading strategy development. 4. for most of the students, vocabulary seems to play a crucial role in reading comprehension. 5. participating in the training seemed to be an emotional issue. 6. the opinions and attitudes of the students evolved during the training. implications and suggestions for further research there are several issues which were elucidated by this study and call for further investigation. they are discussed below. the results indicate that although the participants were at the same level of general language competence (b1), they represented different levels of reading strategy development. by way of revision, the students varied in their opinions concerning the strategies presented during the training and probably in their experience in strategy use. at this point of discussion, it seems useful to quote pressley (2001), who advances the following suggestion to educators: tapsla.12691 p. 20/26 m. kusiak-pisowacka although much is known about how to teach comprehension strategies when students are first learning them, very little is known about how teaching should occur as students are internalizing and automatizing strategies. (p. 9) in the future, more research attention should be devoted to the students who are at the stage of internalizing and automatizing strategies. additionally, it would be useful to explore in more detail the specificity of teaching reading strategies to mixed ability classes, i.e., those that consist of more and less experienced learners as far as strategy use is concerned. in the analysis of diary data, certain aspects of the language used by the informants were examined. as pointed out in the theoretical section of this paper, developing “metacognitive” discourse is a very important part of strategy training as it can facilitate the process of restructuring beliefs and constructing new metacognitive knowledge. thus, in future studies it can be beneficial to follow changes in learners’ discourse and look at the relation between such changes and students’ metacognitive beliefs. pavlenko (2007) points out that in analyzing narrative data, it is crucial to “consider not only what was said or written but also what was omitted and why” (p. 274). one of the aims of the smile training (see table 1) was to create an atmosphere conducive to the exchange of knowledge and experiences. however, it was found that not many comments in the diaries focus on the social side of the teaching/learning situation. although many students valued the atmosphere of the training, there are no comments regarding the learners’ participation in groupwork activities, which may indicate that the learners did not appreciate a facilitating role that such tasks may play in their learning. this finding implies a suggestion that teachers devote more time to sensitizing learners to the usefulness of interactive activities. as regards research, it would be valuable to explore in more detail the “caring and sharing” aspects of a fl classroom, as emphasized by gabryś-barker (2016). the study has a number of limitations, which should be taken into consideration by those who would like to conduct a similar investigation. different prompt statements could elicit different narrations. for example, more open questions can allow learners more freedom to express their opinions. in the present study, the students were instructed to write entries at home. asking them to complete diaries in class may elicit more introspective reports. adopting a different mode of diary keeping, such as recording narrations on smartphones, can be more motivating for learners in the era of developing technology, as suggested by bartlett and milligan (2015). in the present study, diary data were analyzed by means of thematic analysis. an alternative way could be to look at the diaries with a narrative lens. the narrative research perspective would enable researchers to treat learners’ individual reports as stories and students as story tellers, which would mean exploring fl readers’ metacognitive beliefs:… tapsla.12691 p. 21/26 gaining more insight into the dynamic nature of metacognition knowledge. another possible change in the procedure of the study can be the use of other research methods along with diaries. to ensure methodological triangulation, that is, the use of different research methods to investigate the same issue, interviews with informants can be conducted as well. it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss other advantages of strategy training and diary keeping, such as their impact on learners’ reading and writing skills, and metalinguistic knowledge. it is the belief of the author of the paper that the present study contributes to the picture of metacognition in efl teaching and will encourage both teachers and academics to explore the benefits of introspective techniques in their future research. references bailey, k. m., & ochsner, r. 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(2013). metacognitive strategy use and academic reading achievement: insights from a chinese context. electronic journal of foreign languages teaching, 10, 54–69. monika kusiak-pisowacka metakognitive überzeugungen über das lesen in einer fremdsprache auf der basis von einträgen aus schülertagebüchern z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g der artikel befasst sich mit der metakognition und metakognitiven strategien in bezug auf das leseverstehen. obwohl metakognitive strategien ein fester bestandteil der kognitiven handlungen sind, die jeder mensch alltäglich vornimmt, z. b. bei bewertung der wirksamkeit des eigenen handelns, stellt das konstrukt nach wie vor eine herausforderung für die forschung dar, auch im bereich der lesekompetenz. im artikel werden die von flavell (1978, 1981) vorgeschlagenen theoretischen ansätze dargelegt und ein überblick über die forschung zur metakognition bezogen auf das lesen in einer fremdsprache gegeben, wobei ein besonderer schwerpunkt darauf gelegt wird, die mehr und weniger „effektiven“ leser in die untersuchung miteinzubeziehen. des weiteren werden die unterrichtsprinzipien geschildert, welche auf die entwicklung von lernstrategien abgezielt sind, unter besonderer berücksichtigung der lesekompetenz. der theoretische teil des artikels bildet eine einführung in den empirischen teil, in welchem über ein von der autorin durchgeführtes forschungsprojekt berichtet wird. ziel der studie war es, die metakognitiven überzeugungen und meinungen (eng. metacognitive beliefs) der teilnehmer am lesestrategietraining herauszufinden, die von den schülern in den im rahmen des unterrichts geführten tagebüchern exploring fl readers’ metacognitive beliefs:… tapsla.12691 p. 25/26 (eng. diaries) formuliert wurden. die analyse der tagebucheinträge führte zu einigen interessanten schlussfolgerungen, die bei der entwicklung von lernstrategien bzw. bei der durchführung ähnlicher untersuchungen zur metakognition hilfreich sein können. schlüsselwörter: metakognition, strategietraining, lesestrategien, tagebücher, überzeugungen der schüler tapsla.12691 p. 26/26 m. kusiak-pisowacka preface we resolved to start publishing theory and practice of second language acquisition thinking that despite the fact that poland had a strong position in second language acquisition research and that quite a large number of monographic publications in this area came out every year—often published abroad with multilingual matters or springer, among others—yet there was no academic research-oriented journal devoted to the theory and practice of sla which would be widely available to polish academia. following the publication of the first issue, however, it became clear that its scope would attract submissions not only from polish scholars but also international academics. thus far, tapsla has featured articles by such renowned contributors as david singleton, tammy gregersen, jean-marc dewaele—and many other scholars representing innovative trends in sla research worldwide. the journal has become the venue of thought exchange for academics at home and abroad, focusing on often unresearched issues and fairly new developments in sla studies. the editorial board consists of both polish scholars and foreign experts in the area, and represents the wide range of research interests of its members. all updated information on the journal is available on the institute of english (university of silesia in katowice) webpage at www.ija.us.edu.pl (via a special link) and the journal webpage at http://www.journal.us.edu.pl/index.php/tapsla. the present issue consists of articles in various areas of second/third language acquisition, but has a strong focus on foreign language instruction and materials used for this purpose in a variety of contexts and for different age groups. the issue starts with a presentation of a fairly new context of foreign language teaching—a professional environment—in the text by dorota lipińska “the influence of age and l2 on third language acquisition in a corporate environment.” it focuses mainly on two important variables, of age and the influence of a formerly acquired foreign language on the current learning practices of adult learners who are professionally active. katarzyna bańka in the article 6 preface “an analysis of the higher education systems of teaching chinese as a foreign language in poland and china” presents a comparison of educational practices in teaching chinese as a foreign language (chfl) in china and in a non-native context of poland. the author puts forward some ideas to improve chfl instruction. elżbieta gajek looks at more innovative language sources in her article “ict as material culture in call,” which treats information and communication technologies (ict) as representing digital culture artifacts, a significant part of material culture. the author demonstrates their role in teaching foreign languages and aims to find relations between language teachers’ access to digital devices, their perceptions of the usefulness of ict in foreign language learning and teaching, and the actual use of digital materials in their own language teaching, and beyond the classroom for non-professional uses. the next text introduces the theme of authentic foreign language teaching materials as salama embark in “some libya efl university students’ attitudes towards using authentic materials for reading classes” investigates the attitudes of libyan english foreign language (efl) university students towards authentic materials used in fl instruction. the author believes that authentic materials not only present an invaluable source as language input, but first and foremost constitute a strong motivator for learners in their endeavour to become fluent fl users. an interesting and infrequently researched issue of teachers’ foreign language attrition is presented in the text by teresa maria włosowicz “english language attrition in teachers: questions of language proficiency, language maintenance, and language attitudes.” the author discusses the occurrence of foreign language attrition in non-native english language teachers and presents the results of an empirical study of its manifestation at the level of advanced vocabulary and structures. it also comments on the participants’ attitudes to linguistic correctness and their autonomous strategies of language maintenance. finally, maria stec’s article “multimodality of cultural content in elt materials for young learners” deals with english non-authentic didactic materials but this time from the perspective of their value as cultural artifacts that can be used successfully in early language education. she identifies the most important aspects related to teaching elements of english culture as represented in english coursebooks for young learners. we hope that this journal to some extent fills a gap in the polish journal publishing market and that it will be of interest to researchers working in the field of second language acquisition. we would like to invite polish and foreign academics to share their scholarly research with us by submitting their work to the theory and practice of second language acquisition journal published by the prestigious polish academic publisher, wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego (university of silesia press). danuta gabryś-barker adam wojtaszek aleksandra szymańska-tworek university of silesia, katowice teaching materials and the elf methodology – attitudes of pre-service teachers a b s t r a c t the central argument voiced in the present paper is that the english language classroom should be inf luenced by the english as a lingua franca (elf) methodology. what we mean under the notion of elf methodology is a set of assumptions and tenets advanced by a number of scholars (e.g., jenkins, 2002; seidlhofer, 2011), who advocate rejecting the hegemony of a native-speaker language model and embracing a more egalitarian perspective that promotes the linguistic and cultural diversity of the english-using world. the elf methodology is one of the recent developments in elt. an abundant literature (e.g., spichtinger, 2001; mckenzie, 2008) recommends that learners of english are exposed to as many different varieties of english as possible. a further recommendation (e.g., matsuda, 2012) is that the cultural content presented to pupils in the elt classroom should be drawn from multiple sources. the present paper aims to contribute to the debate concerning the implications that the elf methodology carries for coursebooks and teaching materials. the study explores pre-service teachers’ views on the following questions: (1) how many and which varieties of english should appear in the cd recordings that accompany coursebooks? (2) cultures of which countries should constitute the content of teaching materials? the data obtained from 170 pre-service teachers majoring in english indicate that most of them are far more willing to embrace the cultural rather than linguistic diversity in their own teaching practice. keywords: english as a lingua franca, teaching materials, teacher trainees language ideology in teaching materials as far back as 1980, spradley argued that culture encompasses three aspects of human experience: cultural behavior (i.e., what people do), cultural knowltheory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 2 (2) 2016, pp. 83–100 84 aleksandra szymańska-tworek edge (what people know) and cultural artefacts (objects that people produce). the analysis of why, when, and how these artefacts were created, often paves the way for gaining an insight into cultural norms and values that function in a given society. the artefacts can collectively be described as material culture. one of the most conspicuous examples of material culture found in elt classrooms are educational materials such as coursebooks, reference works, grammars, dictionaries, and other language-learning aids. these texts are highly influenced by sociocultural practices and specific cultural values professed by people who write and produce them. instructional materials promote ideologies, perspectives, and positions which reach out far beyond the classroom context and impinge on the way the english language is conceptualized by the general public. when dogmas upon which the materials base are ripe for revision, certain practices are reformulated or eschewed, whereas a new set of assumptions, tailored to the needs of learners, gains currency and affects mass schooling. an example of the ideology embodied in elt materials, significant in the context of the present paper, is the extent to which teaching materials are anglo-centric or the extent to which they encourage students to behave in accordance with certain norms and conventions. in the course of this article, we attempt to emphasize that the changed role of english should have a bearing on the content of elt coursebooks and other educational materials. the unceasing spread of english and the emergence of english as a lingua franca (hereafter elf) carry numerous implications for the english language classroom. an accumulating body of research (e.g., seidlhofer 1997; mckay 2012) points to the need for a reconsideration of the subject “english as a foreign language” on the school curriculum. teaching english should not resemble teaching other languages because the status of english is unique. however, the elf methodology stands little chance of being adopted even by teachers who understand its tenets unless it is validated through inclusion in coursebooks and teaching materials (jenkins, 2005, p. 541). matsuda (2002, p. 184) points out that teaching materials are an important component of the elt classroom and are likely to play a crucial role in forming students’ perceptions of the english language. for this reason, it is important that materials used in the classroom reflect the most recent developments in elt, the case in point being the elf perspective. the present paper aims to contribute to the debate concerning the implications that the emergence of elf has for teaching materials by discussing two features of coursebooks that strongly reflect the dominant language ideology: the content of audio materials that accompany coursebooks and the cultural content. 85teaching materials and the elf methodology… the inclusion of native and non-native english in audio materials one of the implications that the elf methodology carries for classroom materials is the inclusion of as many different varieties of english as possible. cd recordings accompanying coursebooks should expose pupils to a wide selection of inner, outer, and expanding circle varieties of english.1 depriving schoolchildren of this exposure is likely to make learners think that there is only one ‘correct’ variety of the language that they need to conform to. the belief that there exists only one variety of english is a dangerous illusion that can mislead learners and be a source of misunderstandings (sharma, 2008, p. 127). sadly, research shows that this misconception is reflected in the way many students think. friedrich (2002, p. 442) reports on his study, in which learners of english from expanding circle countries were asked to name varieties of english that they were aware of. regrettably, only british english and american english were enumerated. the participants of the study were not even aware of other inner circle varieties of english like australian or canadian english. it seems that learners need to be explicitly taught about the varietal diversification of english in the course of their english language education. needless to say, pupils must not be expected to imitate all the varieties they are provided with. as far as production is concerned, it is advisable that children are exposed to one particular model they are asked to follow. however, listening training is believed to be more effective when a much wider range of different varieties is provided. although the selection of british or american english as an instructional model is understandable, students need to be informed that it is not the only variety of english (matsuda, 2012, p. 173). as pithily put by mckenzie (2008, p. 79), “it seems unreasonable to impose a single or, indeed, a restricted range of pedagogical models for english language classrooms. this seems as unrealistic as exposing learners only to male speakers, or speakers over a certain age.” the english language classrooms have traditionally imposed one or two varieties on learners: british english and/or american english. the faith that british english is aesthetically superior to other varieties, well-suited for education, social life, and the workplace has 1 these terms refer to a model introduced by kachru (1985) that distinguishes between three circles of english (inner circle, outer circle, and expanding circle) which represent three different contexts of the use of english. the inner circle comprises countries where english is used mainly as a native language (e.g., the uk, canada). the outer circle includes countries which are former colonies of the inner circle countries and which have developed their own indigenous varieties of english (e.g., nigeria, india). the expanding circle represents countries, where english is learnt as a foreign language and used primarily for international, rather than intranational purposes (e.g., poland, argentina). 86 aleksandra szymańska-tworek long dominated traditional elt methodology (modiano, 2010, p. 72). it has been recognized that students who have been exposed exclusively to no more than two varieties may be shocked by varieties that differ from native-speaker english and regard them as deficient (matsuda, 2012, p. 171). instead of focusing on inner circle english, learners need to be presented with a multiplicity of language samples, produced by both native and non-native users of the language. spichtinger (2001, p. 52) points to a number of benefits of exposing learners to a rich selection of native and non-native models of english. firstly, learners’ awareness of the richness of the english language and the linguistic diversification of the english-speaking world is raised. secondly, providing schoolchildren with multiple examples of inner, outer, and expanding circle english is likely to contribute to the development of cross-cultural understanding and tolerance. thirdly, the classroom that exposes learners to english produced by both native and non-native speakers helps to prepare them for communication with interlocutors from a variety of l1 backgrounds. however, despite recommendations advanced by elf scholars, research shows that the status quo of the elt classroom has remained unchanged. the english language classroom does not seem to mirror the rationales presented in elf research. a study conducted by matsuda (2002) presents an analysis of seven coursebooks used in the first year of junior high school in japan. according to the study, the use of english among non-native speakers is significantly under-represented in all the examined coursebooks. the study reveals that textbooks used in japanese schools focus almost exclusively on the language of the us and the uk, which reinforces the idea that americans and britons are the prototype of english speakers. as already indicated, although it is reasonable for a textbook to focus predominantly on one variety of english as a model for production, it needs to expose students to a number of different varieties so that learners understand that the variety they study is one of many (matsuda 2012, p. 173). as pointed out by levis (2005, p. 371), although most native speakers speak neither received pronunciation nor general american, teaching materials rely on these prestige models, “giving a skewed view of pronunciation that may not serve learners’ communicative needs.” these two accents have long dominated the elt profession and so they seem ’natural’ to most teachers and learners (matsuda, 2012, p. 171). it is also stated by jenkins (2002, p. 100) that in most language classrooms the only accent students are likely to hear is that of rpand ga-accented speakers on audio materials. she recommends that materials producers need to develop audio recordings that provide students with a wide range of non-native accents. one of the recommended resources for use in the classroom is walker (2010). this publication includes a cd with a wide range of recordings of speakers from argentina, china, germany, hungary, japan, malaysia, poland, russia, and other countries. 87teaching materials and the elf methodology… the cultural content of teaching materials teaching a foreign language has always been strictly connected with raising students’ awareness of target language culture. however, for the vast majority of learners, english has long ceased to be a foreign language. since english has assumed the role of a lingua franca, it can no longer be associated exclusively with inner circle culture. as put by brutt-griffler (2002, p. 6), a language can only become internationalized once it loses its identification solely with one culture. however, despite the fact that english has become de-anglicized, it is far from being de-culturalized (matsuda, 2012, p. 176). the phenomenal spread of english has infused and enriched the language with cultures of all those who use it as a shared resource. importantly for our study, the shift in the use of english carries implications for the cultural content of english classes. a very useful framework for teaching culture is introduced by matsuda (2012, p. 176), who states that cultural content of english classes must be drawn from multiple sources. firstly, teachers need to draw students’ attention to global culture, which involves exposing them to topics that cut across national boundaries, such as world peace or environmental protection. this recommendation is very much in line with other studies (e.g., dörnyei & csizér, 2002, p. 453) which state that english has lost its national cultural base, but has gained association with global culture. secondly, learners need to be made familiar with the culture of their prospective interlocutors. as the number of non-native speakers of english has long outgrown the number of native speakers of this language, it is likely that most learners will use english more often in communication with non-native speakers. this assumption carries implications for english language education. teachers need to diversify the cultural content of their classes to include countries and regions that represent various parts of the world. pupils must be given a chance to reflect on cultures which originate in all the three kachruvian circles. restricting the cultural content of english lessons to inner circle countries deprives learners of the opportunity to get to know the cultural diversification of the english-speaking world. thirdly, pupils must be encouraged to discuss their own culture in english. this way they learn to express their ideas and cultural values and explain them to their future interlocutors. the ability to talk about one’s home culture is an important skill that is likely to prevent or clear up many unfortunate misunderstandings that may arise in the course of intercultural communication. the three elements discussed by matsuda are considered to be a core basis of every coursebook that is intended to teach english in the present-day world. however, research indicates that most materials writers have still not embraced this multicultural perspective. seidlhofer (2011, p. 13) argues that an analysis of textbooks and reference materials shows that native-speaker ideology remains 88 aleksandra szymańska-tworek firmly entrenched. most coursebooks contain culturally biased content that strongly privileges inner circle countries. prodromou (1988, p. 79) states that the majority of textbooks “project an anglo-centric, male-dominated, middleclass utopia of one kind or another.” an example of a study that examines the extent to which coursebooks inform about inner, outer, and exapanding circle cultures is yuen (2011), who analyzed how foreign cultures are represented in two textbook series (longman elect and treasure plus) used in secondary schools in hong kong. the results show that the representation clearly favored the cultures of anglophone countries, while the cultures of africa and asia were under-represented. the study reveals that although both textbook series contain ample cultural content, there is a distinct imbalance in representation of cultures from different regions (yuen, 2011, p. 462). textbook materials focus almost exclusively on the cultures of english-speaking countries, while the cultures of africa and asia are neglected. the author of the study concludes by stating that increasing the amount of coverage on the cultures of non-anglophone countries in textbooks is sought after as it would help develop students’ appreciation of a wider range of foreign cultures. as observed by cook (1999, p. 185), “language teaching would benefit by paying attention to the l2 user rather than concentrating primarily on the native speaker.” this shift of attention carries important implications for materials writers, who are asked to consider that only a relatively small number of learners will use english in predominantly native-speaker contexts. for this reason, teaching manuals should concentrate more on presenting international settings and non-native contexts of language use. teaching materials need to focus more on interaction between non-native speakers and less on embedding english in an anglo-american context (spichtinger 2001, p. 53). coursebooks that present exclusively anglophone cultural norms and values prepare learners to discuss foreign culture rather than their own. deterding (2010, p. 13) talks about a shortage of elf-based teaching materials and expresses the need for such materials to be developed in the near future. their role is considered crucial because few teachers have a rich enough knowledge to introduce their students to the linguistic and cultural diversity of the english-speaking world (matsuda, 2012, p. 169). for this purpose, teachers need to rely on appropriately-designed instructional materials. the study this paper reports on part of a larger research project that examines the attitudes that pre-service teachers of english exhibit towards the subject of their 89teaching materials and the elf methodology… study. the project constitutes a phd proposal that is currently being written by the present author at the institute of english of the university of silesia, katowice. data for the study are collected by means of an extensive questionnaire and in-depth interviews. the questionnaire is intended to gather data concerning the respondents’ awareness of the elf terminology, their attitudes towards native and non-native english, and attitudes towards the way english is presented and taught in the classroom context. we hope to gain an understanding of whether pre-service teachers of english are aware of the implications that the emergence of elf carries for elt practices and, if so, whether they are willing to embrace them as part of their own teaching routine. the present paper reports on the section of the questionnaire concerning the kind of instructional materials the respondents recognize as appropriate and desirable for the classroom use. our questions concentrated on two aspects of teaching manuals that reflect the dominant language ideology: the audio materials that accompany textbooks and the cultural content. the study was conducted in january-march 2014 at the institute of english of the university of silesia. the questionnaire gathered both quantitative and qualitative data, analyzed by identifying emerging patterns, recurring topics, and ambiguous answers. the purpose of the study the purpose of the study presented in this paper is to examine the attitudes held by pre-service teachers of english towards two topics expressed in the following questions: (1) how many and which varieties of english should appear in the cd recordings that accompany coursebooks and other teaching materials? (2) cultures of which countries should constitute the content of instructional materials? the participants respondents who took part in the present research were 170 majors of english, enrolled in years 1 and 2 of the ma teacher education program at the institute of english of the university of silesia. the studied population comprised 40 part-time (extramural) and 130 full-time students, of whom 84.7% were female and 15.3% male. the respondents had elected to take the teacher education module as part of their degree and for this reason the present paper refers to them as pre-service teachers of english. however, despite being referred to as ‘pre-service,’ all of the informants have some teaching experience, gained either through practicum, which is an obligatory part of the teacher preparatory training they attend, or through their professional career as part90 aleksandra szymańska-tworek time or full-time teachers. initially, the practicum requires students to observe classes conducted by regular teachers, then the students are asked to run classes on their own. at the point of administering the questionnaire, the respondents had spent on average 90 hours observing other teachers and approximately 110 hours actively teaching. the students exempt from the practicum on the basis of their professional career as teachers had spent in the classroom at least the same number of hours, although in most cases they had accumulated a far more extensive teaching experience. the teaching practice was one of the two reasons for which we decided to carry out the study among this particular group of respondents. a number of questions included in the questionnaire require informants to relate to their own classroom practices and responding to these questions would be more difficult for freshman or sophomore students. the second reason why the study involved this group of informants was because of their extensive knowledge of methodology of english language teaching. as part of their teacher education program, students attend a considerable number of tefl courses, such as elt methodology, pedagogy, didactics, applied linguistics, and psychology. it is believed that this intense theoretical preparation combined with equally intensive hands-on classroom experience make our respondents knowledgeable classroom practitioners with an increased awareness of the most recent developments in elt, such as the elf perspective. data presentation and discussion the following is a presentation and discussion of data concerning the use of coursebooks and other teaching materials in the elt classroom obtained in the questionnaire study. a question that will serve as a baseline for further analysis of the findings asked the respondents to make a prediction regarding their pupils’ future use of english (see figure 1). as many as 50.6% of the subjects believe school leavers will use english more often in communication with non-native speakers. twenty-five point nine percent predict that their pupils will engage in communication with native and non-native speakers equally often. only 11.8% of the informants predict that their pupils will use english more often with native speakers of english. bearing this position in mind, we proceed to present and discuss other findings obtained in the study. as will become clear during the paper, most respondents assume their pupils will use english more often with non-native speakers, but this prediction seems to have little impact on the respondents’ attitudes towards what happens in the classroom. pre-service teachers’ attitudes towards the inclusion of native and non-native english in audio materials. the elf methodology prescribes the 91teaching materials and the elf methodology… promotion of as many inner, outer, and expanding circle varieties as possible. in order to examine pre-service teachers’ views on this subject matter, our respondents were asked about the number of english varieties that should appear in the cd recordings that accompany coursebooks (see figure 2). figure 1. the respondents’ prediction of their pupils’ future use of english. figure 2. the respondents’ views on the number of varieties that should be included in the cd recordings that accompany coursebooks. as many as 61.7% of the sampled group believe cd recordings need to include only one or two english varieties. a counterperspective is offered by 26.5% who think that the english language classroom should expose pupils to five, six or more varieties of english. the following discussion is an analysis 92 aleksandra szymańska-tworek of reasons given by the respondents to explain their choice. owing to space constraints, we present the responses produced by the two most numerous groups of informants. forty-three point five percent of respondents believe coursebooks need to include two varieties of english. all of the responses point to british and american english as the two appropriate ones. the analysis of the comments obtained from the students allowed for the identification of the following reasons: • 54% of the test population believe pupils must be provided with british and american english because these are the most popular,’ ‘common’ or ‘important’ varieties of english. • 18% claim that learners would be confused if provided with more than two varieties. • 14% believe that the number of varieties is so great that exposing children to all of them is impossible. • 5% observe that most instructional materials used in schools present british and american english and for this reason cd recordings should also provide only these two varieties. • a further 5% point out that pupils must be exposed to two varieties because british is better, superior, more beautiful or more educated, whereas american is more common or popular. • 3% declare pupils will not be prepared for international communication if exposed to only one variety of english. • a handful of the respondents (about 1%) remark that pupils should be exposed to two english varieties, but occasionally they can be provided with a nonstandard variety that could break the monotony of regular classroom practices. this part of the paper constitutes a discussion of the most common responses provided by the students. all of the quotations provided throughout the present paper are intended to represent strands of opinion, rather than individual voices. a large group of the respondents (54%) claim cd recordings should provide learners with two varieties of english because british and american english are the most popular, common or important varieties of english. this sentiment is reflected in the citations presented below: (1) these are two which are the most popular and useful. (2) these are the most popular varieties. (3) students should be exposed to those varieties because they are the most common and widespread. (4) i think that those two varieties of english are the most crucial and important. they are also well-known in comparison to other less known dialects. 93teaching materials and the elf methodology… (5) british and american english are simply the most important varieties of english in the world and children should be familiar with them. worth noting is that the comparison between varieties of english includes an element of evaluation that prioritizes some varieties as more important. the respondents are pre-service teachers and their views on english are likely to shape the way their pupils think about this language. promoting certain varieties as more important or educated suggests that some other varieties are somehow deficient. such classroom practices could potentially lead to negative stereotyping. a further claim advocated by some students is that exposing learners to more than two varieties would make them confused. this belief is exemplified by the following statements: (6) the increase of the amount of varieties would be confusing and misleading for the students. (7) in my opinion there is no point in exposing students to more than two varieties because they would feel lost and confused. what’s more, students only need to master one variety and being exposed to a few of them would make them go off the track. (8) exposing students to more varieties would make them confused which to choose and learn and they would mix all varieties in speaking and writing. (9) if children hear too many varieties they won’t know which variety to follow. this would be very messy and could even discourage children from learning. this group of respondents seems inattentive to the fact that outside of the classroom pupils are likely to encounter a wide selection of different english varieties. the lack of preparation for this linguistic diversification is likely to bring two negative results. firstly, pupils may experience considerable problems in understanding different varieties. secondly, they may recognize some varieties as incorrect, deformed or deficient forms of native-speaker english and their users as uneducated or uncultured. when put in any communication situation, pupils find themselves surrounded by a multitude of inner, outer, and expanding circle varieties. if the english language classroom does not prepare learners for this phenomenal diversity, they will experience sudden shock and confusion that may inhibit their communication skills. on a separate note, it is possible that at least some respondents perceive exposing pupils to certain varieties as commensurate with teaching of these varieties. some informants assume that all varieties which learners are provided with constitute a role model for pupils to imitate and follow. needless to say, this 94 aleksandra szymańska-tworek is not the case. the intention of the questionnaire was to ask about a number of varieties that pupils need to be exposed to, not trained in. a group of respondents suggest that the number of english varieties is so great that exposing pupils to all of them is impossible. the following quotations reflect this strand of opinion: (10) presenting more than two varieties to students is a waste of time. there are many varieties of english and students will never hear all of them. (11) my opinion is that british and american are enough. every nation speaks english with a different accent, but it is unnecessary that children at school are familiar with all of them. (12) there isn’t enough time to analyze all the possible varieties. and i think that most teachers are familiar (can use) only these two varieties properly. the above reflections are based on an assumption that it is impossible or unneeded for pupils to be exposed to all varieties of english and thus it is sufficient for them to be provided with just two. of course, it is indeed impossible for the english language classroom to provide learners with recordings of all english varieties, but it does not mean that the sample must be restricted to only two of them. as already indicated, the present paper discusses the findings to the question about a number of varieties obtained from the two most numerous groups of respondents (see figure 2). forty-three point five percent claim audio materials need to include two varieties of english. contrastingly, the second most numerous group of the subjects (24.7%) recommend that coursebooks promote six of more varieties of english. the responses gathered from this group of the participants revealed the following sets of reasons: • pupils should be exposed to different varieties because this will prepare them for using english in international situations with both native and non-native speakers of english. • pupils must be aware of the linguistic diversity of the english-speaking world. • providing learners with as many different varieties as possible in the classroom alleviates the shock of being exposed to them when abroad. • exposing learners to many different varieties of english is entertaining and makes them interested in the language. some of the comments provided by the students echo recommendations advanced by elf researchers: (13) students should be aware of other varieties because they will rather speak with non-native speakers of english. i hadn’t heard any other 95teaching materials and the elf methodology… english varieties before i went to england and it was very hard for me to understand other non-native varieties of english. (14) there is a big chance that our students will face non-native speakers and it is important to know/understand their varieties. the number of non-native speakers in, for example, england is increasing steadily. (15) the reality is that rp is not enough! being familiar with scottish and irish may save you some great disappointment. they speak so differently! american english is needed because it’s taking over and because of the films and tv series more and more people resort to american vocabulary. indian (pakistani etc.) accents should also be taken into consideration because half of london uses them. (16) non-native speakers of english are one of the biggest groups among which communication takes place! teachers should prepare children for communication with people from all corners of the world! (17) people usually learn english to communicate with others, not necessarily to live in england. they should be exposed to natural conversations between non-native speakers. (18) sometimes students are not aware that english in different countries may sound different. i’d like to give them some samples to show them how different english is. all of the above quotations show that at least some of our informants are receptive to the elf perspective that advocates the promotion of as many inner, outer, and expanding circle varieties as possible. the respondents acknowledge that the presentation of a multiplicity of varieties gives the language classroom an international flavor and creates favorable conditions for the development of communication skills. these informants want to prepare pupils for international communication and reject the british/americancentric view of language. pre-service teachers’ attitudes towards the cultural content of teaching materials. as many as 84.2% of the subjects think developing learners’ cultural awareness is an important aspect of teaching english. this statistic is optimistic, but hardly surprising as the notion of culture has long gained a foothold in elt. many researchers (e.g., valdes, 1986, p. 121) claim that teaching a language without teaching the culture of its native speakers is simply impossible. the more recent developments in the elt methodology have drawn our attention to the fact that the emergence of elf deprives inner circle culture of its privileged status in the classroom. the english language is no longer bound to anglo-american culture exclusively and the relationship between language and culture should be reconsidered (horibe, 2008, p. 243). elf theorists (e.g., matsuda, 2012, p. 176) propose that the cultural content of english classes need 96 aleksandra szymańska-tworek to be drawn from a multitude of sources. this part of the paper attempts to shed light on the sentiments exhibited by pre-service teachers of english concerning the cultural content of coursebooks. the questionnaire asked the respondents to take a stance on the appropriateness of including inner circle and non-inner circle cultures in textbooks and audio-visual materials. more specifically, we followed matsuda’s (2012) framework of reference and asked the informants about the inclusion of cultures of englishand non-english-speaking countries, pupils’ home culture (which in our case is polish culture) and global culture. in addition, the questionnaire asked the participants of the study about their own primary and secondary english education, that is, to what or whose culture they were exposed to by their own teachers. twenty-eight point eight percent of the studied population agree with the statement that coursebooks used in schools need to inform students only about culture of english-speaking countries. this traditional approach to teaching english promotes dependency on a native-speaker framework and does little to raise learners’ intercultural awareness. forty-four point seven percent of the subjects are of the opinion that textbook materials should provide learners with information on various cultures of non-inner circle countries. whereas more than a half of the informants (56.5%) learnt about inner circle during their own primary and secondary education, only 21.2% of the studied population were provided with information about outer and expanding circle countries. the latter statistic leads to an observation that the respondents are far more open to embracing the approach promoting a variety of different cultures than their own teachers of english. this greater receptiveness to culture-related tenets of the elf methodology is likely to be connected with the respondents’ increased awareness of the worldwide shift in the contexts of use of english. it seems that pre-service teachers of english find it easier to accept the cultural rather than linguistic diversity of the english-speaking world and embrace it as part and parcel of english language instruction. forty-four point seven percent of the participants want textbook materials to provide learners with information on various cultures of non-english-speaking countries. even more respondents, 49.4% believe that instructional materials used in polish schools need to present students with information on polish culture. this statistic can be contrasted with the fact that only 28.8% of the studied population were exposed to this kind of information in the course of their own schooling. once again, also in this respect the subjects seem to be more open than their own teachers of english. however, 25.9% do not recognize this need, whereas the remaining 24.7% find it difficult to decide. these two groups of respondents represent standard language ideology that acknowledges the privileged status of enl countries in the classroom. finally, the last question discussed in this paper asked the studied population about global culture. a large group of respondents (78.8%) want coursebooks 97teaching materials and the elf methodology… to include topics that concern the global society, for example, world peace or environment conservation. this statistic is attributable to the fact that global culture has already found its way onto the pages of many popular textbook series that promote the idea of global citizenry. summarily, 44.7% of the studied population think coursebooks need to provide learners with information on various cultures of non-english-speaking countries. forty-nine point four percent of the respondents want coursebooks used in polish schools to present aspects of polish culture, whereas as many as 78.8% of the informants believe coursebooks should include texts concerning global culture. a half of the respondents (50.6%) do not acknowledge the need for polish culture to be discussed in elt. more accurately, 25.9% of the subjects oppose this idea, while 24.7% do not know how to answer the question. this relatively high number of “i don’t know” answers may indicate that the respondents had never reflected on the topic in question. teacher preparatory program made them realize the importance of developing pupils’ cultural awareness, but might have never indicated that cultures outside inner circle should be included in discussions offered to students by the elt classroom. however, it seems that pre-service teachers’ general reception of teaching materials including information on various cultures of english and non-english-speaking countries is more positive than their reception of instructional materials containing references to different varieties of english. conclusion the data show that pre-service teachers are far more willing to embrace the cultural rather than linguistic diversity of the english-speaking world. this attitude is largely attributable to the fact that many coursebooks and supplementary materials available on the polish market already contain texts and discussion prompts that relate to cultures of various non-english-speaking countries. even those teachers who have never reflected on the function of such varied cultural content, may react favorably to this idea because they have got used to it in their teaching practice. these same teachers take less kindly to the idea of exposing students to a wide selection of english varieties because fewer teaching materials contain audio materials that make this practice possible. generally stated, it seems that the subjects undervalue the practice of providing learners with a rich selection of different varieties, despite the fact that the majority of them predict their pupils will have more contact with non-native speakers of english. only 24.7% of the sampled group understands that their prediction carries consequences for the way 98 aleksandra szymańska-tworek english is presented in the classroom and postulate that coursebooks need to include six or more english varieties. the new role of english in the world carries a number of implications for language classroom practices. however, the results show that many preservice teachers still think in terms of native-speaker reference norms. what seems to be needed for teachers to be more receptive towards the elf methodology is re-consideration and re-formulation of teacher training program (sifakis, 2007, p. 357). the major change that is advocated is the inclusion of the concept of elf in teacher education courses so that prospective teachers are educated about the concept in question. seidlhofer (1997, p. 60), who advocated the need for a reappraisal of teacher preparatory programs nearly two decades ago, argues that no far-reaching change can be discernible in the classroom unless teacher education is “carefully re-evaluated, re-thought, and re-formed.” references brutt-griff ler, j. (2002). world english: a study of its development. clevedon: multilingual matters. cook, v. (1999). going beyond the native speaker in language teaching. tesol quarterly, 40(1), 185–209. deterding, d. (2010). elf-based pronunciation teaching in china. chinese journal of applied linguistics, 33(6), 3–15. dörnyei, z. and csizér, k. (2002). some dynamics of language attitudes and motivation: results of a longitudinal nationwide survey. applied linguistics, 23(4), 421–462. friedrich, p. (2002). teaching world englishes in two south american countries. world englishes, 21(3), 441–444. horibe, h. (2008). the place of culture in teaching english as an international language (eil). jalt journal, 30(2), 241–253. jenkins, j. (2002). a sociolinguistically based, empirically researched pronunciation syllabus for english as an international language. applied linguistics, 23(1), 83–103. jenkins, j. 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(2012). principles of teaching english as an international language. in l. alsagoff, s. l. mckay, g. hu, & w. a. renandya (eds.), principles and practices for teaching english as an international language (pp. 28–46). new york: routledge. mckenzie, r. m. (2008). social factors and non-native attitudes towards varieties of spoken english: a japanese case study. international journal of applied linguistics, 18(1), 63–88. modiano, m. (2010). eil, native-speakerism and the failure of european elt. in f. sharifian (ed.), perspectives and pedagogical issues (pp. 58–77). bristol: multilingual matters. prodromou, l. (1988). english as cultural action. elt journal, 42(2), 73–83. seidlhofer, b. (1997). rethinking teacher education: setting an agenda for applied linguistics. vienna english working papers, 6(2), 53–62. seidlhofer, b. (2011). understanding english as a lingua franca. oxford: oxford university press. sharma, b. (2008). world englishes, english as a lingua franca, and english pedagogy. journal of nelta, 13(2), 121–130. sifakis, n. (2007). the education of teachers of english as a lingua franca: a transformative perspective. international journal of applied linguistics, 17(3), 355–375. spichtinger, d. (2001). eil: a global, a european and an austrian perspective. vienna english working papers, 10(1), 48–59. spradley, j. p. (1980). participant observation. new york: holt, rinehart and winston. valdes, j. m. (1986). culture bound. cambridge: cambridge university press. walker, r. (2010). teaching the pronunciation of english as a lingua franca. oxford: oxford university press. yuen, k. (2011). the representation of foreign cultures in english textbooks. elt journal, 65(4), 458–466. aleksandra szymańska-tworek didaktisches material vs. elf-paradigma – einstellungen der künftigen lehrer z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g das elfparadigma (english as a lingua franca, dt.: englisch als verkehrssprache), der von einer wissenschaftlergruppe (z.b.: jenkins, 2002; seidlhofer, 2011) gebildete begriff umfasst eine ganze reihe von prämissen und forderungen, die bezwecken, die rolle des sog. muttersprachlers im englischunterricht zu beschränken, und sprachliche und kulturelle verschiedenheit der englischsprachigen welt aus weiterer perspektive zu betrachten. eine der richtlinien des paradigmas (z.b.: spichtinger, 2001; mc kenzie, 2008) lautet, die schüler mit zahlreichen einheimischen und nicht einheimischen varianten der englischen sprache bekanntzumachen. eine andere empfehlung der wissenschaftler (z.b.: matsuda, 2012) heißt, im englischunterricht die von angelsächsischer und nicht angelsächsischer tradition abstammenden kulturen darzustellen. die im vorliegenden beitrag geschilderte forschung sollte einstellungen der künftigen lehrer zu implikationen des elf-paradigmas für den inhalt von lehrbüchern und anderen didaktischen hilfsmitteln untersuchen. die von 170 befragten gewonnenen ergebnisse ließen folgendes erkennen: obwohl sich die über verschiedene aspekte 100 aleksandra szymańska-tworek der kulturen von nicht angelsächsischen ländern handelnden lehrwerke großer beliebtheit erfreuen, sind die meisten befragten der meinung, dass didaktische hilfsmittel keine nicht einheimischen varianten des englischen verbreiten sollten. theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 5 (1), 2019, pp. 73–92 10.31261/tapsla.2019.05.05 katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia university of bielsko-biala, poland angélica carlet universitat international de catalunya, spain maria pujol valls universitat international de catalunya, spain l2 gain or l2 pain? a comparative case study of the target language development among erasmus+ mobility students and at-home students⃰ a b s t r a c t the erasmus+ exchange program has become very popular, with the numbers of student sojourners growing each year. however, it has previously been observed that not all students benefit equally from the study abroad (sa) experience (cf. kinginger, 2008, 2009; marijuan & sanz, 2018; mitchell, tracy-ventura & mcmanus, 2017; regan, howard & lemée, 2009). consequently, the main aim of the present study was to investigate various factors that might contribute to the development of the target language among two small groups of students, one of which self-selected themselves to undertake their language teaching practicum abroad, as a part of the erasmus+ mobility program (n = 6), and the other at local schools in the country of their residence (n = 5). both groups were examined prior their departure and after their return with a battery of tests that included: oxford placement test, self-reported proficiency questionnaire, oral proficiency test based on cambridge advanced exam, language engagement questionnaire, multicultural personality questionnaire (mpq), big five personality questionnaire, and trait emotional intelligence questionnaire (teique). our findings demonstrated that the majority of the erasmus+ mobility program students examined in this study showed some greater linguistic progress in grammar and speaking in comparison to the at-home students. however, there were two cases that failed to progress after the stay abroad experience. further analyses and interviews showed that some other factors such as attitudes, language engagement, and ⃰ the data collection and analyses were possible thanks to a short term scientific mission (stsm) grant awarded by cost action ca15130 study abroad in the european perspective https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4896-0521 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8411-4731 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6314-4675 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.2019.05.05 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4896-0521 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8411-4731 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6314-4675 katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia, angélica carlet, maria pujol valls74 satisfaction with the erasmus experience might in fact inf luence and shape target language development while abroad. at the same time, it could be speculated that, in the case of researched informants, their progress in grammar and speaking could be assigned mostly to the amount and quality of the language input outside of the classroom setting. keywords: l2 gains, stay abroad, erasmus+ mobility, personality, attitudes, satisfaction l2 gains in the study abroad context the general assumption that study abroad (sa) leads to solid linguistic gains continues to generate vigorous debate (dekeyser, 2010; grey, cox, serafini, & sanz, 2015). research on linguistic development among sojourners has continued to note considerable variability in learning outcomes, and some researchers have sought to explain this variability with reference to individual differences such as initial l2 proficiency level, working memory and other cognitive factors, though without clear success (mitchell, tracy-ventura, & mcmanus, 2017, p. 8). consequently, a commonly held assumption that a study abroad setting is the ideal environment in which to learn a second language was questioned. bryfonski and mackey (2018) noted that even though sojourners might have wider access to interactions with native speakers than they do in their home contexts, the link between language gains and the amount and frequency of that contact while abroad has not yet been firmly established (e.g., freed, segalowitz, & dewey, 2004, p. 374). it was also observed that the immersion experience does not always lead to language development and growth (cubillos, chieffo, & fan, 2008; freed, 1995; sanz, 2014; segalowitz & freed, 2004), highlighting the fact that the process is more complex, dynamic, and nuanced. as isabelli-garcía (2006) rightly stated: studies that examine learners’ attitude, motivation and behaviour in the host environment and link these factors directly to linguistic development can show that learners may not magically become fluent speakers simply by being surrounded by the target language. (isabelli-garcía, 2006, p. 231) gardner (2012) noted that language is a defining characteristic of an individual who is involved in thoughts, self-communication, social interaction, and perception of the world. language is an important part of one’s identity, and the extent to which one can incorporate another language successfully is related to a variety of attitudinal variables that are influenced by the cultural milieu in which language learning takes place (gardner & lalonde, 1985, p. 16). pavlenko (2002, pp. 280–281) noted that “attitudes, motivation or language l2 gain or l2 pain? a comparative case study… 75 learning beliefs have clear social origins and are shaped and reshaped by the contexts in which the learners find themselves.” what is more, they are never static as they depend on the interplay of many social, political, and linguistic circumstances (pavlenko, 2005). thus, it could be stated that foreign language learning (fll) is part of the mental and emotional development of learners taking place in the multidimensional context of a society (shabitha & mekala, 2013). consequently, since the fll process is dynamic and depends on various social, psychological, and linguistic factors, it could be postulated that the interplay of the above-mentioned variables might explain the wide variation in learners’ success in acquiring and using a foreign language in a study aboard context. therefore, this investigation aims to examine how different psychological (personality traits, emotional intelligence) and socio-psychological factors (attitudes, language engagement, satisfaction) are related to the development of the l2 grammar and oral communication skills during a short stay abroad period. literature review as noted by hessel (2017), study abroad research has shown that the linguistic gains made by study abroad participants are often subtle and subject to substantial individual differences (collentine, 2009; freed, 1995; kinginger, 2015; sanz, 2014). as a consequence, there has been considerable research interest in identifying factors that can account for differential linguistic progress during study abroad to understand why some students make substantially greater gains than others. baker-smemoe et al. (2014) addressed a number of variables potentially related to l2 gain while abroad among more than 100 native english speakers participating in study abroad in mexico, spain, france, egypt, russia, and china. informants’ language gains were correlated with several predictors such as personality, social networks (size, dispersion, density, etc.), intercultural sensitivity, amount of second language use, gender, and age. the results demonstrated that pre-program competence variables (pre-program proficiency and intercultural sensitivity) and social/contextual variables (social network development) were greater predictors of language gains than were learner attribute variables (age, gender, or personality). in fact, results suggested that the development of social networks as well as the pre-departure level of cultural sensitivity were the variables that predicted most of the variance between gainers and non-gainers in the researched sample. previous studies have already shown that developing social networks with native speakers while abroad via volunteer work, part-time employment, club membership, etc. can facilitate katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia, angélica carlet, maria pujol valls76 language acquisition (isabelli-garcía, 2006; whitworth, 2006). isabelli-garcía (2006, p. 232), in a small-scale case study exploring how differences in motivation and attitude can affect l2 oral communication skills development, provided evidence of a four-way connection between sla during the sa experience, motivation, intercultural adjustment and significant target language interaction with native speakers. these factors, according to the author, might explain the variation among individual learner’s progress while abroad and illustrate: the complex relationship between motivation, acculturation and the development of social networks that ultimately provide opportunities for exposure to the target language and extended interactions that might be the driving force behind language acquisition in the sa context. (isabelli-garcía, 2006, p. 257) some other research studies suggested that cultural adjustment is, in fact, a very important factor that might influence both the development of the target language while abroad, as well as satisfaction with the sa experience. basow and gaugler (2017) reported that intercultural adjustment over the course of the study abroad semester was best predicted by a combination of individual and social factors. in particular, those who had less difficulty with cultural adjustment had stronger language skills initially, as well as higher levels of social interactions with locals during their sojourn. a higher level of social interactions, in turn, mediated the effects of higher levels of open-mindedness and more positive home-stay experiences. in some other studies (harrison & voelker, 2008; savicki et al., 2004) personality and emotional intelligence traits were also reported to influence intercultural adjustment. savicki et al. (2004) investigated contrasts, changes, and correlates among study abroad students and found that clusters of personality traits (e.g., anxiety, extraversion, openness, and agreeableness) and coping strategies (e.g., active, planning, denial, and behavioural disengagement) related to intercultural adjustment. similarly, harrison and voelker (2008) investigated the cross-cultural adjustment of study abroad students. the results of their study indicated that three sub-dimensions of ei were strongly related to a general adjustment to a host culture. individuals with higher self-emotional appraisal, higher others’ emotional appraisal and higher use of emotion exhibited stronger general adjustment than those who scored lower in these dimensions. when it comes to the role of personality dimensions and their relation to the amount of target language use and self-perceived progress in speaking, a very interesting study by arvidsson et al. (2018) showed that an increase in cultural empathy correlated with both self-perceived progress in speaking and the amount of target language use. at the same time, an increase in open-mindedness was reported to correlate with the amount of target language use. the authors concluded that the mentioned personality traits are l2 gain or l2 pain? a comparative case study… 77 not only important for the ability to understand and interpret other cultures, but it is also possible that creating social bonds with the target language community reinforces those personality dimensions (arvidsson et al., 2018, p. 158). therefore, it could be speculated that even though personality was not always directly linked to the sa students’ l2 gains, it could have a direct influence on socialization in the host culture and frequency of l2 use in the immersive context, as well as development of social networks. consequently, it could be suggested that its influence on l2 gains while abroad might be indirect. along the same lines, studies focusing on the immigrant setting also found personality and emotional intelligence to play an important role in explaining cross-cultural adjustment and expatriate employee success (gabel et al., 2005; huang, chi & lawler, 2005; jassawalla, truglia, & garvey, 2004) but also l2 proficiency and frequency of l2 use (ożańska-ponikwia, 2015; ożańskaponikwia & dewaele, 2012). ożańska-ponikwia (2015) reported that immersion in the l2 culture influenced self-perceived l2 proficiency and the degree of l2 use among polish immigrants in the uk and ireland. it was noted that the longer the participants in the study were immersed in the foreign culture, the more frequently they reported using l2 on an everyday basis. this could be explained by engagement in social interactions and building up new social networks in the l2, which, on the other hand, could be linked to higher and lower order personality traits (ożańska-ponikwia, 2013). informants in her study also noticed that only by immersion and socialization in the l2 culture were they able to understand social, linguistic, and cultural aspects of l2 communication patterns, which influenced their self-perceptions as far as the degree and frequency of l2 use was concerned (ożańska-ponikwia, 2015). when it comes to personality traits and l2 use in the immigrant context, some previous studies (ożańska-ponikwia, 2013; ożańska-ponikwia & dewaele, 2012) confirmed that an immigrant’s personality profile was significantly linked to l2 use and self-perceived proficiency in the l2, with agreeableness, openness and the ei trait of empathy influencing self-perceived l2 proficiency, and self-esteem, stress management, adaptability, wellbeing and the global trait of ei being related to l2 use. it was also suggested that openness and self-esteem are the personality traits that best predict the use and development of english l2 by polish immigrants living in the uk or ireland (ożańska-ponikwia & dewaele, 2012). consequently, it could be speculated that personality characteristics that aid both adaptation, as well as intercultural communication, could also be considered important factors affecting l2 gains while abroad. when it comes to the sa outcomes, dewaele (2009, p. 636) noted that research on immersion education and study abroad showed that increased contact with l2 typically boosts the acquisition of different areas of l2, including sociolinguistic competence (mougeon, rehner, & nadasdi, 2004; regan, 2005), socio-pragmatic competence (kinginger, 2004), and grammatical competence katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia, angélica carlet, maria pujol valls78 (howard, 2005; howard & schwieter, 2018; nadasdi, mougeon, & rehner, 2003). however, it needs to be remembered that when it comes to sojourners’ grammatical and lexical development, reported findings are inconclusive. there were noted both some positive effects on grammatical and lexical development during sa (e.g., grey et al., 2015; faretta-stutenberg & morgan-short, 2017) as well no effects on grammatical development during sa (e.g., isabelli-garcía, 2010). when it comes to speaking proficiency, di silvo, donovan, and malone (2015, p. 77) noted that numerous studies have also compared oral proficiency outcomes of students studying abroad with control groups at their home universities and found that groups abroad are more likely to make greater gains than those studying at home (freed, 1995; segalowitz & freed, 2004; vande berg et al., 2009). at the same time, we have to highlight the fact that findings from studies using the language contact profile (lcp) have not been consistent in supporting the common assumption that increased contact leads to greater improvement in speaking performance (di silvo, donovan & malone, 2015, p. 77). however, what might play a role when it comes to language gains and social network development is the quality and not the quantity of the interactions. this was reflected in the study by baker-smemoe et al. (2014) where no significant differences in the amount of the l2 use between high and no language gainers were reported but the differences were in the type of a social network developed by the informants of their study. consequently, those students who were able to establish a close relationship with target language speakers were reported to be high language gainers. a study by dewey, belnap, and hilstrom (2013) investigated the relationship between social network development and perceived gains in oral proficiency by learners of arabic in a semester program. predictors of gains included greater intensity of friendships, more time spent speaking with people outside of established social circles, and higher levels of english language proficiency of arab friends. another study that showed that establishing a close relationship with the target language speakers might lead to substantial linguistic gains was the one by dewey (2008). he found that vocabulary development by learners of japanese in semester study abroad program was more highly correlated with time spent speaking with friends than speaking with host families which could suggest that interactions in the target language with significant others might influence target language proficiency development. therefore, it could be speculated that high-quality interaction in the target language leading to establishing bonds might trigger l2 oral proficiency and consequently result in higher l2 speaking gains. the overview of the literature presented above showed that various psychological (personality traits), and socio-psychological factors (attitudes, motivation) are often intertwined in influencing different aspects of the sa program, such as the development of the target language proficiency, cultural adaptation l2 gain or l2 pain? a comparative case study… 79 and satisfaction with the sa experience. at the same time, with reported considerable variability in learning outcomes among sa students, it is still not clear what factors may trigger l2 proficiency while abroad. therefore, the current study was designed to assess the possible role of different psychological and socio-psychological variables in the development of the target language proficiency in different contexts of the l2 use (immersive and non immersive). method research questions the present study is to address the following research questions: 1. is there any difference in self-perceived l2 proficiency development between students doing their practicum abroad and those doing it at the local schools in the country of their residence? 2. is there any difference in l2 grammar and speaking proficiency development between students doing their practicum abroad and those doing it at the local schools in the country of their residence? 3. is there any link between personality traits, language engagement and attitudes/satisfaction and l2 grammar and oral proficiency development? participants the participants of this study were 11 spanish/catalan learners of english as their l2. they were all 21-year-old females and majored their fourth year of an education degree at a private university in barcelona. the informants of the study self-selected themselves to undertake their three-month language teaching practicum abroad, as a part of the erasmus+ mobility program (n = 6), or at local schools in barcelona (n = 5). among the erasmus+ mobility recipients, four went to london and two to finland. instruments in the present study, a battery of tests was applied. two of them measured personality traits (big five personality questionnaire; multicultural personality questionnaire). one measured emotional intelligence (trait emotional intell katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia, angélica carlet, maria pujol valls80 igence questionnaire) and four other tests were used to measure english (l2) proficiency (oxford placement test; self-reported proficiency questionnaire; speaking test based on the cambridge advanced exam) as well as frequency of the l1 and l2 use (language engagement questionnaire). below we provide a detailed description of all enumerated questionnaires. the big-five personality test. the big-five broad domains personality test (goldberg, 1992), obtained from the international personality item pool (ipip), measured personality traits such as extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability/neuroticism, and openness. subjects responded to each item on a five-point likert scale. the scale indicating; “never or almost never true of me,” “usually not true of me,” “somewhat true of me,” “usually true of me,” “always or almost always true of me.” these categories were assigned values of 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 respectively. the correlation of the ipip big-five broad domains personality test with the costa and mccrae (1992) big-five factor structure ranged from .66 to .90 with an overall correlation reported as .81 (goldberg, 1992). the cronbach’s α for the big-five broad domains personality test was .84. multicultural personality questionnaire. the multicultural personality questionnaire (mpq) by van der zee and van oudenhoven (2000) is a per sonality assessment questionnaire that was constructed specifically to describe behavior when one is interacting with people from different cultures. the mpq consisted of 40 likert type items measuring such factors as cultural empathy, flexibility, social initiative, emotional sociability, and openmindedness. the cronbach’s α for the multicultural personality questionnaire was .86. trait emotional intelligence questionnaire (teique). petrides and furnham’s (2003) teique used in the present study comprised 30 items rated on seven-point likert scale providing scores on four factors of broad relevance: wellbeing, self-control, emotionality, and sociability. teique required participants to use the rating scale from “completely disagree” to “completely agree” with a mid-point of “neither agree nor disagree.” the teique cronbach’s α for the whole questionnaire was 88 language engagement questionnaire. the language engagement questionnaire (leq) by mcmanus et al. (2014) was used to document participants’ language engagement (l1, l2) for a range of different activities. participants begin by indicating which languages they use on a regular basis (english, french, spanish, other). for each language selected, participants are provided with a list of 26 activities and are asked to indicate how often they do each l2 gain or l2 pain? a comparative case study… 81 activity in that language on a 5-point scale, which gives a maximum score of 130 points, choosing from: every day, several times a week, a few times a week, rarely, never. even though the questionnaire was originally designed for the sa students we have decided to introduce it also to the at-home group to be able to trace potential similarities/differences in l1/l2 use among those at-home students who undertook their practicum in bilingual schools in barcelona and the stay abroad group. oxford placement test. an adapted version of the oxford placement test was administered twice to the participants, the first time prior to their departure and the second time after finishing their practicum. the test was completed online and it contained 100 questions addressing english grammar and vocabulary. each correct answer was attributed two points, which gives a maximum score of 200 points. immediately after the test, participants were given their score, feedback, and an explanation of their approximate level according to the common european framework of reference for languages (cefrl). self-reported proficiency questionnaire. the self-reported proficiency questionnaire was introduced in order to gather data concerning participants’ opinions regarding their overall l2 proficiency as well as l2 proficiency in four micro skills of speaking, writing, listening, and reading. it comprised 5 likert type items: how would you rate your overall proficiency in english? how would you rate your l2 speaking proficiency? how would you rate your l2 writing proficiency? how would you rate your l2 listening proficiency? how would you rate your l2 reading proficiency? speaking test based on cambridge advanced exam. the speaking test followed the guidelines of part 2 of a cambridge advanced speaking exam (cae). participants were given a set of three pictures and were instructed to select and talk about two of the three pictures individually for one minute. testing took place in a quiet room and participant’s individual output was recorded so it could further be analyzed. three cambridge-trained evaluators rated learners’ speaking abilities on the basis of five different skills: pronunciation, vocabulary, accuracy, communication, and fluency assigning 10 points to each skill (maximum score for the proficiency test was 50 points). a 4-pointscale rubric was used for evaluation and a reliability analysis using an intra-class correlation coefficient (icc) with a level of “absolute agreement” was conducted on the rating scores. the cronbach’s α reliability coefficient for each speaking skill ranged from .84 to .87, indicating strong inter-rater reliability katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia, angélica carlet, maria pujol valls82 procedure all participants were tested in a private university in barcelona before and after (t1 and t2) their three-month teaching placement. moreover, all participants also completed a “during practicum” questionnaire addressing their l1 and l2 language usage. t1 and t2 involved a battery of tests, namely the big five personality questionnaire; the multicultural personality questionnaire, the trait emotional intelligence questionnaire, the oxford placement test; selfreported proficiency questionnaire and a speaking test based on the cambridge advanced exam. more details on each instrument can be seen in section 2.2. the tests were administered online in a computer room and students were called out individually into a separate quiet room to perform the speaking test. after completion of the study, participants were given course credit. data analysis the first research question concerned possible difference in self-perceived l2 proficiency development between students undertaking their practicum abroad and those undertaking it at local schools in the country of their residence. in order to be able to answer this question we have calculated mean scores for each language skill measured before and after the practicum. detailed results are presented in table 1. table 1. self-perceived l2 proficiency—at-home vs. stay abroad group l2 proficiency at-home t1 at-home t2 stay abroad t1 stay abroad t2 overall l2 proficiency 3.80 3.80 3.80 3.80 l2 speaking proficiency 4.00 4.00 4.00 4.00 l2 writing proficiency 4.00 4.00 4.00 3.70 l2 reading proficiency 4.20 4.40 3.80 3.80 l2 listening proficiency 4.40 4.60 3.70 4.00 mean (l2 skills) 4.15 4.25 3.87 3.87 the results presented above show that both groups of students rated their overall l2 proficiency identically both prior and after the practicum. the report ed score was 3.8 on a five-point likert scale which means that in the majority of cases they perceived themselves as upper-intermediate/advanced users of l2 english. what was interesting to note was the fact that in both groups this rating l2 gain or l2 pain? a comparative case study… 83 did not change after the practicum. consequently, it could be speculated that from the sa students’ perspective, their stay abroad experience had no influence on their self-perceived l2 proficiency ratings. what is more, after calculating mean scores for all the l2 skills, we could note that the at-home group ranked their l2 proficiency, in all four mentioned skills, higher than the stay abroad group both before and after their practicum. additionally, even though their overall l2 proficiency score did not change after the practicum, the mean score from all the l2 skills was higher than that reported overall. regarding the stay abroad group, the mean score was only slightly higher (3.87) and did not change after the practicum. from the results, it is observed that in selfperceived l2 proficiency, both groups reported the same score before and after their three-month practicum at schools. however, the home-stay group ranked their proficiency in all four l2 skills slightly higher than the stay abroad group. this was also reflected in their post-practicum scores, whereas the scores of the stay abroad group remained identical after their sa experience. the second research question concerned possible differences in l2 grammar and speaking proficiency development among students undertaking their practicum abroad and those undertaking it at the local schools in barcelona. detailed results of the analyses are presented in table 2 and table 3. table 2. l2 grammar development—at-home vs. stay abroad group l2 proficiency at-home t1 at-home t2 stay abroad t1 stay abroad t2 grammar test score 142.4 144.2 142.0 161.0 as can be observed in table 2, the initial grammar test scores in both groups were almost identical. the mean score in the home stay group was 142.4 out of 200 and in the stay abroad group, 142. however, after the practicum, the stay broad group scored higher than the at-home group, receiving a mean score of 161. in regards to the comparison of scores, it may be noted that the at-home group made almost no progress. the difference in the mean scores between t1 and t2 was 2.2, whereas the stay abroad participants progressed substantially with 19 points difference in the mean scores. as for l2 speaking development, the results presented in table 3 clearly show that both groups received similar scores during the first data collection phase, just before the beginning of their practicum. however, after the practicum, the at-home group received lower scores (the difference in scores was 3.5 points) and the stay abroad group scored higher (the difference in scores was 5 points). further analyses showed that the at-home group scored the same or lower in the measured aspects, whereas the stay abroad group got better scores in accuracy, vocabulary, fluency, and pronunciation. interestingly, the katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia, angélica carlet, maria pujol valls84 greatest progress in l2 speaking development among sojourners was noted in accuracy (2.9 points difference). table 3. l2 speaking development—at-home vs. stay abroad group l2 proficiency at-home t1 at-home t2 stay abroad t1 stay abroad t2 overall l2 speaking score 36.0 32.5 36.4 41.4 accuracy 7.0 5.5 6.6 9.5 vocabulary 7.0 5.5 6.6 7.9 communication 8.0 7.5 8.3 8.3 fluency 8.5 8.5 8.7 9.1 pronunciation 5.5 5.5 6.2 6.6 the third research question concerned the possible influence of personality traits, language engagement, attitudes and satisfaction on l2 grammar and oral proficiency development. in order to answer this question, an analysis of the individual responses of all participants will be presented by focusing on highand low-gainers in both groups under question. importantly, there was only one student that failed to progress in the stay abroad group, and one that made some progress only as far as grammar is concerned. thus, they were both assigned to the low-gainers category. all remaining students made some substantial progress in both l2 grammar and speaking. on the other hand, in the at-home group, there were no high-gainers that could be included in the analysis. the highest gain among participants of this group was 4 points in the grammar test and no gain in the speaking test was observed. consequently, analysis of the stay abroad sample focused on both high and low-gainers, whereas the analysis of the at-home sample focused solely on low-gainers. detailed results of the analyses are presented below in tables 4, 5, 6, and 7. table 4. high and low-gainers in the stay abroad group-test scores type of learner grammar test score (t1 & t2) cefrl level (t1 & t2) difference in points speaking test (t1 & t2) difference in points high-gainer 1 156 & 196 c1 & c2 40 47.5 & 50 2.5 high-gainer 2 112 & 146 b1 & b2 34 30 & 35 5 low-gainer 1 158 & 150 c1 & c1 –8 30 & 22.5 –7.5 low-gainer 2 138 & 148 b1 & c1 11 22.5 & 22.5 0 l2 gain or l2 pain? a comparative case study… 85 as can be noted from table 4, there is no clear pattern in the level of proficiency among high and low-gainers in the stay abroad group. it can be seen that there is a student (high-gainer 1) whose l2 proficiency at onset is already high (c1), and still shows, despite the ceiling effect, the greatest progress among all participants. even though her progress in the speaking test is not remarkable, she achieved the highest of all scores at t2. on the other hand, the second high-gainer’s level of l2 proficiency was initially quite low (b1) but she managed to improve greatly in both l2 grammar and speaking. at the same time, among the low-gainers, there is a student whose initial l2 proficiency is quite high (c1) but fails to progress while abroad. the second low-gainer managed to improve slightly in grammar test but no such improvement was observed during the speaking test. since these results are inconclusive, other aspects that could have an impact on l2 proficiency development while abroad were analyzed. results of these analyses are presented in table 5. table 5. high and low-gainers in the stay abroad group—students profiles type of learner cultural empathy openmidedness emotional intelligence l1 engagement l2 engagement attitudes and satisfaction max score 40 40 210 130 130 5 high-gainer 1 39 39 191 83 103 5 high-gainer 2 39 38 188 100 112 5 low-gainer 1 35 37 168 105 68 2 low-gainer 2 37 33 163 104 98 1 from the personality profiles of both high and low-gainers in the study abroad group, it may be noted that the high gainers obtained somewhat higher scores on cultural empathy and open-mindedness variables and significantly higher ones on emotional intelligence. however, what differed in both groups was language engagement, attitudes towards their stay abroad as well as satisfaction towards their teaching practicum. as can be seen in table 5, high gainers used their l2 to a greater extent in comparison to their l1 and had a positive attitude concerning their stay abroad and teaching practicum. on the contrary, the low-gainers used their l1 more often than their l2 and were not happy with their stay abroad and teaching practicum. after some further analyses and interviews, we found out that both students who were assigned to the low-gainer category lived together and did not socialize much with the target language users. they have also complained about their teaching practicum, suggesting that it did not meet their expectations. when it comes to the high-gainers, they were very happy with their stay abroad experience and reported using their l2 to a large degree, especially while engaging in katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia, angélica carlet, maria pujol valls86 long casual conversations and participating in organised social activities (clubs, sports, etc.). as already noted, because of the fact that in the at-home group there were no high-gainers, we have decided to focus only on low-gainers. consequently, table 6 and table 7 provide a detailed presentation of the scores as well as personality profiles of the low-gainers in this group. table 6. low-gainers in the at-home group—test scores results type of learner grammar test score (1 & 2) cefrl level (1 & 2) difference in points speaking test (1 & 2) difference in points low-gainer 1 122 & 122 b1 & b1 0 30 & 22.5 –7.5 low-gainer 2 134 & 136 b2 & b2 2 35 & 27.5 –7.5 as may be noted, the at-home low-gainers had lower l2 proficiency levels in comparison to the low-gainers and high-gainers in the stay abroad group. at the same time, at-home students failed to make any progress or made a little progress in l2 grammar and regressed significantly on the l2 speaking test. while analyzing their personality profiles (table 7), it can be observed that they obtained lower scores on cultural empathy and open-mindedness in comparison to participants in the stay abroad group. moreover, their scores on emotional intelligence did not differ dramatically from the low-gainers in the stay abroad group. another variable that was quite similar in both low-scorers’ groups was language engagement. in all reported cases, low-scorers’ l1 was used more frequently than the l2. however, in the stay abroad group, selfreported frequency of the l2 use was much higher. interestingly, none of the low-gainers in either group reported engaging in long casual conversations or participating in organised social activities as did the high-gainers. on contrary, they have mentioned receptive skills, such as watching tv and/or listening to music. table 7. low-gainers in the at-home group—students profiles type of learner cultural empathy open mindedness emotional intelligence l1 engagement l2 engagement attitudes and satisfaction max score 40 40 210 130 130 5 low-gainer 1 30 31 170 89 55 5 low-gainer 2 36 30 167 102 45 5 l2 gain or l2 pain? a comparative case study… 87 discussion the present study addressed three research questions. the first two questions considered possible differences in self-reported overall l2 proficiency, l2 proficiency in all four language skills (speaking, writing, reading, and listening) as well as l2 grammar and speaking test results among stay abroad and at-home students. the results showed that the stay abroad group perceived both their overall l2 proficiency and their l2 proficiency in all mentioned language skills identically prior and after their sojourn. on the contrary, the at-home group reported higher self-perceived l2 proficiency during the second phase of the data collection (i.e., after completing their practicum) but only when it came to separate l2 skills. what is even more surprising is the fact that objective l2 grammar and speaking test results showed something quite contradictory. according to mentioned results, almost all members of the stay abroad group made substantial progress in both l2 grammar and speaking development. conversely, the at-home students showed some regress in their scores and there were no high-gainers in that group (the only reported gain was 4 points in a grammar test and no gain in the speaking test). it is very difficult to explain these results, however, it could be speculated that the stay abroad group did not report any progress in their self-perceived l2 proficiency after their sojourn due to having faced some difficulties in communication in the foreign language while abroad. the very act of undertaking their practicum at schools where their students were native speakers of english could also be somewhat intimidating at first and consequently influence their self-reports. on the contrary, the at-home group was not confronted with the need to communicate in their l2 on an everyday basis and during their practicum they would most typically teach english to l1 speakers of spanish and not to students whose l1 is english. these factors might also pertain to the perceptions of higher l2 proficiency development reflected in their self-reports. the results of our study also showed that the stay abroad group made greater l2 gains than students doing their practicum at home, which is in line with some previous studies (freed, 1995; segalowitz & freed, 2004; vande berg et al., 2009). it could be speculated that the lack of university classes as well as constant contact with learners at low proficiency level might be somewhat detrimental to the participants’ proficiency level. at the same time, it is important to note that there are some discrepancies between self-reports and more objective test results. addressing the last research question, which concerned a possible link between personality traits, language engagement, attitudes/satisfaction and l2 grammar and oral proficiency development, data analyses showed that the variables that clearly differentiated high-gainers from no-gainers or low-gainers were language engagement factor, satisfaction and attitudes. the participants katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia, angélica carlet, maria pujol valls88 who were assigned to the high-gainers group reported more frequent use of their l2 than their l1 as well as establishing a larger social network that consisted of target language users. they also reported engaging in long casual conversations and participating in organized social activities, which was never the case among low-gainers. we can speculate that negative attitudes and dissatisfaction with the practicum experience influenced their choice in refraining from any extra contact with target language users and communicating mostly in their l1, which was also reflected in their very limited l2 progress. these results are in line with previous studies that showed that students who were able to establish a close relationship with target language speakers were reported to be high language gainers (baker-smemoe et al., 2014; dewey, 2008; dewey, belnap, & hilstrom, 2013). in the case of the personality profiles of the high and low-gainers in our study it could be noted that their scores differed minimally in cultural-empathy and open-mindedness but the discrepancies in their scores on emotional intelligence were much larger. at the same time, scores of the low-gainers in the at-home group were much lower than the ones of the low-gainer sojourners. therefore, it could be speculated that personality might be a mediating variable influencing both cultural adjustment, development of the social network and intensity of the l2 use while abroad. some previous studies (arvidsson et al., 2018; basow & gaugler, 2017; harrison & voelker, 2008; ożańska-ponikwia, 2015; ożańska-ponikwia & dewaele, 2012; savicki et al., 2004) have already shown that personality and emotional intelligence might play a role when it comes to adaptation in the host culture as well as frequency of the l2 use. consequently, we might speculate that it underpins the frequency of the l2 use while abroad, which leads to establishing larger social networks, higher cultural adaptation and greater satisfaction from the sa experience as well as higher l2 gains. limitations of the study this paper reports a small-scale study, and as such, it had its limitations. first of all, only 11 students participated in this first stage of the research, since the group of students available was reduced. further research should be conducted with a larger number of participants, so that more robust claims can be made. another limitation is connected with the short amount of time that participants spent abroad (i.e., 3 months). ideally, longer periods of sa should be investigated. moreover, while some students sojourned in an english speaking country, others spent their time abroad in finland, a country where english is widely used, but as a foreign language. l2 gain or l2 pain? a comparative case study… 89 conclusions the present contribution focused on various factors that might contribute to the development of the l2 grammar and speaking proficiency in different context of the l2 use (i.e., immersive and non-immersive setting). while the results of this small scale case study showed that indeed the stay abroad group was the only one that showed improvement in both measured aspects, it also highlighted the fact that some students within that group failed to make any progress. it could be speculated that in the case of the researched informants, their progress in l2 grammar and speaking could be assigned mostly to the amount and quality of the language input outside of the classroom setting. moreover, some further analyses showed that the relationship between attitude, language engagement, and development of social networks might be of crucial importance, as it influences exposure to the target language and consequently l2 proficiency development while abroad. at the same time, it is important to mention that the personality profiles 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(2006). access to learning during study abroad: the roles of identity and subject positioning. unpublished doctoral dissertation, the pennsylvania state university. cover photo: “big_blue” by max iter (retrieved from www.f lickr.com) copy editing: gabriela marszołek proofreading: joanna zwierzyńska typesetting: edward wilk copyright © 2017 by wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego all rights reserved issn 2450-5455 (print edition) issn 2451-2125 (digital edition) published by wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego ul. bankowa 12b, 40-007 katowice www.wydawnictwo.us.edu.pl e-mail: wydawus@us.edu.pl first impression. no. of copies: 50 + 20. printed sheets: 8.25. publishing sheets: 9.5. offset paper grade, 90 g. price 20 zł (+ vat) printing and binding „totem.com.pl sp. z o.o.” sp.k. ul. jacewska 89, 88-100 inowrocław mirosław pawlak adam mickiewicz university, kalisz state university of applied sciences, konin another look at the l2 motivational self system of polish students majoring in english: insights from interview data a b s t r a c t one of the most recent theoretical developments when it comes to the role of motivation in second language learning is the theory of the l2 motivational self system (e.g., dörnyei, 2005). it has been proposed in recognition of the fact that: (1) learning a foreign language does not only involve acquiring a new communicative code, but also affects the personality of an individual, (2) the difficulties involved in applying gardner’s (1985) concept of integrativeness to foreign language contexts, and (3) the mounting empirical evidence (e.g., dörnyei & csizér, 2002), demonstrating that key components of motivation, such as integrativeness, instrumentality, attitudes towards l2 speakers or manifestations of motivated learning behavior are intricately interrelated. as a result, the notion of integrativeness has been reinterpreted as the l2-specific aspect of an individual’s ideal self and the motivational system is believed to comprise the following three dimensions: (a) ideal l2 self, which is related to the abilities and skills that learners envisage themselves possessing, which may trigger a desire to reduce the distance between their actual and ideal selves, (b) ought-to l2 self, which is connected with the attributes that the learners believe are important in the eyes of significant others, and (c) l2 learning experiences, which is a context-related factor ref lecting the nature of the immediate learning environment and learning experiences. this framework was applied in a qualitative study, the participants of which were 28 english majors in the last year of a three-year ba program who were interviewed about their motives for learning the target language. the analysis revealed that although motivational inf luences which have traditionally been regarded as important do play a role, there are a number of factors, such as family inf luence, instrumentality, knowledge orientation or international posture, that are also of vital importance. keywords: motivation; theory of l2 motivational self system, ideal l2 self, ought-to self, english majors theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 2 (2) 2016, pp. 9–26 10 mirosław pawlak preliminary considerations research into motivation to learn second or foreign languages has never lost its popularity since the publication of gardner and lambert’s (1972) seminal study which provided evidence that learners, at least those in second language contexts having ample opportunities for contacts with native speakers, are driven by integrative or instrumental motives, with the former superseding the latter. this should hardly come as a surprise in view of the fact that, to quote dörnyei (2005, pp. 65–67), motivation “provides the primary impetus to initiate l2 learning and later the driving force to sustain the long and often tedious learning process; indeed, all the other factors involved in sla presuppose motivation to some extent.” in effect, following new theoretical developments, second language (l2) learning motivation research has gone through different phases over the last several decades, moving from the social psychological period, dominated by gardner’s (1985) theory, through the cognitive-situated period, underpinned by motivational theories proposed within the field of educational psychology, such as attribution theory (weiner, 1992) or self-determination theory (deci & ryan, 1985), and also emphasizing the need to explore motivation in specific contexts, to the process-oriented period, where the main focus has been on exploring temporal variation in learners’ motives and intensity of their engagement in the learning task (cf. dörnyei, 2005; dörnyei & ryan, 2015). most of the current research is representative of the latter phase and a process-oriented perspective is very likely to continue to shape research into l2 motivation in the years to come. this, however, should by no means be interpreted as indicating that empirical studies striving to offer insights into learners’ motivation at a particular point in time are no longer viable and should be abandoned. perhaps the most prominent and influential theoretical position that has emerged within the process-oriented approach to the study of l2 motivation is the theory of l2 motivational self system that has been put forward by dörnyei (2005, 2009a, 2014) with a view to bringing the concept of integrativeness closer to the realities of foreign language contexts in which, despite increasing opportunities for foreign travel or technological advances, access to the tl still often remains extremely scarce. drawing on the concept of possible selves and future self guides stemming from personality psychology (markus & nurius, 1986), conceptualizations of motivation proposed by noels (2003) and ushioda (2001), as well as his own research findings (e.g., csizér & dörnyei, 2005; dörnyei & csizér, 2002), he describes the construct of second language learning motivation in terms of three dimensions, namely: (1) ideal l2 self, which is related to the vision of themselves as target language (tl) users that learners hold, (2) ought-to l2 self, which concerns the need to 11another look at the l2 motivational self system of polish students majoring… live up to the expectations of significant others, often to ward off unfavorable consequences, and (3) l2 learning experience, which pertains in the main to the nature of the environment in which learning takes place. as ushioda and dörnyei (2014, p. 400) explain, the key tenet on which the theory is predicated “is that if proficiency in the target language is integral to one’s ideal or ought-to self, this will serve as a powerful motivator to learn the language because of our psychological desire to reduce the discrepancy between current and future self states” (emphasis original). on the one hand, in line with the claims of the process-oriented paradigm, the three components are assumed to be in a state of constant flux as possible selves can be revised upwards or downwards in response to evidence of progress being made, or modified as a result of interaction with other self-concepts (cf. henry, 2015). on the other hand, the adoption of this theoretical stance allows the analysis of l2 motivational self systems at a given point in time, thereby offering a snapshot of the intensity and structure of motivation to study the tl in a specific group of learners (see many of the chapters included in dörnyei & ushioda, 2009; csizér & magid, 2014). it is the latter interpretation that provided the rationale for the study reported in this paper which sought to explore the intensity and nature of the motives underlying english majors’ efforts to learn the tl. in the first part, a brief overview of selected studies adopting the ideal l2 self perceptive will be presented, and, in the second, the aims, design, and findings of the research project will be discussed, which will then offer a basis for a consideration of future research directions and pedagogical implications in the conclusion to the paper.1 review of previous studies into l2 motivational self system since the number of studies adopting l2 motivational self system as the theoretical framework has grown exponentially in recent years, not least because this framework has to some extent assumed the status of a default one in exploring motivational dynamics, a detailed overview of such empirical investigations falls outside the scope of the present paper. in addition, the bulk of this research has been quantitative in nature, seeking, first, to validate the model and explore its facets in different contexts (e.g., ryan, 2009; taguchi, magid, & papi, 2009; yashima, 2009), and, second, to shed light on the links between its different components, learners’ attainment (e.g., lamb, 2012) and 1 the author would like to express his gratitude to his colleagues, dr. anna mystkowskawiertelak and dr. jakub bielak, for their considerable assistance in collecting and analyzing the data employed for the purpose of the present study. 12 mirosław pawlak a number of attributes believed to mediate the success of l2 learning, such as autonomy (e.g., csizér & kormas, 2014), anxiety and self-efficacy (e.g., piniel & csizér, 2015). however, in view of the fact that the research project reported below was qualitative in nature, the focus of the present section will be on a succinct description of several representative studies embodying this research paradigm with the purpose of illustrating the methodological choices made and the nature of insights that empirical investigations of this kind can be expected to yield. one qualitative study which embraced the ideal l2 self perspective was the longitudinal empirical investigation undertaken by lamb (2009), in which this theoretical stance was combined with situated learning theory (wenger, 1998) and social theory (bourdieu, 1991). the aim was to explore over the period of two years the motivational trajectories of two indonesian learners who manifested what higgins (1996) has termed a promotion and prevention regulatory focus in learning english, thus epitomizing to some extent ideal and ought-to l2 selves. the analysis of the data collected in the course of a series of interviews demonstrated that the two constructs can indeed be useful in accounting for differences in approaching the research situation, opportunities for self-regulated learning or classroom experiences. more recent research has attempted to apply l2 motivational system to the study of individual difference variables, as evident in the studies carried out by miyahara (2014) and yue (2014). the former, yet again bringing together the concept of the ideal l2 self, situated learning and imagined communities, focused upon the emotions exhibited by six japanese learners in the first year of a two-year english curriculum. the data collected by means of a series of interviews, conducted over the period of about a year and complemented by the participants’ regular reflections and e-mail exchanges during the six-week study abroad component of the program, were subjected to a combination of thematic and structural analysis which allowed identification of two distinct patterns for the formation of the ideal l2 selves and the contribution of emotions to this process. the latter was a case study of a chinese university student learning english and zoomed in on the role that the discrepancy between learners’ self-concept and their possible selves might play in triggering willingness to communicate in a second language (macintyre, clément, dörnyei, & noels, 1998). thematic analysis of the data obtained from a life story interview, classroom observation, and stimulated recall sessions led the author to conclude that “the learner’s l2 wtc is more likely to be initiated in the l2 communicative situation when the language learner can visualize specific l2 possible selves and realize that the discrepancy between the current self and future possible selves is possible to be reduced by following specific feasible l2 action plans.” magid (2014), in turn, conducted an intervention study in which 31 chinese students enrolled in a variety of courses at a british university had the benefit of a training 13another look at the l2 motivational self system of polish students majoring… program, based on the use of scripted imagery, which was aimed at enhancing their vision of ideal l2 selves as well as honing abilities indispensable for the attainment of this vision, such as setting clearly-defined goals and devising realistic action plans. one of the measures of success were interviews held at the beginning and at the end of the program, which demonstrated that the vision of the participants’ ideal l2 selves can be considerably enhanced, indicating that the application of imagery can be harnessed as a useful motivational strategy. particularly interesting is the study undertaken by waninge (2015), who applied a dynamic systems perspective to investigating the changing nature of l2 learning experience, which is the least known component of the motivational self system, approaching it in terms of affective-cognitivemotivational conglomerates (dörnyei, 2009b) and identifying four recurring attractor states in the language classroom, that is engagement, interest, anxiety, and boredom. the data collected during semi-structured interviews showed, among others, that interest can indeed be affected by a combination of cognitive, motivational, affective, and contextual factors, a finding that testified to the validity of the adopted theoretical framework. finally, lyons (2014) set out to explore the evolution of the l2 self-concept of 39 korean students who had chosen english-related majors over the period of six months. the data gathered through four interviews, one focus group and three follow-up individual ones, enabled the identification of a number of influences on the development of l2 self-concept, such as the ability to come up with a more tangible vision of a future possible self, to monitor the progress being made towards future self-guides, and to attribute successes and failures to the magnitude of one’s own commitment. the study reported in the following section contributes to this line of inquiry by providing valuable insights into the motivated learning behavior of polish students majoring in english and the factors that conspire to create their specific motivational profiles. the study rationale, aims, and research questions as emphasized by pawlak (2016), present-day polish students majoring in english constitute a very different group from those of, say, a decade or two decades ago. this can be attributed, among others, to the fact that being admitted into english departments is much easier now than it used to be, the accompanying lower levels of proficiency of the candidates and lower levels of ultimate attainment, as well as the growing perception of such programs as 14 mirosław pawlak intensive courses in english rather than opportunities to become acquainted with issues in linguistics, literature, culture or foreign language methodology. consequently, it is fully warranted to conduct studies that shed light on the motives that drive english majors in their efforts to improve their mastery of the target language, not least because it can help administrators, program coordinators and university teachers to better adjust instructional content and activities to students’ needs without having to sacrifice too much of what is universally considered the core of ba and ma programs in english philology. after all, most of those involved in running such programs or teaching the multitude of subjects they comprise would undoubtedly attest that their aims should be much more ambitious than just giving students an opportunity to gain greater control over tl skills and subsystems with a view to developing superior communicative abilities. it was such a rationale that prompted pawlak (2016) to conduct a questionnaire study of 220 polish ba students majoring in english, which was aimed to examine the level and structure of their motivation to learn english and adopted as the analytical framework the theory of l2 motivational self system (dörnyei, 2005, 2009). the main findings were that the motivation of the participants was quite strong and that they were in the main driven by such motives as a positive vision of themselves as highly advanced users of the tl at some time in the future, their interest in and fascination with the english language as such, their positive predisposition to the way in which english classes are conducted and their respect for and also to some extent at least, their willingness to get familiarized with other cultures and ways of life. on the other hand, although differences were revealed for the specific items included in the subscales, the contribution of instrumental motives, international vocation or activities, or the encouragement from parents and significant others proved to be of much smaller significance, with such factors as the perceived threat that the tl posed to the mother tongue or anxiety exhibited in classroom and real-world situations exerting a clearly negative influence. the study reported in the present paper can be regarded as a follow-up to this initial research project in that it was also intended to provide insights into english majors’ motives for learning the tl from the perspective of the theory of the ideal second language self. the crucial difference, however, lay in the fact that it drew upon qualitative data, thus allowing more in-depth analysis of the nature of participants’ motivation and at the same time rectifying some of the flaws singled out in the abovementioned study. nevertheless, the research questions addressed were identical and they were as follows: 1. what is the participants’ overall level of motivation to learn english? 2. which of the factors believed to comprise the l2 ideal self-system contribute the most to shaping the participants’ motivation? 15another look at the l2 motivational self system of polish students majoring… participants the participants were 28 english majors in the last year of a three-year ba program, all of whom had also taken part in the previous study undertaken by pawlak (2016) and had volunteered to be included in the present empirical investigation. they were on average 22 years of age and at the time of data collection they had been learning english for an average of 12.5 years, typically having started formal instruction in elementary school. their english proficiency oscillated between b2 and c1 in terms of the levels specified it the common european framework, but it should be emphasized that there was considerable individual variation in this respect among the participants, both in general and with reference to different tl skills and subsystems. similarly to other ba programs in english across poland, the students had the benefit of an intensive course in the target language which required them to attend separate classes dedicated to pronunciation, grammar, speaking, writing, and integrated skills, with the foci being shifted somewhat in each of the three years, as well as to obtain credits in a number of content classes in issues in language acquisition and use, linguistics, literature, history, culture, and foreign language pedagogy, most of which were taught in english. it should also be noted that in the second part of the last year in the program, the period during which the data were collected, the students were predominantly concerned with working on their diploma papers, the completion of which was the necessary condition for being allowed to take the diploma exam and obtaining the ba degree. data collection and analysis the requisite data were collected by means of individual, semi-structured interviews that were conducted outside of regular class time and lasted approximately 10 minutes. in each case, following one or two warm-up questions, the participants were requested to answer a number of queries related to different aspects of the l2 motivational self system which have often been tapped in research undertaken within this framework, mirroring to a great extent issues tackled by the subscales included in the tool employed by pawlak (2016). the facets under investigation were as follows: motivated learning behavior (i.e., effort and persistence in l2 learning), ideal l2 self (i.e., learners’ perceptions of themselves as successful users of english), ought-to l2 self (i.e., the impact of significant others), family influence (i.e., the parents’ role in motivating students to learn english), l2 learning experience (i.e., the extent to which learners enjoy the process of learning inside and outside the classroom), instrumentality (i.e., the significance of pragmatic gains), knowledge orientation (i.e., learners’ desire to expand their knowledge about the world), international posture (i.e., students’ 16 mirosław pawlak readiness to engage in communication with foreigners in a variety of contexts), self-confidence (i.e., the degree to which anxiety is likely to be manifested in different situations requiring tl use), and fear of assimilation (i.e., concerns about the impact of the tl on the mother tongue and the culture it represents). the specific questions that were directed at the students with the purpose of shedding light on these facets touched on such issues as the prospect of getting a job abroad, the use of english in professional and personal lives, the envisaged purposes of using english in the future, aspirations regarding the ultimate levels of attainment, the role of parents in the participants’ learning of english, the relationship between english and its culture, the extent of the students’ involvement in learning the tl, the importance of grades as a motivating factor, the amount of anxiety involved in using english in various situations, the threat that the tl posed to the mother tongue, the culture it represents and national identity, the attitude towards english as a foreign language, as well as the participants’ approach to the study of english. the students were given a choice as to the language in which they preferred to be interviewed, but all of them either chose their mother tongue from the very start or switched to polish when answering some of the questions. the data gathered in this way were audio-recorded, transcribed, and subjected to qualitative analysis which consisted in identifying recurring patterns, taking as a point of reference the aspects of the l2 motivational self system mentioned above. findings and discussion at the very outset of this section, two important comments are in order: first, for the sake of clarity, the findings of the study will be presented in the same order in which the different facets of l2 motivational self system were listed in the preceding section, and, second, in light of the nature of the data, a decision has been made to combine the presentation of the results with the discussion thereof, mainly adopting as yardstick the results of the study conducted by pawlak (2016) which targeted a similar, albeit larger, group of participants. when it comes to motivated learning behavior, it turned out that the students were indeed willing to invest a lot of effort in learning english, which is evident in the fact that, when asked to evaluate their commitment, determination, and involvement in this respect on a scale from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest), the vast majority opted for nine, a value that can be regarded as highly positive. this finding is consistent with the outcome reported by pawlak (2016) and testifies to quite strong motivation on the part of the english majors, which should perhaps not come as a surprise given the high standards that have to be met to successfully complete the ba program, not only in terms of achieving the required level of tl proficiency but also mastering the demanding content 17another look at the l2 motivational self system of polish students majoring… for which ample mastery of english is clearly indispensable. what has to be borne in mind though is that the participants were volunteers who might be inherently more motivated than their peers, and that their reported commitment and effort might be underpinned by rather disparate motives which will be considered in some detail below. the analysis of the responses also revealed that the interviewees were on the whole experienced language learners, quite aware of their strengths and weaknesses, they were able to successfully employ a wide array of language learning strategies and they manifested a high degree of autonomy, as visible, for example, in their capacity for detecting tl areas that posed problems but also for seeking out effective solutions to the difficulties they encountered. the following excerpts illustrate some of these points.2 (1) i am very involved in learning english. after classes at the university i teach children and i give private lessons. that is why in my free time i read books for pleasure or watch movies without subtitles. i am trying to improve my english all the time. (2) i prefer to learn on my own because in a group there is always someone who is distracting me. i like to learn vocabulary, phrasal verbs or idioms. i like to visualize what i am learning or to use different kinds of associations. (3) i am doing my best to improve my english. i have made friends with people from the usa and other countries to have more practice opportunities. this allows me to practice my pronunciation and to find out a lot of things about culture. (4) i am an introvert so i like to learn on my own but sometimes it is useful to exchange observations with someone else. i have always liked to learn practical things. i know that pronunciation is important but it is difficult to master. grammar is even more difficult. moving on to the ideal l2 self, most of the participants stated that they saw themselves in the future as highly proficient users of english in different situations, often making references to the common european framework and describing their envisioned level as c1 or c2. while they were at the same time fully cognizant that attaining superior mastery of the tl, let alone approximating the kind of communicative competence that is manifested by native speakers, is in all likelihood an unachievable goal, they were still determined to pursue it as this endeavor was surely a worthwhile undertaking. another component of their imagined selves was related to their professional lives since most of them envisioned themselves as having careers in which they would use 2 the participants’ responses cited throughout the paper have been translated from polish into english by the present author. 18 mirosław pawlak english on a daily basis as teachers, translators, interpreters, or employees of international companies in which the use of english is the norm rather than an exception. what should be noted, however, is that the responses frequently reflected very different agendas, both with respect to the mastery of specific skills of aspirations for the future. these trends are also in line with the findings reported by pawlak (2016) and they are illustrated in the following comments which appeared in the course of the interviews: (5) i would very much like to achieve the c2 level and i am confident that i can do it if i apply myself. (6) i am considering working as a teacher but also getting a job requiring the use of english. if i become a teacher, i will pass on my knowledge to others, and if i work for some company or find some other job connected with english, this will probably involve translating and interpreting. (7) at the moment i am seriously contemplating becoming a teacher because i got to like this job after my teaching practice and this is what i would very much like to do. i would like to achieve as high a level of proficiency as possible but i am aware that my speaking skills will always lag behind writing or grammar. (8) yes, i would like to translate books and perhaps movies, and maybe promote our culture abroad. i think that i will be able to achieve a level of proficiency which will enable me to communicate with foreigners. there may be a discrepancy between my command of speaking and writing as i would probably be better in speaking. perhaps as a corollary of the nature of the questions posed, the ought-to self was mainly associated with the impact of evaluation on the motivation to learn english. as transpires from the analysis, the students tended to agree that grades played a significant role in encouraging them to study hard, both those they were given on regular achievement tests in different courses, and in particular those they received on their final examinations since they determined whether or not they completed a particular level in the program. some of them also indicated that grades helped them identify the areas that were in need of improvement, which resulted in decisions about the focus of their future efforts. on the other hand, the participants expressed the opinion that grades often failed to reflect their real skills and abilities, either because the format of the tests precluded them from demonstrating their mastery of the target language, a situation which is suggestive of inadequate face validity of the assessment measures used, or because the stress they experienced caused them to underperform. these were, in their view, the main reasons for the blatant lack of correspondence between semester grades, which derived from their day-to-day 19another look at the l2 motivational self system of polish students majoring… performance in a particular course, and the grades received on examinations administered at the end of the academic year. relevant excerpts follow: (9) grades are important to me as they show what i still have to improve. (10) grades influence motivation because, apart from causing irritation and frustration, they bring about motivation to work harder and learn more intensively. (11) grades often do not reflect out true abilities. there is also stress and difficulty in coming up with ideas. (12) grades in practical english often do not give justice to what we know since sometimes there is a problem with a particular topic. besides, not everyone is so concerned with grammar, but they want to speak. for others, grammar is more important and they know it well but they find it hard to communicate. so the grade gives you an idea about a specific area but not the whole mastery. somewhat in contrast to the findings reported by pawlak (2016), family influence proved to be an important factor in affecting the participants’ motivation to learn english, particularly with respect to parental encouragement. as is evident from the students’ responses during the interviews, it was in most cases their parents who could be credited with starting their adventure with english, for example by arranging and funding private tutoring, offered constant support throughout process, and, in some cases influenced the students’ decisions to choose english as their major at the university. there were also some instances, though, when parents were skeptical about the choice of english studies, mainly out of concern about the prospects of securing a job as a teacher, but this did not dissuade students from pursuing this course of study, a decision that was later not contested. the following excerpts illustrate some of these points: (13) my father motivated me since i was a child and my mother enrolled me in my first language course. they have always been supportive and happy with my successes. in fact, it was my mother who encouraged me to study here. (14) my parents sent me to english lessons when i was very young. they have supported me all the time, financially as well, and i have always felt their encouragement. they believe it is a good thing that i am studying english. they approve of whatever i do if they can see i enjoy it. it is a family tradition because my mom is a teacher and my grandma used to teach french. (15) my parents do not interfere with my life and they can see that i am studying what i really want. my mother has doubts about english because there are so many teachers around and she is afraid that i might 20 mirosław pawlak not get a job in the future. but she knows that this is what i want to do and she respects my decision. as was the case in the much larger sample investigated by pawlak (2016), the analysis of the interview responses also indicated that the experience of learning english played a positive role in enhancing the participants’ motivation. for one thing, such sentiments stemmed from the favorable attitude to english as a foreign language as such since many students confessed that they simply liked the sound of english and were positively predisposed to achieving high levels of proficiency in that language. what should also be emphasized is that the interviewees opted for british or american english as the model they would like to aspire to, expressing little appreciation for international english due it its perceived violation of the tl norms. secondly, despite some voices of dissent, the participants were on the whole contented with the kind of instruction that was offered in the program, in most cases heaping praise on their teachers and the instructional practices they routinely employed. such sentiments are visible in the following comments: (16) the sound, i love the british accent, it is so beautiful … in songs and in programs and films. i just like listening to it. (17) i like the sounds of words and the opportunity to use phrases that do not exist in polish. idioms are also interesting. (18) what i particularly enjoy about my classes is group work which is often used by some teachers and they also use tasks planned in such a way that i can exchange my opinions with my peers, in particular with respect to texts that describe different walks of like. i have to admit though that i do not like some aspects of grammar such as syntax. with respect to instrumental motives, they turned out to be of much more significance than in the case of the study conducted by pawlak (2016), but the focus on professional issues was similar. in fact, all of the students seemed to be driven by instrumental goals that were primarily related to enhancing the chances of getting a good job in the future, such that would, on the one hand, be satisfying and, on the other, at the very least secure, if not well-paid. while the majority of the participants were unanimous in the conviction that they would like to be teachers of english, with some of them even specifying the age group they would like to work with, a few others were adamant in the claim that they would never join the teaching profession, making it plain that they were planning to get other qualifications and that they just perceived a good command of english as an asset which they will take advantage of in their professional lives. sentiments of this kind are exemplified in the following excerpts: 21another look at the l2 motivational self system of polish students majoring… (19) i hope to become a respected teacher who can use english similarly to native speakers. (20) i am very much aware of the problems with jobs for teachers but i hope there will be some opportunity for me. i cannot imagine myself doing something else. i just want to teach kids. (21) my dream is working for an international company. i would be happy to work in film production or something like that. i would definitely not like to be a teacher. this job is too hard. (22) i do not know exactly what i will be doing but it will be connected with english for sure. as regards international posture and knowledge orientation, facets that are very closely related to each other, the students were quite willing to communicate with foreigners in various situations, thanks to which they were more likely to expand their knowledge about the world. this, however, was not in most instances tantamount to expressing a willingness to immigrate, but, rather, indicative of their readiness to spend some time in an english-speaking country with a view to gaining greater mastery of the target language. at the same time, however, some of the students did not exclude the possibility of staying abroad permanently, particularly when a propitious opportunity arose. additionally, most of the participants stated that they wanted to get familiarized with the american or british culture before visiting the relevant countries as this would facilitate communication with the native speakers but there were also such who were convinced that the knowledge of culture was irrelevant when international contacts with people coming from a variety of different countries were the goal. the following comments illustrate some of these trends: (23) i might go abroad for a couple of years but not permanently. the main goal would be to improve my english, to make it more natural. i could also get some qualifications. when we collect enough money, we will go to see the states… as tourists, not to work there. but if i get an interesting offer, who knows? i know i might have to go abroad because there are hardly any prospects for young people here. (24) i thought that after i graduate i might go abroad for a year to improve my english and then come back. i could find a job there although i do not know what job this would be, but this would have to be in great britain. however, i would like to have contact with native speakers because you are usually surrounded by poles. (25) i am surely considering immigration although i would like to avoid such a situation. still, such a thought crosses your mind from time to time. 22 mirosław pawlak as regards self-confidence in using english and the effect of anxiety in this respect, the results mirrored to a large extent those reported by pawlak (2016), with the caveat that feelings of self-efficacy, self-confidence or apprehension were a function of the situation in which tl use was expected to occur. this is evident in the fact that whereas some participants regarded interaction with native speakers as extremely stress-inducing, pointing to the danger that they will be able to pin down all the errors and inconsistencies, others were much less apprehensive of such a prospect, arguing that native speakers will point out what is wrong, correct their errors and be able to better understand the sources of their linguistic problems. similar ambivalence was voiced with respect to the instructional setting since, according to the students, some tasks, activities or exam circumstances were inherently more likely to generate anxiety than others, with much hinging on the attitude of the teacher or peers. the following excerpts are illustrative of such sentiments: (26) native speakers are ok as they concentrate on the message and we are good enough to express the intended meaning. by contrast, nonnatives, particularly my teachers, will be more focused on errors and are likely to notice tiniest problems. i am also afraid that the students in my group will laugh at me and i get very anxious during oral exams. (27) i feel stressed out when i use english in the presence of native speakers because they are better than me and they can notice the errors i make. but when i talk to someone who is not a native speaker, this is not a problem and i am not anxious because i know that i will be understood and my errors will go unnoticed. (28) stress? this depends on the members of the examination board. when i was taking my make-up exam, there was no anxiety at all. it was like a conversation with old friends. the analysis of the data demonstrated that the participants were not afraid of the negative impact of english on their mother tongue, their identity and way of life, a finding that stands in contrast to the results of pawlak’s (2016) study. in fact, some of them expressed satisfaction with the omnipresence of english, hoping that adopting some elements of the tl culture could trigger changes in the polish ways of life which clearly failed to live up to their expectations. others saw the impact of english as a natural phenomenon that should not be labeled as good or bad, but which could in fact allow foreigners to become familiarized with the polish culture. others yet were reluctant to favor one style of life over another, stating that this is a distinctive feature of a particular society that should simply be respected or even held in high esteem. representative excerpts from the interviews are the following: 23another look at the l2 motivational self system of polish students majoring… (29) there are many borrowings and english words are used by the young every day but it is not a real danger. perhaps, thanks to english people from abroad will learn more about the polish culture. (30) the polish way of life is different but not better or worse than others, just different. each nationality has its own way of dealing with problems. (31) people there are more relaxed and friendly, more optimistic. we are very serious, we do not smile very often. (32) the english way of life is perhaps not better but if i were to choose, i would rather pursue the american rather than polish dream. a typical pole will always complain. we surely have reasons to complain but the american way of life is more appealing to me. conclusions and implications as can be seen from the foregoing discussion, the results of this qualitative study are to a large extent consistent with the findings of the quantitative research project undertaken by pawlak (2016) with a similar, but much more sizable, group of participants. in particular, it turned out, somewhat contrary to the claims of those lamenting the falling standards of english studies and the lack of commitment on the part of students in foreign language departments, that the english majors were quite strongly motivated to study the tl and to invest considerable time and effort in the task. the most important motives underlying their involvement included a clear vision of themselves as proficient language users in different walks of life, favorable attitudes to the target language and the ways in which it was taught in the program, as well as readiness to get to know other cultures and ways of life. surprisingly, to some extent in contrast to the findings of the previous study, external influences in the form of evaluation and parental encouragement or tangible support turned out to play a much greater part in affecting their motivation whereas anxiety and fear of assimilation proved to be much less detrimental in this respect, with their perceived influence hinging upon a specific situation. despite such overall positive findings, there is still a clear need to aid learners in creating vivid but also realistic visions of themselves as tl users, assist them in coming up with feasible plans that would enable them to accomplish their imagined goals and convince them to attribute their successes and failures to their own efforts rather than forces outside their control. it also appears warranted to provide students with some form of intercultural training, properly tailored to their needs, with a view to making them more sensitive to other cultures, customs and ways of 24 mirosław pawlak life, and take steps intended to boost their self-confidence and self-efficacy, at the same time reducing the anxiety they might be paralyzed by when communicating in english. obviously, before such practices are implemented, further research is indispensable that would, first, corroborate the underlying structure of english majors’ l2 motivational self system in similar contexts, and, second, pinpoint the most effective ways in which such instructional goals can be attained. as the present author has elucidated elsewhere, the results of such studies are bound to provide important signposts for all of those involved in designing, implementing, and assessing ba and ma programs in english, both in poland and other, similar educational contexts. references bourdieu, p. 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(2014). emerging self-identities of second language learners: emotions and the experiential profile of identity construction. in k. csizér & m. magid (eds.), the impact of self-concept on language learning (pp. 206–231). bristol – buffalo – toronto: multilingual matters. noels, k. (2003). learning spanish as a second language: learners’ orientations and perceptions of their teachers’ communication style. in z. dörnyei (ed.), attitudes, orientations, and motivations in language learning (pp. 97–136). oxford: blackwell. pawlak, m. (2016). investigating language learning motivation from an ideal language-self perspective: the case of english majors in poland. in d. gałajda, p. zakrajewski, & m. pawlak (eds.), researching second language acquisition from a psycholinguistic perspective. studies in honor of danuta gabryś-barker (pp. 53–69). heidelberg – new york: springer. piniel, k., & csizér, k. (2015). changes in motivation, anxiety and self-efficacy during the course of an academic writing seminar. in z. dörnyei, p. d. macintyre, & a. henry (eds.), motivational dynamics in language learning (pp. 164–194). bristol – buffalo – toronto: multilingual matters. ryan, s. (2009). self and identity in l2 motivation in japan: the ideal l2 self and japanese learners of english. in z. dörnyei & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identity and the l2 self (pp. 98–119). bristol: multilingual matters. taguchi, t., magid, m., & papi, m. (2009). the l2 motivational self system among japanese, chinese and iranian learners of english: a comparative study. in z. dörnyei & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identity and the l2 self (pp. 120–143). bristol: multilingual matters. ushioda, e. (2001). language learning at university: exploring the role of motivational thinking. in z. dörnyei & r. schmidt (eds.), motivation and second language acquisition (pp. 91–124). honolulu, hi: university of hawaii press. 26 mirosław pawlak ushioda, e., & dörnyei, z. (2014). motivation. in s. m. gass & a. mackey (eds.), the routledge handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 396–409). london and new york: routledge. waninge, f. (2015). motivation, emotion and cognition. attractor states in the classroom. in z. dörnyei, p. d. macintyre, & a. henry (eds.), motivational dynamics in language learning (pp. 195–213). bristol – buffalo – toronto: multilingual matters. weiner, b. (1992). human motivation: metaphors, theories and research. newbury park, ca; sage. wenger, e. (1998). communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. yashima, t. (2009). international posture and the ideal l2 self in the japanese efl context. in z. dörnyei & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identity and the l2 self (pp. 144– 163). bristol: multilingual matters. yue, z. (2014). chinese university students’ willingness to communicate in the l2 classroom.: the complex and dynamic interplay of self-concept, future self-guides and the sociocultural context. in k. csizér & m. magid (eds.), the impact of self-concept on language learning (pp. 250–267). bristol – buffalo – toronto: multilingual matters. mirosław pawlak noch ein blick für motivationssystem im fremdsprachenunterricht von anglistikstudenten. befragungsschlüsse z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g der vorliegende beitrag präsentiert ergebnisse der empirischen forschung über motivation beim fremdsprachenunterricht, die nach der im jahre 2009 von dörnyei entwickelten motivationssystemtheorie in einer fremdsprache durchgeführt wurde. das system besteht aus drei elementen, d.i.: dem idealen sprachlichen „ich“, also der vorstellung des lernenden als eines künftigen zielsprachenutzers; dem sprachlichen „ich“, das den erwartungen anderer für den lernenden wichtigen personen entspricht und meistens auch negative folgen der unerfüllten erwartungen widerspiegelt; den erfahrungen im fremdsprachenunterricht, die mit der lernsituation eng verbunden sind. an der forschung nahmen 28 studenten der englischen philologie teil, welche in teilweise strukturierten interviews befragt die fragen über verschiedene aspekte der besagten theorie beantworteten. die qualitätsanalyse hat eindeutig gezeigt, dass die studenten zum englischunterricht sehr motiviert sind. die entscheidende rolle spielen dabei: ihre vorstellung von sich selbst als fortgeschrittenen benutzern des englischen für berufszwecke, positive einstellung zur englischen sprache und zur methode deren erlernung und die bereitschaft, andere kulturen und lebensweisen kennenzulernen. wichtige rolle spielt hier auch die elternhilfe und erhaltene zensuren, die jedoch die fähigkeiten der studenten nicht immer richtig widerspiegeln. arzu ünel toros university, turkey meryem mirioğlu cukurova university, turkey syntactical modifications in teacher talk of native and non-native speakers in efl classrooms a b s t r a c t: classroom language in efl classrooms comprises the core of communication between teachers and learners. teacher talk plays a central role in understanding the nature of classroom language in this respect. according to krashen’s input hypothesis, teacher talk also constitutes an important source of comprehensible input for the language acquisition of the learner (krashen, 1981). to make the input comprehensible, teachers may make modifications in their vocabulary, syntax, rate of speech or discourse. accordingly, the aim of this study is to discover whether native speakers of english and non-native speakers of english make any syntactical modifications in their teacher talk at elementary and pre-intermediate levels and to try to find out what kind of syntactical modifications they make if they modify their syntax during their speech. the study was carried out with eight efl instructors (both nss and nnss) at çağ university in turkey, using their audio-recordings, a questionnaire, and interviews. antconc 3.2.1 program and spss 17.0 program were used to analyze the quantitative data. the findings of the data were incorporated with the results of interviews forming the qualitative part of the study. the results of the data revealed that native speakers of english and nonnative speakers of english made syntactical modifications in their teacher talk at elementary and pre-intermediate levels. they ranged from subordinate clauses to the types of sentences. the findings of the study also demonstrated that syntactical modifications in the teacher talk of native speakers and non-native speakers at both levels depended on the proficiency level of the learners although not all of these modifications formed a statistically meaningful difference. k e y w o r d s: english as a foreign language, teacher talk, syntactical modifications, comprehensible input theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 1 (1) 2015, pp. 125–141 126 arzu ünel, meryem mirioğlu introduction studies on language learning have made an enormous impact on the study of the classroom environment which facilitates communication and enables different kinds of interaction between teachers and learners. cullen (1998) elucidates the necessity of distinction between the world outside and the classroom, stating that the classroom is unique on its own with its rules and conventions. when we examine recent studies on classroom conversations, it can be easily seen that studies of some researchers, such as wright (2005), ellis and barkhuizen (2005), and seedhouse (2004), mainly concentrate on the features of classroom interaction between teachers and learners and the language that teachers use during interaction. therefore, it is essential to understand the notion of teacher talk in the classroom environment, a significant area for us to study. while xu (2010) defines teacher talk as “an instrument of implementing teaching plan” (p. 46), ellis (1994) focuses on the difference between teacher talk and other kinds of talk, stating “the teacher talk is to address language learners in the classroom differently from the way which addresses other kinds of classroom learners by making modifications in form and function to promote interaction between learner and teacher” (p. 726). along with the definition and the function of teacher talk, the features of teacher talk are also very significant. teacher talk has two main features. while the first feature focuses on the form of teacher talk, such as pauses, speed, repetition and modifications, the second feature stresses the characteristics of the language that teachers use to organize and control classes, the quality and quantity of teacher talk (xiao-yan, 2006). some theoretical background understanding teacher talk necessitates looking into language acquisition and input. in that sense, the concepts of nature and nurture illustrate the core of second language acquisition. while nature means that learners learn the language innately, nurture presumes that the development of the language is stimulated by the environment while learners are in a process of interaction (doughty & long, 2003). many researchers (hatch, 1983; krashen, 1982) have pinpointed that sla is also built upon learners’ getting comprehensible input. it is obvious that acquisition occurs when learners are exposed to language input that correlates with their level of proficiency. it is beyond doubt that one way of acquiring a second language is through simplified input or speech 127syntactical modifications in teacher talk… adjustments. gaies (1983) makes a comparison of the classroom language of teachers at different levels and highlights that teacher talk is roughly tuned to the learners’ language proficiency. krashen (1981) highlights teacher talk as an important source of comprehensible input for the language acquisition of the learner. he (1982) emphasizes that learning takes place by means of the learner’s access to comprehensible input. he (1982) also states that comprehensible input involves “a language that contains structures that are ‘a little beyond’ our current level of competence (i + 1), but which is comprehensible through our use of context, our knowledge of the world, and other extra linguistic cues directed to us” (p. 21). when the “i + 1” structure is examined, “i” stands for learners’ current linguistic competence and “1” represents the items that learners intend to learn. the input theory also has two corollaries (krashen, 1985): corollary 1: speaking is a result of acquisition, not its cause; it emerges as a result of building competence via comprehensible input. corollary 2: if input is understood and there is enough of it, the necessary grammar is automatically provided. the language teacher need not attempt deliberately to teach the next structure along the natural order—it will be provided in just right quantities and will automatically review a sufficient amount of comprehensible input (p. 2). once and for all, in order to understand the central role of modified input in second language acquisition to a high degree, it is necessary to know what modifications native and non-native speakers of english typically make when communicating with non-native learners. previous studies on syntactic features of teacher talk besides the lexical, phonological, and discourse features of teacher talk, syntactic features also play an important role in understanding the modifications in teacher talk. in that sense, the proportion and the frequency of subordination in tt are significant in terms of showing complexity in syntax. the analysis of the frequency of the subordinate clauses in henzl’s study (1973; 1979) illustrates teachers’ tendency to use fewer subordinate clauses to non-native learners. gaies (1976) emphasizes a similar trend regarding the increasing rate of different kinds of subordinations (noun, adjective, and adverb clauses) in correlation with the proficiency level of the learners while chaudron (1979) proposes this variation just for relative clauses. 128 arzu ünel, meryem mirioğlu pica and long (1986) and wesche and ready (1985) examine syntactic subordination in teacher talk by taking the number of clauses per t unit into account. in these studies, they have noted no important differences in the degree of subordination in teacher talk directed to l2 learners in comparison with ns-ns communication. on the other hand, chaudron (1979) emphasizes significantly less complexity in tt to low and high beginners in contrast with greater complexity in teacher talk towards advanced learners. besides, some studies (gaies, 1977; ishiguro, 1986) have found significantly less complex teacher talk addressing non-native learners. the study: overview this current study attempts to focus on lexical and syntactical modifications in teacher talk of native and non-native speakers of english in classrooms where the target language is english. due to the scarcity of studies on such kind of modifications of teacher talk, it is hoped that this study may fill a gap and provide some insights into efficacious english teaching practices. methods the study has a mixed research design in which qualitative and quantitative methods were integrated. the data used in this research design has been obtained from audio-recordings of eight efl instructors (both nss and nnss) at çağ university in turkey, a questionnaire aiming at obtaining participants’ background information and an interview regarding their views on the modifications in teacher talk. participants. the participants of the study were eight efl instructors from the preparatory school at çağ university, the first foundation university in the southern part of turkey. convenience sampling in which participants were chosen randomly was used during the selection of participants. four instructors who participated in this research are native speakers of english, three of whom are females. their ages vary between 28 and 36. while one of the instructors holds a degree in mass communications, three instructors graduated from a department directly related to the english language. among these three instructors, one of them holds both master’s and doctorate degrees and one 129syntactical modifications in teacher talk… participant is presently doing her master’s degree. the teaching experience of these participants ranges from 4 to 15 years. as for the non-native speakers of english, their ages vary between 29 and 57. among the four non-native instructors, two of them are graduates of elt, and the other two hold bachelor of arts degrees in english language and literature and american culture and literature. while two of them are master’s degree students, the other two do not hold any postgraduate degrees. their teaching experience varies between seven and 37 years. tools. three types of instruments were utilized: audio-recordings, a questionnaire on the background of the participants, and an interview regarding participants’ opinions on the modifications in tt. data collection procedure to obtain the data, participants’ speaking lessons were chosen. the total number of learners in each class ranged from 15 to 19 at the elementary and pre-intermediate levels. while there were two classes at the elementary level, there were also two classes at the pre-intermediate level. each class at the elementary and preintermediate levels was taught by one ns and one nns. because there were two classes at the elementary level, there were in all four lessons to be recorded. four other classes were taught in the same fashion at the pre-intermediate level. each session of recordings lasted for 50 minutes in parallel with the duration of each single class. the researcher and a native speaker of english conducted transcriptions of eight sessions of recordings over a span of four months. they transcribed 235 pages in total. these transcriptions were also double-checked by both the researcher and a native speaker of english. to collect the data, permission of both the director of the preparatory school and eight efl instructors was asked in advance prior to in-class recordings. the researcher did not attend the classes in order not to disrupt the natural flow of the lessons. before each class started, the voice recorder was placed in an inconspicuous place in the class so as to minimize the negative effect of the device on the learners while simultaneously increasing the quality of natural data. in addition, the researcher waited outside while the instructor was audio recording the lesson. to obtain the data as natural as possible, instructors were not given information about the main focus of the research. as for the implementation of the questionnaire, it was filled out by the instructors individually. however, during the questionnaire phase, one of the 130 arzu ünel, meryem mirioğlu participants at the elementary level was pregnant. therefore, the researcher sent the questionnaire to the researher via e-mail. the participant filled the questionnaire and sent it back to the researcher to be examined. as the last phase of the data collection, an interview was conducted with each participant. appointments were made to talk with the instructors one by one. then, the researcher met the instructors to interview them on the appointed day. data analysis data analysis of the study is based on the analyses of teachers’ speech at the elementary and pre-intermediate levels regarding syntactical modifications. besides the analysis of the quantitative data, a questionnaire was filled out and an interview was conducted. as for the analysis of teachers’ speech in relation to syntactical modifications, words and sentences in the teacher talk of nss and nnss at the elementary and pre-intermediate levels were counted by both the researcher and a native speaker of english. the obtained data from each instructor’s lesson were entered into spss statistics 17.0. chi square (x2) statistics was utilized. additionally, types of verbs (transitive, intransitive, and linking verbs), verb moods (indicatives, imperatives and subjunctives), voice of verbs (active and passive voice), the verb “be,” subordinate clauses (noun clauses, adjective clauses, and adverb clauses) and types of sentences (compound, complex, and complex compound sentences) were determined and checked by both the researcher and a native speaker of english. the number of types of verbs, verb moods, voice of verbs, the verb “be,” subordinate clauses and types of sentences were calculated one by one. it was examined whether any significant differences existed in the uses of these syntactical structures uttered by nss and nnss at the elementary and pre-intermediate levels according to chi squared distribution in spss statistics 17.0. regarding the analysis of the questionnaire that comprised the qualitative part of the study, it was beneficial to get background information on the participants and to illustrate this information (their age, gender, education, and work experience). an interview was also conducted so as to get instructors’ ideas about whether the language of the teacher in an efl classroom should be modified according to the proficiency level of the non-native learners. the researcher took notes and asked what kinds of modifications needed to be made when the instructors mentioned the necessity of the modifications towards learners. for 131syntactical modifications in teacher talk… the analysis of the interview, the researcher examined the responses regarding the types of modifications that instructors preferred to make towards non-native learners. results table 1 differences in the use of subordinate clauses in teacher talk of nss and nnss at the elementary level subordinate clauses nss nnss χ 2 sd p noun clause 39 22 4.738 1 0.030 adjective clause 14 14 0.000 1 1.000 adverb clause 48 24 8.000 1 0.005 in table 1, when subordinate clauses that nss and nnss used at the elementary level were examined, it was seen that nnss used 22 noun clauses in their speech, nss uttered 39 noun clauses. in parallel with the results, a meaningful difference in the use of noun clause between teacher talk of nss and nnss was noticed (p < 0.05). this meaningful difference between the speech of nss and nnss at the elementary level was also present for the use of adverb clauses (p ≤ 0.05). adverb clauses were used more by nss rather than nnss. the number of adverb clauses in teacher talk of nss was two times as great as the number of adverb clauses in the speech of nnss. nss employed 48 adverb clauses whereas nnss used 24 adverb clauses. in contrast with the use of noun clauses and adverb clauses, adjective clauses were used in the same number by both nss and nnss (14 adjective clauses in both speeches). therefore, in this respect no important difference was observed between the teacher talk of nss and nnss at the elementary level. table 2 differences in the use of subordinate clauses in teacher talk of nss and nnss at the pre-intermediate level subordinate clauses nss nnss χ 2 sd p noun clause 71 39 9.309 1 0.002 adjective clause 25 16 1.976 1 0.160 adverb clause 54 43 1.247 1 0.264 132 arzu ünel, meryem mirioğlu as emphasized in table 2, nss used more noun clauses than nnss did at the pre-intermediate level. there were 71 noun clauses in the speech of nss while there were 39 noun clauses in the teacher talk of nnss. therefore, it is obvious to say that there was a remarkable difference in the use of noun clauses between the speech of nss and nnss (p < 0.05). however, significant discrepancies were not seen in the use of adjective and adverb clauses between the teacher talk of nss and nnss at this level although nss used more adjective and adverb clauses than nnss did (25 adjective clauses in the teacher talk of nss, 16 adjective clauses in the teacher talk of nnss, 54 adverb clauses in the speech of nss and 43 adverb clauses in the speech of nnss). table 3 differences in the use of subordinate clauses between teacher talk of nss at the elementary level and teacher talk of nss at the pre-intermediate level subordinate clauses elementary level pre-intermediate level χ2 sd p nss nss noun clause 39 71 9.309 1 0.002 adjective clause 14 25 3.103 1 0.078 adverb clause 48 54 0.353 1 0.552 table 3 illustrates an increasing pattern in the use of noun clauses, adjective clauses, and adverb clauses in the teacher talk of nss at the pre-intermediate level. to specify the data, nss at the pre-intermediate level used more noun and adjective clauses rather than nss did at the elementary level although there was a marked difference in just noun clauses (p < 0.05). regarding adverb clauses, nss used more adverb clauses at the pre-intermediate level surpassing nss in their speech at the elementary level but that does not form a great difference (p < 0.05). table 4 differences in the use of subordinate clauses between teacher talk of nnss at the elementary level and teacher talk of nnss at the pre-intermediate level clauses elementary level pre-intermediate level χ2 sd p nnss nnss noun clause 22 39 4.738 1 0.030 adjective clause 14 16 0.133 1 0.715 adverb clause 24 43 5.388 1 0.020 133syntactical modifications in teacher talk… table 4 shows that nnss at the pre-intermediate level used more noun, adjective, and adverb clauses than nnss did at the elementary level. despite the high rate of subordinate clauses in the teacher talk of nnss at the pre-intermediate level, there was an observable difference only in use of noun and adverb clauses between the teacher talk of nnss at the elementary and pre-intermediate levels (p < 0.05 for noun clauses, p < 0.05 for adverb clauses). table 5 differences in the use of sentences in teacher talk of nss and nnss at the elementary level sentences nss nnss χ2 sd p compound sentence 26 26 0.000 1 1.000 complex sentence 74 48 5.541 1 0.019 complex-compound sentence 14 6 3.200 1 0.074 as observed in table 5, the number of compound sentences used by nss was the same as the number in the teacher talk of nnss. both nss and nnss used 26 compound sentences. in addition, nss used 14 complex-compound sentences. however, nnss uttered only 6 complex-compound sentences. according to statistical calculations, no significant discrepancies were observed between nss and nnss in the uses of compound and complex-compound sentences at the elementary level (p > 0.05 for compound sentences, p > 0.05 for complex-compound sentences) although the use of complex sentences shows a meaningful difference between teacher talk of nss and nnss at the same level (p < 0.05). table 6 differences in the use of sentences in teacher talk of nss and nnss at the pre-intermediate level sentences nss nnss χ2 sd p compound sentence 34 23 2.123 1 0.145 complex sentence 83 76 0.308 1 0.579 complex compound sentence 29 11 8.100 1 0.004 in table 6, nss used more compound, complex, and complex-compound sentences than nnss did at the pre-intermediate level. despite this, the number of compound and complex sentences used by nss and nnss at the pre-intermediate level did not reflect any important differences (p > 0.05 for compound sentences, p > 0.05 for complex sentences) while the number of complexcompound sentences used by nss and nnss at this level formed a meaningful difference (p < 0.05). 134 arzu ünel, meryem mirioğlu table 7 differences in the use of sentences between teacher talk of nss at the elementary level and teacher talk of nss at the pre-intermediate level sentences elementary level pre-intermediate level χ2 sd p nss nss compound sentence 26 34 1.067 1 0.302 complex sentence 74 83 0.516 1 0.473 complex-compound sentence 14 29 5.233 1 0.022 as pinpointed in table 7, compound, complex, and complex-compound sentences were made more in the speech of nss at the pre-intermediate level rather than in the teacher talk of nss at the elementary level. despite the increasing trend in the number of subordinate clauses at the pre-intermediate level, the only notable difference was seen in the number of complex-compound sentences (p < 0.05) while the numbers of compound and complex sentences in the teacher talk of nss at the elementary and pre-intermediate levels were close to each other. nss at the pre-intermediate level made 14 complex-compound sentences. on the other hand, nss at the pre-intermediate level constructed 29 complexcompound sentences. table 8 differences in the use of sentences between teacher talk of nnss at the elementary level and teacher talk of nnss at the pre-intermediate level sentences elementary level pre-intermediate level χ2 sd p nnss nnss compound sentence 26 23 0.184 1 0.668 complex sentence 48 76 6.323 1 0.012 complex-compound sentence 6 11 1.471 1 0.225 table 8 shows that nnss at the pre-intermediate level made more complex and complex-compound sentences compared with nnss at the elementary level. however, the only significant difference was seen in the use of complex sentences (p < 0.05). there were 48 complex sentences in teacher talk of nnss at the elementary level while there were 76 complex sentences in the speech of nnss at the pre-intermediate level. as for compound sentences, nnss at the elementary level formed more compound sentences than did nnss at the pre-intermediate level. however, it was not possible to see any meaningful differences between these levels because the number of compound sentences 135syntactical modifications in teacher talk… at the elementary level was so close to the number of compound sentencees at the pre-intermediate level (p > 0.05). data obtained from the questionnaire and interview. apart from the tables related to the syntactical structures used in teacher talk of nss and nnss at the elementary and pre-intermediate levels, there was a questionnaire in the study that was designed for getting background information including the age, the first language, educational life, and working experience of the participants (see appendix 1). however, these findings were not taken into consideration for analysis. also, an interview was conducted (see appendix 2). participants were first asked a question regarding whether the language that the teacher uses should change according to the proficiency level of the learners. when the participants answered this question “yes,” they were asked how they could change their language according to the level of the students. they were also asked whether they would simplify or elaborate their classroom language or how they would make some modifications. when the answers of nss were compared with those of nnss at the elementary level, it was clearly seen that both nss and nnss stated that they would modify their talk according to the proficiency level of the learners. they also pinpointed that each proficiency level necessiated certain types of grammar structures. therefore, they put forward that they needed to teach and interact with the learners by taking their language level into account. one of nnss at the elementary level stated, “as each level contains certain structures, teachers should use language according to level of students to make interaction with them easier.” on the other hand, based on the comparison of the answers given by nss and nnss at the pre-intermediate level, it was clearly noticed that nss and nnss at the pre-intermediate level believed that using complex structures at beginner or elementary level could cause learners to lose their motivation during the process of language learning. one of the nnss at the pre-intermediate level said, “how can you use complex sentences when teaching beginners? firstly, they will lose motivation. then, they will lose their interest in the lesson.” they mainly thought that teachers needed to modify their classroom language so that learners could feel confidence in their ability to understand. however, they stated that their classroom language needed to be just beyond the level of the learners. they believed in the necessity of challenge in the language learning process. in addition, they suggested that there was no need to use too simple language and to speak too slowly to make the learners comprehend the language. 136 arzu ünel, meryem mirioğlu discussion and findings the findings obtained from the quantitative data have revealed that nss and nnss at the elementary and pre-intermediate levels made syntactical modifications while addressing non-native learners of english. in addition, the use of subordinate clauses indicates the measure of subordination in teacher talk. regarding noun clauses, nss at the pre-intermediate level used more noun clauses than nss did at the elementary level which forms a notable difference (see table 3). the same trend continues in the speech of nnss at both levels (see table 4). as for adjective clauses, there was a slight increase in the use of adjective clauses in the teacher talk of nss and nnss at the pre-intermediate level compared with the speech of nss and nnss at the elementary level, although this does not constitute a notable difference (see table 1 and 2). in addition to the use of noun and adjective clauses, the use of adverb clauses increased in the speech of nnss at the pre-intermediate level compared to the use of adverb clauses in the teacher talk of nnss at the elementary level forming a significant difference (see table 4). although there is a small increase in the number of adverb clauses in the speech of nss at the pre-intermediate level, this does not lead to a marked difference (see table 3). it can be inferred from the data that teachers mostly tended to use fewer subordinate clauses towards less proficient non-native learners, as hakansson (1986) pinpoints. this inference is also in accordance with the ideas of gaies (1977) emphasising an increase in the use of subordinate clauses to the learners with a higher level of language proficiency. as a second category, the findings of the types of sentences illustrated that nss at the pre-intermediate level used complex sentences most while nss at the elementary level constructed complex-compound sentences least. it is an undeniable fact that there was an increase in the use of compound, complex, and complex-compound sentences in the teacher talk of nss at the pre-intermediate level in comparison with the speech of nss at the elementary level. despite this increase, the only notable difference was observed in the use of complexcompound sentences. nss at the pre-intermediate level used more complexcompound sentences than nss did at the elementary level (see table 7). an increase in the use of these types of sentences can also be observed in the use of complex and complex-compound sentences in nnss’ speech at the preintermediate level. nevertheless, the only meaningful difference was found in the use of complex sentences rather than compound and complex-compound sentences. nnss at the pre-intermediate level constructed more complex sentences than nnss did at the elementary level. as for compound sentences in the speech of nnss at both levels, it can be said that there was interestingly a slight decrease in the number of compound sentences in the teacher talk of 137syntactical modifications in teacher talk… nnss at pre-intermediate level compared with the number at the elementary level but that does not form a markable difference (see table 8). upon examination of the overall findings in relation to types of sentences, it can be concluded that speech addressing less proficient non-native learners should be less complex, as chaudron (1979) and gaies (1977) put forward. this is also in agreement with the findings obtained from the administered interview with nss and nnss at the elementary level and one ns at the preintermediate level stressing simplification of the language and avoidance of complex sentence structures. finally, syntactical modifications obtained from the quantitative data have also been supported by the findings of the interviews although the opinions of nss and nnss at the elementary and pre-intermediate levels on the kinds of syntactical modifications may differ. the results of the interviews have shown that nss and nnss at the elementary level focused on the idea that each proficiency level necessitated certain types of grammar structure and teachers needed to interact with the students according to the proficiency level of the learners. as for nss and nnss at the pre-intermediate level, only one of the nss at this level emphasized the necessity of using simple structures with the beginners and he suggested that teachers should use more advanced grammar as the proficiency level of the learners progressed. the other ns and both of the nnss at the pre-intermediate level also stressed the importance of the teacher talk being modified according to the proficiency levels of the learners because they stressed that using complex structures at the beginner or elementary levels might cause learners to lose their interest and motivation in language learning. however, they also suggested that the classroom language of the teacher should be a little beyond the level of the learners to provide comprehensible input as krashen (1982) put forth. in other words, nss and nnss at the elementary and pre-intermediate level had similar opinions and beliefs on modifying the classroom language according to the proficiency levels of the learners whereas their points of views on the kind of syntactical modifications to be made could show differences. conclusion the findings of the present study try to probe a phenomenon and arouse insights concerning syntactical modifications by native and non-native speakers of english in their speech when talking to non-native learners at the elementary and pre-intermediate levels. by means of the comparison of the teacher talk of native and non-native speakers, this study may contribute to more studies 138 arzu ünel, meryem mirioğlu in relation to the teacher talk of nss and nnss and its modifications, and it may raise awareness of efl teachers regarding the importance of teacher talk. although further research is necessary to enhance the findings of this study, the present findings have several important implications for the field of foreign language teaching. first, comprehensible input is at the core of second or foreign language learning and teaching, and modifications in teacher talk can help nonnative learners understand the input enabling them to acquire the language. in this sense, the linguistic input in teacher talk may be enhanced for the benefit of non-native learners. second, the data gained in this study or similar research may be used by in-service or teacher training programs to give more instructions about how to produce effective teacher talk providing comprehensible input to l2 learners. furthermore, the findings of the study may be beneficial in terms of preparing elt materials and resources which can be used in different classrooms and with various non-native learners to meet their need for comprehensible input. third, teacher resources may concentrate on the phenomenon of teacher talk by presenting and describing adjustments at lexical and syntactic levels in order to contribute to the development of professional skills and improvement of the quality of an esl or efl teacher. 139syntactical modifications in teacher talk… a p p e n d i x 1 questionnaire background information of the participant 1. name: .............................................................................................................................................. 2. surname: ......................................................................................................................................... 3. age: ................................................................................................................................................. 4. number of years in english language teaching: ........................................................................... 5. university degree obtained and year: ............................................................................................ 6. any english certificates: ................................................................................................................ 7. any master or doctorate degree: ................................................................................................... arzu ünel, meryem mirioğlu a p p e n d i x 2 interview 1. do you think that the language that the teacher uses in the classroom should change according to proficiency level of the students while interacting with them? 2. if so, what kind of modifications do teachers make in their speech? (such as simplification, elaboration in the use of vocabulary or structures or some other modifications of the language) references chaudron, c. (1979). complexity of teacher speech and vocabulary explanation/elaboration. the 13th annual tesol convention. boston, ma. cullen, r. (1998). teacher talk and the classroom context. elt journal, 52(3), 179–187. doughty, c. j., & long, m. h. (eds.). (2003). the handbook of second language acquisition. oxford: blackwell. ellis, r. (1994). the study of second language acquisition. oxford: oxford university press. ellis, r., & barkhuizen, g. (2005). analyzing learner language. oxford: oxford university press. gaies, s. j. (1976). sentence combining: a technique for assessing proficiency in a second language. paper presented at the conference on perspectives on language, university of louisville, louisville. gaies, s. j. (1977). the nature of linguistic input in formal second language learning: linguistic and communicative strategies in esl teachers’ classroom language. on tesol, 77, 204–212. gaies, s. j. (1983). the investigation of language classroom processes. tesol quarterly, 17(2), 207. hákansson, g. (1986). quantitative studies of teacher talk. in g. kasper (ed.), learning, teaching and communication in the foreign language classroom (pp. 83–98). århus: aarhus university press. hatch, e. m. (1983). psycholinguistics: a second language perspective. rowley, ma: newbury house, 64. henzl, v. (1973). linguistic register of foreign language instruction. language learning, 23(2), 207–222. henzl, v. (1979). foreigner talk in the classroom. international review of applied linguistics, 17(2), 159–165. ishiguro, t. (1986). simplification and elaboration in foreign language teacher talk and its source. unpublished doctoral dissertation, stanford university, ca. krashen, s. d. (1981). second language acquisition and second language learning. oxford: pergamon press. krashen, s. d. (1982). principles and practice in second language acquisition (pp. 21–64). oxford: pergamon press. krashen, s. d. (1985). the input hypothesis: issues and implications. london: longman. pica, t., & long, m. h. (1986). the linguistic and conversational performance of experienced and inexperienced teachers. talking to learn: conversation in second language acquisition (pp. 85–98). rowley, ma: newbury house. 140 seedhouse, p. (2004). the interactional architecture of the second language classroom: a conversational analysis perspective. oxford: blackwell. wesche, m. b., & ready, d. (1985). foreigner talk in the university classroom (pp. 89–114). in input in second language acquisition. rowley, ma: newbury house. wright, t. (2005). classroom management in language education. new york: palgrave macmillan. xiao-yan, m. (2006). teacher talk and efl in university classrooms. unpublished master’s thesis, chongqing normal university & yangtze normal university, china, 5–13. xu, x. h. (2010). analysis of teacher talk on the basis of relevance theory. canadian social science, 6(3), 45–50. arzu ünel, meryem mirioğlu syntaktische modifikationen in der von englischlehrern – muttersprachlern und ausländern im klassenraum gesprochenen sprache z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die von einem lehrer im klassenraum gebrauchte fremdsprache ist die grundlage der kommunikation zwischen dem lehrer und seinen schülern und die sprache des lehrers (eng.: teacher talk) spielt dabei grundlegende rolle. zum ziel der im vorliegenden artikel dargestellten quantitativ-qualitativen forschung wurden syntaktische modifikationen im englischen, die sowohl von englischen muttersprachlern (eng.: native speakers of english) als auch von den englisch sprechenden ausländern (eng.: non-native speakers of english) gebraucht waren. die schüler in der zu untersuchten klasse verfügten über die englischkenntnisse auf der grundstufe und auf der mittelstufe, und die forschung wurde in bezug auf türkische schule durchgeführt. die ergebnisse zeigten bedeutende syntaktische modifikationen beispielsweise im bereich der anwendung von verschiedenen satztypen in der sprache von den beiden lehrergruppen auf, die offensichtlich vor allem vom wissenstand der schüler abhängig waren. syntactical modifications in teacher talk… 141 theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 2 (2) 2016 wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego • katowice 2016 editors-in-chief danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia adam wojtaszek university of silesia language editor david schauffler university of silesia editorial board janusz arabski (university of silesia, katowice/ vistula university, warsaw) larissa aronin (oranim college of higher education/ trinity college, dublin) jasone cenoz iraqui (university of the basque country, donostia – san sebastian) halina chodkiewicz (maria curie-skłodowska university, lublin) gessica de angelis (trinity college, dublin) anna ewert (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) tammy gregersen (university of northern iowa, cedar falls) ulrike jessner schmid (university of innsbruck, innsbruck) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities/ university of warsaw) jolanta latkowska (university of silesia, katowice) peter macintyre (cape breton university, sydney) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, cracow) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) miroslaw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz/ state school of higher professional education, konin) ewa piechurska-kuciel (university of opole, opole) andrzej porzuczek (university of silesia, katowice) david singleton (trinity college, dublin/ university of pannonia, veszprem) eva vetter (university of vienna, vienna) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, łódź) maria wysocka (university of silesia, katowice) contents preface (danuta gabryś-barker, adam wojtaszek) . . . . . . . . 5 mirosław pawlak another look at the l2 motivational self system of polish students majoring in english: insights from interview data . . . . . . . . . . 9 ingrid bello-rodzeń multilingual upbringing as portrayed in the blogosphere: on parentbloggers’ profile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 anna turula between new technologies and new paradigms in academic education. a nonreductionist approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 lindsey r. leacox, margarita meza, tammy gregersen when language anxiety and selective mutism meet in the bilingual child: interventions from positive psychology . . . . . . . . . . . 61 aleksandra szymańska-tworek teaching materials and the elf methodology – attitudes of pre-service teachers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 grzegorz cebrat how to write an american death notice: some guidelines for novice obituarists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 9 (2), 2023, pp. 1/35 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12816 joanna pitura https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1659-1995 pedagogical university of krakow, poland heejin chang https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9974-367x university of southern queensland, australia tools for scaffolding the development of l2 speaking in english-medium higher education: lessons from poland and australia a b s t r a c t participating in oral l2 communication may be challenging for english-medium higher education students. while literature suggests that scaffolding facilitates the development of l2 speaking, research has not addressed the notion of tools for scaffolding its development. the aim of this study is twofold: (1) to investigate how scaffolding can be embodied in tool design to support l2 speaking and (2) to obtain and analyse student perceptions of the tools. we draw on questionnaire data gathered in two iterations of a larger design-based research study conducted in two contexts: english studies students in poland (n = 26) and culturally and linguistically diverse l2 learners in australia (n = 12). this study illustrates how features of scaffolding were applied to map instructor, peerand technology-based tools in terms of learning activities, resources, technology and feedback. the results suggest that these tools may cater to the multiple levels of student understanding and skill with regard to the development of l2 speaking found in modern l2 classrooms.. keywords: scaffolding, l2 speaking, higher education, poland, australia https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.12816 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1659-1995 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2451-7242 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2451-7242 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9974-367x https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2451-7242 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2451-7242 tapsla.12816 p. 2/35 joanna pitura, heejin chang in english-medium higher education (emhe) settings,1 international students in english-dominant countries and some domestic students in non-english-dominant countries use english as a second or foreign language (esl or efl respectively; l2 henceforth) to communicate in a variety of genres, such as presentations, discussions, debates, with instructors and peers (hyland, 2009; wingate, 2015). since l2 speech production is a complex and demanding cognitive activity (bygate, 1987, 2009; de bot, 2000; kormos, 2006), participating in oral l2 communication and abiding by genre conventions may be challenging for these students. as illustrated in levelt’s (1989) model of speech processing and echoed in kormos’s (2006) elaboration concerning l2 speech production, students may encounter problems while planning content for speaking (conceptualization), turning ideas into sentences (formulation), and audibly expressing their thoughts (articulation) when their language competences (i.e., linguistic, discursive, strategic, and sociolinguistic) and world knowledge are limited (chapelle et al., 1997) and/or when their knowledge of the elements of the target l2 is not automatized (dekeyser, 2015, 2017). although various courses and preparation programmes are offered to help emhe students develop l2 skills, speaking english can still be difficult (mcrae, 2018; yates & wahid, 2013). in addition, some students might be afraid of making mistakes, lack confidence while speaking and be reluctant to speak in class (haidara, 2016). finally, the utility of the offered courses may vary in educational contexts that include homogenous groups of non-native speakers learning l2 in a non-anglophone country (such as poland) and heterogeneous groups of non-native speakers learning l2 in an anglophone country (such as australia). hence, taking steps to better support the development of english speaking skills among these students is of great importance and one way of doing so would be by scaffolding student learning with the use of adequate tools. the pedagogical concept of scaffolding has been subject to research by scholars and educators in the field of l2 learning and teaching (e.g., gagné & parks, 2013; hammond & gibbons, 2001; li & zhang, 2020; mercer, 1994; walqui, 2006; walqui & van lier, 2010). there is also a growing body of research into scaffolding conducted in the area of computer-assisted language learning (botero et al., 2019; chang & sun, 2009; chen & tseng, 2021; cheng, 2010; fan & chen, 2019; hsieh, 2017, 2020; jin, 2013; lee, 2008; li, 2010; liou et al., 2006; mills & kennedy, 2013; narayanan & kumar, 2019; nielsen, 2014; ozaki & ueda, 2021; rezaee et al., 2015; todd, 2014; wu et al., 2012; xu & 1 differing from english language courses, english-medium instruction is delivered in englishdominant countries (australia, the uk, etc.). this form of bilingual education is popular in asia, it is offered to domestic and international students in e.g., korea, china, etc. (hu & wu, 2020) and is also present in many european universities, as a result of the bologna process promoting student mobility (evans & morrison, 2011). english-medium instruction prevails in languagerelated programmes such as english philology, english studies, applied linguistics, etc. tools for scaffolding the development of l2 speaking… tapsla.12816 p. 3/35 xia, 2021). with regard to scaffolding the development of l2 speaking, the term has been used to refer to various classroom strategies (ahmadpour et al., 2016; gerakopoulou, 2016; ghasedi et al., 2018; zarandi & rahbar, 2016), specific teacher-led activities, such as, for example, warm-up, pairwork and introduction of new language (gilead, 2018), corrective feedback (shooshtari et al., 2018), peer interactions (ahmadpour et al., 2016; azir, 2019; nguyen, 2013), and technology (kozar, 2016; mirahmadi & alavi, 2016; tudini, 2003). while these studies suggest that scaffolding facilitates the development of l2 speaking ability, research has not explicitly addressed the notion of tools for scaffolding the development of speaking skills. due to this lack of both theoretical and empirical studies, it remains unclear how to integrate tools to scaffold the development l2 speaking for academic communication. therefore, as speaking skills are central for a successful academic career in emhe, articulating and integrating tools into instruction for scaffolding the learning process of diverse learners found in l2 classrooms in emhe contexts is urgently needed. when setting out to undertake empirical work in an under-researched area, it is essential to organise our knowledge of the issue at hand as an initial research step. hence, in the first part of this paper, the purpose is to systematise our knowledge of scaffolding the development of l2 speaking skills with the use of tools, drawing on the conceptualisations in the existing literature. this research activity is a prerequisite for designing our empirical study. in the second part of this paper, the aim is to confront our theoretical considerations with the empirical reality by developing and evaluating the pedagogy for integrating tools for scaffolding the development of l2 speaking. specifically, in this study, we seek to investigate how scaffolding can be embodied in tool design to support l2 speaking developmental processes in emhe classrooms. to that end, we describe the tools we used in l2 speaking courses, the selection of which was grounded in the identified theoretical approach. second, we seek to obtain and analyse student perceptions of these tools. with this in mind, we draw on questionnaire data gathered in two iterations of a larger ongoing design-based research (dbr) study conducted in two learning contexts: english studies students in poland and culturally and linguistically diverse (cald) l2 learners in australia. in this study we assume the sociocultural perspective to view tools as symbolic (e.g., concepts) and material (e.g., computers) artefacts that mediate human cognitive activity (lantolf et al., 2015; vygotsky, 1978) that can be organised to scaffold (wood et al., 1976) the development of l2 speaking skills. analysing students’ perspectives from different contexts will help establish the extent to which the tools support students’ learning. research activities reported on in the current paper serve to refine and clarify the concept of scaffolding in the area of l2 learning and teaching, organising our theoretical knowledge concerning the problem under study. findings from this study also make contribution to practice with regard to the tapsla.12816 p. 4/35 joanna pitura, heejin chang design and development of pedagogical tools that scaffold the learning process in modern higher education l2 classrooms. literature review scaffolding learning the concept of instructional scaffolding has its roots in sociocultural theory and vygotskian assertion (vygotsky, 1978) that learning, including l2 learning, occurs with the assistance of capable others that allows progress from the stage at which performance is demonstrated to a learner to the stage where they are able to perform the activity independently (storch, 2017). new abilities are learned when they are internalised, that is, transferred from the interpersonal plane into the intrapersonal plane (lantolf et al., 2015). expanding this view, wood, bruner, and ross (1976) applied the metaphor of scaffolding to denote an “adult controlling those elements of the task that are initially beyond the learner’s capacity, thus permitting him to concentrate upon and complete only those elements that are within his range of competence” (p. 90). through scaffolding a learner is capable of conducting a task that is otherwise not attainable and the support is removed when independent performance is viable (belland, 2017). examples of support include modelling, demonstrating features of the task, questioning and providing hints to aid learner reflection (puntambekar & hubscher, 2005). instructional scaffolding is characterised by a number of features. in the broader field of education, puntambekar and hubscher (2005) assert that scaffolding should encompass: (1) a shared understanding of the goal of the activity (intersubjectivity)—ensuring that the learner knows when the task is completed successfully; (2) ongoing diagnosis—determining learner’s current level of understanding and performance in order to establish the right level of support needed; (3) graduated assistance (calibrated support)—based on the outcomes of the diagnosis, matching the support with the current needs of the learner; and (4) fading—eventual removal of support when a learner is able to perform independently. in the area of l2 learning, van lier (2004) argues that aspects such as continuity, contextual support, intersubjectivity, contingency, handover/takeover, flow (p. 151) are essential, whereas hammond and gibbons (2001) note the following: extending understanding, temporary support, macro and micro focuses (pp. 15–18). although the understanding of the tools for scaffolding the development of l2 speaking… tapsla.12816 p. 5/35 concept of scaffolding does not diverge among the abovementioned and other authors, from an instructional design point of view it is important to pinpoint the theoretical features of scaffolding with precision in order to define criteria for the selection and organisation of tools for scaffolding learning. we regard the elements of scaffolding suggested by puntambekar and hubscher (2005) as easily translatable into l2 instructional design and, for this reason, we use the elements proposed as the criteria guiding the design of tools for scaffolding the development l2 speaking in emhe courses. furthermore, apart from the identification of key elements, literature offers the categorisation of scaffolding according to who or what regulates the support. according to belland (2014, 2017), scaffolding can be provided by: • teachers (one-to-one scaffolding): one teacher works with one student, provides learning activities, models, questions, explanations, hints, and feedback. although this form of scaffolding is considered most beneficial, classroom realities limit opportunities for one-to-one scaffolding. • peers (peer scaffolding): support is provided by equally or more capable peers, for example through feedback. despite one-to-one interaction that can be rendered, peer scaffolding may not be sufficient or adequate for learning. • computers (computer-based scaffolding): a computer is used for completing tasks. this distinction is valuable while designing tools for scaffolding: it broadly indicates the types of agents that may be resorted to while planning and organising the provision of tools in modern emhe classrooms, in which exclusive instructor-based one-to-one scaffolding cannot usually be warranted. tools for scaffolding learning literature in the area of scaffolding in broader education and l2 learning refers to tools as scaffolds, providing scaffolding, or providing support (goh, 2017; puntambekar & hubscher, 2005). learning activities, paper-based or software tools, curricula, resources, artefacts, environments, as well as teachers and peers, are all considered as potential providers of support (belland, 2017; goh, 2017; puntambekar & hubscher, 2005). there is also some elaboration on specifying tools used for matching elements of scaffolding in classrooms, as summarised in table 1. tapsla.12816 p. 6/35 joanna pitura, heejin chang table 1 tools for scaffolding learning (based on belland, 2017; puntambekar & hubscher, 2005) element of scaffolding examples of tools for scaffolding intersubjectivity a launcher unit, staging activities; ongoing diagnosis a teacher asks questions or observes student per-formance; graduated support explanation, clarification, encouraging participation, modelling desired performance; fading strategies provide decreasing support over time and are ultimately withdrawn; yet, this literature does not explicitly define the very concept of “tools.” as a result, it has been variably used to refer to instructional support. for example, puntambekar and hubscher (2005) use this term interchangeably with reference to an overarching category of different type of support provided (as, e.g., suggested in the title of the article “tools for scaffolding students in a complex learning environment”) or to denote one of the ways students can be lent support (as in “tools, resources, and curricula,” p. 7). hence, in this study, we return to the theoretical origins of scaffolding in order to conceptualise tools for supporting the development of l2 speaking through the lens of sociocultural theory. from this perspective, human mental functioning and development is viewed as a mediated process, wherein physical and conceptual tools are used to regulate and organise one’s activity or behaviour (engeström, 2001; lantolf et al., 2015; vygotsky, 1978). while physical tools involve the manipulation of objects to accomplish a task, conceptual tools are used to interact with others and/or to impact others’ behaviour (engeström, 2001; hampel, 2019; ma, 2017). furthermore, according to this theory, mental development consists in “gaining greater voluntary control over one’s capacity to think and act either by becoming more proficient in the use of meditational resources, or through a lessening or severed reliance on external meditatio nal means” (lantolf et al., 2015, p. 209). within this process, humans develop by transitioning from external objectand other-regulation towards self-regulation, which is the ultimate goal of learning. in l2 learning, object-regulation refers to the use of artefacts that enable cognitive activity (e.g., an online translator or software for oral presentations), other-regulation entails the presence of other people (e.g., teacher providing hints or feedback on language), and selfregulation characterises learners with internalised objector other-regulated forms of mediation (lantolf et al., 2015). what this means for the present study is that l2 learning, including the development of l2 speaking skills in emhe, can be scaffolded with the astools for scaffolding the development of l2 speaking… tapsla.12816 p. 7/35 sistance of external (physical and conceptual) tools, afforded through objects and other people. furthermore, scaffolding learning entails creating spaces that guide individual l2 learners towards self-regulation in their l2 use. this necessitates providing learners with opportunities to achieve mastery of the skill to the extent to which external tools—objector people-based—are no longer indispensable to act. therefore, for the purpose of the current study, we define tools as physical and conceptual artefacts that can be intentionally organised to support the development of l2 speaking skills. this understanding yields the following instantiations of tools that can be applied to scaffold learning: learning activities, learning resources, instructorand peer-based feedback and technology. tools and scaffolding the development of l2 speaking goh (2017) defines scaffolding in l2 speaking as “the process by which teachers provide helping activities to enable learners to accomplish a speaking task which they would otherwise have been unable to do well on their own” (p. 248). the same author envisages scaffolding for the development of speaking skills in terms of the provision of learning activities that allow learners to progressively build autonomy in task execution. through scaffolding activities learners are helped while planning and organising speech. as an intentional pedagogical strategy, “scaffolding activities can be added on to regular speaking practice tasks to help learners become aware of speech processes and perform better” (goh, 2017, p. 248). apart from the abovementioned work, a limited body of empirical studies have looked into the process of scaffolding l2 speaking. one strand of research describes how scaffolding is applied by teachers in l2 classrooms in an attempt to make sense of what is happening in the classroom by capturing the existing strategies that teachers apply to support their students’ l2 use and learning (gerakopoulou, 2016; gilead, 2018). aside from this research, there are studies that focus on the role of peers in scaffolding processes, that is, providing peer scaffolding in a collaborative presentation task (nguyen, 2013), peer-scaffolded tasks (azir, 2019), and group work with peer assessment and scaffolding (ahmadpour et al., 2016). the next strand of research comprises interventionist studies that optimise the development of l2 speaking and explore the effect of scaffolding strategies on l2 speaking (mirahmadi & alavi, 2016; zarandi & rahbar, 2016). the studies in the last group examine the effectiveness of scaffolding interventions with the use of various scaffolding strategies (ghasedi et al., 2018; shooshtari et al., 2018). the rapid development of web 2.0 tools including learning management systems such as blackboard or moodle, as well as increased opportunities for tapsla.12816 p. 8/35 joanna pitura, heejin chang authentic communication practice in the l2, has resulted in significant learning gains including improved l2 language skills (levy, 2009; chang & windeatt, 2021a; 2021b). these tools have expanded opportunities for online and blended learning by allowing students to practise skills and collaborate on tasks outside of the classroom (barrett & liu, 2016; chang, power, & windeatt, 2022), resulting in a more flexible learning environment (liu, 2011). the technology for audio recording has also advanced to the point where students can easily record themselves speaking and share their recording using portable (mobile) devices (chang & windeatt, 2021b), as well as allow teachers to provide regular feedback to students (moneypenny & simon, 2017). in sum, the existing research gives insight into the ways learners can be supported while they develop l2 speaking skills and the relevant findings point out that scaffolding—be it teacher-, peeror technology-based—helps l2 learners enhance their speaking performance. however, the scholarship in the area of scaffolding the development of l2 speaking remains modest and many important issues are still unresolved. first, intervention studies overviewed above either tend to overlook the theoretical features of scaffolding (e.g., intersubjectivity, ongoing diagnosis, graded support, and fading) while planning l2 speaking instruction or seem to grapple with incorporating scaffolding criteria in l2 instruction. next, the concept of tools is absent from l2 speaking literature and so is the arrangement of tools that can be applied in the scaffolding process. moreover, research has not yet included emhe l2 students who need to develop l2 speaking skills for academic communication. finally, despite the enormous potential of technology to scaffold the development of l2 speaking, this area has received very little attention. as noted by goh (2017), “[i]t is worthwhile for researchers to consider how technology can be harnessed not just for practising speaking but also providing cognitive support in thinking and planning for learners during speech processing as well as developing discourse skills for face-to-face interactions” (p. 258). consequently, it is unclear how tools can be employed to support the development of l2 speaking for emhe students with diverse levels of proficiency often found in language classrooms, and how the scaffolding can be faded. method this exploratory study set out to investigate how well design ideas are embodied and enacted in tools implemented to scaffold the development of emhe l2 speaking skills in speaking courses taught in two learning contexts of polish and australian universities. defining tools for scaffolding the developtools for scaffolding the development of l2 speaking… tapsla.12816 p. 9/35 ment of l2 speaking skills as physical and conceptual artefacts, intentionally organised to support the development of l2 speaking skills, encompassing learning activities, learning resources, instructorand peer-based feedback, as well as technology, the following research question was addressed: form the students’ (users’) perspective, do the tools (i.e., activities, resources, feedback, and technology) embedded in the designed l2 speaking courses support the development of l2 speaking skills of the l2 learners set in two distinct educational contexts? if so, how? taken the role of social and material contexts envisioned in sociocultural theory, tools may work differently across l2 classrooms. by analysing student perceptions of tools used in two different settings, we hope that the findings will provide context-sensitive theoretical insights that will underpin the designs of future similar-type interventions for developing l2 speaking skills in emhe. the results of the study also influence practice as students’ perceptions of the tools can be used in course development in forthcoming sessions. research design in order to answer the research question, the present study uses part of the dataset obtained in two cycles of a larger design-based research (dbr) project which iterated to develop, implement, and evaluate an l2 speaking course for academic communication, with the ultimate aim of generating design principles for l2 speaking courses (pitura, 2022). the dbr approach is defined as “a type of participatory research in which researchers and practitioners collaborate toward a common goal, namely creating new understanding of an educational intervention or issue through the progressive refinement or improvement of a design” (rodríguez, 2017, p. 364). accordingly, dbr provides a methodological framework allowing researchers and practitioners to work together towards solving practical problems, develop, and implement solutions in real classrooms by using multiple methods to collect and analyse data, and refine design principles to advance new theoretical and practical knowledge (anderson & shattuck, 2012; reimann, 2011; rodríguez, 2017). in the current study, two researchers-practitioners collaborated to meet the challenge of developing speaking skills in their emhe l2 classrooms. in line with the longitudinal and cyclical nature of the dbr approach, at the first phase, the tools were designed, developed, and pilot-tested by the first author (joanna pitura) at a polish university in an l2 speaking course offered to undergraduate english studies students in the 2018/2019 academic school year. these tools were next refined and implemented in another sociocultural context by the second author (heejin chang) at an australian university in an l2 speaking course for cald students during two sessions in 2020. with tapsla.12816 p. 10/35 joanna pitura, heejin chang the aim of testing the tools in different sociocultural conditions, australian university was considered suitable as the next iteration of this research project. given the exploratory nature of this study, qualitative data constituted the main source of information about the tools, while quantitative data were given less weight in data collection and analysis, serving a supplementary role. in this dbr study, we analyse and report on the same constructs under different conditions (rodríguez, 2017). this user-based information will help evaluate the tools used and generate design principles for scaffolding l2 speaking courses. in both educational contexts the tools were incorporated to help students meet the following course aims: (1) the development of spoken genre-based oral presentation and spoken interaction language activities (council of europe, 2001, 2018): presentations/talks, debates, discussions, interviews, conversations and chats, (2) the enhancement of the quality of spoken l2 at the b2+ level (council of europe, 2001, 2018) in terms of the range of vocabulary, accuracy, fluency, pronunciation, and coherence in spoken english, and (3) the expansion of students’ general knowledge. the following tools were employed: (1) learning activities (i.e., reading to talk about current affairs, reading for summarising in class, podcasting, learning, and practising specific spoken genres), (2) learning resources (i.e., course materials made available on moodle), (3) feedback (instructorand peer-based), and (4) technology (moodle, soundcloud/voice thread), as presented in table 2. table 2 summary of course tools tool type cycle 1 cycle 2 learning activities before the course: self-assessment of l2 speaking, reflection on speaking skills; before each class • preparing to talk about current affairs; • reading an article of students’ choosing to be summarised in class; • recording a podcast using the soundcloud application (3-minute talk on an instructor-assigned theme connected to technology) in line with the assessment criteria; in each class • step 1. a conversation on current affairs; pairwork; 10 mins; • step 2. summaries of students’ articles and a conversation on the related issues; pairwork, 5 minutes for each partner; in first class: self-assessment of l2 speaking, reflection on speaking skills; before each class • preparing to talk about current affairs by pasting links to the article in a designated online space; • recording a podcast using the voicethread application (3-minute talk on an instructor-assigned theme); in each class • step 1. presenting a summary of what students read; 5–10 mins; • step 2. provide comments, referring to the assessment criteria listed in the task; tools for scaffolding the development of l2 speaking… tapsla.12816 p. 11/35 • step 3. evaluation of partner’s podcasts; students access partner’s podcast using a qr code displayed on the moodle site, listen to it using own headphones and take notes for feedback, referring to the assessment criteria listed in the task; pairwork; approx. 10 mins; • step 4. spoken genre presentation and practice; whole group, pairwork, individual; approx. 60 mins; in last class: assessment: a test on vocabulary, self-assessment of l2 speaking and genre-based speaking skills; • step 3. spoken genre presentation and practice; whole group, pairwork, individual; approx. 60 mins; • step 4. a vocabulary test; in last class: self-assessment of l2 speaking and genre-based speaking skills; learning resources of instructor’s choice: moodle modules; units from academic vocabulary in use (mccarthy & o’dell, 2008); online content, i.e. youtube videos, links to websites and blogs; of students’ choice: online articles, websites, blogs; the same; feedback in class: from instructor and peers out of class: from instructor—assessment of the submitted podcasts; feedback on l2 (the indication of errors, e.g., mispronounced words, grammar mistakes, inadequate structures) and genre-based speaking, sent to individual ss via moodle; in class: from instructor and peers out of class: from instructor—assessment of the submitted podcasts; feedback on l2 (the indication of errors, e.g., mispronounced words, grammar mistakes, inadequate structures) and genre-based speaking, in person; technology in class: university computer and projector out of class: students’ computers and/ or smartphones both: soundcloud application, students’ smartphones, moodle. the same; using voicethread instead of soundcloud. scaffolding was achieved by capturing the four elements of intersubjectivity, graduated support, ongoing diagnosis, and fading (puntambekar & hubscher, 2005). scaffolding was provided by the instructor, peers, and technology (belland, 2017), that is, through the moodle learning management system. various tool types for inand out-of-class use were selected to match with the four elements of scaffolding (table 3). tapsla.12816 p. 12/35 joanna pitura, heejin chang table 3 overview of scaffolding with the use of tools element of scaffolding form of scaffolding type of tool in-class use out-of-class use intersubjectivitiy moodlebased activities staging activities; cycle 2 only: introductory module; cycle 1 only: introductory module; resources youtube videos, websites, blogs; cycle 2 only: links to cefr level descriptors; cycle 1 only: links to cefr level descriptors; graduated support moodlebased activities staging activities; academic english vocabulary in use (mccarthy & o’dell, 2008); voice recording; reading for speaking; resources online articles, websites; peerbased activities pair/groupwork; resources peer podcasts; feedback on voice recording; instructorbased feedback on in-class genrebased l2 performance; ongoing diagnosis moodlebased activities vocabulary tests; selfassessment of spoken l2 proficiency; reflection on genre-based speaking skills; resources links to cefr level descriptors; instructorbased feedback assessment and comments on voice recording; technology cycle 1 only: moodle messenger; fading moodlebased activities genre based instruction; script-based or plan-based voice recording activity, decided by the student; resources use of reference materials as much and long as needed. use of reference materials as much and as long as needed. tools for scaffolding the development of l2 speaking… tapsla.12816 p. 13/35 with regard to intersubjectivity, in order to create a shared understanding of the learning goals vis-à-vis their actual performance, students used moodle-based activities and curated resources that familiarised them with spoken genres and target l2 quality (b2+ level). at first, students engaged in the activities included in the introductory module that comprised an overview of course aims, assignments, etc., as well as self-assessment of spoken l2 proficiency and reflection on genre-based l2 speaking skills. in class, shared understanding of spoken genres was achieved through staging activities, one text (genre) type per module. these activities introduced students to the following genres: self-presentations, presentations/talks, debates, discussion, interviews, chats/conversations. in each module, following genre-based instruction (hyland, 2003, 2007, 2008, 2018; richards & rodgers, 2014), the activities were organised to help students reflect on their experience with given genres (“building the context”) and to model the speaking activity (“modelling and deconstructing the text”). these activities were supplemented with online resources, that is, youtube videos, websites, and blogs. all these tools were intended to help students grasp the understanding of l2 spoken text quality and structure which they were expected to produce. as to graduated support, students were provided with (1) moodle-, (2) peer, and (3) instructor-based opportunities to practise speaking and receive continuous assistance. first, moodle-based staging activities supported the practice of genre-based speaking. in class, students co-created spoken interaction texts with their partners (“joint construction of the text”), produced texts individually (“independent construction of the text”) and distinguished text types one from another (“linking to related texts”) (hyland, 2003, 2007, 2008, 2018; richards & rodgers, 2014). through voice recording (podcasting) activities, students practised oral production texts (self-presentations and talks). this activity aimed to help students engage in the systematic practice of speaking out-of-class, using suggested resources (websites) to learn about the topics of their talks. all the topics were related to technology and aimed to familiarise students with various aspects of digital literacy. if students felt insecure, they could write the script of the text in l2 and then read it while recording. additionally, in order to help students note and put to use desirable l2 vocabulary and grammar, students used designated units from academic english vocabulary in use (mccarthy & o’dell, 2008). to enable the acquisition of content for speaking, students read extensively out-of-class. the support included recommended websites to read to be familiar with current affairs (e.g., www.bbc.com/news) and to summarise content in class (e.g., websites of nature, new scientist, scientific american). second, peers provided support through pair-and groupwork activities, in which students had partners and audience to engage with while speaking and to receive immediate feedback on performance. peer podcasts that were accessible for all course participants through moodle also served as resources in the form of the models that could be imitated. tapsla.12816 p. 14/35 joanna pitura, heejin chang third, instructor-based feedback in class aimed to modify students’ genrebased l2 spoken performance. these tools were selected to support diversity in the classroom by accommodating students of different levels of proficiency and backgrounds as they develop mastery in l2 speaking. through the use of these tools, students were provided with structure and guidance inand out-ofclass whenever they constructed their own spoken texts. although technologybased support was the same for all students, individual feedback that emerged in the interaction with peers and the instructor was to trigger the use of the affordances of technology-based tools (that were earlier employed to achieve intersubjectivity), according to their shifting needs. concerning ongoing diagnosis, throughout the course, students’ speaking skills were regularly assessed by instructors to provide students with further assistance. this included regular in-class monitoring of student performance and out-of-class assessment of students’ voice recordings. furthermore, students did online vocabulary tests to ensure that they build an appropriate range of l2 vocabulary for academic communication. on course completion, students self-assessed their l2 speaking skills and reflected on genre-based performance. these tools allowed instructors to spot challenges in student speaking and react by adjusting instruction. fading of support was accomplished by means of two activities: (1) staging genre-based instruction activities with supplementary reference resources and (2) voice recording (podcasting) activities with supplementary reference resources. in staging activities support was faded automatically at the independent construction phase as it was assumed that students would become capable of independent activity by then due to the sequence of instructional activities. at all stages students could use moodle-based reference materials as much and as long as they needed. in voice recording activities students themselves could fade the support. specifically, students were allowed to write full scripts of their talks and then to make the recording by reading it. when they gained confidence in performing this activity, they recorded the talks using a plan only. while preparing their scripts or plans, students could also use moodle-based reference materials when necessary. through this strategy, students were provided with an opportunity to practise organising the talk and selecting appropriate language. participants with the view to evaluating the utility of the designed tools in different sociocultural contexts, the participants comprised two distinct groups of emhe students: a (near) homogenous group of non-native speakers set in a non-anglophone country (poland) and a heterogeneous group of non-native tools for scaffolding the development of l2 speaking… tapsla.12816 p. 15/35 speakers set in an anglophone country (australia). the polish group (pg) included 26 efl undergraduate english studies students in their second year of an extramural ba-level programme, participants of a compulsory one-semester (18 hours) “discussions” course form the first cycle of the dbr project. they were in their 20s and 30s, speakers of polish as l1, one student’s linguistic context being ukrainian as l1. their english language proficiency was varied, around the area of the b2 level, according to the cefr scales (council of europe, 2001, 2018). the australian group (ag) included 12 esl students from a variety of nationalities (i.e., afghanistan (1), china (2), congo (2), syria (2), iraq (2), south korea (2), and venezuela (1)) studying at an undergraduate level at an australian university. they were in their 20s and early 30s. they had been residents of the country from a week to five years before the course commenced. they attended a one-semester in-sessional language and study skills programme “academic speaking and listening,” 12 hours per week for 10-weeks, within which the speaking content was used for four hours per week. student level on entry to the course was ielts 5.0 to 5.5 (b1 equivalent). all the participants provided informed consent in writing. data collection data used in this study were gathered by means of a self-report pen-andpaper questionnaire containing closed-ended items and open-ended questions formulated in the english language. as this study was implemented in real classrooms, student involvement was considered essential in the research process. students’ perceptions regarding the use of tools influence their learning during the course, the understanding of which is important for course designers and practitioners. this knowledge can help better design speaking courses and facilitate student learning. the current study uses part of a large dataset and considers five groups of items that investigated student tool perceptions in terms of inand out-ofclass activities, learning resources, feedback from peers and the instructor, and technology. out-of-class activities with the use of three items, students were asked to evaluate how helpful homework assignments were for developing their speaking skills: “reading articles to be summarised in class,” “reading about current affairs to be discussed in class,” “podcasting about technology-related aspects.” responses ranged from 1 (“not helpful at all”) to 5 (“very helpful”). additionally, students were invited to elaborate on their responses (“why?”). tapsla.12816 p. 16/35 joanna pitura, heejin chang in-class activities five closed-ended items were worded: “what i did in class helped me improve my discussion/interview/conversations/debating/presentation skills.” students’ responses were recorded on a 5-point likert type response scale (1 = “disagree,” 5 = “agree”). learning resources six closed-ended items were worded: “course materials provided on moodle helped me improve my discussion/interview/conversations/debating/presentation skills.” again, students’ responses were recorded on a five-point scale (1 = “disagree,” 5 = “agree”). feedback the students were asked to evaluate the feedback for developing their speaking skills through two items: “feedback from other students,” “feedback from the course instructor.” responses ranged from 1 (“not helpful at all”) to 5 (“very helpful”). additionally, students were asked to elaborate on their ratings (“why?”). technology students evaluated the technology for developing their speaking skills: “moodle,” as well as audio-sharing platforms: “soundcloud” (pg) and “voicethread” (ag). students responses were recorded on a scale ranging from 1 (“not helpful at all”) to 5 (“very helpful”) and students were also invited to elaborate on their responses (“why?”). the questionnaire was distributed in last class in both groups, students completed it anonymously. data analysis in order to explore student perceptions of tools used in their speaking course, questionnaire data were subjected to qualitative and quantitative analyses. the open-ended responses from the questionnaire were analysed qualitatively for major themes. content analysis involving the identification and analysis of the emerging themes within the dataset (dörnyei, 2011) was adopted to capture students’ experiences with course tools. student accounts were quantified; the digits provided in the text denote the number of students who reported aspects tools for scaffolding the development of l2 speaking… tapsla.12816 p. 17/35 within the given theme. we quote student words in an uncorrected form to illustrate points made. with regard to quantitative data analysis, we tallied means (responses ranging from 1 indicating a negative evaluation to 5 indicating a high evaluation) for each survey item and displayed the results to show average ratings in both groups. given the qualitative nature of the approach adopted in the study (not allowing for the generalisation of the findings), we do not employ inferential statistical analyses and we do not report statistical significance of the results. results this section presents the results, that is, students’ perceptions (pg—polish group; ag—australian group) of the tools designed and implemented in both courses in terms of (1) learning activities (i.e., reading to talk about current affairs, reading for summarising in class, podcasting/voice recording, learning and practising specific spoken genres), (2) learning resources (i.e., course materials made available on moodle), (3) feedback (instructorand peer-based), and (4) technology (moodle and audio-sharing platforms). learning activities reading to talk about current affairs pg. systematic reading and ensuing in-class conversations on the topics related to current affairs was seen, in students’ declarations, advantageous for (1) practising speaking (8), (2) developing knowledge of the world (6), catering for the need of engaging in meaningful spoken interactions (4), developing other competences and attitudes (2) but it was also indicated that this activity can be challenging (5). first, as noted by one of the students, speaking practice is essential to improve speaking skills and one way of practising is to speak about current affairs. another student emphasised the usefulness of this activity by having to put “different sets of difficult vocabulary” to use. furthermore, talking about current affairs in english and exchanging opinions creates space that helps “speak more freely in english,” allowing the students to produce long turns in speech: “if the topic was interesting i could elaborate on it even more than 5 minutes.” although one student confessed that “i just personally never felt it,” they considered it “a great warm-up though.” the next category of responses comprises an idea that by reading students have an opportunity tapsla.12816 p. 18/35 joanna pitura, heejin chang to become and/or remain knowledgeable of the world. this is considered to be important, as expressed by one of the students: “i gained huge knowledge about the world, and what was going on, i think it was my favourite part of the course.” the next category contains comments indicating that reading about current affairs fosters students’ need for and the ability to engage in spoken interaction. specifically, student words suggest that engaging in spoken exchanges with peers was sought for: “there were very interesting opinions and topics so i wanted to add something from myself.” another student felt more competent with regard to communicating in speaking: “i know how to cooperate with the partner, in a proper and friendly way.” as to other reported competences and attitudes, two students mentioned practising translation skills and assertiveness. according to one of them, “current affairs that i read about were usually in polish, so i had a chance to practise translating new information… to english in speech.” yet another student declared that while talking about current affairs, there were often conflicting opinions which helped him/her practice assertiveness in speech. the challenges emerging in students’ comments include their struggles related to lack of interest (e.g., “when somebody isn’t interested in politics, etc. reading these articles is painful,” “i’m not interested in current affairs and it was hard for me to speak about something that i’m not interested in”) and insufficient preparation (e.g., “it made me do research about current affairs although i have to confess that i wasn’t always prepared,” “i didn’t like it. it was hard for me to choose what i should read about”). ag. the analysis of students’ responses reveals three areas: (1) practising due to relevance and interest (7), (2) integration of and connection with the real world (4), and (3) enhancing motivation in learning (6). the freedom of choice of the topic of current affairs helped them participate in class discussions more actively. most students stated that they enjoyed doing this activity because they could choose the topic they were interested in. some students explained that the chosen topic was currently reported in news bulletins and newspapers so it was valuable for them to be able to engage in discussions with others outside the classroom (e.g., “i read a lot about corona virus and the conflicts in hong kong because i was interested in and people around me talked about them. i wanted to know [them] in english”). one student stated: “although i often listened to some difficult words from tv or other people’s talk, i hardly used them in a conversation. but now i managed to use them in class as well as outside.” another student wanted to have “more time to discuss the topic we brought and have a debate” and yet another one stated that “reading current affairs helped me a lot to learn new words.” tools for scaffolding the development of l2 speaking… tapsla.12816 p. 19/35 reading for summarising in class pg. the students endorsed this activity and they found reading and summarising articles beneficial for the development of their l2 speaking skills. they reported (1) enhanced spoken performance (8), (2) gains in the quality of l2 with regard to the range of vocabulary and accuracy (6), and (3) affective outcomes (6). the improvement of spoken performance is attributed to systematic training based on article content. owing to reading, students reported an increase in the perceived ability to take longer turns (“i’ve learnt how to talk about something for a couple of minutes”) and to talk in an engaging way (“it’s difficult to present a topic to a partner in a way that will interest them and provoke a discussion and article summaries let me practice that”). one student stated that reading and then summarising article content supported their practice of discussion skills when they are forced to work with a partner who has “a totally different way of thinking and opinions” on the issues presented in the text. with regard to the comments on gains in the range of vocabulary and accuracy, the students explained that this is the result of the need to check unfamiliar words used in the texts. one student reported spending more time studying grammar (past tenses). the comments in the last category address emotions suggesting that reading to summarise articles engages students in a stimulating activity. the students reported “checking significant information,” “finding interesting information,” reading “interesting articles,” “broadening horizons” and “understanding more.” ag. similarly to the polish group, the students in the australian group reported: (1) improved english language skills (7), (2) acquired content knowledge (7), and (3) affective outcomes (5). by preparing this activity on weekly basis, the students made it a habit to read and speak. one student explained that “i prepared a note for a summary because [there were] some words i needed to remember when i shared my story to my classmates.” and “i looked up a dictionary many times while reading articles, which helps my vocabulary.” the student added that this activity was not only enhancing l2 skills but also content-related knowledge. they reported: “i learned a lot about medical terminology and medicine, especially side effects.” when they shared a summary successfully with their classmates, they seemed to feel confident (“some story was difficult to summarise in english. but i did, which made me so happy”). alternatively, due to lack of practice and preparation, they felt embarrassed. the student confessed: “i couldn’t remember how to pronounce some words and it was so difficult to memorise… i really wanted to stop summarising my article because i didn’t prepare it well.” tapsla.12816 p. 20/35 joanna pitura, heejin chang podcasting (voice recording) on technology-related topics pg. three categories of themes arise in students’ responses: content-related (11), topic-related (6), and language-related (6). content-related comments indicate that students gained and engaged with new knowledge—described as “current/ important” by one of the study participants—because they had to do research in order to collect information prior to recording their talks. as reported, students learned, among others, about aspects of modern technology and how it can be used to improve their english. furthermore, one student confessed that although they do not “like online activity (my own, i tend not to do it),” they found it “interesting to know that there are many things that can help me develop myself.” topic-related comments revealed student interest in the area (e.g., “i am interested in that topic. it was really helpful to improve and gain a bit more to what i currently know”). alternatively, some students acknowledged that the topics were interesting but difficult to talk about, and, despite gains in knowledge, the topics were not interesting or sufficiently diverse (e.g., “not only technology-related topics are needed”). finally, language-related comments concerned the perceived gains in the range of vocabulary and cohesion (e.g., “it develops also vocabulary and abilities of ‘common speech’ (links between paragraphs…, etc.)”). voice recording itself helped students get accustomed to speaking and one study participant stated that it supported the development of their communication skills: “i learnt to use my voice as a tool of conveying the message.” ag. the students considered this activity to be helpful in two areas: (1) content knowledge (12) and language (12). most students felt that they gained knowledge (e.g., “i learned a lot. i made a note about information and my thoughts,” “learned a lot. i didn’t even know, in my tongue”). beyond this, they emphasised the improvement of language skills by practicing and the exposure in english (e.g., “improved speaking because i practiced a lot,” “i learned many new words because i had to read english texts”). overall, these activities (reading for talking about current affairs, reading for summarising in class, and podcasting—voice recording) were favourably evaluated by the students (figure 1). pg students rated the helpfulness of reading articles to be summarised in class higher (m = 4.3) than reading about current affairs (m = 4.04) or podcasting (m = 3.88). ag students gave reading about current affairs the highest rating (m = 4.58), and also highly rated reading articles for summarising (m = 4.17, and podcasting (m = 3.79). tools for scaffolding the development of l2 speaking… tapsla.12816 p. 21/35 figure 1 how helpful were homework assignments for developing your speaking skills? mean evaluations; 1 = not helpful at all, 2 = rather not helpful, 3 = hard to say, 4 = quite helpful, 5 = very helpful. as displayed in figure 2, in-class activities were reported to have helped the students develop speaking in given genres. ag students stated that course activities mostly helped them improve discussion (m = 4.58), conversation (m = 4.67) and presentation skills (m = 4.551). pg students also highly rated these aspects (m = 4.65, m = 4.58, m = 4.46, respectively). in pg students’ opinion, in-class activities helped improve debating (m = 4.19) and interview skills (m = 4.04), while ag students gave these skills moderate ratings (m = 3.75, m = 3.45). figure 2 what i did in class helped me… mean evaluations; 1 = disagree, 2 = rather disagree, 3 = hard to say, 4 = rather agree, 5 = agree. tapsla.12816 p. 22/35 joanna pitura, heejin chang learning resources available data show that the learning resources helped students enhance their speaking skills, as evidenced in the mean ratings presented in figure 3 (no qualitative data available in the dataset). on average, in pg students’ view, the resources helped them to improve, first and foremost, their presentation (m = 4.62) and conversation (m = 4.46) skills, the improvement in other skills being also highly rated (discussion skills m = 4.27; debating skills m = 4.24; interview skills m = 4.12). ag students declare that these resources helped them most to improve discussion skills (m = 4.67), while the improvement in other skills was rated slightly lower (interview skills m = 3.88; debating skills m = 3.96). figure 3 course materials provided on moodle helped me… mean evaluations; 1 = disagree, 2 = rather disagree, 3 = hard to say, 4 = rather agree, 5 = agree instructor and peer-based feedback pg. with regard to feedback, students’ comments focused on the quality and impact of the feedback received. as to the feedback from the instructor, the majority of the comments reflected on impact (16), seven comments concerned the quality and one student voices a limitation. considering the impact, students’ comments indicated that having received feedback from the instructor they better understood what their learning goals should be (“specially i liked private emails which were very clear to understand and show me as a student what i needed to improve for the next time”). moreover, instructor feedback was reported to have fostered l2 development, such as pronunciation and grammar, and helped notice weaknesses (“instructor showed me my mistakes that i didn’t know i’ve done; now i pay special attention to pronunciation”). instructor feedtools for scaffolding the development of l2 speaking… tapsla.12816 p. 23/35 back can also infuse students with a sense of reassurance (“i know whether my skills are good enough”) and boost motivation to work (“getting each time a message from the teacher/expert, with a relevant, motivating comment,” “i wanted to be better and it was for me a great motivation to learn. i could see that i am not as bad as i thought”). the comments concerning the quality of instructor feedback highlighted the relevance of feedback, pointing out students’ strengths and weaknesses, the objectivity of feedback, its clarity, as well as feedback being “very helpful” and “professional.” one student felt that it was undeservedly positive: “the teacher wasn’t severe and rather moderate so feedback was very often better than i expected and deserve.” one student stated that there were “[t]oo many people on the course,” suggesting that more in-class feedback could have been provided, had there not been so many students in class. as to peer feedback, more comments referred to the quality of feedback (15) than to the impact it had (12). with regard to the quality, the students report both positive experiences and scepticism concerning the reliability of feedback. in many accounts, peer feedback was helpful (“thanks to his or her opinion we could keep an eye on our mistakes”), immediate (“they told us what was wrong or fine immediately after listening so they had a ‘fresh’ overview and could be honest”), specific (“i know where and what mistakes i make,” “gave me concrete information”), as well as sincere, responsible, and trustworthy (e.g., “fellow students are smart and tolerant. this equals to proper feedback”). in some students’ opinion, peer feedback was not useful when it was not sincere (“i wasn’t sure if the feedback was real [or] maybe my partner didn’t want to make me upset,” “some people were just trying to be nice, not necessarily told you what they really thought about your speaking skills,” “i don’t think that my partner was 100% honest with me, she wanted to be nice, never said a bad word about my podcasts or other activities”). concerning the impact of peer feedback, study participants reported its influence on l2 competences (pronunciation, noticing mistakes) and setting the goals for learning (“they told me what they liked and said what i should improve so i knew what to work on”); it also strengthened their efforts to improve own performance (“i could see what other people think about my speeches; different points of views and how could i did it in different or better way”). although one student found peer feedback reassuring (“it is good to know what others think and have a constructive critic”), another one was disturbed (“it wasn’t appropriate to my skills. always too low rating what demotivated me”). ag. the analysis of the data suggest that the students valued both the instructor and peer feedback. in peer feedback, they emphasise two areas; (1) learning (7) and (2) quality (4). the students noted that peer feedback was helpful because it supported their own learning (e.g., “i like peer feedback. the point they made was useful to correct my mistake”). however, a few students expressed tapsla.12816 p. 24/35 joanna pitura, heejin chang concern about the quality of feedback (e.g., “it was good to receive their comments but i was not so sure their comments were right because they were not experts”). regarding feedback from the instructor, the students commented that the quality of feedback was beneficial in three areas: structure (7), language (8), content (5), and method (3). the students understood the difference of structural and functional aspects of a given spoken genre (e.g., “at the beginning, my talk was like daily conversations. academic presentation has a structure and i learned how to organise my talk”). they also appreciated feedback on language (e.g., “she corrected my pronunciation and wrong words”), as well as content (e.g., “sometimes i didn’t understand readings so her explanation helped me to understand”). next, the students indicated that individual feedback was effective to help them understand their problems (e.g., “she gave me feedback in person and it was in detail about my work. so i could ask questions about her feedback and was able to understand my problems”). overall, instructor feedback was perceived as being more helpful than peer feedback. overall, as can be seen from figure 4, in both groups, feedback from the instructor was rated higher (pg m = 4.45; ag m = 4.67), compared to the feedback from peers (pg m = 3.92; ag m = 3.91). figure 4 how helpful was feedback for developing your speaking skills? mean evaluations; 1 = not helpful at all, 2 = rather not helpful, 3 = hard to day, 4 = quite helpful, 5 = very helpful. tools for scaffolding the development of l2 speaking… tapsla.12816 p. 25/35 technology (moodle and audio-sharing platforms) pg. while moodle is considered a valuable platform containing information (14) that facilitates learning (10), soundcloud is associated with novelty (6), enabling (13), emotions (3), and tensions (5). the students value moodle for making the content available and for being a convenient and helpful hub of materials. the materials themselves are described as relevant, interesting, abundant, “clear and straightforward” information (links, tips, etc.) needed for preparing and following the course. additionally, the resources are believed to foster learning appropriate vocabulary, for example: “because of the materials posted there we could learn new vocabulary elements at home.” one student reported gaining more familiarity with target genres owing to moodle-based materials and another one declares that these materials helped them memorise information: “i remember things better when someone comments a video material. when i read something i forget.” in students accounts, the platform, by making the resources available, facilitated their work out of class (e.g., “i downloaded the materials and checked them as often as i had a problem with something”). as to soundcloud, its use for sharing digital voice recordings was novel for the students. they were not used to this kind of activity but they welcome the new opportunities that the tool affords, that is, being able to hear oneself speak, being “graded by a professional” or being more technology-literate. the tool is also regarded as an enabler, as reported by study participants. students’ words suggest that it enabled noticing their l2, for example, “especially when i had to check pronunciation of some words and now i pay attention to pronunciation and i remember my mistakes to this day,” “i started paying more attention to how i speak.” one student realised that their speaking skills were worse than previously imagined. the tool also supports improvements in the organisation of extended spoken utterances. other participants focused on the opportunity to listen to other students’ podcasts as models to follow and to monitor own production by being able to hear themselves speak, “our voice, mistakes from the side.” two students emphasised the feedback opportunities that the tool availed: “feedback from podcasts helped me, i wanted to improve my skills and now i can see i am on a higher level. podcasts were very good.” two students also declared that the tool provided them with an audience, described as “theoretically wider” by one student or “limited” by another. next, three students’ comments referred to the emotions that speaking entails. in students’ words, their experience with soundcloud helped them reduce anxiety (“i’ve stopped being worried about my sounding and started to focus on content”) and was a source of satisfaction (“being a little bit of a perfectionist myself i spend some time making sure the podcast is good. and it really turned out to be ”). as reported by one student, the experience with soundcloud has increased their confidence as a speaker. yet, a number of tensions emerge; two tapsla.12816 p. 26/35 joanna pitura, heejin chang participants revealed concerns related to the way they recorded their podcasts, the usefulness of this activity versus their expectations. as one student stated, “i was reading what i earlier prepared, in the way as i always read so i don’t think it changed anything.” another student notes that “it wasn’t the same as talking with other people live. i could prepare my presentation earlier. in real life i cannot make notes while talking with someone. that’s why talking in real life is stressful for me.” one student experienced a conflict of values: “i prefer to be honest and true, for me it was just pretending of being quite good at some topics.” finally, one study participant declared that that they would rather speak more in class, simultaneously recognising that it is not possible because of the course length. one student admitted “combating with my obligations to make podcasts.” ag. while reflecting on how moodle supports their future study at university, the students feel that being familiar with moodle will be very useful (e.g., “i learned how to use studydesk [that is part of moodle]”) recording activities gave the students mixed feeling and experience (e.g., “it was so hard to access voicethread by my mobile at the beginning. but it is good to learn how to record, and interesting to hear my voice after recording”). student evaluations of how helpful moodle and audio-sharing platforms (soundcloud—pg; voicethread—ag) were for developing l2 speaking skills are quite similar for both types of technological tools (figure 5). pg students’ average rating of moodle is m = 4.23 and the audio-sharing platform is m = 3.88, whereas ag students’ ratings for moodle is m = 4.21 and the audio sharing platform is m = 4.01. figure 5 mean evaluations of how helpful were the following for developing your speaking skills? mean evaluations; 1 = not helpful at all, 2 = rather not helpful, 3 = hard to say, 4 = quite helpful, 5 = very helpful tools for scaffolding the development of l2 speaking… tapsla.12816 p. 27/35 discussion the conceptualisation of tools for developing l2 speaking skills, as detailed in the theoretical part of this paper, served as a theoretical foundation to investigate tools for scaffolding skill development among emhe students in two different contexts. a core premise underlying our approach is that tools mediate cognitive activity and, hence, have the potential to support linguistic development when tools are intentionally organised to scaffold learning (vygotsky, 1978; wood et al., 1976). as the concept of tools for developing l2 speaking skills remains under-researched, we need to advance our knowledge by articulating and integrating tools for scaffolding the learning process of diverse learners in modern classrooms. when students are supported in becoming familiar with the features of l2 they are expected to perform, see models of target l2 behaviour, practise the skill employing available tools as long and as much as needed, and when they receive feedback on performance, they are likely to speak with increasing fluency, confidence, and accuracy. the results of this exploratory study thus reflect on student perceptions of the scaffolding tools (i.e., activities, resources, feedback, and technology) that were used by the students in two emhe contexts. considering the research question, the current study found preliminary evidence that, in students’ view, the designed tools support the development of l2 speaking skills in both groups of learners (a homogenous group of non-native speakers of english set in poland—a non-anglophone country and a heterogeneous group of non-native speakers set in australia—an anglophone country) in a comparable fashion. both inand out-of-class activities are reported to facilitate the development of the genre-based speaking skills targeted in the course, that is, talks/presentations, debates, discussions, chats/conversations. students’ words suggest that, owing to systematic and frequent text production, they grow accustomed to speaking and, by having an opportunity to hear their own speech in voice recordings, they can evaluate their performance. beyond that, data suggest that out-of-class activities allow students to prepare for speaking by acquiring and consolidating both content and language to be activated in oral text production. yet, there are individual students who find some outof-class activities limiting and/or uninteresting, as well as those who are doubtful of the sense of voice recording in the current shape, which makes it more difficult for them to engage in these learning activities. next, the results of the study suggest that the resources applied in the course were believed to support the development of l2 speaking. described as relevant, abundant, accessible, and easy to use, the resources seem to help students acquire l2 vocabulary and understand genre-based speaking. they also allow students to prepare for class, follow the course and can be referred to whenever reference is needed. tapsla.12816 p. 28/35 joanna pitura, heejin chang feedback appears to be a valued tool, too. it becomes evident that feedback from the instructor contains information about the weaknesses or mistakes in produced texts, as well as hints concerning genre-based text organisation and target l2. instructor-based feedback helps students envision and/or revise their learning goals and also provides some students with a sense of relief with regard to their capabilities as l2 speakers, as well as motivation for future work. peer-based feedback, in turn, can be frequent, immediate, and can also be used to monitor own mistakes, as well as learning goals. however, both instructor and peer feedback is not always considered sincere or in agreement with expectations, which seems to breed conflict and tension on its reception. finally, technology appears to support student learning throughout the course. moodle grants continuous and unrestricted access to the learning activities and resources in class and referral to the resources out of class whenever students need information or examples to model their own speaking. online sharing of voice recordings—in this study accomplished by the use of soundcloud and voicethread applications—allows students to use other students’ podcasts as examples of target text and to receive feedback from the instructor out of class. on the whole, these results are consistent with prior research suggesting that scaffolding is beneficial for developing of l2 speaking through the use of learning activities and resources, feedback and technology (ahmadpour et al., 2016; azir, 2019; gerakopoulou, 2016; ghasedi et al., 2018; gilead, 2018; mirahmadi & alavi, 2016; nguyen, 2013; shooshtari et al., 2018; zarandi & rahbar, 2016). this study further contributes to the field by advancing a wider use of different types of tools as scaffolds provided in multiple forms (belland, 2017) to help students enhance their l2 speaking skills in the emhe context. this study illustrates how tools were used to accommodate the features of scaffolding in tools to help students understand what they need to learn, receive information about their performance, draw on the available support or proceed without it when it is no longer needed, both in class and beyond classroom walls (puntambekar & hubscher, 2005). besides, the results suggest that frequent and regular digital voice recording is particularly well-suited to enhance l2 speaking, which builds on the results obtained in prior research (bui & huang, 2018; de jong & perfetti, 2011; qiu, 2019; tecedor & campos-dintrans, 2019; chang & windeatt, 2021b) that emphasises the affordances of practice activities and technology to promote confidence while speaking. through voice recording, students have a chance to structure, rehearse, and hear their own performance, thereby making the process of speaking “visible” (goh, 2017, p. 248) and hence more manageable for l2 speakers. also, the use of moodle to create a flexible learning environment (liu, 2011) is linked to the development of strategies for monitoring progress in learning progress. the limitations of this study include, first and foremost, those that pertain to design-based and interventionist research conducted by practitioners in real tools for scaffolding the development of l2 speaking… tapsla.12816 p. 29/35 classrooms. the existing groups differ in terms of the number of participants and their social-material makeup, and the implementation of the tools in the classroom could have been influenced by the resourcefulness and energy of each instructor-researcher. next, the students used a set of tools, which may or may not be the only set possible to optimally advance students’ l2 speaking skills. apart from that, our findings may be affected by the fact that researchers taught the participants and were also in charge of the design and implementation of the tools, which may question the credibility of the results. acknowledging these limitations, the analysis of the dataset was conducted by both researchers aiming to provide thick description of the results. but even so, the findings in our exploratory study should be regarded in terms of preliminary insight that requires further empirical investigation, including other research designs and giving more prominence to quantitative data collection and more sophisticated analytical methods. on the other hand, for the same reason, that is, being practice-based, this study makes it possible to document and analyse the use of tools in real-world classrooms, thereby affording research insight not feasible otherwise and allowing, as reimann (2011) notes, “teachers’ pedagogical practices and students’ learning practices… enter into decision making at all levels where educational decisions are made” (p. 43). conclusion higher education students need environments that effectively support their l2 learning and use in academic settings. this study aimed to advance the area of l2 learning and teaching by conceptualising and analysing tools for scaffolding emhe students’ l2 speaking through the collaboration of researcherspractitioners in real-world classrooms in two educational contexts. this study illustrates how features of scaffolding were applied to map instructor, peerand technology-based tools to include inand out-of-classroom activities, resources, the learning management system (moodle) and voice recording applications (soundcloud, and voicethread) and peers’ and instructors’ feedback in l2 speaking courses. students’ accounts suggest that inand out-of-class activities support the development of l2 speaking, in particular, by allowing the students to hear their own speech while practising. peer and instructor feedback facilitated their speaking performance, just as the use of technology tools, that is, moodle and voice recording applications. overall, the results suggest that these tools can help cater to the multiple levels of student understanding of genre-based l2 speaking in diverse educational settings. yet, it is necessary to acknowledge that, due to the study design, the findings must be treated with caution. tapsla.12816 p. 30/35 joanna pitura, heejin chang despite this, we believe that the tools described in this article are an important first step towards designing instructional scaffolding in emhe l2 speaking classrooms. our study uncovered that there is room for further attempts to determine the adequacy of tools for scaffolding l2 speaking. for example, more research is imperative to inform the adaptation and use of the resources in speaking activities. there are also many unanswered questions related to the provision of feedback, that is, how to efficiently provide more of instructor-based feedback on l2 spoken performance to individual students in large classes or how to provide peer feedback of better quality. finally, researchers can seek to find innovative ways of employing technology to assist l2 learners develop speaking skills for academic communication. 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(2021). scaffolding process knowledge in l2 writing development: insights from computer keystroke log and process graph. computer assisted language learning, 34(4), 583–608. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2019.1632901 https://doi.org/10.4018/ijcallt.2012070104 https://doi.org/10.4018/ijcallt.2012070104 tools for scaffolding the development of l2 speaking… tapsla.12816 p. 35/35 yates, l., & wahid, r. (2013). challenges to brand australia: international students and the problem with speaking. higher education research & development, 32(6), 1037–1050. zarandi, s. z. a., & rahbar, b. (2016). enhancing speaking ability through intervening scaffolding strategies. theory and practice in language studies, 6(11), 2191–2195. joanna pitura, heejin chang instrumente zur förderung der entwicklung von l2-kommunikation in der englischsprachigen hochschulbildung: unterrichtserfahrungen aus polen und australien z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die teilnahme an mündlicher l2-kommunikation kann für studierende an hochschulen mit englisch als unterrichtssprache eine herausforderung darstellen. während die literatur nahelegt, dass die scaffolding-methode die entwicklung der l2-kommunikation erleichtert, hat sich die forschung bisher noch nicht mit dem problem der hilfsmittel für die entwicklung des scaffoldings befasst. die vorliegende studie verfolgt zwei ziele: 1) zu untersuchen, wie das scaffolding als hilfsmittel zur unterstützung der l2-kommunikation eingesetzt werden kann, sowie 2) das wahrnehmen der hilfsmittel durch studierende zu erfassen und zu analysieren. sie stützt sich auf daten, die auf der grundlage von zwei befragungen im rahmen einer größeren designbasierten forschung erhoben wurden, und zwar in bezug auf zwei gruppen: anglistik-studierende in polen (n = 26) sowie kulturell und sprachlich differenzierte l2-lernende in australien (n = 12). die studie veranschaulicht, wie die scaffolding-methode verwendet wurde, um lehrer-, peerbzw. technologiebasierte hilfsmittel in hinsicht auf lernaktivitäten, ressourcen, technologie und feedback auszuarbeiten. die ergebnisse deuten darauf hin, dass die hilfsmittel auf verschiedene ebenen von verständnis und fähigkeiten der lernenden bezüglich der entwicklung der l2-kommunikation im modernen l2-unterricht angewandt werden können. schlüsselwörter: scaffolding, l2-sprechen, hochschulbildung, polen, australien teresa maria włosowicz university of social sciences, cracow multilingual processing phenomena in learners of portuguese as a third or additional language a b s t r a c t: the purpose of the study is an analysis of polish students’ cued translation of polish (l1) and english or french (l2) sentences into portuguese (third or additional language in de angelis’s (2007) terminology). in particular, the study investigates cross-linguistic interaction (herdina & jessner’s (2002) term) in multilingual processing involved in l3 production. in fact, translation constitutes a special case of production because, on the one hand, the content is already contained in the l1 or l2 source sentences, but, at the same time, this is not necessarily a facilitation, as the cues may require the use of words or structures the participants might not use in free production. the article is based on two studies carried out with thirty and forty-two students of portuguese philology respectively. as the results show, cross-linguistic interaction in various directions was observed, not only from l2 (english or french), l3 (in those participants for whom portuguese was an l4 and their l3 was spanish or italian), l4, etc. or, intralingually, from portuguese, but also from l1, despite the distance between polish and portuguese and the special status of the native language. however, the amount of interference and/or negative transfer often depended on the sentence rather than on the language combination. the diversity of the observed interactions also supports herdina and jessner’s (2002) claim of the dynamic and unpredictable nature of cross-linguistic interaction. k e y w o r d s: sla, multilingualism, language learning, language acquisition, psycholinguistics introduction by and large, the investigation of portuguese l3 acquisition is an area of research that has received little attention and relatively few studies have been published so far on its phenomena. first, l3 acquisition research constitutes a new and constantly developing domain and, second, the portuguese language theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 2 (1) 2016, pp. 65–86 66 teresa maria włosowicz is still regarded as quite exotic and is rarely studied, as compared not only with english, but also, for example, with spanish. however, the situation is changing, as more and more americans are becoming interested in brazil—be it for business or cultural reasons—and the demand for portuguese is gradually growing (razuk, 2008, pp. 21–22). still, the learning of portuguese as a foreign language has not yet received the attention it deserves. the purpose of the paper is an analysis of polish students’ translations from polish (l1) and english or french (l2) into portuguese as a third or additional language (term introduced by de angelis (2007) to refer to l3 and further languages) in order to reveal multilingual processing phenomena, especially different forms of cross-linguistic interaction (abbreviated to clin, herdina & jessner, 2002). the present article is based on two studies: in the first one, the subjects translated 15 sentences from polish and 15 sentences from english or french into portuguese. in the second one, another group of participants translated ten sentences from polish into portuguese. it was assumed that translation, as a task involving the coactivation of at least two languages, would provoke more cross-linguistic interaction (clin) than a monolingual task. at the same time, unlike purely lexical or purely grammatical tasks, translation would involve both grammatical and lexical processing. still, given that sentence structure is largely determined by the morphosyntactic properties of lexical items (singleton, 2000, p. 17), grammar and lexis are largely interconnected. thus, in the present paper, such errors as the use of false friends or the confusion of word meanings are regarded as lexical, whereas using, for example, an infinitive instead of the subjunctive after a particular verb is classified as a grammatical error. however, in the present two studies cued translation was used in order to make the participants use the target structures as much as possible, as in free translation they could use a variety of unpredictable structures, which might have complicated the analysis. the research questions were as follows: first, what languages were the sources of transfer and/or interference into portuguese? as a working hypothesis, it could be assumed that an important role would be played by linguistic similarity, especially psychotypology (kellerman, 1987), but given the special role of the native language (hufeisen, 1991), its influence could not be excluded either. second, what types of errors did the participants make and what language processing phenomena do the errors reveal? third, what do the data reveal about multilingual storage and processing? 67multilingual processing phenomena in learners of portuguese… multilingual storage and processing general properties of multilingual systems. generally, multilingual systems are neither fully integrated nor fully separate. on the one hand, crosslinguistic interaction, including such phenomena as transfer, interference, borrowing and code-switching (herdina and jessner, 2002, p. 29), indicates some interconnection between the languages. on the other hand, multilinguals’ ability to use each language separately, for example, while talking to monolinguals, shows that there is enough separation to prevent language mixing (singleton, 2003, pp. 168–169). in the process of vocabulary acquisition, the l2 lexicon is initially an extension of the l1 lexicon and, with time and increased proficiency, it becomes an independent system (herwig, 2001, p. 117). similarly, the l3 lexicon starts out as an extension of another lexicon, though not necessarily l1, but, for example, a more closely related (and thus more similar) language. indeed, formal similarity plays an important role in both acquisition and processing. as kellerman (1987) has shown, psychotypology, or a learner’s own perception of language distance, is more significant for the learning of a foreign language than the language distance estimated by linguists. however, the distance perceived between languages influences not only the acquisition of vocabulary, but also processes of transfer in general, including at the grammatical level. still, transfer does not have to manifest itself in the form of errors or anomalous structures. undoubtedly, positive transfer results in correct structures, but it is also more difficult to detect because the learner seems to know the appropriate rules (kellerman, 1987, p. 222). a related, though slightly different phenomenon is interference. according to herdina and jessner (2002, pp. 28–29), transfer can be defined as a regular and largely predictable phenomenon of transferring structures from one language into the other, whereas interference constitutes dynamic interaction which is not reducible to any of the languages involved. consequently, it can be supposed that some forms of transfer are a result of interference: as two or more languages are coactivated and interact, some words or structures can be transferred from one language to the other, even without the speaker realizing it (wlosowicz, 2008/2009). in fact, as the system shift (de angelis, 2005, p. 14) phenomenon indicates, learners can use a non-target language word, thinking it is the intended target language word. at the same time, it must be remembered that the mental lexicon is not arranged like a dictionary, but rather it is a network in which the properties of lexical items are stored in a distributed way (herwig, 2001). within each entry, there are separate yet interconnected nodes representing the phonological, syntactic, semantic, etc. properties of words (herwig, 2001, pp. 121–123). 68 teresa maria włosowicz moreover, as the present author’s earlier research indicates (włosowicz, 2012), some properties (e.g. the morphological endings of the indicative) may be more available than others, such as the subjunctive or irregular verb forms. still, as semantic and syntactic properties are stored in a distributed way, they do not all have to be immediately available and focus on meaning does not have to be accompanied by focus on form and a non-target form of the target word or a semantically related word with different syntactic properties may be selected. as for the representation of more general grammatical rules, such as inversion or preposition stranding, they are acquired by ug parameter setting (klein, 1995). if a foreign language value differs from the native language one, the parameter needs to be reset. as klein (1995) has shown, l3 learners, who are already familiar with two grammars, build more powerful grammars and reset parameters to the l3 values more efficiently than l2 learners do. however, in l3 acquisition both l1 and l2 can be sources of transfer and/ or interference. while l1 remains an important source of transfer (hufeisen, 1991), there is considerable evidence for l2 transfer as well (de angelis, 2007, pp. 22–40). in general, given the interconnection between the languages, clin is inevitable. as green (1993, pp. 260–269) has proposed on the basis of bates and mcwhinney’s (1989) competition model, lexical entries compete for selection and the item most compatible with the input (in comprehension) or with the communicative intention (in production) is selected, although it may belong to a non-target language. this might explain the system shift phenomenon (de angelis, 2005), as spreading activation leads to the selection of non-target language items which seem appropriate enough not to be intercepted by control mechanisms. given the number of factors involved in third or additional language acquisition, translation into l3 (or a further language) must be assumed to be a complex and largely unpredictable process. at the same time, as a combination of source language comprehension and target language production, it can be assumed to reveal a number of language processing phenomena. translation as multilingual processing. generally speaking, translation consists in the reproduction in the target language of the meaning of the source language text. simultaneously, the production process is somewhat simplified, as the communicative intention is already present in the source language text. as hölscher and möhle (1987, p. 114) remark, “the number of choices among available linguistic devices is restricted.” however, this facilitation may only be apparent, as the learner may not know the target language equivalents of the source language words and structures and, if he or she were to convey the same meaning spontaneously, he or she would choose completely different 69multilingual processing phenomena in learners of portuguese… linguistic means. translation is therefore useful for testing learners’ knowledge of particular words and structures. translation can thus broadly be divided into two stages: source language comprehension and target language production. as illustrated by perfetti’s (1999) blueprint of the reader, based on levelt’s (1989) blueprint model of speech production, the comprehension process starts by the identification of word forms, which activate the appropriate lexemes within the lexical entries. the lexemes activate the corresponding lemmas, which send activation to the underlying concepts. once a number of concepts have been activated, a context is formed, which then sends activation back to the lemmas, which permits, among other things, the selection of the contextually appropriate meanings of appropriate words. it may be assumed that, in accordance with levelt’s (1989) blueprint model of speech production, in target language production the opposite process takes place, however, the following must be taken into account: first, if the translation operates from a well-known language, especially l1, it may be assumed to involve few or no comprehension problems (herwig, 2001). yet, in producing the target text, the subject may not know a target language word (both the lexeme and the lemma), the target form (e.g. the past tense form of an irregular verb, despite knowing the infinitive), some lemma information (such as the word’s syntactic properties), or the target language concept. still, as has already been signaled, the target word form may not be available within the lexeme (e.g. the learner may know the form of the present indicative, but not the subjunctive), the lexemes of similar words may be confused due to formal similarity, or non-target syntactic information may be activated, either due to interference from another lemma, or because the tl lemma actually contains information copied from l1, which may result in the choice of an incorrect structure. second, in case of word order differences (e.g. adjectives precede nouns in one language and follow them in the other), translation cannot be wordfor-word, but should take into account the target language rules. even so, in translation from l2 into l3, some non-target structures might pass unnoticed, especially l2 structures, regarded as foreign and thus as more correct than structures transferred from l1. in summary, translation into a third or additional language must be assumed to be a very complex process, involving clin between all the languages at the lexical and the grammatical levels. still, in the case of cued translation, despite the apparent facilitation, the subjects cannot avoid using certain structures, which makes the transfer of non-target structures from l1 or l2 even more visible. 70 teresa maria włosowicz method participants. study 1 was carried out with thirty polish (l1) students of portuguese philology at the jagiellonian university in cracow and seven learners of portuguese at the iberian language school ‘porto alegre’ in katowice. thirty-one of the subjects were female and six were male. as portuguese philology students in poland generally start learning the language at university, which is also the case of the participants in the present study, all of the subjects can be assumed to have an intermediate or an upperintermediate level of proficiency in portuguese. similarly, the seven subjects at the private language school themselves defined their levels of proficiency in portuguese as intermediate. given the relatively low popularity of the portuguese language in poland, it was difficult to find a sufficient number of learners advanced enough to participate in the study, and the group is therefore not as homogeneous as it might be expected. in particular, they have a variety of language combinations and portuguese is their third or additional language, but not always l3. still, as van gelderen et al. (2003, p. 23) have observed, multilingual groups are generally more heterogeneous than the research design might require. their l2 was mostly english (30 subjects), but seven subjects had french as l2. all of them had also studied other languages, especially spanish (19 subjects), german (16), italian (11), french (8 subjects for whom it was not the l2), latin (5), romanian (4), ancient greek (2), catalan, russian, estonian, hungarian, and modern greek (one subject each). still, their language biographies can be established only approximately, as the chronological acquisition order and the time of learning each language do not always reflect the proficiency levels attained in the languages. study 2 was carried out with forty-two intermediate students of portuguese philology, at maria curie-sklodowska university in lublin (22 participants) and at the jagiellonian university in cracow (20), thirty-seven of whom were female and five male. forty-one of the subjects had studied english and for 34 of them it was the l2. thirty-five had studied spanish and three of them indicated it as their l2. the next most popular languages were german (16 subjects, one of whom indicated it as her l2), french, and italian (11 subjects each, while one indicated italian as her l2), and russian (6 subjects, two of whom indicated it as their l2). some subjects had also studied romanian (5), latin (5), swedish and chinese (one subject each). their language biographies are therefore so varied that determining the sources of cross-linguistic influence can only be approximate. 71multilingual processing phenomena in learners of portuguese… data collection procedure. study 1 consisted of the cued translation of ten sentences from polish (l1) and ten sentences from english or french (l2) into portuguese, followed by a questionnaire concerning the subjects’ language biographies and the translation task. the thirty subjects whose l2 was english translated polish and english sentences into portuguese, whereas the seven subjects whose l2 was french translated polish and french sentences. the focus was on infinitival and gerundive clauses, as well as on the subjunctive. the stimuli were of the following type: adam congratulated mary on winning a poetry contest. – o adão felicitou a maria _____________ um concurso de poesia. however, if the focus was on the choice of the verb form and, consequently, the target verb form could not be revealed, the infinitive was prompted by an extra cue, for example: you did not really tell me to drive your grandma to the airport. (to drive – conduzir) – na verdade não me disseste _______________ a tua avó ao aeroporto. (the whole list of sentences used in the study is presented in appendix 1.) study 2 consisted of the cued translation of ten sentences from polish into portuguese, where the focus was both on grammar and lexis, and a questionnaire. the stimuli were of the type illustrated by the following example: kiedy słońce zachodziło, siedzieli na tarasie przy plaży.1 ___________ o sol _____________, _____________ numa terraça _____________. however, the target structures were sometimes prompted by extra cues, for example: chociaż piotr jest bardzo bogaty (superlative), ciasto, które podał na swoich urodzinach, było bardzo złe.2 _____________ o pedro ________________, o bolo que ____________ na sua festa de anos __________________. here, the extra cue was added in order to suggest that the students should use the superlative form riquíssimo (very rich, extremely rich), which is more emphatic than the analytic form muito rico (very rich). (the sentences are presented in appendix 2.) results and discussion study 1. tables 1 and 2 show the sources of influence the students’ translations from polish and english into portuguese can be attributed to and they actually reflect language processing only in this particular group, but even so, the participants’ translation reveals a number of interesting phenomena. 1 as the sun set, they were sitting on a terrace next to the beach. 2 even though peter is very rich (superlative), the cake he served at his birthday party was very bad. 72 teresa maria włosowicz however, the results should be treated with some caution, as it is not always possible to determine a particular source of cross-linguistic influence and one has to rely on “plausible interpretation” or “plausible reconstruction” (corder, 1972, p. 42, as cited in heine, 2004, p. 85). moreover, even if the source of influence is identified as, for example, l1, this does not necessarily mean that the transfer was negative and resulted in an error. in fact, as the present author has argued elsewhere (włosowicz, 2012), transfer may take subtle forms, such as the preference for certain structures, for example, finite clauses, even if infinitival clauses sound more idiomatic in the target language. moreover, as each sentence could contain several more or less serious errors, the focus here has been on clin at the grammatical level, though lexical transfer and interference have also been observed. (the results have been partly discussed in włosowicz (2012, pp. 144–146), but only in reference to the english l2 group.) furthermore, while the author’s earlier paper (włosowicz, 2012) focused on cross-linguistic interaction at the grammatical level as much as possible (as has been explained in the introduction above, grammar and lexis are largely interconnected and cannot be fully separated in the analysis), the present study also takes into account clin at the lexical level (see below). tables 1 and 2 show the percentages of responses attributable to different sources in the translation from polish into portuguese and from english into portuguese respectively by the polish-english-portuguese group (włosowicz, 2012, p. 145). the results are categorized into: correct (target structures), l1 influence, l2 influence, l3 error/non-target structure, other languages, avoidance, and other (often impossible to identify). table 1 the percentages of responses attributable to different sources in the polishenglish-portuguese group’s translation from polish into portuguese sentence correct% l1 influence % l2 influence % l3 error/ non-target structure % other languages % avoidance % other % 1 56.67 20 6.67 16.67 2 16.67 30 30 20 3.33 3 30 46.67 6.67 3.33 6.67 6.67 4 3.33 40 3.33 36.67 6.67 6.67 3.33 5 46.67 40 6.67 3.33 3.33 6 40 23.33 10 23.33 3.33 7 46.67 13.33 3.33 20 6.67 10 8 90 3.33 6.67 9 13.33 50 30 3.33 3.33 10 6.67 63.33 30 73multilingual processing phenomena in learners of portuguese… table 2 percentages of responses attributable to different sources in the polish-englishportuguese group’s translation from english into portuguese (włosowicz, 2012, p. 145) sentence correct% l1 influence % l2 influence % l3 error/ non-target structure % other languages % avoidance % other % 1 16.67 6.67 53.33 13.33 10 2 26.67 50 6.67 16.67 3 40 30 10 3.33 16.67 4 30 30 36.67 3.33 5 30 43.33 23.33 3.33 6 90 3.33 6.67 7 6.67 40 40 6.67 3.33 3.33 8 50 13.33 13.33 10 6.67 6.67 9 33.33 46.67 3.33 13.33 3.33 10 23.33 6.67 30 36.66 3.33 as the results show, the sentences differed in difficulty, from relatively easy to fairly difficult ones. the most correct translations (90%) were produced in the case of the sentences portugalski jest pięknym językiem mimo tego, że jest dość trudny (‘portuguese is a beautiful language despite being quite difficult.’) and despite working at an embassy, robert speaks few foreign languages. both sentences contain the structure apesar de + infinitive (apesar de ser and apesar de trabalhar respectively) and it can be assumed that the subjects had good command of this structure and did not have to rely on the l1 routine, which would have required a finite clause. still, falling back on l1 routines has been observed in the case of other sentences, for example: (1) henry does not remember dressing up as a duck during the carnival: 63.33%. target: o enriques não se lembra de se ter mascarado de pato durante o carnaval. subjects’ responses included, for example, o enriques não se lembra mascarou-se de pato/mascarar-se de pato durante o carnaval (there is no perfect infinitive in polish). (2) czy mogłabyś powiedzieć filipowi, żeby przyszedł jutro? (could you tell philip to come tomorrow?): 50%. target: poderias dizer ao filipe para (ele) vir amanhã? subjects’ responses included, for example: poderias dizer ao filipe que viesse/ que venha amanhã? in the translation from english into portuguese, the most l1 influence was observed in the case of the sentence isabella asked her sister to help her with the homework (50%). instead of the infinitival target structure, (a isabel pediu à sua irmã para ajudá-la/ para a ajudar no trabalho de casa), the subjects tended to choose such structures as: a isabel pediu à sua irmã que lhe ajudasse no trabalho de casa. simultaneously, the indirect object (lhe) instead of the 74 teresa maria włosowicz direct object is another proof of l1 influence, as in polish the verb pomagać (to help) takes the indirect object in the dative case, whereas the portuguese verb ajudar (to help) takes the direct object, which, in the case of pronouns, occurs in the accusative case. (unlike in polish, in portuguese only pronouns, and not nouns, are marked for case.) similarly, in the sentence joan hopes to marry a rich man (target: a joana espera casar (or: casar-se in brazilian portuguese) com um homem rico) 43.33% of the subjects produced finite clauses, for example, a joana espera que ela se case com um homem rico. the second most frequent case of l1 influence on l2-l3 translation (46.67%) is the sentence john is very busy repairing his car (target: o joão está muito ocupado a reparar/ reparando o seu carro). in fact, the analogous sentence in polish (alicja jest bardzo zajęta pisaniem pracy magisterskiej (‘alice is very busy writing her m.a. thesis’) triggered even more l1 transfer (63.33%), the dominant structure being a literal translation, for example, a alice está muito ocupada com escrever sua tese de mestrado. however, the lower percentage of polish-like structures in the l2-l3 translation and the use of the gerund (o joão está muito ocupado reparando…) indicate that similarities between english and portuguese facilitated the choice of the structure and that, moreover, source language structures influence subjects’ choices in translation. as for cross-linguistic influence at the lexical level, it was not very frequent, because most potentially unfamiliar words were prompted by the cues. however, some clin was also observed, for example, one participant wrote ambaçada instead of embaixada (embassy), under the influence of polish (ambasada) and possibly also italian (ambasciata). in fact, the italian word ambasciata was used by three students, two others used the spanish word embajada, and two borrowed the polish word ambasada into portuguese. moreover, for unclear reasons (probably because of phonological and orthographic similarity, even though the target verb was prompted), one participant used the spanish verb marearse (to be seasick or dizzy) instead of mascararse (to dress up in portuguese). some influence of spanish was also observed at the morphological level, as the past subjunctive forms obtuviera and viniera indicate. certainly, errors of this kind lie on the borderline between grammar and lexis, but as word forms belonging to the spanish lexemes obtener and venir, they can be regarded as lexical rather than grammatical influence. tables 3 and 4 show the results obtained by the french l2 group. the categories of sources of clin are the same as in tables 1 and 2. 75multilingual processing phenomena in learners of portuguese… table 3 percentages of responses attributable to different sources in the translation from polish into portuguese by the polish-french-portuguese group sentence correct% l1 influence % l2 influence % l3 error/ non-target structure % other languages % avoidance % other % 1 42.9 57.14 2 42.9 14.3 28.6 14.3 3 14.3 57.14 14.3 14.3 4 14.3 57.14 14.3 14.3 5 28.6 14.3 14.3 28.6 14.3 6 71.4 14.3 14.3 7 28.6 14.3 42.9 14.3 8 71.4 14.3 14.3 9 42.9 28.6 28.6 10 14.3 14.3 14.3 57.14 table 4 percentages of responses attributable to different sources in the translation from french into portuguese by the polish-french-portuguese group sentence correct% l1 influence % l2 influence % l3 error/ non-target structure % other languages % avoidance % other % 1 14.3 42.9 14.3 14.3 14.3 2 14.3 57.14 28.6 3 57.14 28.6 14.3 4 42.9 57.14 5 14.3 14.3 28.6 42.9 6 28.6 14.3 14.3 42.9 7 42.9 42.9 14.3 8 14.3 28.6 14.3 42.9 9 14.3 28.6 42.9 14.3 10 42.9 14.3 28.6 14.3 in the french-portuguese translation, as the languages were typologically closer to each other, one might expect a higher percentage of correct responses. however, as table 4 indicates, this was not the case, as the highest percentage of correct responses (57.14%) was obtained in the case of the sentence en dépit de travailler dur, marie est toujours de bonne humeur (‘despite working hard, mary is always in a good mood’). here again, the structure apesar de + infinitive proved to have been mastered best and, similarly, in the polish-portuguese translation, 71.4% of the subjects produced the target structure. 76 teresa maria włosowicz the other most frequently correct structure in the l1-l3 translation was the sentence małgorzata nigdy nie widziała, jak kangury skaczą (‘margaret has never seen kangaroos jumping’; target: a margarida nunca viu cangurus a saltar, though a margarida nunca viu cangurus saltar was also accepted), where 71.4% of the subjects chose the infinitive, while only one person (14.3%) translated the sentence literally (…como os cangurus saltam). a possible reason may be the existence of a similar structure in french (marguerite n’a jamais vu les kangourous sauter), which may have been a source of positive transfer. transfer from french was also frequent in the case of the sentence je vais traduire le texte pour que vous puissiez le lire (‘i am going to translate the text so that you can read it’; target: vou traduzir o texto para você(s) poder(em) lê-lo). 57.14% either translated the french sentence literally or chose ‘por’ instead of ‘para’ because of its phonological similarity with ‘pour’. another interesting tendency towards french-portuguese transfer was observed in the sentence il a demandé à la secrétaire d’écrire une lettre au ministre (‘he asked the secretary to write a letter to the minister’; target: pediu à secretária para escrever uma carta ao ministro). three subjects (42.9%) chose the french-like preposition and wrote de escrever. some influence of english was also observed. in the sentence przykro mi, że nie zaprosiłam cię na urodziny (‘i am sorry not to have invited you to my birthday party’; target: sinto muito por não te ter convidado à minha festa de anos), four subjects (57.14%) omitted the preposition, producing structures like: sinto muito não te convidei… (cf. i am sorry i did not invite you to my birthday party). here, the cross-linguistic influence was mostly grammatical, while lexical influence was limited to function words (for example, por instead of para), except for some interference from french (e.g. volar instead of voar ‘fly’). a possible reason is that the focus of the study was on grammar, while potentially unknown words were prompted by the cues. this indicates that l2-l3 influence is not limited to lexis, but can also occur at the grammatical level. study 2. the results of study 2 are presented in table 5. the categories into which the sources of influence have been divided are the same as in study 1, with one exception. here, portuguese (port) is a source of intralingual influence (e.g. overgeneralization), while l3 refers to another language that was the subjects’ l3, especially spanish. in fact, the calculations can only be approximate, as they are based on ‘plausible reconstruction’ (see above) and not on tapping the exact processes going on in the participants’ brains. moreover, as interference is dynamic and non-reducible to a single language (herdina & jessner, 2002, pp. 28–29), finding the exact source of a non-target form may even be impossible. 77multilingual processing phenomena in learners of portuguese… table 5 percentages of responses attributable to different sources in the translation from polish into portuguese sentence correct% l1 influence % l2 influence % l3 influence % port. % other lang. % avoidance % other % 1 4.76 21.43 7.14 11.9 38.1 16.7 2 9.52 19 7.14 4.76 57.14 3 11.9 19 11.9 2.38 2.38 50 2.38 4 7.14 16.67 26.19 2.38 4.76 4.76 23.8 14.29 5 40.48 4.76 16.67 28.57 9.52 6 28.57 4.76 4.76 23.8 28.57 9.52 7 28.57 50 2.38 7.14 9.52 2.38 8 19 64.3 4.76 7.14 4.76 9 47.62 2.38 11.9 30.95 2.38 4.76 10 35.7 47.6 2.38 9.52 2.38 l1 influence was most visible in the sentence w finlandii pije się dużo mleka, a we francji je się ślimaki (‘in finland a lot of milk is drunk and in france snails are eaten’; target: na finlânda bebe-se muito leite e na frança comem-se caracóis), as 64.3% of the subjects chose the singular construction na frança se come/ come-se caracóis instead of the plural, as the singular is also used in polish. the second most frequent case of l1 influence (50%) was sentence 7, where the subjects tended to choose the indicative (e.g., * a pesar do pedro é muito rico) instead of the correct forms apesar de o pedro ser riquíssimo (infinitive), or embora o pedro seja riquíssimo (subjunctive: though peter be very rich), which indicates their reliance on l1 routines. however, apart from the target forms, the colloquial form apesar do pedro ser riquíssimo was also accepted, as it is often used by native speakers on the internet and the students may have also acquired it from such input. l1 influence was also observed in sentence 10 (47.6%), where the subjects chose the imperfective form (a maria lia/ *leia um livro) instead of the continuous form (a maria estava a ler um livro (mary was reading a book)). finally, in sentence 1 the influence of l1 polish was quite frequent too (21.43%). the form sentavam (e.g., quando o sol ___________3, sentavam numa terraça à praia.) is a reflection of the polish imperfective aspect (siedzieli – they were sitting) expressed by a single verb form. in fact, the target portuguese form was estavam sentados (literally: [they] were seated), while the continuous form, sentavam-se is reflexive and means they were sitting down, 3 the gap reflects the participant’s ignorance or avoidance of the target form. however, as part of the sentence has been provided, it is analysed as a case of clin. on the other hand, the response would have been classified as avoidance if the subject had avoided translating the sentence completely or had provided only the prepositional phrase à praia (by the beach). 78 teresa maria włosowicz which refers to the process or habit of taking seats, rather than to the state of being seated. on the other hand, different more or less inaccurate forms, such as sentiam, sentaram, sentavão, estavam sentando, etc. can be attributed to intralingual influence in portuguese, which resulted in the retrieval of non-target verbs (e.g. sentiam comes from sentir – to feel) or verb forms, or even the creation of non-existing forms (e.g. sentavão). the influence of l2 english was most visible in sentence 4, where 26.19% of the subjects used the present tense in the conditional clause (*se eu encontro esse livro) instead of the future subjunctive (se eu encontrar esse livro), as in: if i find that book. however, as a similar construction occurs in spanish, the influence may also have been double. l3 influence came mainly from spanish and was especially visible in sentences 5 (16.67%) and 9 (11.9%). in 5, instead of comprar-te-ei uma caneta nova (‘i will buy you a new pen’), the subjects used the spanish future tense form compraré, e.g. compraré-te uma caneta. by contrast, in sentence 9, instead of vais tomar (um) duche agora? (‘are you going to take a shower now?’), four subjects used the form vais a tomar (cf. vas a ducharte ahora?). in the same sentence, the subjects tended to use unnecessary definite articles (tomar o duche), probably due to overgeneralization of other portuguese structures. in this case, the correct form contains either no article (tomar duche), or an optional indefinite article with a generic meaning (tomar um duche). they also sometimes used non-target words (e.g. tomar um banho ‘to take a bath’) or even tomar uma banheira ‘to take a bath(tub)’), or neologisms (e.g. tomar o chove, under the influence of chuveiro (a shower as a piece of equipment)). still, the biggest numbers of correct answers were observed in the case of sentences 9 (47.62%) and 5 (40.48%), precisely because they allowed the most possible alternatives. in 5, apart from comprar-te-ei, vou comprar-te and vou te comprar, it was also possible to use the present tense (compro-te, see below) and in 9, structures with or without the indefinite article were acceptable. possible influence of german might be supposed in the sentence comprote uma nova caneta (instead of comprar-te-ei/ vou te comprar/ vou comprarte uma caneta nova, cf. ich kaufe dir einen neuen kugelschreiber), where the present tense form was used in a future sentence. however, as the use of the present in reference to the future is also possible in portuguese, the choice of the present tense is not an error, but rather a preference reinforced by the existence of a similar structure in another language. at the same time, this may just be the choice of a morphologically simpler option, prompted by the avoidance of the morphologically complex form comprar-te-ei (infinitive + pronoun + future tense morpheme), or hesitation between vou te comprar and vou comprar-te (i am going to buy you [a new ballpoint pen]), both of which are correct, but with a slight stylistic difference. forms where the pronoun follows the verb (e.g. compro-te) often appear stylistically bet79multilingual processing phenomena in learners of portuguese… ter in european portuguese, while ones in which the pronoun precedes the verb (e.g. te compro) are more characteristic of brazilian portuguese and are regarded in european portuguese as more colloquial. on the other hand, in some contexts forms with the pronoun following the noun are considered hypercorrect, for example, after some conjunctions (e.g., estou a escrever para te dar as notícias (i am writing in order to give you the news) sounds better than estou a escrever para dar-te as notícias). thus, it is possible that some students were not sure whether to use vou te comprar ou vou comprar-te, while they were sure of the correctness of compro-te. still at the grammatical level, avoidance was observed in sentences which required the subjunctive (2, 3, 4, and 6). as the subjects themselves admitted, they had only recently started learning the subjunctive and were not sure of its forms. on the other hand, lexical transfer was both intralingual and interlingual (overgeneralization, the confusion of similar forms), for example, quando o telefone sonou (target: tocou (when the telephone rang)), probably under the influence of spanish (sonar) or french (sonner) or overgeneralization in portuguese (som ‘sound’). similarly, uma pena (feather) used instead of uma caneta (pen) may be due to the influence of the english pen, or an extension of the meaning of pena in portuguese, perhaps supported by the polish word pióro (pen/feather) or the italian word penna (pen/feather). the influence of italian was reflected, for instance, in the borrowing of the verb tramontare (*quando o sol tramontava), instead of pôr-se (quando o sol se punha—when the sun was setting). this indicates that the concepts underlying equivalents in different languages do not fully overlap (pavlenko, 2009). however, as activation spreads from source language words to their equivalents, it also activates the corresponding concepts, which send activation back to the lemma level, and the result may be a non-target word, partly overlapping in meaning with the target. general discussion. in general, both studies show that translation is a useful tool for studying multilingual language processing. to answer the research questions, first, the sources of transfer and/or interference were l1 (polish), l2 (english, french or sometimes spanish), l3 (if different from portuguese, especially spanish), portuguese (intralingual influence), as well as other languages (italian or even german). however, the influence of the particular languages often depended on the structure used in a given sentence. although typological proximity is an important factor in both positive and negative transfer, the influence of l1 polish remains visible, especially in the choice of target structures (not necessarily erroneous, as discussed above). this supports razuk’s (2008, pp. 171–172) finding that l1 influence is particularly strong at the syntactic level, as l1 syntax 80 teresa maria włosowicz is acquired early and remains deep-rooted in the mind, which often results in syntactic transfer. moreover, relatively many errors can be attributed to intralingual influence, especially the use of non-target portuguese words or word forms. it can be supposed that an important role is played by formal similarity and phonological-level connections (cf. herwig, 2001) and by such processes as semantic extension, largely motivated by transfer. the hypothesis concerning the transfer sources is thus generally confirmed, yet with some additional reservations. given the dynamic nature of multilingual systems, the results of clin are largely unpredictable and a word or structure from a less closely related language may reach the highest activation level and be selected, and the factors determining this may be quite idiosyncratic (recency of use, individual associations, etc.). certainly, lexical transfer and interference were generally limited to the romance languages, especially spanish and french due to formal similarity, though pena may have been influenced by pen in english. however, the clin observed between several languages at the grammatical level indicates that all the grammars of a multilingual are connected to a common ug base (cf. cook’s (1992) notion of multicompetence) and interact, often in unpredictable ways. it is also possible that, unlike the lexical level, where formal differences (e.g. between polish or english and portuguese words) facilitate language separation, the grammatical level is more abstract and thus the languages are more difficult to keep apart. thus, even if ug parameters are reset in accordance with the rules of a language, the parameter settings of other languages can interfere with them, for example, because of higher activation levels. second, the error types observed ranged from the confusion of words (e.g., apesar (despite) and apenas (hardly)) and the creation of neologisms (e.g., volar instead of voar), through the use of incorrect non-target structures (e.g., the present indicative form instead of the future, the subjunctive or the future subjunctive) and structures occurring in a non-target language such as spanish (ir a + infinitive), to reliance on l1 routines, such as finite clauses instead of infinitival ones (which, in some cases, were erroneous, but not always). however, all the errors observed occurred in production, as the comprehension of l1 and l2 did not cause the subjects any problems. this shows that clin is a multifaceted phenomenon which can occur at different levels simultaneously and result in the production of unpredictable structures. finally, the results indicate that, on the one hand, lexical and grammatical processing is largely interconnected and the choice of particular structures often depends on the activation of lexical items and their morphosyntactic properties (e.g. verb + de (or another preposition) + infinitive). on the other hand, in multicompetent language users the grammars of their languages are all based on ug and interconnected, perhaps more or less strongly as a function of their 81multilingual processing phenomena in learners of portuguese… similarity, and the parameter settings appear to be so subtle that they cannot be kept apart, as clin is inevitable. conclusion on the basis of the results, it can be concluded that the processing of portuguese as a third or additional language constitutes a highly complex process, dependent not only on the typological similarity between the languages, but also on a variety of factors, such as the activation levels of particular words and structures, or the existence of a formally similar word in two or more languages which supports transfer (also negative, as in the case of pena and sonar). the status of the native language is indeed special, however, if the languages are as distant as polish and portuguese, l1 influence can be subtle, leading to the preference for certain structures, rather than direct transfer. undoubtedly, the languages are interconnected; they share a common ug base despite different parameter settings, and not only is it impossible to separate their processing, but often it is also difficult to identify the source of an error or a syntactic or lexical choice. however, the occurrence of syntactic transfer may be partly attributable to the use of translation: in some cases, the source language sentence may have activated the corresponding syntactic structure, leading to a literal l3 translation. while translation allows for testing of the participants’ knowledge of the target structures, it may also prompt them to use the source language structures in the target language. moreover, as the present study is based on written production, it is possible that some other processes, even inaccessible to consciousness, also took place, so it would be advisable to continue research on this topic, using other methods as well. future research might also investigate the processing of other structures, also in other language combinations, to contribute to the study of multilingual processing. acknowledgements. i wish to thank prof. dr hab. barbara hlibowickawęglarz of maria curie-skłodowska university in lublin, dr natalia czopek, dr monika świda and mrs ana isabel wąs-martins, m.a. of the jagiellonian university in cracow, and mr nilton bicca moraes of the iberian language school ‘porto alegre’ for allowing me to carry out the studies with their students. 82 teresa maria włosowicz a p p e n d i x 1 stimuli used in study 1 polish sentences 1. przykro mi, że nie zaprosiłam cię na urodziny. (zaprosić: convidar) sinto muito _______________________________ à minha festa de anos. 2. nie przypominam sobie, żebym rozmawiała z prezydentem w zeszłym roku. não me lembro ______________________________ com o presidente no ano passado. 3. anna ma nadzieję, że dostanie pracę w liniach lotniczych „tap”. a ana espera ____________________________ um trabalho na companha aérea ‘tap’. 4. piotr pogratulował mi tego, że zdobyłam nagrodę. o pedro felicitou-me ______________________________ um prémio. 5. chciałabym cię prosić, żebyś kupił pomidory. queria pedir-te _________________________ tomates. 6. małgorzata nigdy nie widziała, jak kangury skaczą. (kangur – canguru, skakać – saltar) a margarida nunca viu ___________________________________. 7. przyniosę buty, żeby pani je zobaczyła. vou trazer os sapatos __________________________________. 8. portugalski jest pięknym językiem mimo tego, że jest dość trudny. o português é uma língua bonita apesar ________________ bastante difícil. 9. czy mogłabyś powiedzieć filipowi, żeby przyszedł jutro? poderias dizer ao filipe ________________________ amanhã? 10. alicja jest bardzo zajęta pisaniem pracy magisterskiej. a alice está muito ocupada _____________________ sua tese de mestrado. english sentences 1. adam congratulated mary on winning a poetry contest. o adão felicitou a maria ___________________ um concurso de poesia. 2. isabella asked her sister to help her with the homework. a isabel pediu à sua irmã ____________________ no trabalho de casa. 3. i’m sorry to have disturbed you with a phone call last night. (to disturb – incomodar) sinto muito ______________________ com um telefonema ontem à noite. 4. one day mark saw a strange man walking in the woods. (to walk – passear) um dia o marco viu ______________________________ na floresta. 5. joan hopes to marry a rich man. a joana espera _________________________ um homem rico. 6. despite working at an embassy, robert speaks few foreign languages. apesar ___________________________, o roberto fala poucas línguas estrangeiras. 7. you did not really tell me to drive your grandma to the airport. (to drive – conduzir) na verdade não me disseste ____________________ a tua avó ao aeroporto. 8. i will translate the text for you to read. 83multilingual processing phenomena in learners of portuguese… vou traduzir o texto ________________________________. 9. john is very busy repairing his car. o joão esta muito ocupado ______________________ seu carro. 10. henry does not remember dressing up as a duck during the carnival. (to dress up as – mascarar-se de) o enriques não se lembra ________________________ de pato durante o carnaval. french sentences 1. anne a vu un oiseau étrange voler au-dessus de la forêt. a ana viu _________________________ em cima da floresta. 2. je vais traduire le texte pour que vous puissiez le lire. vou traduzir o texto ______________________________. 3. en dépit de travailler dur, marie est toujours de bonne humeur. apesar __________________________, a maria está sempre de alto astral. 4. je suis désolée de ne pas t’avoir informé du mariage de ma sœur. sinto muito ______________________ do casamento da minha irmã. 5. pourrais-tu dire à philippe de venir demain matin? poderias dizer ao filipe _______________________ amanhã de manhã? 6. jean est très occupé à réparer sa voiture. o joão está muito ocupado ________________________ seu carro. 7. hélène ne se souvient pas d’avoir voyagé en allemagne en 2001. (voyager – viajar) a helena não se lembra _____________________ para a alemanha em 2001. 8. je te félicite d’avoir terminé tes études. felicito-te ________________________________ os estudos. 9. il a demandé à la secrétaire d’écrire une lettre au ministre. pediu à secretária _______________________ uma carta ao ministro. 10. monique espère obtenir un travail à la banque. a mônica espera ____________________________ um trabalho no banco. 84 teresa maria włosowicz a p p e n d i x 2 stimuli used in study 2 1. kiedy słońce zachodziło, siedzieli na tarasie przy plaży. _________ o sol __________, _______________ numa terraça ____________________. 2. gdybym tylko (=i wish) kupiła bilet na ten koncert wczoraj! ____________________ um bilhete para esse concerto _______________! 3. gdyby sylwia nie odmówiła, pracowałaby teraz w międzynarodowej firmie. se a sílvia ________________, _______________ agora ___________ multinacional. 4. jeśli znajdę tę książkę, pożyczę mu ją jutro. se ____________ esse livro, ________________ amanhã. 5. nie przejmuj się! kupię ci nowy długopis. não ___________________! _________________ uma __________________. 6. oby egzamin nie był zbyt trudny! ____________________ o exame ________________________ difícil! 7. chociaż piotr jest bardzo bogaty (superlativo), ciasto, które podał na swoich urodzinach, było bardzo złe. ____________________ o pedro _________________, o bolo que ____________ na sua festa de anos ______________________. 8. w finlandii pije się dużo mleka, a we francji je się ślimaki. na finlânda ______________________, e na frança ____________________________. 9. czy zamierzasz wziąć prysznic teraz? _____________ tomar __________________? 10. maria czytała książkę, kiedy telefon zadzwonił. a maria _____________ um livro __________________________________. references bates, e., & macwhinney, b. 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(2008). do inglês l1 ao português l3 passando pelo espanhol l2: transferências em regência/transitividade verbal, com foco nas preposições. ph.d. thesis. rio de janeiro: pontfícia universidade católica do rio de janeiro. ringbom, h. (1987). the role of the first language in foreign language learning. clevedon: multilingual matters. singleton, d. (2000). language and the lexicon. an introduction. london: arnold. singleton, d. (2003). perspectives on the multilingual lexicon: a critical synthesis. in j. cenoz, b. hufeisen, & u. jessner (eds.), the multilingual lexicon (pp. 167–176). dordrecht–boston– london: kluwer academic publishers. wlosowicz, t. m. (2008/2009, published 2011). les influences interlinguales sur la compréhension des textes dans la troisième langue: une approche cognitivo-pragmatique. villeneuve d’ascq: atelier national de reproduction des thèses. włosowicz, t. m. (2012). cross-linguistic interaction at the grammatical level in l3 reception and production. in d. gabryś-barker (ed.) cross-linguistic influences in multilingual language acquisition (pp. 131–150). berlin–heidelberg: springer. teresa maria włosowicz phänomene der mehrsprachigen sprachverarbeitung bei den lernern von portugiesisch als dritt-oder zusatzsprache z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g das ziel der studie war eine analyse der übersetzung mit hinweisen (cued translation) von polnischen (l1) und englischen oder französischen (l2) texten ins portugiesische 86 teresa maria włosowicz (drittoder zusatzsprache, nach der terminologie von de angelis, 2007) von polnischen (l1) studenten. die studie erforscht insbesondere die interlingualen interaktionen (cross-linguistic interaction, den von herdina und jessner geprägten begriff, 2002) bei mehrsprachiger verarbeitung in der produktion von l3. eine übersetzung stellt in wirklichkeit einen sonderfall der sprachproduktion dar, weil der inhalt schon in den l1oder l2-quellensätzen enthalten ist, obwohl es andererseits keine erleichterung ist, denn die hinweise können den gebrauch von solchen wörtern oder strukturen erfordern, die von den probanden in freier sprachproduktion nie gebraucht werden könnten. der beitrag basiert auf zwei studien, die jeweils mit dreißig und zweiundvierzig studenten portugiesischer philologie durchgeführt wurden. wie die ergebnisse zeigen, wurden interlinguale interaktionen in verschiedenen richtungen beobachtet, nicht nur aus l2 (aus dem englischen oder dem französischen), aus l3 (bei den probanden, für die portugiesisch eine l4 war und deren l3 spanisch oder italienisch waren), l4, etc., sowie intralinguale interaktionen im portugiesischen, aber auch aus dem polnischen (l1), trotz der distanz zwischen dem polnischen und dem portugiesischen und des besonderen status der muttersprache. die menge von interferenzen und/oder negativem transfer hing jedoch häufig eher von dem satz als von der sprachkonstellation ab. die vielfalt von den zu beobachtenden interferenzen bestätigt herdina und jessners (2002) behauptung von dynamischer und unvorhersehbarer natur der interlingualen interaktion. ingrid bello-rodzeń university of silesia, poland multilingual upbringing as portrayed in the blogosphere: on parent-bloggers’ profile a b s t r a c t this article presents the results of an online survey completed by an international group of parents who write about their multilingual upbringing experience on personal blogs. as the first stage in a multi-case study that aims at characterizing multilingual parenting styles and strategies, the web questionnaire was designed to build the profile of the participants based on their demographic and linguistic background, their blogging practices, and their family’s linguistic situation. the literature review discusses the prevalence of multilingual child rearing and endorses parent-blogging both as a genre and as a potential research data source. the methodology, on the other hand, introduces the participants, as well as the survey design procedure. results derive from the identification of salient themes, summarized in two preliminary categories: parents’ views on being bi-/multilingual and parental insights on multilingual upbringing strategies. the descriptive-interpretive analysis of the responses indicates that parents’ understanding of multilingualism inf luences their self-concept as language users and their being bloggers. moreover, parents’ capacity to adopt and adapt communication strategies is deemed an important factor for successful early multilingualism. in general, the findings are treated as the starting point to examine the role of parent-blogging in promoting multilingualism and delve into multilingual parenting styles. keywords: multilingual upbringing, parent-blogging, online surveys, multilingualism research introduction multilingual families thrive as global mobility and the internet enhance cross-linguistic encounters and bring people from all corners of the world together. every day, parents of different nationalities with distinct educational theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 2 (2) 2016, pp. 27–46 28 ingrid bello-rodzeń backgrounds and levels of expertise in multilingual upbringing discuss their family language practices over the web. although the reasons to participate in online exchanges may vary from one parent to another, the will to promote multilingualism in their household prompts them to join a growing virtual community that encourages its members to exchange experiences, share concerns, and meet like-minded people. while many parents search the web to find information and explanations, others decide to contribute their own stories in the form of narratives and reflections posted on personal weblogs. their entries are not only a form of personal expression but a type of text meant to trigger discussion and opinion exchange among potential readers, including other bloggers and parents in a similar linguistic situation. this initiative has turned the blogosphere into a space where it is possible to learn about the multilingual upbringing experience of families around the world just by reading their e-journals, which can be easily found by any internet user with the help of some query keywords. blogs of this kind have been chosen for an ongoing study on multilingual upbringing. they offer first-person accounts on the communication practices of several families, an overview of their language plan (rosenback, 2014), and a non-intrusive look into their multicultural lives. from a research perspective, such blogs represent access to personal narratives written without any conditioning or externally-imposed purpose in mind. before looking at the texts, however, the study has focused on their writers. consequently, the main purpose of the present article is to introduce the parent-bloggers (pbs) whose online journal entries will be examined to shed light on parenting styles in the multilingual family context. the profile presented here has been built on the data gathered through an online survey completed by an international group of parent-bloggers who, firstly, fulfilled the participant selection criteria and, secondly, granted consent for their posts to be analyzed for research purposes. while the findings discussed henceforward are limited in scope and need to be expanded with the subsequent analysis of the blogs, they acknowledge the existence of a pro-multilingualism virtual community and set the ground to explore a new research avenue in the study of child-rearing practices in multilingual households. multilingual upbringing: an exception to the norm? in most societies, multilingualism has been the norm throughout the ages (lamza, 2007), thus “the majority of peoples in the world are multilingual, not monoor even bilingual” (bagga-gupta, 2013, p. 36). on a global scale, pure 29multilingual upbringing as portrayed… monolingual societies and individuals who exclusively speak one language are hard to find. the coexistence of several languages within a community is not atypical, and neither is the case of couples with different native languages who adopt a lingua franca to be able to communicate. as distances shrink and cultural encounters happen, interracial, multicultural, and multilingual families flourish worldwide. being the first “educational environment where the culture forming process takes place” (majorczyk, 2010, p. 23), the family plays a key role in promoting values such as mutual respect, empathy, and cultural sensitivity. it is within the household that the next generation of world citizens, with high interpersonal skills and the ability to understand themselves in relation to the other, are being formed. from this perspective, the potential individual and social benefits for children being raised in such environment become evident: advanced communication skills, intercultural awareness and, in general, understanding and respect for the other. despite the advantages it may have, multilingual/multicultural families seem to make a bigger effort to achieve what is often taken for granted in the “traditional” ones. passing on their languages, values, and traditions to their offspring requires conscious decision-making and collaborative work from the parents. not only are they obliged to create a favorable environment that guarantees exposure to several languages, but also to actively get involved in the process. as a result, the efficiency of language acquisition in multilingual upbringing by parents of different nationalities is viewed as a current and complex research issue (paradowski, bator, & michałowska, 2016). in order to succeed in their endeavor, parents may even require some external support from relationships, professionals, and other families in the same situation, especially when they have no prior experience to rely on. according to rosenback (2014), the seven central principles of multilingual parenting or what she refers to as “the seven cs” are: communication, confidence, commitment, consistency, creativity, culture, and celebration. each one of them refers to both a challenge and a goal for parents to pursue in order to foster the knowledge of languages, which is the key that opens the door to other cultures. as demanding as it may be, multilingual upbringing is not a rare practice occurring in isolation or just recently. the ubiquity of multilingualism becomes apparent on weblogs featuring families composed of parents and children with different nationalities, who communicate in several languages and, in some cases, reside in a place none of them is originally from. what conditions favor or hinder their success and what factors influence their decisions might give us some hints on the principles of multilingual parenting, as well as on issues that need careful consideration when examining and/or promoting early multilingualism. 30 ingrid bello-rodzeń even though “[t]here are more people in the world who use more than one language in their everyday lives than people who spend their whole lives using only one language” (cruz-ferreira, 2010, p. 5), much is yet to be learned about the conditions in which multilinguals develop. in order to determine whether there is a correlation or a gap between the existing theory about multilingual upbringing and the practices conducted at home, a bridge between them both needs to be built. given their nature and scope of interest, the logs kept by the parents may well be scrutinized from a research perspective to establish that connection. parent-blogging as a genre weblogs, or blogs in short, are frequently updated websites consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order, which are typically published by individuals in a personal and informal style (walker, 2005). unlike personal webpages with fairly static formats, blogs present original and constantly changing content. they have been considered “an important social tool” (ferreira et al., 2013, p. 1177) that encourages “self-motivated” users (chen, 2014) to share ideas, individual experiences, and opinions in order to meet a/the need for self-expression and community development (morrison, 2010). three main styles of blogging have been identified: personal or diary-style blogging, filterblogging, and topic-driven blogging (walker rettberg, 2008). personal blogs are used as a diary deliberately open to the public. although not limited to a predefined topic, they present pieces of information about the author’s life and interests. the second type of blogs, as their name indicates, is used to filter the web from the bloggers’ own point of view. instead of documenting their offline life, bloggers record their experiences and finds on the web. finally, on topic-driven blogs authors share newly discovered ideas and information with their readers about a specific subject. unlike the previous ones, these blogs are often run collaboratively by a group of contributors. in order to research multilingual upbringing from the parents’ perspective, the scope of the research study is limited to personal weblogs. as explained by walker rettberg (2008), these blogs let their writers’ individual voices be heard and disclose information purposefully shared with potential readers and, consequently, they are marked by wit and introspection. while filter blogs offer information about a subject matter without engaging in “partisan advocacy” (webb & wang, 2013, p. 206) and topic-driven blogs act more like websites, personal weblogs have “an intimate, sometimes confessional, style where the 31multilingual upbringing as portrayed… author provides the readers with subjective representations and reflections on the topic discussed” (lomborg, 2009, n.p.). most of the personal weblogs that discuss childrearing can be categorized as ‘mommy blogs,’ a genre that features personal online logs whose primary topic is motherhood. morrison (2010) considers mommy blogging “a form of autobiography in real time” (n.p.). her definition stresses the introspective, personal and time-bound character of this genre. she characterizes these writing practices as purposive, creative, and interpersonal to distinguish them from private diaries or public websites. the mommy blogger network is strongly interconnected and highly diverse, so it allows parents to build a community in which they talk to others and get feedback on their ideas (stansberry, 2011; webb & lee, 2011). compared to other weblogs, mommy blogs share the same technical affordances, but they can be significantly different in terms of audience reach and degree of reciprocity (morrison, 2010). some of these blogs are externallyoriented (scheidt, 2008), written for a broad audience, in a more professional but less intimate tone. other are confessional personal accounts, or “confessional online diaries” (walker, 2005), written to meet a personal need rather than attract audience. as opposed to the first group, a third type of blogs is treated as newsletters for far-away relatives and friends, where authors are more concerned about strengthening bonds and sharing materials than about having a fine or creative writing style. despite the efforts to endorse mommy blogging as a genre, it is argued that the term itself “reinforces women’s hegemonic normative roles as nurturers, thrusting women who blog about their children into a form of digital domesticity in the blogosphere” (masullo chen, 2013, p. 510). likewise, “this label may disrespect other aspects of bloggers’ identities including worker, wife, friend, and daughter” (webb & lee, 2011, p. 245). opinions are divided among bloggers, as well. some people support the idea of mommy blogging as “a radical act” (cjo9, 2012), while others prefer to distinguish between mom blogging—mothers who blog but do not necessarily or exclusively write about their family lives—and mommy blogging—a genre that features blogs about mom-centric topics (piersall, 2011). noticeably, a change in usage of the term can be observed by conducting the google search mentioned by friedman & calixte (2009). the authors report that the search for the term “mommy blogging” offered 80,000 hits, ten times more than that for “mom blogger.” unlike the significant difference they account for, a more recent google verbatim search—conducted in june 2016—offers only 54,000 matches for “mommy blogging” and more than 44,800 for “mom blogging.” this variation in the results can be interpreted either as an increase in the amount of mothers who blog, following piersall’s (2011) distinction, or as 32 ingrid bello-rodzeń a decline in popularity and, allegedly, in the number of bloggers who embrace the first term. given both the controversy over the name of the genre and the fact that the participants of this study include mothers and fathers who blog, the terms “parent-blogging” and “parent-bloggers” are deemed to be more accurate and inclusive. parent-blogging (on multilingual upbringing) is viewed here as a dynamic, interactive and introspective form of online writing in which parents offer chronological records of their family’s efforts to pass on and maintain three or more languages in their household. the uniqueness of this genre makes it a valuable data source for studies on multilingual language acquisition (mla) from a parental perspective. parents’ blogs as data in multilingualism research the analysis of parent-blogging is founded on the notion of multilingualism as “the new linguistic dispensation” (aronin & singleton, 2008, 2012), that is, a systemic phenomenon with an evolving status that “embraces the current reality of language ideologies and policies, and language education in all its aspects” (aronin, 2015, p. 5). from that perspective, “languages are seen as complex and dynamic systems which are in constant interaction” (safont jordà & portolés falomir, 2015, p. viii) and the relationship user-environment-language is deemed essential to understand current linguistic realities (aronin & singleton, 2008). as suggested by cruz-ferreira, the approach taken in this paper—and in the whole study—distances itself from the “clinical” view of multilingualism that examines what knowing several languages “does” to people and, rather, focuses on what people are able to do with several languages in order to support learning and acquisition processes. the analysis of the selected cases is an attempt to inquire into the multilingual reality of families located on different parts of the world who use and/or are exposed to three or more languages on a daily basis. blogging confers authorship and endorses personalized content production and presentation, hence weblog entries reflect the writer’s topics of interest and opinions (scheidt, 2008). posts about parenting, for example, may reveal attitudes and beliefs held, as well factors on which some of the decisions regarding child rearing are grounded. although the emphasis added on language acquisition and the frequency with which this topic is discussed varies from one blogger to another, the existing parent-blogging archives contain significant episodes in the multilingual journey of the authors and their families. 33multilingual upbringing as portrayed… morrison (2010) asserts that parent-blogging responds to an expressed need to create and/or deliberately join a community that understands and recognizes parenthood as a subjective experience. “bloggers assign meaning to the stages and cycles of life that may otherwise be missed in their busy existence, if not chronicled” (webb & lee, 2011, p. 246). regarding multilingual upbringing, parents’ chronicles may unveil what they consider significant moments, gains, fears, and challenges in this endeavor. moreover, the posts can be examined to analyze parental attitudes, beliefs and, in general, an array of field data that could otherwise be lost, unavailable or much harder to gather. the reason to inquire about multilingual upbringing from the parental perspective by means of blog entries is twofold. on the one hand, parent-blogging on multilingualism is an introspective, dynamic, and socially-oriented phenomenon which is, as such, under-researched. on the other hand, this practice evidences parents’ widespread need and efforts to promote several languages in their household. if multilingual upbringing is a complex and demanding process that requires persistence and dedication from the parents in order to be successful (paradowski et al., 2016), then it is worth researching how parents strive for it by looking at the narrative introspections they so readily share online. to some extent, parent-bloggers can be viewed as ethnographers willing to share their participant observations and field notes with anyone interested in their findings. drawing on the literature, it is assumed that: a) the online exchanges that occur in the blogosphere are beneficial because they encourage parents to discuss ideas, share concerns, and meet like-minded people; b) as a result of their interactions, a growing virtual community of practice that endorses multilingualism exists; c) the information shared by parent-bloggers offers valuable insights into the dynamics of language acquisition and use in diverse sociocultural settings, which could not be easily reached, or would simply remain unknown otherwise. the online survey participants: the parents behind the blogs the study employs a multiple-case study design, in which each parentblogger (n = 13) is conceptualized as a “case” and a cross-case analysis (yin, 2003) is conducted to find similarities amongst all participants. in total, 12 female and 1 male participants, whose ages range between 20–29 (1), 30–39 (9), and 40–49 (3) years old, completed the survey. a code (pb#) was assigned to identify each parent—the number was given according to the order in which 34 ingrid bello-rodzeń the answers were automatically saved on the online spreadsheet. additionally, participants chose to be addressed as “first name, author of (name of blog)” when excerpts from their blogs were to be cited throughout the study. table 1 parent-bloggers’ demographic and linguistic background pb# – place of origin current place of residence family languages no. of children: year, (country) of birth latvia germany eng – ltv – ger 2: 2014, 2016 (germany) spain bulgaria spa – bul 2: 2008, 2013 (spain) sweden germany spa – swe – ger 2: 2005, 2008 (germany) poland usa pol – spa – eng – asl 1: 2013 (usa) poland canada fre – pol – eng 2: 2011, 2014 (canada) scotland germany eng – hun – ger 2: 2012, 2014 (germany) poland germany spa – pol 1: 2013 (germany) venezuela hungary spa – eng – hun 1: 2012 (hungary) germany italy ita – eng – ger 2: 2008, 2010 (italy) russia italy eng – rus – ita 2: 2009, 2011 (italy) singapore malaysia eng – chi – ger 1: 2011 (singapore) ecuador norway eng – nor – spa 1: 2013 (norway) usa france fre – eng – spa 4: 2001, 2003 (usa); 2006, 2012 (france) table 1 shows that the participants come from europe (9), south america (2), north america (1) and asia (1) and that none of them lives in their birthplace at present. noticeably, seven pbs reside in their partner/spouse’s country of origin, whereas the rest are based in a “third” country, namely germany (4), the usa (1), and malaysia (1). most people (11) have been living in their current place of residence for more than five years and expect to stay there permanently. regarding the number of children, seven couples have two, five have one, and one couple has four kids. in total, there are 23 children (13 girls, 10 boys), out of whom 13 are toddlers/preschoolers (2–5 y/o). only in two cases (pb3 & pb9) the children’s age range is a bit higher. by number of families in which they are spoken/used, the languages (famlang) listed by the participants include: english (10), spanish (7), german (5), polish (3), french (2), hungarian (2), italian (1), bulgarian (1), chinese (1), latvian (1), norwegian (1), swedish (1), and american sign language (1). while english was found to be the most common language between couples (10 cases), it is used between one or both parents and their children only in four families. spanish was the second most popular “couple language” (5/13 cases), with one of the parents being a native speaker. it was listed as a famlang in 5 cases. even though most parent-bloggers (pbs) are not native speakers of english and two families did not include it as a famlang, nine people in the group 35multilingual upbringing as portrayed… use english to write most of the content of their blogs. two other respondents write in spanish, one in polish, and another one mostly in swedish with occasional posts in english or spanish. english can therefore be seen as the means for self-expression and the lingua franca among the majority of these parents. method: web survey design & implementation surveys administered online are used to address a wide variety of languagerelated issues. they have gained popularity and are extensively employed in social research, for they have been found to be economical, fast to create and deploy, and convenient to reach out to a representative group of potential participants (sue & ritter, 2012; wilson & dewaele, 2010). according to dörnyei and csizér (2012), survey studies in the field of second language acquisition (sla) can inform us about people’s intended language behavior, their background information and biodata, their knowledge of certain issues in sla and, in general, their opinions and attitudes towards the l2. in large-scale studies, but also in small-scale studies in which face-to-face contact with the participants is complicated or even impossible, questionnaires are administered using different survey software or applications available on the web. that is the case of this study. an online questionnaire was created with the purpose of gathering information to build the profile of an international group of parents. prior to preparing the online survey, purposive criterion sampling (palys, 2008) was applied to filter the search results and to define the scope of the study. moreover, the following five criteria were used to scrutinize and choose the blogs and potential research participants: • it had to be a personal weblog, not a filter or a topic-driven blog. • explicit reference to the use of more than two languages in the family was a must. • it had to be written in english, spanish, and/or polish—the languages of the researcher. • it had to include posts about multilingual upbringing, early multilingualism and/or any other related topics. • it had to be a public blog and still active at the moment it was found. in total, 48 blogs were located between july 2015 and january 2016. an invitation to participate in the study was sent to 32 people whose blogs complied with all the conditions above. although 11 bloggers never replied, 21 agreed to fill in the online survey and granted consent for their posts to be analyzed for research purposes. the instrument was designed to elicit information about four related topics, namely: general demographic and linguistic background, self-perceived proficiency level in their languages, blogging practices, and multilingual parenting experience. 36 ingrid bello-rodzeń preparing the offline version of the questionnaire and a general benefit-cost estimation of different survey software were the initial steps. once approved and available online, the questionnaire was piloted with two parent-bloggers who, despite meeting the initial selection criteria, differed from the rest of the group because their children are adults already and their entries are not focused on their current family situation. the feedback received served to adjust the wording of a few questions and validate clarity and accuracy of the instrument. the url was e-mailed to 19 parent-bloggers and the data-analysis began four months later. following gläser and laudel (2010), the theory and the data analysis were taken into consideration to identify salient themes related to multilingual parenting. both verbatim quotes taken from the answers of different respondents and a brief description of the theme were used to name the preliminary categories. excerpts from the survey responses are quoted or paraphrased when a whole statement was given by a specific pb. verbatim words appear in quotation marks to account for the participants’ voice. in other cases, the interpretation of the answers to close-ended questions is provided. rather than final conclusions, the data gathered offered an array of essential issues to delve into during the blog content analysis phase. results & discussion the results presented hereafter correspond to the descriptive-interpretative analysis of the survey questions that specifically addressed issues in multilingualism. as mentioned, this instrument was the means to establish a first contact with the participants in order to learn about their background and ask for certain information that could not have been found just by reading their blogs. although multilingual upbringing practices were not inquired in detail, most open-ended questions encouraged and/or required the respondents to elaborate on their answers. the findings derive from the analysis of their comments. “multilingualism is a lifestyle choice”: parents’ views on being bi-/ multilingual the term multilingual is used here to refer to individuals and their families, rather than to societies. who is considered to be multilingual and what does it take to become one? the answer to those queries is not always clear-cut. “multilinguals have been called all sort of names, which cast more shadows 37multilingual upbringing as portrayed… than light on what they are” (cruz-ferreira, 2010, p. 1). in this study, it is assumed that “a multilingual is neither the sum of three or more monolinguals nor a bilingual with an additional language” (de angelis & selinker, 2001, p. 44). in the survey, the participants were asked to identify themselves and their partners as “monolingual, bilingual, multilingual or other” and to elaborate on their choices. almost everyone, 12 out of 13 pbs, indicated that they perceive themselves as multilinguals. pb2, who self-identifies as a bilingual and not as a multilingual is, however, a simultaneous bilingual in spanish and catalan, who additionally declares being a proficient user of bulgarian and an independent user of english. the justification for her choice was as follows: “i consider myself bilingual because i can speak 2 languages at a native level. as for the other 2 languages i know, i don’t speak them perfectly well” (q11, pb2). as paradowski et al. (2016) state, her answer could indicate that she confines the labels bi/multilingualism to early language acquisition. additional data would be needed to know the linguistic biography of the parents in order to better understand their perceptions as language users. moreover, it could be useful to contrast the results obtained with the blogs to determine what views of multilingualism, if any in particular, parents convey. yet, the survey showed that they are aware of their linguistic background. among the reasons for considering themselves multilingual, pbs mentioned their ability to speak three or more languages fluently (pb1), the fact that they use them on a daily basis, for different purposes with specific people (pb5, pb6) and their living abroad experiences (pb9). for the sake of this study, it is worth mentioning that all the pbs have completed higher levels of education: they hold either bachelor’s (1), master’s (10), or doctoral (2) degrees. in the survey-based study conducted by paradowski et al. (2016), the authors highlight that the fact that 43.2% (16 out of 37) of their participants had higher linguistic education could have influenced the thoroughness of their observations and answers. further research will help to determine whether there is a correlation between the parents’ linguistic knowledge and their family language practices. yet, answers like those quoted below indicate that the participants’ language trajectories are solid and give them the perspective of a native speaker, a fl learner and a language model/ teacher—in their role as parents. i speak and understand polish and english at a native level, having immigrated to the us at age 8. i studied spanish for 5 years and am married to a native spanish speaker. my expressive spanish is better than my receptive spanish. i am literate in all three languages. (q11. pb4) 38 ingrid bello-rodzeń i use three languages every day (english, german, and hungarian) and because we spend a lot of time in romania at my parents-in-law i use basic romanian while i’m there (3–4 months a year). (q11. pb6) english is my native form of communication in work and with my husband, family and friends and in the community where i live. i use mandarin with my father and some relatives, my friends from china and taiwan (they are native speakers) and primarily with my son. i switch to german with my in laws. i used french sometimes when i worked in brussels.” (q11. pb11) in addition to assessing themselves, the participants were asked to describe their partner’s/spouse’s proficiency level. the goal was to build up a broad picture of the couples and, consequently, comprehend the dynamics of their language practices at home. the respondents said their partner/spouse to be multilingual or bilingual in 7 and 5 cases, respectively. in one case, the answer given was “not bilingual [but] able to understand and live bi and multilingual culture and education” (q.22.5. pb7). “speaks well/fluently,” “is proficient,” “understands well” or “has near native proficiency” were some of the phrases used to support their choices. no-one chose monolingual as a response and one person did not supply any answer. although there are no monolinguals in the group, not everyone is a native user of all the languages they listed as their l1. pb13 self-evaluated as a proficient speaker of spanish and a native speaker of english. surprisingly enough, she mentioned that spanish is the language she uses to communicate with her children almost 100% of the time, while english is her and her french husband’s common language. her case shows efforts to maintain her heritage language, spanish, despite it not being her stronger language or the majority language in her current place of residence. based on their comments, it could be argued that this group of parents concur with otwinowska (2015), who maintains that being multilingual does not imply knowing several languages perfectly, but being able and trying to use this knowledge and competence in various communicative situations. beyond the number of languages an individual may know, or the sequence in which those languages were acquired or learned, it is the ability and willingness to use them, not perfectly but effectively, what makes someone multilingual. as pb13 states, “multilingualism is a lifestyle [emphasis added]” and not only a label assigned to describe a fixed attribute or some sort of innate talent of people who speak several languages. the way parents perceive multilingualism has also a direct impact on their being bloggers. although blogging is not their main occupation, they devote time and effort in keeping their sites updated. 12/13 pbs listed language-related topics when asked about the main topics of their blogs; the person who did 39multilingual upbringing as portrayed… not put it explicitly, mentioned motherhood instead. according to the survey, parents run their blogs “to share [their] experiences raising a multilingual child and sharing [sic] more about [their] expat life (pb1),” as well as “to document [their] kids’ language development” (pb6). pb13’s comment concisely expresses what most participants mentioned as reasons to blog: many people close to me were asking me what i thought was the reason why bilingualism worked in some families and not in others. after struggling to answer the question, i decided i would start a blog in a quest to define what factors lead to successful bilingual families. (q13. pb13) even though she only refers to bilingualism in this statement, she explains in another comment that her family moved to a different country and since then she has been passing on two minority languages to her children. as a result, she even renamed her blog “trilingual mama.” parents’ blogs are also the result of a felt need to disseminate multilingualism, for ‘there was very little information around and [they] wanted to share [their own] experience’ (pb9). parents may not be experts in all multilingual upbringing matters, but they are both willing to share their first-hand experience and eager to spread the word in the blogosphere. if multilingualism influences the way in which these families live, it is pertinent to observe what influences their language practices and to what extent they pass on their own attitudes to their children. the second salient theme in the analysis of the survey sheds some light on this regard, as it focuses on the decisions made by the pbs and their partners in terms of following a multilingual upbringing “plan.” their evaluation of the process and the results observed thus far place the parents’ capacity to adjust existing strategies to their specific needs as an important factor for successful early multilingualism. “opol version 2.0”: parents’ insights on (in)efficient multilingual upbringing strategies parents may employ different strategies to stimulate the acquisition and use of each language, but “[t]here is no ‘golden rule,’ no single ‘foolproof’ strategy to raise multilingual children successfully: each family decides what suits their needs best, because every family is unique and so is every child” (cruz-ferreira, 2010, pp. 60–61). multilingual families do not simply adopt language-learning strategies; they adapt them to their particular needs and their unique linguistic situation. for the sake of consistency, terms such as model, method, approach, strategy and/or technique are not used interchangeably here, despite this happening 40 ingrid bello-rodzeń in the literature. in this article, parenting strategies refer to specific parental behaviors used in the child-rearing process (darling & steinberg, 1993). in the same vein, multilingual parenting strategies are understood as practices to pass on and maintain several languages. terminological consensus could help in describing linguistic environments and interaction patterns more accurately, hence the restricted use of the term here. as cruz-ferreira (2010) suggests, “families who decide to raise their children multilingually are bound to start at once seeking information and advice about what exactly should be done to achieve this purpose successfully” (p. 59). what seems to be natural or taken for granted in other families (e.g., using one’s l1 to talk to a baby) requires deliberate action in multilingual ones because parents fear that their actions may hinder their children’s mla process. this being so, it is pertinent to analyze what factors influence parental decisions so as to support effective multilingual upbringing practices. in the web survey, parent-bloggers were asked to mention the strategy or strategies of communication they followed in their family. in order to check whether parents were aware of the characteristics and potential advantages and disadvantages of different strategies, no additional information or major explanation was provided. however, it was assumed that they were quite familiar with the concept, as most of them have written about this topic on their weblogs. in the order they appeared, the options given and the corresponding number of respondents were: “one parent/person, one language—opol” (11), “minority language at home—ml@h” (0), “mixed strategy” (1), “time and place” (0), “initial one-language strategy” (0), “other” (1), and “none” (0). the findings from paradowski & michałowska (2016) were helpful to interpret the survey results. in their case, 91% of the respondents said to have followed a specific strategy to raise their children bilingually, but three families had adopted none. in mine, not only did all pbs mention the strategy they employ, but they also provided the links to the posts they have written about this topic for further analysis. this may imply higher awareness of the mla process from the parents who deal with three or more languages in their households at the same time. the results proved the popularity of the opol strategy in which each parent uses his or her native language to communicate with the child. opol has been appointed as a household strategy for natural bilingualism (pearson, 2010), especially for families in which parents have different nationalities (paradowski et al., 2016). parent-bloggers commented that they chose opol because “… it is what [they] believed to be most effective for imparting 3 languages” (pb11) and because “it was helpful to pass on [their] l1 as a minority language” (pb5). in spite of its popularity, the effectiveness of opol as a multilingual parenting strategy has been questioned. de houwer (2007) states that it is “neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition” and cruz-ferreira (2010) argues that it 41multilingual upbringing as portrayed… is “a monolingual-caregiver norm” because it encourages parents to use only one language to talk with their children, denying the fact that they are also multilinguals. the survey results indicate that most families use what pb13 described as “an adaptation of opol” (q.27), that is, a more suitable and personalized version of this strategy. pb3’s comment below supports this statement: i call it opol version 2.0. in today’s society it is impossible to speak only one language in front of the children, they know that i speak other languages as well. but they also know, that they should speak swedish with me. (q.27.1, pb3) clearly, pb3 is aware of the ubiquity of multilingualism and argues that limiting oneself to just one language when the children know their parents are multilingual is contradictory. she also makes a point when she mentions that the children know what language they should use with whom. if parents are expected to teach through example, and if they want their children to be able to function in different languages, then they should act accordingly. not only did parents explain why following a strategy like opol strictly would restrict their everyday interactions, but they also gave an overview of the complex communication patterns that characterize their multilingual lifestyle. in the excerpt below, pb7 and pb8 describe how they switch between languages depending on the context and on their current situation. their statements demonstrate that their strategies are flexible and prone to be modified. before our daughter was born we used to speak only german. since 2 years we switched to use only spanish at home between us, because my husband does not spent so much time at home, but i can and love to speak spanish. last months i start to use more polish phrases to him also and he answers when he understands in spanish. our child learns [german] through hearing it in kindergarten and in the environment where we live (q.27.1, pb7). one parent, one language [spanish, hungarian]. english was introduced by chance, when we started going to a playgroup in english. at that time (elena was 8 months old) i decided to keep english as an alternative language for games, songs and story books (q.27.1, pb8). the adoption of multilingual upbringing strategies is key in understanding the dynamics of early mla. so far the findings suggest that the popularity of certain strategies does not necessarily guarantee their effectiveness. paradowski et al. (2016) argue that a single strategy of communication seems to be insufficient for most families, so parents use additional aids and methods to make the language acquisition process more efficient. in view of the linguistic 42 ingrid bello-rodzeń background of the parents, the next step in the ongoing research study will be studying the factors that determine how they plan, follow and change their multilingual communication practices at home. although multilingualism might be natural and accessible, especially to people whose parents are of different nationalities (paradowski et al., 2016), there is still a lot to learn from parents who commit to this endeavor. if willingness and the ability to use several languages for specific purposes in various situations are needed to be considered multilingual, then examining the correlation between parental attitudes and their children’s multilingual competence development can shed light into the actions we as researchers may take to endorse multilingual practices in contexts where different cultures and languages coexist. conclusion multilingual upbringing is an increasing phenomenon inextricably linked to today’s world’s unique sociolinguistic situation, hence research in this area is essential to support these practices amongst international families. this article presents an attempt to gain insight into the stories of thirteen multilingual families who share a common goal: bringing up their children to be multilingual. the profile of the participants was built on the interpretation of the data gathered by means of an online questionnaire. the blog mining phase, the survey preparation process, and the preliminary analysis of the information obtained have been summarized. multilingualism studies are multilayered and acquisitive in nature, and so there is a promising future for interdisciplinary research in the field (comanaru & dewaele, 2015; aronin & hufeisen, 2009). psychological methods have been integrated to broaden the scope of mainstream multilingualism research (see for example pavlenko, 2004; dewaele & mccloskey, 2015). in general, there is a call for apposite and emerging methods that consider and explore the inherent properties of contemporary multilingualism, namely complexity, liminality, suffusiveness and, more recently, super diversity (aronin, 2015; aronin & singleton, 2002). the study in which this paper is framed responds to that call by taking parents’ blogs as an alternative road to understanding and visualizing multilingual parenting strategies and styles. parent-blogging is personal yet public, dynamic but consistent, and introspective though socially-oriented in nature. as a genre, it offers access to archival records containing anecdotal reports and introspective reflections that could be hard to retrieve otherwise. the analysis of blogs 43multilingual upbringing as portrayed… written by parents who chronicle and discuss their family’s multilingual journey needs to be conducted taking into consideration the evolving user-environmentlanguage relationship in order to understand their linguistic realities. thus far the interpretation of the web survey results has focused on introducing the parents and their family’s multilingual environment. as the first stage in the process of exploring parents’ blogs from a multilingualism research perspective, it was possible to learn about their personal and linguistic background, their family languages and the strategies they use to enhance multilingualism at home. existing theory and research on bi/multilingual language acquisition are the lenses used to look at the data with the purpose of understanding how the families strive to maintain their languages. the survey was also helpful to notice issues that need to be examined at subsequent research phases, such as parental discourses and attitudes towards mla. in addition to the content of the entries, the scope of the blogging practices needs to be investigated to determine whether and how they promote multilingual child-rearing. the goal is to examine the participants’ experiences and strategies from various analytical perspectives to unveil their parenting styles. by the same token, the study seeks to recognize parents’ first-hand experience and their enterprise in documenting their children’s linguistic developmental process. if language is the faculty that distinguishes humans from other animals and permits us to organize all forms of social life, then preserving languages should be regarded as a priority for the future of our society. the international family is the setting where languages and cultures meet and flourish. the present article shows that international families, despite being geographically scattered, strive to join efforts and form a community in which multilingual upbringing provides fertile ground for intercultural dialogue, social cohesion, and mutual respect. references aronin, l. 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(2003). case study design and research: design and methods (3rd edn.), thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. 46 ingrid bello-rodzeń ingrid bello-rodzeń das spiegelbild mehrsprachiger erziehung in der blogosphäre: zum profil eines elternbloggers z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g in dem beitrag werden ergebnisse der im internet durchgeführten umfrage dargestellt. der fragebogen wurde von internationaler gruppe der ihre blogs zum thema mehrsprachige erziehung führenden und ihre eigenen erfahrungen dabei ausnutzenden eltern ausgefüllt. als erste stufe der analytischen forschung (eng.: multi-case study), die bezweckt, verschiedene erziehungsstile und erziehungsstrategien zu schildern, wurde ein internetfragebogen ausgearbeitet, dessen zweck war es, den profil von den forschungsmitgliedern in bezug auf ihre demografischen und sprachlichen umstände, ihre tätigkeit in der blogosphäre und sprachliche situation ihrer familien zu bilden. in dem literaturüberblick werden betont: die natürlichkeit der mehrsprachigen erziehung und große bedeutung der von den eltern geführten blogs (eng.: parent-blogging), sowohl als einer literarischen gattung, als auch als potentieller forschungsdatenquelle. der beitrag stellt die an der forschung teilnehmenden eltern vor und schildert den prozess der umfrageanfertigung. ihre ergebnisse werden in zwei folgenden kategorien resümiert: ansichten der eltern über zweisprachigkeit und mehrsprachigkeit, und ihre bemerkungen über strategien der mehrsprachigen erziehung. die deskriptiv-interpretatorische datenanalyse zeigte auf, dass die betrachtungsweise der mehrsprachigkeit von den eltern deren identität als sprachbenutzer und bloggers beeinf lussen. darüber hinaus gilt die fähigkeit der eltern, eine kommunikationsstrategie anzunehmen und anzupassen als unerlässlicher faktor beim mehrsprachigkeitserwerb von den kindern. im großen und ganzen betrachtet man die ergebnisse der besagten forschung als ein ausgangspunkt für erforschung der rolle von der bloggattung bei verbreitung der mehrsprachigkeit und als eine grundlage für erforschung der erziehungsstile in mehrsprachigen familien. elżbieta gajek university of warsaw, poland ict as material culture in call a b s t r a c t human and technology interactions are bilateral. a man makes use of the technology available anytime, but the technology enhances human potential and creates opportunities for further development in this area. this mutual inf luence is illustrated on the example of the use of information and communication technologies (ict) in language learning and teaching (ll&t). both historical perspectives on computer-assisted language learning (call) and the contemporary practices depict interrelations between material artifacts and their use for learning purposes in the multilingual reality of the internet. the results of research on teachers of foreign languages show that material culture gives grounds for social and pedagogical practices, yet, human perceptions, opinions, and actions constitute the actual use of it. keywords: computer-assisted language learning, material culture, language teachers, ict introduction information and communication technologies shape many areas of social life and culture. almost all world languages can be represented on the internet. unicode standard ensures encoding and handling written texts in most of the world’s languages. it contains over 110,000 characters used in writing systems of various languages covering 100 scripts. but still some languages are not present on the net, which is a side effect of digital divide. to prevent it people need to have access to quality content at international, regional, and local level in their native languages. however, depending on the demographic data ten languages are used more often than others. table 1 shows the number of internet users by language. theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 3 (1) 2017, pp. 47–60 elżbieta gajek48 table 1 ten top languages used in the web on 31st december 2013 languages internet users% of world total internet users by language world population for this language english 28.6 800,625,314 1,370,977,116 chinese 23.2 649,375,491 1,392,320,407 spanish 7.9 222,406,379 439,320,916 arabic 4.8 135,610,819 367,465,766 portuguese 4.3 121,779,703 260,874,775 japanese 3.9 109,626,672 127,103,388 russian 3.1 87,476,747 142,470,272 german 2.9 81,139,942 94,652,582 french 2.8 78,891,813 377,424,669 malay 2.7 75,459,025 284,105,671 top 10 languages 84.3 2,362,391,905 4,856,715,562 rest of the languages 15.7 440,087,029 2,325,143,057 world total 100.0 2,802,478,934 7,181,858,619 source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm the proportion of internet users does not reflect the amount of resources in the languages listed above. there are some methodological constraints in assessing the amount of resources in a language. the number of websites is constantly growing.1 search engines report the total of domains they are indexing; however, there are webpages that have not been indexed, multilingual websites, moreover, some non-native speakers write blogs or social networking posts in foreign languages they know. what is more, easy access to texts in various languages enhances multilingualism as learners of a language can easily find study materials on the internet. in this way, ict influence ll&t. but the increasing number of users of languages other than english illustrates the decreasing role of english as the main language of the net. the unesco report “twelve years of measuring linguistic diversity in the internet: balance and perspectives,” written by daniel pimienta, daniel prado, and álvaro blanco, showed that english was not the dominant language on the web in 2009. the use of english dropped from 80% in 1996 to 45% in 2008 (pimienta, 2009). 1 according to internet live stats the number of webpages was 1,197,146,189 on may 25, 2017, at 4 p.m. and three minutes later it was 1,197,146,732. source: http://www.internetlivestats. com/total-number-of-websites/. ict as material culture in call 49 however, when the users solve problems with script at the level of a keyboard, call techniques are the same for any language. the history of computerassisted language learning shows how language teachers and software developers have made attempts to adopt existing technology to the needs of language learners. although ict has not been invented and developed for language learning, operational functionalities of the software and hardware gradually change ll&t practice enhancing language acquisition, language skills training, and intercultural communication in the multilingual world. material artifacts in human perception the perception of reality is the traditional domain of philosophical studies. heidegger (1927) in his early work emphasizes the role of the objects as tools. later heidegger (1949) raises the importance of the influence of objects on the human. new technology has to be adopted by the individuals and the society. moore (1991/1999) identifies technology adoption lifecycles in five segments: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. innovators are the pioneers, early adopters are visionaries who love working with technology, early majority are people who would use the technology to solve their problems on condition that they see it is successful for others they know, late majority are similar to early majority but less confident with the technology, laggards will wait until the moment they have no other choice. nowadays, the telephone seems to be fully adopted by laggards. in the case of language teachers the readiness to use ict depends on the level of their own individual and institutional experience. bax (2003, p. 24) presents the stages of normalization, which can also be perceived as interactions between a human and machines in social and educational contexts. 1. early adopters. a few teachers and schools adopt the technology out of curiosity. 2. ignorance/scepticism. however, most people are sceptical or ignorant of its existence. 3. try once. people try out but reject it because of early problems. they can’t see its value – it doesn’t appear to add anything of ‘relative advantage.’ 4. try again. someone tells them it really works. they try again. they see it does in fact have relative advantage. 5. fear/awe. more people start to use it, but still there is (a) fear, alternating with (b) exaggerated expectations. 6. normalization. gradually, it is seen as something normal. elżbieta gajek50 although the telephone as a material artifact has been finally adopted, ict is still far from normalization. what is more, according to eurobarometer 340 (2010) only 17% of polish people want to employ new scientific innovations and achievements in their life. thus, the social context for implementing ictbased material culture is not favorable. information and communication technologies as artifacts material culture related to ict includes hardware and specialized digital devices. however, as none of the devices could operate without software, it also has to be included as part of material culture. hardware and peripherals the main part of a personal standalone computer is a central station with a separate screen, mouse, joystick, keyboard, printer, scanner. small memory storage devices always belong to the hardware as each type needs special reading devices. at the beginning, programs were stored on flexible 5.25 inch diskettes which were replaced by 3.5 inch disks and then by pendrives also called usb sticks. terabytes external storage devices are also connected to the computer via usb. the movable storage in laptops and notebooks is integrated into one piece of equipment. nowadays, hardware has become so small to be installed in a device whose primary affordance is a phone or a tablet. however, the use of mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and standalone computers differs, depending on the needs of users. to build a computer network, other material hardware and software are used, such as routers, optical fibers, net protocols, etc. however, the end users do not need to be aware of the detailed structure of internal nets unless they serve their purpose. software computer programs, which make hardware operational and provide users with interfaces, can also be treated as artifacts. hardware and software are designed to be easily operated by the users. thus, user-friendliness and functionality of ict are the main concerns of interface designers. the common area of interests shared by language teachers and learners, and software ict as material culture in call 51 engineers—designers of interfaces has led to the practical concept of participatory design (pd). the end users are involved as full participants in the design and evaluation of hardware, software, and computer-based activities (muller, 1992). this collaborative and iterative process focuses on quality improvements (bloomberg & henderson, 1990). according to colpaert (2004), students occupy different roles such as being a software user, language learner, communicator, and contributor to the design process. thus, participatory approaches emphasize mutuality and reciprocity in shaping material artifacts to enhance and facilitate learning. in their case study, cárdenas-claros and gruba (2010) specify the role of students in developing help options in computer-based listening activities. digital products a separate category of ict material artifacts is created by digital devices dedicated to specific functions only, for example, educational toys, e-book readers, digital cameras, robots, game players. however, the tendency to integrate various functions leads to mobile devices such as mobile phones, smartphones, and tablets which offer comfortable access to some resources and encourage various types of users’ activities. the users become less and less aware of the in-built hardware and software. digital culture artifacts this category consists of software which is more and more normalized. hardware and software are perceived just as means of storage and access. their social and cultural role surpasses their image as a technology artifact, for example: portals, websites, video, and audio editing programs, games, mobile applications, web 2.0 services such as social media, blogs, wikis, etc. social and cultural role of digital artifacts tim bernes-lee perceives the internet more as social creation and medium of social communication rather than as technological device. the medium shapes its users through the language, the interface, and strategies of usage. tim bernes-lee said: “it was really hard explaining the web before people just got used to it because they didn’t even have words like click, and jump, and page.” whatever the design of digital interface is, humans need to adopt their elżbieta gajek52 operational strategies as well as their cognitive strategies to be able to use the tools for their purposes. thus, computer users constantly develop computational thinking which enables them to solve problems with the use of computers effectively. a human needs to be able to define a problem in a way which can be dealt and managed with ict. this requires a certain level of understanding as to what can be done with ict and how. it also requires reasonable estimation of ict limits. dede (1995, para 4) notices the influence of medium-related objects on their users. “the telephone creates conversationalists; the book develops imaginers who can conjure a rich mental image from sparse symbols on a printed page. much of television programming induces passive observers. today’s “couch potatoes,” vicariously living in the fantasy world of television, could become tomorrow’s “couch funguses,” immersed as protagonists in 3d soap operas while the real world deteriorates.” ict creates gamers, blog exhibitionists, forum debaters, haters, etc. or learners of whatever they want, for example, languages. historical perspective on technology change influences on call computers were not developed for teaching and learning languages. their first aim was rooted in mathematics to facilitate calculations. similarly, the origin of script was also grounded in mathematics and trade. thus, the educational use of digital devices in ll&t is an extra affordance. ict is primarily aimed at business and military developments, its educational use is secondary, so almost all new digital artifacts need to be adopted to educational purposes. the history of call provides insights into the processes of adopting existing material artifacts to the needs of language learners and teachers. it shows how individuals, institutions, and even educational systems adopt material culture. but first approaches to the use of computers in lt and ll surprisingly appeared, when computers operated on thousands of bulbs were only under control of it specialists, the machines did not have any user-friendly features. carton cards were used to input a code of the computer program into the computer. strips of pinched paper carried the output of computer operations. it is hardly to imagine that the first idea of the use of computers for language learning appeared in the 1950s, when the mainframe computers looked like very big wardrobes, with no screens, no keyboards, no mouse devices, and no windows. the use of video discs to provide learners with audio and video materials was not user-friendly. taylor (1980) introduced the idea of a computer in ll as a tutor, tutee, and tool. in the role of a tutor, through computer-assisted ict as material culture in call 53 instruction the computer teaches the child, as a tool, the computer amplifies ability to address academic tasks, and as a tutee, it helps students learn by programming (tutoring) the computer. later the role of a toy was added to emphasize learning while playing. the next step in ict material development was introduced with pc’s (personal computers) in the 1980s. windows provided space for graphics and interactivity. language learning interactive software with texts, video, and audio materials was stored on cds and used on standalone computers. however, the cds were replaced in the 1990s by internet resources. gradual progress in building either wire or wireless internet connection has added communication functionalities, which opens interests in intercultural communication between learners of languages and starts all web 2.0 based learning activities. ict has become a means of either teacher-initiated and supervised or independent communication between learners. etwinning program launched in 2004 allows for organized institutional cooperation between schools in different countries in which ict is a means of communication. cultura exchanges site, at massachusetts institute of technology, provides framework for tandem academic intercultural cooperation for language learners. other internet initiatives, such as livemocha, gather independent learners who support each other in language learning. international project partners become resources of cultural knowledge. what is more, intercultural competence can be trained in practice via digital artifacts. parallel to the development of the net, audio, and video have been more and more accessible and user-friendly. the next step introduced mobility of the hardware when laptops connected to the internet with an lcd screen, an in-built keyboard, and a touchpad instead of a mouse were launched. then, the computer hardware reached the size of a telephone or a tablet and the era of mobile-assisted language learning has started. interactive whiteboards (ib) have become the most popular display devices used in education, which also allow for interaction with software or other users. as material artifacts ib operate linked to a computer and a beamer. internet connection is a must to exploit them to their full potential. cutrim schmid and whyte (2014) explore both the theoretical underpinnings of the use of this artifact and practical implementation of it in ll&t and in teacher training showing the educational potential of the interactive whiteboard. this example illustrates how the material culture (in fact one piece of it) fosters development in pedagogy and methodology of teaching languages. clickers were remote control devices for voting. in the classroom they are used for checking students answers in closed questions and giving short answers. their main pedagogical role is to engage students into class activities and transform students learning (beatty, 2004). elżbieta gajek54 technologies of the future the latest technology as material artifacts opens new areas of language learning pedagogy. for example robots can be used as teacher assistants in class or learner assistants for senior learners (wen-chi et al., 2015). the use of mobile devices opens various dimensions of learning mobility: (1) mobility in physical space; (2) mobility of technology; (3) mobility in conceptual space; (4) mobility in social space; and (5) learning dispersed over time; with context being the “overarching term to cover interrelated aspects of mobility” (such as mobility in space, time, technology, social mobility, dispersed learning (kukulska-hulme et al., 2011, p. 159). finally, three artifacts with the potential in ll&t are worth mentioning as technologies of the future. (1) google glasses provide text translation of what the person next to you is saying. (2) qr codes as means of giving instructions to students and directing them to materials may facilitate classroom learning and teaching. (3) digital textbooks are being adopted by educational systems in many countries. all of them may also introduce changes in methodology and teaching strategies in call. the need for learner preparation for call the need for teacher training for call has been well established and researched since the very beginning of the use of computers in ll&t and increased with the advent of online ll (berge, 1995; harasim, 1990). any change in material culture has encouraged interest in teacher training. the research includes, for example, teacher training for online learning environments (ernest et al., 2013; guichon, 2009; hampel & stickler, 2005; wang et al., 2010), design and evaluation of the best ways of training online language teachers (comas-quinn 2011; ernest et al., 2012; stickler et al., 2010), the use of multimodal audio-graphic online environments has received specific attention (hampel & stickler, 2012). for years teachers have relied implicitly on prensky’s idea (2001) of “digital natives” which assumes that learners of young age are computer literate and possess all competences and skills to be able to learn effectively with and through technology that is available for them. investigation of online communication between language learners leads to more focus on learner training for the use of technology in ll. but learners can use ict in the classroom encouraged by their teachers or independently in informal settings. even digital natives are not able to use online tools proficiently and to their best advantage for the purpose of learning (jeffrey et al., 2011; thorne, 2003). they need training focused on both selection of digital artifacts effective in their learning context and ict-based learning strategies. some research ict as material culture in call 55 has pointed out the negative impact of technology on student learning (conole, 2008; ushioda, 2005). technologies “can only be effective if they are in the hands of students who know what to do with them” (figura & jarvis, 2007, p. 457) and that effective use of technologies requires learners to possess certain skills, strategies, and attitudes (hubbard, 2004). the research presented above illustrates how the technology as material culture requires further developments in training strategies not only for teachers but also for learners, how it shapes its users: learners, teachers, and researchers while they enter the multilingual digital world. feminist angle half of the language learners are women. three fourths or more teachers of languages are women, depending on the country, for example, in poland 90% of language teachers are women. thus, feminist perspective on ict as material artifacts gives an additional insight into the topic. as ict is perceived as a male domain in europe and america, females tend to diminish their computer competence and refrain from developing ict skills (gajek, p. 2012). women need stable, easy, and user-friendly digital tools. an example of such artifact is email, skype, and the majority of social media. the need for stability enhances the trend towards normalization defined by bax (2003). once learned how to operate it, the tool becomes invisible, it is used for work, communication, cooperation, and cultural or artistic purposes. interface updates are nightmares for female ict users. methodology the aim of the research was to find interrelation between teachers of languages access to digital devices, their opinions and perceptions on the usefulness of ict in language learning and teaching and actual use of digital materials in their teaching practice and for private purposes. the total number of 671 teachers of languages participated in the study from march to april 2013. the respondents answered questions distributed through the foundation for the development of the polish educational system newsletter. results the results indicate the importance of the feminist angle as 90.3% of the respondents were women and 9.7% were men. eighty point nine percent were elżbieta gajek56 aged between 25 and 45. seventy-three point three percent were teachers of english, 20.1% were teachers of german, 7.5% were teachers of russian, and 4.8% were teachers of french. seven point two percent were qualified as teachers of two languages. as the survey was distributed online, all respondents had access to hardware and software required. seventy-one point eight percent had an access to a standalone computer, 86.3% to a laptop, and 52.5% to both of them, 21.0% to a notebook, and 58.3% to an interactive whiteboard. the teachers use ict for: writing texts (95.38%), for emails (98.36%), for contacts through social media (66.02%), making films (36.81%), and taking photos (80.18%). they also use digital media for reading and listening in the language they teach 86.74%. thus, they are active and experienced computer users of digital resources. the teachers have a positive attitude towards the use of digital resources and tools in class. eighty-nine point eight percent of the respondents agree with the statement that “languages should be taught in communication with other learners abroad—also via ict.” what is more, 96.6% agree that “communication with foreign partners motivates learners to learning languages.” ninetytwo point fifty-four percent of them encourage learners to read and listen to digital texts in the language they learn, while 87.3% agree that digital films and audio materials are necessary for learning foreign languages. seventy-six percent disagree with the statement that while teaching reading and listening the teachers should not use digital devices, whereas 89.37% disagree that the use of computers in language class is a waste of time. seventy-nine point seven percent of the respondents are not afraid that pupils damage digital equipment during their lessons. as many as 81.34% also disagree that students are not competent enough to use computers for language learning. in terms of the teachers’ competences 63.28% declare to know how to use an interactive whiteboard, 62.54% are able to show learners how to use mobile devices for language learning while 60.6% know how to use them in class. however, they do not often use digital resources in class. at least every week 39.8% use dictionaries, 33.4% let pupils do tasks on an interactive whiteboard, while 25.2% use digital games. what is more, games are used mainly at primary level. only 39.5% of the respondents actively participated in international projects either etwinning or comenius, which nowadays are components of erasmus+. in the open question teachers who do not use computers in class complain about the limited access to hardware, either to computers or to an interactive whiteboard, 36.7% do not have access to the school computer lab because of the it lessons which take place there. some voices emphasize the role of teacher’s motivation to the use of ict in ll&t. ict as material culture in call 57 discussion the analysis and results show that digital materiality is the key factor in introducing and effective using of ict in ll&t. what is more, even if the language teachers are competent users of ict and their professional and private attitude towards technology is positive, the actual use of ict is not as intensive as the factors might indicate. there must be other reasons for increasing the impact of ict on ll&t. digital materials give the ground on which social and pedagogical practices are built. buckland (2000) indicates the role of school’s policy with clear managerial and organizational regulations reflecting national curriculum, local human resources—their preferences and responsibilities, systems and procedures including channels of communication, assessment of learners and teachers as well as staff development opportunities. conclusions the use of material artifacts and their successful integration into a classroom depends on many kinds of social practices built on the materiality, for example, the design of activities based on pedagogical priorities (richards, 2005). to avoid using technology for the sake of technology, instructors have to implement it on the basis of sound pedagogy and theoretical perspectives (karabulut et al., 2012) and provide learners with information about the technology which enhances language learning in informal settings outside the classroom. on the one hand, the analysis presents the need for conceptual and critical methodology reflection at every stage of development of technology. on the other hand, it shows the need for human flexibility in the technology adoption for pedagogical purposes in the multilingual world. in the case of less widely spoken languages the creation of digital resources in both international and local languages is equally important. ict’s material artifacts used in the language classroom encourage rethinking ll&t practice within a holistic ecological approach (hoven & palalas, 2011). further development of effective learning procedures can only take place through the hands-on approach and experience shared among all stakeholders, that is, learners, teachers, educational managers and leaders, software engineers and educational researchers considering all voices from various contexts. elżbieta gajek58 references bax, s. 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(2003). artifacts and cultures-of-use in intercultural communication. language learning & technology, 7(2), 38–67. ushioda, e. (2005). the role of students’ attitudes and motivation in second language learning in online language courses. calico journal, 23(1), 49–78. wang, y., chen, n.-s., & levy, m. (2010). teacher training in a synchronous cyber face-to-face classroom: characterizing and supporting the online teachers’ learning process. computer assisted language learning, 23(4), 277–293. wen-chi v. w., rong-jyue, w., & nian-shing, ch. (2015). instructional design using an inhouse built teaching assistant robot to enhance elementary school efl learning. interactive learning environments, 23(6), 696–714. elżbieta gajek60 elżbieta gajek kommunikative und informationstechnologien (tik) als materielle kultur im computergestützten sprachunterricht (njwk) z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die wechselbeziehung zwischen menschen und technik ist zweibahnig. der mensch macht sich die technik zunutze, aber auch die technik verbessert die leistungsfähigkeit des menschen und schafft bedingungen für weiterentwicklung des technikeinsatzes. diese bilaterale abhängigkeit wird hier am beispiel von anwendung der kommunikativen und informationstechnologien (tik) im fremdsprachenlehren und -lernen expliziert. sowohl der historisch betrachtete computergestützte fremdsprachenunterricht als auch heutige didaktische methoden veranschaulichen die wechselbeziehung zwischen materiellen objekten und deren ausnutzung beim lernen im mehrsprachigen internetmilieu. die lehrer können immer sachkundiger, tik im lehrund lernprozess anwenden. die schüler dagegen brauchen die strategien des erfolgreichen unterrichts mittels der digitalen lehrmittel kennenlernen. die von den fremdsprachenlehrern durchgeführten forschungen zeigen, dass obwohl materielle kultur die grundlage der sozialen und pädagogischen handlungen bildet, sind ansichten, meinungen und konkrete maßnahmen derjenige faktor, der für die anwendung der materiellen kultur beim erfolgreichen fremdsprachenunterricht entscheidend ist. theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 5 (1), 2019, pp. 11–42 10.31261/tapsla.2019.05.02 teodor petrič university of maribor, slovenia ratings of affective and non-affective aspects of german idioms in second language processing a b s t r a c t in this paper psycholinguistic and emotional properties of 619 german idiomatic expressions are explored. the list of idiomatic expressions has been adapted from citron et al. (2015), who have used it with german native speakers. in our study the same idioms were evaluated by slovene learners of german as a foreign language. our participants rated each idiom for emotional valence, emotional arousal, familiarity, concreteness, ambiguity (literality), semantic transparency, and figurativeness. they also had the task to describe the meaning of the german idioms and to rate their confidence about the attributed meaning. the aims of our study were (1) to provide descriptive norms for psycholinguistic and affective properties of a large set of idioms in german as a second language, (2) to explore the relationships between psycholinguistic and affective properties of idioms in german as a second language, and (3) to compare the ratings of the german native speakers studied in citron et al. (2015) with the ratings of the slovene second language learners from our study. on one hand, the results of the slovene participants show many similarities with those of the german native speakers, on the other hand, they show a slight positivity bias and slightly shallower emotional processing of the german idioms. our study provides data that could be useful for future studies investigating the role of affect in figurative language in a second language setting (methodology, translation science, language technology). keywords: idioms, affective properties, psycholinguistic properties, german, slovene language, affect, and idiom processing many studies addressing the relationship between emotion and language in human communication have shown that emotional aspects of words or https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4397-9365 http://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.2019.05.02 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4397-9365 teodor petrič12 word combinations affect comprehension processes in native language (jacobs, 2011; jacobs et al., 2015) and second language use (conrad, recio, & jacobs, 2011, p. 2). in everyday communication, emotional content is often conveyed with figurative (i.e., non-literal) expressions (pollio et al., 1977). according to a number of studies (e.g., fainsilber & ortony, 1987; drew & holt, 1998), figurative expressions are preferred to literal language in several discourse types, presumably to elicit empathy in the addressee and thus to sound more convincing. emotionally laden words exhibit higher levels of brain activation and are processed faster than neutral words, non-literal sentences evoke stronger emotional responses than literal sentences (bohrn et al., 2012; citron & goldberg, 2014). the question how these expressions contribute to the conveyance of affectivity still needs further investigation (citron & goldberg, 2014). the meaning of a (part of a) sentence is considered figurative if the language user has to construct the intended meaning of a sentence not only by retrieving conventional word meanings from the mental lexicon and joining them according to the principle of semantic compositionality, but also by applying stored knowledge about their relationships to specific types of situations. in many languages different types of figurative expressions can be distinguished (e.g., metaphors, proverbs, idioms, and oxymora). our study focussed on idioms, which in many languages belong to the most frequent type of figurative expressions. idioms are strings of words whose phrasal meaning cannot be derived solely from the meaning of its constituent words and appears to be fully or partially arbitrary. although the constituent words seem to contribute to the overall formal, semantic, and pragmatic properties of an idiom, most often the phrasal meaning of an idiom has to be learned to be fully understood or used in appropriate situations. therefore it is often argued that it has to be stored in some way in a mental lexicon or knowledge system, together with its constraining formal properties and contextual preferences. several models have been proposed to account for l1 idiom processing, especially for idiom comprehension (for detailed overview, see libben & titone, 2008; cieślicka, 2015). according to lexical look-up models (swinney & cutler, 1979, bobrow & bell, 1973), idioms are fixed expressions listed in the mental lexicon. linguistic processing of the string and retrieval of the idiomatic meaning proceed in parallel, with the retrieval of the idiomatic meaning being faster than the computation of its literal meaning. the idiom decomposition hypothesis (gibbs, nayak, & cutting, 1989) postulates that only decomposable idioms are processed faster than novel control phrases due to the contribution of their components to the figurative meaning of the idiomatic phrase. the graded salience hypothesis assumes that the more frequent, familiar, conventional or prototypical/stereotypical the information is, the more it is salient in one’s mind (giora, 2003, p. 28). since salience always has processing priority, salient meanings (e.g., the figurative meaning of ambiguous familiar idioms) ratings of affective and non-affective aspects of german idioms… 13 are predicted to be retrieved faster than their less salient meanings (e.g., the literal meaning of ambiguous familiar idioms). according to the configuration hypothesis (cacciari & tabossi, 1988), idioms are processed word by word, until enough information has accumulated to render the sequence of words highly expected to be an idiom. at this point, the idiomatic meaning is retrieved. the superlemma model (sprenger, levelt, & kempen, 2006, pp. 174, 176) claims that idioms are both unitary and compositional, but at different levels of their cognitive representation. it assumes a separate representation of the idiom on the lexical-syntactic processing level, that is, the superlemma, which is a representation of the syntactic properties of the idiomatic phrase linked to its constituent lemmas. but these lemmas are not bound exclusively to an idiomatic meaning. idiom processing is facilitated due to reduced competition between the constituent lemmas of the superlemma. among the above described l1 models, the configuration hypothesis (cacciari & tabossi, 1988) and the superlemma model (sprenger et al., 2006) are most compatible with our view on processing german idioms (petrič, 2014). according to the l2 model of dual idiom representation (abel, 2003), it is assumed that only non-decomposable and frequently occurring idioms are represented by entries on the conceptual level of the mental lexicon, whereas decomposable idioms are represented by lexical entries of their components. storage in the mental lexicon, but also decomposability are assumed to facilitate idiom processing. in contrast to native speakers, l2 learners tend to assess the literal meaning of idioms more often (literality bias) since they do not develop as many idiom entries in their mental lexicon and have to rely more often on the literal analysis of idiom components. the literal salience model (cieślicka, 2006; 2015) suggests that in l2 comprehension, literal meaning is generally more salient and therefore enjoys a processing advantage over the figurative meaning. the findings of siyanova-chanturia & conklin (2011) confirm that native speakers process idioms faster than novel phrases, but suggest that proficient non-native participants do not process idioms faster than novel phrases. these findings, that is, figurative meanings require more re-reading than literal ones, are in line with those in cieślicka (2006). in contrast, the study of conklin & schmitt (2008) does not observe any differences between figurative and literal meaning processing for either native or proficient non-native participants. the findings of beck & weber (2016), as well as our own research on german idioms (petrič, 2014), suggest that proficient non-native speakers process figurative meaning in a similar manner as native speakers and do not support the idiom diffusion model of liontas (2002) that translatability of idioms from l1 to l2 has a significant impact. for proficient l2 users, titone et al. (2015) come to the same conclusion as beck & weber (2016). however, matlock & heredia (2002) suggest that beginning l2 learners do not follow the same routes of idiom processing as native speakers since they seem to first access the literal teodor petrič14 meaning and translate it into to their native language. when becoming more proficient, l2 learners are able to bypass those first two less efficient steps in idiom processing. our study follows the idea that differences in l1 and l2 idiom processing are not the result of a distinct manner of processing figurative expressions but rather the result of cross-linguistic differences (cf. beck & weber, 2016). description of the experiment aims of the study several psycholinguistic properties (i.e., familiarity, meaningfulness, decomposability, semantic transparency, figurativeness, ambiguity, predictability and others) have been shown to affect idiom processing (for an overview, see libben & titone, 2008). our study is based on the work of citron, cacciari, kucharski, beck, conrad, and jacobs (2015), which not only included several psycholinguistic variables that have been already studied in some normative studies on idiomatic expressions in native language use (e.g., english, french), but also provided descriptive norms of affective variables (arousal, valence) and concreteness for german idioms. the aims of our study were (1) to provide descriptive norms for psycholinguistic and affective properties of a large set of idioms in german as a second language, (2) to explore the relationships between psycholinguistic and affective properties of idioms in german as a second language, and (3) to compare the ratings of the german native speakers studied in citron et al. (2015) with the scores of the slovene second language learners from our study. therefore a list of 619 german idioms, previously used with german native speakers (cf. citron et al., 2015), was presented to slovene learners of german as a foreign language as part of a research project on german idioms in foreign language learning (cf. jesenšek, 2014). our study provides data that could be used for future studies investigating the role of affect in figurative language in a second language setting. participants a total number of 81 slovene students of the german department of the university of maribor participated in our study, but only the results of 73 (48 female and 25 male) could be included in our analysis. our subjects were 19–22 ratings of affective and non-affective aspects of german idioms… 15 years old and had sufficient experience in working with standard computer programs (e.g., spreadsheets). their native language was slovene and after consulting lecturers from the same department, their proficiency in german as a foreign language was estimated reaching at least a b1 to b2 level (“independent level”) according to the european reference frame for language competence (erflc). language material the language material in our study consisted of a list of 619 german idioms, previously selected by citron et al. (2015) on the basis of several idiom lists and rated by german native speakers. citron et al. (2015, pp. 7–8) used the following criteria of distinction between idioms and other types of figurative expressions: – an idiom in the list should consist of a verbal phrase (vp) and one or several arguments, that is, to spill the beans or to give someone a hard time (but without distinguishing between internal and external syntactic valency of an idiom); – the verb of an idiom should be capable of inflection (i.e., person & tense); – the meaning of an idiom should be conventionalised (contrary to metaphors) and – an idiom should not consist of an entire sentence (contrary to proverbs like a man’s home is his castle). the idioms in the list were presented as infinitival clauses, as it was the case in the experiment with german native speakers conducted by citron et al. (2015). the idiomatic expressions consisted of two to nine words or nine to 43 letters. procedure our participants received the same tasks, stimuli, and instructions as the german native speakers in the study of citron et al. (2015, pp. 15–18). employing a questionnaire in electronic spreadsheet form, we tried to obtain information on how our participants were rating the linguistic properties of the german idiomatic expressions on the list. after general instructions with information on the topic of the questionnaire, the participants received specific instructions on how to rate the idiomatic expressions according to several criteria and scales, three german examples and the list of 619 (unrated) german idioms. the participants of our study received the task to rate the following properties of the idiomatic expressions: familiarity, semantic teodor petrič16 transparency, figurativeness, concreteness, ambiguity, emotional valence, and emotional arousal. the participants also had the task to describe the meaning of the german idioms in their own words and subsequently to rate their confidence in the appropriateness of their description. the descriptions of the idioms written down by our participants (i.e., their knowledge of the idiomatic meaning) were assessed based on the descriptions in german idiom collections (ephras, 2006; udem, 2001) and rated dichotomously as “correct” [1] or “wrong” [0]. in the general instructions the participants were urged not to leave any expression unrated and to accomplish all tasks in a spontaneous fashion. in the specific instructions they were also asked to accomplish each rating task subsequently (column by column in the electronic spreadsheet): first emotional valence, then emotional arousal, followed by familiarity, semantic transparency, figurativeness, concreteness, and ambiguity, concluding with the description of the idiomatic meaning and the rating of their confidence in their own description). variables in the experiment in the experiment our participants rated or described the german idioms by the following variables: familiarity, semantic transparency, figurativeness, concreteness, ambiguity (also known as literality or literal plausibility), emotional valence, emotional arousal, confidence into one’s own idiomatic knowledge and knowledge of idiomatic meaning. ambiguity was also determined by the experimenters of the study citron et al. (2015). another variable, that is, the length of the idiomatic construction, was calculated by citron et al. (2015). in the instructions the participants were given descriptions of the rating scales and typical examples (for a detailed view of all instructions, scales and examples, cf. citron et al., 2015, appendix a). familiarity refers to the subjective frequency of exposure to idioms (titone & connine, 1994), that is, how often one has read or heard an idiom. familiarity may differ from objective frequency estimates of expressions occurring in written and spoken texts. the slovene students had to rate the familiarity of the german idioms (familiarity.m) according to the same seven-point likert-scale (ranging from one to seven, that is, from very unfamiliar to very familiar) as the german native speakers in citron et al. (2015). semantic transparency (sem.transp.m) relates to the degree of how easy the idiomatic meaning of a german idiom could be derived from the (literal) meanings of its constituents. the german native speakers in citron et al. (2015) and our slovene participants were instructed to rate the semantic transparency of the german idioms according to a seven-point likert-scale (ranging from one to seven, i.e., from very opaque to very transparent). ratings of affective and non-affective aspects of german idioms… 17 figurativeness relates to the degree to which an idiomatic expression is perceived as expressing a non-literal meaning. the figurativeness of the german idioms (figurative.m) was rated by the german native speakers in citron et al. (2015) and our slovene participants according to a seven-point likert-scale (ranging from one to seven, i.e., from non-figurative to very figurative). concreteness (concrete.m) was described as a property of a linguistic element to be experienced with one or more of the human senses. the german native speakers in citron et al. (2015) and the slovene second language learners in our study were instructed to rate the concreteness of the german idioms according to a seven-point likert scale (ranging from one to seven, i.e., from very abstract to very concrete). ambiguity (also called literality or literal plausibility) refers to whether an idiom also has a semantically plausible literal meaning (cronk, lima, & schweigert, 1993) if occurring in an appropriate context. in citron et al. (2015) the german idioms were determined by the experimenters as ambiguous or not ambiguous (variable ambiguity.d), but in our study the slovene participants were instructed to determine idiom ambiguity themselves (variable ambiguity). emotional valence (emo.val.m) was one of the two obtained affective variables describing to which extent a stimulus was rated positive or negative (cf. russell, 1980). the german native speakers in citron et al. (2015) and the slovene second language learners in our study were instructed to rate the german idioms according to a seven-point scale ranging from –3 to +3 (i.e., from very negative to very positive). another affective variable was included during our statistical analysis by calculating the square of emotional valence, which was called emotional valence2 (emo.val.m^2 or emo.val.msq). this variable represents the degree of stimulus emotionality independent of its polarity and enables us to explore potential quadratic relationships between emotional valence and other variables emotional arousal (arousal.m) was the second affective variable employed in both studies and referred to the extent an event was emotionally stimulating, regardless of its polarity (barrett & russell, 1998). the german native speakers in citron et al. (2015) and the slovene participants from our study were instructed to rate the emotional arousal of a german idiom according to a seven-point likert scale (ranging from one to seven, i.e., from not emotionally stimulating to very stimulating or intense). knowledge of idiomatic meaning refers to whether or not the correct idiomatic meaning is known. some studies (tabossi, arduino, & fanari, 2011) tested this variable by asking participants to provide a written explanation of the idiomatic meaning, whereas others measured the extent to which participants were confident about their own knowledge of the idiomatic meaning (bonin, méot, & bugaiska, 2013; libben & titone, 2008; teodor petrič18 titone & connine, 1994). since knowledge of the idiomatic meaning and confidence can differ, we tested these two variables separately. the german participants in citron et al. (2015) and our slovene participants received the task to describe the meaning of the german idioms in their own words, that is, their knowledge of the idiomatic meaning (variable know.idiom. meaning, measured in %). the descriptions were evaluated as “correct” or “false” by comparing them with those provided in collections of german idioms (ephras, 2006; udem, 2001). due to evaluation issues concerning the slovene participant data, this variable has not been included in the statistical analysis presented in this article. confidence (confidence.m) refers to the extent to which participants are sure about their own knowledge (bonin et al., 2013). the german native speakers in the study of citron et al. (2015) and the slovene participants in our study were instructed to rate their own definitions of the idiom meanings according to a seven-point likert scale (ranging from one to seven, i.e., from poor to excellent knowledge). in contrast to the german participants, the slovene second language learners were instructed to rate their idiomatic knowledge after they had already provided the definitions of the idioms meanings. the length of an idiom, that is, the number of words [length.w ] or letters [length.l] it consists of, was determined by the experimenters of the study citron et al. (2015) and was included in the analysis as a psycholinguistic variable since online-studies have shown that it has substantial impact on the cognitive processing of phrases. expected relationships between the variables the sensitivity to emotional content in a second language is still an open issue in research. according to some researchers (bond & lai, 1986), second language processing would differ from first language processing by increased emotional distance (shallow encoding of emotional content, emotion words experienced in fewer contexts). recent research rather seems to support the assumption that second language processing is not always less emotional but rather modulated by several factors such as age of acquisition, proficiency level and exposure to the second language environment (conrad et al., 2011, p. 2). since the proficiency of the second language learners included in our study has reached a sufficiently high level (i.e., b1 or b2 according to erflc), we assumed that the cognitive processing of german idiomatic expressions in our second language learners was qualitatively comparable to the processing in german native speakers. therefore, we generally expected to replicate correlations between psycholinguistic and affective variables found in the study of citron et al. (2015) with german native speakers. ratings of affective and non-affective aspects of german idioms… 19 according to our general assumption from the previous paragraph, we expected to obtain positive correlations between familiarity, knowledge, and confidence that have been found in previous normative studies on idioms in native language use (citron et al., 2015; bonin et al., 2013; libben & titone, 2008; tabossi et al., 2011). since we assumed a basic preference for less cognitive complexity, we also expected positive correlations between familiarity on the one hand, and transparency and concreteness on the other, as well as a negative correlation between familiarity and idiom length: that is, it should be easier for a second language learner to become familiar with shorter, transparent and/or more concrete idioms than with longer, opaque and/or more abstract ones. furthermore, we expected a negative relationship between familiarity and figurativeness, since constituents in figurative expressions exhibit less semantic overlap than those in literal expressions (cf. beeman, 1998) and should be more difficult to decode. furthermore, we expected positive correlations between familiarity on one hand and both affective variables (valence and arousal) on the other hand, that is, it should be easier for a second language learner to become familiar with expressions of polarizing and stimulating content (high contrast between semantic levels) than with expressions of neutral content (low contrast between semantic levels). concreteness, semantic transparency, figurativeness, idiom length, valence, and arousal have not yet been tested for idioms in second language acquisition. therefore we expected similar correlations as found and discussed in citron et al. (2015) for german native speakers: positive correlations between transparency and concreteness, transparency and length, figurativeness and length, transparency and arousal, concreteness and arousal, figurativeness and arousal, and negative correlations between transparency and figurativeness and between concreteness and figurativeness. furthermore, we expected positive correlations between knowledge and confidence on the one hand, and transparency and concreteness on the other in our second language data. we also tested whether the properties of ambiguous and unambiguous idioms differed, and how they were correlated with the other studied variables. in line with the findings in citron et al. (2015, pp. 12–13), we expected negative correlations between ambiguity on the one hand, and valence and arousal on the other. furthermore, in citron et al. (2015) ambiguous idioms were rated more concrete than unambiguous ones, possibly because it was easier to establish a link to the literal meaning of an ambiguous idiom than to imagine the meaning of unambiguous idioms, exhibiting figurative meaning only. another difference found in citron et al. (2015) was that unambiguous idioms were better known than ambiguous ones. similar relationships were also expected in our second language data. furthermore, we also expected a negative correlation between teodor petrič20 ambiguity and transparency, that is, ambiguous idioms should be rated as less transparent, and a positive correlation between ambiguity and figurativeness, that is, ambiguous idioms should be rated as more figurative. concerning the relationships between affective variables, we expected to replicate the results based on german idioms in native language use (citron et al., 2015) and single words (e.g., citron et al., 2014)—namely, a quadratic relationship between valence and arousal (i.e., the more valenced an idiom, the more arousing it is) and a negative linear relationship (i.e., negative idioms are rated as more arousing than positive idioms). results of the experiment descriptive statistics and distribution of variables table 1 displays descriptive statistic values for the variables obtained in this experiment: the number of observations for every variable (n), the average value (mean) and its standard deviation (sd), the central value (median) and its median absolute deviation (mad), its standard error (se) and also information on the distributional characteristics of a variable, that is, its skewness (skew) and peakedness or tail extremity (kurtosis). knowledge of the idiomatic meaning is not included in this table. the distribution of the variables was checked visually and numerically with specific tests in the statistics program r and found to be acceptable to the assumptions made for applying regression techniques (pena & slate, 2014; ruginski, 2016; prabhakaran, 2017); only the variable length of idiom was logarithmically transformed. table 1 descriptive statistics of the obtained variables variable n mean sd median mad skew kurtosis se emotional valence 45645 –0.19 1.94 0 2.97 0.19 –1.16 0.01 emotional arousal 45690 4.00 1.73 4 1.48 –0.06 –0.83 0.01 familiarity 45730 4.40 1.82 5 1.48 –0.24 –0.97 0.01 semantic transparency 45229 3.91 1.78 4 1.48 0.07 –1.04 0.01 figurativeness 45727 4.72 1.63 5 1.48 –0.44 –0.55 0.01 concreteness 45721 3.71 1.68 4 1.48 0.07 –0.82 0.01 ambiguity 45103 0.36 0.48 0 0 0.56 –1.68 0 confidence 42447 5.08 1.58 5 1.48 –0.59 –0.33 0.01 length.l 45806 22.89 5.79 22 5.93 0.69 0.46 0.03 length.w 45806 4.48 1.29 4 1.48 0.40 –0.12 0.01 ratings of affective and non-affective aspects of german idioms… 21 the mean values of the ratings of both participant groups, that is, the german native speakers (l1-german) studied in citron et al. (2015) and the slovene second language learners (l2-german) from our study, were statistically compared with a manova (i.e., with participant groups and idioms as independent variables and all affective and psycholinguistic variables together as dependent variable). according to manova the difference between the groups was significant (pillai = 0.7985; f(8, 611) = 302.58; p < 0.001). table 2 shows that the differences between the mean values of nearly all variables of both participant groups were significant (p < 0.05), except in the case of figurativeness with no significant mean value difference between the participant groups (4.72 vs. 4.70; p = 0.22). table 2 mean values of slovene and german participants and f-tests in manova variable l2-german l1 german f-value df p-value valence –0.19 –0.58 389.41 1, 618 < 0.001 arousal 4.00 3.82 90.14 1, 618 < 0.001 familiarity 4.39 4.76 192.60 1, 618 < 0.001 transparency 3.91 4.13 45.94 1, 618 < 0.001 figurativeness 4.72 4.70 1.51 1, 618 0.22 concreteness 3.71 3.34 172.58 1, 618 < 0.001 ambiguity 0.36 0.47 47.85 1, 618 < 0.001 confidence 5.06 6.10 1552.37 1, 618 < 0.001 the mean values of nearly all scales were significantly different in the data of both participant groups, however, the correlation values show striking similarities, that is, strong correlations in the case of emotional valence (93%), emotional arousal (78%), familiarity (54%), semantic transparency (54%), figurativeness (60%), concreteness (51%), and ambiguity (67%). in the case of confidence the german and slovene participants differed strongly, thus the correlation coefficient was very low and not significant (–3%). from our point of view, these results suggest that l1 and l2 processing of idioms by and large follow the same principles. however, manova displayed quantitative differences between the participant groups, estimated to belong to different erflc competence levels (b1/b2 vs. c2), and most of the test results suggest deeper idiomatic knowledge of the german native speakers. teodor petrič22 internal and external validity an internal consistency analysis shows the reliability of an implemented measure in a study. the most often used measure of the internal consistency of evaluation scales is cronbach’s alpha: the higher the α coefficient, the more the items have shared covariance and probably measure the same underlying evaluation scale or concept. according to our consistency analysis (cf. revelle, 2018 on r-package psych), the evaluation data of all the scales in our experiment can be considered consistent since cronbach’s alpha reach values above the threshold (α > 0.7), which according to kline (1999) indicates high consistency or reliability of the evaluation data table 3 internal consistency of scales (cronbach’s alpha values) arousal valence familiarity transparency figurativeness concreteness ambiguity confidence 0.91 0.98 0.94 0.9 0.89 0.82 0.95 0.88 inter-rater reliability indicates to which extent the ratings of different participants agree with one another. we used krippendorff’s method to analyse the inter-rater reliability of our rating data. krippendorff’s alpha calculates the probability of empirical agreements and deviations (nordmann, cleland, & bull, 2014, p. 5). our analysis with 73 raters and 619 items indicates that the ratings of the slovene participants reached only a low level of agreement, much below krippendorff’s recommended threshold of 0.67 and therefore the ratings can be assumed to be not independent from the participants in the study. the highest agreement was found with emotional valence, followed by ambiguity and familiarity, the lowest with confidence and concreteness. these values indicate that the ratings of the idiom properties are only to a small degree independent of our participants and therefore they exhibit a low degree of replicability or external validity. similar low values of inter-rater agreement (based on krippendorff’s alpha) have been found by nordmann & jambazova (2017, p. 202) in a rating study on english and bulgarian idioms. according to nordmann et al. (2014) the relationship between the evaluations can be consistent (i.e., the evaluation scale can be internal consistent), but this does not indicate that different participants show high agreement (i.e., high inter-rater reliability). ratings of affective and non-affective aspects of german idioms… 23 table 4 inter-rater reliability (krippendorff’s alpha values, calculated with r package irr, cf. gamer, lemon & fellows, 2012) arousal valence familiarity transparency figura tiveness concret eness ambiguity confidence items 619 619 619 619 619 619 619 619 raters 73 73 73 73 73 73 73 73 value 0.0798 0.3177 0.1454 0.0631 0.0567 0.0325 0.1703 0.0278 relationships among variables statistical procedures and criteria. in order to study the relationships among affective and non-affective variables, we mainly followed the statistical procedure described in citron et al. (2015, p. 10). we calculated partial correlations between each variable. significant partial correlations (with p < 0.05) were distinguished according to their correlation coefficient r as small correlations (0 < r < ±0.1), moderate correlations (±0.1 < r < ±0.3) and large correlations (±0.3 < r). in contrast to citron et al. (2015, p. 9), who applied a distribution independent bootstrapping technique for all parametric statistical analyses, we used ordinary least squares regression and mixed effects regression modelling techniques. since it was known from the literature (efron & tibshirani, 1993) that emotional valence and arousal ratings show a quadratic relationship (figure 1), we also included squared emotional valence as predictor for arousal ratings. suitable regression models were chosen on the basis of backward selection correlations between affective variables. in the presented idiom list adapted from citron et al. (2015), idioms with negative valence (n = 422) prevailed over such with positive valence (n = 194) or zero valence (n = 3). the slovene participants rated 372 idioms as negative, 245 as positive and 2 as zero valenced. the data of the slovene participants indicate a slight positivity bias compared to the ratings of the german participants. this is most apparent with average valence ratings between –0.5 and 0.5, which show a balanced ratio between negative and positive ratings in the slovene participant data (80 vs. 76) and a stronger negative tendency in the german participant data (131 vs. 34). however, the above described overall ratio in the valence ratings of the german and slovene participants is mirrored in the evaluation data of both participant groups: linear emotional valence was negatively correlated with emotional arousal (i.e., in the data of the slovene participants, pearson’s correlation coefficient r = –0.254, spearman’s rank correlation coefficient ro = –0.339, p < 0.05, calculated with the r package ppcor, cf. kim, 2015). according teodor petrič24 to cacciari (1998) and drew and holt (1988), this result seems to be typical for idioms as an indirect form of communication, preferred to the more straight forward literal expressions in the case of statements with negative connotation. the non-linear (u-shaped) relationship between valence and arousal found in the data of the slovene and german participants also corresponds to the u-shaped relationship between emotional dimensions found with single words (cf. bradley & lang, 1999; citron et al., 2015, p. 11). the non-linear relationship is less pronounced in the data of the slovene participants compared to the german participants. the following figure 1 reports the partial correlations between emotional arousal and emotional valence in the data of both participant groups. due to some differences in statistical methodology, the numbers for the german participants in the following table slightly differ from those in citron et al. (2015). figure 1. distribution of the affective variables in the ratings of the slovene learners of german as a foreign language (green = regression line, red = trend line). correlations between affective and psycholinguistic variables. the partial correlations between each affective variable and non-affective variables in our experiment with slovene second language learners are summarized in table 5, showing pearson’s partial correlation coefficients (calculated by r package rcmdr, cf. fox, 2017). significant correlations with p < 0.05 are printed bold, marginally significant correlations with 0.05 < p < 0.10 are in italics. due to minor differences in statistic methodology, the numbers for the german participants slightly differ from those given in citron et al. (2015). ratings of affective and non-affective aspects of german idioms… 25 table 5 partial correlation coefficients between affective and non-affective variables in the data of the slovene and german participants variable emotional arousal emotional valence slovene german slovene german familiarity 0,24 0,15 0,09 0,16 transparency 0,19 0,25 0,04 0,07 figurativeness 0,27 0,31 0,11 –0,01 concreteness –0,02 0,08 0,03 –0,08 confidence 0,01 –0,07 0,01 0,00 length.letters 0,05 0,01 0,00 –0,03 length.words –0,03 –0,01 0,03 0,09 the participants from both groups associated more familiar, transparent, and figurative german idioms with higher levels of emotional arousal. these three partial correlations were moderately high, with figurativeness showing stronger correlation than familiarity and semantic transparency. the correlation between familiarity and arousal in the slovene ratings was stronger than in the german ratings. in case of transparency we observed the opposite. in contrast to the german participant data, the correlation between arousal and concreteness was not significant in the data of the slovene participants. both participant groups associated more familiar german idioms with higher levels of linear emotional valence, though more strongly in the german data. the groups differed in other cases: figurativeness was moderately correlated in the slovene data, idiom length, measured as number of words, in the german data. correlations among psycholinguistic variables. the partial correlations between each pair of non-affective variables in our experiment with slovene second language learners (si) and german native speakers (d) are summarized in table 6, showing parametric pearson partial correlation coefficients (calculated by r package rcmdr, cf. fox, 2017). significant correlations with p < 0.05 are printed bold, marginally significant correlations with 0.05 < p < 0.10 are in italics we found twelve significant partial correlations between pairs of nonaffective variables in the data of the slovene participants. four of these twelve correlations were large and eight of them moderate, nine of twelve correlations were positive, three were negative. the obtained significant partial correlations are in concord with our previously described expectations, except one (i.e., between familiarity and figurativeness). teodor petrič26 figure 2. partial correlations between emotional arousal and non-affective variables (ratings of german and slovene participants). figure 3. partial correlations between emotional valence and non-affective variables (ratings of german and slovene participants). ratings of affective and non-affective aspects of german idioms… 27 ta bl e 6 pa rt ia l co rr el at io ns b et w ee n no naf fe ct iv e va ri ab le s (s lo ve ne p ar tic ip an ts = b el ow d ia go na l, g er m an p ar tic ip an ts ab ov e di ag on al ) si / d fa m ili ar ity tr an sp ar en cy fi gu ra tiv en es s c on cr et en es s c on fid en ce le ng th .l le ng th .w fa m ili ar ity 0. 01 7 0. 02 0 – 0. 00 3 – 0. 05 4 –0 .1 48 0. 04 5 tr an sp ar en cy 0. 44 4 –0 .6 50 0. 15 2 – 0. 00 1 0. 07 8 0. 09 6 fi gu ra tiv en es s 0. 10 1 –0 .4 81 –0 .1 90 0. 04 0 0. 05 3 0. 13 3 c on cr et en es s – 0. 01 4 0. 11 3 –0 .2 77 – 0. 04 2 0. 06 1 – 0. 00 7 c on fid en ce 0. 49 6 0. 15 9 0. 13 7 0. 07 7 0. 00 3 0. 04 8 le ng th i n le tte rs –0 .1 07 0. 03 9 – 0. 06 4 – 0. 05 3 0. 01 1 0. 73 5 le ng th i n w or ds 0. 05 0 – 0. 03 1 0. 14 4 0. 11 1 0. 06 2 0. 75 6 teodor petrič28 the four large correlations obtained from the data were the positive correlations between familiarity and transparency, familiarity and confidence, and between both measures of idiom length (i.e., number of letters vs. words), and the negative correlation between transparency and figurativeness. the large positive correlation between familiarity and transparency of german idioms corresponds to experimental results obtained with single words (montefinese, ambrosini, fairfield, & mammarella, 2014). the large positive correlation between familiarity and confidence was expected from other idiom studies (citron et al., 2015; bonin et al., 2013; libben & titone, 2008; tabossi et al., 2011). the large negative correlation between transparency and figurativeness was expected and also observed with german native speakers in the study of citron et al. (2015, p. 12): a figurative meaning is semantically less transparent and vice versa the eight moderate correlations from the slovene data were either positive correlations (i.e., between familiarity and figurativeness, transparency and concreteness, transparency and confidence, figurativeness and confidence, figurativeness and idiom length, and between concreteness and idiom length), or negative correlations (i.e., between familiarity and idiom length, and between figurativeness and concreteness). these moderate correlations (with the exception of the first mentioned) were expected due to similar, though not always significant relationships in the study of citron et al. (2015). from the ratings of the german participants (cf. citron et al., 2015) eight significant partial correlations between non-affective variables were obtained: one large positive correlation (between both measures of idiom length), one large negative correlation (between transparency and figurativeness), three positive moderate correlations (between transparency and concreteness, transparency and idiom length, and between figurativeness and idiom length), and two negative moderate correlations (between familiarity and idiom length, and between figurativeness and concreteness). confidence was not in a significant relationship with any of the other psycholinguistic variables, but knowledge of idiomatic meaning (excluded from analysis of the slovene participant data) was highly correlated with familiarity. in both participant groups (german and slovene), the following significant correlations could be observed: between familiarity and idiomatic knowledge (i.e., confidence ratings of the slovene participants vs. percentage of correct idiomatic descriptions of the german participants), familiarity and idiom length (i.e., shorter idioms were more familiar), transparency and figurativeness (i.e., the more transparent an idiom, the less figurative it was rated, and vice versa), transparency and concreteness (i.e., more transparent idioms were also rated as more concrete), figurativeness and concreteness (i.e., the more figurative an idiom was rated, the more it was rated as abstract), and between figurativeness and idiom length (i.e., idioms with a larger number of constituent words ratings of affective and non-affective aspects of german idioms… 29 were rated as more figurative). unsurprisingly, the high correlation between both measures of idiom length was found in the data of both participant groups. smaller differences between both participant groups concern the moderate correlations with idiom length. the slovene participants associated longer idioms with higher levels of figurativeness and concreteness, but the german participants with higher levels of figurativeness and transparency. both scales (transparency and concreteness) are positively correlated with each other and similar with respect to their hearer-friendly effect. two more obvious differences between the participant groups concern the positive correlations between familiarity on the one hand, and transparency and figurativeness on the other, the former showing a strong correlation, the latter a moderate one. the strong correlation between familiarity and transparency was expected since it should be easier for the slovene second language learners to become familiar with transparent idioms. the (unexpected) positive partial correlation between familiarity and figurativeness seems to be due to the moderating effect of transparency in the slovene participant data. the simple (bivariate) correlation between familiarity and figurativeness was negative (r = –0.18, p < 0.05) and seemed to confirm our assumption that figurative expressions are of greater cognitive complexity than transparent expressions and therefore more difficult to learn and become familiar with. ambiguous compared to unambiguous idioms. in contrast to the procedure in citron et al. (2015) where idiom ambiguity was categorized by the researchers, the task to rate the ambiguity of the presented german idioms was accomplished by the slovene second language learners of our study. the ratings of the slovene participants and the german researchers of the study citron et al. (2015) were strongly correlated (r = 0,665; n = 619), but nonetheless, the difference between the l1and l2-evaluations of idiom ambiguity was significant according to a non-parametric kruskal-wallis-test (χ2 = 275.03; df = 1; p < 0.001). the slovene participants assigned only about 36.4% to the group of ambiguous idioms, the german researchers of the study citron et al. (2015) about 47.3%. it is unclear whether the slovene participants spontaneously recognized only the figurative meaning or rather only the literal meaning of the presented ambiguous german idioms. according to abel (2003), second language learners rely to a greater extent on the literal meaning of idiom components than native speakers. but since the participants knew the task was about german idioms, it is also very likely that the slovene participants were biased and that plausible literal meanings came less often to their minds. in order to compare the effect of idiom ambiguity on the ratings of the slovene and german participants, we used the dichotomous categorization of the experimenters in citron et al. (2015). the mean values of the slovene and german participants according to ambiguous and unambiguous idioms are teodor petrič30 provided in table 7 (due to our methodology the values for the german participants in some cases slightly differ from those given in citron et al. (2015, pp. 12–13, 14). significant differences between mean values in each participant group were subject to manova (i.e., with all affective and non-affective variables as dependent variables and ambiguity determined by citron et al. (2015) as independent variable) and are printed bold (i.e., with p < 0.05 as significance threshold for individual variables). the overall manova results for the slovene participants (pillai = 0.1336; f (10, 608) = 9.38; p < 0.001) and the german participants (pillai = 0.2089; f (11, 607) = 14.57; p < 0.001) were significant. table 7 mean values of variables accounting for ambiguity (as determined by citron et al., 2015) variable slovene participants german participants ambiguous unambiguous ambiguous unambiguous emotional valence –0.21 –0.17 –0.62 –0.56 emotional valence2 1.03 1.34 1.86 2.29 emotional arousal 3.92 4.07 3.70 3.92 familiarity 4.39 4.40 4.75 4.78 semantic transparency 3.88 3.93 4.06 4.19 figurativeness 4.64 4.79 4.66 4.73 concreteness 3.80 3.62 3.63 3.08 confidence 5.06 5.07 6.11 6.09 idiomatic knowledge ... ... 89.61 91.91 length in letters 23 23 23 23 length in words 5 4 5 4 number of idioms 293 326 293 326 both participant groups rated ambiguous german idioms as less valenced (i.e., valence squared, independently of whether positively or negatively) and less stimulating, but as more concrete than the unambiguous idioms. citron et al. (2015, p. 13) argue that the literal plausible meaning of ambiguous idioms interferes with its idiomatic meaning and reduces emotional rating values, but makes it easier to produce mental images which can be more directly associated with sensory modalities. furthermore, the slovene participants rated ambiguous idioms as less figurative. the german participants showed the same (but not significant) tendency. the tendency to rate ambiguous idioms as less figurative than unambiguous idioms seems to fit with data from neuro-imaging showing the stronger emotional engagement of figurative formulations over their ratings of affective and non-affective aspects of german idioms… 31 literal counterparts (citron & goldberg, 2014). the idiomatic knowledge of the german participants (i.e., the percentage of correct idiomatic descriptions) reached higher levels with unambiguous idioms than with ambiguous idioms. this outcome is in line with the suggestion that the plausible literal interpretation of ambiguous idioms causes interference with the figurative interpretation and makes it more difficult to describe the meaning. this relationship has not been statistically tested yet with the slovene data. mean confidence levels (i.e., another way to obtain information on idiom knowledge) were not significantly different for ambiguous and unambiguous idioms in neither of the two participant groups. regression models regression models with familiarity as dependent variable. the ordinary least squares regression model s1 for the estimation of idiom familiarity (familiarity.m), including six significant predictors, can account for 59% of the variance in the data of the slovene participants (r2 = 0.58; r = 0.77; f(6, 612) = 145.3; p < 0.001): (s1) estimated familiarity = –2.61 + 0.29*emotional arousal + 0.05*emotional valence + 0.49*semantic transparency + 0.88*confidence – 0.19*log(length.l) + 0.28*ambiguity. according to model s1, familiarity reached higher levels if the idiom was rated more stimulating, more positive, more transparent, shorter and more ambiguous (i.e., literally plausible). the model of the slovene evaluation data resembles the model of the german participant data (g1) in several aspects. the regression line was as follows (cf. citron et al. (2015, p. 12): (g1) estimated familiarity = 0.19*arousal (log 10) + 0.38*knowledge – 0.23*length in letters (log 10) + 0.11*emotional valence – 0.14*emotional valence2 in the german participant data, knowledge of idiomatic meaning was the strongest predictor for idiom familiarity. this result corresponded to the strong effect of confidence in the regression analysis of the slovene participant data. furthermore, we could observe that higher levels of familiarity were in both participant groups attributed to shorter german idioms and to those rated more teodor petrič32 stimulating and positive. the relationship between familiarity and valence complies with the experimental results on emotional-laden words (cf. citron et al., 2015, p. 12), which could imply that participants in normative studies prefer to declare familiarity with positive concepts and less so with negative ones. the differences between the german and slovene familiarity estimates concern valence squared, semantic transparency and ambiguity. the regression analysis of the slovene participant data did not confirm a quadratic relationship between familiarity and emotional valence, and the regression analysis of the german data did not show any significant effect of transparency and ambiguity (i.e., literal plausibility). these results suggest that second language processing of idioms compared to first language processing relies more strongly on transparency and literal plausibility and less strongly on emotional aspects of complex language expressions. regression models with emotional arousal as dependent variable. the ordinary least squares regression model s2 for the estimation of emotional arousal of the slovene participants, including five significant predictors and one marginally significant variable (i.e., log (length.l)), can account for 40% of the variance (r2 = 0.40; r = 0.64; f(6, 612) = 69.14; p < 0.001), with ambiguity excluded 39% (r2 = 0.39; r = 0.63; f(5, 613) = 79.19; p < 0.001); transparency, concreteness, and confidence were not significant (p > 0.05): (s2) estimated emotional arousal = 1.81 – 0.12*emotional valence + 0.17*emotional valence2 + 0.22*familiarity + 0.16*figurativeness + 0.11*log(length.l) – 0.30*ambiguity. in contrast to our regression above, the mixed effects regression model s3 also accounted for two random effects (participants and idioms) and thus resulted in seven significant main effects (aic = 157514; χ2 (7) = 2030.2; p < 0.001―compared to the null model with random effects only, aic = 159530); concreteness and idiom length were not significant (p > 0.05): (s3) estimated emotional arousal = 2.59 – 0.05*emotional valence + 0.08*emotional valence2 + 0.08*familiarity + 0.05*transparency + 0.07*figurativeness + 0.05*confidence – 0.06*ambiguity + (1|participants) + (1|idioms). according to model s3, higher levels of familiarity, transparency, figurativeness, confidence and valence squared increased the levels of emotional arousal in the data of the slovene participants. negative valence was more stimulating than positive valence. idiom ambiguity, rated by the slovene participants, decreased emotional arousal levels. ratings of affective and non-affective aspects of german idioms… 33 according to both models (s2 and s3), the slovene second language learners attributed higher levels of emotional arousal to more negatively rated, higher valenced, more familiar and more figurative german idioms than to positively rated, lower valenced, less familiar and less figurative idioms. the predictor idiom length was marginally significant in model s2, that is, idiom length had a small positive effect on arousal levels, but after also accounting for random effects in model s3, semantic transparency and confidence (i.e., referring to idiomatic knowledge) turned significant instead. in both models, concreteness was not significant. the significant impact of ambiguity on arousal levels was dealt with in the former section on partial correlations. figure 4. mixed effects regression model s3. the regression models of the slovene evaluation data (s2 and s3) are in line with our above stated expectations and resemble the model of the german evaluation data (g2) in several aspects. the regression line was as follows (cf. citron et al. (2015, p. 11)): (g2) estimated emotional arousal = 0.15*familiarity + 0.13*concreteness + 0.29*figurativeness + 0.15*semantic transparency – 0.13*emotional valence + 0.48*emotional valence 2 teodor petrič34 in both participant groups, higher levels of arousal were attributed to more familiar, more figurative, emotionally less neutral and more negative german idioms. however, in the data of the german participants, concreteness was a significant predictor. another difference worth mentioning was that familiarity in the slovene models (s2 and s3) showed a stronger effect on higher levels of emotional arousal than figurativeness and squared emotional valence, whereas in the german participant model g2, we could observe the opposite. furthermore, concreteness seemed to be conceptually less clear to the slovene participants than ambiguity (i.e., literal plausibility), thus only the latter showed a significant effect on arousal levels. conclusion the aims of this study were to provide second language norms for psycholinguistic and affective properties of german idioms in second language processing, to explore the relationships between them, and to compare the ratings of slovene second language learners (from our study) with those of german native speakers (studied in citron et al., 2015). in our summary, we first turn to the relationships concerning emotional variables. in both studies the participants associated more valenced idiomatic meanings with higher levels of arousal, with negative idioms leading to a higher level of arousal than positive idioms. these results may reflect the tendency that non-literal expressions are preferred over literal ones when speakers make negative statements (cf. cacciari, 1998; drew & holt, 1988). however, the ratings of the slovene participants indicated a slight positivity bias compared to those of the german participants. this result may lend some support for the view that a positivity bias is to be expected in second language processing (cf. schumann, 1998). furthermore, the non-linear (u-shaped) relationship between arousal and valence was less pronounced in the data of the slovene participants than in the data of the german participants. these details may support the view of attenuated emotionality (or emotional detachment) of second language processing (cf. harris, 2004). the preference for non-literal expressions in emotionally less desirable situations was also indirectly supported by the tendency of both participant groups to associate more figurative idioms with higher levels of arousal, and by the tendency of the slovene participants to associate them with higher levels of valence. according to citron et al. (2015) these results may reflect a general feature of language since also obtained with single words (e.g., citron et al., 2014; võ et al., 2009). ratings of affective and non-affective aspects of german idioms… 35 the positive correlation of semantic transparency and arousal, observed in both participant groups, seems to support the assumption that it is easier to attribute high arousal values to idioms in which the literal meaning of the constituent words clearly contributes to the idiomatic interpretation. in both participant groups, emotional valence and arousal had a positive linear correlation with familiarity, which supports the assumption that it is easier to attribute higher levels of valence and arousal to familiar idioms. but in contrast to the german participant group, the data of the slovene participants did not confirm a negative quadratic relationship between valence and familiarity. the authors of the study citron et al. (2015, p. 11) argue that the negative quadratic relationship in the german participant data could be connected with higher token frequency of positive idioms in speech. in the data of the german participant group, concreteness was positively correlated with emotional arousal, supporting the assumption that concrete concepts with a direct reference to sensory modalities may be seen as more linked to physiological states (citron et al., 2015, p. 11). this assumption was not confirmed in the data of the slovene participants. the correlation analysis in our study indicates that concreteness, being substantially moderated by transparency and ambiguity, may be a less reliable scale in second language analysis. many idiom meanings appear to be stored and comprehended with the support of mental images (e.g., the idiom constituent kater in the opaque german idiom einen kater haben, “to have a hangover,” but literally “to have a male cat”). thus, idiomatic meanings, though abstract in meaning, can be associated with high levels of imageability. a positive correlation between emotional arousal and imageability has been already observed with single words (citron et al., 2015, p. 11; ljubešić, fišer, & peti-stantić, 2018). ambiguity was determined by the experimenters of citron et al. (2015), but also by the slovene participants. ambiguity determined by the experimenters was included in our comparisons of the german and slovene participants. the data of both participant groups showed negative correlations between ambiguity and both affective variables, that is, idioms without a plausible literal meaning were associated with higher levels of valence and arousal. citron et al. (2015, p. 13) argue that the potential literal meaning of ambiguous idioms interferes with its idiomatic meaning and reduces emotional rating values, but makes it easier to produce mental images which can be more directly associated with sensory modalities. in contrast to the german participant data, the slovene data did not show any significant partial correlations between idiom length and valence we now turn to the relationships among the psycholinguistic variables (familiarity, transparency, figurativeness, concreteness, idiom length, confidence, and idiomatic knowledge). in the ratings of the german participants, familiarity (i.e., subjective frequency) was positively correlated with knowledge of the teodor petrič36 idiomatic meaning (citron et al., 2015, p. 12), confirming previous findings exploring idiomatic knowledge or confidence (bonin et al., 2013; libben & titone, 2008; tabossi et al., 2011; titone & connine, 1994). since knowledge had not been included in the analysis of the slovene participant data, we obtained results from confidence, which was also designed to capture knowledge. in contrast to the data of the german participants, the results of the slovene second language learners confirm a strong positive relationship of confidence with familiarity and a moderate positive correlation with transparency and figurativeness. the positive partial correlation between confidence and figurativeness resulted from the moderating effect of transparency, that is, confidence was highest if transparency reached high levels and figurativeness low levels. citron et al. (2015) argue that confidence may not necessarily be a reliable measure of the actual knowledge of an idiomatic meaning, which is better captured by familiarity and asking participants to write the meaning down. in the data of the slovene second language learners, the perceived level of figurativeness of an idiom was negatively correlated with semantic transparency and concreteness and positively with familiarity. the more idiomatic a meaning was, the less semantically transparent and concrete it was rated. however, the more idiomatic a meaning was, the more familiar it was rated. the positive partial correlation seems to be a moderating effect of transparency: the familiarity ratings reached their lowest levels if idiom transparency was rated low and figurativeness high. the correlations of figurativeness with transparency and concreteness replicate the results of the german native speakers in citron et al. (2015). the meanings of most idiomatic strings were unrelated to the literal meaning of the constituent words, and predominantly conveyed abstract contents according to citron et al. (2015), the german participants perceived shorter idioms as more familiar and longer idioms as providing more semantic information than shorter idioms, facilitating their figurativeness and semantic transparency. similar results were found in the partial correlation results of the slovene participant group: idiom length (measured as number of words or letters) was negatively correlated with familiarity and positively with figurativeness and concreteness in contrast to the data of the german participants, where semantic transparency was not correlated with familiarity (in line with tabossi et al., 2011; but see abel, 2003) or with idiom knowledge (unlike tabossi et al., 2011), the data of the slovene participants showed a strong positive correlation between familiarity and semantic transparency. citron et al. (2015) argue that the results of the german participants seem to reflect the fact that storage and retrieval of familiar idioms is of no need to detect a clear relationship between the component word meanings and the global figurative interpretation of the string (bonin et al., 2013; libben & titone, 2008; titone & connine, 1994). in contrast, storratings of affective and non-affective aspects of german idioms… 37 age and retrieval in a (first or second) language acquisition setting seems to rely to a greater extent on the literal meaning of figurative expressions (cf. abel, 2003) and their transparency, that is, to establish a post-hoc link between an idiomatic meaning and its individual components (cf. cacciari, 2014). according to nippold and taylor (2002), who compared transparency judgements of children and adolescents in their native language, found that for the children the easiest idioms were more familiar and transparent than the most difficult idiomatic expressions. our conclusion is that such a correlation may be also typical in second language judgements. furthermore and in contrast with the l1 german, the data of the slovene participants showed a moderate positive correlation between transparency and concreteness. the more concrete an idiom was rated, the more it was transparent. in comparison to the german native speakers, the second language learners in our study showed a moderate tendency to refer to the meaning of individual idiom components and the accessibility of their meaning on a sensory level ambiguity (i.e., potential literal plausibility of idioms) had mainly an inhibitory effect on other variables in the data of both participant groups: ambiguous idioms were less emotionally salient (i.e., rated as less valenced and arousing) and more linked to concrete, sensory-based information than were unambiguous idioms. they were less correctly defined by the german participants (not analyzed in the data of the slovene participants), and rated less figurative by the slovene participants than unambiguous idioms. citron et al. (2015) argue that the literal meaning might represent a source of possible interference in ambiguous idioms, which leads to the preference of sensory-based information and lower emotional salience. in the data of the slovene participants, ambiguity reached its highest levels if concreteness values were high and figurativeness low. hopefully, our descriptive and comparative study provides some insight into the relationships between figurative language and affect in second language processing and will prove to be useful for further research in this field. much like other normative studies, it shows a lower degree of inter-rater reliability (tested with krippendorff’s alpha), but it shows high reliability—that is, internal consistency (tested with cronbach’s alpha). to our knowledge, several psycholinguistic and affective variables (such as emotional arousal and valence, concreteness, figurativeness) were not tested in previous normative studies on german idioms in second language processing, but can be taken into account in upcoming experimental settings and other applications. teodor petrič38 references abel, b. 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(2009). the berlin affective word list reloaded. behavior research methods, 41, 534–538. teodor petrič bewertungen affektiver und nicht-affektiver aspekte von idiomen im deutschen als zweitsprache z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g dieser beitrag präsentiert die ergebnisse einer zweitsprachlichen untersuchung psycholinguistischer und affektiver eigenschaften von 619 deutschen idiomatischen wortverbindungen, die zuvor von citron et al. (2015) gesammelt und von deutschen muttersprachlern bewertet wurden. in unserer studie wurden dieselben redewendungen von slowenischen lernern des deutschen als fremdsprache bewertet. unsere probanden stuften jede redewendung in bezug auf emotionale wertigkeit, emotionale erregung, bekanntheitsgrad, konkretheit, ambiguität (wörtliche bedeutung), semantische transparenz und bildhaftigkeit ein.unser beitrag hatte die folgenden ziele: (1) deskriptive normwerte für psycholinguistische und affektive eigenschaften von idiomatischen wortverbindungen im deutschen als zweitsprache zu erschließen, (2) die in der zweitsprache charakteristischen beziehungen zwischen affektiven und nicht-affektiven eigenschaften von idiomen zu untersuchen und (3) die bewertungen der in citron et al. (2015) untersuchten deutschen muttersprachler mit denen slowenischer daf-lerner zu vergleichen. [this paragraphismissing in the englisch abstract: zu diesem zweck erhielten unsere slowenischen probanden dieselbe idiom-liste und dieselben aufgaben wie die von citron et al. (2015) untersuchten deutschen muttersprachler, und zwar jede der (ambigen oder nicht-ambigen) idiomatischen wortverbindungen hinsichtlich emotionaler valenz, emotionaler intensität, gebräuchlichkeit, konkretheit, semantischer durchsichtigkeit, metaphorizität sowie hinsichtlich ihres idiomatischen wissens (zuversicht) zu bewerten.] die ergebnisse der slowenischen probanden zeigen einerseits große übereinstimmungen mit denen der deutschen muttersprachler, andererseits aber auch eine leichte neigung zu positiven einstellung teodor petrič42 und eine etwas oberf lächlichere emotionale verarbeitung der deutschen idiome. die untersuchungsergebnisse könnten in zukünftigen studien (in den bereichen sprachmethodik, translationswissenschaft, computerunterstützte sprachgenerierung), in denen die rolle von affektiven eigenschaften idiomatischer ausdrücke untersucht wird, von nutzen sein. schlüsselwörter: idiomatische wortverbindungen, affektive eigenschaften, psycholinguistische eigenschaften, deutsch, slowenisch theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 5 (1), 2019, pp. 55–72 10.31261/tapsla.2019.05.04 marzena s. wysocka university of silesia in katowice, poland poetry in teaching grammar to the advanced users of polish as a fl a b s t r a c t the article offers an insight into problematic issues the advanced learners of polish as a fl cope with in terms of grammar in speaking and writing. it opens with a brief insight into teaching literature, poetry including, in a fl classroom. what follows includes types of poems and their potential to be used in the teaching context, mainly when teaching grammar. having presented the scope of linguistic problems experienced by the users of polish as a fl, the type and frequency of grammatical problems are discussed. polish grammar-based issues the foreigners struggle with constituted the main area of the research conducted among 146 students of the polish language course attending the school of polish language and culture at the university of silesia in katowice, poland. the findings come from oral and written assignments produced by the sample in question, and, most frequently, ref lect grammatical mistakes that are persistent and difficult to eliminate from the linguistic repertoire. given that, ways of using poetry as a means of a “grammar refresher” are suggested. these include a few examples of activities based on poems to be used when trying to overcome particular linguistic difficulties, together with implications for teachers raising students’ language awareness and developing ref lection on language per se. keywords: poetry, poems, grammar, grammar problems in trying to show the language-literature and/or literature-language interplay, it is enough to reach any type of a literary genre. how these two coexist is best exemplified in a language and literature syllabus, but can also be a part of a general language course building on both linguistic and literary experiences aiding reflection, lengthening the span of attention and increasing learners’ self-awareness. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2787-8676 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.2019.05.04 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2787-8676 marzena s. wysocka56 teaching literature in a fl classroom undeniably, it is the language-based approach that is the most common approach to literature in the fl classroom. following carter and long (1991), the exposure to literature can increase learners’ vocabulary and linguistic structures, as well as a more creative aspect of the language consisting in metaphor, symbolism and imagery. a wide range of techniques commonly used with literary texts in a fl environment include close testing, matching synonyms, rephrasing, and jumbled lines, to name a few, and serve certain linguistic goals. it is most often to think about the meaning of the text. by approaching the text in this deconstructionist way and breaking it down into a series of its parts, the learners are given a chance to focus more on grammar structures. following hanauer (2001), what the classroom participants notice in this way involves the form (over 90% of learners), with 84% of unusual usage and only 9.87% paying attention to literary meaning. the very numbers of noticing differ when it comes to the personal growth model and its emotion-based nature. here, the learners are encouraged to express personal opinions on a text, and relate any intellectual or emotional response to their own experiences. this technique follows the commonly held theory of reading which lays emphasis on the interaction of the reader with the text (cadorath & harris, 1998). in this regard poetry seems to be dominating over prose, and sounds very attractive for its readers as it is well-known for completeness and brevity of the text, and the encapsulation of the powerful thought or emotion. though, the choice of the texts needs great care. a linguistically complex poem with new structures and sophisticated vocabulary is likely to be inaccessible to many fl learners, and result in a „switching off” rather than a desired effect, that is, emotional engagement in the text. the same seems to be true of poems requiring background knowledge of the social or historical milieu, and/or based on some factual information to be introduced beforehand by the teacher. yet, even such difficult texts can be successful when provide direction for learners to construct meaning from their own experience. poetry in a fl classroom following szczęśniak (2009) poetry in teaching a fl is generally treated as an innovative potential aimed at developing students’ linguistic and cognitive competences. in the former case, a well-prepared material, in the form of a text, is to influence lexis, grammar, and morphology, as well as become the poetry in teaching grammar to the advanced users of polish as a fl 57 basis of enhancing students’ listening, reading, speaking and writing skills. the latter, on the other hand, giving social, cultural, and historical background, allows for acting, thinking, and feeling in a fl, including openness to other languages, cultures, and communities. kozłowski (1991) goes even further and compares using poetry in a classroom to a multidimensional experience and a powerful effect on learners’ literary, emotional, creative, aesthetic or critical competences, to name a few. the more “attractive” the poem, the bigger influence on its receivers can be observed. what constitutes this text attractiveness is elaborated on by burzyńska and markowski (2006), according to whom it is composed of directiveness, clarity, or, paradoxically, the lack of both, as well as thought-provoking and innovative ideas, or a metaphorical nature of the language itself. more specifically, it is distinctive features of poetic texts, such as for example rhythms, rhymes, onomatopoeic expressions, assonances, and alliterations that enrich the way the message is conveyed and the language in general is portrayed at the same time. working on a poetic text, as szczęśniak (2009) has it, can start from just underlining given words, for example, vowels or consonants to pay learners’ attention to word spelling. looking for prefixes or suffixes, diminutives and/ or augmentatives, analogically, is to rise students’ awareness of word formation and morphology. in the same vein, when asked to concentrate on certain parts of speech, such as verbs, nouns or adjectives and adverbs, the learners may develop their understanding of word order, as well as how these co-exist and form a larger unit referred to as a sentence structure. the next step can be to read a poem and work on substituting given words or phrases, transforming parts and/or whole sentences, as well as coming up with new units. practically, it may cover practicing plurals/singulars, inflections, tenses, and so on. and, finally, the students may be asked to reflect on word or sentence relations, ponder over their double/metaphorical meaning, as well as go for writing their own lines according to suggested patterns, or just get involved into free writing as such. being so diversified, poetry seems to be a part of not only a very interesting text-based task to implement during regular classes, but also a series of remedy classes when something goes wrong. types of poems taking all the above-mentioned into account, it is worth emphasizing that different poems serve different purposes, and can be used differently to promote language acquisition. the most common poem forms are picture poems and pattern poems. marzena s. wysocka58 picture poems according to finch (2003), picture poems offer a visual perspective on the arrangement of words, and are, therefore, an effective means of encouraging learners to interact with the target vocabulary (table 1). table 1. an example of a picture poem (adapted from hadfield & hadfield, 1991, p. 9) here the poems look like the object they describe. the structure is the shape of the object, and task completion comes from arranging words to match that shape. to name an example of a task in polish, the students can be asked to come up with a word, for example noodles (as in figure 1), and “draw” its shape: figure 1. an example of a task in polish: a picture poem (mrożek, 1999, p. 125) poetry in teaching grammar to the advanced users of polish as a fl 59 another type of a picture poem is the one in which the words outline the object being described. again, these words can be sentences or collections of word-associations, and, thus, encourage the learners to interact and experiment with the language (figure 2). figure 2. an example of a picture poem (adapted from hadfield & hadfield, 1997, p. 16). figure 3. an example of a calligram poem in polish (mrożek, 1999, p. 132) marzena s. wysocka60 mrożek (1999) refers to the text visually arranged in a way that it forms contours associated with the text’s content as a calligram poem. practically speaking, it means that in order to create it the students may be asked to think of a given word, and present the line that appears to bound a given object, as in figure 3. pattern poems pattern poems, on the other hand, are believed to be especially successful in the fl classroom as they can be adopted to teaching grammar and sentence structure. following finch (2003), patterns in such poems usually consist of grammatical items (adjectives, adverbs, verbs, etc.,) metrical frameworks, phrases, or sentence structures, though they can also include acronyms: table 2 an example of a pattern poem (adapted from holmes & moulton, 2001, p. 15) furry face red hair intelligent eyes ears that hear everything nose that sniffs dog of my dreams funny real interesting enjoyable nice delightful few people are real friends in my life. i enjoy seeing true, not new friends every day the very example presents an acrostic poem based on the word friend. the central acronym uses single word-association to describe the concept of friend, while the acronym to its left uses an adj + noun structure. the third acronym in this figure constructs two complete sentences, in which the required letters appear at the front of every three or four words. to give an example of a polishcontext pattern poetry, it is worth looking at acronyms mentioned before or alphabetical sequencing giving rise to a number of texts and tasks for students suggested by mrożek (1999): figure 4. an example of a task for students in polish (mrożek, 1999, p. 123) poetry in teaching grammar to the advanced users of polish as a fl 61 through patterns, the learners can rehearse correct spelling, discover new as well as use familiar vocabulary, practice specific language structures such as phrases, word order, and verb tense, to name a few examples. these can be done by means of interactive and rewarding drills focusing on a particular aspect of grammar or syntax developing students’ awareness of structure and phrase at the same time. this is particularly important as the two constitute a real hardship for fl learners, polish grammar patterns being considered especially difficult. language problems experienced by users of polish as a fl the most frequent language difficulties non-native speakers of polish suffer from are morpho-syntactic in character, and wysocka (2007) classifies them into the following: • prepositions, for example, *kupię na pani kawę, *idę do poczty • pronouns, for example, *tamte mężczyźni, *widzę się z ją • case, for example, *ona ma duży pies, *potrzebuję krzesło. • word order, for example, *bardzo podoba się mi, *to jest kot gruby. • tense, for example, *tomek wczoraj ogląda film • aspect, for example, *będę napisać, *jutro ona będzie kupić książkę • verb inflections, for example, *bylimy, *jestemy • verb conjugation, for example, *kupowuje,*gotowywać • adjective comparison, for example, *bardziej lepszy, *bliżejszy, *zdrowiejszy • plural forms, for example, *człowieki, *dziecka, *studenty, *profesory. • collocations, for example, *robić sport, *wziąć zdjęcie, *mieć prysznic • prefixes, for example, *przyprać pranie • suffixes, for example, *inteligentność • spelling, for example, lack of discrimination between the words kość and kosić in trying to find the reasons for a high frequency the above-enumerated are characterised by in the case of the polish language, wysocka (2007) claims that it is l1–l2 distance and disparities that give rise to language problems of that kind. for example, chinese learners divide words into syllables in accordance with their l1 tones, or form interrogatives placing question words at the end of utterances, it being a chinese rule of question formation. l1 habits are also visible in linguistic behaviours of englishor german-speaking students in terms of prepositions, pronouns or word order, due to ambiguities their mother tongues are allowed in the case of the first two, and a more fixed nature of the third one in comparison to polish. the situations in which the motherese is marzena s. wysocka62 devoid of the category of case (e.g., norwegian), tense or verb inflections (e.g., chinese), translate into inaccuracies in all these language spheres. problems with aspect are typical of germans learning polish and result from the lack of equivalents to the german pluperfect in polish. the lack of polish correspondences is also true of verb conjugation and plurality in japanese. the former takes on the shape of a consonant and vowel form non-existing for poles, whereas the latter as such does not exist in japanese at all. difficulties with preand suffixation are numerous in the case of english speakers of polish and can be boiled down to a variety of means of word formation in polish. in final, problems with collocating words or spelling reflect circumstances under which l1-specific features influence tl performance and result in polish forms based on and built of non-existent features regardless of l1. more recently, krawczuk (2008), dilna (2008) or dąbrowska and pasieka (2008) add to the above-mentioned: • government, • grammatically-oriented phraseology, as well as • semantic and syntactic combinability. to start with, problems with government most often derive from l1 interferences and range from germanic and romanian to slavonic languages. to name a few examples, native speakers of english would say *spędzamy mniej swojego czasu na, czechs *byłem z niej nie tylko rozczarowany and ukrainians *tolerancja do kogoś or *mieszkam blisko od uniwersytetu on account of apparently close, though incorrect solutions the languages suggest (krawczuk, 2008). when it comes to phraseology, what the students struggle with is modifications of the original constructs (e.g., owijać w bawełnę changed into owijanie) which, as dilna (2008) claims, unable their recognition, or, to quote dąbrowska and pasieka (2008) are responsible for failures at realization of phrasal verbs per se (e.g., *to był prezent zapierający dech ludziom or *z wyrażeniami szacunku). finally, problems with word and sentence relations stem from inappropriate accommodation (markiewicz-pławecka, 2008). this consists in wrong combinations of modifiers and words or phrases modified, resulting in such expressions as *po świętach połowa narodu otrzyma trudności z trawieniem or *brno jest drugie największe miasto. surprisingly, it is slavic learners of polish, bulgarians in particular, who experience difficulties with modification most frequently. not only do inaccurate language forms constitute frequent language problems, but also disfluencies occur in large numbers and are wide in scope. wysocka (2007) groups them as follows: • filled pauses, for example, eeeee..., aaaaa..., • unfilled pauses, • incorrect fixed expressions, for example, dzień dobry instead of dobry wieczór and vice versa, poetry in teaching grammar to the advanced users of polish as a fl 63 • l1 use, for example, *bardzo sympatyczny animal, *ten nachtklub, • reformulations, for example, to jest… to są..., • correctly formed fixed expressions, for example, według mnie..., • reliance on english, for example, let’s say..., i think..., right..., • problems with register and style, for example, *czy pani idziesz do sklepu? the first four types of behaviours seem to be equally l1-induced. to start with filled pauses the learners of polish use, eeee is typical of chinese learners and users whereas aaaa illustrative of english influences. the interchangeability of greetings under discussion is symptomatic of the french misguided by an adjective taking an initial position in bon jour. in a similar vein, the inclusion of english words is a tendency the english learners and users of polish indicate, while german linguistic features constitute what germans usually relate to. the remaining categories are common to all non-native speakers of polish as a fl, irrespective of language background and source language they operate on. paraphrasing, or an overuse of certain routine formulas, is observed whenever the learners come across obstacles in expressing themselves. such difficulties are also resolved by means of referring to english which, being a lingua franca, serves the role of a “walking stick,” regardless of other languages acquired and/ or learned. discourse problems, to build on dąbrowska and pasieka (2008) are frequently the result of syllepsis, namely, a combination of semantically distant words (e.g., *odczuwają potrzebę w jedzeniu, opieki i miłości) or a mixed register accounted for differences in the realization of polish polite forms in the slovak or ukrainian language, to name a few (nowakowska, 2008). language behaviours resulting from the reverse situation, notably, polish playing a role of the tl, seem to be influenced by the same mechanisms influenced mostly by grammatical and morphological interferences, and reflect the following (wysocka, 2009): • case, • subject-verb agreement, and • inflection providing examples from the literature, problems with case stem from fixed rules of a noun declension system in polish and previously-mentioned nonexistence and/or its different realization in the first language as in english or russian where the former operates on the genitive only whereas the latter relies on six when contrasted with seven in polish (wysocka, 2007). the resultative forms range from *nie słuchaliśmy muzykę or *oddaj to adam (korol, 2008). likewise, subject-verb agreement tends to be troublesome for foreign learners of polish because of a fixed verb conjugation only partially realized in for example english verb system. the case of inflection, on the other hand, imposes on korean speakers the linguistic behaviours they cannot translate from their mother tongue. as a result, they produce such inaccuracies as *czas bardzo szybko minęła or *zjadłam dużo czekoladów (mielczarek & lisowski, 2008). marzena s. wysocka64 the research proper: problems with grammar what grammatical (in)accuracies and (dis)fluencies reappear while using polish (in speaking and writing) has been the core objective of the study conducted among the advanced users of polish as a fl. the sample the sample constituted 146 students of the polish language course attending the school of polish language and culture at the university of silesia in katowice, poland. eight different nationalities and languages the sample represented allowed for presenting them under the label of three different branches of the indo-european language family, namely germanic, slavonic, and romance. the first group (a) comprised 13 german (g), 16 scandinavian (s), and 13 english (e) students of polish as a fl, it being 46 altogether. the second (b) was composed of 24 ukrainians (u) and 25 slovaks (sl.), which makes 49 in total, whereas the third group (c) consisted of 14 italian (i), 18 spanish (sp.), and 19 french (f) course participants, that is 51 as a whole. as far as gender and age distribution are concerned, group a was made up of 17 female and 29 male students aged 21–45, group b contained 21 females and 28 males between 24 and 49 years of age, while in group c the number of female representatives came to 25 and male ones to 26 between the ages of 20 and 31. in terms of qualifications, groups a and b seemed homogeneous and included similar proportions of ba and ma degree holders, that is, 25 vs. 21 and 25 vs. 24 respondents respectively. groups c, being younger in general, predominated in ba students (27), it being 10 more than ma students (17), as well as 7 subjects with no diplomas whatsoever. when it comes to their language experience, it was not limited to studying polish as 100% of the german, english, italian, spanish, and french respondents admitted working as lecturers and/or teachers of their native language in language schools in poland; 9, 10, 4, 7, and 10 of them respectively having their ba in language and culture (teaching). tools text samples, which constituted the main source of the language material produced by the sample selected (146 respondents altogether), were divided into oral and written assignments. in both cases, the tasks the questioned subjects were confronted with covered a topic for discussion randomly chosen from a list poetry in teaching grammar to the advanced users of polish as a fl 65 of 100 quotations singled out for the purposes of the study.to give an example, the very list contained the following: co my wiemy, to tylko kropelka. czego nie wiemy, to cały ocean. isaac newton twórczość to umiejętność nowego spojrzenia na starą wiedzę. anonim drzewa i kamienie nauczą cię rzeczy, których nie usłyszysz z ust żadnego nauczyciela. św. bernard z clairvaux być inteligentnym to bardzo męczące. henri bergson to, co szkodzi, uczy. fedrus nauka jest sprawą wielkich. maluczkim dostają się nauczki. stanisław jerzy lec as regards oral assignments, they focused on students’ oral performance and were designed to record samples of the language output produced by the informants in the course of speaking. more specifically, the respondents were required to comment on one of the statements drawn from the list of quotations given. each time, the responses recorded were intended to mirror the students’ 3-minute spontaneous reactions to the topic. as opposed to oral assignments, written tasks were focused upon examining a written discourse produced by the group under investigation. this time, each of the questioned students was asked to pick a slip of paper containing a topic for discussion. having selected one of the quotations at a time, they were requested to remark on the issues in focus in writing, given a 30-minute time-limit. what was looked for in students’ spoken and written text samples in terms of grammar inaccuracies ranged from single words (e.g., parts of speech such as verbs, adjectives, pronouns, etc.) to phrases, clauses and sentences, including the way they are combined, positioned as well as realized in the overall language system. the results when it comes to speaking, the students’ performance violated rules of grammar mainly as a result of unfortunate choice and usage of language within the scope of previously-mentioned grammar patterns, structures and orientations ranging from a dozen to even a few hundred examples of a given violation (table 3): marzena s. wysocka66 table 3. problems with grammar (speaking) grammar problem frequency of occurrence g s e u sl. i sp. f subject overuse 92 100 125 72 88 99 108 100 lack of subject-verb agreement 97 108 95 95 95 100 95 95 problems with case 77 69 76 67 71 71 72 68 wrong prepositions 69 69 71 67 71 71 72 68 problems with comparison 62 63 65 63 64 64 67 63 misuse of pronouns 51 50 48 45 43 61 58 56 problems with relative pronouns 37 31 38 31 34 35 31 30 verb omission 11 14 19 19 21 21 14 12 qualitatively speaking, on the other hand, what the students arrived at covered the following utterances: *ja myślę, że ja wygram ten mecz, *dzieci byli z nami na zawsze, *on kupuje jego samochody, *ja się cieszę do ich przyjazdu, *byłoby bardzo przyjemniej tam być, *chcę ciebie powiedzieć, *to jest droga, na którą poznasz kilka ciekawych ludzi, *to nie podniecające *zapytam jemu, zapytam jemu, czy jest chętny… *to jest tak, bo dziewczyny byli, dziewczyny byli…. all in all, the grammatical symptoms as such testified to insignificant differences between the sample, the most significant of which appeared in line with the subject overuse occurrences. what should be paid attention to, however, is the type of influences determining the form of behaviours in question. here, the most invasive seemed english and german impact, especially when it comes to the use of wrong pronouns, relative pronouns included. apart from that, the students’ utterances reflected a number of disfluencies. these, by definition, are caused by pauses, all-purpose words, repetitions, reformulations, unfinished utterances, over-reliance on certain structures, redundant categories or meaningless expressions, and, depending on the language feature produced, can be either erroneous or non-erroneous. language disfluency that accompanied grammar inaccuracy while speaking covered four different categories (table 4): poetry in teaching grammar to the advanced users of polish as a fl 67 table 4. language disfluency (speaking) language disfluency frequency of occurrence g s e u sl. i sp. f pauses 177 113 200 300 180 60 70 70 repetitions 110 150 170 301 149 192 183 115 overuse of grammatically-based fixed expressions 66 104 190 201 179 159 102 109 unfinished words/phrases 34 46 70 91 99 100 49 31 as the numbers show, ukrainians were the least fluent among the participants in question, pausing, hesitating, and repeating themselves almost ad infinitum. second “best” appeared the english-speaking students overrelying on pauses and fixed language strings, slightly taking over the slavs and italians who turned out to be too repetitive and linguistically fixed, as well as overused fixed expressions, and often did not care to finish their sentence the students’ writing samples, in comparison to speaking, were more diversified and broader in scope in terms of language areas misused and/or misfitted (table 5): table 5. problems with grammar (writing) grammar problem frequency of occurrence g s e u sl. i sp. f subject overuse 90 96 114 69 81 96 105 99 lack of subject-verb agreement 90 96 95 80 89 90 93 87 problems with case 75 70 75 66 65 70 70 70 wrong prepositions 60 76 73 66 70 69 72 69 wrong pronouns 32 39 59 31 59 49 40 41 problems with relative pronouns 21 26 30 19 21 31 29 28 problems with comparison 19 24 31 19 18 28 29 21 the numbers translated into the quality of expression, giving rise to the following utterances: *ja wiem, że ja… *to jest dzień który ja lubię. *one byli gorsze, *często jest tak z takich sytuacjach, marzena s. wysocka68 *to jest nich inicjatywa, *mój sąsiad, które ja gram szachy, *ja jestem bardzo lepszy z gramatyki *ja siedzę na publiczności, *ja mam czuć, że polska wygra. following the “grammatical numbers,” ukrainian and slovak students seemed to be the least fossilized representatives of the sample, having the biggest problems with the subject-verb concord. the weakest, on the other hand, were englishand spanish-speaking subjects, facing all types of grammatical problems. what was observed in line with grammatically-incorrect sentences reflected overuse of grammatically-based fixed expressions making the written text incoherent (table 6): table 6. text incoherence (writing) text-incoherence frequency of occurrence g s e u sl. i sp. f overuse of grammatically-based fixed expressions 19 27 59 71 45 99 76 40 as seen from the table, these ranged from several to almost one hundred of occurrences. irrespective of observable frequency, though, the language produced was deprived of its factual quality most frequently in the case of italians or spaniards who seemed to celebrate the very fact of just expressing themselves, and writing as such, rather than conveying the message. the representatives of the remaining nationalities produced shorter text samples so a lower number of fixed expressions reappearing while writing may be the result of such a situation ways of overcoming problems in trying to avoid and/or overcome at least some of the above-listed difficulties, one should neither understate nor undermine the power and benefits of language practice, be it the classroom or (home) work. poetry in teaching grammar to the advanced users of polish as a fl 69 using poetry the examples of assignments presented below, though cater for only some problems listed above, differ from the tasks included in traditional course books as they are based on poetry. they are believed to not only broaden the perspective of problem recovery, but also language mastery, developing linguistic competence and reflection on language at the same time irrespective of the course or study attended. the poems in question are written by the author of the article, and offer a remedial work on a language, in the form of a recognition/production task (see table 7). table 7. task 1 (poem taken from wysocka, 2010, p. 49) task 1. przeczytaj wiersz, wypisz wszystkie rzeczowniki w mianowniku, a następnie od każdego z nich utwórz formę odpowiadającą na niżej sformułowane pytania. w porcie najpierw przypłynęły zapach i oddech sztormu głębokie jak ocean spokojny i niespokojne jak morze czerwone a gdy tylko przybiłeś do portu zalały mnie ciepłe fale twoich myśli i po raz pierwszy żałowałam, że umiem pływać ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………......................................................................................……………………………… z kim? z czym? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… kogo? czego? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… o kim? o czym? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… here, it is the case of nouns that the learners are confronted with. first, they are asked to write down all the nouns in the nominative case, and then proceed to answering a few questions, each reflecting a different case in polish. a more demanding exercise, on the other hand, is threefold. it opens with a part devoted to all the adjectives presented in the text. what follows concerns the way the very adjectives should be matched with nouns given leaving the original forms unchanged. and, finally, sentences are to be created on the basis of previously-coined adjective + noun combinations (see table 8). marzena s. wysocka70 table 8. task 2 (poem taken from wysocka, 2010, p.28) task 2. przeczytaj wiersz, wypisz przymiotniki znajdujące się w tekście, połącz je odpowiednio z podanymi niżej rzeczownikami, nie zmieniając istniejących form, i utwórz po jednym zdaniu z każdym utworzonym połączeniem (przymiotnik + rzeczownik). *** chciałabym zamknąć oczy i uszy, usta i nos i wyłączyć myślenie a pilot z czerwonym guzikiem „włącz” schować gdzieś głęboko żebyś nie mógł mnie uruchomić przez parę ładnych, brzydkich dni. nocy, liści, kolorem, znakiem, słów, paskiem przymiotniki: ……………….................………………………………………..………………………………………………… przymiotniki z rzeczownikami: ……………………………………………………...................…………………………………………………… ……………………………………………………………………...................…………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………...................……………………… zdania: ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………............................................ conclusions the suggestion is to use poetry-based exercises for any language area(s) the students have problems with or are not confident about, and, thus, influence their language awareness; its attention, noticing and understanding components. irrespective of the type of a poetic text, using poetry in a fl classroom is believed to help understand relationships in meaning between words, while a stylistic analysis of poems is likely to improve learners’ understanding of discourse, an emphasis being put on developing inference-making skills. the future research could further explore the students’ linguistic competence, be it lexis, morphology, phonology, spelling and/or punctuation. having investigated the students’ problems within a given language area, a series of poetic texts could be implemented depending on the group and its needs. ideally, they could serve as a remedy for something that still goes wrong or as a positive reinforcement to encourage and reward proper linguistic behaviours. poetry in teaching grammar to the advanced users of polish as a fl 71 secondly, the research may be additionally equipped with a questionnaire aimed at collecting learners’ opinions on using poetry as a way of polishing the language in the classroom context. references burzyńska, a., & markowski, m. p. 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(2001). kultura języka polskiego. praktyczne ćwiczenia. łódź: wydawnictwo wyższej szkoły humanistyczno-ekonomicznej. willis, d. (2005). rules, patterns and words. grammar and lexis in english language teaching. cambridge: cambridge university press. wysocka, m. s. (2007). język polski językiem obcym. o problemach językowych wśród uczących się języka polskiego jako języka obcego. języki obce w szkole, 2, 162–164. wysocka, m. s. (2009). stages of fossilization in advanced learners and users of english: a longitudinal diagnostic study. częstochowa: wydawnictwo wyższej szkoły lingwistycznej. wysocka, m. s. (2010). nie tylko we śnie. jastrzębie zdrój: wydawnictwo black unicorn. wysocka, m. s. (2012). tylko tyle. jastrzębie zdrój: wydawnictwo black unicorn. ewa cieślicka, arkadiusz rojczyk university of silesia in katowice, poland self-reported vs. self-rated pronunciation in a non-native language a b s t r a c t the study investigates how their own accent in english is self-perceived by polish learners. more specifically, we compare how, and to what extent, self-reported pronunciation differs from self-rated pronunciation prior to and after the exposure to one’s recorded speech. previous research on non-native accent rating has concentrated on scores obtained from native speakers or other proficient speakers of english. in the current study, we concentrate on how learners evaluate their own accent in english for parameters such as pronunciation, articulation, and f luency. we also introduce an independent variable of proficiency to see if it interacts with the perception of learners’ pronunciation. both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted and the result showed that there are no major differences between how learners report their accent in english and how they rate it from the recording of their own speech. it indicates that the general self-image of one’s accent is fairly stable and exposure to the sample of one’s speech does not change the overall self-perception. keywords: psycholinguistics, phonetics, self-assessment of pronunciation, language learning introduction several studies have provided the rationale for self-assessment in language learning, namely: promotion of learning and increased learner motivation, a raised level of awareness, the positive impact of metacognitive awareness on goal-orientation, an expansion in range of assessment techniques, shared assessment burden and the autonomy of learners as a post-course effect (oscarsson, 1989; salimi, kargar, & zareian, 2014). the significance of accurate self-rating is a result of the assumption that standardized tests do not fully succeed in evaluating language competence, due to creating artificial contexts for language theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 3 (2) 2017, pp. 69–86 ewa cieślicka, arkadiusz rojczyk70 use (spence-brown, 2001). self-assessment has been argued to constitute an indispensable part of autonomous learning (grader & miller, 1999; harris, 1997). hunt, gow, and barnes (1989, p. 207) emphasize that without self-assessment, “there can be no real autonomy.” the purpose of this study is to establish how polish learners assess their own pronunciation skills at secondary and tertiary levels of education. the research aimed to check whether any significant changes could be observed in the learners’ self-rating scores before and after they were exposed to the pre-recorded samples of their own productions. we aimed to tap the expectations students hold for their l2 pronunciation skills and see if—when confronted with reality—they believe they have met them. another goal was to look for differences between the two levels of proficiency to see how experience affects self-ratings. the following paper also aims to address the issue of learners’ self-judgment of their pronunciation, confidence in their own pronunciation skills and awareness thereof. we sought to find whether there arises the problem of either overestimation or underestimation of competence, of which, as macintyre, noels, and clément (1997, p. 279) speculate, “self-enhancement would probably facilitate language learning while self-derogation would impair progress.” in their research, macintyre et al. (1997, p. 281) “took ratings of perceived competence prior to the language tasks” and note that, “it also would be interesting to have self-assessments done after task performance. […] post facto reporting might actually enhance the biases, because highly anxious students might focus on errors in performance and less anxious students […] on their communicative successes.” the present study can therefore be considered a follow-up investigation with a focus on accent rating. it combines qualitative and quantitative methods of research in pursuance of a deeper understanding of both the tendencies observed in selfrating and the possible reasons behind them. previous research nowacka (2012) points to the importance of good english pronunciation as perceived by l2 learners. in her survey, almost all respondents (98%) agreed on its significance, while 89% of them believed that students should aim for native english pronunciation. the findings of a number of studies into the reliability of self-assessment suggest a pattern of overall agreement between self-assessments and ratings (blanche, 1985; oscarsson, 1978; rea, 1981). oscarsson (1978) notes that, when given scaled descriptions of performance as rating tools, adult learners demonstrate the capacity to accurately evaluate their linguistic ability. it has also been reported that over the course of second self-reported vs. self-rated pronunciation in a non-native language 71 language practice and through feedback, specific student training and/or domestic immersion speakers display an improved ability to correctly self-assess their sound discrimination skills and oral performance (chen, 2008; dolosic, brantmeier, strube, & hogrebe, 2016; ross, 2006; yules, hoffman, & damico, 1987). this indicates that more advanced learners should find self-assessment of their l2 pronunciation less problematic. previous findings also point to the importance of clear and explicitly stated assessment criteria which help improve the effectiveness and precision of self-assessment (chen, 2008; dolosic et al., 2016). some learners have admitted to employing (among other cognitive strategies) phonetic self-evaluation as a tool in developing their pronunciation skills (nowacka, 2008). however, other research suggests that problems with valid self-evaluation occur even in advanced l2 learners (dlaska & krekeler, 2008). although the results of expert raters’ assessments of pronunciation and self-ratings coincided in 85% of all cases, the students only managed to identify a little less than a half of all the speech sounds which the raters considered inaccurate. in their study, macintyre et al. (1997, p. 274) observe that “subjective, self-rated proficiency relates substantially to actual proficiency, but the two are not isomorphic.” raasch (1980) and ross (2006) note rather low correspondence between self-assessment and expert judgments. nowacka (2008) also found that graduates from english departments in poland tend to lack self-criticism, and are therefore incapable of accurate and objective selfevaluations of their pronunciation. blue (1988) shows that nationality serves as an important factor, with some nationalities tending towards overestimation of their level and others likely to underestimate it. there is also evidence to suggest that students whose self-assessments are unrealistically high or low are more likely to give up on language learning than those who are able to assess their skills realistically (blue, 1994). previous research also shows that non-native speakers tend to be consistent in rating other non-native speakers’ pronunciation more critically than they rate their own (episcopo, 2009). breitkreutz, derwing, and rossiter’s (2001) study draws attention to the fact that in stand-alone pronunciation classes, some of the most popular cds used in computer labs focus solely on phonetic segments. consequently, it may be assumed that the learners’ awareness of the primacy of prosodic variables is low. in derwing and rossiter (2001), nearly 40% of esl students were unable to identify specific problems with their pronunciation. meanwhile, the remainder usually pointed to segmentals (84% of all problems mentioned). only 10% of the acknowledged difficulties were related to prosodic aspects of pronunciation. ewa cieślicka, arkadiusz rojczyk72 the current study in the current study we look into how and to what extent self-reported pronunciation differs from self-rated pronunciation. by self-reported pronunciation we mean evaluating one’s pronunciation skills in general without referring to any particulars samples of one’s speech. by self-rated pronunciation we mean evaluating the recording of one’s pronunciation by listening to a recording of one’s speech. the main objective is to directly confront scores obtained for self-reported pronunciation with those obtained for self-rated pronunciation. such confrontation allows us to look into the stability of the perception of one’s pronunciation skills. logically, one of the following patterns is predicted to emerge in the results: 1. the scores for self-reported pronunciation are equal to the scores obtained for self-rated pronunciation, indicating that the awareness of one’s pronunciation skills is stable and is not affected by specific performance in a given speech sample. 2. the scores for self-reported pronunciation are higher than the scores obtained for self-rated pronunciation, indicating that the awareness of one’s pronunciation skills is generally overrated and that it is verified negatively when listening to one’s recorded speech samples. 3. the scores for self-reported pronunciation are lower than the scores obtained for self-rated pronunciation, indicating that general self-perception of one’s pronunciation is underestimated and that it is enhanced when listening to one’s performance in a recording. another categorical predictor used in the current study is the proficiency of speakers. lower-proficiency students versus higher-proficiency students are hypothesized to perform differently in their ratings of self-reported and self-rated pronunciation; however, the exact pattern of differences cannot be predicted. the lower-proficiency speakers/raters had not received any specialized training in pronunciation and phonetics. the higher-proficiency speakers/raters had completed a two-year course in pronunciation and phonetics. while the actual differences in pronunciation skills between the two groups are obvious, it is hard to predict how proficiency and pronunciation training will affect self-reporting and self-rating of their pronunciation. one or some of the following patterns are logically likely to emerge: 1. higher-proficiency speakers/raters will self-report their pronunciation higher than lower-proficiency speakers/raters because they have confidence in their pronunciation skills as a result of longer exposure to english and the completion of pronunciation and phonetics training. 2. lower-proficiency speakers/raters will self-report their pronunciation higher than higher-proficiency speakers/raters because they are not acquainted with self-reported vs. self-rated pronunciation in a non-native language 73 detailed intricacies of english pronunciation and are unaware of mistakes they make. 3. when listening to the recording of their own speech, higher-proficiency speakers/raters will self-rate their pronunciation higher than lower-proficiency speakers/raters because, again, they will have more confidence in their performance. 4. when listening to the recording of their own speech, lower-proficiency speakers/raters will self-rate their pronunciation higher than higher-proficiency speakers/raters because they will be unaware of and will not notice their pronunciation mistakes and problems. the last issue to resolve is if self-reported pronunciation and self-rated pronunciation will interact significantly between the two groups. we hypothesized that the higher-proficiency speakers/raters would self-rate their pronunciation from the recording higher than in self-reports, because the knowledge of phonetics and pronunciation details may decrease general self-perception of their pronunciation, however, when they were exposed to the real samples of their speech, they would be likely to appreciate it with higher scores. on the other hand, lower-proficiency speakers/raters were hypothesized to self-rate their pronunciation in the recording lower than in self-reports, because the exposure to their own real pronunciation would make them realize that it did not match the target native pronunciation. however, these hypotheses are not a very strong bet and other patterns are not much less likely to emerge in the results. together with the results for pronunciation rating, we also report results for other aspects of speech, such as articulation and fluency. moreover, we decided to include descriptive qualitative questions about the strong and weak points of the speakers/raters pronunciation. participants a total of 66 learners of english took part in the study. the lower-proficiency group consisted of 35 participants (20 females; 15 males) with a mean age of 18 years. they were all second-grade students of the international baccalaureate diploma programme (classes taught exclusively in english) at the 1st liceum ogólnokształcące im. edwarda dembowskiego in gliwice. their estimated proficiency was b1–b2 in the common european framework of references for languages (cefr). they had had no separate dedicated training in pronunciation or phonetics. the higher-proficiency group consisted of 31 participants (24 females; 7 males) with the mean age of 24.9 years. they were fifth-year students of english recruited from the institute of english, university of silesia in katowice. their proficiency was c1–c2 in the cefr. they had completed a two-year course in pronunciation and phonetics which had covered ewa cieślicka, arkadiusz rojczyk74 both segmental and suprasegmental aspects of english pronunciation. none of the participants in either group reported any speech or hearing disorders nor had any indication of such. materials the materials included rating of selected aspects of pronunciation and speech production using a 1–9 likert scale. in the first part of the experiment, the aspects to rate referred to the participants’ self-perception without any exposure to the recordings of their speech. the same aspects were used in the second part of the experiment, when the participants rated recordings of their own speech. the following parameters were used for rating: 1. how do you rate your pronunciation? [(1) strongly polish-accented—(9) native-like]. 2. how do you rate your articulation? [(1) very unclear—(9) very clear]. 3. how do you rate your fluency? [(1) very poor—(9) very good]. we also decided to include a more subjective, emotionally-loaded parameter of expected changes and improvement in the participants’ pronunciation: 1. how much do you want to change in your pronunciation? [(1) nothing—(9) everything]. additionally, two descriptive questions for qualitative analysis were provided: 1. what do you consider to be the strengths of your pronunciation? 2. what do you consider to be the weaknesses of your pronunciation? procedure in the first part of the experiment, the participants filled in a questionnaire with afore-described points relating to their self-perceived pronunciation. they were instructed to objectively rate and describe how they perceived their pronunciation and accent in english. in order to reduce social desirability bias, the personal details provided by the respondents were kept to a minimum—initials and dates of birth—for proper assignment of the recordings in future stages of the research. after completing the questionnaire, the participants were recorded reading a short passage in english: i entered the hotel manager’s office and sat down. i had just lost $50 and i felt very upset. “i left the money in my room,” i said, “and it’s not there now.” the manager was sympathetic, but he could do nothing. “everyone’s losing money these days,” he said. he started to complain about this wicked self-reported vs. self-rated pronunciation in a non-native language 75 world but was interrupted by a knock at the door. a girl came in and put an envelope on his desk. it contained $50. “i found this outside this gentleman’s room,” she said. “well,” i said to the manager, “there is still some honesty in this world!” they were instructed to read it with a natural tempo in the most natural way. the lower-proficiency students were recorded in a quiet room with a dynamic shure sm58 microphone connected to the quad-capture usb interface (roland). the higher-proficiency students were recorded in the acousticsphonetics laboratory at the institute of english, university of silesia in katowice, in a sound-proof booth. the signal was captured at 44100 hz (24 bit quantization) through a headset dynamic sennheiser hmd 26 microphone fed by a usbpre2 (sound devices) amplifier. all recordings were saved as .wav files. after two months, the participants were invited to take part in the second part of the experiment in which they were asked to listen to their own recording and rate it using the same parameters as in the first part. a two-month period guaranteed that the participants did not remember how they had rated their pronunciation in the self-reporting stage. the recordings were played through headphones from a laptop. all participants easily recognized their voice and were aware of the fact that they were to rate their own pronunciation from the recording. analysis and results both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted. the quantitative data were analyzed in a mixed 2x2 anova with a between-subject independent variable of proficiency (lower/higher), a within-subject independent variable of task (self-rate your pronunciation/rate your recording) and a dependent variable of rating (1–9). the qualitative data were analyzed from descriptive answers concerning the strengths and weaknesses of the participants’ self-reported pronunciation and from the exposure to the recordings. quantitative analysis rated pronunciation. the mean rating for self-reported pronunciation in the lower-proficiency group was 5.6 (se = 0.2) and 5.5 (se = 0.2) in the higherproficiency group with the insignificant difference [f(1, 64) = .15, p > .05], ewa cieślicka, arkadiusz rojczyk76 indicating that both groups self-reported their pronunciation almost alike. the ratings between 5 to 6 suggest that both groups perceived their pronunciation as only a little higher than average. when exposed to the recording of their own speech, the participants rated their pronunciation almost identical as in the self-reporting stage. the mean rating was 5.5 (se = 0.2) for the lowerproficiency and 5.8 (se = 5.8) for the higher-proficiency group respectively. the difference between the groups was not significant [f(1,64) = .88, p > .05]. predictably, there were no significant within-subject differences between selfreported pronunciation and pronunciation rated from the recording in either the lower-proficiency group [f(1, 34) = .07, p > .05] or higher-proficiency group [f(1,30) = 2.6, p > .05]. rated articulation. the self-reported mean scores for articulation were very similar to the ones for pronunciation. the mean rating in the lowerproficiency group was 5.6 (se = 0.2) compared to 5.4 (se = 0.2) in the higherproficiency group. the difference was not significant [f(1, 63) = .79, p > .05]. when exposed to the recording, the lower-proficiency students had a mean score of 5.2 (se = 0.3). the mean score in the higher-proficiency group was 5.6 (se = 0.3). again, the difference was statistically insignificant [f(1, 64) = 1.14, p > .05]. within-group comparisons for each group between scores obtained from self-reporting and rating the recording revealed that the differences were not significant in either group. in the lower-proficiency group the difference was close to significant [f(1, 33) = 3.15, p = .08], pointing to some trend that listening to the recording decreased ratings of articulation (5.6 to 5.2), however, again, the difference was not statistically significant. in the higher-proficiency group the trend was reversed (5.4. to 5.6), but it was also statistically insignificant [f(1, 30) = .74, p > .05]. rated fluency. ratings for fluency did not differ much from the already reported ratings for pronunciation and articulation. self-reported scores did not differ significantly between the lower-proficiency (m = 5.9; se = 0.2) and higher-proficiency (m = 5.7; se = 0.2) groups [f(1, 64) = .53, p > .05]. a significant difference emerged when the participants listened to the recording. the lower-proficiency students rated their fluency significantly lower (m = 4.9; se = 0.3) than higher-proficiency students (m = 6.2; se = 0.3) [f(1, 64) = 9.53, p < .01]. a mixed analysis with two categorical predictors of proficiency (lower / higher) and task (self-rate your pronunciation / rate your recording) revealed a significant interaction of proficiency and task [f(1, 64) = 14.5, p < .001]. figure 1 shows that listening to the recording triggered different tendencies in rating fluency depending on proficiency. self-reported vs. self-rated pronunciation in a non-native language 77 figure 1. interaction plot between proficiency and task for rated fluency. while the higher-proficiency students increased their mean ratings from 5.7 to 6.2, the lower-proficiency students decreased their mean ratings from 5.9 to 4.9. the post hoc bonferroni tests showed that the significant main effect was largely contributed to by the lower-proficiency group which significantly decreased rating of their fluency when exposed to the recording ( p < .01). this difference was not significant in the higher-proficiency group ( p = .6). desired change in pronunciation. the reported desired change in pronunciation prior to the recording was almost identical: 5.6 (se = 0.3) and 5.5 (se = 0.3) for the higherand lower-proficiency group respectively. when exposed to the recording, the participants exhibited slightly different trends depending on proficiency. the higher-proficiency students decreased the rating of desired change to 5.5 (se = 0.3), compared to the lower-proficiency students, who increased their mean scores to 6 (se = 0.3); however, the difference between the two groups was not statistically significant [f(1, 64) = 1.58, p > .05]. within-group comparisons revealed that the difference in rating for self-reporting and after listening to the recording was not significant in either the higher-proficiency [f(1, 30) = .01, p > .05] or lower-proficiency group [f(1, 33) = 1.43, p > .05]. ewa cieślicka, arkadiusz rojczyk78 qualitative analysis the participants’ answers provided for the two descriptive questions were assigned into one or more of four groups: as being related to pronunciation, articulation, tone of voice, and/or fluency of speech. other answers, either unrelated, unclear or difficult to categorize, were not taken into account for the purpose of this analysis, and were therefore omitted, but will be brought up in the general discussion. differences in self-reporting. for question one, “what do you consider to be the strengths of your pronunciation?”, out of 31 respondents in the higherproficiency group, 18 students provided answers which pointed to one or more of the four aspects of pronunciation mentioned above. the same was the case for 23 people in the lower-proficiency group of 35. the percentage share for each mentioned feature is presented in figure 2. figure 2. bar graphs for answers assigned to the four aspects for both levels of proficiency, strength of pronunciation. it appears that there is a tendency for higher-proficiency speakers to initially value their pronunciation and articulation slightly higher than the lowerproficiency group, but they are much less eager to consider their tone of voice satisfactory. both groups reported to be equally content with their speech fluency. the response rate, however, is not to be considered very solid. for the second question, “what do you consider to be the weaknesses of your pronunciation?”, the response rate was considerable. out of 31 respondents in the higher-proficiency group, assignable answers were provided by 29 students. in the lower-proficiency group, the question was answered by 30 of 35 students. once more, the percentage share is represented in figure 3. self-reported vs. self-rated pronunciation in a non-native language 79 figure 3. bar graph for answers assigned to the four aspects for both levels of proficiency, weakness of pronunciation. the difference in how often pronunciation was mentioned is fairly consistent with what has been revealed in the first question—namely that lower-proficiency speakers are less satisfied with their pronunciation. remarkably, identical disregard for their articulation and tone of voice was shown in both groups, but with tone of voice being mentioned less frequently. lower-proficiency speakers were expressively less likely to refer to their fluency when discussing their weaknesses. self-reporting vs. post-exposure rating in higher-proficiency participants. the change in response rates between the self-reporting and post-exposure stages of the experiment was not substantial, with six more respondents answering the first descriptive question, and one fewer answering the second descriptive question (see figure 4). figure 4. bar graph for descriptive answers assigned to the four aspects for higher-proficiency speakers, strength of pronunciation. ewa cieślicka, arkadiusz rojczyk80 the second stage, self-rating, resulted in a lower percentage share of pronunciation among the provided answers, although the change is not very significant. it may indicate the students’ initial—though moderate—overestimation of their skills. the change in fluency percentage, however, suggests that the exposure to the pre-recorded samples left the students pleasantly surprised by their own fluency of speech. there is only very minor variability in the rating of articulation and tone (see figure 5). figure 5. bar graph for descriptive answers assigned to the four aspects for higher-proficiency speakers, weakness of pronunciation. following the second part of the experiment, the only major changes in the descriptive answers were related to pronunciation and fluency. the higherproficiency speakers were slightly more dissatisfied with their pronunciation, but their fluency was not mentioned as a weakness quite as often anymore. the frequency of their pointing to articulation and tone did not undergo any serious change. self-reporting vs. post-exposure rating in lower-proficiency participants. similarly to what was the case for the university students, the difference in response rates between the two stages of study was not substantial, the only change occurring in the first descriptive question, which came to be answered by three more participants in the second part of the experiment (see figure 6). self-reported vs. self-rated pronunciation in a non-native language 81 figure 6. bar graph for descriptive answers assigned to the four aspects for lower-proficiency speakers, strength of pronunciation. after listening to their speech samples, the students were less likely to point to their tone of voice and/or fluency as one of their strengths, but appeared rather pleased with their pronunciation and articulation (see figure 7). figure 7. bar graph for descriptive answers assigned to the four aspects for lower-proficiency speakers, weakness of pronunciation. it was not until the second stage of the experiment that the students seemed to widely acknowledge their lack of fluency as their weakness—the switch appears to have been very rapid. again, as a logical consequence of the respondents’ contetment with their pronunciation and articulation, those two features were mentioned much less frequently, in the case of articulation the frequency dropping to a near half of what was observed in the first stage. ewa cieślicka, arkadiusz rojczyk82 general discussion the analysis of the quantitative results will be presented from two perspectives: the perspective of proficiency on self-perception of one’s pronunciation and the perspective of how listening to the recording of one’s speech changes the perception of one’s pronunciation. in the first perspective, what emerges as the most evident is the stability of self-perception of pronunciation irrespective of proficiency. the fact that the higher-proficiency group was both more advanced in language competence and had had prior training in pronunciation did not affect their ratings—even though previous studies have shown that formal phonetic training substantially improves productive pronunciation skills (nowacka, 2008). it is interesting to note that both groups rated their pronunciation between 5 to 6 on a 9-point scale, which points to the fact that they perceived their pronunciation as only slightly higher than the average between native and non-native. it may be concluded, at least in the light of the current results, that students, who should theoretically be much more confident in their pronunciation, are in fact not. additionally, the ratings of the desired change do not show that less proficient students are more willing to change something in their pronunciation. it runs counter to initial intuition that lower-proficiency and lack of specialized pronunciation training should lead to the higher desire for improvement. similarly surprising is the fact that the higher-proficiency students expressed relatively high desire for change, as high as the one expressed by the lower-proficiency students. it leads to the conclusion that proficiency and phonetic training do not guarantee more confidence in pronunciation. as gardner et al. (1989) observe, anxiety levels normally tend to decline with the rise of experience and proficiency. whenever a student expects to fail, anxiety results—which could in turn lead to self-derogation bias in the self-assessment of language skills. it could therefore be alleged that higher-proficiency students of english who should, in theory, be confident enough to perceive their pronunciation skills as advanced (due to their experience), and who at the same time tend to rate themselves as just slightly above average (between native and non-native) may suffer from a form of language anxiety. similar results were obtained for articulation and fluency. as regards articulation, it may be argued that the participants did not fully differentiate between articulation and pronunciation. while it may be the case for the lowerproficiency students who had not received any training in pronunciation and phonetics, the higher-proficiency students are likely to have been aware of the difference between pronunciation and articulation. nevertheless, the mean rating for articulation is very similar to the one for pronunciation in both groups. it leads to the conclusion that articulation is taken to be fully integrated with self-reported vs. self-rated pronunciation in a non-native language 83 pronunciation independent of how proficient students are or whether or not they have acquaintance with phonetics. the comparison of the results from self-reporting and after exposure to the recording points to a general conclusion that listening to one’s recording does not change the perception of one’s pronunciation. listening to the recording did not change ratings for either pronunciation or articulation. the exception here is fluency, which exhibited the influence of task on ratings in an interacting pattern. after listening to the recording, the higher-proficiency students increased their mean scores, whereas the lower-proficiency students decreased their scores. it is not easy to explain why this parameter exhibited the effect of task. there are, however, two reasons to consider it as separate from both pronunciation and articulation. one reason is that fluency is somehow disconnected from pronunciation. in common wisdom it is taken to mean how fast one speaks irrespective of specific correctness of pronunciation and articulation. it is also connected with skills such as the generation of syntactic constructions and verbal fluency. another reason is that rating fluency from the recording of a read text is not well-grounded methodologically. fluency seems to be more connected with spontaneous speech, where it is inseparably coupled, at least in general conception of the term, with skills such as word finding and sentence construction. the qualitative analysis was conducted from two perspectives—the perspective of differences in self-reporting among the two levels of proficiency, and the perspective of differences in descriptive answers preand post-exposure to one’s recording in each group of participants. regardless of the level of proficiency, both stages of our study have come to show that out of the four aspects we grouped the descriptive answers into (pronunciation, articulation, fluency, and tone of voice), pronunciation was referred to the most often, both as a weakness and a strength. it could be argued that this is due to the importance students of all levels attach to attaining native-like model in accent, intonation, and stress. this conclusion is consistent with nowacka’s (2012) aforementioned study. when enquired about their weaknesses, the students would frequently point to how “polish” they sounded. in both groups, there were instances of participants misunderstanding the task and providing anwers which were irrelevant to pronunciation, but instead referred to their vocabulary, listening comprehension or grammar skills, which could be indicative of their poor understanding of what proper pronunciation stands for and equals to. it can be generally concluded that as it comes to fluency, the lower-proficiency students slightly overestimate their fluency whereas the higher-proficiency students underestimate it. a possible explanation for this is that generally, more is expected from university students in terms of fluency, and they could therefore repeatedly be made to feel that they did not meet certain standards. the only truly significant changes which could be observed in the qualitative questions ewa cieślicka, arkadiusz rojczyk84 were those related to pronunciation and fluency in the lower-proficiency group between the two parts of the experiment. for fluency, these results are in tact with what has been shown in the quantitative analysis, where the mean decrease in rating was statistically significant. in the case of pronunciation, however, the findings were not distincly reflected in the 1–9 scale ratings in the previous part of the analysis. regardless of their level of acquaintance with transcription and phonetics, both groups used phonetic symbols to point to their specific articulatory problems—those instances, however, were still very rare. many students saw their pronunciation as clear and easy to understand, and perceived this intelligibility as a definite strength. another interesting aspect to note is the switch in response rates between questions concerning the self-reported strengths and weaknesses of the participants’ pronunciation. the increase in the number of answers for the weakness question may suggest that it is much easier for students to think and speak of the flaws in their language skills than of the strengths. yet we must also acknowledge the possibility that the respondents might have been somehow intimidated by the prospect of being verified by comparing their reported strengths and their recording. therefore, this particular tendency could have more to do with experimental inhibitions among l2 learners than with how they actually perceived their pronunciation skills. conclusions as may be concluded from the current results, the general perception of one’s pronunciation ability is stable, not affected by specific performance in a given recording and irrespective of proficiency. students at both levels of proficiency express similar desire for improvement of their pronunciation skills—hence, experience and phonetic training do not seem to translate into confidence. instances of the participants’ misunderstanding of the survey questions were telling and are to be taken into account for future research, perhaps in the application of even more clearly defined criteria. the current findings that self-reported pronunciation does not differ from the pronunciation rated from the recording of one’s speech forms a starting point for our future investigation in which we intend to apply voice manipulation. the rationale is as follows: if one self-reports one’s pronunciation in the same fashion as they rate it from the recording of their voice, we are interested to see if ratings for the recording of one’s own pronunciation change if one does not know they are listening to their own speech. in other words, we plan to create a situation in which students will rate their own pronunciation, being unaware of the fact that they are actually listening to their own speech. in self-reported vs. self-rated pronunciation in a non-native language 85 order to do that, we plan to manipulate voice parameters to the extent that the voice is reliably altered without manipulating other speech parameters that may contribute to accent rating. in order to set out with such a study, we needed to establish that students indeed do not differ in their self-reporting and rating their own recording when they know it is their own speech. the current study has established that self-reporting and the recording rating are fully connected. references blanche, p., & merino, b. j. 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(1987). paying attention to pronunciation: the role of selfmonitoring in perception. tesol quarterly, 21(4), 765–768. ewa cieślicka, arkadiusz rojczyk die selbsteinschätzung der fremdsprachigen aussprache vor und nach dem abhören der aufnahme der eigenen stimme z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die im vorliegenden artikel geschilderte untersuchung betrifft die selbsteinschätzung der fremdsprachigen aussprache bei polnischen schülern der niedrigeren und höheren lernstufe. sie konzentrierte sich darauf, die unterschiede zwischen der selbsteinschätzung vor und nach dem abhören der aufnahme der eigenen stimme zu vergleichen. in früheren untersuchungen zur ausspracheeinschätzung besprach man die den schülern von muttersprachlern oder fortgeschrittenen sprachbenutzern gegebenen noten, wohingegen in vorliegender analyse die einschätzung des eigenen akzents hinsichtlich solcher kriterien wie aussprache, artikulation und flüssigkeit im mittelpunkt steht. die forschungsergebnisse wurden dann einer qualitativen und quantitativen analyse unterzogen. es wurden keine relevanten unterschiede zwischen der zu erklärten ausspracheeinschätzung und der selbsteinschätzung der aussprache nach dem abhören der aufnahme von eigener stimme festgestellt. das lässt zum schluss kommen, dass die allgemeine wahrnehmung eigener akzentqualität beständig ist und sie ändert sich nicht in folge der reaktion auf solche aufnahmen. schlüsselwörter: psycholinguistik, phonetik, selbsteinschätzung der aussprache, fremdsprachenunterricht dorota lipińska university of silesia in katowice, poland the influence of age and l2 on third language acquisition in a corporate environment a b s t r a c t the role of age factor in sla has been systematically studied by numerous psycholinguists for many years (ellis, 1994), starting from the critical period hypothesis (first proposed by penfield and roberts, 1959, and then popularized by lenneberg, 1967) and continuing until today. however, sometimes learners’ age is not the only potential difficulty. the situation becomes even more complicated in the case of l3 acquisition when not only all factors inf luencing sla are active, but also numerous other processes affect tla. the aim of this study was to analyze the inf luence of the age factor and learners’ l2 on tla in a corporate environment. a group of subjects from an international company situated in the south of poland agreed to participate in the study. they were native speakers of polish learning l3-german in their company, but varying in terms of l2 (english and russian), as well as in terms of age. the participants were between 28 and 62 years old. the results of regularly administered tests focusing on various language skills, obtained by the learners were compared. the subjects also completed questionnaires concerning difficulties they encountered while learning german. both information sources delivered intriguing results contributing to the area of tla and age-related research. keywords: age, third language acquisition, in-company teaching, foreign language learning the age factor in sla the age factor in second language acquisition is one of the most widely discussed elements affecting this process and it has been systematically studied by numerous psycholinguists for many decades (e.g., jackiewicz, 2009). it is widely known that the tendency to acquire novelties changes during the theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 3 (1) 2017, pp. 7–27 dorota lipińska8 lifetime (ellis, 1994). a natural question which arises when one considers the age factor is the matter of a possible critical period for sla (e.g., singleton & leśniewska, 2012). for instance, for many years it has been demonstrated that “earlier is better” for learning a second language (flege & mackay, 2011). these kinds of opinions are inextricably connected to the critical period hypothesis which in fact has been the subject of a long-standing debate (in both general linguistics and language acquisition studies) over the extent to which the ability to acquire language is actually biologically linked to age. this hypothesis claims that there is an ideal period of time to acquire language in a linguistically rich environment and that after this time ‘window’ further language acquisition becomes much more difficult. the hypothesis was first proposed by penfield and roberts (1959) and then popularized by lenneberg (1967) who stated that there are maturational constraints on the time a first language can be acquired. the language acquisition relies on neuroplasticity. if language acquisition does not occur by puberty, some aspects of language can still be learnt but full mastery is impossible to be achieved. although the theory constituted the starting point for extensive research in studies on l1 acquisition (see, e.g., singleton & ryan, 2004), it has often been extended to a critical period for the second language acquisition, however this application is much more controversial. the most popular interpretations of the critical period hypothesis in sla are the following. firstly, after a certain maturational point, second language learners are no more able to achieve the native-like proficiency in their target language. moreover, they need to undertake more tremendous effort in order to achieve good results in language learning. what is most pessimistic, is the sharp decline in second language learning potential observed after the age of puberty (singleton & leśniewska, 2012). certainly, it has been often observed that l2 older learners rather rarely achieve the nativelike fluency which younger learners display more frequently, despite commonly progressing faster than children in the initial stages. it may be that it is better to start learning a new language at a young age; however, there are also numerous exceptions of individuals who mastered l2 in adulthood (singleton, 1995). nevertheless, it cannot be forgotten that children lack the linguistic experience, strategies, and knowledge which adults posses and which can be useful in learning a new language. an individual who began learning english at the age of two, after 20 years achieves a similar level of competence like somebody who started learning the same language intensively at the age of sixteen after six years. thus, it is very difficult to decide whether children are able to achieve the same level in a new language faster than teenagers or young adults (arabski, 1997; jackiewicz, 2009). moreover, there is a constant question when exactly this critical period finishes. for instance, aram et al. (1997, p. 85) noticed that “the end of the critical period for language in humans has proven […] difficult to find, with the inf luence of age and l2… 9 estimates ranging from 1 year of age to adolescence.” in literature one can find various proposals concerning this matter. while piske et al. (2001) suggest it is 12 years of age, others place it at 15 years of age (e.g., zabrocki, 1966) or even 6 (e.g., sikorski, 2002). another topic for dispute is what language skills may be affected by the critical period (see singleton, 2005). most researchers focus on l2 pronunciation and agree that language learners who start to be exposed to a target language after the age puberty will not ever “pass themselves off as native speakers phonologically” (scovel, 1988, p. 185). the same view is presented by, for example, long (1990) or wysocka (2007). nonetheless, there are also opposite opinions and studies (e.g., tarone, 1978) describing adult language learners who managed to achieve perfect pronunciation in their target language. also porzuczek and rojczyk (2010) noticed that the results obtained from the latest acoustic studies suggest that human capability of learning l2 sound systems and their components is not diminished or lost after the age of puberty and that older language learners are capable of acquiring foreign vowels and consonants at a good level. other skills that are thought to be under the influence of the critical period are l2 morphology and syntax (e.g., long, 2007). however, there is no clear explanation whether the critical period really affects those skills. there were numerous studies on language learners who achieved very high levels of l2 proficiency in spite of starting learning their target language at older age (e.g., birdsong, 1992; singleton & lengyel, 1995; bongaerts et al., 2000; bongaerts, 2003; muñoz & singleton, 2007; kinsella, 2009; flege & mackay, 2011). hyltenstam and abrahamsson (2000) notice that there are no described instances of such learners who would behave in every detail like native speakers of a particular language, but still there are no early l2 learners who would either. what most researchers seem to agree on, is the opinion that later language learning requires more effort and conscious learning (e.g., lenneberg, 1967; breathnach, 1993; bongaerts, 1999). nevertheless, it may be connected not with the critical period for language acquisition, but with the process of increasing importance of conscious learning in all domains, linked to one’s cognitive development (e.g., feldman, 2009). what appears to be the most reasonable approach to the age factor in sla, is a new tendency to change the scope of interest a little. instead of focusing on only neurobiological maturational factors, more and more researchers are starting to examine a complex combination of social, environmental, and affective factors reflecting multidimensionality of sla (singleton & muñoz, 2011; singleton & leśniewska, 2012). dorota lipińska10 language transfer transfer of linguistic properties from one’s mother tongue into the target language is said to be one of the most obvious and at the same time pervasive features of the process of second language acquisition (towell & hawkins, 1994; arabski, 1997; arabski, 2006). the discussion on this topic began with the work of american linguists, robert lado and charles fries, in the 1940s and 1950s. although the work of lado and fries was obviously a kind of catalyst for subsequent research, one can argue that serious thinking about crosslinguistic influences could be dated even to the nineteenth century historical linguistics (odlin, 1989; gass & selinker, 2008). since the beginning of the twentieth century there has been a great acceptance of the idea that native language and its characteristics could seriously influence the process of sla (odlin, 1989; bley-vroman, 1990; bohn, 1998). for many years transfer was perceived as the major source of several difficulties for l2 learners (richards & sampson, 1974; broselow, 1984). at the very beginning of the research in this subject potential difficulties were expected to happen only in those areas of two languages where they were most visibly different (arabski, 1997). at the same time, the structural distance between languages was thought to be an important factor either facilitating or hindering second language acquisition (crystal, 1998). sla was supposed to be dealing with and overcoming those differences. yet, later research showed that the differences and similarities between two languages are usually not comparable to difficulties in acquiring one of them as the second language and that transfer itself is a very complex and deep phenomenon (arabski, 1997; crystal, 1998). moreover, it turned out that there are different kinds of transfer and that it may be either positive or negative. in the case of visible similarities between the mother tongue and the target language one could speak about a phenomenon of positive transfer (ellis, 1994; arabski, 2006). from the behaviorist perspective positive transfer is helpful in acquiring second language habits (littlewood, 1994). yet, the differences and contrasting elements between languages usually tend to contribute to negative transfer (ellis, 1994; arabski, 2006). negative transfer of l1 habits hinders a learner’s acquisition of a target language (littlewood, 1994). it was observed that not only structures, vocabulary, and grammar rules are transferred in sla, but also other habits from l1 may undergo this process (corder, 1967). another unarguable issue is the fact that transfer changes as learners’ interlanguages develop (arabski, 1997). according to towell and hawkins (1994) the acquisition of second languages and the development of one’s interlanguage is typically staged. at beginner and elementary levels, students tend to be very sensitive to the influence of their mother tongue. when their interlanguage the inf luence of age and l2… 11 changes, develops, and becomes more similar to l2, the influence of l1 is usually less visible. on the other hand, the situation is more complex, because, although advanced l2 learners are obviously less sensitive to l1 influence in everyday conversations and simple sentences, they also use more complicated language structures and forms which again can be significantly affected by their mother tongue thus showing again examples of transfer (arabski, 1997; towell & hawkins, 1994). generally speaking, language transfer is used to simplify l2 structures and their use, not to complicate them (arabski, 2006). what is also essential is the fact that the mother tongue and the target language need to be genetically connected to each other to allow the occurrence of transfer between them (arabski, 1997). interference is likely to appear when there is a crucial similarity measure between the first and the second language (ellis, 1994). depending on how close the languages are and what kind of similar characteristics they share, the transfer will occur in different situations and different structures (arabski, 1997; towell & hawkins, 1994). although it seems that transfer may affect all linguistic levels, such as phonetics, phonology, syntax, morphology, lexicon and discourse (towell & hawkins, 1994), it should be added that not every structure from l1 may be transferred to l2. here the notion of transferability is a very significant factor. it is said that only those structures which are psycho-linguistically neutral can be transferred. it is very interesting that l2 students do not tend to transfer, for example, idioms (arabski, 1997; kellerman, 1977). still, structures from l1 which sound naturally in l2 are very frequently transferred. it was also proven that transfer may be observed much more often in informal situations, in which a speaker does not focus on the form, but on conveying the sense of the message itself (arabski, 1997, 2006). one cannot also forget that language transfer does not occur only between l1 and l2. in the case of l3 acquisition, the situation becomes even more complicated and possibilities of interlanguage transfer multiply (arabski, 2006). third language acquisition first of all, it has to be said that for many years acquisition of third or any additional language was simply classified as a part of sla (e.g., cenoz, 2000; jessner, 2006). however for the last twenty years third language acquisition (tla) has been described as a separate process, clearly different from sla (chłopek, 2011), and this difference will be important for the purpose of this article. when one compares sla and tla it is easy to notice that there are copious differences between these processes. however, the main and probably dorota lipińska12 the most crucial one, is the number of languages (or interlanguages) previously acquired by language learners. it is so important as those languages are likely to interact with one another. another factor which cannot be ignored is the order of language acquisition in tla. the explanation is simple: while during sla the number of such configurations is quite narrow—either two languages may be acquired synchronously or l2 after l1, tla allows for more complex combinations (e.g., three languages one after another, l1 + l2 first and then l3, l1 first and then l2 + l3 or even all three languages at the same time). the third very influential factor is one’s fluency in each of the acquired languages. having looked at all those factors altogether, one may notice that third language acquisition is a more complex and more dynamic phenomenon than sla (chłopek, 2011). transfer in tla may also be more complicated and complex than in sla. it is easily noticeable when one remembers that sla allows for l1→l2 transfer or l2 intralingual interference (and of course, l2→l1 but this option is not as common as the two previous variants), while in tla, because all acquired languages may influence each other in any possible configuration, the number of combinations is much higher. for instance, for three languages the transfer possibilities could be following: l1→l2, l1→l3, l2→l3, l2→l1, l3→l2 or l3→l1 (chłopek, 2011; ionin et al., 2011). moreover, although it does not occur so frequently, also various language combinations may be a source of language transfer (e.g. l1 + l2→l3, l1 + l3→l2 or even l2 + l3→l1) (chłopek, 2011). what is also interesting, some studies showed that various languages create various interlingual effects and, for instance, it is a frequent case that l2 affects l3 in ways that l1 never does (odlin, 2005). therefore, both l1 and l2 may affect l3. the frequent question is which of those languages is a more frequent source of transfer. although rather considerable research has been conducted in this matter, the results are not uniform. depending on a research project, combinations of analyzed languages and examined language aspects or skills, some researchers proved that in the case of l3 acquisition, l2 may serve as a predominant source of transfer (e.g., hammarberg, 2001; treichler et al., 2009) but other studies showed that it could be one’s mother tongue (e.g., chumbow, 1981) as well. nevertheless, a simple order of acquisition cannot be regarded as an exclusive explanation in tla studies. a typological distance (based on classifying languages according to their structural characteristics) between the analyzed languages is thought to be even more significant than the order in which the languages were learnt (letica & mardešić, 2007; lammiman, 2010; chłopek, 2011). for example, de angelis and selinker (2001) discovered in their study that typological similarity between non-native languages is likely to provoke non-native transfer in non-native production. this has been proven by other scholars. for instance, lipińska’s (2014a) study on lexical transfer in l3 production showed that typologically the inf luence of age and l2… 13 closer l2-english affected l3-german to a more significant extent than l1polish did. similar situation occurred in lipińska’s (2014b) study on foreign vowel production where again l2-english affected l3-german to such a great degree that the analyzed l2 and l3 vowel categories merged completely. while explaining why some languages are transferred and other ones are not, numerous variables are taken into consideration, such as proficiency and fluency in both l2 and l3 (e.g., bardel & lindqvist, 2007; de angelis, 2007; lindqvist, 2010), frequency of use, a degree of formality or age of onset (e.g., de angelis, 2007; falk & bardel, 2010). nevertheless, one factor has recently taken the lead. researchers have proven in many studies that l2 can exert a stronger effect on l3 than l1 (e.g., bardel & falk, 2007; bohnacker, 2006; falk & bardel, 2011; leung, 2005; rothman & cabrelli amaro, 2010) which required an explanation. it has been discovered that it may be caused by a socalled l2 status factor. this factor has been thought to determine the transfer source (l1 or l2) in studies on l3 vocabulary and pronunciation (e.g., cenoz, 2001; de angelis, 2007; llama et al., 2007). but what exactly is it? it can be interpreted as “a desire to suppress l1 as being ‘non-foreign’ and to rely rather on an orientation towards a prior l2 as a strategy to approach the l3” (hammarberg, 2001, pp. 36–37). de angelis (2005) clarified that non-native languages are classified as “foreign language” category in learners’ minds, and it creates a cognitive association between them. l1 does not sound “foreign,” so it is usually eliminated from this association. this kind of classification is called an “association of foreigness” (de angelis, 2005, p. 11). it may favor non-native transfer, hence l2 is given a privileged status. such a situation was observed even earlier by other scholars, for instance by meisel (1983), who named it a “foreign language effect” (see also ecke & hall, 2000, where the phenomenon has a german name “fremdspracheneffekt”). learning foreign languages in a corporate environment the last factor which may significantly influence the results in the case of the current study and which thus has to be mentioned is the company environment in which language learning may take place. unfortunately research on a corporate learning and teaching is really scarce. chong (2013) wrote an article, and lipińska (in press) conducted a study on an in-company teaching foreign languages from a teacher’s perspective. although a learner’s perspective would be more useful in our case, some general conclusions may be drawn also concerning language learners. dorota lipińska14 first of all, both chong and lipińska noticed that in-company language learners attend l2 classes irregularly and it is very difficult to meet the same group of learners at two consecutive classes. some of the course participants come to classes very rarely. secondly, it frequently happens that they do not do their homework. it is especially problematic as in most cases in-company language classes are held once a week and without learners’ own work it is difficult to expect any significant progress. what is more, a lot of course participants who attend in-company classes are not very motivated since they do not pay for their language classes and their progress is not externally assessed. another interesting article which contributes to the topic was written by newton and kusmierczyk (2011). the authors noticed that in-company courses often fail to meet the managers’ and participants’ expectations as they do not deliver the required opportunities for language socialization, include inappropriate, not adjusted materials and classes are frequently focused on decontextualized language study and fail to address language needs directly relevant to the workplace. all these factors considered, one can expect that, at least in some cases, in-company language learning/teaching may not be as effective as language learning/teaching in other environments (e.g., language schools where course participants pay for courses on their own and come of their own free will). current study the current study is a part of more extensive research on in-company language learning and teaching. the research consists of multiple stages, each of them focused on a different aspect of the subject—ranging from various factors affecting the process to teachers’ and learners’ opinions on the matter. rationale and study design the aim of this study was to analyze the influence of two factors (first of all, learners’ age and, secondly, their previously learnt l2) on tla in a corporate environment. according to a popular belief, older language learners could be expected to achieve worse results than their younger groupmates. however, at the same time, a typologically closer l2 might exert a stronger transfer on l3 than an l2 from a different branch of a language family. what is more, learning a foreign language in a company environment may be less effective than in other environments and general results obtained by in-company lanthe inf luence of age and l2… 15 guage learners can be expected to be considerably low. therefore, the following questions arise: do younger learners achieve better results? does l2-english affect acquisition of l3-german to a larger extent than l2-russian? can in-company learners achieve as good results as those learners who attend courses in language schools? study participants a group of subjects from an international company situated in the south of poland agreed to participate in the study. they were native speakers of polish learning l3-german in their company, but varying in terms of an l2 (either english or russian). the study participants consisted of thirty-two people, six women and twenty-six men. they were between 28 and 62 years old. they attended german courses at a2+ and b1 levels according to the common european framework of reference for languages (2011). what is important is the fact that all subjects started learning german in their company from scratch, having no prior experience in learning this language. all of them were from the same region of poland (silesia and zagłębie, southern poland) and thus shared a similar language background. methodology the results of the end-of-year tests in various language skills (grammar, vocabulary, reading comprehension, listening comprehension, and speaking), obtained by the learners at the end of 2015, were compared. mean results and standard deviations were calculated. for the purpose of the analysis, the subjects were divided twice into contrasting groups. firstly, they were divided into two groups according to their age. the first group of study participants comprised learners who were <50 years old (18 people). the other group of subjects consisted of learners who were ≥50 years old (14 people). secondly, the subjects were divided into two groups once again, this time according to their l2 which they had learnt prior to the company course in german. in this case the first group, with l2-english consisted of 15 subjects, while the other group, with russian as an l2, comprised 17 study participants. significant was the fact that all of them claimed not to have any knowledge of the other l2 in question. the subjects also completed questionnaires and wrote retrospective comments concerning difficulties they encountered while learning german. dorota lipińska16 study results the following section presents the results of the current study. they are divided into three sections describing the effect of the age factor on tla, the influence of subjects’ l2s on their l3-german and the study participants’ opinions concerning learning a third language. the age factor table 1 presents the test results obtained by the study participants. for the purpose of this part of the analysis, they were divided into two groups of learners, according to their age. the first group consisted of younger learners who were less than 50 years of age. the other group comprised older learners who were 50 years old or more. table 1 the end-of-year test results obtained by the subjects, divided according to their age language skill group <50 (n = 18) group ≥50 (n = 14) the worst result the best result the mean result standard deviation the worst result the best result the mean result standard deviation % % grammar 20 100 72 17.44 40 100 80 16.95 vocabulary 15 100 79 19.62 55 100 82 14.20 reading comprehension 55 90 79 9.00 75 100 84 8.36 listening comprehension 45 95 80 13.77 70 95 79 7.03 speaking 30 95 83 14.14 60 95 81 9.92 as one can see, the results obtained by both younger and older subjects were quite similar. the differences in mean results in the case of all language skills were insignificant and reached the values between 1% and 8%. in three cases (grammar, vocabulary, and reading comprehension) the older learners even outperformed the younger ones, achieving slightly better results. the most noticeable difference was observed for grammar, where more than 50 learners achieved mean result at the level of 80%, while their younger groupmates were 8% worse, having the result at the level of 72%. however, the younger subjects were slightly better at listening and speaking. the inf luence of age and l2… 17 of course, these are mean values, and one ought to look at individual scores as well. it can be noticed that the differences between the best and the worst results were much bigger in the younger group. the results achieved by the older learners were more consistent. in order not to rely on bare numbers, a two-way anova was performed. it aimed at examining the effects of the age and l2 factors on acquisition of l3-german by the subjects. table 2 presents the results for the age factor. table 2 the results of a two-way anova for the age factor language skill sums of squares degrees of freedom mean squares f-ratio p-values grammar between 504.000 1 504.000 1.698 0.202 within 8,905.544 30 296.851 total 9,409.544 31 vocabulary between 70.875 1 70.875 0.232 0.634 within 9,165.375 30 305.512 total 9,236.250 31 reading comprehension between 196.875 1 196.875 2.584 0.118 within 2,285.565 30 76.185 total 2,482.440 31 listening comprehension between 7.875 1 7.875 0.061 0.806 within 3,865.891 30 128.863 total 3,873.766 31 speaking between 31.500 1 31.500 0.202 0.656 within 4,678.256 30 155.942 total 4,709.756 31 as one can see in table 2, the results of anova confirmed what had already been noticed in table 1. since all p-values were much greater than 0.05 (and we assume this number to establish the point of statistical significance), it can be undoubtedly stated that the differences between the two age groups were statistically insignificant. dorota lipińska18 the l2-effect the next part of the analysis presents the test results divided according to the subjects’ l2s. it aims at analyzing whether there is any significant influence of an l2 on learning german as an l3. it is especially valuable, since one of the analyzed l2s (english) is typologically close to l3-german, and hence may be expected to be more influential than the other l2 (russian) which is typologically more distant. table 3 the end-of-year test results obtained by the two groups of subjects, divided according to their l2s language skill group l2-english (n = 15) group l2-russian (n = 17) the worst result the best result the mean result standard deviation the worst result the best result the mean result standard deviation % % grammar 20 100 70 18.19 40 100 80 15.49 vocabulary 15 100 77 20.76 55 100 83 13.37 reading comprehension 55 90 78 9.39 75 100 84 8.05 listening comprehension 45 95 80 15.00 70 95 79 6.66 speaking 30 95 82 15.33 60 95 83 9.34 as table 3 illustrates, again there is no significant difference between the mean results obtained by the subjects with english as an l2 and the subjects with l2-russian. the differences range from 1% to 10%. however, in the case of grammar, vocabulary, speaking, and reading comprehension, the group of learners with l2-russian achieved higher scores than the group with l2english. the greatest difference was noticed for grammar (10%). it may suggest the existence of negative transfer between subjects’ l2 and l3 in the case of the two typologically close languages (english and german). once again, in order not to rely on bare numbers, also this part of the analysis was subject to a two-way anova. table 4 presents the results for the l2-factor. the inf luence of age and l2… 19 table 4 the results of a two-way anova for the l2 factor language skill sums of squares degrees of freedom mean squares f-ratio p-values grammar between 796.875 1 796.875 2.822 0.103 within 8,471.307 30 282.377 total 9,268.182 31 vocabulary between 286.875 1 286.875 0.968 0.333 within 8,893.797 30 296.460 total 9,180.672 31 reading comprehension between 286.875 1 286.875 3.789 0.061 within 2,271.249 30 75.708 total 2,558.124 31 listening comprehension between 7.969 1 7.969 0.062 0.805 within 3,859.690 30 128.656 total 3,867.658 31 speaking between 645.469 1 645.469 4.132 0.051 within 4,685.894 30 156.196 total 5,331.363 31 as can be seen in table 4, the results of anova again confirmed what had already been concluded from table 3. as almost all p-values were much greater than 0.05, it can be unquestionably said that the differences between the two l2s were statistically insignificant. the only skill which was characterized by a much lower p-value was speaking, where it equaled 0.051 and was very close to statistical significance. however, the numbers and statistics cannot show everything and only an in-depth analysis of the mistakes the study participants made can shed more light on the subject. especially the vocabulary, speaking, and grammar parts reveal the real reason for the results analyzed above. in the case of vocabulary exercises, the learners with l2-english were characterized by numerous instances of the usage of false friends (deceptive cognates) such as bekommen (‘be given’) instead of werden (‘become’), hybrids (coinages) such as all lange tage instead of tagelang, and calques like feuermann instead of feuerwehrmann, all deriving from the subjects’ l2. in the case of grammar, the subjects transferred dorota lipińska20 rules from their l2 and frequently used hybrids/blends (they especially mixed items while creating verbs—e.g., the stem was english, but german inflectional endings were added—goest, eaten’ etc.). in the case of speaking, the subjects used code-switching (sometimes only particular words were uttered in an l2, and sometimes—full phrases or sentences) and deceptive cognates. at the same time, the subjects whose l2 was russian never transferred its properties to l3-german. there were no instances of false friends, calques, hybrids or code-switching. those learners were more likely to abandon the message, use the semantic extension within an l3 or use the description instead of using an actual word. the subjects’ comments the study participants were also encouraged to write any comments they wanted, concerning learning german in their company. the selected comments are presented below. they were divided into three categories, depending on the subjects who had written them, in order to facilitate the analysis. all the comments below were written in polish by the subjects and then translated by the author of the paper. the subjects with l2-english: (1) i’m always trying to use english. it’s so annoying. (2) all the words i can think of are in english. (3) when i speak, i immediately want to switch to english. (3) english is easier. (4) it’s difficult because i speak english much more fluently. (+ 5 similar comments) (5) german is too difficult. the <50-year-old subjects: (6) i don’t have time for learning a new language. (7) work, home, young children = no time for learning german. (+ 3 similar comments) (8) i don’t need to speak german – it’s enough that my managers do. (9) 90 minutes weekly is not enough. (10) i am happy that i have a language course for free. the ≥50-year-old subjects: the inf luence of age and l2… 21 (11) i thought i was too old to learn a new language but it turned out that i am not. (12) i really appreciate it that i can learn something new. (13) i am glad that i can participate in german classes as i have to speak with my german counterparts. (14) finally, i have time to learn something useful. i also study at home, i listen to cds in my car etc. (15) i was scared to have classes with my younger colleagues, but everything is fine. (16) grammar is the most difficult thing – especially declension. (17) i think german grammar is pretty complicated. (+ 3 similar comments) as one can realize having analyzed the comments above, the subjects with l2-english are fully aware of the l2-interference which disturbs them and hinders successful communication and language learning. some of them also prefer english to german. generally speaking, younger learners frequently claim not to have enough time they could spend on learning german. they are preoccupied by their work, keeping moving up the career ladder, family matters, etc. moreover, in the company where the subjects are employed, the ability to speak german is necessary mainly for the communication between the managers and supervisors. since most of the younger subjects do not hold such positions, some of them do not see any need to speak german. there are also subjects who, on the other hand, are willing to learn an l3, but notice an insufficient number of classes which is the reason for their slow progress. the older study participants seem to be more motivated to learn german—both for the professional purposes and for their own satisfaction of doing something pleasant and useful. they may also have more time for learning as, for example, they do not have young children who need a lot of attention. some of them had been afraid of learning together with their younger colleagues, but during the language course they realized that the age does not have to be a problem. summary in conclusion, it can be said that age is not a crucial factor in tla, and older learners may be as successful as the younger ones. in the current study no significant statistical difference was found for the age factor, in the case of all the analyzed language skills. both the ≥50-year-old and the younger subjects achieved similar results. a slightly more visible influence was exerted by the study participants’ l2. the study results suggested that a typologically close dorota lipińska22 l2-english served as a source of negative language transfer in learning german as an l3, but l2-russian did not affect the process of tla in this way. both the analysis of the mistakes the subjects made and the comments concerning learning a third language, provided by the study participants, showed the complexity of tla. while statistical analyses did not show any significant influence of the two aforementioned factors on subjects’ process of learning german, the analysis of their mistakes revealed more details. although the results obtained during the tests were similar in terms of numbers, the subjects made different kinds of mistakes. while in the case of learners with l2-english l2-transfer was the main source of difficulties, the subjects whose l2 was russian, were more likely to abandon a message or task or try to find help within their l3. one of the possible explanations for this discrepancy between the groups was the fact that those subjects who had learnt english as an l2, had probably been motivated to learn that language and thus were likely to develop foreign language learning and communication strategies. on the other hand, since russian was imposed on all polish pupils under communism, most learners lacked any motivation to learn it and because of that they may not have acquired the appropriate language learning experience which could be later transferred to l3 learning. another explanation might be connected to müller-lancé’s (2003) division of multilingual learners into monolinguoids (i.e., multilinguals behaving like monolinguals), bilinguoids (multilinguals characterized by strong cross-linguistic connections between two languages only) and multilinguoids (multilinguals characterized by strong cross-linguistic connections between the mental representations of all languages). while the l2-russian group may have been monolinguoids, the l2-english group were rather bilinguoids. another matter worth looking at in more detail is the study of participants’ age. even though both younger and older learners’ results were similar, the reasons why the two groups are successful (or unsuccessful) may be different. younger learners may have better physiological learning capacities; however, they have more duties connected not only to their job and their efforts to get promoted, but also family responsibilities including young children. older learners, on the other hand, can be thought to learn more slowly due to the physiological or psychological factors, but at the same time they have more time they can devote to learning since their professional situation is more stable and their familial and parental duties have already decreased. of importance is also the fact that the results obtained by the in-company learners involved in the study were very similar to those achieved by the groups taught by the researcher in two language schools in the same region of poland. it suggests that learning/teaching a language in a company environment does not necessarily have to be less effective than in other environments. all those factors considered, it can be undoubtedly stated that learning a language is a really complex phenomenon and cannot be very easily and quickly explained. it is especially true for learning a third or another language. the inf luence of age and l2… 23 naturally, it was just a preliminary study and it would be advisable to analyze other groups of languages, as well as to involve larger groups of study participants from various areas of the country. references arabski, j. 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(2011). common european framework of reference for languages: learning, teaching, assessment. dorota lipińska der einfluss vom alter und von der zweiten sprache auf erwerb der dritten sprache im körperschaftsmilieu z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die rolle des alters als eines den erwerb von der zweiten sprache (sla – eng.: second language acquisition) bewirkenden faktors war schon seit vielen jahren von mehreren psycholinguisten (z.b.: ellis, 1994) systematisch untersucht, angefangen von der hypothese der kritischen periode (welche zuerst von penfield und roberts im jahre 1959 entwickelt und dann von lenneberg verbreitet wurde) bis zum heutigen tage. es kommt aber auch vor, dass der alter der lernenden selbst nicht das einzige problem und kein hauptfaktor im spracherwerbsprozess ist. der prozess mag nämlich beim erwerben der dritten sprache (tla – eng.: third language acquisition) viel komplizierter sein, weil man in dem fall nicht nur mit den die sla bewirkenden, sondern auch mit vielen anderen für tla typischen prozessen zu tun hat. der zweck der vorliegenden untersuchung war die analyse des einf lusses vom alter der lernenden und der einwirkung der früher erworbenen sprache auf das erwerben der dritten sprache in einem körperschaftsmilieu. an der untersuchung nahmen die bei einer großen internationalen firma mit sitz im südpolen angestellten freiwilligen teil. alle waren polnische muttersprachler im 28–62 lebensjahr und lernten deutsch als dritte sprache, sie unterscheiden sich jedoch voneinander in der zweiten sprache (englisch oder russisch) und im alter. man wollte feststellen, inwieweit oben genannte faktoren die tla beeinf lussen können, und zu dem zwecke wurden die von den probanden in den verschiedene sprachliche fähigkeiten prüfenden tests erzielten ergebnisse miteinander verglichen und die kommentare der probanden zu den während des lernprozesses getroffenen schwierigkeiten analysiert. die probanden waren jedes mal in zwei gruppen geteilt – hinsichtlich des alters oder der zweiten sprache. die gezeitigten ergebnisse lassen folgendes feststellen: obwohl das alter keine große rolle beim erwerben der dritten sprache spielt, ist der einf luss von der früher erworbenen zweiten sprache merklich. theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 5 (2) 2019, pp. 5–8 10.31261/tapsla.7772 preface we began publishing this journal in 2015. the decision to publish came from that fact that although poland has a strong presence among second language acquisition and multilinguality researchers, which is demonstrated by both the large number of conferences and also book publications appearing every year, academic journals focusing on theoretical issues as well as practical concerns of sla are fairly rare. the initial success of the journal is demonstrated by the fact that despite its short life, it is already indexed in several databases, including scopus (from 2019). thanks to this, it is also recognised by the polish ministry of higher education as a serious academic journal. we would also like to emphasize that the origins of our journal can be found in the success of the international conference on second/foreign language acquisition which has been organized for over thirty years by the institute of english at the university of silesia in katowice. it is an academic event that brings together many polish and foreign academics every may. its focus is on new trends in sla research but also on fairly un-researched issues. the conference always has a leading theme, however, the scholars are invited to present their research even if it falls out of the scope of the main topic. our journal quickly became an additional channel for publication of conference papers of high academic standard. however, we also warmly welcome other contributions, not connected with the conference itself. the whole process of paper submission is automated via an open journal system (ojs) and this embraces the article submission, referee assignment, and double blind-review process as well as the revisions, copyediting, and production stages. a team of experts from the university of silesia press are involved to make the whole procedure smooth and effective. the open access system allows for the generous availability of the most recent research in the field at no cost at all, thus promoting articles published in its issues to wide audiences. http://doi.org10.31261/tapsla.7772 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en 6 preface we believe that our journal already serves an important need in projecting new and interesting research in sla coming both from polish and foreign scholars in the field. the journal is published bi-annually, in june and december. as mentioned earlier, each text is peer-reviewed in a double-blind referring process by referees selected by us from the editorial board, but also beyond. the editorial board itself consists of both polish scholars and foreign experts in the area, and represents the wide range of research interests of its members. all updated information on the journal is available on the journal webpage at www.tapsla.us.edu.pl. the present issue focuses both on general themes of sla research, but also has a strong accent on development of different language skills in context by a bilingual/multilingual language learner/user. it opens with a text by the wellknown multilinguality researcher, gessica de angelis entitled “the bilingual advantage and the language background bias,” in which the claim is made about the advantages that bilingualism has in various spheres of life, including healthcare and education but which also points to possible disadvantages of being bilingual. the author carefully examines evidence that comes from advanced research that demonstrates both advantages for cognitive development of a bilingual as well as its drawbacks. de angelis points to certain discrepancies in the research evidence analysed, ascribing it to the language bias of the studies analysed. she also suggests a way forward in researching bilingual/multilingual advantage and its understanding. the following text by david singleton entitled “bi-/multilingual communication, identity and the posited intermingling of language systems in the mind” questions the way researchers talk about “the languages in the mind” and the conceptual dimensions of language. the author claims that knowledge of languages in the mind “is in fact in all its aspects highly differentiated” and to this end, he provides evidence from a variety of research areas such as language loss/recovery, bilingual/multilingual development and communication and importantly, the affective dimension of language differentiation. the following texts in the present issue take an interest in individual language skills development in efl learners. anna kiszczak and halina chodkiewicz in their text “text-based student questioning in efl settings: long-term strategy implementation in reciprocal reading tasks and its perception” focus on the importance of strategy training in the development of reading skills in a foreign language. the text reports on a classroom-based study the aim of which was to demonstrate whether a oneterm training session on reciprocal reading would improve quality in the use of student-generated questions at different periods of time, that is, during and after the sessions. the results of the study and their discussion offer some insights as to the development of reading skills in a foreign language class, which are considered an essential aspect in fl learning achievement. the next text, “influence of background knowledge and language proficiency on preface 7 comprehension of domain-specific texts by university students” by justyna kendik-gut continues the theme of reading comprehension skills and not only the role in this process of language proficiency but also that of background knowledge. the results of a quantitative study analysed statistically (test scores) confirmed the initial hypothesis that background knowledge and the language proficiency have a strong influence on reading comprehension of domain-specific texts. the author also presents some implications deriving from the study results and their discussion for efl classrooms. the next text by agnieszka ślęzak-świat entitled “complementarity of reading from paper and screen in the development of critical thinking skills for 21st-century literacy,” though also focusing on reading skills, takes a different angle on the topic. the author observes changing reading habits due to the development of modern technology and to this end, she discusses reading preferences of 21st-century readers, whose practices embrace both reading digital texts online and traditional printed ones. the author comments on how the reading mode contributes (or otherwise) to the development of critical thinking, perceived as “understanding complex ideas, evaluating evidence, weighing alternative perspectives and constructing justifiable arguments.” in the text to follow, maría begoña ruiz cordero’s “assessing english writing skills of students from bilingual and non-bilingual schools in castilla-la mancha, spain. a comparative study” takes up the theme of content and language integrated learning (clil) in relation to the development of writing skills in a foreign language. the aim of the study carried out by the author was to compare the levels of writing in english achieved by learners in clil and non-clil programmes at different schools across various geographical regions. the present issue finishes with two book reviews. the first one reviewed by danuta gabryś-barker presents a commentary on the monograph by wojciech malec entitled developing web-based language tests (2018), which is a comprehensive literature overview of language testing-related issues with a strong focus on using modern technology in the process of language assessment. apart from its in-depth theoretical part, it presents in details an on-line programme conceived by the author which can be of great help to all fl teachers in designing, analysing and finally assessing their test results. the second review by grażyna kiliańska-przybyło looks at the second edition of a book by lia litosseliti (2018) research methods in linguistics, whose focus lies in research methodology. it provides the readers with an overview of both quantitative and qualitative research methods employed in empirical studies in linguistics. the author advocates the use of a mixed method approach, which is necessary in the multidisciplinarity of modern research in linguistics. we hope that this issue will be of interest to researchers working in the field of second language acquisition. we would also like to invite polish and foreign academics to share their scholarly research with us by submitting their 8 preface work for the theory and practice of second language acquisition journal published by the prestigious polish academic publisher, wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego (university of silesia press). danuta gabryś-barker adam wojtaszek https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0308-4337 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0308-4337 theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 5 (2) 2019, pp. 123–127 10.31261/tapsla.7638 lia litosseliti (ed.), research methods in linguistics (2nd ed.). london: bloomsbury academic, 2018 the book entitled research methods in linguistics, edited by lia litosseliti, addresses the issue of research methodology that needs to be worked out before any empirical research is initiated. in the introductory chapter by lia litosse liti (p. 1) we can read that “linguistics is a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary field of study characterized by a diversity of theoretical, epistemological, and methodological approaches applied in different subfields (e.g., semantics, phonology, language acquisition), branches (e.g., experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics) and related fields (e.g., education, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, mathematics, sociology). […] as a heterogenous field, it has been in a continuous process of reformulation and bridge-building.” this diversity is ref lected in the way the book is organized and structured as “it encourages readers to take a wider view of key approaches along the quantitative-qualitative continuum” (litosseliti, 2018, p. 2). apart from providing a thorough and comprehensive overview of research methods available in the field of linguistics (e.g., such as quantitative methods, interviews, case study research), the volume also critically examines the affordances and limitations of quantitative versus qualitative paradigms. in addition, it presents the value of the holistic and mixed methods research, and the need to push the boundaries of methodologies to incorporate crossdisciplinary perspectives (litosseliti, 2018, p. 2), which makes this volume an essential contribution to the field of research methodology and a valuable resource for researchers, especially novice ones. the content organization of research methods in linguistics is very clear and logical. it seems that the reader is gradually introduced to particular research designs. the volume starts from an introductory chapter entitled http://doi.org10.31261/tapsla.7772 grażyna kiliańska-przybyło124 introducing research methods in linguistics, which is followed by twelve thematic chapters, structured into three parts: part one—issues (four chapters), part two—quantitative perspectives (three chapters), and part three— qualitative perspectives (five chapters). part one—issues provides readers with background knowledge necessary to conduct research. it examines steps that need to be followed as well as issues that must be taken into consideration while preparing one’s own research design such as setting appropriate research questions or choosing the best research scenario. this part consists of four chapters: research questions in linguistics (chap. 1), quantitative, qualitative, mixed or holistic research? combining methods in linguistic research (chap. 2), ethics in linguistic research (chap. 3) and transcription in linguistics (chap. 4). interestingly, part one of the volume also covers ethical values and guidelines that have to be observed in the process of research planning, administration, and dissemination of research results. ethical conduct of linguistic research, researcher/participant roles, confidentiality, privacy, ownership, access or dissemination constitute some of the themes raised and presented in this chapter. chapter 4, in turn, tackles the issue of transcription and examines principles as well as challenges linguists face while attempting to represent recorded talk in a textual written form. special attention is paid to conversation analysis and its approach to social interaction. part two deals with quantitative type of data and it includes the following chapters: quantitative methods: concepts, frameworks and issues (chap. 5), organizing and processing your data: the nuts and bolts of quantitative analyses (chap. 6), and corpus methods in linguistics (chap. 7). chapter 5, which opens the second part the volume, presents a distinction between quantitative and qualitative methods. it also discusses the characteristics of quantitative research and comments upon hypothesis formation and features of a good quantitative research design (i.e., quantifiability, reliability, and validity). chapter 6 concentrates on the process of analysing quantitative data. the value of chapter 6 lies in the fact that it examines two common statistical tests used in linguistics, chi-square and t-test. finally, chapter 7 analyzes corpus methods and characterizes corpus linguistic techniques (e.g., comparisons of word frequencies, a keyword analysis, examinations of collocates, and concordances). part three of research methods in linguistics focuses on the qualitative methods and it comprises five chapters: critical perspectives on using interviews and focus groups (chap. 8), discourse-analytic approaches to text and talk (chap.9), linguistic ethnography (chap. 10), multimodality: a guide for linguists (chap. 11), and case study research in applied linguistics (chap. 12). chapter 8 comments upon the use of interviews and focus groups within social science and linguistic research. it addresses benefits and drawbacks of implementing those research methods for collecting data. interestingly, interviews and focus groups are treated as collaborative or interactional events lia litosseliti (ed.). (2018). research methods in linguistics… 125 in which the interviewer or moderator plays an important, participative role (edley & litosseliti, 2018, p. 195). however, one may be disappointed by the fact that the authors do not refer to the previous sources concerning interviews such as brown (2001). chapter 9 explores the ways in which discourse-analytic approaches reveal the “meaningfulness” of text and talk. the chapter also examines five diverse approaches to discourse analysis: conversation analysis (ca), interactional sociolinguistic analysis (isa), discourse analysis (da), critical discourse analysis, and feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis (fpda). the next chapter (chap. 10) focuses on linguistic ethnography and its contribution to the study of language and social life. the authors of this chapter discuss three key issues in linguistic ethnography such as the interdisciplinarity of linguistic ethnography, data collection and its potential to provide nuanced understandings of talk in context and topic-related studies (copland & creese, 2018, p. 274). chapter 11 provides a rationale for a multimodal perspective on meaning, communication, and discourse. this chapter revolves around the issues of multimodality, that is, different modes that people use beyond speech and writing. characteristics of social semiotics as a field of study is supported with an example of a social semiotic analysis by exploring online text making on facebook. this gives readers some insights into steps of multimodal inquiry (bezemer & jewitt, 2018, p. 281). the final chapter of the volume (chap. 12) is devoted to case study research in applied linguistics. the author comments upon benefits and drawbacks of case study research designs and provides examples of qualitative case study research in language learning. additional topics examined in chapter 12 concern thematic analysis, longitudinal research, generalizability and ethical issues in case study research. each chapter of the volume follows a certain pattern: it starts with a brief characteristics of the basic concepts, then it offers illustrative examples from recent research studies. finally, it outlines key assumptions underlying a particular approach or method, its contribution to the field, and where appropriate, its potential for combination with other approaches or methods (litosseliti, 2018, p. 5). a list of references and suggestions for further reading that include both printed (paper based) as well as online sources make each chapter very clear, informative, and useful especially for those who need guidance and resources for planning their own research design. as this is the second edition of the book, its content was slightly modified when contrasted with the first edition. some chapters have been expanded or added, for example, multimodality and new modes of communication such as digital communication have received more emphasis in this edition. the authors thoroughly characterized the multimodality and provided more extensive information on practical application of such research designs. moreover, some new chapters have been added (e.g., the ones concerning transcription, ethics in linguistics or case study research). however, slightly disappointing is the grażyna kiliańska-przybyło126 fact that narrative analysis present in the first edition of the book was deleted in the second one. undoubtedly, second edition of research methods in linguistics is a concise and valuable position offering guidance and support especially for those who start their empirical work. simple and straightforward questions that the authors of particular chapters address, such as how many research questions (p. 21) or what quantitative method to use (p. 140) together with more complex issues discussed, for example, unethical practices and consequences (p. 73) or social semiotics (p. 290), and many others help to rethink research procedures one may be familiar with. this volume definitely gives food for thought and broadens one’s perspective in how research design can be planned. furthermore, the book is well grounded in the current research, which makes it a useful resource for those who would like to refresh and extend their knowledge about the research methods available in linguistics. the format of the book and the content organization add up to the overall clarity, accessibility, and practicality of the book. theoretical background is supplemented with questions to think, references and additional sources both printed and available online. this promotes a variety of ways in which the volume can be used in practice (as a self-study material or a reference material for seminar-style research method course). however, it could be argued that the theory included in this volume does not always provide a sufficient review of literature available in the field of research methodology. widely-recognized books on research methods by nunan (1992) or dörnyei (2007) are presented only in the chapter discussing research questions in linguistics (chap. 1, pp. 13–34). other sources related to research methodology (e.g., brown, 2001; gabryś-barker, 2011; brown & rodgers, 2002) are not mentioned. the idea to narrow down a relatively vast literature to just few items may be intentional to achieve clarity and leave space for reader’s inquiry and critical reflection. yet, inexperienced (or novice) researchers may get the feeling that the theory is somewhat inadequately represented. the volume is mostly based on english-speaking literature concerning the field of research methodology, so the potential researchers representing other cultural/educational contexts would still have to get familiar with sources published in their own contexts. all things considered, i recommend reading research methods in linguistics, edited by lia litosseliti, for a number of reasons. the volume provides a comprehensive overview of current tendencies in research methodology. content selection offers as a wide selection of methods including multimodality, discourse analytic approaches to text and talk, ideas for mixed or holistic research. as such, it enables readers to get a broader perspective on the research designs one can implement, taking various paradigms into consideration and planning the research that reflects important trends and research issues. lia litosseliti (ed.). (2018). research methods in linguistics… 127 references bezemer, j., & jewitt, c. (2018). multimodality: a guide for linguists. in l. litosseliti (ed.), research methods in linguistics (2nd ed.) (pp. 281–303). london: bloomsbury academic. brown, j. d. (2001). using surveys in language programs. cambridge: cambridge university press. brown, j. d., & rodgers, t. s. (2002). doing second language research. oxford: oxford university press. copland, f., & creese, a. (2018). linguistic ethnography. in l. litosseliti (ed.), research methods in linguistics (2nd ed.) (pp. 259–280). london: bloomsbury academic. edley, n., & litosseliti, l. (2018). critical perspectives on using interviews and focus groups. in l. litosseliti (ed.), research methods in linguistics (2nd edi.) (pp. 195–225). london: bloomsbury academic. dörnyei, z. (2007). research methods in applied linguistics. oxford: oxford university press. gabryś-barker, d. (ed.). (2011). action research in teacher development: an overview of research methodology. katowice: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego. litosseliti, l. (ed.). (2018). research methods in linguistics (2nd ed.). london: bloomsbury academic. nunan, d. (1992). research methods in language learning. cambridge: cambridge university press. grażyna kiliańska-przybyło university of silesia in katowice, poland https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0185-5911 theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 5 (2) 2019, pp. 25–38 10.31261/tapsla.7555 david singleton trinity college, dublin, ireland university of pannonia, veszprem bi-/multilingual communication, identity and the posited intermingling of language systems in the mind a b s t r a c t this article addresses the claim that the notion of bounds between language-varieties in the mind should be abandoned. such rhetoric has become standard in respect of the conceptual dimensions of language. the proposition does not, however, confine itself to underlying concepts; it calls into question the whole notion that languages in the mind are bounded entities in any of their aspects. the response to this position presented here is that knowledge of languages in the mind is in fact in all its aspects highly differentiated, and that this differentiation broadly follows traditional lines (always recognizing that demarcation between languages is occasionally permeable). evidence in favour of this view is drawn from a number of areas, including language loss and recovery, bilingual/multilingual development and communication, and the affective dimension of language differentiation. keywords: bilingual, multilingual, boundedness, differentiation, identity, separate development, interaction, quintus ennius, strategic objectives, non-normative introduction i should like to begin with a story e-mailed to me some years ago by the finnish psychologist, elizabet service, about an experience her multilingual sister had had in france. with her permission i have cited it in a number of publications to illustrate various points, but it seems especially relevant in the current context: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2720-5965 http://doi.org10.31261/tapsla.7772 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en david singleton26 my sister, while studying in france, was once addressed on the street in finnish. only after several attempts by the speaker did she understand her own native language, the point being that she was expecting french. service goes on to relate similar episodes in her own life involving her l2, english, a language she speaks to a very high level of proficiency: i have had a very similar experience trying to make finnish out of something that was easy enough to understand when i realised it was english. i shall come back to such experiences, which many of us could probably add to, later. they cast severe doubt, it seems to me, on the proposition of radical intermingling of languages in the mind. the notion of such radical intermingling is currently very much in the air, this direction of theorizing being encouraged in some people’s minds by their interpretation of dynamic systems theory (e.g., de bot 2008, 2016; de bot, lowie, & verspoor, 2007). there has been a tendency on the part of many researchers to want to abandon all talk whatever of boundaries or differentiation between languages and language-varieties in the mind. indeed this is a standard position in respect of the semantic or conceptual dimensions of language (mackenzie, 2016), where the received wisdom is that for all language-varieties known by the multi-competent user there is a common underlying “conceptual base” (kecskes & papp, 2000)—that is to say equivalence, fusion, and language-neutrality at the conceptual level (see also de groot, 1992; costa, 2005; kroll & stewart, 1994). athanasoupoulos (2016) has recently addressed this issue, speaking of the need to re-examine the notion of a common conceptual base in respect of the languages of bi-/multilinguals. citing pavlenko and jarvis (pavlenko, 2005; jarvis & pavlenko, 2008), he points out that most words that are considered “translation-equivalents” across languages do not share the same conceptual representation, even when they denote concrete entities (ameel et al., 2005), and that there is increasing evidence, from investigations of bilingual cognition, of systematic cross-linguistic variation in the conceptual representation of a range of different domains of experience. his conclusion is that learning a new language involves creating new concepts and recalibrating existing concepts. the desire to dispense with boundaries does not, however, stop at concepts; for some years researchers, of a range of theoretical stances, going well beyond dynamic systems theory, have been tending to call into question the whole notion that languages in the mind in general are bounded entities (e.g., harris, 1998; toolan, 2008; vaid & meuter, 2016). the response to this position adopted here (cf. singleton 2016, 2018) is that languages in the mind are in all their aspects, in fact, highly differentiated, and bi-/multilingual communication, identity and the posited intermingling… 27 that such differentiation broadly follows the lines recognized by the traditional boundaries which draw (always, of course, crossable and permeable) lines between languages. the article will make mention of a number of arguments from the evidence of bilingual and multilingual experience which favour the above stance. evidence against unboundedness from language loss and aphasia in bi-/multilinguals powerful evidence of separability comes from the phenomenon of the selective recovery of language-varieties known to bi-/multilinguals and lost as a result of brain damage. these patterns of selective recovery do not necessarily relate to distinct neural representations of the different languages, but may have to do with damage to control mechanisms located in the prefrontal cortex that activate the target language and inhibit the non-target language (see, e.g., abutalebi, 2008), in other words, distinguish between different languages. there is also some mysterious but intriguing evidence from non-parallel aphasia (see, e.g., fabbro, 1999, chapters 12–16). in other words, when a bi-/multilingual experiences disruption of his/her language capacity, such disruption does not consistently affect all the languages he/she knows in the same way, as one would expect if language knowledge were an undifferentiated block, but often presents different recovery profiles and different phenomena from language to language. whitaker, for example (1978, p. 27), refers to the case of an english scholar in the area of the classical languages and literatures who, after losing all his languages, recovered first ancient greek, then latin, both of which he had encountered as a schoolchild. he subsequently recovered french, which he had learned as an adult, and finally english (his l1). grosjean, for his part, refers (1982, p. 260) to the instance of a swiss multilingual who recovered first french (his chronologically third language) and later standard high german (his chronologically second language), but who never recovered his native variety, swiss german (which is, of course, very different from standard german). fabbro (2002, p. 204) reports the strange case of a person whose first language was veronese (a variant of venetian, very different from standard italian), who had exclusively used veronese in all her daily activities, except for a few words of standard italian (her second language) very rarely, but who, following a brain injury, started communicating exclusively in standard italian. her condition subsequently improved to the point where she could understand veronese, but she persisted in her producing only standard italian. another case is that of jürg schwyter (schwyter, 2011), who, following a stroke, lost the use of every one david singleton28 of his languages. he recovered receptive capacities in all his languages swiss german (his chronologically first language), standard german (his chronologically second language), english, italian, and french (his later school languages), but has recovered full productive capacities only in his mother tongue, swiss german, and his main professional language, english. as noted earlier, such selective (and patchy) recovery of languages constitutes an argument the notion that the knowledge and processing of these languages is a unitary phenomenon. concerning non-parallel aphasia, paradis and goldblum (1989) report the case of a trilingual subject who was a native speaker of gujarati. the person in question lived in madagascar, and had additionally acquired malagasy, madagascar’s official language. at age six he had also learned french at school, and he used this language on a daily basis in his professional activities. following a neurosurgical operation, he evidenced disorders typifying broca’s aphasia in gujarati but no deficits in his other languages. two years after the operation he had fully recovered gujarati but had difficulties with malagasy in terms of verbal fluency and syntactic comprehension. four years after the operation no disorder was detected in either language. (cf. also gil & goral, 2004). thus, deep-seated language disorders, which are commonly assumed to affect the totality of languages known to an individual, are shown by such evidence sometimes to be “selective” in terms of the languages they target. again, such evidence argues for the differentiation and boundedness of languages in the mind. these cases of selective recovery and non-parallel aphasia are slightly puzzling from an identity perspective, in the sense that, as the above references and discussion indicate, it often seems to be the native language, with which identity would be thought to be strongest, which is longest lost or which is afflicted by disorders. strong personal identification with a language does not, then, necessarily protect it from the kind of disruption associated with physiological problems affecting the brain. the above evidence certainly does point, however, to the notion that each language in the mind has its own processing dynamic, in other words, has a degree of, as it were, autonomy, of developmental individuality. evidence against unboundedness from bi-/multilingual development and interaction let us return to the story told by service showing that it is possible for a person not to understand a language in which he/she is highly proficient— including his/her mother tongue—if he/she is not expecting to encounter it. bi-/multilingual communication, identity and the posited intermingling… 29 another case i was told of very recently by the corpus linguist sylviane granger, who was recently in china with her husband, a reasonably proficient learner of chinese. often when her husband spoke chinese, it was not initially reacted to by their chinese hosts (who also spoke english)—the point being that they were not expecting their l1 from a westerner. as in the case of the earlierdiscussed instances of language loss due medical reasons, identity with one’s l1 or a very strong l2, fails to protect the languages in question—in this case from such occurrences of incomprehension. such evidence strongly suggests that an l1 or strong l2—as entire systems—can in certain circumstances be set at a very low level of activation, a radically lower, comprehension-preventing level of activation, than the language(s) one is expecting to encounter. if it is possible for the mind to select a language to render “dormant” in this fashion, as opposed to another language/other languages rendered “ready for action,” this clearly implies—speaks volumes about—differentiation of languages in the mind. turning to the early developmental front the individuality of the progress of each language is indicated by studies (schelleter, sinka, & garman, 1997; sinka & schelleter, 1998; sinka, garman, & schelleter, 2000) which looked at two children acquiring, respectively, latvian and english and german and english. latvian and german are both highly inflected languages, whereas english is, of course, not. the researchers found evidence of the development of functional categories in latvian and german from the earliest stages, but not in english, from which the researchers conclude that the nature of latvian and german input is rich enough to trigger early functional category development, whereas the english input is not. the faster development of functional categories in these cases seemed to have nothing to do with identification with the languages in question and everything to do with the nature of what the children were exposed to. the strong implication of these findings is, however, again that, whatever about identity, the languages acquired by a simultaneous bi-/ multilingual develop separately. the question of whether this is in fact the case from the very earliest stages of acquisition has been quite a controversial one. one much-cited view is that the simultaneous bi-/multilingual begins with a single language system and that his/her languages separate only at a later stage (e.g., volterra & taeschner, 1978; see discussion in clark, 2016, pp. 386ff.). this hypothesis suggests that simultaneous bi-/multilinguals begin with a single language system, a single fused linguistic representation, and that it is only around the age of three years that they begin to differentiate their languages (see, e.g., pettito et al., 2001, p. 455). according to this view, the child at the very early stages of language development is not in possession of translation-equivalents across languages, but rather he or she has a single lexical store, with a single word from one or other of his/her languages for any given meaning. on this basis, the evidence cited in favour of the above perspective tended to be that david singleton30 of language mixing (cf. macrory, 2006: 163; cf. nicoladis & genesee, 1997). the claim was that mixed utterances arose because the child at an early stage did not have access to translation-equivalents across languages, that he or she had just one lexical store, with a particular word from one or other of his/her languages for any given meaning. it is irrefutable that language mixing goes on in the language use of young multilinguals, and that much of this mixing happens because a child may know an expression in one language for which he/she has no equivalent in other languages. nicoladis and secco (2000), for example, report that around 90% of the mixing they observed in very young bilinguals was explicable in terms of lexical gaps in one language or the other. that is to say, when the children lacked the expression they needed in one language but had it at their disposal in their other language, they simply drew on what they knew to supplement what they did not know. this strategy undoubtedly continues throughout childhood and indeed into adulthood simply because languages differ in their conceptual patterning and learners of every age have less than complete mastery of such patterning (cf. gessman, 2014). zhang (2006) demonstrates this with respect to siblingsibling interaction between two chinese-english bilingual children, where, for instance, the chinese expressions kao-ya (‘roast duck’) and fu-lu (‘pickle made from soya beans’) were used in english matrix utterances because the english translation-equivalents were unknown (and in the latter case non-existent). this is a very natural strategy for the multilingual child to adopt. it of itself says nothing about the question of the separation or integration of a young multilingual’s languages. quay (1995), for her part, shows the falsity of the notion that the multilingual’s lexicon is systematically distributed across languages; and she, accordingly, strongly disputes the claim that there is a stage at which the multilingual has just one item in one or other language for a particular meaning (cf. also deuchar & quay, 2000). bi-/multilingual children, in other words, generally keep their languages apart when using them, and they are highly adept—even at a very early age (see, e.g., genesee, nicoladis, & paradis, 1995; nicoladis, 1998)––at making decisions as to which language to speak to whom. it seems, moreover, that on occasions where languages are mixed, the mixing in question may evidence an awareness—again from an early age—of the language competencies of interlocutors (see, e.g., lanza, 1997). de houwer puts it this way: like monolingual children, bilingual children pay a lot of attention to the input they receive. they soon notice that this input differs depending on who is talking and in what situation someone is talking. just like monolingual children, bilingual children attempt to talk like the people around them. because of the bilingual situation, however, the bilingual child has bi-/multilingual communication, identity and the posited intermingling… 31 more options than the monolingual one … [a]t a very young age bilingual children are skilled conversationalists who easily switch languages. (de houwer, 1995, p. 248: cf. chevalier, 2015, for some interesting insights into trilingual children’s interaction) the affective dimension and quintus ennius’s three hearts in their normal functioning adult bi-/multilinguals too, of course, are very attentive in their use or non-use of specific languages to the linguistic identities and competencies of their interlocutors. this is clearly a necessary condition of successful communication. the bounds of a language in the bi-/multilingual’s mind are thus clearly set by, if by nothing else, the linguistic identities of others, and by the consequent limits of intelligibility. especially interesting in this connection is the case of interlingual couples and families (see, e.g., singleton & pfenninger, 2018). often two people who get involved romantically with each other and who speak different languages opt for one they identify as their “language of the heart” (dewaele & salomidou, 2016). this language is then set apart from other languages in their repertoire by strong, affective factors. piller found that many couples perceive their private language as the foundation of their relationship: “[…] we were both happy then that we could speak german, and our relationship started with drinking coffee and speaking, and so speaking was very important to us and whenever we are having a serious conversation, it really needs to be in german, otherwise it doesn’t go well, and it doesn’t feel right” (piller, 2002, p. 222). usually the language in question is the l1 of one of the couple, but not always. in this context, i should like to refer to the interesting case of a couple i came across quite recently. the couple, named for present purposes solange and jan, met in france where solange grew up; jan is dutch. they have used english with each other from the start of their relationship. they are now married and living in the netherlands and they both now have a good command of each other’s language but they continue to identify english as their “language of the heart” for their private conversations. they have a three year-old daughter with whom solange communicates in french and jan in dutch. the common language of the household is sometimes dutch and sometimes french. the daughter does not yet know english and makes fun of her parents when she hears them speak their language of intimacy. the differentiation of the use of the languages is thus clear: solange to daughter: french jan to daughter: dutch solange to jan to solange (family matters): french/dutch solange to jan to solange (couple matters): english david singleton32 this is anything but a mish-mash. the bounds in the language users’ minds are in this case set by, among other factors, the role of english as the couple’s language of intimacy. the intelligibility factor also comes into the picture, though, in the sense that everyone in the trio understands french and dutch, and in the sense that english is (for the parents happily) unintelligible to the daughter. (this latter situation will no doubt change with time and circumstances―especially when the child reaches school age). this talk of intimacy leads inevitably to quintus ennius’s much-discussed three hearts. quintus ennius, who flourished in the second and third centuries b.c., has been called the “father of latin poetry.” he was a prolific writer, but his works in the centuries after the early roman emperors fell into disfavour, with the result that only fragments of his opus survive. his principal claim to fame is his remark (reported by the later author aulus gellius) that because he knew three languages (latin, greek, and oscan) he had three hearts: “quintus ennius tria cordia habere sese dicebat, quod loqui graece et osce et latine sciret.” it should be noted that the word for heart in latin—cor—was applied to the seat of intelligence as well as the seat of the emotion. part of what quintus ennius was saying, then, coincided with the truism of twentieth century linguistics (see lyons, 1963, pp. 37ff.), according to which every language articulates the world uniquely in terms of its various structures and consequently in terms of its concepts and configurations of concepts, a truism which is not lightly to be discarded (see, e.g., earlier discussion of athanasoupoulos, 2016). its implication is that, in order to function intelligibly and comprehendingly in the relevant language communities, users of multiple languages need to make use of structural and conceptual systems specific to each of their languages, systems which are of their nature differentiated from those of their other languages. the reality of a degree of cross-linguistic permeability, influence and interaction, which has been recognized since the dawn of time, does not imply an undermining of the other reality of essential differentiation between language systems in the mind (cf. singleton 2003, 2012). quintus ennius was also undoubtedly talking, however, about the affective dimension of his three hearts, and this dimension is certainly a feature of modern research into the management of multiple languages. in emotion research (e.g., keysar, hayakawa, & an, 2012; pavlenko, 2012) it has been suggested that words that label emotion are typically represented at a deeper level of conceptual understanding in a native or dominant language as compared to their second language representation. also, dewaele (2016) discusses pavlenko’s (2006) account of the feedback that emerged from the (dewaele & pavlenko, 2001–2003) bilingualism and emotion questionnaire, where her findings was that almost two-thirds of participants reported feeling like different people when they switched languages—a phenomenon with which many bi-/multilingual communication, identity and the posited intermingling… 33 readers of the present text—as well as its writer—will identify. the evidence from the emotional level too, then, clearly favours differentiation between the multilingual’s languages. a european phenomenon? the (distinctly racist) occasional riposte that i have (recently) encountered to all of the above is that differentiation may indeed be a feature of language management in european contexts but that all over africa and asia “mishmash” is the norm. the idea seems to be that separating languages is a function of naming them, of standardizing them, of reading and writing them—as if these phenomena were, in any case, confined to european contexts. i want to take just two examples to begin to “nail” this myth. the first is from canagarajah’s (2009) study of a job interview in sri lanka. the following quote is from the candidate for the position in question—mixing tamil and english. this looks like “mish-mash” if ever there was such! naan sociology of religion — ilai taan interested. entai thesis topic vantu ‘the rise of local deities in the jaffna peninsula’ … oom, oru ethnographic study — aai taan itay ceitanaan. kittattatta four years — aai field work ceitanaan. it is in the sociology of religion that i am interested. my thesis topic was ‘the rise of local deities in the jaffna peninsula’… yes, i did this as an ethnographic study — i did field work for roughly four years. canagarajah’s commentary, however, is that the candidate makes full use of his receptive multilingualism and of the english scholarly expressions at his disposal in coping with the interviewer’s questions, and strategically draws on the english at his command to shift the interaction in his favour. what might have appeared at first sight to be a chaotic throwing together of tamil and english is in fact a delicately patterned exploitation of the two languages, taking account of differences in their status and function—shot through with the different strategic objectives attached to the use of each of the two languages. no confusion here, then, but skilfully exploited differentiation at every turn of the way. my second example is from yager and gullberg’s (2019) account of semantic non-convergence in the competencies of jedek-jahai bilinguals in northern peninsular malaysia. jedek and jahai are lexically and typologically similar languages, and, therefore, on the basis of all the work on psychotypologicallyrelated cross-linguistic influence, one would expect cross-linguistic interaction between them in jedek-jahai bilinguals. and indeed such there is, but—in this non-normative, non-standardized, non-literate setting, there is surprisingly little semantic convergence. to quote the authors: “contrary to predictions, the results david singleton34 did not reveal a general increase in the congruence of jedek and jahai extensions in the bilingual groups. instead, there was an increase in incongruence only where there was also form overlap in the two languages.” obviously more work needs to be done on cross-linguistic interaction in such environments, but the notion that non-normative settings promote the wholesale blending of languages, is in the light of the above very dubious. envoi to sum up, evidence from all of the areas discussed above point firmly in the direction of the differentiation of languages in the bi-/multilingual mind. differential language loss and recovery as well as language disorders following stroke or brain surgery indicate that internalized language systems each have their own dynamic. the same conclusion is favoured by various aspects of normal bi-/multilingual development; in particular, the fact that different dimensions of language develop at different speeds in the bi-/multilingual’s languages, the refutation of the claim that there is a stage at which the bi-/ multilingual child has just one item in one or other language for a particular meaning/function and the evidence that bi-/multilingual children are adept from a very early age at deciding which language needs to be spoken to whom. the differentiation of the bi-/multilingual’s languages is also apparent in the different affective roles they can have in family life and in the different ways people seem often to feel when using them. an important footnote on the above is that bi-/multilingual language use is no more characterized by “mish-mash” in places like sri lanka and malaysia than it is in european settings. an illuminating sidelight is cast on this matter by werker’s discussion of infant speech perception. werker points out that the infant engaged in the process of language development has to deploy his/her perceptual knowledge of “the rhythmical properties of the [...] language, of the speech sound categories that distinguish one possible word from another, and of the sequences of sounds that are allowable within a word and/or the statistical learning of other cues to segmentation” (werker, 2012, p. 50). only in so doing, she says, can the child isolate different words and structures and map them on to meaning. the child who grows up in an environment involving more than one language, she goes on to point out, has to master the rhythmical properties, the phonetic categories, the phonotactic regularities, the word order patterns, the lexis–concept configuration and the conceptualisation of the world of each language. what is more, the infant bilingual must do this, she states, without interlingual confusion. the obvious comment to add, of course, is that what applies to the child multilingual applies to multilinguals of any and every age. bi-/multilingual communication, identity and the posited intermingling… 35 note i should like to acknowledge with thanks some very useful comments that simone pfenninger made on an earlier version of this text. references abutalebi, j. 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(1994). category interference in translation and picture naming: evidence for asymmetric connections between bilingual memory representations. journal of memory and language, 33(2), 149–174. lanza, e. (1997). language mixing in infant bilingualism: a sociolinguistic perspective. oxford: clarendon press. lyons, j. (1963). structural semantics: an analysis of part of the vocabulary of plato. volume 20 of publications of the philological society. oxford: blackwell. mackenzie i. (2016). multi-competence and english as a lingua franca. in v. cook & li wei (eds.), the cambridge handbook of linguistic multi-competence (pp. 478–501). cambridge: cambridge university press. macrory, g. (2006). bilingual language development: what do early years practitioners need to know? early years, 26(2), 159–169. nicoladis, e. 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(2018). l2 proficiency as a function of cultural identity in interlingual couples. theory and practice of second language acquisition, 4(1), 7–22. sinka, i., garman, m., & schelleter, c. (2000). early verbs in bilingual acquisition. reading working papers in linguistics, 4, 175–187. sinka, i., & schelleter, c. (1998). morphosyntactic development in bilingual children. journal of bilingualism 2(3), 301–326. toolan, m. (2008). introduction: language teaching and integrational linguistics. in m. too lan (ed.), language teaching: integrational linguistic approaches (pp. 1–23). london: routledge. vaid, j., & meuter, r. (2016). not through a glass darkly: refocusing the psycholinguistic study of bilingualism through a ‘bivocal’ lens. in v. cook & li wei (eds.), the cambridge handbook of linguistic multi-competence (pp. 77–96). cambridge: cambridge university press. volterra, v., & taeschner, t. (1978). the acquisition and development of language by bilingual children. journal of child language, 5(2), 311–326. werker, j. f. (2012). perceptual foundations of bilingual acquisition in infancy. annals of the new york academy of sciences, 1251, 50–61. whitaker, h. (1978). bilingualism: a neurolinguistics perspective. in w. ritchie (ed.), second language acquisition research: issues and implications (pp. 21–32). new york: academic press. werker, j. f. (2012). perceptual foundations of bilingual acquisition in infancy. annals of the new york academy of sciences, 1251, 50–61. yager, j., & gullberg, m. (2019). asymmetric semantic interaction in jedek-jahai bilinguals: spatial language in a small-scale, non-standardized, egalitarian, long-term multilingual setting in malaysia. international journal of bilingualism, https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006918814378 zhang, h.-q. (2006). bilingual sibling interaction: a case study of linguistic features and their social functions. mphil dissertation. trinity college dublin. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1367006918814378 david singleton38 david singleton kommunikation zwei-/mehrsprachiger personen, identität und vermeintliche durchdringung von sprachsystemen im kopf z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g der beitrag setzt sich mit der behauptung auseinander, dass das konzept der grenzen zwischen sprachlichen variationen im kopf aufgegeben werden sollte. eine solche rhetorik wurde zu einem standard in bezug auf die konzeptuellen aspekte der sprache. diese behauptung ist jedoch nicht auf die grundbegriffe beschränkt; sie stellt das konzept in frage, dass sprachen im kopf ganzheitliche systeme sind, die in jeder hinsicht voneinander getrennt sind. als reaktion auf die diskussion wird in diesem beitrag die auffassung vertreten, dass das wissen über die im kopf gespeicherten sprachen tatsächlich sehr unterschiedlich ist und dass diese differenzierung im prinzip traditionellen grundsätzen entspricht (wobei stets anerkannt wird, dass die grenzen, die die sprachen voneinander trennen, manchmal durchlässig sind). die für diese sichtweise sprechenden beweise kommen aus vielen bereichen, einschließlich des sprachverlustes und der sprachwiederherstellung, der entwicklung und kommunikation von zwei-/mehrsprachigen personen und der affektiven dimension der sprachenvielfalt. schlüsselwörter: zweisprachige person, mehrsprachige person, einschränkung, vielfalt, identität, eigenständige entwicklung, interaktion, quintus ennius, strategische ziele, mangelnde normativität reviews theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 5 (2) 2019, pp. 117–121 10.31261/tapsla.7701 wojciech malec, developing web-based language tests. lublin: wydawnictwo kul, 2018, isbn 978-83-8061-641-7, 439 pages the book by wojciech malec entitled developing web-based language tests makes a positive impression at first glance because it is well over four hundred pages. secondly, and more importantly, its topic—foreign language testing, which constitutes a difficult area for teachers inexperienced and experienced alike—suggests that it could be a very valuable resource. additionally, his presentation of the technological advancements which complement a thorough theoretical background to the subject covers in the greatest details the process of fl test construction, its administration and analysis of the final product. particular attention is paid to fl tests’ reliability, a complex construct which is explained here in a reader-friendly manner. the volume consists of two main parts organised into eight chapters, a bibliography consisting of 544 entries, three appendices, and the subject index. the book starts with an introduction, which presents the theme, defines the constructs basic for the topic of language testing, and elaborates on the structure of the volume. the presentation is coherent, logical, and comprehensive in detail. the first part of the book principles of assessment (pp. 25–199) constitutes the theoretical background to foreign language testing, whereas the second part web-based testing (pp. 201–377) presents the practical aspects of testing, the major part of which is a detailed demonstration of the online programme webclass, designed by the author. this part shows what role modern computer technologies can play in testing language achievement. the book closes with conclusions (pp. 379–383). such a structure gives evidence of what the main objectives of this publication are. half of the book is a thorough overview of testing as an essential aspect of fl teaching, which is interpreted on the basis http://doi.org10.31261/tapsla.7772 danuta gabryś-barker118 of a very extensive literature in the field. the other half places emphasis on the deployment of information and communication technologies (ict) in fl assessment. below there are more detailed comments on the contents of the book and their assessment. chapter 1 test development (pp. 27–64) is devoted to a detailed description of the fl test construction process, which is based on the very broad selection of sources the author refers to, making use of older ones such as works by bachman, palmer (1996), niemierko (1999), and more recent publications, just to mention carr (2011), lane, raymon, and haladyn (2016) among many others. the author emphasizes here the cyclical nature of constructing a test referring to each of the stages in detail but paying special attention to the first stage (the first component). this stage embraces the design of the test in terms of its context and objectives of assessment, requirements, form and its basis in the profile of the prospective testees. it also comments on the structure and content of the test, as well as on the scale of assessment for each test task. in chapter 2 test evaluation (pp. 65–124), the reader will find a presentation of different models of test evaluation such as a model of usefulness by bachman and palmer (1996) or the argumentative validation model of kane (1992–2013). the author compares both models demonstrating their similarities and differences and taking a critical perspective on both. the author discusses in a lot of detail the qualities of a good language test, referring among other things to its practicality, authenticity, and validity. however, it is test reliability as the major quality that is rightly assumed by the author to require the most thorough discussion. here, the reader will find two different methods of test reliability evaluation, the classical and the generalizablity theory. it is the latter one that the author discusses by means of a presentation of one-facet crossed designs, focusing on relative and absolute errors, coefficients and test length, phi lambda, standard error of measurement and gt-1 calculator. the chapter also offers a comment on the evaluation of decision consistency (threshold loss agreement, square-error loss agreement) and additionally, the validation procedures of classroom-based tests. he emphasizes that the analysis of test results in the generalizability theory is a complex process, although there are programmes which can assist testers and facilitate this process. it is worth mentioning at this point is that the author created his own programme, independent of the webclass presented later in the book, which is available for fl teachers for use in analysing their test results. charter 3 test items (pp. 125–166) demonstrates the process of test item construction, the actions and decisions the teacher has to make in the process of preparing the first version of a test as well as the final one. it is a logical, coherently presented and complete set of test formats. it discusses the selectedresponse items (multiple choice, binary choice, multiple response, multiplewojciech malec (2018). developing web-based language tests… 119 choice cloze, matching, etc.) as well as limited-production items (gap-filling, cloze and c-test, gapped sentences, transformation, sentence writing, error correction, etc.). it is not only a first-class description but also a critical assessment of individual test formats. this part of the book proposes useful guidelines for teachers but it is also a necessary introduction to the test formats used in part ii of the book—in the practical discussion of the webclass platform designed for fl test construction. chapter 4 item analysis (pp. 167–199) is an extensive comment on how to assess the correctness of test items by means of selected statistical procedures in two types of assessment: norm-referenced testing and criterion-referenced testing. the procedures refer to such parameters as item facility, discrimination, and distractor evaluation. the author presents a critical view of these procedures, which leads him to his own ideas on how to modify them. it is another example of how a thorough knowledge of testing issues, critical thinking and a creative approach can lead to new solutions. we have the best example of the above in the practical part ii of the book, presenting a new programme for test construction and its evaluation. the practical part starts with chapter 5 technology in language testing (pp. 203–248) and it is a perfect example of the author’s belief in the power of modern technologies, which—when used appropriately, in the educational contexts and specifically in foreign language instruction—will not only facilitate but also improve this process, making it both valid and reliable. in this context of fl testing, the programme described here offers teachers not only help in test construction but also in the evaluation of its reliability at different stages—at the beginning but also at the final stage of the analysis of test results. the platform offers many possibilities, such as class enrolment, peer correction, adding and editing documents, performance report for a given group, feedback options or the possibility of archiving the test for later use (which is not without value for the teacher), among many others. malec discusses the strengths of the platform but he is also aware of its limitation. it is important to emphasize that webclass was created on the basis of scholarly theories and findings presented in the first part of the book, thus it testifies to certain scholarly standards. this chapter also presents the platform and its functioning, itemising its four modules—administration, communication, materials, assessment. additionally, a commentary is offered on teaching and testing with webclass. in other words, the chapter is a detailed discussion of what the platform has on offer for fl teachers. the following chapters, that is, chapter 6 test design and production on webclass (pp. 249–304), chapter 7 test use and evaluation on webclass (pp. 305–350) and chapter 8 administration mode (pp. 351–378) continue in terms of technicalities an extremely detailed presentation of the platform, which i will not comment on here as they are purely technical instructions on operating the software/online platform. danuta gabryś-barker120 chapter 8 administration mode effects (pp. 351–378) is the only empirical section in the book, which reports on the study comparing the results of two equivalent language tests administered in different forms, that is, a traditional paper-based test (pbt ) and web-based test (wbt ). the author carried out extensive analysis of both tests and their results, measuring, for example, their reliability or item facility. he also looks in this study at single test results in relation to individual learner differences such as, for instance, learners’ experience in computer work and its impact on the test results. the analysis demonstrates the comparability of the results in each of the measured aspects—for this reason, the author recommends the use of both forms of testing. in conclusions (pp. 379–384), the author goes back to the different aspects of fl testing discussed earlier in the theoretical part to emphasize that each of the principles of testing are implemented in his programme. this offers some assurance of its academic validity. despite the fact that the author is an ardent promoter of ic technologies in fl testing, he also sees the value in traditional paper-based testing. although the platform was designed with fl teachers in mind, it can equally well be implemented in other areas of measurements, where analysis of reliability is at issue. to recapitulate, what i find most interesting and valuable in the book is the fact that it is a text which is really well-read in the literature of language testing, both in relation to the background texts presenting traditional views and especially those which relate to ic technology. both were used in creating an innovative and extremely useful platform for language testing. thus, the pragmatic value of the book is well worth noting. it presents not only a useful tool for fl teachers and discusses the platform’s merits, but also gives detailed and user-friendly instruction on how to use it. additionally, teachers will find here an extensive presentation of statistical measures that can be used to assess fl test reliability and ways of analysing results. having sensitized fl teachers (the prospective readers of this book) to the issues in test construction, analysis and assessment, the author shares with them his knowledge on test construction at its various different stages. he might also have commented on the most commonly committed errors by teachers in test construction, which is often the weakest dimension of fl teachers’ professional competence. as to the practical part of the book, the author presented only one short empirical study to demonstrate the value of webclass. maybe another such examples could be a study of how the author himself uses the platform in his own daily didactic practice and a discussion of its advantages as measured by selected research tools (also disadvantages and problems). such examples would constitute a good way of promoting this useful tool. the book concludes with a short subject index. it is a pity that the author did not also include an authors’ index. as to the formal side of the book, although it is written in good academic english, the topic is wojciech malec (2018). developing web-based language tests… 121 not presented hermetically and prospective readers will enjoy its reader-friendly form of expression and also the tidiness of the publication. all in all, i can fully recommend this book by wojciech malec to all fl teachers as well as to researchers on e-learning approaches to foreign language instruction. it is a good example of how knowledge, didactic practice, and passion can result in something as creative and useful as the webclass platform. i hope that this review may contribute to its success. danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia in katowice, poland https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703 contents preface (danuta gabryś-barker, adam wojtaszek) 5 articles gessica de angelis the bilingual advantage and the language background bias 11 david singleton bi-/multilingual communication, identity and the posited intermingling of lan guage systems in the mind 25 anna kiszczak, halina chodkiewicz text-based student questioning in efl settings: long-term strategy imple mentation in reciprocal reading tasks and its perception 39 justyna kendik-gut influence of background knowledge and language proficiency on comprehen sion of domain-specific texts by university students 59 agnieszka ślęzak-świat complementarity of reading from paper and screen in the development of critical thinking skills for 21st-century literacy 75 maría begoña ruiz cordero assessing english writing skills of students from bilingual and non-bilingual schools in castilla-la mancha, spain a comparative study 95 reviews wojciech malec (2018) developing web-based language tests (lublin: wydawnictwo kul)––by danuta gabryś-barker 117 lia litosseliti (ed ) (2018) research methods in linguistics (2nd ed ) (london: bloomsbury academic)––by grażyna kiliańska-przybyło 123 style guide for the authors 129 cover photo: “big_blue” by max iter (retrieved from www.f lickr.com) copy editing: gabriela marszołek proofreading: joanna zwierzyńska typesetting: edward wilk copyright © 2017 by wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego all rights reserved issn 2450-5455 (print edition) issn 2451-2125 (digital edition) published by wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego ul. bankowa 12b, 40-007 katowice www.wydawnictwo.us.edu.pl e-mail: wydawus@us.edu.pl first impression. no. of copies: 50 + 20. printed sheets: 8.0. publishing sheets: 9.5. offset paper grade, 90 g. price 20 zł (+ vat) printing and binding „totem.com.pl sp. z o.o.” sp.k. ul. jacewska 89, 88-100 inowrocław larissa aronin oranim academic college of education, israel vasilis politis trinity college, dublin, ireland multilingualism as an edge* a b s t r a c t: the article presents a philosophical conceptualization of multilingualism. philosophy’s general task is to subject human experience to reflective scrutiny and the experience of present day society has changed drastically. multilingualism, as the vehicle of a new linguistic dispensation, plays a central role in it. we apply the metaphor ‘edge’ to explore the way multiple languages are deployed in, and intensively shape, the postmodern world. we also demonstrate how multilingualism is an edge, not only metaphorically, but involving true and real boundaries of various kinds, and all of them are essential for its nature. k e y w o r d s: philosophy, multilingualism, boundaries, edge introduction multilingualism is currently a thriving area of enquiry. it is being researched from a variety of angles and has amassed an impressive and diverse pool of data. theoretical knowledge on multilingualism is expanding too. it concerns social organization, the role of languages, and a wider vision of the universe in which speaking and thinking man, homo loquens, exists. research methodology on multilingualism allows for a wide range of approaches. while a great diversity of traditional methods of psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research continues to be intensively employed by scholars, a significant change is taking place as new methods are developed or being borrowed from neighboring disciplines, and also from seemingly distant ones theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 1 (1) 2015, pp. 27–49 * the research work of the first author of this article was supported by the visiting research fellowship at the trinity long room hub arts and humanities research institute, tcd, dublin, ireland. 28 larissa aronin, vasilis politis (aronin & jessner, 2015). the new trends in the research methodology of multilingualism include conceptualizations which is an umbrella term, meaning “applying theoretical thinking and entailing interpretation of data from a number of viewpoints. this can include clarifying terms, developing new concepts and constructs, and applying novel perspectives to already studied phenomena” (aronin & jessner, 2015, p. 62). conceptualization as a method refers to the field of philosophy, and in this paper we reach a philosophical level of conceptualization of multilingualism. this is distinct from other research in its scope and methods and also in that it is a method that “avoids using the senses and relies on reflection” (lacey, 2001, p. 252). to engage in the philosophical level of investigation requires that enough empirical data are collected in a research discipline. by now, multilingualism has arrived at a situation appropriate for philosophical concerns, and the province of the philosophy of multilingualism is emerging. the philosophy of multilingualism as a distinct area of research in multilingualism was enunciated in 2008 (aronin & singleton, 2008a), and is still taking its first steps in an incipient area (aronin & singleton, 2013). its establishment has been warranted by the intensive development of multilingualism studies, which in turn was the consequence of the new global realities, in which so much depends on multilingual arrangements and individuals. the role of multilingualism in the contemporary world has changed with the enormously extended scope and salience of current multilingualism. there has been a dramatic rise in the number and significance of multilinguals and multilingual communities all over the world. the latter’s diversity and complexity account for the fact that today constellations of languages often fulfill the communicative, cognitive, and identification requirements once met by single languages. but the crucial importance of this novel and distinct global development is that multilingualism affects post-modern society as a whole. vital societal processes and prominent characteristics of contemporary society are inseparably linked to multilingualism (aronin, 2007; aronin, forthcoming; aronin & singleton, 2008b; 2012; singleton, fishman, aronin, & ó laoire, 2013). in this contribution we offer a philosophical consideration of the phenomenon of multilingualism, and suggest using the metaphor of edge to better understand its current nature. to this end, we outline the cognitive field of the concept ‘edge’, and present a brief synthesis of how edges are treated in natural sciences. we then demonstrate in what way multilingualism is an edge (or how multilingualism represents an edge) from various perspectives. finally, the advantages of such a theoretical vision for developing the theory and good practices of multilingualism are discussed. 29multilingualism as an edge metaphors as method of thinking metaphors are employed not only in poetry and belles lettres as rhetorical devices; they have long been applied for understanding the world around us, and later in science as a tool to facilitate the grasp of abstract conceptual ideas in various domains of knowledge. by providing a particular type of comparison by analogy metaphors capture the essence of a phenomenon under exploration, and open up researchers’ minds for generating new solutions. it has been noted that the choice of metaphors over time is governed by the stage of technological development, and ensuing scientific views, which, together with contemporaneous religious, cultural, and political beliefs create societal mind-sets in a particular period. indeed, the hyperbolic formal symbolism of the late middle ages permeated the existence of people in daily life, architecture, painting, and literature, and was the basis of their perception of the world. see, for example, johan huizinga’s 1919/1924 study of art, life, and thought in france and the netherlands during the 14th and 15th centuries. this work sumptuously described symbolic thinking, a system of correspondences based on the perception of shared qualities such as heat, cold, and density, which rested on the authority of ancient writers. the 16th–17th centuries’ discoveries in astronomy, mechanics, and the composition of matter, including those of nicolaus copernicus (1473–1543), galileo galilei (1564–1642), johannes kepler (1571–1630), robert boyle (1627–1691), and sir isaac newton (1642–1727), led to deployment of different kinds of metaphors (crane, 2010). the new metaphors, where analogy conveyed the structure, were necessitated by the character of the findings, which were invisible or inaccessible to the bare eye. planets and the way celestial bodies move could not be seen without a telescope, and copernicus’s heliocentric system which identified the sun, rather than the earth, as the center of the solar system, was not easily demonstrated to the public. atoms are invisible and their movements are impossible to follow; it was difficult to see how they could make up what appeared to be a solid surface. what an ordinary person could intuitively understand from everyday experience came into sharp disagreement with the findings of scientists of that time. “ordinary people could no longer trust their experience of the world to reveal the truth about its nature” (crane, 2010, p. 105). metaphor and analogy became indispensable for science, because the workings of the physical world, such as small particles and the causes of natural events, can only be understood by analogy with phenomena that are visible or perceivable (gentner & jeziorski, 1993). a new analogy, that of a clockwork mechanism, providing a mechanistic model of the universe, became prominent in the 17th–19th centuries. scientific 30 larissa aronin, vasilis politis explanations using the metaphor of machinery were used for the explanation of the world itself. the clockwork universe goes ticking along, and because its gears are governed by the laws of physics, every aspect of the machine was expected to be predictable. the same was deemed true of the human body. doctors saw the body as made up of many individual parts that work together, and food was seen as a fuel, in accordance with the spirit of industrialization of the time. when, in the 20th century, the computer metaphor took over, the universe was seen as a complex high-tech computer system. the computer metaphor is widely employed for the explanation of how the brain works. the human brain is perceived and treated as an information-processing system and its functioning is imagined in terms of “processing,” “input,” and “information” which is “stored” or ”encoded.” in cognitive psychology, human thought is described as a collection of algorithms. the choice of a particular metaphor is crucial in a number of ways. depending on which metaphor is chosen, the focus of the research is selected. when, in the 17th–19th centuries, the machine metaphor was in use by scientists and intellectuals, not only did they think of everything in terms of machines, engines, and gears, but also the parts of a ‘machine’ whether that be a person, nature or a plant, was at the center of attention, and research was interested in how the machine operated. attention was focused on the way in which parts fit together and affected each other, in order to see how the machine worked. in such thinking a body as a machine cannot run without fuel (food), and the machine requires the right amount of fuel to keep it running. the focus established by the choice of a particular metaphor leads to seeing some real things as highly important, and others as irrelevant for scholarly attention. currently, commonly used productive metaphors are those of flux and fluidity, and not surprisingly, studies investigating life trajectories, changes, and dynamics in organizations of communities proliferate. in some ways, the version of the metaphor determines the attitude and conclusions of studies. in the 19th century, charles darwin (1809–1882) and his peers perceived the similarity between the transmutation of biological species and the ‘evolution’ of languages (alter, 1999). it is hardly surprising that the metaphors of nature and living creatures are frequently used in linguistics. languages evolve, grow, change, live ‘die’, and “become extinct.” the natural reaction to seeing a living being in danger is to think it should be protected, preserved, and revived. this is how endangered languages are treated. at times, the metaphorical tool is taken to extremes and languages are blamed for being killers themselves: “english is the world’s worst killer language” (skuttnabkangas, 2004). not everything is similar in the source of a metaphor and what it seeks to illustrate. one has to be aware that metaphors can be dangerously 31multilingualism as an edge seductive and resistant to change, while human knowledge advances, eventually proving an image to be misleading. thus, conceptual metaphors work as models for abstract phenomena and processes, and provide insights for their understanding. metaphors define the focus of exploration, direct scholarly vision, delimit the content of the research and, in a way, pre-determine research outcomes, as well as forming attitudes of laypeople and intellectuals towards the phenomena of life. the following discussion, while proposing a metaphor, is not intended to instill a dogma, but rather to employ the metaphor of ‘edge’ to grant insights, while drawing on the findings and approach in natural sciences for the benefit of understanding multilingualism better. the metaphor of ‘edge’, which we are propounding in this article, like other metaphors in previous times, is consonant with the contemporary scientific discourse. typically for conceptual metaphors (lakoff & johnson, 1980), it endeavors to elucidate the highly abstract, complex, and multidisciplinary phenomenon of current multilingualism, with the help of the source domain associated with basic kinetic and spatial experiences. the ‘edge’ metaphor is also inspired and merited by the time-honored, insightful treatment of the concept of edge in philosophy and recently in the natural sciences. what is an edge? the word and the meanings of edge. the word ‘edge’ in english has the following three major meanings: 1. edge as the border, boundary, margin and verge, or outside limit of an object or area, as well as a line or line segment that is the intersection of two planes. 2. the second meaning refers to sharpness, a harsh and sharp quality: “the sharpened side of the blade of a cutting implement or weapon, like in ‘a knife with a razor-sharp edge’” and a reference to negative outcomes as in brink, verge, <on the edge of disaster> and the threshold of danger or ruin, <living on the edge> (www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/edge). 3. edge also has the meaning of force, effectiveness, vigor or energy; a quality or factor which gives superiority over close rivals: ‘his cars have the edge over his rivals’ (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/edge). all these meanings are metaphorically suitable for multilingualism, as will be shown below. but first, let us look how edges are treated in the natural sciences. 32 larissa aronin, vasilis politis natural sciences about edge. natural sciences have taken interest in edges since the middle of the 20th century. it was discovered that edges are not only mysterious places appearing and behaving differently from centers. they are not less important than the habitats, communities or ecosystems which they separate. centers of attention in biology, geography and ecology, and adjacent disciplines are natural edges, such as borders between forest and grassland or between ocean and continent (coast). a coastline is a good example of an edge in nature. geographers note that although coastal areas account for only 10 percent of earth’s land surface, they serve as home to two-thirds of the world’s human population (http:// www.scienceclarified.com/landforms/basins-to-dunes/coast-and-shore.html). seabirds (about one-quarter of all bird species in north america) use coastal habitats for some part of their annual cycle (the state of the birds 2013: report on private lands united states of america, http://www.stateofthebirds. org/habitats/coasts). not only do beautiful landscapes attract people, animals, and birds to the coast, where dry land meets the ocean or other large bodies of water. coasts are some of the most active environments on earth. wind and water gradually wear away earth surfaces and the accumulation and building up of natural materials take place. tides move over the surface of the earth as it rotates with an average time between high tides of 12 hours and 25 minutes. but the time of tides is not regular and predictable, and variations in the depth of the oceans and the distribution of landmasses combine with other factors to produce highly complex tidal behavior. there are many edges that are human-made, such as fences between estates or borders between countries. some borders are impalpable, such as the equator, an imaginary line around the middle of the earth, which divides the planet into the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere. even borders that have no physical reality are very important for people in many different ways. for example, residents of regina, the capital city of saskatchewan, qualify for the canadian northern residents deduction for simply living in a zone located at 50° 46’n / 104° 61’. extra payments to compensate for a difficult climate are established officially according to the ephemeral borders of latitude/ longitude. scholars claim that intangible borders deserve no less attention than visible, perceivable borders. ecologists become conscious of important things about edges. first of all, edges attract, harbor or trigger intensive activities. it is along edges that essential physical and biological activity takes place. scientists note a twofold activity intensification: (a) much higher diversity of species than in ‘inner’ areas, and (b) intensity of biological and other processes in these places. the edge effect on the organic environmental level is further heightened by social commotion and bursts of activity. consider continental shelf zones, abundant 33multilingualism as an edge in marine life. the sovereignty of the rich edge area of the kuril islands in the sakhalin oblast of russia, originating from the events of 1855 (treaty of commerce and navigation between japan and russia) is still disputed between the russian federation and japan. edges are where the action is, claims the exhibition in the boston science museum, april 2014, and therefore where discoveries are to be made. taking a wider social perspective, we can find more illustrations for the claim that edges make for bustling places. major urban cities and areas are often situated on the borders between continents and oceans and their populations are growing faster than those in inland areas. the average population density in coastal areas is about 80 persons per square kilometer, twice the world’s average population density (usswe). investments and infrastructure are often greater, too. one could ask what about those important, big cities that are not coastal, such as prominent russian federation urban industrial and cultural centers counting millions of citizens, such as moscow, niznii novgorod, novosibirsk, and irkutsk. those are not on ocean-continent borders, but they happen to be right on the perimeter bordering forest and grasslands (encyclopedia, 1994). (the last examples recall the well-known fact that volcanoes ‘sit’ on geological borders. huge, rocky tectonic plates separate, collide, and slide past each other, causing earthquakes, feeding volcanic eruptions, and raising mountains.) the mediterranean region, situated on geological, historical, business, and political edges, has always been the hub of momentous events, conflicts, discoveries, and trade. in ecology such zones are termed ‘ecotones’—eco, from greek oikos, house, plus tone, from greek tonos or tension. intensified activity is not the only reason why edges matter. geographers, biologists, and ecologists have discovered a number of important features which make edges a justified focus of scientific interest. when they looked at edges more carefully, geographers realized that they are not simply thin lines on a map. in fact, edges in nature are pieces of territory that separate areas, communities, and habitats and have ‘breadth’ and ‘width’. they are ‘transitional zones’ between two areas. it was discovered that transitional zones possess specific features. the first unique feature is that borders are both abrupt and gradual (sharp and blurry) at the same time. as we see them on a map, or from a plane, they appear as thin lines, but on coming closer, or being within the territory, the border ‘dissipates’, and loses its sharp form. in this case, on looking closer, we discover a transition territory, a strip which may be narrow or wide, like between a forest and a field, or forest and grasslands. the transitional zones, the edges, turn out to differ considerably from nonedges in appearance and structure. the boundary habitat allows for greater diversity, and changes in population or community structure take place. for example, it has been noticed that the density of songbird populations is greater on estates, campuses, and similar settings, as compared with tracts of uniform 34 larissa aronin, vasilis politis forest (odlin, 1971) and that environmental features such as air temperature, soil moisture, and light intensity all change at edges. the ‘transition zones’ are dissimilar to any of the neighboring areas that they delineate; the features of adjacent territories ‘mix’ within the ‘transitional zone’. many species of plants and animals favor edge zones, and do not live in the ‘inner’ areas. often, the so-called exotic in biology, species that are non-typical for a given territory, can constitute up to half of the population. as a result of contact, the environment of the border strip becomes non-similar to any of the neighboring areas; in fact, it becomes unique. in addition, it was discovered that borders have considerable impact on the inner areas that they separate. the above is not all that we now know about edges from the sphere of ecology. borders, in fact, have at least two functions. they divide and isolate, and they also connect. where edges meet, there is a meeting point for many species of plant and animal life, for physical and chemical materials, and therefore they create an interface for interactions, development, and change. boundaries are of at least two types. one type, the “threshold/limit boundary” is a boundary between two very different areas. for example, a forest edge separates a forest from a meadow. the existence of such type of boundary is the result of the difference of the neighboring territories that are separated. the forest edge exists exactly because the forest and the meadow are so different. those borders have all the edge effects we cited above. the second type of boundaries distinguished by geographers, are those which separate very similar areas, such as two identical fields. such boundaries are characterized by strong isolating qualities. they can effectively insulate, segregate a property, country, or community. the boundaries of the second type impart individuality and uniqueness to territories so separated simply by their existence. thus on the one hand, boundaries divide and isolate, on the other, they connect. thus boundaries often act as membranes, selectively allowing the passage of some things but not others. philosophy on boundaries. the findings of natural sciences regarding physical, chemical, and biological features of edge regions, as well as their societal implications have been formulated in philosophical considerations on boundaries. philosophical thought suggests that events also have boundaries, at least temporal ones. moreover, even abstract entities, such as concepts or sets (e.g. imagined communities), are thought to have boundaries of their own. multilingualism traditionally deals with processes, such as language acquisition, comprehension, or language change, but events and concepts are also essential for multilingualism, thus making philosophical concerns highly relevant for it. early intuitive definitions of ancient philosophers (e.g. euclid and aristotle) of the term ‘boundary’ gave rise to a number of puzzles philosophers deal with in our times (politis, 2012). one of them examines the dilemma of defining 35multilingualism as an edge the exact point that divides spatial or temporal entities. when a boundary/line separates two adjacent entities, to which does it belong? where is the last point of the one and the first point of the other? leonardo da vinci, in his notebooks, expressed the question thus: what is it that divides atmosphere from the water? is it air or is it water? (1938, pp. 75–76). aristotle is credited with the classical version of the puzzle in regard to temporal boundaries: when a moving object comes to rest, is it in motion or is it at rest? does the transitional moment belong to the motion interval or to the rest interval? (http://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/boundary/). another philosophical concern regarding boundaries is the division between bona fide, ‘objective in some sense’ and fiat, ‘artificial, which are not so grounded in the autonomous, mind-independent world’. philosophers’ doubts about the concept of boundaries are reasonable, and wittgenstein’s suggestion that the boundaries of our language are the boundaries of our world (1921, pp. 5–6) implies that boundaries might be just a result of the organizing activity of our mind, and might not therefore exist in the real world. these general philosophical questions are appropriate and are indeed central for multilingualism. the following section will probe more deeply into edges in multilingualism and their types, and into how multilingualism itself is an edge. how multilingualism is an edge edges in multilingualism this section will start with a brief reflection on the appropriateness of three main meanings of the concept of edge for the study of multilingualism (3.1). we then carry on with the inventory of some long-standing research topics in biand multilingualism, which, in effect, revolve around the idea of edge, boundaries, and borders. these include: who is a bilingual? and what is a language? other topics include interlanguage, multi-competence, mental lexicon, cross-linguistic interaction, and language distance. the final subsection of section three will discuss the physical-geographical and physiological boundaries of multilingualism. multilingualism can be conceptualized through the metaphor of edge in its three main meanings. the metaphorical analogy with the meaning of ‘edge’ as effectiveness, vigor, and superiority is obvious. studies in psycholinguistics and applied linguistics give us plentiful evidence of certain cognitive advantages for an individual. the current consensus in sociolinguistics and 36 larissa aronin, vasilis politis multilingualism studies is that both for an individual and as a community arrangement, multilingualism is mainly beneficial. it gives an individual a competitive edge in societal communication and in career and job seeking. power is distributed through languages and their ordering. as for the meaning of sharpness, danger, and edginess multilingualism can indeed be a sharp edge when ignored or mishandled (see e.g., kramsch & jessner, forthcoming). it is an edge for children who are in the situation of subtractive bilingualism. in a situation of subtractive bilingualism learning a second language interferes with the learning of a first language. eventually the second language replaces the first language. this is commonly found in children who emigrate to a foreign country when they are young, especially in cases of orphans who are deprived of their first language input. on a societal level, deep disputes may take place in a society over the status of languages; one example is of protesters clashing with police in 2009 in kuala lumpur, an event which was ignited by the decision of the government to start teaching mathematics in english, instead of as previously in malay (bbc news, 2009). in the same way as the one word, ‘edge’, contains two somewhat opposing ideas of benefits and potential danger, so the phenomenon of individual and societal multilingualism is advantageous on the one hand, but on the other hand, also filled with potential and real challenges. the third meaning of the notion ‘edge’ is the meaning of border, margin, limits, and boundaries. in this meaning, unlike in the two others, multilingualism has not been explored. to our mind, considering edges or boundaries of multilingualism and multilingualism as an edge has philosophical significance. multilingual studies provide facts from various disciplines for philosophical considerations and can contribute to the discussion of long-disputed philosophical issues. on the other hand, exploring multilingualism through the metaphor of edge seems to us beneficial to the field of multilingualism. in fact, multilingualism is all about edges. the crucial issues of linguistic, bilingual, and multilingual research revolve around boundaries. major bilingualism and multilingualism discussions are exactly about boundaries and edges, although they may not be labeled like that. even the lengthy disputes on terminology revolve around where the boundaries are set. needless to say, linguists, educators, and other stakeholders in multilingualism research depend on decisions regarding borders for answers. some decisive pivotal boundaries of multilingualism. it appears that much of the thinking on multilingualism consists of considering and examining boundaries. multilingualism studies describe recognizing and experiencing boundaries, fixing them, crossing them, and breaking them. the bilingual stage of societal awareness in respect of language has brought some crucial notions important for multilingualism up to the present. 37multilingualism as an edge the term ‘bilingual’ has been discussed at length. the decades-long discussions have still not determined an exact answer for simple questions: who is a bilingual? at which point does a monolingual become a bilingual? how can one distinguish between the two? there is no way to define an exact moment or level of skill to pinpoint this. whether one can be eligible for being called a bilingual depends on where the border is set with regard to proficiency, fluency, frequency of using l2, and communicating successfully in it. the borders arbitrarily set by different scholars, institutions, and opinions assumed by laypeople as a default are extremely wide-ranging. if proficiency is considered a defining factor in placing the divide, the two polar views appear thus: “native-like control of two or more languages” bloomfield (1933, p. 56); “active, completely equal mastery of two or more languages” (braun, 1937, p. 115) and, at the other pole, the interpretation given by john edwards: “if, as an english speaker, you can say c’est la vie or gracias or guten tag or tovarisch—or even if you understand them—you clearly have some command of a foreign tongue” (edwards, 1994, p. 55). contemporary views range between these extremes but where to put the dividing post remains unclear. should we reserve the label bior multilingual for persons whose proficiency is native-like and balanced across both/all their languages and across the range of language skills—i.e., understanding and producing speech, reading and writing—or should we be less demanding in our application of these terms? might we, for example, be prepared to qualify as bilingual the russian engineer who with fluency and understanding reads technical articles in english but is unable to pronounce what he reads? can we conceive of attributing multilingual status to the spanish opera singer who performs consummately in italian, german and french but is unable to converse in any of these languages? (aronin & singleton, 2012, pp. 1–2). in case the distinction is based on the criterion of frequent use, distinguishing between those who use both, or all, their languages frequently and those who do not, again presents a challenge. frequency of use may be defined in different ways, and communicatively successful use of the languages depends on the point of view of the beholder-recipient or hearer of the message. perhaps, a quite unexpected ‘edge’ for a layperson would be the notion of language itself. the most basic question: what is a language? is crucially bound up with establishing and locating boundaries. the notion of a ‘language’ itself is ‘a vast abstraction’ (cook, 2013b, p. 28), a fiction. the facts are only exhibited in the actual performance of particular languages: english, chinese, navajo, kashmiri (strevens, 1982, p. 23). kemp (2009) argues: 38 larissa aronin, vasilis politis if the existence of ‘a language’ is fiction, researchers need to be clear and explicit about where they are drawing the boundaries between one language and another in order that others can recognize the fiction as meaningful for the purpose of the study. in practice, for both psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research, this is often done by specifying boundaries in social and cultural usage. (p. 16) as attention to bilingualism was growing in the middle of the 20th century, a number of concepts were accepted, that were fundamental for bilingualism, and later important also for multilingualism. most of them, in fact, deal with phenomena that according to the established assumptions of that time can be considered edges. in the monolingual perspective, the traditional views on the degree of language proficiency deemed desirable for the second language learner was that it should match the level of a ‘native speaker’, that is, full mastery of all the skills. thus, the expected proficiency in both languages (neighboring entities) was perfect l1 and perfect l2. the reality though, is that only a few individuals reach balanced bilingualism. the majority of language users normally do not attain this aim, but remain in between, in the transitional zone. the edge on the interface between the skills in the mother tongue and another language is crowded with l2 learners-users. therefore, a number of concepts, actually explaining the edge phenomena, were put forward and are now fundamental for bilingual and multilingual research and practice. the concept of interlanguage associated with the name of larry selinker (1972), or, as termed in the earlier version of the notion put forward by stephen pit corder in 1967, ‘transitional competence’, implies that while advancing in the target language (target system), a learner of a second language develops an intermediate system. the intermediate system draws on the learner’s first language (source language) knowledge and receives the input from the l2, (target language), but is a separate linguistic system, different from both his first language and the target language as it would be spoken by a native speaker (tarone, 1979; selinker & douglas, 1985). this interlanguage or ‘transitional competence’ is in a transitional zone, an edge between the two different entities of the first (mother tongue) and the second (target) language. it displays edge effects in being different from the neighboring entities, and having its own quality; it is systematic in its own way. notably, the target language development can cease at any stage of proficiency, hence the interlanguage ‘solidifies’ in the stage it is at. in applied linguistics this phenomenon is called fossilization. most of the second and additional language users more often than not stay in a transitional zone. this edge, thus, is a norm, including the majority of multi-language users, rather than an exception. while interlanguage refers to language skills, the concept of multi-competence (cook, 1991; 1992; 1993) treats language users more directly. it describes 39multilingualism as an edge the edge effect of when two (and more) languages meet in one person. these edge effects are seen in bilinguals, who according to vivian cook, possess a special quality distinguishing them from those who have mastered only one language. initially defined as ‘knowledge of two or more languages in the same mind’ (cook, 1991, p. 103) and ‘the compound state of mind with two grammars’ (cook, 1992, pp. 557–558), the concept of multi-competence reveals the nature of biand multilinguals as essentially different from only-one-languagespeakers, in that ‘it assumes that someone who knows two or more languages is a different person from a monolingual, and so needs to be looked at in their own right rather than as a deficient monolingual’ (cook, 2013a, p. 3768). both interlanguage and multi-competence brought into the limelight phenomena that were different from what was then considered mainstream, and made scholars and teachers recognize them as important. there are, no doubt, many people who speak languages not like native speakers. that is, they are in a transition zone; they are different from both l1 and target language speakers. these populations constitute a large proportion of the people on earth. the implication of using the metaphor of edge is that we see these ‘transitional language users’ as comparatively stable, rather than in a temporary brief stage of motion towards the target of perfect l2. as for the special qualities of the edge populations being different from the ‘regular’ ones, these are established by research in applied linguistics and psycholinguistics. bilinguals were found to have advantages in a whole range of abilities (e.g. hamers and blanc, 2000, p. 89): enhanced executive control (bialystok, 2011, p. 229), sensitivity to semantic and grammatical relations and regularities (see e.g. bialystok, 2001; 2002), communicative sensitivity (baker, 1993), and cognitive advantages in areas beyond the linguistic domain, such as visual-spatial abilities, and the capacity to solve problems based on conflict and attention (such as sorting cards by color, and then re-sorting them by shape) (bialystok, 1999). bilinguals are ‘more attuned to the communicative needs of those with whom they talk’ and have ‘two or more worlds of experience’ (li wei, 2000, p. 23). more recent hubs of scholarly attention are also primarily about edges, and focus on debating the borders and boundaries between the language systems in one speaker. the issue of a bilingual and multilingual mental lexicon revolves around one essential question of whether the mental lexicon of a bilingual or multilingual consists of separate and distinct lexicons for each language, or whether the lexicons of all the languages at user’s disposal are integrated. evidence supports both arguments for separation and those for integration (cenoz & jessner, 2003). the line of research on cross-linguistic interaction (cli) is about the ways in which different languages and their various aspects interact in the mind of a multilingual speaker. linguistic performance in the additional language and 40 larissa aronin, vasilis politis further language development are seen as dependent on the influence of languages upon each other (cenoz, hufeisen, & jessner, 2001; kellerman, 1995). the outcomes of these interactions are seen in errors or, on the contrary, quick and successful mastery of various language aspects. a range of linguistic phenomena subsumes the notion of cli transfer, interference, and borrowing from one language system to the other. what are traditionally seen as cross-linguistic interrelationships are, in the first place, the crossing or not crossing of the borders between languages. saying ‘languages in the mind of a user’, we mean not only the linguistic system of a particular language, but also cultural knowledge and assumptions, as well as experience, language learning techniques, and whatever else is connected to a particular language for a language user. in the process of acquisition of their target language, l3 or ln, multilinguals rely not only on their native and strongest language (l1), but also on other languages at their disposal. cross-linguistic interaction between the nonnative languages is the most recent line of investigation (see e.g. de angelis & dewaele, 2009). in bilingualism, the cross-linguistic interaction (crossing the borders of languages in our terms) can go only two ways, from the mother tongue (l1) to the foreign/second language (l2) and back, l2–l1. by contrast, the case of trilingualism furnishes more relationships (more borders to cross), thus giving the chance for ‘the influence of l1 on l2, l1 on l3, l2 on l1, l2 on l3, and l3 on l1’ (jessner, 2003, p. 45). research shows that borders between three languages are complex, and the chance for the occurrence of crossings among them is not straightforward, but rather selective. it is not casual either. influences and interactions between l1, l2, and l3 can go in all possible directions and configurations. boundaries between languages in fact, operate as membranes, allowing for one kind of transfer, but not for another. transfer is particularly common with lexical items, thus lexis seems to pass borders more easily than, for instance, structural elements of a language. the phonetic character of a language, on the other hand, seems to encounter obstacles that make it the component least able to cross the border, perhaps because it requires re-settling the basis of articulation (using the organs of speech in a new way) (hammarberg & hammarberg, 2005). what are the ‘keys’ that open the borders, and under which circumstances do they perform better? this is the matter for further research. it is believed that language distance triggers transfer from non-native languages to l1 and other non-native languages more readily between similar languages. with that, not all language aspects cross equally well; for example, cross-linguistic similarity works differently for comprehension than for production, as ringbom found in relation to the transfer in finnish learners of english (ringbom, 2005, p. 79). there is also evidence of transfer between languages with greater language distance, for instance, as described in the study of schmidt and frota (1986), 41multilingualism as an edge who reported instances of arabic lexical influence, rather than l1 english, on l3 portuguese (for the overview on research in cli see de angelis & dewaele, 2009). the notion of language distance, traditionally employed in the disciplines of linguistics and applied linguistics and sla and tla, is also a metaphor, explaining the differences between abstract and complex entities such as languages in spatial terms. it fits perfectly into the metaphoric approach of edges. other reasons believed to allow a language feature to travel from one language to the other are the recentness of using a language (the items are transferred to l3 from l2, because l3 was the most recent language a speaker used); psychotypology, which is perceived similarity (see, e.g. sjöholm, 1995, study on finnish and finland-swedish learners’ linguistic choices); and, the so-called foreign language effect (see e.g hammarberg, 2001; ortega, 2008; ringbom, 2005; williams & hammarberg, 1998). the borders seem to let through not only language aspects such as grammar or vocabulary items, but also experience, processes, and strategies associated with one particular language across situations with additional languages (gabryś-barker, 2009). physical boundaries. the metaphor of edges in multilingualism is often literal. there are multiple limits, borders, and boundaries which are material, tangible, and perceptible for either humans or mechanical or electronic equipment. the physical, bodily, and otherwise tangible/real borders in multilingualism are the ones we may call bona fide boundaries. geographical boundaries. physical geographical borders separate countries. less distinct, but also physically discernible boundaries may delineate areas in a city where minority languages are spoken. consider the boundaries of irish use in the republic of ireland that delimit the territories where the irish language is spoken as a community language, called gaeltacht. the boundaries are visibly shrinking as time goes by. this physical border, and what happens to it, is meaningful for the country in many ways other than simply marking physical territory. this border is also symbolic, and concerns national and ethnic identity, history, and the current rise of the national aspiration to learn irish better, and use it in more domains. sociolinguistically, the gaeltacht areas and irish language users may be thought of as displaying an edge effect, in the sense that they have their own distinctive properties which differ considerably from mainstream english speakers. this refers to those few who are fluent in gaelic, and to the majority of irish speaker-learners as l2 speakers of their own native language (which is not their l1). this territory and these people as marginal speakers of a minor42 larissa aronin, vasilis politis ity language represent individuality and uniqueness, indeed significant for the country in many ways, especially in recent years when the importance of the irish language is coming to the fore in the discourse of the country. it appears that in human society (1) physical geographical edges are not only physical, they are at the same time edges that indicate and actualize political, ethical, moral, and other divisions between people, and periods in the life of a country. these latter divisions (edges) are invisible but noticeable and significant. we can also see that (2) geographically and socially peripheral edges under some particular circumstances take a central place at least in some aspects. from the natural sciences we learn that (3) the influence of geographical physical edges spreads to both the edge area itself or edge populations and also to ‘inner’ or central areas and populations. this two-way impact is well illustrated by the studies which deal with borders in the most direct way, in one of the major areas of multilingualism: the study of language contact. specialists in language contact focus on the connecting interface of edges; they are interested in how languages come in contact, and what makes them interact in various ways. despite this traditional emphasis, the field of language contact is clearly about limits and boundaries in the first place. studying language contact reveals how distinct territories or entities (e.g. groups of language speakers) deal with the fact of division, separation, and borders, as well as the impact of these, when it comes to managing or handling them. the first edge effect on neighboring entities, in this case, languages in contact, is illustrated by loan words, or borrowings. words from algonquian languages, such as skunk, moccasin, and wigwam crossed the border between the english speakers and native americans and were introduced to the english language. australian english received words like kangaroo and boomerang from the aboriginal languages of australia through the borders (physical, historical, and social) between english speakers and aborigines. the transitional zone itself, the ‘transitional entity’, appears in the form of new languages and speakers of these languages. this social outcome of dealing with borders would be called, using our metaphor, the result of edge effect, or what biologists would call ‘exotic species’. the new languages, pidgins, creoles, and bilingual mixed languages, are clearly linguistically distinct from both of their source languages. they might indeed sound exotic to the ear of the source language speakers. it is no wonder that they have not always been accepted as fully-fledged languages. they have been considered marginal, as have been the people using them. for example, we may cite anglo-romany, a bilingual mixed language in which the grammar is fully english and the lexis includes many basic vocabulary items from the original romani language, an indic ethnic-heritage language of northwest india. 43multilingualism as an edge if the previous examples dealt with distance, the next one shows edge as a limit in time and resources. the european union currently has twenty-three official and five semi-official languages (2011, http://ec.europa.eu/translation /index_en.htm). to what extent can time and financial limits be sensibly extended to accommodate translation, and other needs, and thus how many more languages could be accepted as official languages of the eu? physiological boundaries. other objective edges would include physiological boundaries and limits of different natures. human physiology is known to present limitations for language acquisition. human abilities for memory, for retaining or retrieving vocabulary, are limited, and applied linguistics thoroughly investigates these limits. there exist physical, biological edges, boundaries within which, it is believed, languages are acquired. age is a limitation and boundary, extensively discussed in multilingualism for various purposes: age of first language acquisition, second and next languages acquisition; age in the context of the ‘age factor’ hypothesis. neurolinguists use brain-imaging methods, such as positron emission tomography (pet) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri), with the aim of demarcating the brain areas involved in language production and comprehension. they also use the findings of neurosurgery performed in functional mapping cortical stimulations, intended to localize the precise areas of brain that are crucial for language. theoretical findings on multilingualism obtained with the help of the metaphor of edge analyzing multilingualism phenomena through the lens of edges we might suggest the following: 1. physical geographical edges are not only just these [physical], they are at the same time symbolic edges that indicate, and carry out, political, ethical, moral, and other kinds of divisions between people and periods in the life of a country. these latter divisions (edges) are invisible but noticeable and significant. 2. in multilingualism, where physical and intangible human-imposed edges are often all in one, it is difficult to say which kind of border we are dealing with in each particular situation. are they of a physiological, physical nature, or simply imposed by authorities, by our unconscious assumptions, or inculcated by history, culture and family? the answers to these questions 44 larissa aronin, vasilis politis might assist in the solutions of particular sociolinguistic, political or ethical situations connected with languages. 3. under some circumstances geographical and social peripheral edges play a central place, at least in some aspects. 4. as in the natural sciences we can discern that the influence of edges in multilingualism spreads through to both the edge area itself or edge populations, and also to ‘inner’ or central areas and populations. 5. in bilingualism and multilingualism, edges increasingly become accepted and treated as a norm. 6. there is a trend to accommodate the in-between edge zones. tracing bilingualism and multilingualism research milestones, one can mark a trend towards less strict demarcation of borders between phenomena (that are meaningful for research and practice), such as native and non-native speakers of english. instead of the criteria of earlier, essentially unattainable limits of proficiency as for a native speaker, the notions of ‘expert user’ or ‘l2 user’ as an active user of one’s non-native language in one’s own right are put forward. these terms suggest that it is enough to have fully operational command of the language with appropriate vocabulary and grammar, and accurate and fluent speech. variants of english pronunciation, different from the standard english and non-native english teachers are signs of attempts to accommodate the edges. conclusions in this article we attempted to advance the theoretical understanding of multilingualism by engaging a philosophical mode of study. we presented metaphors as a method of thinking, and employed the metaphor of edge in order to gain insights into the nature of multilingualism. to this end, we first clarified the concept of edge in its glossarial meaning, and surveyed how natural sciences and philosophy treat this concept. then we turned our attention to the various edges of multilingualism and proposed a number of decisive pivotal boundaries that originated in the bilingual period of awareness of human languages (on the periods of societal awareness of language and languages; see aronin & singleton, 2012, pp. 19–32) and included initial and ongoing attempts to define terms, such as: language, bilingual, interlanguage, multi-competence, cross-linguistic interactions, and multilingual lexicon, in light of the inherent edge effects they display. the more tangible boundaries and edges, which concomitantly merge with symbolic borders, in the areas of sociolinguistics, language contact, applied linguistics, and neuro45multilingualism as an edge linguistics, have been evoked, in order to arrive at initial conclusions on edges in multilingualism. a number of theoretical findings about multilingualism have been put forward. how does realization of edges (boundaries) in multilingualism contribute to our understanding of it? the implications of the philosophical conceptualization of multilingualism through the metaphor of edge lie in the domain of theoretical approaches, and also, in the long run, in practices dealing with multilingual reality. the implications, from purely theoretical ones to more practically usable ones, are as follows: 1. first of all, the metaphor of edge provides one more way of understanding multilingual experience by suggesting a coherent structure. it gives a new meaning to the knowledge accumulated on multilingualism. understanding the importance of edges in multilingualism re-directs researchers’ attention to yet unexplored edges. 2. looking at multilingualism as edge, and thus moving the traditional angle of vision can reveal emerging trends in multilingualism, which could not be seen from another angle. this perspective will allow us to raise fresh questions in relation to a variety of old and new topics. 3. among other things, the suggested vision of multilingualism as an edge explains why multilingualism is currently at the center of life and civilization, and is a space-time ‘where things happen’. edges in multilingualism are the space-times to be investigated in the first place, as they contain and reflect the most important events and developments (aronin, 2014). 4. realization that boundaries are seen differently from the edge area, and from the ‘distance’, can help us account for the discrepancies in some experimental data gathered to date. entities outlined by boundaries of different scales and natures would justifiably yield different results. such results are unsurprisingly, not always compatible with each other, thus undermining the validity of a study when the characteristics of edges are not taken into consideration. 5. in multilingualism, where the disciplines of sociology, linguistics, ethnography, political thought, and others come together, accepting the ubiquity and ‘normalcy’ of edges in complex reality, eases the unnecessary tension of multiple lines of research trying to exactly define the undefinable, and encourages us to admit the reality of transitional entities. those are not anomalous phenomena, but characteristic of the current sociolinguistic dispensation. edges are paradoxical, for although they are transitional phases or entities, they are comparatively stable. 6. lakoff and johnson (1980, p. 131) pointed out that metaphors “sanction actions, justify inferences and help us set goals.” an understanding of languages as borders, which can divide or connect, might stimulate scholars 46 larissa aronin, vasilis politis to set up nontraditional algorithms of study of previously investigated phenomena. for example, in language contact studies, the first task might be to establish whether a particular case presents an instance of contact, or of a barrier. introducing such a metaphorical perspective gives us more detailed and clearer knowledge, as such a view stimulates differential treatment of edges, e.g., depending on whether they are fiat or bona fide; or allows one to explore the properties of membranes for effective regulation of borders of various natures. 7. edges are recognizable to varying extents. some, even significant ones, may be indiscernible. therefore, drawing on the natural sciences, we might wish to search for signs of a meaningful divide. specific indicators for edges in multilingualism (between communities and groups, between monolinguals, bilinguals and multilinguals) could be worked out. further investigation into the ethics of multilingualism and language policy would open up if we were able to detect the invisible and symbolic edges. we have offered a novel theoretical consideration of the way people use languages in modern times, and how this reflects on human practices, through the metaphor of edge. the edges of multilingualism call for further investigation in more depth. references alter, s. 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(1921). logisch-philosophische abhandlung. annalen der naturphilosophie 14, 185–262 (english translation by c. k. ogden, tractatus logico-philosophicus). london: kegan paul, trench, trubner, 1922. larissa aronin, vasilis politis die metapher für den rand bei konzeptualisierung der mehrsprachigkeit z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g der artikel präsentiert eine philosophische auffassung von dem phänomen der mehrsprachigkeit. die philosophie befasst sich im allgemeinen mit menschlicher erfahrung und der reflexion über sein leben, das heutzutage vielen dramatischen und sogar drastischen veränderungen unterworfen ist und die mehrsprachigkeit spielt dabei bedeutende rolle. die metapher für den „rand“ (eng.: edge) wurde zur schilderung der mehrsprachigkeit und der hauptrolle der sprache bei gestaltung der gegenwärtigen wirklichkeit gebraucht. der artikel lässt erscheinen, dass die mehrsprachigkeit nicht nur metaphorisch als ein rand, sondern auch wortgetreu interpretiert werden kann; in der wörtlichen bedeutung kommen ihre grenzen und wichtigste merkmale zum ausdruck. theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 5 (2) 2019, pp. 59–74 10.31261/tapsla.7519 justyna kendik-gut university of opole, poland influence of background knowledge and language proficiency on comprehension of domain-specific texts by university students a b s t r a c t this paper presents the results of a quantitative study that explores two factors contributing to reading comprehension of domain specific texts, namely, the level of language proficiency and background knowledge. overall, 32 students participated in the study by taking two custom-designed reading comprehension tests. the test scores were further analyzed using spss statistical software. the results of statistical tests revealed the differences between study groups as well as the effects of compensation. more precisely, the most proficient group scored higher on almost all tests and completed the tests more quickly than the remaining groups. the statistical tools used to test the data showed that there are significant differences between all the groups in their performance on proficiency level test and in timing. hence our hypothesis concerning the inf luence of background knowledge and language proficiency on reading comprehension of domain-specific texts has been confirmed. finally, the paper discusses limitations of the study as well as implications for efl teaching. keywords: reading comprehension, background knowledge, language proficiency, domainspecific texts introduction text comprehension is a complex phenomenon. each person has a unique experience as he or she is brought up in various social communities, learns about many traditions related to his or her family, visits places and encounters different people. what is more, young students learn about specific domains of https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4848-6823 http://doi.org10.31261/tapsla.7772 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en justyna kendik-gut60 knowledge, such as physics, music, or tourism. all these factors, and many more, shape their personality and have an inf luence on their worldview. due to them, every person understands the received messages differently. the inf luence of experience and knowledge on the students’ learning process has become a matter of discussion for different researchers. it has been also an intriguing issue for linguists interested in the processes of reading. they have conducted many studies concerning the inf luence of one’s background knowledge on comprehension of different texts types (carrel, 1983; erten & razi, 2009; joag-dev & steffensen, 1995; keshavarz & atai, 2007; ridgway 1997; yin, 1985). the general purpose of these studies was to check whether background knowledge can affect reading comprehension and, if so, how strong this inf luence can be. this research1 focuses on the problem of background knowledge and its effects on one’s reading comprehension. i observed that despite the high level of proficiency, some learners may face problems while reading a text on a specific subject matter. very often, the terminology of some professions is opaque and not available to a layperson, hence the mere linguistic knowledge may not be enough to fully comprehend a text. nevertheless, due to the high level of proficiency, some students of a foreign language may activate other factors in order to compensate for the lack of background knowledge. reading, reading comprehension, and background knowledge reading is a very important activity in people’s lives. people read for different purposes—searching for information, entertainment, or learning, among others. however, the readers usually do not wonder what exactly reading is and what kind of processes are involved in this complex activity. grabe and stoller (2002, p. 9) claim that “reading is the ability to draw meaning from the printed page and interpret this information appropriately.” moreover, urquhart and weir (1998, p. 37) state that reading “largely takes place in the mind.” at this point, it may be assumed that reading is not only the process of producing sounds corresponding to the signs printed on paper, but it also involves many mental processes that are activated while reading. according to gough, hoover, and peterson (1996, p. 3), 1 this research is a part of my ma thesis conducted under the supervision of prof. liliana piasecka at the university of opole in 2014. inf luence of background knowledge and language proficiency… 61 [a] child who cannot decode cannot read; a child who cannot comprehend cannot read either. literacy—reading ability—can be found only in the presence of both decoding and comprehension. both skills are necessary; neither is sufficient. such a point of view shows that the reading ability is inevitably connected with the comprehension. in other words, reading any discourse without understanding it would be pointless. comprehension of a text is an essential issue in the process of decoding a printed text. it may be seen as a process of assigning meaning to any discourse and “getting information from written text” (urquhart & weir, 1998, p. 85). sousa (2014, p. 101) lists five actions that a reader engages in order to comprehend a text, and these are “identifying words by using knowledge outside the text, accessing word meaning in context, recognizing grammatical structures, drawing inferences, and self-monitoring.” hence, it can be assumed that comprehension of a text is a complex phenomenon, and the different interactive processes require a reader to become an active reader responsible for the meaning that he or she derives from a text. comprehension involves a number of factors, and those are predicting the content of a text, confirming predictions with the content and, eventually, changing or complementing predictions (goodman, 1971). the predictions are connected with readers’ knowledge about the world and a subject matter. on the basis of goodman’s view, coady (1979) proposed a basic model of english as a second language (esl) reader. he states that during the process of reading and comprehending the text, esl reader uses his or her conceptual abilities, which means a reader’s intellectual capacity, processing strategies, including “e.g. grapheme-morpho-phoneme correspondences, syllable-morpheme information (deep and surface), lexical meaning and contextual meaning” (carrel & eisterhold, 1987, p. 219) as well as background knowledge. each of these components integrate with others resulting in comprehension. moreover, as piasecka (2008) notices our understanding of a written text is bound to the frameworks of our culture and society. it is easier for a reader to comprehend a text that is closer to his or her cultural context. this issue is also connected with the reader’s background knowledge. as clarke and silberstein (1977, p. 137) claim, “skill in reading depends on the efficient interaction between linguistic knowledge and knowledge of the world.” hence, in order to establish a working definition of reading, it may be concluded that every act of reading, or decoding a written text, should be strictly connected with comprehension that requires from a reader an active participation in a reading process, using particular information stored in his or her mind––in other words, his or her background knowledge. justyna kendik-gut62 looking at factors that affect reading, bernhardt (1996, p. 93) comments that “knowledge can be defined as that information held by the writer and assumed to be known to the reader.” many researchers claim that the knowledge which a reader brings to the reading activity is crucial in understanding any discourse. saville-troike (2006) assumes that the progress in reading depends on how much background knowledge a reader has when he or she starts reading. according to bernhardt (1996), there are three types of knowledge, namely, local-level knowledge operating among a specific group of people, culturespecific knowledge that includes familiarity with rituals or history of a given group, and domain-specific knowledge, the latter being the focus of this study. throughout the school education, one learns specific domains of knowledge such as history, music, physics or math. however, this kind of knowledge does not have to be gathered by institutional learning only. carrell and eisterhold (1987, p. 220) maintain that the text alone does not carry any meaning in itself; it is rather one’s prior knowledge which directs the reader’s attention to the meaning of the text. they also state that the reader’s “previously acquired knowledge structures are called schemata,” which means that when reading a text, readers relate its content to their already existing schemata which may not be literally and explicitly written down. thus, many readers may comprehend the same text in the different ways, as everything depends on their prior knowledge connected with a text’s subject matter. research review on the readers’ prior knowledge the influence of background knowledge on text comprehension has been already addressed by researchers (joag-dev & steffensen, 1995; yin, 1985; ridgway, 1997; keshavarz & atai, 2007; erten & razi, 2009). for example, steffensen and joag-dev (1995) explored why proficient language learners have difficulties in understanding texts in a foreign language. the main focus of their research was schema theory and the functions of schemata in text comprehension. the authors formulated some hypotheses, one of which was that the readers would recall more information from the text in their native language than in a foreign language. moreover, it was believed that students will make more culture related connotations, even if they are not literally stated in the text. what is more, it was predicted that the participants would need more time to read in the foreign language than in their native one. the results showed that the cultural knowledge significantly affects text comprehension as the readers make more or less appropriate inferences while trying to derive meaning from the text. if the readers lack specific kind of inf luence of background knowledge and language proficiency… 63 background knowledge, they will attempt to use the knowledge they have already gathered and adopt it into a text. the study conducted by yin (1985) concentrates on whether readers’ prior knowledge influences their comprehension of domain-specific texts. the author focused specifically on background knowledge, considering it as a factor which can significantly influence reconstructing the meaning of a text. hence, she sees prior knowledge as the sum of knowledge about language and other kinds of relevant knowledge that a reader has already accumulated. yin (1985) maintains that one needs prior knowledge in order to correctly interpret a written message. the results of the experiment conducted by yin (1985) confirmed the assumption that readers’ prior knowledge connected with a content of a text and the linguistic proficiency play an important role in understanding domainspecific texts. the experiment also revealed that the absence of one factor, for example, prior knowledge or linguistic proficiency, can be compensated by the activation of the other. hence, the author implies that the second language teachers should focus more on the process of reading than on the sole product of it. they should make students aware of the factors influencing reading, and they should develop troubleshooting or problem-solving strategies among students by using all kind of knowledge and skills that the students have already acquired. keshavarz and atai (2007) investigated whether the content schemata have a significant effect on text comprehension and attempted to verify whether it interacts with the readers’ proficiency and text simplification. the results proved that content schemata affect comprehension stronger than simplification. erten and razi (2009) focused on the background knowledge connected with the readers’ culture as they aimed to provide evidence that cultural familiarity with a short story exerts influence on reading comprehension. the said researchers found that the readers comprehend more and are more motivated while reading a text connected with their experience and culture. the objective of ridgway’s study (1997) was to verify whether effects of schemata would occur only between two linguistic thresholds. the results partially confirmed the author’s assumption, as they revealed that the students always use background knowledge but its effect is not always seen. in a similar vein, the main goal of the study presented in this paper is to verify whether the students’ background knowledge and linguistic proficiency influence their understanding of a text on a specific subject matter. this study provides a complementary perspective on the relationship between background knowledge and reading comprehension as it does not take into consideration the cultural background of the participant, but it takes into account an influence of participants’ linguistic proficiency. the methodology and research material used in this study are described in the following section. justyna kendik-gut64 research material and methodology aim of the study and research questions as it was previously mentioned, background knowledge is a significant factor influencing readers’ text comprehension. thus, the goal of this study is to check how students of different study programmes (law, computer science, english philology) would perform on texts devoted to various subject matters, and whether the prior knowledge has a significant impact on text comprehension. what is more, apart from background knowledge also the readers’ level of proficiency affects the process of text comprehension. hence, another goal of this study was to check whether the readers who are more proficient in language would perform similarly or better on the texts that are not connected with their interest or study programme than the students who are less proficient, but who read the texts based on a subject matter familiar to them. hence, the hypothesis put forward in this study implies that the participants will perform better on the texts based on the topics familiar to them. what is more, it is also assumed that the participants’ higher level of proficiency will compensate for their lack of domain-specific knowledge. as a result, this study aims to provide answers to the following research questions: 1. does background knowledge influence comprehension of domain specific texts? 2. does the higher level of linguistic proficiency compensate for the lack of domain-specific knowledge? participants all in all, 40 participants took part in the study, however, since eight students did not take the second test they were not taken into consideration in overall findings. the participants were the students of law, computer science, and english philology at the university of opole. the first group of participants were the students of law (lfg) who were in their second year of their study, aged between 20–23 years, with the mean-age of 20.8. generally, 20 participants from this group took part in the study, but only 12 of them took both tests; there were seven female and five male participants. on average, they had been learning english for 12 years, ranging from six to 18 years. the second group were students of computer science (csg), who were also in their second year of study. the mean-age was 21.9, ranging from 20 to 23 years, and they had been learning english for ten years at the time, ranging from 15 years to three years. there were 11 males in the group. the third group were students of inf luence of background knowledge and language proficiency… 65 english philology (epg) in the fourth year of their study, aged between 22–24 years; their average age was 22.8. there were nine participants in the group, that is, one male and eight females. they had been learning english for 13.9 years on average, ranging from 12 to 17 years. materials the data subjected to the analysis included the results of two tests. the first test consisted of two parts, namely, personal questionnaire and a test assessing the participants’ level of linguistic proficiency. the tasks varied in the level of difficulty. the maximum score on the proficiency level test was 49 points. the second test comprised three texts arranged randomly. one text was connected with the domain of law and dealt with the history of common law. the other text was devoted to computer science and its subject was a review of a pc. there was also a neutral text based on the topic not connected with the aforementioned study programmes; it dealt with the beginnings of religion in ancient scandinavia. the maximum score for text from the legal domain text was nine points, for the text devoted to computer science—nine points, and for the neutral text it was five points. hence the total number of points was 23. procedure and stages of the study as it was mentioned earlier in the paper, there were three groups and each participant had to take two tests. all the participants were asked to sign the tests, as the results of the first test were then related to the results of the second one. the first group that took the test was lfg. they had to fill in personal questionnaire and deal with tasks for determining the level of linguistic proficiency. two weeks later, during the second meeting, the students were given three texts arranged randomly, thus each participant had a different order of the texts. meanwhile, the csg took the first test, and after two weeks, the second test was administered to this group. the last was epg, who were administered the first test in june, and the second one in october, which was due to the vacation period. the spss program was used for statistical analysis of the test results. justyna kendik-gut66 results the results of the tests are presented in the form of figures. the first tool used in the study was the linguistic proficiency level test. the results of the test are provided in figures 1, 2, where minimum and maximum scores, means, as well as standard deviation are presented for all the three groups. the highest standard deviation (sd) in score was recorded for epg (5.38) and in time—csg (8.96), which means that these groups are more differentiated. the lowest sd in score (4.52) is found in csg, and in time (3.35) in epg, which means that these two groups are more homogenous. it can be observed that the epg not only achieved the highest score on the proficiency level test, but also completed the test the fastest of all. what is more, the csg group that scored the lowest needed more time than the remaining groups to complete the task. 0 10 20 30 40 50 mean sd minimum maximum lfg (n = 12) csg (n = 11) epg (n = 9) figure 1. the results of the proficiency level test (maximum score 49 points). 0 10 20 30 40 50 mean sd minimum maximum lfg csg epg figure 2. time of performance of the proficiency level test. inf luence of background knowledge and language proficiency… 67 figures 3, 4, 5 present the results of the second test. according to the data, the lowest mean for all three texts were recorded in lfg, although they scored better on the proficiency level test than csg. an interesting finding is that lfg has the lowest score on the text connected with the subject matter of their studies, namely, the text about the history of common law. this group scored better on the text which was on the topic unfamiliar to them, that is a computer science text. it is presumed that there are at least two factors which influenced the lfg students’ performance and these are their approach to test two, which was rather unconcerned, and the omnipresence of various electronic and computer devices in our day-to-day life. according to our assumptions, the csg performed best of all the three groups on the computer science text. epg not only has the highest score, but also performed best on the proficiency 0 5 10 15 20 25 computer science text (max. score = 9) law text (max. score = 9) neutral text (max. score = 5) total (max. score = 23) time mean sd minimum maximum figure 3. the results of test two—lfg. 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 computer science text (max. score = 9) law text (max. score = 9) neutral text (max. score = 5) total (max. score = 23) time mean sd minimum maximum figure 4. the results of test two—csg. justyna kendik-gut68 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 computer science text (max. score = 9) law text (max. score = 9) neutral text (max. score = 5) total (max. score = 23) time mean sd minimum maximum figure 5. the results of test two—epg. level test. this group appears to be the most homogenous since the standard deviation in this group is 3.28. what is more, the non-parametric kruskal-wallis test for ranked data was used to verify whether there are statistically significant differences between the groups under scrutiny. figure 6 presents the results of the kruskal-wallis test. the non-parametric kruskal-wallis test shows that there are almost no significant differences between the groups. hence, a relation between the students from different study programmes and the reading comprehension of domain-specific test cannot be assumed. the test presents only two significant differences, the first one in proficiency level test ( p = 0,00), and the second one in time 1 (time of performance of proficiency level test) ( p = 0,005). 0 0,05 0,1 0,15 0,2 0,25 0,3 0,35 proficiency level test time 1 computer science text law text neutral text total time 2 p figure 6. the kruskal-wallis test. furthermore, i checked the correlation between the results from the proficiency level text and the scores from test two. the results are presented in inf luence of background knowledge and language proficiency… 69 figure 7 and show that the correlation between the level of proficiency and comprehension of domain-specific texts holds three cases. the level of proficiency of the students from epg correlates positively with comprehension of the neutral text ( p = 0.02, correlation = 0.77). what is more, the total score from all three texts also shows a positive correlation with epg level of proficiency ( p = 0.01, correlation = 0.78). moreover, the scores from all three groups from the proficiency level test correlate positively with the scores from the neutral text ( p = 0.03, correlation = 0.38). nevertheless, in these three cases, the results present a moderate correlation between the variables, hence a cause and effect relation between the level of proficiency and the reading comprehension cannot be indicated. lfg’s and csg’s level of proficiency does not correlate positively with text comprehension ( p > 0.05). 0 0,2 0,4 0,6 0,8 1 computer science text law text neutral text total reading score proficiency − three groups proficiency − lfg proficiency − csg proficiency − epg figure 7. the correlations. discussion the data collected during the study proves that there is almost no statistically significant influence of background knowledge on the comprehension of texts devoted to a subject matter familiar to readers (figure 6, 7). there was only one case where the prior knowledge influenced comprehension, and it occurred in the group of students of computer science, who achieved the highest score on the computer science text, however, the result does not prove to be statistically significant. in contrast, students of law scored the lowest on the text on the subject matter that was supposed to be familiar to them. although the results show that there are differences in the groups’ performance on texts with different subject matters (figures 3, 4, and 5), the tools used to process the data show that these differences are not statistically significant. justyna kendik-gut70 the results from the correlation test (figure 7) show that there is a correlation between the students’ level of proficiency and text comprehension. the correlation holds in the case of english philology students, who achieved the highest score on the proficiency level test, and their results moderately correlate with the scores from the neutral text and their total score from comprehension test. it is also seen that the english philology students achieved the highest scores on almost all texts. the exception here is the group of computer science students, who scored better on a computer science text. the two hypotheses presented in this study state that the participants will perform better on the texts describing the topics familiar to them, and that the participant’s higher level of linguistic proficiency will compensate for the lack of domain-specific knowledge. in the light of the reported results, both hypotheses can be confirmed only partially. the students of computer science performed better on the text familiar to them, nevertheless, the students of law scored the lowest on the text connected with their studies. this group performed better on the computer science text. similar findings were also reported in the study conducted by ridgway (1997), who assumed that some concepts are more universally available, hence even a layperson can access information on them, for example in mass media. nowadays, people are surrounded by different kinds of electronic devices, thus the wording connected with this subject matter could be familiar not only for the computer science students. what is more, the vocabulary used in the domain of law is more difficult and opaque, notably for a layperson, and that is why it may cause more problems while reading and comprehending the text. in addition, legal texts usually contain many terms of latin origin, which can further hinder text processing and understanding by readers. however, the students of law admitted in the questionnaire that they know latin language. finally, it was found that the group of english philology students proved to be more proficient linguistically, and they scored the highest on almost all texts. what is more, the kruskal-wallis test shows significant differences between the groups in the proficiency level test (figure 6) and the total score of test two proves to be statistically significant and correlates positively with the english philology students’ level of proficiency (figure 7). saville-troike (2006) states that advanced reading is more demanding as it includes the knowledge of both basic and domain-specific vocabulary. the sentence structure of domain-specific texts is also more complex. thus, understanding specialized texts “requires extensive exposure to written text because vocabulary, grammar and discourse structures differ in the kind of language used for academic versus interpersonal purposes” (saville-troike, 2006, p. 159). this assumption offers an explanation to the highest score of the english philology students. not only are they more proficient in language skills, but also they are more exposed to various types of academic and subject-specific texts written in english throughout their eninf luence of background knowledge and language proficiency… 71 tire study programme. moreover, the timing from both tests also appears to be significant as the students from the english philology group needed less time to complete the tests, as compared with the remaining groups. the kruskalwallis presents statistically significant differences between the groups in time of performance of the first test (figure 6). however, their automaticity in reading and processing information was conscious so they completed the tasks accurately. in yin’s study (1985), it appeared that the proficiency in language can compensate for the lack of background knowledge, which means that the results reported in this study confirm yin’s findings. nevertheless, one has to admit that 180 participants took part in the study conducted by yin (1985), while only 32 students were participants in the presented study. hence, the small number of students can also be the factor that influenced the results, which should not be construed of as definitive. that is why it is important to further verify the results of this study by conducting it with a higher number of students. it may be expected, among others, that the level of linguistic proficiency will have a greater influence text comprehension. conclusions as the role of background knowledge and linguistic competence in reading comprehension is rather multifaceted, i realise that this study has certain limitations. as mentioned earlier, the first limitation is the number of participants. the total number of students in my study was 32 whilst in other studies there were, for example, 69 students (ridgway, 1997) or even 180 (yin, 1985). it can be assumed that with the greater number of participants, the influence of both prior knowledge and language proficiency might prove to be stronger. secondly, the omnipresence of technology and different kinds of electronic devices might have also affected the results of the study, as the students might be well-familiar with the vocabulary connected with the subject of computer science. it can be assumed that the participants could have already gathered the background knowledge connected with computers, even if they do not study computer science. on the other hand, there are also some domains where wording is more opaque and difficult for non-specialists (e.g., law). obviously enough, since i did not assess the participants’ domain-specific knowledge, this issue is a mere theoretical speculation. another factor that could have played an important role in the study is the students’ motivation and attitude toward the research. according to norris-holt (2001, para. 20) “motivation is an important variable when examining successful second language acquisition.” it was noticed that one group’s approach justyna kendik-gut72 was rather indifferent (lfg). such an approach can affect the final results, as nonchalance does not facilitate text comprehension. finally, the format of the test could also have influenced the results. on test two the participants were asked to fill in the gaps. it can be speculated that if the students were administered the recall test, which requires producing their own answers, the scores would be different. implications for esl classroom teaching as the study proves, background knowledge facilitates comprehension of written discourse. carrell and eisterhold (1987) suggest that while administering reading exercises to students, teachers should activate appropriate schemata that the students already have and use in order to help them understand a text. this can be achieved by providing the students with cues in the text. in that case, graphic images may be very helpful as the students may easily associate them with the written language and information conveyed in the text. although the students may be given the cues, they may still not comprehend a text because they may lack those schemata. thus, the teachers should provide their students with the background knowledge before reading tasks. as richgels (1982) notices, it is much easier for the students to understand or elicit meaning from a text which describes a topic familiar to them. it is important to adequately prepare the students before assessing their knowledge of an unfamiliar subject. the different kinds of pre-tasks that aim at providing the students with background knowledge are useful as the starting point of reading. moreover, according to keshavarz and atai (2007), the teachers should not teach new linguistic items (words, expressions or phraseologies) on the texts which concern unfamiliar topics. this approach might be too challenging for the students as they may not find any cues in the text. it is also important to develop the process of active reading in the students. this means that the students should actively participate in reading exercises by noticing textual cues, interpreting them correctly, making inferences and using every kind of knowledge that is available to them. the students should also get to know how to use language resources, for example monolingual and bilingual dictionaries and, if possible, language corpora. as yin (1985) notices, the teachers should focus on the process of learning a language, not only on its product. teaching students to become more conscious and independent in their process of acquiring a target language is crucial as it leads to success in language learning. nevertheless, students may have appropriate knowledge, but they might find it difficult to activate it due to a low level of language proficiency. teachers should therefore encourage the students both to develop a rich vocabulary and to inf luence of background knowledge and language proficiency… 73 learn about language structures, as it leads to greater comprehension of a written text. the study proves that some of the reading problems may be caused by a lower level of linguistic proficiency. the students who lack background knowledge try to activate every source possible in order to facilitate reading. hence, developing all language skills is a crucial factor in the process of reading and text comprehension. references bernhardt, e. b. 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(1971). psycholinguistic universals in the reading process. in p. pimskeur & t. quinn (eds.), the psychology of second language learning (pp. 135–142). cambridge: cambridge university press. gough, p. b., hoover, w. a., & peterson, c. l. (1996). some observations on the simple view of reading. in c. cornoldi & j. oakhill (eds.), reading comprehension difficulties (pp. 1–13). hillsdale, nj: erlbaum. grabe, w., & stoller, f. l. (2002). teaching and researching reading. edinburgh: pearson education. joag-dev, ch., & steffensen, m. s. (1995). cultural knowledge and reading. in j. ch. alderson & a. h. urquhart (eds.), reading in a foreign language (pp. 48–64). new york: longman. keshavarz, m. h., & atai, m. r. (2007). content schema, linguistic simplification, and efl readers’ comprehension and recall. reading in a foreign language, 19(1), 19–33. norris-holt, j. (2001). motivation as a contributing factor in second language acquisition. the internet tesl journal, 7(6). retrieved from: http://iteslj.org/articles/norris-motivation. html piasecka, l. (2008). psycholinguistic and socio-cultural perspectives on native and foreign language reading. opole: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu opolskiego. richgels, d. j. (1982). schema theory and representations of reading comprehension. the journal of education research, 76(1), 54–62. ridgway, t. (1997). thresholds of the background knowledge effect in foreign language reading. reading in a foreign language, 11(1), 151–168. saville-troike, m. (2006). introducing second language acquisition. new york: cambridge university press. justyna kendik-gut74 singhal, m. (1998). a comparison of l1 and l2 reading: cultural differences and schemata. the internet tesl journal, 4(10). retrieved from: http://iteslj.org/articles/singhal-readingl1l2. html sousa, d. a. (2014). how the brain learns to read. 2nd ed. new york: sage publications. urquhart, a. h., & weir, c. j. (1998). reading in a second language: process, product and practice. new york: longman. yin, k. m. (1985). the role of prior knowledge in reading comprehension. reading in a foreign language, 3(1), 375–380. justyna kendik-gut zum einfluss des fachwissens und des sprachniveaus der studierenden auf das verstehen von fachtexten z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g diese studie befasst sich mit dem einf luss des fachwissens auf das verstehen von fremdsprachigen fachtexten. darüber hinaus wird das problem der allgemeinen sprachkenntnisse aufgeworfen, zu untersuchen ist dabei, ob ein höheres sprachniveau den mangel am fachwissen ausgleichen kann. an der untersuchung nahmen 32 studierende der universität oppeln teil – 12 jurastudierende, 11 informatikstudierende und 9 studierende der englischen philologie. die umfassende analyse der umfrageergebnisse ergab, dass das fachwissen keinen statistisch signifikanten einf luss auf das textverstehen hat. die analyse der zusammenhänge zwischen dem sprachniveau und dem textverstehen zeigte, dass ein höheres sprachniveau nicht nur das bessere textverstehen beeinf lusst, sondern auch den leseprozess beschleunigt. einer der faktoren, der zu forschungseinschränkungen führen kann, ist die geringe teilnehmerzahl. es ist möglich, dass bei ihrer größeren anzahl die auswirkungen von fachwissen und sprachniveau höher sein könnten. schlüsselwörter: lesefertigkeit, hintergrundwissen, sprachkenntnisse, fachspezifische texte theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 6 (2), 2020, pp. 169–171 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.8361 dorota werbińska, the formation of language teacher identity. a phenomenographic-narrative study słupsk: wydawnictwo akademii pomorskiej, 2017, isbn 978-83-7467-274-0, 526 pp. language teaching is a challenging occupation, not only because it requires a skilled language competence, but also because it needs constant interaction with other human beings and needs instant decision making, often under the pressure. it takes many years of experience, reflectivity as well as a proactive stance to develop full professionalism in teaching: from the very moment of making a decision to taking it up, through the training process, until reaching autonomy in the mature years. affiliation to the profession appears to be a precondition to success at all stages of teacher development. the relatively recent book of dorota werbińska titled the formation of language teacher identity. a phenomenographic-narrative study (2017) puts into scrutiny the initial steps of learning to become the foreign language educator. by qualitatively investigating numerous accounts of teachers-to-be, she manages to propose a synthetic framework for developing language teacher identity. this together with insightful narratives of the emergence of teacher knowledge constitute the greatest assets of the book. this is a bulky volume, consisting of 526 pages organized into six chapters and complemented with an extensive reference list and eight appendices. yet, the book has a very clear structure. the first chapter synthetically discusses various approaches to describing the concept of professional identity, such as existentialist, poststructuralist, narrative, and discursive as well as its conceptualizations among various researchers, for example, wenger’s (1998) notion of the communities of practice, benson et al.’s (2013) facets of identity, or pennington’s (2015) frames of teacher identity, among others. the critical overview of these theories serves the author as a springboard for constructing her own model https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en joanna rokita-jaśkow170 of teacher identity in chapter 2. her model, named 3 altif model (i.e., 3a language teacher identity framework), is the basis for presenting the overview of current research on language teacher identity, both globally and locally, that is, in poland as well as for investigating her own empirical data in chapters 5 and 6. chapter 4 describes the research methodology, also characterizing the adopted perspective as a phenomenological and narrative study. the professional identity model of a foreign language teacher proposed in chapter 2 describes the propensities a person deciding to become a language teacher should show. they are referred to as the 3 as in the framework, that is, affiliation, attachment, and autonomy. affiliation to the teaching profession encompasses the sense of belonging to the profession and motives for its choice attachment to the teaching profession denotes preferences and beliefs about teaching. teacher autonomy is characterized by such qualities as agency, reflectiveness, and resilience of the teacher, which allow him/her to make independent and informed decisions, regardless of the imposed roles in the education system. in addition to these components, the proposed teacher identity model has been enriched with two other concepts: discontinuity introduced by english (2013) and analogously the term continuity introduced by the author herself. these terms mean negative experiences encountered by people on their way of becoming a teacher, or conversely, expectations that the experience of becoming a teacher will run smoothly and without any disturbance respectively. it is within this model that the extensive amount of qualitative data is analyzed in chapters 5 and 6. the narratives have been obtained from the pre-service teachers, mentors as well as the researcher herself by means of such elicitation tasks as written accounts, metaphors, diary entries, interviews, and field notes. the obtained amount of data seems to have been overwhelming, and yet the researcher managed to identify the recurring motives and topics, and finally organize them within broader categories of the 3 altif model. i have a high opinion of werbińska’s book. first of all, this is the first comprehensive study in poland which deals with the professional identity of a foreign language teacher (and not, a much more widely studied identity of language learners). the overview of literature on the subject covers the most recent research carried out on language teacher identity after the year 2000 in various contexts globally (see chapter 3.2.). secondly, the author should be appreciated for dealing with a huge amount of empirical data. the monograph primarily relies on qualitative research, conducted at several times and in several different groups. the empirical material consists of hundreds of recordings of interviews, narratives, observation sheets, and metaphors. organizing them, identifying the main threads, and then interpreting them must have required a lot of effort and deep knowledge of the topic. dorota werbińska, the formation of language teacher identity… 171 it is hard to find any drawbacks in this book, except for the fact that the huge amount of qualitative data may be overwhelming for a non-expert reader. fortunately, werbińska has managed to skillfully group and categorize the narratives under topical headings. additionally, summative tables of key facts, methods, research strands, etc. help to orient the reader in this extensive text. my other criticism of the work could relate to the fact that the author proposed the 3 altif model a priori, that is, before presenting empirical data, as if assuming in advance that she would find evidence for its verification. to my mind, the formulation of the model should rather result from the previously presented analysis of the collected data. it would be also advisable to present quantitative analyses of the data, for example, of frequency and types of collected metaphors, as it would allow to illustrate some general tendencies in a more objective way. i suspect, however, that the researcher developed the aforementioned model in the course of data analysis and intentionally presented it before revealing the research results so as to enable readers to follow the line of argument and interpret the data. to conclude, the aforementioned monograph is of great importance, both for researchers and for teacher educators, especially in the era of an ongoing discussion on reforming teacher education and diminishing interest in the teaching occupation. here i totally agree with the author’s conclusions highlighted in the summary: first of all, motives for taking up teaching studies among pre-service trainees should be scrutinized. additionally, candidates for the profession should be given more support through the mentoring system, both in the course of the study and in the first year of practicing the profession. all in all, it has to be publicized that developing professional teacher identity requires time and considerable investments of human and financial capital. joanna rokita-jaśkow pedagogical university of cracow, poland https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6272-9548 anna bąk-średnicka jan kochanowski university, kielce, poland pre-service teachers’ attitudes related to family involvement in light of their school placement experience a b s t r a c t this paper addresses the issue of building a broader level of partnership between teachers and parents as early as in pre-service teacher education. the ministry of higher education in poland has formally acknowledged that prospective teachers should have knowledge about parents as sites of pedagogical activities, as well as acquire the skills to cooperate with them (journal of laws, 2012). in practice, however, preservice teachers’ plans to keep parents of their future pupils at a distance have been well documented. this may be partly due to the fact that school placements specific requirements in module 2 referring to 30 hours of pedagogical practice and module 3 referring to 120 hours of didactic practice do not assume that trainee teachers have any (in)direct contacts with parents during their practicum (journal of laws, 2012). consequently, the cases of contacts with parents during school placements are accidental, isolated, and sporadic. likewise, we doubt that the approach of dictating school mentors as to the types of family-school contacts trainee teachers are likely to experience can be effective, despite the fact that some school mentors do expect that they are told what to do. the paper describes a qualitative study which reveals that there is a statistically significant amount of evidence of an association between ex-trainee teachers’ personal contacts with parents and their high opinion about collaboration with parents as regards supporting children in: doing homework, recognizing and developing children’s talents, as well as tackling at home those learning problems which occur during lessons. in the paper we suggest that in order to improve the situation in the area of contacts with parents, teacher educators ought to develop training programs that emphasize teacher trainees’ varied and active role in parent interactions. keywords: foreign language teacher trainees, field experiences, parental involvement theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 3 (2) 2017, pp. 29–47 anna bąk-średnicka30 introduction this article is about partnership. in the words of epstein, [i]n partnership, educators, families, and community members work together to share information, guide students, solve problems, and celebrate success. partnerships recognize the shared responsibilities of home, school, and community for children’s learning and development. students are central to successful partnerships. they are active learners in all three contexts—at home, at school, and in the community. they link members of these groups to each other. students are not bystanders but contributors to and actors in the communications, activities, investments, decisions, and other connections that schools, families, and communities conduct to promote children’s learning. (2011, p. 4) the paper draws attention to the unquestionable fact that teaching practice should give trainee teachers many opportunities for direct contacts with parents. in this article we make an assumption that the importance of parental involvement has been well recognized by schools, however, at the level of pre-service teacher education it still needs some improvement. the first part presents a literature review which uncovers that pre-service teachers create various cultural stereotypes and misconceptions about the types of parental involvement. the roles of parents are usually limited to being “distant assistants” and “chaperones” as well as the types of relationships are mainly characterized by “conflict and criticism.” graue and brown (2003, p. 721) explain that this is due to “cultural scripts” which are the notions, ideas and memories that preservice teachers stick to and which lead to given patterns of behavior. if not challenged, lowered and distorted expectations concerning parents can act as a self-fulfilling prophecy (nowosad, 2014, pp. 53–56). that is why the paper emphasizes the unquestionable role of teaching practice in giving trainees opportunities for initiating contacts with parents on a more direct level, therefore, challenging their stereotypes and misconceptions. we are of the opinion that school placements, when compared with learning through role-playing activities and observations, can provide pre-service teachers with many opportunities to analyze real-life problems by means of “case-based teaching and learning.” these types of firsthand experiences can foster the development of critical reflection skills (gabryś-barker, 2012). consequently, the second part of the paper presents a study conducted on a sample of 28 english ex-trainee teachers whose aim was to find out whether there are any statistically significant associations between their opinions about the eight types of family involvement (epstein, 2011, p. 46; śliwerski, 2001, p. 174) and their direct and indirect contacts with pre-service teachers’ attitudes related to family involvement… 31 parents during their teaching practice. the study reveals that there are no statistically significant associations when it comes to their indirect contacts with parents and their opinions in question. there are, however, statistically significant associations as regards their direct contacts with parents and their opinions about the most important type of parental involvement. this may point to the conclusion that since pre-service teachers’ direct contacts with parents during teaching practice are beneficial in shaping their opinions about parents, teacher training programs and programs of training should take the fact into account. in this respect, in the first part of the paper we also refer to analyses of such documents in departments of pre-primary and primary teacher education at selected polish universities. the findings reveal that higher education schools neglect the area of preservice teacher-parent cooperation. theoretical background the polish education reform of 1999 increased school autonomy and laid down a set of guidelines for family-school collaboration. parents are entitled to be members of school councils and have set up parents’ councils; moreover, they have full access to such school documents as school statutes specifying the school-family collaboration, school educational programs, and school-based assessment (internal assessment). in particular, school statutes specify “organisation and forms of collaboration between parents (legal caretakers) and schools as regards teaching, education and prevention” (journal of laws, 2001). banasiak (2013) conducted a study in may 2007 in light of the polish education reform of 1999. the central research purpose was concerned with primary school principals’, teachers’ and parents’ knowledge of the principles of the reform in the area of family-school collaboration, their opinions of the effectiveness of the implementation of the reform, as well as whether the reform is reflected in school documents. in the study, the data were gathered from surveys, school statutes, and journal of laws 1999, and further analyzed with reference to the size and system of the schools under investigation. the analysis of the school statutes revealed that they define the role of parents’ councils, but only one-third has a subsection devoted to family-school collaboration (banasiak, 2013, p. 76). the following types of relationships were mentioned: consultations with teachers and specialists, parent-teacher conferences, home visits by teachers, letters, phone calls, parents volunteering to support the school and pupils’ activities and participating in workshops (banasiak, 2013, p. 75). the most popular types of contacts are parent-teacher conferences, devoted to those pupils who experience various problems at school, and consultations, anna bąk-średnicka32 whereas the least popular types of contacts are home visits by teachers, parents observing lessons and parent-teacher conferences devoted to post-primary education (banasiak, 2013, pp. 90, 106, 112). interestingly, most teachers from bigger educational centers assume responsibility for building a deeper level of partnership with parents, whereas teachers from smaller centers shift the responsibility onto parents (banasiak, 2013, p. 101). while school principals and teachers are of the opinion that the reform increased parental rights, parents declare that they have a limited role in decision making at school and, surprisingly, that they find the limited role satisfactory; the findings raise a question whether parents avoid greater involvement in primary education on purpose or whether it is due to their unawareness of their rights (banasiak, 2013, pp. 77, 108, 112–113, 143). banasiak concluded that without introducing changes in the first cycle of education when prospective teachers can challenge cultural stereotypes, learn the psychology of communication and the practical skills on how to establish and develop school-family partnerships, the benefits of the reform may be unsatisfactory. likewise, the growing body of research delineating the benefits of family involvement in early childhood education for children, parents, teachers, and schools has contributed to the growing importance of teaching practice. there is an ongoing debate on effective systemic and conceptual solutions to make the teaching practice function as “a real source of teachers’ competences, i.e. the knowledge about learning determinants and mechanisms, practical and cognitive skills used in the process of professional practice, abilities of autonomic and responsible performance of undertaken tasks and reflective self-evaluation” (czerepaniak-walczak, 2012, p. 22). current approaches to preservice teacher education assume concepts of reflection-inaction and learning through practice, forwarded by schön (1983, 1987) and fish (1989) and based on the deweyian theory of learning by doing (dewey, 1910). they refer to developing personal and professional judgment through solving practical problems by the application of critical reflection rather than routine. as stated by fish, while this view is demanding and complex in comparison to traditional views, “it offers student and mentor a learning adventure in which each can contribute to the growth of the other in an infinite variety of ways” (1995, p. xi). a future teacher’s professional development goes beyond classroom practice and also involves a social context which assists trainees in “the process of developing a philosophy of teaching” (bartlett, 1990, qtd. in crookes, 2003, pp. 181, 183). overall, the area of teacher-parent collaboration is one of several areas of concern whose limitless potential seems not to have been exploited to the full. the following studies focus on teacher training programs and programs of training in departments of pre-primary and primary teacher education at selected polish universities. pre-service teachers’ attitudes related to family involvement… 33 studies on teacher-parent collaboration in selected polish universities the ministry of higher education in poland general and specific requirements as regards teacher training are laid down in the journal of laws 2012. during the first cycle of education, the basic teacher training program prepares prospective teachers for teaching one subject at the pre-primary and primary level. it covers three modules: subject-related training (module 1), training in pedagogy and psychology (module 2), and didactic training (module 3). module 2 requires 30 hours of pedagogical practice and module 3 requires 120 hours of didactic practice. polish universities are given considerable autonomy as regards the programs of pedagogical and didactic trainings. pre-primary and primary teacher education: teacher training programs and programs of pedagogical training. nowosad and pietrań (2015) analyzed teacher training programs and programs of pedagogical training in state, higher education schools in 2010–2011 and 2012–2013 academic years. the aim of the analysis was to find out whether the polish education system reform introduced in 1999 resulted in covering in the programs the topic of family-school cooperation. the analysis revealed that during the 2010–2011 academic year only six universities (university of warsaw, university of łódź, university of szczecin, university of silesia in katowice, maria curie-skłodowska university in lublin, and kazimierz wielki university in bydgoszcz) offered a course in parent involvement to pre-service teachers as obligatory in departments of pre-primary and primary education. the analysis of teacher training programs of the selected universities in the academic year 2012–2013 revealed that only 20% of the higher education institutions under investigation (university of warsaw, university of łódź, university of szczecin, and the nicolaus copernicus university in toruń) offered an obligatory course on parent involvement (nowosad & pietrań, 2015, p. 139). nowosad and pietrań (2015, p. 140) concluded that in the majority of the state higher education schools the course on parent involvement is unaccounted for, which is a disturbing fact. in the case of the programs of pedagogical trainings in academic year 2010–2011, only six universities (kazimierz wielki university in bydgoszcz, cardinal stefan wyszyński university in warsaw, maria curie-skłodowska university in lublin, nicolaus copernicus university in toruń, university of silesia in katowice, and jan kochanowski university in kielce) required trainee teachers to have contact with parents during their pedagogical practice. in the academic year 2012–2013 students of only four universities (kazimierz wielki university in bydgoszcz, cardinal stefan wyszyński university in warsaw, maria curie-skłodowska university in lublin, and nicolaus copernicus university in toruń) were obliged to have contacts with parents during their pedagogical practice (nowosad & pietrań, 2015, p. 142). nowosad and pietrań noted that the findings do not overlap with the anna bąk-średnicka34 obligatory course on parent involvement offered by the higher schools, because only nicolaus copernicus university in toruń offered a course in question and actually obliged future teachers to have contacts with parents by means of participating in parent-teacher conferences, teacher council meetings and school council meetings as passive observers (nowosad & pietrań, 2015, p. 141). błaszczyk (2014) analyzed programs of pedagogical training in departments of eight polish universities educating foreign language teachers. the aim of the analysis was to find out whether the documents cover such areas of pedagogical practice as (1) counseling and educational, (2) organizational, (3) diagnostic, and (4) professional. the analysis of pedagogical practicum regulations reveals that in five universities (faculty of english at adam mickiewicz university in poznań, german studies institute at university of gdańsk and german studies institute at university of opole, centrum edukacji nauczycielskiej at university of wrocław, and the pedagogical university of kraków) practicum rules and procedures strictly follow the ministerial requirements and consequently cover all the abovementioned areas, whereas in three universities (faculty of modern languages at university of warsaw, nicolaus copernicus university in toruń and maria curie-skłodowska university in lublin) pedagogical training also cover the didactic area (i.e., module 3 referring to 120 hours of didactic training). programs of pedagogical training of only four universities (centrum edukacji nauczycielskiej at university of wrocław, maria curie-skłodowska university in lublin, the pedagogical university of kraków, and nicolaus copernicus university in toruń) devoted special attention to building family-school partnership during pedagogical practice. it seems, as błaszczyk concluded, that the issue of family-school collaboration, which belongs to the counseling and educational area of ministerial requirements, needs more attention on the part of the authors of programs of pedagogical training. pre-primary and primary foreign language teacher education: didactic training. mihułka (2016) presented the results of a small scale cross-sectional study carried out among german student-teachers at the institute of german philology, university of rzeszów. the overall aim was to evaluate their teaching practice in the academic year 2015–2016 so that its new editions could be improved. the studied population comprised 38 student-teachers aged 22–25. twenty-one of them were students of the first cycle of education and 17 were students of the second cycle of education. data for the study were collected by means of a questionnaire which consisted of 21 mostly open-ended questions. the questionnaire was divided into three areas: the organization, planning, and running of german lessons as well as the role of a german teacher in the glotto-didactic process (mihułka, 2016, p. 54). when asked about the activities that they were involved in during their practicum, student-teachers listed: completing (e-)register books (60.5%), getting familiar with school statutes pre-service teachers’ attitudes related to family involvement… 35 (21%), writing reports in pupils’ daily records (18.4%), correcting pupils’ tests and written works (13.1%), checking pupils’ knowledge and skills (7.9%), doing break duty on school corridors (5.2%), and participating in parent-teachers conferences (5.2%) (mihułka, 2016, p. 54). thus, only two german studentteachers reported participation in parent-teacher conferences. however, it is not specified whether those were student of the firstor second-cycle education. the study revealed that teaching practice allowed trainee teachers to reflect on their level of linguistic skills since more than half of first cycle trainees (57.1%) admitted that they should improve their pronunciation competence and lexical competence (mihułka, 2016, p. 55). similarly, karolczuk (2013b, p. 140) evaluated teaching practice of russian student-teachers at the institute of russian philology at the university in białystok in the academic year 2009–2010. it was discovered that out of 89 trainees who undertook teaching practice in lower secondary schools only 14 (16%) observed parent-teacher conferences. in the case of a study evaluating teaching practice in primary schools (karolczuk, 2013c, p. 54), with a sample of 99 trainees only 12 (12%) participated in parent-teacher conferences. karolczuk (2013a, p. 101) is of the opinion that the professional success of teachers of russian, which is a second foreign language, is conditioned by their skills to maintain good contacts with pupils and parents. as a consequence, karolczuk (2013a, p. 101) believes that all trainees should have a chance to participate in parent-teacher conferences in order to critically analyze school mentors’ interpersonal skills as well as conduct “case studies” based on interviews with teachers, pupils, and parents. derenowski (2015) analyzed the influence of teaching practice on english student-teachers’ awareness concerning their future teaching career. the subjects were 46 third-year english philology students in the faculty of philology at state university of applied sciences in konin. data for the study were collected by means of a questionnaire which consisted of three open-closed questions in polish plus comments, as well as interviews with trainees divided into four groups when the participants were encouraged to express their opinions (derenowski, 2015, pp. 33, 34). question one referred to the role of the practicum in trainees’ perception of the teaching profession; in question two they were asked to decide whether they wanted to become teachers, and in question three they were asked to decide about the importance of such aspects of teaching as: teacher-students contact, discipline, lesson plan, l1, didactic aids, various forms of teaching, testing, feedback, correction as well as school documents (derenowski, 2015, p. 33). more than two-thirds of trainees (78%) claimed that teaching practice allowed them to realize that they wanted to be teachers (derenowski, 2015, p. 34). teaching practice resulted mainly in trainees’ new perception of teacher-pupils contacts (derenowski, 2015, p. 34). most trainees believed that the teacher training program should not be changed (derenowski, anna bąk-średnicka36 2015, p. 35). however, the overall author’s opinion is that trainees expect that teaching practice should be more pragmatic and based on exchanging experience and viewpoints with other trainees and mentors (derenowski, 2015, p. 38). the abovementioned findings can be brought into line with international research on the impact of school placements on future teachers’ opinions about parent involvement, briefly presented below. family involvement versus school placements in research literature parent involvement at home or at school can be (un)conscious, active or teacher-induced, spontaneous or planned, (in)direct as well as (in)formal. moreover, it can be enhanced by involving members of the (extended) family to collaborate with (class) teachers as counselors and experts as well as by involving them in school policy planning and decision making processes. in short, family involvement can be defined in terms of epstein’s framework of six categories: type 1—parenting, type 2—communicating, type 3— volunteering, type 4—learning at home, type 5—decision making, and type 6—collaborating with the community (epstein, 2011, p. 46). mcbride (1991) adapted epstein’s model of family involvement to measure pre-service teachers’ attitudes toward parental involvement as well as their underlying causes. the adapted version of the instrument developed by epstein (epstein & dauber, 1988) was used to finally construct six scales (types 5 and 6 of epstein’s framework were merged into one category), where the sixth scale referred to the subjects’ general attitudes toward family involvement (mcbride, 1991, p. 8). the sample, 271 subjects, studied early childhood teacher education at a university in the united states. the sample combined a group of 82 students who were doing their teaching practice placements while participating in the study (mcbride, 1991, p. 7). mcbride (1991, p. 9) concluded that all the subjects, regardless of their demographic and background characteristics, had a high opinion of all types of parental involvement; they were of the highest opinion about type 2—communicating and they had the lowest opinion about type—3 volunteering. further study on correlations between subjects’ attitudes regarding the six scales of parental involvement and their classroom experience revealed that there were considerable differences in type 1—parenting, type 2—communicating, type 3—volunteering, and type 4—learning at home. in particular, as mcbride (1991, p. 11) concluded, participants who had already enrolled in teaching practice placements had a greater “awareness of the importance of parental involvement” than those who lacked any classroom pre-service teachers’ attitudes related to family involvement… 37 experience. besides, the subjects expressed stereotypical views on the role of parents envisioned as mothers of young children “volunteering to help out on field trips or in the classrooms” (mcbride, 1991, p. 15). to sum up, the subjects were favorable to family involvement despite their minimal preparation in the area of parent involvement strategies. uluag (2006) in her phd dissertation examined primary pre-service teachers’ opinions and experiences regarding parental involvement. uluag (2006, p. 7) reasons that since research shows that “preservice teachers who feel more confident with parents are more likely to involve parents, […] it would seem logical that teacher education programs would have a responsibility to help future teachers gain confidence in the area of parental involvement.” the data for the study were collected by means of interviews with 223 preservice teachers, six in-service teachers and five university supervisors, a survey questionnaire with pre-service teachers as well as an analysis of the teacher training program with respect to courses on parent involvement (uluag, 2016, p. 30). additionally, 12 individual interviews were conducted with fourth-year student teachers who had completed their field experiences. the parent involvement survey questionnaire was adapted from mcbride (1991) and it was based on epstein’s six types of parental involvement. the study showed that the respondents had a high opinion about all types of involvement but they reported the highest opinion on type 2—communication and the lowest opinion on type 5—decision making (uluag, 2006, p. 46). similarly to mcbride’s study (1991), fourth-year student teachers who completed their teaching practice scored higher when compared to the groups beginning the teacher training programme (uluag, 2006, p. 53). in particular, they scored higher than the other groups with reference to type 5—decision making (uluag, 2006, p. 61). similarly, baum and mcmurray-schwarz (2004) analyzed pre-service teachers’ beliefs about family involvement. they concluded that pre-service teachers have two specific concerns regarding the quality of the teacher-family relationship. more precisely, they asserted that the relationship was mainly “characterized by conflict and criticism” and that they would have to cater to children’s basic needs which otherwise should have been met at home (2004, pp. 58, 59). similarly to mcbride (1991), baum and mcmurray-schwarz revealed preservice teachers’ misconceptions about the role of parents in education. mainly, they “recognize the importance of parent involvement in the classroom, but from the perspective that the parents’ presence can aid the teacher in managing his or her classroom responsibilities” (2004, p. 60). when it comes to teacher education, the authors recommend “incorporating family involvement across the early childhood teacher education curriculum,” that is, “to include a class devoted to parent involvement and education,” or to offer “a course devoted entirely to the topic of communication,” or to allow students “to role-play a variety of possible situations in which they need to use appropriate communication and/or conflict anna bąk-średnicka38 resolution strategies” within “the existing frameworks of teacher preparation programmes” (2004, pp. 57–60). moreover, baum and mcmurray-schwarz (2004, pp. 60, 61) emphasize the role of introducing students to research on “the benefits of parent involvement,” they also express the need to rethink the role of field placements in order “to fully address the issue of parent involvement.” all in all, field placements should give students ample opportunities “to take a more active role in parent interactions,” “to be involved with parents on a more direct level,” or even “to initiate contact with parents, write newsletters or other forms of correspondence, plan and implement a family activity, develop a family handbook, and/or participate in parent-teacher conferences” (2004, p. 61). the authors emphasize the role of collaboration between student, cooperating teacher, and teacher educator in the process. tomczyk (2009) in her phd dissertation focused on prospective teachers’ conceptualizations of hands-on parent-teacher conference experiences gathered during their internship. the data were gathered by means of online surveys and in-depth interviews conducted among 22 fifth-year prospective teachers from a midwestern university in the united states and interpreted through the constructs of figured worlds by holland, lachicotte, skinner, and cain (1998) as well as of impression management by goffman (1959). the in-depth interviews were carried out with eight out of 22 interns. despite the fact that, as pointed out by tomczyk (2009, p. 38), the participants were not “representative of all elementary teaching candidates,” the findings allowed for singling out three types of figured worlds of parent-teacher conferences, namely: collaboration centered, instruction centered, and impression centered. thus, the interns assumed that their role was either to collaborate with parents, instruct, or impress them. tomczyk (2009, p. 161) concluded that the socially and culturally driven patterns of behavior can be modified and improved on condition that prospective teachers have a full awareness and a complete understanding of their own experiences of parent-teacher conferences. in line with this, foote et al. (2013, pp. 126, 127) noted that teacher educators have to have knowledge about the various orientations that prospective teachers hold about a child’s family, culture, and community in order to help them recognize and reorient their perspectives into something more “positive and productive.” in the case of foote et al.’s study, the data were gathered by means of in-depth interviews with 20 prospective teachers who took a mathematics methods course in three universities in the united states. the researchers managed to single out three themes that refer to prospective teachers’ beliefs about a child’s family, culture, and community, namely: influence, relationship, and resources. in other words, the future teachers hold different opinions as regards pupils’ family and community; learning math is strongly influenced either by the quality of family support, the quality of home-school communication or the availability of family and community resources for teachers. pre-service teachers’ attitudes related to family involvement… 39 in summary, the above brief literature review reveals that there is a gap in teacher education as regards courses on family-school partnership as well as more direct contacts with parents during teaching practice. what follows is a report from a small scale study which contributes to the ongoing debate: how to increase preservice teachers’ awareness and understanding of the importance of building a broader level of partnership with parents. ex-trainee teachers’ attitudes related to family involvement in light of their (student) teaching experience—a report from the study the aim of the study is to find out whether there are any statistically significant associations between ex-trainee teachers’ opinions about the eight types of family involvement (epstein, 2011, p. 46; śliwerski, 2001, p. 174) and their declared direct and indirect contacts with parents during their teaching practice. research questions: (1) what are ex-trainee teachers’ opinions about the eight types of familyschool involvement? (2) which types of parent-teacher collaboration did ex-trainee teachers observe during their pedagogic and didactic practice (indirect contact with parents)? (3) which types of parent-teacher collaboration were they engaged in during their pedagogic and didactic practice (direct contact with parents)? (3) are there any statistically relevant associations between the types of parentteacher collaboration ex-trainee teachers observed and their opinions about the most important types of family-school involvement? (5) are there any statistically relevant associations between the types of parentteacher collaboration ex-trainee teachers were engaged in and their opinions about the most important types of family-school involvement? subjects subjects for the study were 28 ex-trainee teachers (24 females and four males) aged 24–35 at the state school of higher education in sandomierz (now the branch campus of jan kochanowski university in kielce). they completed their teaching placements from 2013 to 2017. it is assumed that their opinions anna bąk-średnicka40 about the eight types of family-school involvement were formed both by their student teaching experience, as well as any other forms of teaching which they undertook from 2013–2017. three female students were exempt from teaching practice because during their studies they were already practicing teachers. procedures subjects were asked to complete a questionnaire (in polish) which consisted of two parts. part one was a slightly modified version of epstein’s framework of six types of family involvement (epstein 2011). part two consisted of two open-ended questions which referred to trainees’ experience as regards their contacts with parents during their pedagogical and didactic practicum. the questionnaires were distributed mainly through emails during the 2016–2017 academic year. measures part one of the questionnaire was constructed around eight types of schoolfamily collaboration: type 1—parenting (“helping all families understand child and adolescent development and establishing home environments that support children as students”), type 2 —communicating (“designing and concluding effective forms of two-way communication about school programs and children’s progress”), type 3—volunteering (“recruiting and organizing help and support at school, home, or in other locations to support the school and student’s activities”), type 4—learning at home (“providing information and ideas for families about how to help students with homework, and curriculum-related activities and decisions”), type 5—decision making (“having parents from all backgrounds serve as representatives and leaders on school committees and obtaining input from all parents on school decisions”), type 6—collaborating with the community (“identifying and integrating resources and services from the community to strengthen and support schools, students, and their families, and organizing activities to benefit the community and increase students’ learning opportunities”) (epstein, 2011, p. 46); type 7—parents observing lessons, and type 8—home visits by teachers (śliwerski, 2001, p. 174). subjects were asked about their opinions regarding the importance of the eight types of collaboration using the four-point likert scale with responses ranging from strongly disagree, disagree, agree, to strongly agree. in part two, the subjects were asked to respond to two open-ended questions: (1) which types of parent-teacher collaboration did you observe during your pedagogic and didactic practice? (2) did you have any direct contact with pre-service teachers’ attitudes related to family involvement… 41 parents during your pedagogic and didactic practice. if yes, briefly describe what kind of contact you had. the narrative form of the responses allowed for the collection and further analysis of the respondents’ thoughts and opinions as presented in the section. the three female students who had been exempt from teaching practice did not fill out this part of the questionnaire. in order to check whether there existed any statistically significant relationship between the opinions of the most and least important types of parent-teacher collaboration and the subjects’ indirect and direct contacts with parents, pearson’s chi-square (χ²) test was used. the strength of one statistically significant association that was revealed using pearson’s χ2 test, was measured using cramer’s v. results descriptive statistics part one of the questionnaire the specifications below present the respondents’ answers in frequency and percentages as regards their opinions about the importance of the eight types of family-school involvement. type 1—parenting: 25 (89.2%) respondents agree (16 / 57.1%) and strongly agree (9 / 32.1%) that this type of relationship is important. type 2—communicating: 27 (96.4%) respondents agree (4 / 14.3%) and strongly agree (23 / 82.1%) that this type of relationship is important. type 3—volunteering: 22 (78.5%) respondents agree (10 / 35.7%) and strongly agree (12 / 42.8%) that this type of relationship is important. type 4—learning at home: 27 (96.4%) respondents agree (15 / 53.6%) and strongly agree (12 / 42.8%) that this type of relationship is important. type 5—decision making: 24 (85.7%) respondents agree (16 / 57.1%) and strongly agree (8 / 28.6%) that this type of relationship is important. type 6—collaborating with the community: 17 (60.7%) respondents agree (11 / 39.3%) and strongly agree (6 / 21.4%) that this type of relationship is important. type 7—parents observing lessons: 12 (42.8%) respondents agree (10 / 35.7%) and strongly agree (2 / 7.2%) that this type of relationship is important. type 8—home visits by teachers: 11 (39.2%) respondents agree (9 / 32.1%) and strongly agree (2 / 7.2%) that this type of relationship is important. the analysis of the data suggests that the majority of subjects had a high opinion of types 1–6 of parent involvement. they were of the highest opinion about type 2—communicating, (answers ‘strongly agree’). they had the lowest anna bąk-średnicka42 opinion about type 7—parents observing lessons, and type 8—home visits by teachers (answers ‘strongly agree’). part two of the questionnaire (1) which types of parent-teacher collaboration did you observe during your pedagogic and didactic practice? the specification below presents the respondents’ answers in frequency and percentages as regards the types of family-school involvement that they observed during their teaching practice (they had indirect contacts with parents). type 1—parenting: 2 (7.2%) respondents observed this type of involvement. type 2—communicating: 18 (64.3%) respondents observed this type of involvement. type 3—volunteering: 11 (39.3%) respondents observed this type of involvement. type 4—learning at home: 6 (21.4%) respondents observed this type of involvement. type 5—decision making: 3 (10.7%) respondents observed this type of involvement. type 6—collaborating with the community: 4 (14.3%) respondents observed this type of involvement. type 7—parents observing lessons: 0%. type 8—home visits by teachers: 2 (7.2%) respondents observed this type of involvement. the analysis of the data suggests that type 2—communicating was the most often observed type of collaboration, whereas none of subjects observed type 7—parents observing lessons. (2) did you have any direct contact with parents during your pedagogic and didactic practice? if yes, briefly describe what kind of contact you had. nine subjects (32.1%) had direct contact with parents which was type 2— communicating. four pre-service teacher-parent contacts were consultations devoted to pupils who experienced various problems at school (trainees reported to parents acts of misbehavior). four contacts were devoted to informing parents about their children’s progress. one parent contacted a trainee to excuse his child from school. one of ex-trainees who did not have any contacts with parents had asked his mentor whether he could participate in a parent-teacher conference, but his mentor told him that “the school does not arrange this type of trainees’ participation in school practice.” pre-service teachers’ attitudes related to family involvement… 43 pearson’s chi-square (χ2) test in order to find out whether there is a statistically significant relationship between the respondents’ opinions about the importance of the types of parent involvement and the types of involvement that they actually observed during their teaching practice (their indirect contacts with parents), pearson’s χ2 test was used. the results of the analyses are presented below. type 1—parenting: there is no statistically significant relationship between the variables (χ2(df=2) = 0.46; p = 0.793). type 2—communicating: there is no statistically significant relationship between the variables (χ2(df=2) = 2.0; p = 0.366). type 3—volunteering: there is no statistically significant relationship between the variables (χ2(df=3) = 2.36; p = 0.502). type 4—learning at home: there is no statistically significant relationship between the variables (χ2(df=2) = 1.87; p = 0.393). type 5—decision making: there is no statistically significant relationship between the variables (χ2(df=3) = 0.56; p = 0.906). type 6—collaborating with the community: there is no statistically significant relationship between the variables (χ2(df=3) = 0.69; p = 0.877). type 8—home visits by teachers: there is no statistically significant relationship between the variables (χ2(df=3) = 4.55; p = 0.208). in order to find out whether there is a statistically significant relationship between the respondents’ opinions about the importance of the types of parent involvement and their direct contacts with parents of type 2—communicating, pearson’s χ-square test was used. type 2—communicating: there is no statistically significant relationship between the variables (χ2(df=3) = 2.24; p = 0.327). there is no significant association between subjects’ opinions about the types of parent-teacher relationships and the types of relationships that they observed during their teaching placements. in order to find out whether there are statistically significant associations between respondents’ direct contacts with parents of type 2—communicating and their opinions about the types of parent involvement, pearson’s χ2 test was used. the analysis reveals that there is a statistically significant relationship between respondents’ direct contacts with parents of type 2—communicating and their high opinion about type 4—learning at home (χ2(df=2) = 6.68; p = 0.035). cramer’s v is 0.49 out of a possible maximum value of 1. this represents a medium association between subjects who had direct contact with parents during their teaching placements and their high opinion about collaboration with parents as regards supporting children in: doing homework, recognizing and developing children’s talents, as well as tackling at home those problems which occur during lessons. there is also a difference between respondents anna bąk-średnicka44 with and without direct contact with parents as regards answer ‘agree’ (z = 2.3; p < 0,001) and ‘strongly agree’ (z = –2.6; p < 0.001). respondents who had direct contact with parents during their practicum are much often of the opinion that type 4—learning at home is a very significant type of family-school collaboration (answer “strongly agree”) when compared to those who did not experience such contacts. there is a reversed interrelation when it comes to answer ‘agree.’ there is no significant relationship between direct contact of type 2 communicating and: type 1—parenting (χ2(df=2) = 1.64; p = 0.441), type 2—communicating (χ2(df=2) = 2.24; p = 0.327), type 3—volunteering (χ 2 (df=3) = 1.33; p = 0.722), type 5—decision making (χ2(df=3) = 3.07; p = 0.381), type 6— collaborating with the community (χ2(df=3) = 4.61; p = 0.203), type 7—parents observing lessons (χ2(df=3) = 1.26; p = 0.740) and type 8—home visits by teachers (χ2(df=3) = 1.77; p = 0.623). conclusions the research results in the present study seem to relate to those referred to in the second part of the paper. the subjects in the research studies by mcbride (1991) and uluag (2006) had the highest opinion of type 2—communicating, which was confirmed in the present study. the awareness of the importance of parent involvement was greater in those subjects who had already enrolled in teaching practice (mcbride, 1991) and completed it (uluag, 2006). in the case of this study all ex-teacher trainers had completed teaching practice and must have undertaken other forms of informal and formal teaching as well as had contacts with educational centers as parents. the present study provided deeper insight into the impact of direct contacts with parents during (student) teaching experience on the subjects’ opinions related to family involvement. in this way it provides a new perspective on the problem of how to raise trainees’ awareness and understanding of the importance of building a broader level of partnership with parents. it does not allow for drawing far-reaching conclusions since the subjects were not a representative group. despite this fact, however, the present study shows that the type of school and family relationships that the subjects experienced during their school placements, that is, communication, is positively associated with one type of the relationship, that is, learning at home. thus, those ex-trainees who experienced direct contact with parents strongly agree that parents have an important role to play in supporting their children at home. contrary to the above, no such positive associations were found when it comes to the ex-trainee teachers who just observed parent-teacher contacts while doing their placements. it goes without saying that “of all types of papre-service teachers’ attitudes related to family involvement… 45 rental involvement, supervision of learning activities at home may be the most educationally significant” (uluag, 2006, p. 15). also, parents are more willing to work with their child at home “when teachers nurture the teacher parent relationship” (uluag, 2006, p. 18). the international research studies on teacher trainees’ beliefs as well as their awareness of the importance of home-school collaboration shows the supporting role of teacher educators. the development of critical reflectivity by means of solving practical problems should go hand in hand with equipping teacher trainees with communicative skills and cooperative strategies tailored to particular educational and social contexts. a case in point is a teaching practice which should “fully address the issue of parent involvement” (baum & mcmurray-schwarz, 2004, pp. 60, 61). in particular, trainees should have opportunities for contacts with parents “on a more direct level” (baum & mcmurray-schwarz, 2004, p. 61). therefore, it seems obvious that one of the priorities for preparing pre-service teachers is to help them realize that “partnerships recognize the shared responsibilities of home, school, and community for children’s learning and development” (epstein, 2011, p. 4). as noticed by foster and lovel, it can be achieved by “placing students in field experiences where they can interact with families of varying socioeconomic levels and ethnic backgrounds” (1992, qtd. in katz & bauch, 1999, p. 202). concluding, we are of the opinion that the first step to improve the situation in the area of contacts with parents is to develop programs of training that emphasize teacher trainees’ varied and active role in parent interactions. references banasiak, m. 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(2014). ocena jakości praktyk pedagogicznych w zakresie przygotowania nauczycieli do współpracy z rodzicami. in j. piekarski, e. cyrańska, and b. adamczyk (eds.), doskonalenie praktyk pedagogicznych – dyskusja (pp. 47–63). łódź: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu łódzkiego. śliwerski, b. (2001). program wychowawczy szkoły. warszawa: wsip. schön, d. a. (1987). educating the reflective practitioner. usa: jossey-bass. schön, d. a. (1983). the reflective practitioner. usa: basic books. tomczyk, m. (2009). prospective teachers’ figured worlds of the parent-teacher conference: collaborating with, instructing and impressing parents. unpublished doctoral dissertation. michigan state university. uludag, a. (2006). elementary preservice teachers’ opinions about parental involvement in elementary children’s education” doctoral dissertation. florida state u. pre-service teachers’ attitudes related to family involvement… 47 anna bąk-średnicka die einstellung der zukünftigen lehrer zu den mit der zusammenarbeit zwischen familie und schule verbundenen fragen nach den erfahrungen aus der lehrerpraxis z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g in ihrem artikel erörtert die verfasserin das problem der zukünftigen lehrer, die sich nicht im klaren sind, dass sie mit den eltern ihrer schüler unbedingt eine engere zusammenarbeit aufnehmen müssen, die weit über solche typische formen des kontaktes wie z. b.: elternabende oder telefongespräche hinausgehen wird. den durch das ministerium für wissenschaft und hochschulbildung (gesetzblatt 2012; pos. 131) erlassenen richtlinien zufolge, sollte die lehrerausbildung sowohl die kenntnisse über die eltern als subjekte der pädagogischen tätigkeit, als auch die fähigkeit zur zusammenarbeit mit ihnen umfassen. in der wirklichkeit aber, was die forschungen zeigen, distanzieren sich zukünftige lehrer von den eltern ihrer künftigen schüler. die ursache dafür liegt wahrscheinlich darin, dass es in den die pädagogische und didaktische praxis bestimmenden bildungsmodulen nr. 1 u. 2 die voraussetzung fehlt, die referendaren können in einen indirekten, direkten, formellen oder informellen kontakt mit den eltern treten (gesetzblatt 2012; pos. 131). im resultat sind diese kontakte während der lehrerpraxis eigentlich zufällig und sporadisch. andererseits aber ist es schwer zu erwarten, dass die pädagogischen betreuer der referendaren solche treffen mit den eltern von der schule beauftragt sozusagen „auf wunsch“ veranstalten werden, obwohl manche von ihnen klargestellte anforderungen bevorzugen. der zweite teil des artikels beinhaltet die ergebnisse der unter den absolventen des lehramtsstudiums des ersten grades durchgeführten qualitativen sozialforschung. die befragten sollten sich dafür entscheiden, welcher von den 8 typen des elternengagements zur förderung ihrer kinder ihrer meinung nach am wichtigsten und welcher am belanglosesten sei (nach: j. epstein 2014 u. b. śliwerski 2001). sie sollten auch ihre kontakte mit den eltern während ihres referendariats schildern. die forschung sollte veranschaulichen, ob es statistisch gesehen eine wesentliche wechselbeziehung zwischen den von den befragten bevorzugten typen des engagements und ihren wirklichen kontakten mit den eltern gibt, und ihre ergebnisse haben das bestätigt. die referendaren welche einen direkten kontakt mit den eltern aufgenommen haben, sind häufiger bereit, die hauslehre (typ 4) als ein wichtiges element der zusammenarbeit zwischen der schule und den eltern zu beurteilen. schlüsselwörter: persönliche gesinnung der referendaren, die während des referendariats gesammelten erfahrungen, elternengagement, partnerschaft xinyue cécilia yu laboratoire de linguistique formelle, université paris diderot the acquisition at the interface of ditransitive constructions in mandarin chinese by french adult learners a b s t r a c t: the semantically fine-grained ditransitive constructions in mandarin chinese show complex interaction between lexical semantics, constructional semantics, and syntactic frames. this study examines the acquisition process of the syntax as well as the semantics of these constructions by launching two experiments with french learners of chinese. the experiment results reveal a ‘syntax-before-semantics’ learning process and the important role of input in implicit learning. k e y w o r d s: interface, ditransitive constructions, mandarin chinese, syntax, adult learners introduction for several decades, many studies have contributed to the understanding of argument realization in different languages and from diverse points of view, such as in the fields of syntax, corpus study, first language acquisition, and second language acquisition, etc. this subject attracts our interest in the foreign language acquisition field because of a difficulty hypothesis claimed by krifka (2004): one of the difficult areas for persons learning a foreign language is to grasp the range of usages of syntactic patterns that exist in the foreign language. it is not sufficient to learn how passive formation works, […]. one also has to learn which verbs can passivize at all, […]. (p. 1) theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 1 (1) 2015, pp. 69–96 70 i am especially interested in the acquisition of ditransitive constructions in chinese by french learners, exactly because of the multiple argument realization possibilities and the existence of certain lexical and constructional semantic constraints in the target language, which should cause learning difficulties for learners whose mother tongue exhibits neither such possibilities nor such constraints. in consequence, our general research question is: facing the ditransitive constructions in mandarin chinese, how do french learners of chinese acquire the complex three-way interface between lexical semantics, constructional semantics and syntactic frame? ditransitive constructions in french, english, and mandarin chinese even though our study adopts the construction grammar frame (goldberg, 1995; jackendoff, 1997, among others) for theoretical analysis and for the experimental study interpretation, the term ‘ditransitive’ used here refers “to all three-argument constructions across languages whether a double object construction, as in english, or other syntactically comparable constructions: usually, subject, object, and a dative np, but also a clitic doubled dative, as in spanish, or a genitive np, as in greek” (levin, 2004, p. 4). some theoretical background. the ditransitive constructions in english have been studied for several decades. most endeavors have been devoted to the so-called ‘dative alternation’ phenomenon which refers to the alternation between a prepositional construction and a double object construction as illustrated in the following examples: (1) john sent a book to mary. prepositional construction (2) john sent mary a book. double-object construction it has been observed that the alternation between these two constructions is not always free for the same verb (gruber, 1965; oehrle, 1976, among others). (3) john sent a book to london. (4) *john sent london a book. pinker (1989) proposes the wide range rules to capture the semantic constraint in the double-object construction, according to which the first object xinyue cécilia yu the acquisition at the interface of ditransitive constructions… 71 in the double object construction must have the property of a possessor. so this constraint excludes sentence (4) since the city of london could never be a possessor. it has also been claimed that the dative alternation is not free for all dative verbs. for example, throw and push are very close in semantics, but they demonstrate different behaviors with regards to the dative alternation: (5) john threw mary the ball. (6) *john pushed mary the ball. pinker (1989) then proposes the narrow range rules that restrict certain verb subclasses from entering the double object construction. for example, throw belongs to the verb subclass denoting an instantaneous force, which allows the dative alternation, while push belongs to the verb subclass denoting a continuous force, which prevents the dative alternation. these lexical semantic constraints were further developed by van der leek (1996) and krifka (1999; 2004) and were adopted in both the construction grammar (goldberg, 1995; croft, 2003) and lexical semantic approaches (rappaport hovav & levin, 2008). it is proposed in the construction grammar approach that the double object construction indicates a transfer event while the prepositional construction implies a caused motion event (goldberg, 1995, among others). but the ‘verb sensitive approach’ (rappaport hovav & levin, 2008; levin, 2008) argues that the implied event depends not only on the syntactic form (double object or prepositional) but also on the verb lexical semantics. so give type verbs denote a caused possession event in both forms while send and throw type verbs denote a caused possession event in the double object construction and a caused motion event or a caused possession event in the prepositional construction. i apply this perspective of combining lexical semantic constraint and constructional constraint to our comparative analysis of the ditransitive constructions in french, the mother tongue of our target learners, english, an l2 for most of the learners, and chinese, the target language. according to construction grammar, each basic argument structure denotes an event that is related to human experiences. with regard to our study, the caused possession event is the semantic key to delimiting the ditransitive constructions in the three languages. precisely, based on the specificity of chinese, i am going to look at the outward caused possession event, outward intended caused possession event and concerned benefaction event. there is a fourth event related to ditransitive constructions in chinese, the inward caused possession event. but due to space limitations, in this paper i will just talk about the first three events and leave the last one for future discussion. 72 xinyue cécilia yu constructional semantics: outward caused possession event. in chinese, there are four syntactic forms which express an outward caused possession event (examples are given in table 1): two post-verbal prepositional constructions (i.e. (7) and (10)) (henceforth np-pp form and pp-np form), a preverbal prepositional construction (i.e. (23)) (henceforth preverbal-gei), and the double object construction (i.e. (15)) (henceforth do construction). but similar to the dative alternation in english, in chinese not all dative verbs can enter into these four constructions: there are also some lexical semantic constraints. in this study, we take two verb subclasses into consideration: caused possession type verbs and caused motion type verbs. caused possession verbs (‘true-dative’ verbs in the term of jackendoff 1992, ‘give-type verbs’ in the term of rappaport hovav & levin, 2008), such as give, submit, offer, and return, denote an event such that an agent causes a recipient to possess a theme and take inherently three arguments: agent, theme, and recipient. caused motion verbs (‘send-type’ and ‘throwtype’ verbs in the term of rappaport hovav & levin, 2008), such as send, pass, throw, and move, denote an event such that an agent causes a theme to move and take inherently two arguments: agent and theme. according to construction grammar, in english when caused motion verbs enter the double object construction, it is the construction that contributes the third argument: recipient (goldberg, 1995). in chinese both types of verb can enter the two post-verbal constructions (i.e. (7) and (10) vs. (17) and (20)), but only the caused motion verbs are allowed in the preverbal gei form (i.e. (23) vs. (13)) while only the caused possession verbs are legitimate in the double object form (i.e. (15) vs. (25)). the two post-verbal constructions also exist in french (i.e. (9), (12) vs. (19), (22)) and english (i.e. (8), (11) vs. (18), (21)), and exhibit no particular lexical semantic constraint either. but it is observed that the pp-np form is preferred when the pp denoting the recipient is ‘heavier’ than the np denoting the theme (‘heavy np shift’). there is not any preverbal-gei equivalent in french or in english. but there is a preverbal-recipient form in french: the clitic construction. this construction legitimates both caused possession verbs and caused motion verbs (i.e. (14), (24)). as we have seen previously, the double object construction exists in english and legitimates caused possession verbs (i.e. (16)) and some types of caused motion verbs (i.e. send-type and throw-type, but not push-type, (26) vs. (27)). this construction does not exist in french. the summary of comparison of the three languages is presented in table 1. the acquisition at the interface of ditransitive constructions… 73 ta bl e 1 c au se d po ss es si on e ve nt s— co m pa ri so n of c hi ne se , e ng lis h, a nd f re nc h le xi ca l se m an tic s c hi ne se e ng lis h fr en ch ca us ed p os se ssi on v er bs : i.e . gi ve , su bm it, of fe r, re tu rn ... n p -a ge nt v v p -t he m e p p -r ec ip ie nt n p -a ge nt v n p -t he m e p p -r ec ip ie nt n p -a ge nt v n p -t he m e p p -r ec ip ie nt (7 ) z ha ng sa n so ng -le y i-b en -s hu g ei m al i. ‘z ha ng sa n ga ve a b oo k to m ar y. ’ (8 ) jo hn g av e a bo ok t o m ar y. (9 ) je an a d on né u n liv re à m ar ie . ‘j ea n ga ve a b oo k to m ar ie .’ n p -a ge nt v p p -r ec ip ie nt n p -t he m e n p -a ge nt v p p -r ec ip ie nt n p -t he m e (h ea vy n p s hi ft) n p -a ge nt v p p -r ec ip ie nt n p -t he m e (h ea vy n p s hi ft) (1 0) z ha ng sa n so ng g e i m al i yi -b en -s hu . ‘ z ha ng sa n ga ve t o m ar y a bo ok .’ (1 1) j oh n ga ve t o m ar y a bo ok t ha t he bo ug ht y es te rd ay . (1 2) j ea n a do nn é à m ar ie u n liv re q u’ il a ac he té h ie r. ‘ je an g av e to m ar ie a b oo k th at h e bo ug ht y es te rd ay .’ ?/ * n p -a ge nt p p -r ec ip ie nt v n p -t he m e n p -a ge nt c li t ic -r ec ip ie nt v n p -t he m e (1 3) ? /* z ha ng sa n g e i m al i so ng -le yi be nsh u. ( ‘z ha ng sa n ga ve a b oo k to m ar y. ’) (1 4) j ea n lu i a do nn é un l iv re . ‘ je an g av e hi m /h er a b oo k. ’ n p -a ge nt v n p -r ec ip ie nt n p -t he m e n p -a ge nt v n p -r ec ip ie nt n p -t he m e (1 5) z ha ng sa n so ng -le l is i yi -b en -s hu . ‘ z ha ng sa n ga ve l is i a bo ok .’ (1 6) j oh n ga ve m ar y a bo ok . ca us ed m ot io n ve rb s: i .e . se nd , pa ss , th ro w , m ov e. .. n p -a ge nt v v p -t he m e p p -r ec ip ie nt n p -a ge nt v n p -t he m e p p -r ec ip ie nt n p -a ge nt v n p -t he m e p p -r ec ip ie nt (1 7) z ha ng sa n jile y i-b en -s hu g ei m al i. ‘ z ha ng sa n se nt a b oo k to m ar y. ’ (1 8) j oh n se nt a b oo k to m ar y. (1 9) j ea n a en vo yé u n liv re à m ar ie . ‘ je an s en t a bo ok t o m ar ie .’ n p -a ge nt v p p -r ec ip ie nt n p -t he m e n p -a ge nt v p p -r ec ip ie nt n p -t he m e (h ea vy n p s hi ft) n p -a ge nt v p p -r ec ip ie nt n p -t he m e (h ea vy n p s hi ft) (2 0) z ha ng sa n ji g e i m al i yi -b en -s hu . ‘ z ha ng sa n se nt t o m ar y a bo ok .’ (2 1) j oh n se nt to m ar y a bo ok th at he bo ug ht y es te rd ay . (2 2) j ea n a en vo yé à m ar ie u n liv re q u’ il a ac he té h ie r. ‘ je an s en t to m ar ie a b oo k th at h e bo ug ht y es te rd ay .’ n p -a ge nt p p -r ec ip ie nt v n p -t he m e n p -a ge nt c li t ic -r ec ip ie nt v n p -t he m e (2 3) z ha ng sa n g e i m al i jile y i-b en -s hu . ‘ z ha ng sa n se nt a b oo k to m ar y. ’ (2 4) j ea n lu i a en vo yé u n liv re . ‘ je an s en t hi m /h er a b oo k. ’ ?/ * n p -a ge nt v n p -r ec ip ie nt n p -t he m e n p -a ge nt v n p -r ec ip ie nt n p -t he m e (2 5) ? /* z ha ng sa n jile l is i yi -b en -s hu . ‘ z ha ng sa n se nt l is i a bo ok .’ (2 6) j oh n se nt m ar y a bo ok . (2 7) * jo hn p us he d m ar y a bo ok . xinyue cécilia yu74 constructional semantics: outward intended caused possession vs. concerned benefaction (no transfer). in english, the dative alternation involves not only the alternation between the double object construction and the to-prepositional construction, but also the alternation with the for-prepositional construction: (28) john baked a cake for mary. (in order to give the cake to mary/in mary’s place) (29) john baked mary a cake. but just like the ‘to-alternation’, the ‘for-alternation’ is also subject to some semantic constraints: (30) john opened the door for mary. (in mary’s place/*in order to give the door to mary) (31) *john opened mary the door. as predicted by the wide range rules of pinker (1989), the ‘for-alternation’ should also obey the restriction that the first object in the double object construction implies a recipient. ‘for’ in (28) can introduce a recipient who receives the object-theme, or a concerned beneficiary (term proposed by colleman, 2010) in whose interest the action is carried out by the subject-agent with no intention to transfer the object-theme to the beneficiary. when the sentence is interpreted such that john baked the cake in order to give it to mary, (28) may be ‘alternated’ to (29). ‘for’ in (30) can only introduce a concerned beneficiary but never a recipient, which is why (31) is ruled out. so here a for-prepositional construction in english can denote (at least) two types of event: a caused possession event and a concerned benefaction event, while the double object construction expresses just a caused possession event type. a closer examination of the double object construction issuing from the for-dative reveals that this kind of caused possession event is more like an intended event rather than a successful event (goldberg, 1995; croft, 2003, among others). (32) john baked mary a cake, but threw it away. (33) *john gave mary a cake, but threw it away. a caused possession event expressed by caused possession verbs, such as give, implies the successful possession of the object-theme by the object recipient; but such implication is not shared by a caused possession event expressed by verbs such as bake since it can be denied (cf. (33)). the verb bake stands the acquisition at the interface of ditransitive constructions… 75 ta bl e 2 in te nd ed c au se d po ss es si on e ve nt v s. c on ce rn ed b en ef ac tio n ev en t— co m pa ri so n be tw ee n c hi ne se , e ng lis h, a nd f re nc h le xi ca l se m an tic s c hi ne se e ng lis h fr en ch cr ea tio n ve rb s (in te nd ed ca us ed p os se ssi on ): i .e . m ak e, dr aw , w rit e. .. n p -a ge nt v v p -t he m e p p -r ec ip ie nt n p -a ge nt v n p -t he m e p p -r ec ip ie nt n p -a ge nt v n p -t he m e p p -r ec ip ie nt (3 4) z ha ng sa n zu ole yi -g eda ng ao g ei m al i. ‘ z ha ng sa n m ad e a ca ke f or m ar y. ’ (3 5) j oh n ba ke d a ca ke f or m ar y. (3 6) j ea n a fa it un g ât ea u po ur m ar ie . ‘ je an m ad e a ca ke f or m ar ie .’ (? ) n p -a ge nt v p p -r ec ip ie nt n p -t he m e (3 7) ( ?) z ha ng sa n zu o g e i m al i yi -g eda ng ao . ‘ z ha ng sa n m ad e a ca ke f or m ar y. ’ n p -a ge nt p p -r ec ip ie nt v n p -t he m e n p -a ge nt c li t ic -r ec ip ie nt v n p -t he m e (3 8) z ha ng sa n g e i m al i zu ole yi -g eda ng ao . ‘ z ha ng sa n m ad e a ca ke f or m ar y. ’ (3 9) j ea n lu i a fa it un g ât ea u. ‘ je an b ak ed a c ak e fo r hi m /h er .’ *n p -a ge nt v n p -r ec ip ie nt n p -t he m e n p -a ge nt v n p -r ec ip ie nt n p -t he m e (4 0) * z ha ng sa n ka ole m al i yi -g eda ng ao . ‘ z ha ng sa n ba ke d m ar y a ca ke .’ (4 1) j oh n ba ke d m ar y a ca ke . ac tiv ity v er bs (c on ce rn ed b en ef ac tio n w ith ou t tr an sf er ): i .e . op en ( a do or ), w at er ( a pl an t) , cl ea n (w in do w ). .. *n p -a ge nt v n p -t he m e p p (g ei )be ne fic ia ry n p -a ge nt v n p -t he m e p p (f or )be ne fic ia ry n p -a ge nt v n p -t he m e p p (p ou r) -b en ef ic ia ry (4 2) * z ha ng sa n da ka i m en g ei m al i. ‘ jo hn o pe ne d th e do or f or m ar y. ’ (4 3) j oh n op en ed t he d oo r fo r m ar y. (4 4) j ea n a ou ve rt l a po rt e po ur m ar ie . ‘ je an o pe ne d th e do or f or m ar ie .’ *n p -a ge nt v p p (g ei )be ne fic ia ry n p -t he m e (4 5) * z ha ng sa n da ka i ge i m al i m en . ‘ z ha ng sa n op en ed t he d oo r fo r m ar y. ’ n p -a ge nt p p (g ei )be ne fic ia ry v n p -t he m e n p -a ge nt c li t ic -b en ef ic ia ry v n p -t he m e (4 6) z ha ng sa n g e i m al i da ka i m en . ‘ z ha ng sa n op en ed t he d oo r fo r m ar y. ’ (4 7) j ea n lu i a ou ve rt l a po rt e. ‘ je an o pe ne d th e do or f or h im /h er .’ *n p -a ge nt v n p -b en ef ic ia ry n p -t he m e *n p -a ge nt v n p -b en ef ic ia ry n p -t he m e (4 8) * z ha ng sa n da ka i le m al i m en . * ‘z ha ng sa n op en ed th e do or fo r m ar y. ’ (4 9) * jo hn o pe ne d m ar y th e do or . xinyue cécilia yu76 for verbs pertaining to a verb subclass, creation verbs (pinker, 1989; levin, 1993). these verbs can enter the double object construction in order to express an intended caused possession event. of course, creation verbs are not the only verbs that can have for-dative alternation in english. other verbs, such as buy, are also legitimate in both constructions, as long as they indicate a pre-condition of transfer event (goldberg, 2010; liu, 2006). if we take a look at chinese, we can observe that the double object construction is ruled out for both intended caused possession event (cf. (40)) and concerned benefaction event (cf. (48)) (examples are given in table 2). the intended caused possession can be expressed in both post-verbal prepositional constructions with some acceptability differences ((34) vs. (37)). it is also legitimated in the preverbal gei construction (cf. (38)). contrary to english, which uses the same post-verbal np-pp construction to express both events ((35) & (43)), in chinese the concerned benefaction is ruled out in the post-verbal constructions ((42) & (45)) and is only expressed by the preverbal gei construction (cf. (46)). in french, both the post-verbal prepositional pour-construction (equivalent to for-construction in english) (cf. (36)) and the preverbal clitic construction (cf. (39)) can host creation verbs and other transfer pre-condition verbs to express an intended caused possession event. they can also host other activity verbs to express a concerned benefaction event ((44) & (47)). the summary of comparison of the three languages as regards intended caused possession event and concerned benefaction event is presented in table 2. some previous studies on acquisition of ditransitive constructions different linguistic theories have led to different research perspectives on the (l1 as well as l2) acquisition of ditransitive constructions. under the generative grammar approach, in the early years, interest was devoted to the markedness of the double object construction and l1 transfer effect in l2 acquisition (cf. mazurkewich, 1984; white, 1987). later linguists focused more on the acquisition of the interaction between the lexical semantics and the syntactic form, specifically, the learnability of broad range rules and narrow range rules (gropen et al., 1989; pinker, 1989; inagaki, 1997; gorden & chung, 1998, among others). it has been argued that l2 learners can acquire the narrow range rules as long as they have achieved a certain proficiency (inagaki, 1997). more recently, the acquisition of to-dative alternation and for-dative alternation has been studied in terms of high applicative and the acquisition at the interface of ditransitive constructions… 77 low applicative (oh, 2010; shimanskaya, 2012) according to the proposal of marantz (1993) and pylkkänen (2008). under the construction grammar approach, linguists work more on the possibility of the generalization of the form-meaning pairs (constructions) and the role of different input types (skewed vs. balanced input) during the generalization of constructions (goldberg et al., 1995; 2002; 2006; 2008; gries & wulff, 2005; taylor, 2008; mcdonough, & nekrasova-beckern, 2014; yook, 2013, among others). according to goldberg and casenhiser (2008), form-meaning pairs (constructions) are learned based on input. in experimental studies, with a minimum of training, subjects are capable of recognizing the form and the meaning of a new construction (fast mapping). furthermore, biased input supplied with the preponderance of a certain type of examples could lead to generalizations that are more accurate when compared to a more representative input. but the biased frequency is only a sufficient but not a necessary condition to facilitate learning. in the l2 acquisition perspective, it would be advisable to supply a target input which includes abundant prototypical cases during training. an examination of textbooks of chinese as a foreign language shows that the teaching of ditransitive verbs generally begins with typical ditransitive verbs such as gei (give), jiao (teach), wen (ask). the verb gei (give) is a significant example since it carries the nuclear meaning of ditransitivity—successful caused possession, which is identical to the central meaning of ditransitive constructions (goldberg, 1995). based on the comparative analysis of chinese, english, and french and previous studies on the acquisition of ditransitive constructions, i would like to examine whether french adult learners of chinese can acquire the three-way interface between lexical semantics, constructional semantics and syntactical frame. furthermore, due to some similarities between the three languages, are the constructions with post-verbal pp favored by the learners? in order to answer these general questions, two experiments were carried out with the participation of french adult learners of chinese as learner groups, and chinese native speakers as a control group. method participants. fourty french college students majoring in chinese took part in our experimental study. most of them come from the university of paris diderot, and a few of them are from the national institute of oriental languages and civilizations (inalco), university of rennes ii, and university xinyue cécilia yu78 of lyon ii. every participant gets an id to take all the tests and to validate their participation. since there is no official or national chinese proficiency test in france, in order for us to get to know the participants’ language background, they were asked to complete an online language history questionnaire (li et al., 2013). meanwhile i contacted three teachers of the chinese department of paris diderot and asked them to individually evaluate every participant from this university. putting the participants’ auto-evaluation and teachers’ global evaluation together, i managed to divide the learner participants into three groups: low intermediate, high intermediate, and advanced. i also found 14 chinese native speakers, who were generally college students, to form a control group. the participants’ general information is summarized in table 3. table 3 summary of experiment subjects group number sex mean age mean learning time experience in china/taiwan mean duration in china/taiwan low intermediate 15 3m 12f 22.07 3.7 years 3 persons 6.67 months high intermediate 16 4m 12f 21.69 3.1 years 2 persons 11.5 months advanced 9 5m 4f 28.22 6.7 years 6 persons 20.6 months control group 14 4m 10f 29.3 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ materials of experiment i: interaction between lexical semantics and syntactical frame to express a caused possession event. research questions and hypotheses. in the first experiment, i tried to tackle two specific questions: research question 1: do french learners acquire the double object construction in chinese to express the caused possession events despite its absence in french? hypothesis: given that learners are supposed to have pre-acquired the double object construction in english, and that the initial input of ditransitive verbs in chinese consists of gei (give), wen (ask), gaosu (tell), prototypical ditransitive verbs according to goldberg and casenhiser (2008), learners should acquire the usage of double object to express the caused possesion. research question 2: can french learners acquire different sub-classifications of dative verbs, especially the distinction between the caused possession verbs and the caused motion verbs? hypothesis: since the caused possession verbs and the caused motion verbs behave alike in french and the distinction in english is very subtle, french learners are expected to overgeneralize the usage of these two types of verbs in the double object construction and the preverbal gei the acquisition at the interface of ditransitive constructions… 79 construction due to interference from pre-acquired languages. precisely, they would be expected to approve the occurrence of caused motion verbs in the double object construction and caused possession verbs in the preverbal gei construction. acceptability judgment task (ajt). recall that in this experiment i examine the caused possession events expressed by four syntactic frames combined with two types of verbs in chinese. these combinations constitute the 8 conditions of the ajt (see table 4). table 4 conditions of the acceptability judgment task of experiment i conditions chinese english french np-pp-poss* + + + np-pp-mot + + + pp-np-poss + + + pp-np-mot + + + do-poss + + ø do-mot – + ø gei-poss – ø ø gei-mot + ø ø * in this table, np-pp denotes the form np-v-np-pp, pp-np denotes the form np-v-pp-np, do denotes the double object construction, gei stands for the preverbal gei construction, poss stands for the lexical semantics of caused possession, while mot stands for caused motion. hence, np-pp-poss denotes the combination of the form np-v-np-pp and the lexical semantics of caused possession. the addition symbol ‘+’ means that such combination is acceptable in this language; the subtraction symbol ‘–’ means that such combination is not or is less acceptable in this language; the empty set symbol ø means that such form does not exist in this language. the verbs used in the 1–7 likert scale ajt are: – 5 caused possession verbs: zengsong (offer), huan (return), jiao (submit), jie (lend), zu (rent); – 5 caused motion verbs: ji (send), dai (bring), na (take), ban (move with hands), chuan (pass). each caused possession type verb combines with a caused motion type verb to form a pair; such a verb pair mixes with the four constructions to constitute the previously illustrated 8 conditions. the combinations of caused possession verbs and caused motion verbs are randomized. in total, there are 24 verb pairs constituting 24 experimental items. each experimental item contains the sentence to be judged, following a context that is necessary to exclude inappropriate interpretation of the sentence to be judged. besides, there are 24 distracters formed with diverse types of prepositions. table 5 presents an experimental item with the verb pair zengsong (offer) and ji (send). xinyue cécilia yu80 table 5 example of ajt of experiment i conditions items context: mark loves chinese tea. mr. wang is his chinese friend. l1 prediction l2 prediction np-pp-poss wang xiansheng zengsong-le yixie zhongguo cha gei make. mr. wang offer-asp some chinese tea gei mark ‘mr. wang offered some chinese tea to mark.’ + + np-pp-mot wang xiansheng ji-le yixie zhongguo cha gei make. mr. wang send-asp some chinese tea to mark ‘mr. wang sent some chinese tea to mark.’ + + pp-np-poss wang xiansheng zengsong gei make yixie zhongguo cha. mr. wang offer gei mark some chinese tea ‘mr. wang offered mark some chinese tea.’ + + pp-np-mot wang xiansheng ji gei make yixie zhongguo cha. mr. wang send gei mark some chinese tea ‘mr. wang sent mark some chinese tea.’ + + do-poss wang xiansheng zengsong-le make yixie zhongguo cha. mr. wang offer-asp mark some chinese tea ‘mr. wang offered mark some chinese tea.’ + + do-mot wang xiansheng ji-le make yixie zhongguo cha. mr. wang send-asp mark some chinese tea ‘mr. wang sent mark some chinese tea.’ – + gei-poss wang xiansheng gei make zengsong-le yixie zhongguo cha. mr. wang gei mark offer-asp some chinese tea ‘mr. wang offered some chinese tea to mark.’ – + gei-mot wang xiansheng gei make ji-le yixie zhongguo cha. mr. wang gei mark send-asp some chinese tea ‘mr. wang sent some chinese tea to mark.’ + + elicitation task—translation. besides the ajt, which is conceived to examine learners’ implicit knowledge (nunan, 1996; sorace, 1996; chaudron, 2003), a semi-guided translation task is conceived to examine learners’ target language performance (chaudron, 2003). in order to avoid the priming effect, the clitic form in french is chosen to conceive resource language experimental items, since it is the only syntactic frame not shared by the target language. among the verbs used in the ajt, 6 verbs are chosen in the translation task: – 3 caused possession verbs: zengsong (offer), jie (lend), huan (return); – 3 caused motion verbs: ji (send), dai (bring), ban (move with hands). each verb is used in 3 sentences, which results in 18 experimental items. there are also 18 distracters soliciting uses of different prepositions. just like the ajt, in the translation task, each item consists of a context and a sentence to be translated. taking the experiment duration into account, in order to make the task easier, i provide all the elements in chinese necessary for the translation. note that these elements are presented in a random order. apart from the nps and the verb that must be used, prepositions other than the acquisition at the interface of ditransitive constructions… 81 gei are also provided. the subjects of the experiments are asked to choose the necessary elements (nps, verb, preposition(s)) and put them in the correct order according to the original sentence in french. here is an example of the experimental items with the caused possession verb huan (return): context in french: zhangdong a rencontré fanfan à la bibliothèque. (zhangdong met fanfan in the library.) sentence to translate into chinese: (50) zhangdong lui a rendu un album d’images. zhangdong clitic has returned a photo album. ‘zhangdong returned a photo album to her.’ the sentence in french is followed by an empty space where subjects can paste the necessary elements to translate the sentence. below the empty space are the provided elements in chinese: (to use if necessary) gen (with) / ti (in the place of) / gei (to) / ba (disposal preposition) / bei (passive marker) / wei (for) zhangdong huan (return) ta (she/her) (to use if necessary) le (aspectual marker) yi-ben-huace (a photo album) with a sentence like (50), learner subjects could produce a translation such as: (51) np-pp-poss zhangdong huan-le yi-ben-huace gei ta. zhangdong return-asp one-cl-photo album gei her (52) pp-np-poss zhangdong huan gei ta yi-ben-huace. zhangdong return gei her one-cl-photo album (53) do-poss zhangdong huan-le ta yi-ben-huace zhangdong return-asp her one-cl-photo album and in case learner subjects did not acquire the relevant lexical semantic constraint, they would produce an unacceptable sentence such as: (54) gei-poss # zhangdong gei ta huan-le yi-ben-huace. xinyue cécilia yu82 (54) zhangdong gei her return one-cl-photo album ‘zhangdong return a photo album for her/in her place.’ (a concerned benefaction reading) materials of experiment ii: interaction between lexical semantics and syntactical frame to express an intended caused possession event and a concerned benefaction event. research question and hypothesis. in this experiment i want to answer one specific question: research question 3: can french learners acquire the construction semantics constraint of the intended caused possession event and the concerned benefaction (without transfer) event? hypothesis: in french, both target events are expressed by the same syntactic forms and are very close semantically. in chinese, despite their semantic similarity, the concerned benefaction (without transfer) event is exclusively expressed in the preverbal gei construction, while the intended caused possession event can be expressed in both preverbal and post-verbal constructions. french learners are supposed to be less sensitive to this constraint due to the interference from pre-acquired languages. acceptability judgment task (atj). as we have seen previously, in chinese, creation verbs and other pre-condition of transfer verbs can be used in three ditransitive constructions (with different acceptability) to express an intended caused possession event. on the contrary, the concerned benefaction event can only be expressed with general activity verbs in preverbal gei construction (or some other structures, such as np ti (in place of) np v np, np wei (for) np v np, that i do not tackle in this study) but not post-verbal constructions. so the 3 structures combined with 2 types of verb create the 6 conditions of the atj (see table 6). table 6 conditions of the acceptability judgment task of experiment ii conditions chinese english french np-pp-cre* + + + np-pp-ben – + + pp-np-cre +/ ? – – pp-np-ben – – – gei-cre + ø ø gei-ben + ø ø * the labels of structures used in this table are identical to those in experiment i. cre stands for creation verbs, while ben stands for general activity verbs that can be used to express a concerned benefaction event. the verbs used in the 1–7 likert scale ajt are: – 5 verbs of creation/precondition of transfer: zuo (make), mai (buy), zhao (find), hua (draw), xuanze (choose); the acquisition at the interface of ditransitive constructions… 83 – 5 verbs of activity without possibility of transfer: chuan-shang (put-on), daishang (put-on), tie (paste), gua (hang), baoguan (keep). each creation verb combines with a general activity verb to form a pair; such a verb pair mixes with the three constructions to constitute the previously illustrated 6 conditions. the combinations of creation verbs and activity verbs are fixed due to pragmatic reasons (for instance, given that the two verbs in each verb pair share the same context, if the context provides an engagement event, it would be appropriate that someone ‘put on’ or ‘keep’ a ring for someone else, but rather unnatural that someone ‘draw’ a ring. hence, some verbpair combinations are pragmatically inappropriate). in total, there are 18 verb pairs constituting 18 experimental items. each experimental item contains the sentence to judge following a context that is necessary to exclude inappropriate interpretation of the sentence to be judged. besides, there are 30 distracters. see table 7 for an example of experimental item containing the verb pair zuo (make) and chuan-shang (put-on): table 7 example of ajt of experiment ii conditions itemcontext: xiao hong will go to school. l1 prediction l2 prediction np-pp-cre mama zuo-le baisede chenshan gei xiao hong. mum make-asp white shirt gei xiao hong ‘mum made a white shirt for xiao hong.’ + + np-pp-ben mama chuanshang-le baisede chenshan gei xiao hong. mum put on-asp white shirt gei xiao hong ‘mum put on a white shirt for xiao hong.’ – + pp-np-cre mama zuo-gei xiao hong baisede chenshan. mum make-asp xiao hong white shirt ‘mum made a white shirt for xiao hong.’ +/ ? – pp-np-ben mama chuanshang gei xiao hong baisede chenshan. mum put on gei xiao hong white shirt ‘mum put on a white shirt for xiao hong.’ – – gei-cre mama gei xiao hong zuo-le baisede chenshan. mum gei xiao hong make-asp white shirt ‘mum made a white shirt for xiao hong.’ + + gei-ben mama gei xiao hong chuanshang-le baisede chenshan. mum gei xiao hong put on-asp white shirt ‘mum put on a white shirt for xiao hong.’ + + elicitation task—translation. an elicitation task similar to the one in experiment i was conceived for experiment ii. 6 verbs chosen from the ajt were used in the translation task: – 3 creation/precondition of transfer verbs: zuo (make), mai (buy), hua (draw); – 3 activity (without possibility of transfer) verbs: chuan-shang (put on), daishang (put on), baoguan (keep). each verb was used in 3 sentences, which results in 18 experimental items. there are also 18 fillers. xinyue cécilia yu84 here is an example of experimental items with the creation verb hua (draw): context in french: prof guan vient de déménager dans un nouvel appartement. (prof. guan has just moved into a new apartment.) sentence to translate into chinese: (55) lin tian lui a peint une peinture. lin tian clitic has drawn a painting ‘lin tian drew him/her a painting.’ similarly, the sentence in french is followed by an empty space where subjects can paste the necessary elements to translate the sentence. below the empty space are the provided elements in chinese: (to use if necessary) gen (with) / gei (gei) / bei (passive marker) / bi (compared to) /de (resultative marker) lin tian hua (draw) ta (she/her) (to use if necessary) le (aspectual marker) yi-fu-youhua (a painting) the sentence (55) is supposed to be translated in one of the 3 tackled ditransitive structures: (56) np-pp-cre lin tian hua-le yi-fu-youhua gei ta. lin tian draw-asp one-cl.-painting gei him/her (57) pp-np-cre (?) lin tian hua gei ta yi-fu-youhua. lin tian draw gei him/her one-cl.-painting (58) gei-cre lin tian gei ta hua-le yi-fu-youhua. lin tian gei him/her draw-asp one-cl.-painting procedure. the two experiments were carried out on ibex farm between april 2nd and 15th of 2014. mails including experiment instructions and a vocabulary list were sent to participants to get them prepared before the launch of the experiments. learner participants were allowed to take the tests at home or in the language resources centre of paris diderot. when they had finished all the tests of the two experiments, they got a small present as a reward. the acquisition at the interface of ditransitive constructions… 85 results results of ajt of experiment i. three way anova with construction and semantic as within-subject factors and group as between-subject factor was conducted. the main effect of construction (f (3, 138) = 24.78, p < 0.001), semantic (f (1, 46) = 4.36, p < 0.05) and group (f (3, 46) = 4.45, p < 0.01) was significant. there was a significant interaction effect of construction × group (f (9, 138) = 10.10, p < 0.001), and construction × group × semantic (f (9, 138) = 15.74, p < 0.001) were observed. further simple effect analysis showed that chinese native speakers are sensitive to the lexical semantic constraint in both double object construction and preverbal gei construction. in the double object construction the caused possession verbs are accepted more easily than the caused motion verbs (f (1, 13) = 100.99, p < 0.001). in the preverbal gei construction, caused motion verbs are found more acceptable than caused possession verbs (f (1, 13) = 445.38, p < 0.001). in the post-verbal np-pp and pp-np constructions, both types of verbs are found almost equally acceptable. these behaviors conform to what the linguistic analysis predicted. with regard to the low intermediate group, learners are not sensitive to lexical semantic constraint in any construction form. more precisely, they almost equally accept the two types of verbs in the four different structures. it is worth mentioning, however, that learners of this group demonstrate a marginally different acceptability between the np-pp and the pp-np form: they tend to accept more easily the pp-np form (f (1, 14) = 4.44, p = 0.054). for the high intermediate group, learners are not sensitive to the lexical semantic constraint either. but among the four structures, preverbal gei and post-verbal pp-np are much more favored than the other two structures. furthermore, learners of this group significantly prefer the pp-np structure as compared to the np-pp structure (f (1, 11) = 13.15, p < 0.01). as far as the advanced group is concerned, learners show some sensitivity to the lexical semantic constraint. in the double object construction, they correctly accept more caused possession verbs than caused motion verbs (f (1, 8) = 15.21, p < 0.01). but in the preverbal gei construction, no distinction between the two types of verb has appeared yet. it is curious to see that they significantly prefer caused motion verbs to caused possession verbs in the nppp form (f (1, 8) = 8.29, p < 0.05), even though chinese native speakers do not show such preference. figure 1 presents the mean scores rated by control group and learner groups in the acceptability judgment task of experiment i. xinyue cécilia yu86 figure 1. means scores of control group and learner groups in ajt of experiment i. the acquisition at the interface of ditransitive constructions… 87 results of translation task of experiment i. the translation task is conceived to elicit the production of ditransitive constructions to express a caused possession event. recall that all four structures studied here are legitimate to express such an event, albeit being subject to different lexical semantic constraints. after the elimination of some incomplete sentences (4.1% of total sentences), it is interesting to see that in the data collected from the 40 learner participants there are not only the four ditransitive constructions but also some unexpected structures. for example: original sentence in french: ‘xiao wang lui a prêté un livre.’ (‘xiao wang lent him/her a book.’) translation in chinese: ba construction (59) np ba np v gei np xiao wang ba yi-ben-shu jie gei ta. xiao wang ba one-cl-book lend gei he/she (60) ba without gei xiao wang ba yi-ben-shu jie ta. xiao wang ba one-cl-book lend gei he/she the ba construction is often called a ‘disposal’ construction (li & thompson, 1981; xu, 1996). syntactically it proposes the direct object in a preverbal position and marks it with ba (ba originally is a verb, indicating ‘hold’, then is grammaticalized to a ‘coverb’, a term proposed by li and thompson (1981), or a ‘light verb’, the term used in generative grammar, or a ‘preposition’, the term used in teaching of chinese as a foreign language). semantically the ba construction implies that the action expressed by the verb affects the object. the ba construction is compatible with ditransitive constructions (tang, 1979, among others) by realizing the direct object in the preverbal position. but both corpus studies (liu, 2007; yao & liu, 2010) and experimental studies (yu, 2013) show that the ba construction is more likely to be used when the direct object conveys given information. in the present work, direct objects in experimental items represent new information rather than old information. so the use of ba construction is not ungrammatical but it is not appropriate. besides the inappropriate production of the ba construction, subjects also use other prepositions or structures. since they are not abundant, we will not talk about them in detail. the percentage of major structures found in the collected data is presented in table 8. xinyue cécilia yu88 table 8 summary of percentage of attested structures occurrences in elicitation task of experiment i low intermediate group ba(38%) > pp np(25%) > do(19%) > preverbal gei(15%) poss(44%) < mot(56%) poss(75%) > mot(25%) poss(40%) < mot(60%) poss(51%) ≈ mot(49%) high intermediate group pp np(48%) > preverbal gei(25%) > do(12%) > ba(9%) poss(63%) > mot(37%) poss(37%) < mot(63%) poss(44%) < mot(56%) poss(50%) = mot(50%) advanced group pp np(38%) > preverbal gei(31%) > do(12%) > ba(12%) poss(64%) > mot(36%) poss(14%) < mot(86%) poss(95%) > mot(5%) poss(58%) > mot(42%) from table 8 we can see that learners of the low intermediate group overuse the ba construction from the point of view of information structure. it seems that they have acquired the forms of pp-np construction, double object construction and preverbal gei construction. but in the use of the two latter constructions, they are not sensitive to the lexical semantic constraints: they use more caused motion verbs in the double object construction and both caused possession verbs and caused motions verbs in the preverbal gei construction. the most obvious difference between the low intermediate group and the high intermediate group is that learners of the latter group use much fewer ba constructions, which may be interpreted as progress in the acquisition of information structure (this interpretation needs to be further checked). the ppnp form is still the favorite ditransitive construction, followed by the preverbal gei construction, followed by the double object construction. in the use of the preverbal gei construction learners begin to be sensitive to the lexical semantic constraint and use more caused motion verbs than caused possession verbs. but such a constraint has not been acquired in the use of the double object construction. it is in the production of the advanced group that the acquisition of lexical semantic constraints can be evidenced. learners of this group make correct and significant distinction between the two types of verb in both preverbal gei construction and double object construction. the overuse of ba construction is an individual behavior rather than a group performance. the acquisition at the interface of ditransitive constructions… 89 results of ajt of experiment ii. three way anova with construction and semantic as within-subject factors and group as between-subject factor was conducted. the main effect of construction (f (2, 94) = 129.17, p < 0.001), semantic (f (1, 47) = 23.33, p < 0.001) and group (f (3, 47) = 3.65, p < 0.05) was significant. there was a significant interaction effect of construction × group (f (6, 94) = 11.05, p < 0.001), semantic × group (f (3, 47) = 21.46, p < 0.001) and construction × semantic × group (f (6, 94) = 5.01, p < 0.001) were observed. further simple effect analysis showed that the preverbal gei construction can be used to express both an intended caused possession event and a concerned benefaction event. both creation verbs and general activity verbs are highly acceptable in this structure by chinese native speakers, but with a constant significant difference between them (f (1, 16) = 12.2, p < 0.01). the np-pp form cannot be used to express a concerned benefaction event, but it can legitimate intended caused possession events; the difference is significant (f (1, 16) = 173.97, p < 0.001). the concerned benefaction event is totally rejected in the pp-np form, while the intended caused possession event is slightly but significantly more acceptable in this structure (f (1, 16) = 10.23, p < 0.01). learners from the low intermediate group and the high intermediate group accept the preverbal gei structure to express intended caused possession event and concerned benefaction event. but they make no significant distinction when rating the two post-verbal prepositional structures. for the advanced group, learners significantly highly accept the preverbal gei construction and they reject more the post-verbal prepositional constructions. meanwhile, they begin to make a significant distinction between the two events when the np-pp form is concerned (f (1, 8) = 17.67, p < 0.01). figure 2 presents the mean scores rated by the control group and the 3 learner groups in the 1–7 likert scale acceptability judgment task of experiment ii. results of translation task of experiment ii. as i examine the acquisition of 3 ditransitive constructions in this experiment, the preverbal gei construction, the np-pp construction and the pp-np construction, we find many unexpected structures in the collected data. besides the overuse of ba construction that we have discussed in section 5.4, in the translation task of experiment ii, there is also a curious and noticeable usage of the bei construction. the bei construction is a prototypical passive construction in mandarin chinese (li & thompson, 1981; xu, 1996, among others). the subject of the bei construction generally implies a patient semantic role. it is semantically not compatible with the concerned benefaction event; in an intended caused possession event, it is impossible for the recipient role or the incremental theme to occupy the subject position. so, generally this construction is incompatible xinyue cécilia yu90 figure 2. mean scores of control group and learner groups in ajt of experiment ii. the acquisition at the interface of ditransitive constructions… 91 with a ditransitive construction. this construction is nevertheless found in the learners’ productions with either the theme or the recipient/beneficiary in the subject position. besides the ba construction and the bei construction, various other structures were found in the data. i just present the major structures produced by learners with their percentage in table 9. table 9 summary of percentage of attested structures occurrences in elicitation task of experiment i low intermediate group preverbal gei(37%) > do(21%) > pp np(18%) + diverse errors (ba, bei, etc.)cre(50.6%) ≥ ben(49.4%) cre(43%) < ben(57%) cre(68%) > ben(32%) high intermediate group preverbal gei(63%) > pp np(21%) > do(9%) + less diverse errorscre(52%) > ben(48%) cre(53%) > ben(47%) cre(32%) < ben(68%) advanced group preverbal gei(85%) + few errorscre(53%) > ben(47%) the preverbal gei construction is the favorite structure among the three learner groups with an increased preference correlating with increased proficiency. in the productions of the low intermediate group, the double object construction appears with a relatively high percentage despite the fact that this structure is legitimated neither for the intended caused possession event nor for the concerned benefaction event. the use of this structure becomes less frequent in the high intermediate group and almost disappears in the advanced group. the favorite structure in experiment i, the pp-np form, appears too in the productions of the low intermediate group and high intermediate group in this experiment. it is used to express both tackled events, while it is actually ungrammatical to express a concerned benefaction event. as previously mentioned, diverse errors are produced by learners of the low intermediate group and disappear with increased proficiency. xinyue cécilia yu92 discussion the results obtained from the two experiments show that the low intermediate level learners accept and produce the pp-np structure, the double object construction and the preverbal gei form. it can be explained by the fact that these three ditransitive constructions are explicitly taught in their textbook: the double object structure and the preverbal gei are taught early in the first year of their study of chinese, the pp-np form is taught at the beginning of the second year, and most participants are in the second or in the third year in college. but semantic constraints are not taught explicitly. this could explain the constraint violation found in both tasks in the two experiments with intermediate level groups. but fortunately, in experiment i, the advanced group learners begin to be sensitive to lexical semantic restrictions in the double object construction. in experiment ii, learners overcome little by little the over-acceptance and the overuse of post-verbal constructions to express the concerned benefaction event as they make progress in learning chinese. if the advanced group learners can overcome some overgeneralizations, this could not be explained by explicit learning effect, given that to our knowledge no explicit instruction on ditransitive constructions’ semantic constraints is provided in classroom teaching. this progress seems to be stimulated by input from the target language. as the auto-evaluation indicates, most of the advanced group learners have frequent contacts with the target language, such as reading, tv watching, and communication with chinese native speakers in daily lives or in travel. these contacts may implicitly provide them with positive evidence of semantic constraint. so far, it seems appropriate to conclude that french learners begin the acquisition of ditransitive constructions in chinese from the learning of structural forms and then move to the learning of subtle lexical and constructional semantic constraints. this acquisition process echoes the findings of some previous studies, such as those of inagaki (1997) and oh (2010). however, there is still a question to be answered: why do not french learners show preference for the post-verbal np-pp construction despite the existence of an equivalent structure in their mother tongue and other pre-acquired languages such as english? according to the findings of mazurkewich (1984) and white (1987), there should be a positive transfer to facilitate the acquisition of the np-pp construction. why is this phenomenon not seen among our french learners? recent quantitative studies carried out by ambridge et al. (2012; 2013; 2014) and goldberg (2011) may give us some enlightenment with the entrenchment hypothesis. the acquisition at the interface of ditransitive constructions… 93 the entrenchment hypothesis is the claim that repeated presentation of a verb in one (or more) attested construction (e.g. the po-dative) […] causes the learner to gradually form an ever-strengthening probabilistic inference that adult speakers do not use that particular verb in nonattested constructions (e.g. the do-dative) […]. (ambridge et al., 2012, p. 48) adopting this hypothesis in my study, i may explain that since the double object construction, the preverbal gei construction and the pp-np construction are explicitly taught in class, based on these input the french learners may form the ‘ever-strengthening probabilistic inference’ that the np-pp form is a nonattested construction and thus not legitimated. this explanation seems highly probable because from the acquisition process of semantic constraints we have already seen the importance of statistical input in implicit learning. conclusion this study examines the acquisition process of semantically fine-grained ditransitive constructions in chinese by french adult learners and focuses on the three-way interaction between lexical semantics, constructional semantics, and syntactic frame. from the point of view of syntactic forms, learners of our study show a great preference for the pp-np structure and the preverbal gei structure due to massive input. the very low acceptance and very rare production of the nppp form indicates that there is no apparent interference from l1, which could be explained by the entrenchment effect. from the point of view of semantic constraints, overgeneralizations of formmeaning pairing are found at low intermediate level and high intermediate level. but as the proficiency in chinese increases, learners can overcome some of the overgeneralization effects. for future tasks, more detailed statistical analyses are expected to reveal the acquisition process more accurately. meanwhile as part of our ongoing research, new experimental studies are being carried out to examine the information structure and constituent length factors in the acquisition of ditransitive constructions. acknowledgements. i’m grateful to my doctoral supervisor claire saillard with whom i had many interesting discussions during the preparation and realization of the present study. i would also like to thank barbara hemforth, xinyue cécilia yu94 marzena watorek, weilin shen, and ye tian who devoted much time to helping me with the experiment design and statistical analysis. this work is supported by a public grant overseen by the french national research agency (anr) as part of the “investissements d’avenir” program (reference: anr-10-labx-0083). references ambridge, b., pine, j. m., rowland, c. f., & chang, f. 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(eds.), handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition. new york and london: routledge. white, l. (1987). markedness and second language acquisition. studies in second language acquisition, 9(03), 261–285. xu, d. (1996). initiation à la syntaxe chinoise. paris: l’asiatheque. yao, y., & liu, f. h. (2010, august). a working report on statistically modeling dative variation in mandarin chinese. in proceedings of the 23rd international conference on computational linguistics (pp. 1236–1244). association for computational linguistics. yu, x.y. (2013). an experimental study on dative alternation in mandarin chinese. presentation at the 25th naccl, university of michigan, proceedings in press. yook, c. (2013). the role of frequency in korean learners’ acquisition of english dative construction. english teaching, 68(1). xinyue cècilia yu das erwerben von ditransitiven konstruktionen in der mandarinsprachvariante von erwachsenen franzosen z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die verfasser zeigen ditransitive konstruktionen in mandarinvariante der chinesischen sprache als eine komplexe interaktion zwischen lexikalischer semantik und syntax (eng.: syntactic frames). der artikel betrifft zwei experimentelle forschungen, die dem prozess der akquisition von ditransitiven konstruktionen von den chinesisch lernenden franzosen gewidmet wurden. die ergebnisse bestätigen den vorrang vom syntaxerwerb vor der lexik und die rolle des inputs beim indirekten lernen (eng.: implicit learning). jean-marc dewaele birkbeck college, university of london, uk peter macintyre cape breton university, sydney, nova scotia, canada carmen boudreau cape breton university, sydney, nova scotia, canada livia dewaele worcester college, university of oxford, uk do girls have all the fun? anxiety and enjoyment in the foreign language classroom a b s t r a c t: the present study focuses on gender differences in foreign language enjoyment (fle) and foreign language classroom anxiety (flca) among 1736 fl learners (1287 females, 449 males) from around the world. we used 21 items, rated on a likert scale, reflecting various aspects of fle (dewaele & macintyre, 2014), and 8 items extracted from the flcas (horwitz et al., 1986). an open question on fle also provided us with narrative data. previous research on the database, relying on an average measure of fle and flca (dewaele & macintyre, 2014) revealed significant gender differences. the present study looks at gender differences in fle and flca at item level. independent t-tests revealed that female participants reported having significantly more fun in the fl class, where they felt that they were learning interesting things, and they were prouder than male peers of their fl performance. however, female participants also experienced significantly more (mild) flca: they worried significantly more than male peers about their mistakes and were less confident in using the fl. our female participants thus reported experiencing both more positive and more mild negative emotions in the fl classroom. we argue that this heightened emotionality benefits the acquisition and use of the fl. k e y w o r d s: foreign language enjoyment, foreign language classroom anxiety, individual differences, gender theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 2 (1) 2016, pp. 41–63 42 jean-marc dewaele, peter macintyre, carmen boudreau, livia dewaele introduction perhaps the most common way to divide humans is into two sexes, male and female. in childhood play, sex differences establish themselves and samesex friendship lasts a lifetime for many of us, even if we marry a member of the opposite sex. popular books tell us that “men are from mars and women are from venus” (gray, 1992)—so distinct are men and women that they seem to come from different planets. however, not everybody agrees with this perspective. feminist scholars, such as cameron (2008), have accused gray of perpetuating myths and of exploiting “people’s tendency to rely on stereotypes when processing information” (p. 14). moreover, we acknowledge that gender is not a clear-cut binary category. transgender people situate themselves at different points along the gender continuum and this can be dynamic, as they can live in role part time (kulick, 1998). we agree that it is crucial to avoid simple, stereotypical concepts of gender differences. eckert and mcconnell-ginet (2013) have shown that the connections between language and gender are deep yet fluid, and arise in social practice. before speculating on possible reasons for differences between women and men (or the absence of them), there is reason to investigate how large the differences between boys and girls, men and women really are, especially when it comes to language learning. simply believing the stereotype that girls have superior language learning skill might discourage some boys from engaging with the language learning process, in a self-fulfilling prophesy. the belief in gender differences, and what one should do about them, might be more relevant to communication than the observable gender differences themselves. for this reason, gender differences merit thorough investigation. such research is particularly relevant in relation to emotional dimensions in fl learning, where small but significant differences have been identified (dewaele & macintyre, 2014). literature review meta-analyses point to the discovery of only relatively small gender differences1 in various behaviors relevant to language, emotion, and communication. what is typically considered female communication style tends to be grounded in use of emotional expression (tenenbaum, ford & alkhedairy, 2011). stereotypically, women are expected to react to negative events more 1 we use “gender” to refer to the social construct. 43do girls have all the fun?… emotionally, for example with sadness, crying, and greater withdrawal than men (hess et al., 2000). this leads to a question as to whether these judgments are due to unsubstantiated gender labels, or whether they have some basis in the intensity of felt emotion. neuroscience research shows that significant differences have been found in the way men and women process the same events. event related potential (erp) studies have found higher emotional reactivity in women than men when viewing a negative stimulus (gardener et al., 2013). furthermore, a comprehensive review by chaplin and aldao (2013) found that although women showed more internalizing emotions, such as sadness, anxiety, and fear, they also showed more positive emotions, such as happiness. this may be due to a higher level of emotional reactivity in women overall, not only to negative events. while stereotypes paint a broad picture of gender differences in language, communication and emotional experience, the meta-analytic work does not support sweeping generalizations. a number of studies have addressed the issue of gender differences in fl learning that follow a trend of statistically significant but small effect sizes. there are studies that show a female advantage in language development and usage. eriksson et al. (2012) analyzed emerging language skills in ten separate linguistic communities. they found that females show a small yet consistent advantage over males in several aptitudes, including communicative gestures, productive vocabulary, and combining words. studies of scholastic achievement show similar results. one meta-analysis based on 502 effect sizes indicated that girls had a consistent advantage over boys in school marks, with effect sizes being largest in language-based courses (voyer & voyer, 2014). further, a longitudinal study conducted by van de gaer, pustjens, van damme and de munter (2009) on a cohort of 2,270 secondary school students (aged 12–18) in flanders (the dutch-speaking part of belgium) showed that girls made a quasi-linear positive learning gain in language across their secondary education, whereas boys started with a decline followed by acceleration in their learning gain in language. denies (2015) found a more mixed picture in her investigation of the english l2 self-efficacy beliefs of over 22,500 european fifteen-year-olds. she compared listening, reading and writing proficiency to their endorsement of 12 can-do statements taken from the common european framework of reference for languages (cefr). logistic regression analyses revealed positive correlations between both elements and variation linked to gender and country of origin. boys tended to have higher self-efficacy beliefs than equally proficient girls, but the pattern was reversed when students were presented with the easiest task descriptions. denies (2015) carried out a second study, linking gender to students’ proficiency across three languages, three skills and fourteen countries. english turned out to be the exception to the general tendency for girls to surpass boys’ l2 skills, with boys sometimes performing significantly better than 44 jean-marc dewaele, peter macintyre, carmen boudreau, livia dewaele girls. gender differences were stronger in writing than in listening or reading. cross-country variation in the gender gap was interpreted by denies as evidence that gender is primarily a social factor rather than a biological factor in fl learning. her multilevel mediation analyses with constituents of motivation suggested that in most cases where girls outperformed boys, a significant part of this advantage could be explained by the differential appeal of the students’ l2 course and by the instrumental, integrative and intrinsic value that students attribute to the l2 (denies, 2015). henry and cliffordson (2013) noted that gender differences in language motivation research have received little attention (dörnyei & csizér, 2002). existing studies have found that adolescent male fl learners in the united kingdom (williams, burden & lanvers, 2002), canada (kissau, 2006; kissau & turnbull, 2008) and australia (carr & pauwels, 2006) have less desire to acquire fls and invest less effort in learning them than their female peers. williams et al. (2002) also reported strong gender differences among british learners in their perceptions of fls: french was the language preferred by girls while boys preferred german. a 14-year-old boy explained that “‘french is the language of love and stuff” (p. 520) while a 14-year-old girl said that german reflects “‘the war, hitler and all that” (p. 520). kissauand turnbull (2008) confirmed that for boys, not all languages are perceived equally. anxiety certainly has been widely examined in language learning and might be the most studied emotion in second language acquisition (sla) (horwitz, 2010). defined as “the worry and negative emotional reaction aroused when learning or using a second language” (macintyre, 1999, p. 27), anxiety-arousal can weaken the learning potential of the fl learner, wreck the best teaching techniques and render the most attractive teaching material inadequate (arnold & brown, 1999, p. 2). it has been described as one of the strongest predictors of success or failure in fl learning (macintyre, 1999). the list of potential sources of anxiety in language learning and communication is long, including harsh error correction (gregersen, 2003), competitiveness among learners (bailey, 1983), incompatibility between teacher and student (gregersen & macintyre, 2014), personality traits such as neuroticism, extraversion, and psychoticism (dewaele, 2002; 2013a), emotional stability and social initiative (dewaele & al saraj, 2015), perfectionism (dewaele, to appear; gregersen & horwitz, 2002), second language tolerance of ambiguity (dewaele & shan ip, 2013), and other factors (horwitz, 2010). conflicting findings have emerged from research into the relationship between gender and fla. some researchers reported lower fla levels for women than for men (campbell & shaw, 1994; kitano, 2001); others have found the opposite pattern (arnaiz & guillén, 2012; donovan & macintyre, 2005) and some have found no differences at all (dewaele, petrides & furnham, 2008, dewaele, 2013b; matsuda & gobel, 2004). wang (2010) observed that confu45do girls have all the fun?… sion reigns in this area of research and that “unknown variables” may be at play (p. 96). park and french (2013) attributed the inconsistent research results for gender differences to socio-cultural factors because prior research studies were conducted in one location, and speculated that learner variables, such as motivation, interest and sincerity, might be relevant to the pattern of gender differences. perhaps in considering the research methods to investigate gender differences, the meta-analytic research net is being cast too wide to capture the nature of the effect—gender differences might not be found on an inter-planetary level but rather on a detail-oriented, microscopic level. in the present study we will examine in detail the possibility that the different findings might be the result of a lack of focus on the details of the emotional reactions themselves, where specific facets of anxiety might be tied to gender differences. park and french (2013) investigated specific items of the flcas, but the authors did not focus on the substantive meaning of those items which might reveal some of the more subtle processes tied to gender. although anxiety has been well studied, it is difficult to draw conclusions about gender differences in enjoyment from the existing sla literature. previous literature on emotion in language learning has largely concentrated on negative emotion, with positive emotion not being as well researched (arnold, 2011; arnold & brown, 1999; brown & white, 2010; imai, 2010). however, positive attitudes and emotions feature prominently in models of a broader complex of motivation. for example, gardner’s influential model of integrative motivation (1985; 2010) described the motivated learner as having affective reactions that include interest in fls and desire to learn the fl. further study of positive emotions in language learning, as topics in their own right, is warranted by developments in positive psychology and potential applications to sla (see lake, 2013; macintyre & mercer, 2014). fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory has accumulated evidence for a clear differentiation between positive and negative emotions (fredrickson, 2001; 2003; 2007). fredrickson has reported that negative emotions tend to be associated with a specific action tendency, that is, a tendency toward a specific type of behavior (see reeve, 2005). for example, anger leads to the urge to destroy obstacles in one’s path. fredrickson’s research proposes that, compared with negative emotions, positive emotions produce a qualitatively different type of response. [the broaden and build] theory states that certain discrete positive emotions—including joy, interest, contentment, pride, and love—although phenomenologically distinct, all share the ability to broaden people’s momentary thought-action repertoires and build their enduring personal resources, ranging from physical and intellectual resources to social and psychological resources. (fredrickson, 2003, p. 219) 46 jean-marc dewaele, peter macintyre, carmen boudreau, livia dewaele the effects of positive emotion go beyond pleasant feelings by enhancing the ability to notice things in the environment, enhancing awareness of language input, and dissipating the lingering effects of negative arousal, promoting personal resiliency and hardiness during tough times. positive emotion facilitates both exploration and play, two key factors that tend to bring people together. the development of theories in psychology that differentiate positive from negative emotion raises the interesting question of how each affects language learning (macintyre & gregersen, 2012). in a preliminary investigation, dewaele and macintyre (2014) investigated the amount of overlap between fle and flca. they developed a fle scale with 21 items (e.g., creativity, pride, interest, fun) reflecting a positive environment in the fl class (teacher and peers). they also used 8 items extracted from the well-established flcas reflecting physical symptoms of anxiety, nervousness and lack of confidence (horwitz et al., 1986). they found a small, negative correlation between fle and flca (r = –0.36), and that overall levels of fle were significantly higher than those of flca. interestingly, female participants scored higher for both fle (p < 0.002) and for flca (p < 0.004) (p. 254). dewaele and macintyre (2014) thus claim that fle and flca are empirically (negatively) related but are not opposite ends of the same experience—enjoyment and anxiety are distinct emotions. we decided that a greater amount of detail was needed on fle and flca to understand more precisely what it is that women fear and enjoy more in the fl class. in considering the questions that will guide research we will look at some of the subtle ways in which anxiety and enjoyment operate in the language learning context, and in particular for ways in which male and female learners differ with respect to those emotions. in designing the following research questions, we are keeping the positive emotion (enjoyment) strictly separate from the negative emotion (anxiety) by focussing on the meaning of specific items. research questions 1. are there gender differences in items reflecting fle and flca? to be more precise, what items specifically reflect gender differences and what does the wording of particular items tell us about gender and language learning? 2. given the gender differences, how do women and men describe their fl classroom experiences of anxiety and enjoyment? 47do girls have all the fun?… method participants and demographics. a total of 1736 multilinguals (1287 females, 449 males2) filled out the online questionnaire. the age range of participants was quite broad, ranging from 11 to 75, with a mean age of 24 (sd = 8.5). levels of education represented in the sample included: having—or working towards—an intermediate high school diploma (n = 91), a high school diploma (n = 113), a bachelor’s degree (n = 994), a master’s degree (n = 450) or a phd (n = 94). the largest number of participants were studying english as a fl (n = 855, 49%), while others were studying french (n = 276, 16%), spanish (n = 218, 13%), dutch (n = 157, 9%) and german (n = 139, 8%), or a range of different languages (6%). a small number of respondents (n = 34) were not currently involved in fl learning, but had had recent fl experience. most participants (n = 1322, 84%) were studying one fl, with smaller numbers studying two (n = 215, 14%) or three (n = 37, 2%) fls.3 a quarter of participants had been studying a fl for 5 years or less, another quarter had studied one between 6 and 9 years, a third quarter had studied a fl between 10 and 12 years, with the remaining participants having studied a fl for more than 13 years. when asked about their mastery of the fl overall, only 5 described themselves as beginners (0.3%), 243 as low intermediate (14%), 67 as intermediate (4%), 435 as high intermediate (25%) and 293 as advanced (17%).4 asked about how they would rate themselves compared to their fl learning peers, 42 described themselves as far below average (2%), 171 as below average (10%), 772 as average (44%), 638 as above average (37%), and 116 as far above average (7%). of the 90 nationalities reported, belgians constituted the largest group (n = 365, 21%), followed by britons (n = 244, 14%), chinese (n = 174, 10%), americans (n = 118, 7%), and 845 participants (48%) belonging to other nationality groups (n < 80). there were also many participants who self-reported as having dual-nationality. the sample consists of 456 self-reported bilinguals (26%), 555 trilinguals (32%), 415 quadrilinguals (24%), 202 pentalinguals (12%), and 70 sextalinguals (4%). the 44 remaining participants (3%) reported knowledge of 7 to 10 languages. 2 10 participants did not disclose their gender. 3 172 participants did not provide this information. 4 we decided to merge the category of beginners with that of lower-intermediate. 48 jean-marc dewaele, peter macintyre, carmen boudreau, livia dewaele the instrument. the questionnaire started with a demographics section from which the above information was retrieved. following this, participants were asked to respond to 29 items describing the fl class on standard 5-point likert scales with the anchors “absolutely disagree” = 1, “disagree” = 2, “neither agree nor disagree” = 3, “agree” = 4, “strongly agree” = 5. of these items, 8 were extracted from the flcas (horwitz et al., 1986) and 21 items written to reflect fle (dewaele & macintyre, 2014). the starting point for the fl enjoyment scale was ryan et al.’s (1990) interest/enjoyment subscale consisting of 7 items related to enjoyment, fun, interest, and boredom at one point in time. these were specifically adapted to the fl environment and were rephrased so that they elicited a more global judgment of past fl classes. we added “items relating to dealing with fl mistakes made in public, identity, improvement in using the fl, pride in one’s own performance, group membership, the social environment and cohesiveness, attitudes towards the learning of the fl, the presence of laughter, and judgments about peers and teachers” (p. 243). all items were positively phrased. in addition, the 8 flcas items reflected physical symptoms of anxiety, nervousness, and lack of confidence (horwitz et al., 1986). they were chosen to capture the reliability of the original scale without sacrificing the reliability of the measurement (macintyre, 1992). two flca items were phrased to indicate low anxiety and six were phrased to indicate high anxiety. the low anxiety items were reverse-coded so that high scores reflect high anxiety for all items on this measure. a one-sample kolmorogov-smirnov test revealed that the distribution of the items was not normal. however, t-tests tolerate moderate violations to their normality assumption (rosenkrantz, 2008, p. 478) and the levene’s test for equality of variances will be used to verify the assumption of equality in the groups of females and males. the final survey question was open-ended. the instructions were as follows: “describe one specific event or episode in your fl class that you really enjoyed, and describe your feeling in as much detail as possible.” one thousand and seventy-six participants answered the open question, producing 52,471 words. these data are used for illustrative purposes only. the first version of the questionnaire was pilot-tested with 15 participants. this led to the deletion of some items and the reformulation of others. the research design and questionnaire obtained approval from the ethics committee of the school of social sciences, history and politics at birkbeck, university of london. the final version of the questionnaire was posted online using googledocs and an open call was addressed to multilinguals, to colleagues and friends of the authors, including participants in previous studies, asking them to forward the call to friends, teachers or students. in other words, we used snowball sampling, that is, a non-probability sampling technique. we are aware that there was an inevitable self-selection bias, as it is more likely for 49do girls have all the fun?… satisfied language learners to participate in a study on language learning than those who dislike it. data analysis. our data analysis can be described as the data-validation variant of a convergent parallel design (cresswell & plano clark, 2011). in this approach, quantitative and qualitative data are collected simultaneously, which is efficient with large samples. the purpose of the quantitative data in this approach is to identify the specific items where values of male and female participants differed significantly. the purpose of the qualitative data is to provide illustrations of the closed items in the questionnaire, written by participants themselves. results provided by the two types of data are mixed and combined in the discussion section. cresswell and plano clark (2011, p. 81) explain that with this type of analytic approach “…the qualitative items are an add-on to a quantitative instrument, the items generally do not result in a complete contextbased qualitative data set. however, they provide the researcher with emergent themes and interesting quotes that can be used to validate and embellish the quantitative survey findings.” the analysis will proceed in two stages. in the first phase, the statistical analysis will be used to identify which of the items had significantly different values for the male and female participants. in the second phase, data extracts will be selected from the open question guided by the principle that they are representative of a particular closed item, concise, and interesting. in this way, we give a voice to participants, allowing us to add an emic dimension to the abstract, etic statistical dimensions. results in order to assess gender differences in the fle and flca items, a series of independent t-tests were performed. in reporting the results below, we adjusted the probability level required to decide on statistical significance using bonferroni’s correction to reduce the risk of type i error. the t-test is considered to be a relatively liberal test, and the bonferroni adjustment is fairly conservative. adopting this procedure might produce a slightly elevated risk of type ii errors overall, that is, we might not be declaring a difference to be significant when it should be. for this reason, we make note of both the bonferroni-adjusted and unadjusted significance levels. for this set of analyses, the p-value required for significance is equal to or smaller than 0.002 (0.05/29 = 0.002). a series of independent t-tests revealed that female participants differed significantly from males for 5 out of 29 to50 jean-marc dewaele, peter macintyre, carmen boudreau, livia dewaele tal items, with significant differences for another 8 items using the standard p < 0.05 criterion (see table 1). table 1 differences between female and male participants in dependent variables, ranked according to the level of significance item t df p mean females mean males in class, i feel proud of my accomplishments 4.1 771.4 0.001 3.84 3.65 i don’t worry about making mistakes in fl class 3.9 1734 0.001 3.05 3.30 it’s fun 3.4 1734 0.001 4.34 4.18 i feel confident when i speak in fl class 3.1 1734 0.002 3.13 3.31 i’ve learnt interesting things 3.1 704.5 0.002 4.32 4.18 i can feel my heart pounding when i’m going to be called on in fl class 3.0 1734 0.003 2.99 2.78 i get nervous and confused when i am speaking in my fl class 2.8 1734 0.005 2.78 2.61 i enjoy it 2.7 1734 0.006 4.12 3.99 it’s cool to know a fl –2.1 653 0.011 4.63 4.53 i always feel that the other students speak the fl better than i do 2.3 1734 0.022 2.82 2.67 i can be creative 2.2 1734 0.031 3.77 3.67 i don’t get bored 2.1 1734 0.033 3.64 3.51 there is a good atmosphere 2.0 1734 0.045 4.10 4.01 making errors is part of the learning process –1.7 1734 0.087 4.46 4.52 i’m a worthy member of the fl class 1.6 739.7 0.089 3.64 3.56 it’s a positive environment 1.5 669.2 0.127 3.99 3.92 i can laugh off embarrassing mistakes in the fl 1.4 719.2 0.142 3.47 3.39 we laugh a lot 1.3 1734 0.154 3.45 3.37 i learnt to express myself better in the fl class –1.1 1734 0.265 3.38 3.44 i feel as though i’m a different person during the fl class 1.0 1600 0.290 2.76 2.69 i start to panic when i have to speak without preparation in the fl class 1.0 1734 0.297 2.74 2.67 even if i am well prepared for the fl class, i feel anxious about it –1.0 811.1 0.324 2.64 2.58 we form a tight group 0.6 1734 0.518 3.28 3.24 the teacher is friendly –0.6 1734 0.533 4.25 4.28 the teacher is encouraging –0.5 1734 0.600 4.18 4.21 we have common “legends,” such as running jokes 0.5 829.4 0.642 3.02 2.99 the peers are nice –0.4 1734 0.644 4.01 4.02 it embarrasses me to volunteer answers in my fl class 0.3 1734 0.774 2.53 2.51 the teacher is supportive 0.1 1734 0.903 4.20 4.20 51do girls have all the fun?… from table 1 we can conclude that the female participants reported stronger negative and positive emotions than the male participants on items that showed gender significant differences. figure 1 visualizes the differences between the means of the female and male participants for the five significant items (p < 0.002). figure 1. differences in mean values (and sd) of female and male participants for the 5 bonferroni-adjusted significant items. in terms of fle items, using the bonferroni adjusted significance test and compared to the male participants, the female participants felt significantly more proud of their achievement, had more fun, and felt they were learning interesting things. using the unadjusted significance test, the females also tended to like the atmosphere of the fl class more, enjoyed it more and agreed more strongly that it is “cool” to know a fl. finally, females also tended not to feel bored and felt more creative in the fl class, compared to males. to understand the results in more detail, and to hear the learners’ voices, we examined the comments written by the respondents. the following comments by five female participants illustrate the ways in which emotional reactions unfold, in their own words: brittany, female, 18, canadian: it was the beginning of the school year and the teacher was handing back an essay we wrote the week before and when she gave me mine, she announced to the class that i had the highest mark and that she has never given anyone a mark that high before. i felt really proud of myself because the week before i got back an assignment i thought i did well on but i actually did really bad and it made me start to question if i continuing to learn the french language was the right decision for me. but getting such a good mark on that essay renewed my faith in 52 jean-marc dewaele, peter macintyre, carmen boudreau, livia dewaele myself and it made me determined to always do my best and to not give up when it gets tough. sophie, female, 12, british: it is really fun as you make new friends with people you did not know and you form relationships over the bonds of you learning and making mistakes together. rosalind, female, 17, british: i had a conversation with someone entirely in french and saw how exciting (and useful) it is to be able to speak in a completely different language. i could also see how all my lessons weren’t a waste of time and that i knew a lot more french than i thought i did. amy, female, 17, british: when i was training for my as speaking exams last year, we had a language assistant over from south america to help us. in one of these sessions, i had a light bulb moment. i was suddenly able to express myself in spanish in a way i hadn’t previously been able to. i was answering spontaneous questions with ease and feeling confident enough to answer without pausing for more than a second. inès, female, 19, belgian: when we played a game that consisted in finding the title of the film describes. it was funny and interesting. it was the first time i really enjoyed the course. and this subject was motivating, i had more things to say and more creativity. in terms of flca items, using the bonferroni-adjusted significance test, we found that female participants were significantly more worried about their mistakes and significantly less confident than their male peers. they tended to feel more nervous and confused, experienced more physical symptoms of anxiety such as a pounding heart in the fl class and felt the others were better at speaking the fl than they (according to the unadjusted significance tests). the following observations by three female participants show how the lack of confidence and the worry about mistakes can be overcome by specific activities and by a positive atmosphere in the class: caela, female, 22, american: irish gaelic has some pretty nice curses (e.g., “may you be eaten by a cat, and may the devil eat the cat!”), so the day we learned those we practiced cursing each other. we were a small class of about 5 people, so it was really fun to be a little silly. i didn’t feel quite as intimidated to perform well when everyone was laughing, and was able to relax more than usual and try phrases without worrying about having perfect pronunciation. audrey, female, 24, belgian: in english, i like the works of group and when we speak about topical subject. one day with my professor of english we played small plays. at the beginning i was anxious not to manage 53do girls have all the fun?… to pronounce well the text or to have made the errors in the text which i had written. but at the end i was satisfied to have been able to surmount (overcome) my anxiety to speak in front of everybody in english. i am also satisfied when i receive from good grade after an examination when i know that i worked hard. simona, female, 22, macedonian: we were supposed to have a 2-minute speech before our peers and our professor on a topic we chose. all of my peer’s presentations were great and i really loved experiencing the feeling when i was talking before all of them. it was really special, even if at first i was a bit nervous and felt my heart pounding, but it felt great standing there and expressing my opinion and knowing that all of the other students are listening to you with attention. male participants made similar comments. philip reported the joy of getting the pronunciation right: philip, male, 23, swedish: when i nailed the pronunciation on a sentence i read out loud in my seminar group. cristian enjoyed a moment of laughter in class that stimulated his learning: oooo cristian, male, 18, columbian: el momento que me gusto fue cuando jugamos domino esto fue un momento de risa en el cual me divertí aprendí y fue un momento muy agradable. (‘the moment i enjoyed was when we played domino, it was a moment of laughing, it was fun, i learned and it was very nice’). no significant differences appeared for three flca items referring to the more paralyzing aspects of anxiety (‘i start to panic when i have to speak without preparation in the fl class’; ‘even if i am well prepared for the fl class, i feel anxious about it’; ‘it embarrasses me to volunteer answers in my fl class’). attitudes towards errors also were similar in both groups (‘making errors is part of the learning process’; ‘i can laugh off embarrassing mistakes in the fl’). the same was true for perceived progress (‘i learnt to express myself better in the fl class’). there were no differences either in the judgment of the social aspects in the fl class (‘it’s a positive environment’; ‘we form a tight group’; ‘we have common legends such as running jokes’; ‘the peers are nice’), nor in the appreciation of the teachers (friendly, encouraging, supportive). finally, no differences emerged between both groups in the amount of laughing, in the ability to express oneself in the fl, in feeling a worthy member of the group and in assuming a different identity in the fl class. 54 jean-marc dewaele, peter macintyre, carmen boudreau, livia dewaele discussion the present study reveals a rich and nuanced picture of gender differences in two emotional dimensions, anxiety and enjoyment. we knew from dewaele and macintyre (2014) that female participants scored significantly higher on the composite measures of fle and flca. although female participants experienced more flca overall, gender differences were not significant on all items. a similar pattern emerged in park and french (2013) who reported gender differences on only 5 of the 33 items on the complete flcas scale. in the present data, the difference between female and male respondents was only significant for two items reflecting relatively milder experiences of flca. female participants worried more about mistakes and were less confident. they also tended to feel that the other students were better, they tended to feel more nervous and confused, and were more likely to have a pounding heart in the fl class. however, they did not differ from the male participants in the more severe, paralyzing aspects of anxiety, such as panic, freezing-up often out of embarrassment, or increased anxiety despite being prepared. williams et al. (2002) reported similar results, with girls scoring higher on desire and liking the fl, but not showing a significant difference with the boys in their attitudes towards teachers, parents and peers. our female participants had more fun, pride, enjoyment, excitement, and interest in the fl class that allowed them to be creative and become “cool” multilinguals. the observations of brittany, sophie, rosalind, inès, amy, philip and cristian reported above bring the statistical findings to life. in their own words, learners described how a good mark on an essay boosted their pride and strengthened their determination to do well in the fl class, how learning together with peers is fun because it strengthens social bonds, how excited one can feel when actually being able to use the fl, and how funny and interesting games in the fl class can allow students to be creative and boost their motivation. these specific contexts converge with chaplin and aldao’s (2013) finding that girls show more positive and internalizing emotions (sadness, anxiety, sympathy) than boys, especially in adolescence, a time often associated with emotional ups and downs. this obviously does not mean boys cannot experience similar emotions, as our comments showed. when interpreting gender differences, we should carefully avoid thinking of the results in terms of mutually exclusive categories (as in the mars versus venus type of arguments), preferring instead to think of baseline differences between groups that are modified to a considerable extent by individual experiences and lead to a wide distribution of scores within each group, and considerable overlap between groups. similar caution is necessary when conceptualizing positive and negative emotions. although it might seem natural to conceptualize positive and negative emotion as operating in a seesaw fashion (one goes up and the other goes 55do girls have all the fun?… down), such a view is inconsistent with emotion research, especially over the past decade (fredrickson, 2007; macintyre & gregersen, 2012). the combination of both higher flca and higher fle shown by female learners is not a contradictory result. female fl learners seem to care more about their fl performance and their progress in the fl perhaps because they find it intrinsically appealing, fun and of value (dörnyei & csizér, 2002; henry & cliffordson, 2013). in effect, this pattern “raises the stakes” for learning, boosting both positive and negative emotion. although there is some worry that they might not do as well in the fl as they expect, the concern does not tend to cause them to panic or freeze when having to use the fl. respondents caela, audrey, and simona described how they managed to overcome anxiety and perform in the fl in front of their peers and teacher. fredrickson (2001; 2007) argues that enjoyment is associated with characteristics most teachers would welcome: creativity, the urge to play, and going beyond one’s limits. experiencing joy in the fl class is described as a facilitating experience for the language learners in our sample whose prose nicely exemplifies fredrickson’s theoretical tenets. fredrickson (2001; 2013) points out that the different types of resources that are built during play, including social bonds and specific skills, last much longer than the transient feelings that set the emotional tone for learning. if female, compared to male, fl learners are generally having more fun in fl classes, they might unlock their potential faster and thus progress further than their male peers, even if they also experience some of the facets of anxiety more often or with greater intensity. high levels of language anxiety are typically negatively linked to fl proficiency scores, including course grades, standardized tests, and other measures (horwitz, 2010). researchers generally agree that strong anxiety feelings are disruptive to behavior, interfering with interpersonal communication, cognition, and learning (macintyre & gardner, 1994). however, the interpretation of cases of moderate anxiety, and what to do about less-severe levels of anxiousness, might change considerably if we consider a wider emotional context. dewaele and macintyre (2014) argued that enjoyment and anxiety could cooperate from time to time, with enjoyment encouraging playful exploration and anxiety generating focus on the need to take specific action. our data suggests that we find greater levels of enjoyment among the active and successful learners in our sample, yet some anxiety certainly is present. is it possible that our female participants managed to find a constructive balance between enjoyment and anxiety? did they manage to develop a better ratio of positive to negative emotion in the fl class (fredrickson, 2013)? females scoring higher than males on fle and flca items is not problematic conceptually or in practice; a combination of stronger positive and negative emotions in fl learning might provide a stronger basis for motivation than 56 jean-marc dewaele, peter macintyre, carmen boudreau, livia dewaele would weaker emotions. it can be argued that both positive and negative emotions are inherently adaptive (macintyre, 2007; reeve, 2005), suggesting that stronger overall emotional experiences can facilitate language learning even if negative emotions are part of the experience. fredrickson (2013) has suggested that the ratio of positive to negative emotions might be more important than simply the absence of negative emotion. typically sla studies of emotions have focused on one specific emotion, most often anxiety.5 but if we consider emotions in combination with each other, then a study focused on anxiety (e.g., park & french, 2013) or one that is designed to arouse anxiety (macintyre & gardner, 1994) is likely activating a suite of associated emotions, both positive and negative (such as pride and confidence, frustration and anger) among the participants. even if the focal point is anxiety, we should be aware of the network of emotions that surround it. mixing emotions occurs not only at the item level, but at the research design level as well. interpreting the mixture of positive and negative emotions raises an important methods issue, specifically aggregation of regular and reversedscored items. when a scale has some items with positive wording and other items with negative wording, it is the researcher who aggregates positive and negative emotions into a single construct, a single score for each respondent’s fla for example. this is done by taking the negatively worded items and “flipping” the scores (e.g., a “1” becomes a “7” and a “2” becomes a “6” on a 7-point likert scale) before adding them to scores on the other items. in the case of flcas and other anxiety measures, positively phrased item-level words such as proud, confident, sure, and relaxed are reverse-scored at the time of analysis. but for the research participants, scores on these items might reflect something phenomenologically different as they respond to the questionnaire items. if positive and negative emotions are correlated but essentially different experiences, as fredrickson suggests, then existing measures of anxiety may be conceptually less homogeneous than generally assumed because of the mix of positive and negative emotion. it should be emphasized that the reverse-scoring used in self-report scales of emotions can be justified on the basis of item-response theory. it is a threat to the validity of scores when items are all keyed in a positive or negative direction. in addition, the correlations among items and the overall cronbach’s alpha coefficient typically obtained for the flcas (often in excess of 0.90) justifies the procedure of reverse-scoring and aggregation. it is when one takes on a research question with a more microscopic-level analysis, as we did in this study, that the mixing of emotions by using reverse scoring procedures presents itself as a conceptual issue. if the purpose of research is to assess changes in 5 this is not the case with models of motivation such as gardner’s (1985; 2010) integrative motive which has combined anxiety with positive emotions such as interest and desire to learn. 57do girls have all the fun?… typical anxiety reactions over time, or correlations between fla and other measures (such as course grades), then reverse-scoring flcas items does the job very well (horwitz, 2010). but if the research purpose is to dissect subtle variations in positive and negative facets of emotions as we are doing in the present study, or to identify changes in emotion over brief timescales, then we must exercise additional caution. patterns and processes that are observed on one level or timescale can change substantially when examined on either a broader or narrower basis. pedagogical implications drawn from this analysis might help settle a long standing issue in the anxiety literature—the nature of facilitating anxiety (scovel, 1978; park & french, 2013). horwitz (1990, in press) has consistently cautioned against language teachers deliberately increasing anxiety among their students in the hope of finding its elusive facilitating effects. this is wise counsel. our data support and elaborate horwitz’ admonishment; techniques designed to increase anxiety divorced from enjoyment seem both troublesome and indefensible. however, mild-to-moderate levels of anxiety reactions likely will accompany positive emotions when participants value what they are doing, such as when the self-concept is implicated (e.g., a fun but potentially embarrassing activity) or when something important is at stake (e.g., course grades or future opportunities) (see also dewaele, 2011; 2015). the subtle mixing of positive and negative emotion at the research design and item aggregation levels potentially has set the stage for the persistent notion of facilitating anxiety. we suggest that it is not the negative anxiety component of the flcas but rather the undertones of positive emotion implicated in some of the items that are associated with any potentially facilitating effects of anxiety. therefore, consistent with the original differentiation of facilitating and debilitating anxiety (alpert & haber, 1960), facilitating anxiety should not be considered a lower level or amount of anxiety (below a hypothetical ‘threshold’) but rather a qualitatively different, strongly-negatively correlated, positive emotion related to excitement, risktaking, arousal, eagerness, and so on. one potential implication of this notion is that teachers who put the prime focus on creating enjoyment experiences for learners in learning situations where something is at stake (e.g., course grades, public performance, and learner self-esteem) likely have to accept that some anxiety might come along for the ride, especially for the female learners. the present data that show that positive and negative emotions indeed are mixing in language classrooms; learners with greater emotional intensity are likely to experience both more anxiety and more enjoyment in fl classrooms. before concluding this article we offer some comments on the limitations of the research. our sample is both very large and mostly self-selected. as such, the respondents do not necessarily represent the general population of fl learners (if such a sample actually could be defined and meaningfully delineated). in addition, participants who volunteered to spend time completing the online 58 jean-marc dewaele, peter macintyre, carmen boudreau, livia dewaele questionnaire probably were positively biased towards fl learning in the first place. the size and international scope of the present sample, though it was not randomly chosen, does help to reduce the concern for gender differences tied to one specific location or nation (park & french, 2013). further research could investigate whether the gender patterns in fle and flca are similar for specific fls. williams et al.’s (2002) finding of stereotypical representations about so-called “feminine” and “masculine” languages could affect both fle and flca of female and male fl learners. here again, caution is needed. indeed, more girls (69%) than boys studied french up to a level in the uk in 2013, but they also outnumbered them (60%) for german (report by the joint council for qualifications, 2013).6 moreover, as denies (2015) showed, gender differences can vary from country to country, and from skill to skill. in other words, having a sample from a single geographical and school context might allow researchers to control certain variables, but it would not necessarily increase the generalizability of the findings. we are aware that dividing our population into male and females learners may lead to the objection that we ignored possible intra-group differences and that gender may combine with contextual factors that influence flca and fle. the present study is relatively decontextualized, as that is the nature of the survey method when a large, international sample is used. future research on gender differences that takes into account the effect of classroom environment within specific schools is recommended. for example, it would be an interesting research question to ask whether male learners, who have been found to prefer a relaxed and supportive environment compared to female learners, experience different levels of fle and flca when such a classroom environment is provided (kissau & salas, 2013). finally, our selection of more extracts by female learners than male learners does not imply that the latter differed in the type of observations they made. conclusion item-level statistical analysis of the fle scale (dewaele & macintyre, 2014, 2016) and items selected from the flcas (horwitz et al., 1986) revealed that 6 with the caveat that only small differences existed in the proportion of british girls and boys obtaining a* to c grades in 2013 for the a level exams for french, german and spanish. a larger proportion of girls did obtain a* to c grades for irish, welsh, and other modern languages. of course, one could argue that only a minority of the best male fl learners chose a fl as a level subject, which would explain why their scores were not that different from those of their female peers. 59do girls have all the fun?… our female participants had significantly more fun, were prouder of their fl performance and felt they were learning interesting things in the fl class. they tended to experience more enjoyment and more excitement in a positive fl classroom environment that allowed them to be creative, and tended to agree more that knowing a fl was “cool” compared to the male participants. the female learners’ superior positive emotions were complemented by a higher level of some facets of anxiety. in other words, the female participants reported experiencing more emotion overall in the fl classroom, which has been described as the engine behind linguistic progress (macintyre, 2007). at first glance, this might seem to be a contradiction. however, drawing on fredrickson’s theory allows for a more complete understanding of the network of positive and negative emotions active in the language learning process. these findings point to the need for research to examine gender differences in a specific context of interest (hyde, 2005). acknowledgment. we would like to thank all our participants for having provided us with precious input and observations. special thanks also to dr ruxandra comanaru and dr ren wei, who managed the online questionnaire on googleforms and on a chinese website. we also want to thank the colleagues and friends who forwarded our call for participation, including dr françoise masuy from the université catholique de louvain and miss amy botwright, university of cambridge, who helped us recruit participants. references alpert, r., & haber, r. n. 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(2002). “french is the language of love and stuff”: student perceptions of issues related to motivation in learning a foreign language. british educational research journal, 28(4), 503–528. 63do girls have all the fun?… jean-marc dewaele, peter macintyre, carmen boudreau, livia dewaele ob mädchen spaß haben? angst und freude im fremdsprachenunterricht z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die untersuchung konzentriert sich auf geschlechtsunterschiede hinsichtlich zweierlei aspekte: freude am fremdsprachenlernen (eng.: foreign language enjoyment – fle ) und sprachangst (eng.: foreign language classroom anxiety – flca). an dem experiment nahmen 1736 eine fremdsprache lernenden schüler (1287 frauen und 449 männer) teil. man gebrauchte dafür 21 elemente von den varianten der likert-skala, die verschiedene aspekte der freude am fremdsprachenlernen darstellen und von dewaele & macintyre (2014) entwickelt wurden und 8 mit sprachangst verbundene elemente nach hortwitz et al. (1986). die bei der fle-untersuchung gestellte offene frage erlaubte, narrative daten zu sammeln. frühere untersuchung des fle-mittelwertes und flca-mittelwertes (dewaele & macintyre) hat wesentliche geschlechtsunterschiede nachgewiesen. die vorliegende studie ist auf geschlechtsunterschiede von fle und flca hinsichtlich ausgewählter elemente fokussiert. objektive t-teste von den studenten haben aufgezeigt, dass die schülerinnen einen viel größeren spaß als die jungen beim fremdsprachenunterricht hatten. die schülerinnen waren auch viel stolzer darauf, etwas neues und interessantes lernen zu können, gleichzeitig aber ließen sie eine mäßige – viel größere als es bei den jungen der fall war – sprachangst erkennen. sie waren auch beunruhigt über gemachte fehler und nicht selbstsicher beim fremdsprachengebrauch. so ließen die probandinnen viel positivere und ziemlich negative emotionen im fremdsprachenunterricht erkennen. es zeugt davon, dass verstärkte emotionalität den erwerb und den gebrauch einer fremdsprache positiv beeinflusst. jolanta latkowska university of silesia how relevant is the sapir-whorf hypothesis to contemporary psycholinguistic research? a b s t r a c t: the paper raises the question of whether the linguistic relativity proposal, also known as the sapir-whorf hypothesis, should be used as a frame of reference for modern research into the relationship of language to cognition. the question is discussed in the context of whorf’s (1956) writings, with emphasis on factors that are crucial to the proposal, i.e. language, thought, and behavior. the second issue addressed by the paper is whether linguistic categories provide an accurate window on cognition, as was suggested by whorf and in some of the more recent debates. the analysis takes the form of a correlational study which examines the categorization criteria applied in tests that require language-based and language-neutral judgments. k e y w o r d s: linguistic relativity, sapir-whorf hypothesis, cognition, language, correlational study introduction to the psycholinguist and second language acquisition researcher, the sapirwhorf hypothesis, also known as the linguistic relativity principle, indicates the possibility of a causal relationship between language and thought. originally, the relationship was assumed to be deterministic, with language acting as a mould of cognition. accordingly, the categories of the native language were attributed with formative powers which determined the perception and apprehension of extra-linguistic reality (carroll, 1956). because of a lack of unequivocal empirical evidence and a barrage of criticism on purely theoretical grounds (kramsch, 2004), this ‘strong’ deterministic version of the hypothesis was rejected as untenable. the ‘weak’ relativistic hypothesis is generally accepted, however, since it resonates with a popular perception of language as a shaping but not restrictive force (pederson, 2007). also, the weak hypothesis received support theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 1 (1) 2015, pp. 7–26 jolanta latkowska8 from a large number of studies conducted in the 1990s and during the first two decades of this century. for an informative review of relevant research see pederson (2007) and cook and bassetti (2011). research into linguistic relativity embraced slobin’s thinking for speaking hypothesis (slobin, 1996; 2003; 2004; 2005), which stipulates that verbalization induces a language-dependent mode of thinking that transforms non-linguistic conceptual content into a ‘verbalizable’ propositional format prior to articulation. this is done in accordance with the available linguistic categories, which additionally serve as a mechanism directing the speaker’s attention to those aspects of experience that they encode. consequently, inferences about conceptual processing may be drawn from both verbal and non-verbal performance. as research into the paradigm produced strong confirming evidence, the thinking for speaking hypothesis tends to be invoked as a weak form of linguistic relativity (han & cadierno, 2010). this reserves the term strong hypothesis for those strands of relativistic research that explore correlations between linguistic categories and cognitive behavior on the basis of behavioral measures that either by-pass or entirely exclude language (levinson, 2003; lucy, 2004). the first decade of the 21st century saw the emergence of a bilingual turn in relativistic thought and a spate of studies investigating cross-language interaction and the ensuing restructuring of cognitive mechanisms (athanasopoulos, 2011b; bylund, 2011; pavlenko & malt, 2011; von stutterheim, 2003). it also bore witness to renewed criticism of the sapir-whorf hypothesis, as well as accusations that it was couched in terms that did not reflect whorf’s original concerns. a case in point is pavlenko’s (2014) most recent contention that whorfian effects manifest themselves through language use and are most easily observed in bilinguals. such a disparity of opinion over what constitutes whorfian effects is not new to relativistic debates. for example, research into the conceptual basis of emotion words shows that when used as stimuli in research, emotion words influence the categorization, memory, and perception of emotion. in the absence of such prompts people are unable to identify emotion and perceive it in a categorical way (gendron et al., 2012). according to malt and ameel (2011), such a lack of discriminating power in a non-verbal condition is indicative of an absence of relativistic effects. gendron et al. (2012), by contrast, disregard the non-verbal dimension and classify as relativistic the effects evoked by the presence of emotion words. thinking for speaking appears to be equally contentious. while slobin (1996; 2003; 2004; 2005) and han and cadierno (2010) see language-driven thinking as a (weak) form of linguistic relativity, athanasopoulos (2011a) regards it as being solely linguistic. this paper addresses the confusion that beclouds the notion of whorfian/ relativistic effects on cognition by referring to the writings of benjamin lee whorf, who is credited with developing the hypothesis, and analyzing them in how relevant is the sapir-whorf hypothesis… 9 terms of themes that are central to relativity, i.e. thought, language, and behavior. it is hoped that the analysis will help put the sapir-whorf hypothesis in perspective and evaluate its tenets against current trends in psycholinguistic research. the second objective of the paper is to reexamine the extent to which language-based tests provide a neutral and/or accurate view of conceptual processes such as non-verbal categorization. this is vital for understanding the controversy surrounding the hypothesis and the rationale behind some of its subsequent modifications. whorf’s views on key relativistic variables thought and thinking. following the recommendations of watson, early 20th-century american psychology abandoned investigations of conscious thought and mental activity on the grounds that they were unobservable. accordingly, a theory claiming that thinking takes place in a language and that ‘the greatest light upon it […] is thrown by the study of language’ (whorf, 1956, p. 252) must have aroused intense interest and attention, not to mention controversy and criticism. in such a climate, whorf, who had no background in psychology and gained recognition in academia primarily as an expert on maya hieroglyphs and indian languages, advanced the view that linguistic diversity sparked off cognitive differences in speakers of different languages as a function of continued use of the patterns of their native language for expression. the evidence quoted in support of these claims was linguistic and behavioral, and is the subject of the following sections. although many contemporary analysts consider the notion of habitual thought to be the cornerstone of whorf’s hypothesis, it did not receive much attention in his writing. in fact, his collected works (carroll, 1956) contain only one article devoted to the subject with only one specific explanation of what the term meant to its author. it reads as follows: by ‘habitual thought’ and ‘thought world’ i mean more than simply language, i.e. than the linguistic patterns themselves. i include all the analogical and suggestive value of the patterns […], and all the give-and-take between language and the culture as a whole, wherein is a vast amount that is not linguistic yet shows the shaping influence of language. in brief, this ‘thought world’ is the microcosm that each man carries about within himself, by which he measures and understands what he can of the macrocosm. (whorf, 1956, p. 147) jolanta latkowska10 beautifully phrased, the quotation indicates that whorf saw thought as the linguistic and non-linguistic content of the mind. surprisingly, there is no mention of either regularity or frequency of occurrence that could account for the habitual nature of thought. the shaping influence of language is described elsewhere as a non-conscious structuring process that is not always overtly linguistic: thinking in a language does not necessarily have to use words. […] much thinking never brings in words at all, but manipulates whole paradigms, word-classes […] ‘behind’ or ‘above’ the focus of personal consciousness. (whorf, 1956, p. 252, footnote 1) the now classic statement “the linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language […] is itself the shaper of ideas” (whorf, 1956, p. 212) explains the significance of the paradigms and word-classes, which are attributed with formative powers. whorf (1956, p. 258) stated explicitly that sentences were more essential than words. unfortunately, to the detriment of his theory, whorf was often inconsistent and imprecise. in his rebuttal of the watsonian notion that silent thinking is essentially “suppressed talking accompanied by laryngeal agitations” (whorf, 1956, pp. 66–68), he ambiguously suggests the possibility that it is rapport between words, which enables them to work together at all to any semantic result […] that constitutes the real essence of thought insofar as it is linguistic. (whorf, 1956, pp. 66–68) and that “thinking itself is in a language—in english, in sanskrit, in chinese” (whorf, 1956, p. 252). in fact, vague references to the “linguistically-determined thought world” (whorf, 1956, p. 154) abound in his texts, implicating language in general as a potent structuring agent. this lack of precision should take no one by surprise. whorf was clearly an open-minded researcher who was familiar with trends and developments in psychology. for instance, the idea that thought was largely linguistic was borrowed from jung, while in the yale report (whorf & trager, 1996) gestalt theory served as a backdrop for a discussion of the interaction between language and perception. whorf was also aware but dismissive of alternative views of the language-thought interface. the quotations below lay out his thoughts on this matter: talking, or the use of language, is supposed only to ‘express’ what is essentially already formulated nonlinguistically. formulation is an independent process, called thought or thinking, and is […] indifferent to the nature of particular languages. (whorf, 1956, p. 207) how relevant is the sapir-whorf hypothesis… 11 formulation of ideas is not an independent process, […] but is part of a particular grammar, and differs, from slightly to greatly, between different grammars. (whorf, 1956, pp. 212–213) nevertheless, it must be stressed that his approach to the issue was that of an early 20th-century linguist preoccupied with analyses of phonemes and morphemes and relatively uninformed about the complexity of cognitive processing which poses a challenge to interdisciplinary research a century later. whorf (1956, p. 42) seemed to distrust psychological terminology which he regarded as a legacy of old laboratory experiments. consequently, his use of psychologyrelated terms is intuitive and commonsensical, as demonstrated by the following description of how grammar influenced what a psychologist could have called perception and categorization. the specifics of both processes remain a matter of conjecture. users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars towards different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation. (whorf, 1956, p. 221) whorf’s attempts to embrace the cognitive and linguistic levels attracted the attention of lakoff (1987, p. 330), who called him a pioneer in (cognitive) linguistics and “the most interesting linguist of his day.” yet, from the perspective of psychology, the research did not meet the requirements of good science because it used imprecise and intuitive terminology, and employed anecdotal and impressionistic evidence, and for an obvious failure to define terms (variables) carefully and form testable hypotheses, which was vital for obtaining empirical evidence for the theory. what tends to be overlooked is that, as a linguist, whorf was neither interested nor qualified to conduct research that met those requirements. behavior. the way whorf understood the behavioral aspect of linguistic relativity had little in common with modern interpretations of the hypothesis. under the influence of sapir, a leading anthropologist of the time, he came to regard language as a social construct and consequently looked for signs of its influence in culturally conditioned personal and social activities. the influence manifested itself as “constant ways of arranging data” and “most ordinary everyday analysis of phenomena” (whorf, 1956, p. 135) in line with the language habits of the community. whorf became acutely aware of the dependency of behavior on linguistic descriptions of events in his work as a fire inspector. although initially concerned with purely physical conditions and circumstances surrounding the starting of fires, he soon discovered that part of the blame lay with how the situation was represented linguistically. a case in point is jolanta latkowska12 the now classic example of gasoline drums which, when full, require handling with caution and care. this caution is abandoned around empty gasoline drums because the word empty suggests a lack of danger. the sad truth is that empty drums are potentially even more dangerous because they contain explosive vapor (whorf, 1956, p. 135). the principle behind this dependency is as follows: “people act about situations in ways which are like the ways they talk about them” (whorf, 1956, p. 148). the example makes clear that whorf did not distinguish precisely between verbal and non-verbal behavior. nor did he try to infer cognitive patterns from the observed behavior. it seems he was happy to accept that activities that were not explicitly linguistic were non-linguistic by default and that patterns of behavior reflected patterns of thought. his contemporaries, including his pupil and friend john b. carroll, adopted a more principled approach, however, and argued for a strict separation of linguistic and non-linguistic processes. this protected linguistic relativity from becoming circular and tautological, as explained by casasanto: inferring cognitive differences solely from linguistic differences is hopelessly circular. patterns in language can serve as a source of hypotheses about cognitive differences between members of different language communities, but some sort of extra-linguistic data are needed to test these hypotheses: otherwise, the only evidence that people who talk differently also think differently is that they talk differently! (2008, p. 67) it also solved the problem of a linguistic bias in data analysis as researchers were able to assess cognitive phenomena in a language-neutral way, i.e. without privileging a vision of reality invoked by the language of the analysis, or indeed, the researcher’s native language. this was a problem whorf was intensely aware of. language. a second dimension of the linguistic relativity principle represents the notion that languages are relative and vary in how they conceptualize and represent extra-linguistic reality. in the words of whorf: “each language performs […] artificial chopping up of the continuous spread and flow of existence in a different way” (1956, p. 253) and segmentation of nature is an aspect of grammar […]. languages differ not only in how they build their sentences but also in how they break down nature to secure the elements to put in those sentences (1956, p. 240). on the linguistic level, the result of the segmentation process is a large scale pattern-system of grammatical categories such as nouns, verbs, number, gender, how relevant is the sapir-whorf hypothesis… 13 voices, tenses, and the like. the categories are attempts to segment and interpret experience. the rules of “patternment” and patterns of sentence structure are specific to each language and guide mental activity. whorf borrowed the idea that the sentence is the main unit of linguistic structure and therefore should be used as a template in linguistic analyses from bloomfield. what is more, in a truly structuralist style, he made a strenuous effort to describe carefully the linguistic terms used in his research and analyses. surprisingly to some, whorf’s understanding of lexical semantics was quite vague. in fact, he did not seem to be familiar with the fregean distinction between sense and reference (cf. goddard, 2003). this is demonstrated in no uncertain terms by the quotation below: that part of meaning which is words, and which we may call “reference,” is only relatively fixed. reference of words is at the mercy of the sentences and grammatical patterns in which they occur. (whorf, 1956, p. 259) to put things in perspective, it should be noted that in his lifetime american linguistics was preoccupied with phonology and morphology, while semantics was underdeveloped since, like all things cognitive, it was considered to be beyond the reach of scientific investigation. yet another theme running through whorf’s work was that of language as a cultural phenomenon, or more specifically, as an “especially cohesive aggregate of cultural phenomena” (1956, p. 65). it is a shared knowledge of the aggregate that makes it possible for the members of a particular speech community to communicate, as explained in the excerpt below: we cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way–an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. the agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory (whorf, 1956, pp. 213–214). the belief that cultural norms are codified in ethnic languages inspired whorf (1956, pp. 138–139) to address the question of an interplay of culture and linguistic norms. he was particularly interested to find out if there were “traceable affinities between (a) cultural and behavioral norms and (b) large-scale linguistic patterns.” the answer was affirmative, although whorf conceded that the two were related rather than correlated, making the relation much weaker than some of his comments seemed to suggest. the conclusion to be drawn was that language and culture should be studied as a whole since they jolanta latkowska14 were closely integrated. it is more than likely that this anthropological slant in whorf’s reasoning prevented him from using quantifiable research paradigms. finally, as a linguist and anthropologist, whorf expressed concern about what lucy (2011, p. 46) called “unwitting lingua-centrism” of linguistic evaluation and description. this is a tendency to analyze languages in terms of categories rooted in the researcher’s own language. although unable to eliminate the bias of using english as a tool of analysis in his own research, whorf made his views regarding this issue clear: but to restrict thinking to the patterns merely of english […] is to lose a power of thought which, once lost, can never be regained. […] i believe that those who envision a future world speaking only one language, whether english, german, russian, or any other, hold a misguided ideal and would do the evolution of the human mind the greatest disservice. (1956, p. 244) by the same token, he was very conscious of the limitations of linguistic metalanguage which, in his opinion, was useless in any other than a strictly grammatical sense (whorf & trager, 1996). whorf’s contribution to linguistics exceeds by far the scope of this paper, which has presented his position on language insofar as it relates to linguistic relativity. among whorf’s most notable endeavors in other areas were attempts to decipher maya and aztec writing, and an analysis of the hopi language, as well as numerous theoretical articles on phonotactics, the cryptotype, and language typology. although some of the notions they advanced were either modified or indeed disproved by later research, it should be borne in mind that whorf was deprived of the opportunity to develop and perfect his work because he died of cancer at the age of 44. his death and that of his mentors, franz boas and edward sapir, who died within a few years of whorf, dealt a blow to the linguistic relativity proposal, which was presented to the world in an unfinished form. practical implications. the current reawakening of interest in linguistic relativity and the expansion of the concept to include bilingualism are living proof that the sapir-whorf hypothesis continues to inspire researchers across the academic spectrum. this is most evident in the outpouring of studies and monographs on the subject that has been observed over the past two decades or so. they are a tribute to whorf in particular for having opened a debate that required expertise and vision, and for having had the courage of his convictions. it must be kept in mind, however, that sapir and whorf were pioneer researchers with a focus on cultural rather than cognitive phenomena. consequently, the paradigm established for their work could not meet the requirements of more how relevant is the sapir-whorf hypothesis… 15 controlled studies designed to discover relationships between narrowly defined variables. as has been demonstrated in this paper, whorf’s understanding of thought was often intuitive, while his analysis of data was descriptive and impressionistic, even philosophical at times. this alone diminishes the usefulness of the original and/or any other broadly conceived version of linguistic relativity for current research which is based on detailed cognitive models. as pederson rightly observes, nowadays: the question ‘does language influence thought?’ is being replaced by a battery of questions about whether a given feature of a specific language influences particular cognitive operations, what the exact cognitive mechanisms are which give rise to this influence, and how we can most precisely characterize the nature of this influence. (2007, p. 1036) in the light of the above, it becomes apparent that the disagreements over what constitutes whorfian effects on cognition that are common in psycholinguistic circles cannot be conclusively resolved because whorf did not provide enough information on the subject. in fact, he was only a precursor of what later came to be known as a research trend bearing his name. personally, i applaud cook’s (2011, p. 12) comment that there is an infuriating tendency for academics “to debate not the actual issues involved, but their interpretation of the writings of whorf and sapir […], rather like the exegesis of a sacred text.” paradoxically, this paper is no exception. still, as a researcher, i would much rather concentrate on the real issues. one of them is discussed below. linguistic and (non?)-linguistic categorization in tasks using linguistic stimuli: a correlational study objectives. according to lakoff (1987, p. 330), the classic whorfian argument “that the structure of a language could influence nonlinguistic behavior” should be couched in terms of the question of whether naming is part of (nonlinguistic) cognition. the present study investigates this issue by attempting to find out to what extent semantic naming distinctions correlate with categorization patterns in tasks that: • apply non-linguistic criteria of categorization, e.g. similarity judgments in a free sorting task; • implement categorization according to lexico-semantic criteria which diverge from those laid down by the words under study. jolanta latkowska16 the existence and strength of significant correlations will show whether the observed linguistic patterns may be construed to reliably reflect the underlying conceptual models. this will be the case when items given the same name in the linguistic task are placed in the same category in the non-linguistic condition (latkowska, 2013). participants. the participants of the study were 30 first-year students of the university of silesia attending a teacher training course at the english department. their level of proficiency in english was assessed with the oxford quick placement test (2001) and ranged between the b2 (n = 22) and the c1 (n = 8) levels. none of them had stayed in an english-speaking environment for more than a month. the students also had elementary to lower intermediate knowledge of german, which they had studied in secondary school and at university. because the study did not examine cross-language comparisons, it was not considered essential to restrict it to monolinguals or limited bilinguals. materials. the materials used in the study included nine scenarios (see below), each of which created a context to activate the targeted meaning and related concept. the scenarios were built around the semantic components of wierzbicka’s (1997) natural semantic metalanguage explications for three polish friendship terms, i.e. przyjaciel, kolega, and znajomy. eight scenarios were used in a previous study where they elicited the targeted words consistently (latkowska, 2013). przyjaciel ‘best friend’ s1) we went to school together and lived in the same street. on saturdays we would first meet in the playground, and then, a few years later, on the tennis court. now we often go to our local for a chat. there isn’t a thing we wouldn’t know about each other. s4) we often talk on the phone or on the net. our conversations are very honest and deep; sometimes they remind me of going to confession. s9) she/he is one of the few people i trust and often discuss my problems with. i admire his/her experience and disinterested wisdom. kolega ‘friend’ s2) for five years, we have been meeting at university where we do the same degree course. we sometimes study for exams together and in our free time, i.e. quite rarely, we go to the cinema. s6) for several years we’ve been going to ski camps together. in fact, all of us started from scratch and had many adventures on the ski slopes and routes. we enjoy skiing together. how relevant is the sapir-whorf hypothesis… 17 s10) we are classmates and often stay after school to do our homework together. there are five of us in all and we enjoy studying together. znajomy ‘acquaintance’ s3) we meet when walking our dogs and often have a chat while our pets chase each other on the grass. this is how i hear the news about the people living in the area. s5) we met at a conference where we were seated next to each other at the conference dinner. after an interesting conversation we exchanged business cards. s8) our kids are classmates and we often meet at parents’ meetings or when collecting them from school. sometimes, when i have to work overtime, s/he walks my son home for me. two distractor items were also included, both with a focus on neighbor, i.e. s11 and s7, which read as follows: s7) although we live on the same floor we meet once a month or less. s11) we live in a house on the city outskirts. the couple next door are very friendly and we often help each other. for example, last summer i watered their garden when they went on holiday. the participants were instructed to write down the word(s) they would use to name their relationship with the individual(s) described in each scenario (test 1). the relationship was not romantic and they could use the same word several times to refer to different scenarios, or use two different words to refer to the same situation. the scenarios were presented in a randomized order which is indicated by the letter s for scenario and the entry number. the participants were expected to provide the target word in response to the prompt: this person is a(n) or these people are (my)… . the questionnaire was implemented in polish. in addition, the participants were requested to complete a scenario evaluation test (test 2, see appendix 1), which was a verbal categorization task aimed at finding out how the participants perceived the scenarios. this was vital to clarifying the nature of the relation signified by each of the friendship terms. the participants were required to assign a corresponding scenario number to one of the following categories: • a very close and personal relationship; • a close but not intense, also professional relationship; • a purely social relationship; • a purely professional relationship. to obtain information about the participants’ language history, the oxford quick placement test (2001), paper and pen version, was used, as well as a backjolanta latkowska18 ground questionnaire. the questionnaire focused on factors such as education level and experience with the l2. procedure. the tests were administered in the following sequence: • the free sorting task; • the scenario naming test (test1); • the scenario evaluation test (test 2). in the free sorting task, which tends to be used to assess non-verbal categorization (malt & ameel, 2011), the participants were presented with a list of unnumbered scenarios and asked to put them into categories on the basis of their similarity. the instructions for the task read as follows: mark with the same letter, i.e. a, b, c, and so on, situations which in your opinion are similar to each other/one another. the participants were free to form as many categories as they saw appropriate. the order of the scenarios was randomized and the participants were not aware of the purpose of the study. the free sorting task preceded the other two tests which required explicit verbalization. it was hoped that implementing the sorting task first would help avoid drawing the respondents’ attention to specific linguistic criteria, thus reducing the extent of subvocal verbalization. a decision was also made not to include triads matching in the study since the binary choice enforced by the structure of the task did not always accurately reflect the categorization choices of the respondents who, if given the chance, might have opted for a different answer (latkowska, 2009). what is more, the piloting stage for the triads task produced inconsistent results. the naming test and the scenario evaluation test were implemented as described in the section on materials. the respondents were given 45 minutes to complete all three tests. they were also allowed to sign the test sheets with a fictitious name to ensure anonymity. the background questionnaire and the placement test were completed the following week. analysis. to compare the similarity of the participants’ categorization choices in the three tasks, the situations that were placed in the same category were combined into pairs. for example, if scenarios 1 and 4 elicited the name przyjaciel, they were placed in the verbal category of przyjaciel under the label 1, 4. if these two scenarios were marked with the same letter in the free sorting task, they were obviously in the same category, too, which was considered to be a measure of similarity between verbal categorization and sorting behavior. for the sake of precision, the pairing of the situations from the sorting test was carried out using an excel macro created for this purpose. the pairs were then tallied and the score for each pair was correlated with those for the equivalent pairs in the other two tasks. the mode of analysis developed for this study is partly modeled on malt et al. (1999). the shapiro-wilk test was run to assess the distribution of the data. since they did not follow normal distribution how relevant is the sapir-whorf hypothesis… 19 (w > 0.19, p = 0.000) in all three tests, non-parametric spearman rank-order correlations were computed. the alpha level was set at 0.05 or less. results and discussion. in the free sorting task, the subjects created six categories marked from a to f. category f contained just one scenario (s7) and was subsequently excluded from the analysis. the sort yielded 42 pairings of scenarios, the most frequent of them being 4, 9 (n = 30), 1, 4 (n = 25), 1, 9 (n = 25), 8, 11 (n = 23), 10, 2 (n = 20), 2, 6 (n = 16), and 5, 7 (n = 16). the naming task elicited four main groupings, i.e. (1) przyjaciel (n = 84), (2) kolega (n = 83), (3) znajomy (n = 108) and (4) sąsiad (n = 45). there were also infrequent cases of other names. all of the scenarios elicited their targets, which in most cases constituted about 70% of each category’s elicited name set, and were thus the dominant names. as regards the scenarios that received the same name, there were 38 pairings altogether. the most frequent ones included: 4, 9 (n = 26), 1, 4 (n = 24), 1, 9 (n = 21), 10, 2 (n = 21), 10, 6 (n = 21), 5, 8 (n = 21), 3, 5 (n = 19), and 7, 11 (n = 19). test 2 served as a control for the naming task and produced a clear response pattern for s1, 4, and 9 (przyjaciel ‘close friend’), which were classified as very close and personal by between 25 and 30 respondents (83%–100%). s5 for znajomy was evaluated as purely professional (n = 25) by the majority of respondents, too. there was more variability in the responses to the remaining situations. overall, the test produced 38 scenario pairings, the most frequent being: 4, 9 (n = 27), 1, 9 (n = 25), 1, 4 (n = 23), 10, 2 (n = 20), 10, 8 (n = 12), 2, 6 (n = 12), 2, 8 (n = 11) and 2, 11 (n = 11). spearman rank-order correlations computed for specific categories in the free sorting and naming tests showed clearly that the two tests summoned different categorization criteria. the sorting task (table 2, see appendix 3) elicited judgments based on the most salient and extreme properties, such as very intense and personal contact (s1, 4, 9) on the one hand, and little or no contact (s5, 7) on the other. situations involving relationships of moderate intensity were perceived as similar. in the naming task (table 1, see appendix 2), znajomy covered situations involving varying degrees of intensity, except for the most powerful ones, which were assigned primarily to przyjaciel, and secondarily to kolega. there were no statistically significant positive correlations between the words. thus, although similar at first glance, the patterns of similarity identified in the naming task did not match. neither did the criteria applied in the sorting test reflect those exhibited in the naming task. a between-test comparison involving the sorting test and the scenario evaluation test (test 2) yielded surprising between-task synchrony (table 2, see appendix 3), with grouping a correlating significantly with categories evaluated as very close and personal (ρ = 0.62, p = 0.000), grouping b showing jolanta latkowska20 similarity to close but not intense relationships (ρ = 0.41, p = 0.004), grouping c aligning with purely social relations (ρ = 0.36, p = 0.01), and grouping d correlating significantly with purely professional scenarios (ρ = 0.36, p = 0.01). grouping e correlated with purely social relations as well (ρ = 0.30, p = 0.04). the categories of the naming test and those of the evaluation test displayed a comparable level of similarity (table 1, see appendix 2). namely, przyjaciel was strongly correlated with the very close and personal parameter (ρ = 0.72, p = 0.000), kolega correlated with the close but not so intense category (ρ = 0.58, p = 0.000), while znajomy was aligned to both close but not so intense and purely social relations (ρ = 0.3 and ρ = 0.44, respectively, p < 0.05). the significant correlate for sąsiad ‘neighbor’ was purely social relations (ρ = 0.50, p = 0.000). these results are too systematic to be accidental and indicate that semantic categories are the most precise medium of description for other semantic categories. conclusions. the results of this small-scale study show that language-based tests may yield quite misleading results when used to examine non-verbal categorization patterns. although the data demonstrate an obvious dissociation of lexical naming in test 1 from the allegedly non-linguistic criteria applied in the free sorting task, the dissociation is called into question by the correlations obtained for the sorting task and the scenario evaluation test (test 2). because these are so consistent they raise the possibility that more general linguistic criteria were involved in the sorting process. this does not seem unlikely since linguistic stimuli activate entire language systems, bringing to bear context-relevant parameters and criteria. it is their interfering influence that might have cancelled out the effects of the naming distinctions from test 1. as things stand, however, we have no way of knowing whether the observed trends reflect deeper conceptual distinctions or the dynamics of semantic processing at the linguistic level. this lack of clarity is of relevance to research into all things whorfian, where it is necessary to distinguish between the conceptual and linguistic levels of representation. since language-based tests allow for the involvement of untargeted linguistic categories, which may affect the validity of findings, their usefulness for research into non-linguistic categorization should be seriously questioned. as a concluding remark, it might be worth noting that thanks to the application of sophisticated research technologies such as, e.g. fmri and erps, researchers are now studying the language-cognition interface in ways that were unimaginable to whorf and his contemporaries. there can be no doubt that, despite many shortcomings, the sapir-whorf hypothesis continues to fascinate the academic community, inspiring further research into the unsolved mysteries of the human mind. how relevant is the sapir-whorf hypothesis… 21 a p p e n d i x 1 polish version of test 2 które z przedstawionych sytuacji odnoszą się do relacji (można pominąć niektóre z podanych poniżej punktów) bardzo bliskich i osobistych (podaj numery sytuacji) .............................................................................................................................................................. .............................................................................................................................................................. .............................................................................................................................................................. .............................................................................................................................................................. .............................................................................................................................................................. zażyłych, lecz mniej osobistych, również zawodowych (podaj numery sytuacji) .............................................................................................................................................................. .............................................................................................................................................................. .............................................................................................................................................................. .............................................................................................................................................................. .............................................................................................................................................................. typowo towarzyskich (podaj numery sytuacji) .............................................................................................................................................................. .............................................................................................................................................................. .............................................................................................................................................................. .............................................................................................................................................................. .............................................................................................................................................................. typowo zawodowych (podaj numery sytuacji) .............................................................................................................................................................. .............................................................................................................................................................. .............................................................................................................................................................. .............................................................................................................................................................. .............................................................................................................................................................. jolanta latkowska22 a p p e n d ix 2 ta bl e 1 sp ea rm an ’s co rr el at io n co ef fic ie nt s fo r th e lin gu is tic t es ts n = 4 8 p rz yj ac ie l k ol eg a z na jo m y s ąs ia d v er y cl os e c lo se b ut no t in te ns e s oc ia l p ro fe ss io na l p rz yj ac ie l rh o n/ a ρ = − 0. 17 p = 0. 25 ρ  = − 0. 39 p = 0. 00 5 ρ = − 0. 09 p = 0. 51 ρ  = 0. 72 p = 0. 00 0 ρ  = − 0. 46 p = 0. 00 1 ρ = − 0. 19 p = 0. 19 ρ = − 0. 07 p = 0. 59 k ol eg a rh o ρ = − 0. 17 p = 0. 25 n/ a ρ = 0. 17 p = 0. 24 ρ = − 0. 21 p = 0. 13 ρ = − 0. 12 p = 0. 41 ρ  = 0. 58 p = 0. 00 0 ρ = − 0. 13 p = 0. 35 ρ = − 0. 03 p = 0. 83 z na jo m y rh o ρ  = − 0. 39 p = 0. 00 5 ρ = 0. 17 p = 0. 24 n/ a ρ = 0. 25 p = 0. 08 ρ = − 0. 46 p = 0. 00 0 ρ  = 0. 30 p = 0. 04 ρ  = 0. 44 p = 0. 00 1 ρ = 0. 25 p = 0. 08 s ąs ia d rh o ρ = − 0. 09 p = 0. 51 ρ = − 0. 21 p = 0. 13 ρ = 0. 25 p = 0. 08 n/ a ρ = − 0. 11 p = 0. 43 ρ = 0. 00 6 p = 0. 96 ρ  = 0. 50 p = 0. 00 0 ρ = − 0. 05 p = 0. 71 how relevant is the sapir-whorf hypothesis… 23 a p p e n d ix 2 ta bl e 2 sp ea rm an ’s co rr el at io n co ef fic ie nt s fo r th e fr ee s or tin g ta sk a nd t he l in gu is tic t es ts n = 4 8 g ro up in g a g ro up in g b g ro up in g c g ro up in g d g ro up in g e p rz yj ac ie l k ol eg a z na jo m y s ąs ia d v er y cl os e an d pe rs on al c lo se bu t no t in te ns e s oc ia l p ro fe ss io na l g ro up in g a rh o n/ a ρ = 0. 08 6 ρ = 0. 07 2 ρ = − 0. 00 3 ρ = − 0. 35 6 ρ = 0. 60 2 ρ = 0. 29 2 ρ = − 0. 25 4 ρ = − 0. 24 3 ρ = 0. 61 7 ρ = 0. 05 8 ρ = − 0. 18 8 ρ = − 0. 03 3 s ig . (2 -t ai le d) p = 0. 56 2 p = 0. 62 7 p = 0. 98 3 p = 0. 01 3 p = 0. 00 0 p = 0. 04 4 p = 0. 08 1 p = 0. 09 6 p = 0. 00 0 p = 0. 69 6 p = 0. 20 1 p = 0. 78 6 g ro up in g b rh o ρ = 0. 08 6 n/ a ρ = 0. 63 6 ρ  = 0. 44 7 ρ  = 0. 05 6 ρ  = − 0. 00 6 ρ = 0. 27 3 ρ = 0. 41 9 ρ = 0. 15 4 ρ = − 0. 09 1 ρ = 0. 40 9 ρ = 0. 24 5 ρ = − 0. 18 1 s ig . (2 -t ai le d) p= 0. 56 2 p = 0. 00 0 p = 0. 00 1 p = 0. 70 3 p = 0. 96 6 p = 0. 06 0 p = 0. 00 3 p = 0. 29 5 p = 0. 53 8 p = 0. 00 4 p = 0. 09 3 p = 0. 21 8 g ro up in g c rh o ρ = 0. 07 2 ρ = 0. 63 6 n/ a ρ = 0. 48 7 ρ = − 0. 03 2 ρ = 0. 09 3 ρ = 0. 02 4 ρ = 0. 33 1 ρ = 0. 25 2 ρ = − 0. 02 4 ρ = 0. 20 9 ρ = 0. 36 0 ρ = 0. 02 4 s ig . (2 -t ai le d) p = 0. 62 7 p = 0. 00 0 p = 0. 00 0 p = 0. 83 1 p = 0. 52 8 p = 0. 87 1 p = 0. 02 1 p = 0. 08 3 p = 0. 87 0 p = 0. 15 5 p = 0. 01 2 p = 0. 87 3 g ro up in g d rh o ρ = − 0. 00 3 ρ = 0. 44 7 ρ = 0. 48 7 n/ a ρ = 0. 19 8 ρ = 0. 15 8 ρ = − 0. 11 4 ρ = 0. 38 7 ρ = − 0. 01 1 ρ = 0. 08 1 ρ = − 0. 12 1 ρ = 0. 22 5 ρ = 0. 35 9 s ig . (2 -t ai le d) p = 0. 98 3 p = 0. 00 1 p= 0. 00 0 p = 0. 17 6 p = 0. 28 2 p = 0. 44 1 p = 0. 00 7 p = 0. 93 9 p = 0. 58 5 p = 0. 41 3 p = 0. 12 4 p = 0. 01 2 g ro up in g e rh o ρ = − 0. 35 6 ρ = 0. 05 6 ρ = − 0. 03 2 ρ = 0. 19 8 n/ a ρ = − 0. 14 2 ρ = − 0. 19 6 ρ = 0. 29 2 ρ = 0. 42 2 ρ = − 0. 16 8 ρ = − 0. 21 5 ρ = 0. 29 5 ρ = 0. 26 2 s ig . (2 -t ai le d) p = 0. 01 3 p = 0. 70 3 p = 0. 83 1 p = 0. 17 6 p = 0. 33 5 p = 0. 18 2 p = 0. 04 4 p = 0. 00 3 p = 0. 25 3 p = 0. 14 3 p = 0. 04 2 p = 0. 05 7 jolanta latkowska24 references athanasopoulos, p. 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(1997). understanding cultures through their key words. oxford: oxford university press. jolanta latkowska26 jolanta latkowska wie wichtig ist die sapir-whorf-hypothese für gegenwärtige psycholinguistische forschungen? z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g in dem artikel möchte die verfasserin die frage beantworten, ob die sapir-whorf-hypothese ein bezugspunkt für gegenwärtige forschungen über den zusammenhang zwischen der sprache und dem kognitiven apparat des menschen (dem denken) werden kann. die diskussion fußt auf benjamin lee whorfs (1956) werken; berücksichtigt werden dabei die für die oben genannte hypothese wichtigsten begriffe: sprache, gedanke und verhalten. gesucht wird auch die antwort auf andere frage: ob sprachkategorien ein gewisses fenster zu den zu grunde liegenden denkprozessen sind, wie whorf und einige von den heutigen tendenzen der kognitiven sprachwissenschaft behaupten? bei der analyse bedient sich die verfasserin der in verbalen und nonverbalen texten angewandten kategorisierungskriterien. małgorzata bielicka, efektywność nauczania języka niemieckiego na poziomie przedszkolnym i wczesnoszkolnym w dwujęzycznych placówkach edukacyjnych w polsce [the effectiveness of teaching german at the preschool and early school levels in bilingual educational institutions in poland]. poznań: wydawnictwo naukowe uam, 2017, isbn: 978-83-232-3198-1, 395 pages the monograph by małgorzata bielicka describes a research study whose main goal was to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching german to young polish-speaking learners in an immersion programme. in the study, the author focused on the development of grammatical competences as well as their use during reception and production by young children acquiring german as their first foreign language (fl) within the so-called poznań model. in my review, i will first present the contents of the monograph and then point to some of its good and bad sides. the theoretical part of the monograph comprises the introduction and three chapters. in the introduction, the aim of the research and the hypotheses are presented, and the structure of the whole book is sketched. the author emphasises the importance of the undertaken topic, by pointing to the need of early bilingual education of polish children and the importance of an early acquisition of an fl other than english. the reader is also informed that the project is in fact work in progress, and its next goal is the assessment of the participants’ competences in english at the end of primary school education. then in the first chapter the author describes the european ‘mother-tonguetheory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 6 (1), 2020, pp. 189–194 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.7973 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en zofia chłopek190 plus-two’ policy. the difficulties connected with the plurilingualism strategy and its low effectiveness are pointed out. among other things, the author mentions the insufficient number of hours devoted to the teaching of languages other than english, resulting in low attainments in these languages. by doing so, she indirectly underlines the importance of her own research activity. proceeding to read the second chapter the reader gets acquainted with a historical overview of bilingual education. next, the most important terminology used in the book is presented, in particular notions such as immersion, content and language integrated learning, and bilingual education/teaching are explained, and their different interpretations and practical applications described. for this reason, this chapter is an important theoretical foundation of the research presented later in the book. further in the same chapter, general teaching goals and bilingual teaching goals realised in polish schools are outlined. moreover, the relationship between teaching a curricular subject and an fl is explained. finally, the author explains her choice of the terms. chapter three begins with the description of child development, from the cognitive, pragmalinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. the author concentrates in particular on children’s grammatical competences (the research focus of the present study). next, the reader finds a description of the l1 and l2 development, including the stages of grammar development. the author mainly quotes research studies conducted with polishand german-speaking children, which is understandable, since these are the languages of the participants of her own research study. in the next part of this chapter, the positive influence of early bilingualism on the child’s cognitive and linguistic development is presented. the author discusses the competences achieved by learners in institutional settings and then moves on to describe the polish educational system, with particular attention paid to the effectiveness of language education at the pre-school and early school levels. she also makes a comparison of natural and instructed processes of language learning. in the final section of this chapter, the principles of bilingual teaching and the competences of teachers working with young learners are presented. the empirical part of the monograph embraces four chapters. chapter four presents the results of the observation conducted by the author in two educational institutions in poznań, poland: the bilingual kindergarten ene due rabe and the primary school no. 22, in which a german-speaking day-care room was organised. the reader is provided with information about the research procedures, conditions of the didactic process, as well as applied methods and materials. this part of the chapter ends with some conclusions—recommendations regarding the teaching process, such as the need for moderate language instruction, without explicit grammar explanations. some comments with regard to parents’ desirable attitudes and behaviour are also included, and the importance of parents’ and generally the society’s influence on the child’s multilingualism is stressed. in the next section of chapter four the author presents the małgorzata bielicka, efektywność nauczania języka niemieckiego… 191 desirable competences of language teachers and points to the various skills and abilities necessary in the context of immersion. finally, the formal qualifications of kindergarten and primary school teachers of german are described. in the fifth chapter the reader is acquainted with the results of another research study. here the author describes the quantitative analysis of the receptive grammatical competences of the participating children and answers the research questions. next the reader is informed about the research tool and the procedure of the study (which was cross-sectional—except for the few children who attended both the kindergarten and the school day care). the last subchapter includes the results of a statistical analysis. in chapter six, the author proceeds to discuss the qualitative analysis of the children’s language production, focusing on their grammatical competences. the reader is also provided with some additional comments on the receptive grammatical skills as well as lexical competences of the children. the final part of this chapter presents a rating scale developed by the author for the assessment of the grammatical competences of young learners acquiring an fl in immersion. chapter seven provides the summary of the results described in two previous chapters. the children’s receptive and productive skills are juxtaposed and the relationship between them is analysed. chapter eight, the last one in the book, comprises the summary of the book, the most important conclusions of the research and their practical implications. the author emphasises the effectiveness of early fl immersion, although she admits that fl learning is also effective when it begins at school. she also points to the salience of an early contact with and a long exposure to an fl, and stresses the need for using the target language in the classroom, contextualisation of the language input, discreet control of the learning processes and individualisation of teaching. next the author sums up the desired competences of a language teacher, describes the role of parents in assisting their children’s multilingualism and indicates various possibilities of implementing immersion teaching in educational institutions. finally, the research aims and hypotheses are addressed, and further research fields are suggested. i would like to point to some important assets of the monograph. firstly, the relevance of its topic should be stressed, that is, the development of an fl other than english at an early age. in polish schools, students typically learn english as the first fl and usually they are not motivated to learn any further language. the author is right in maintaining that an early introduction of a language such as german, which is less popular than english and which may be more difficult for a polish-speaking person (though this thesis probably ought to be verified), is a solution which may lead to the development of plurilingual competences (so strongly promoted in various documents of the eu). since learners are usually willing to learn english and this language is omnipresent in their lives, there is a high probability that they will be able to achieve high levels of competence in english as an l3 even much later in life. zofia chłopek192 the value of the monograph also lies in the promotion of teaching fls in immersion (content and language integrated learning), which results in the simultaneous acquisition of subject knowledge and language skills. this way of teaching leads to the development of language in authentic communication, which revolves around important and interesting topics. even though immersion programmes have been usually found very effective, they are rarely implemented in schools (kersten & rohde, 2015). the research study does not belong to easy ones. in research conducted with young learners it is relatively difficult both to recruit an adequate number of respondents and to obtain reliable results. nevertheless, the author has coped with the task very well (even though the inter-group comparisons do not allow true generalisations, due to the rather small number of participating children, that is, 44). the work offers some interesting conclusions. for example, it turns out that the language learning process at the school level proceeds faster than at the pre-school level, and that there is a positive effect of an early contact with an fl on the development of the competences in this language. nevertheless, most of the conclusions should yet be verified, as the number of the participating children was rather low and some significant additional variables1 may have influenced the results. probably the most important achievement of the research is the development of the rating scale of children’s grammatical competences in an fl acquired in immersion. even though the scale includes only the lowest levels of grammatical ability, the author signals a new research study whose aim is to complement the scale with higher levels. thus the reviewed work may be treated as the first step towards the development of language achievement scales serving the measurement of young learners’ communicative competence. moreover, the interdisciplinary character of the monograph must be emphasised––even though the research is strongly grounded in the field of fl didactics, the author makes use of the achievements in (cognitive) psychology, pedagogy, psycholinguistics, and (cognitive) linguistics. partly for this reason, the book has important didactic implications. it is full of practical information which may be useful for head teachers and teachers in kindergartens and primary schools, and the ‘poznań model’ may be implemented in other educational institutions. unfortunately, i must also point out some downsides of the reviewed monograph. a serious drawback of the book is that some important information is either missing from it or has been presented in an insufficient manner. for instance, in the second chapter, the historical overview of bilingual education 1 for example, five girls had some additional contact with the german language (see pp. 330– 331). małgorzata bielicka, efektywność nauczania języka niemieckiego… 193 seems to be rather sketchy and incomplete. a better solution would have been to focus on the european countries only, especially considering the topic of the preceding chapter (the european language policy). also in chapter two, more information regarding the critical period hypothesis should have been presented, especially as the author is interested in the language development of young children. psychoand neurolinguistic studies conducted on the critical period for both the native language and second languages have questioned the original theories proposed by penfield and roberts (1959) and lenneberg (1967). thus, it is a pity that the author has not elaborated on the subject. moreover, it seems that when presenting the teaching goals in the second chapter the author should have concentrated on the teaching goals regarding the bilingual education of the age group which was relevant to the present study, that is, preschooland school-children. in chapter three, a more thorough analysis of the current theories of child development might be useful for the reader. it seems that quoting chomsky and hymes—even though the contributions of these researchers are undeniable—is a little bit outdated in the face of the present-day abundance of psychological, psycholinguistic, and neurolinguistic research studies. a similar problem can be noted later in the same chapter, where the author sets out to make a comparison of the natural and instructed language acquisition processes, but fails to present any neuroand psycholinguistic research outcomes pertaining to this issue, for example, those which indicate different, age-, method-, and context-related engagement of the procedural and declarative memory systems in the learning process.2 in chapter four, the reader does not feel adequately informed about the research procedures and outcomes. for instance, it is not clear which role the author played in planning, conducting, and evaluating the language classes in the bilingual kindergarten and in the primary-school day care and, in general, what her contribution was to the development of the ‘poznań model’ of teaching young children in immersion. moreover, it is not explicitly stated in which of the institutions the quoted dialogues with children took place. furthermore, it is a pity that the layout of the lesson plans (mentioned on p. 169) which was implemented in both institutions participating in the research project has not been included in the appendix. the layout might be of use to other researchers working with young learners in immersion programmes. also, i think more information would be in place as to the test used in the study (pp. 175–176). even though throughout the book the author explains and defines the terms she uses, it seems that a few additional explanations might be useful for the reader. i mean such terms as, for example, assimilation and accommodation 2 compare, for example, publications by m. paradis, f. fabbro, n. ellis, f. pulvermüller. zofia chłopek194 (p. 155), ‘fine-tuning’ (p. 157), or first language (l1), second language (l2), third language (l3), and foreign language (in many places). i am also dissatisfied with the definition of submersion, which suggests that its consequence is inevitably the supersession of the mother tongue by a new language (p. 53). moreover, i cannot agree with the statement claiming that english is structurally easier than german (p. 123). such a statement should be supported by appropriate research results. it should be also taken into consideration that language difficulty is relative and depends to a large extent on the languages one already knows. as for the formal side of the monograph, its structure is correct. the content is presented in a logical manner, from the eu language policy and immersion models through the child’s language development. the text is coherent, with its different parts logically interwoven. unfortunately, the reader frequently stumbles over language mistakes, stylistic problems, and other formal errors. these occur especially in the case of german or english words, and names of quoted researchers. to conclude, the reviewed book is a valuable contribution to the present state of knowledge about teaching fls to young learners. it may become an important source of information for researchers active in the field of early fl acquisition, as well as educators working with children in kindergartens and primary schools. nevertheless, the readers of the monograph must also take into consideration its drawbacks which i have pointed out in the present review. references kersten, k., & rohde, a. (2015). immersion teaching in english with young learners. in j. bland (ed.), teaching english to young learners: critical issues in language teaching with 3–12 year olds (pp. 71–89). london and new york: bloomsbury academic. lenneberg, e. h. (1967). biological foundations of language. new york, ny: john wiley & sons. penfield, w., & roberts, l. (1959). speech and brain mechanisms. princeton, nj: princeton university press. zofia chłopek silesian university of technology, poland https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5324-8710 cover photo: “big_blue” by max iter (retrieved from www.f lickr.com) copy editing: gabriela marszołek proofreading: joanna zwierzyńska typesetting: grażyna szewczyk electronic version is the original one. the journal was previously published in printed form with the issn 2450-5455 the journal is distributed free of charge issn 2451-2125 published by wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego ul. bankowa 12b, 40-007 katowice www.wydawnictwo.us.edu.pl e-mail: wydawus@us.edu.pl first impression. printed sheets: 8.25. publishing sheets: 9.5. http:// https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ anna turula pedagogical university in kraków between new technologies and new paradigms in academic education a non-reductionist approach a b s t r a c t the article presents an insight into an exploratory study carried out between february and may 2014. the study looked into the process of teacher training enhanced by new technology: an ma call seminar facilitated in the blended format as a series of online and off line tutorials. the participants of the class were 9 first-year students of the tefl ma programme at the pedagogical university in cracow, poland. the study and its results were described in detail in previous publications (turula, 2015, turula, in press). the present article investigates an aspect of the process researched: negotiating between the digital realm, with its different tools and their affordances and a social context of the digital—or blended, as is the case here—education. keywords: reductionist/non-reductionist approach, affordancing; ict the perspective when reflecting on the role of the material culture in the 21st century language education, one can hardly avoid considering the virtual material. alongside the decreasing clarity of distinctions between the material and the non-material culture noted in modern research, similar liquefying of borders can be observed between the so-called traditional and digital environments and artefacts, including those typical of language learning and teaching. in fact, when considering the word material in its broader sense, including that of relevant and consequential, the younger generation may decide that the online and its culture are more material than the offline aspects of our life. this is why, theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 2 (2) 2016, pp. 47–60 48 anna turula any contemplation on the contemporary language pedagogy need to see both: the two sides of the material coin; and their mutual influence and dependencies. however, in examining the relation between new technologies and different manifestations of social life (including language education), it is easy to get trapped in one of the available deterministic viewpoints. as a result, one may argue that the internet and its uses dictate the way we act; alternatively, it is often claimed that our social practices and rituals influence our mode of computing. in education, such a reductionist approach will draw a line between those who believe that it is digital tools that determine the shape of schooling and those who subscribe to the approach-first stance. confronting what is declared on the topic of digital education with the actual status quo, it seems that while words speak for approach-first, common deeds show an inclination towards a certain degree of technocentrism (cf. kurek & turula, 2014). in other words, while theoreticians claim that digital tools should always be secondary (in poland, mainly by morbitzer, 2009, 2010, among others)—and practitioners assure they are—new technologies per se make their way to the fore of the modern classroom, backgrounding pedagogical issues more frequently that we would like them to. in an attempt to describe the digital educational reality, which is by far more complex, this article goes beyond the reductionist perspectives into a nonreductionist stance on the relation—or rather multiple relations—between new technologies and university teaching. it starts by clarifying where the followers of the reductionist/non-reductionist positions stand. then it applies these perspectives to the opportunities new media offer, referring to the nmc horizon report 2014, one of the most important publications listing modern technologies which are likely to influence education. following this is an example of a computer-assisted educational practice implemented at the academia—an efl teacher training course enhanced by new technology—that has been subject to the author’s exploratory research. new technologies and education the perspectives on mutual relations in his article on the methodology of the internet-related research, dahlberg (2004) departs from three different aspects of what he calls the circuit of technology: the uses of the new media, the digital artifacts and the social context in which all this happens. consequently, he claims, if we choose to adopt a linear, one-direction view of cause-effect relations in this circuit, we have to consider it from the three different angles determined by these aspects. resulting from 49between new technologies and new paradigms… this are three types of determinism. they are discussed, following dahlberg (2004), below, with a slight change of focus (education) and based on sources which are more contemporary than those cited in the original work. the first mentioned by dahlberg is the uses determinism which ignores the artifact (seeing it as neutral) and concentrates on the needs of the agents using it. this approach is based on the conviction that “the gratifications sought from the internet by individuals can predict the use of the medium” (dahlberg, 2004 p. 5). in other words, the motive/interest/attitude of the user determines the choice of tool and its use. in education it means, for example, that a need for a more controlled learning environment may encourage the teacher to use a learning management system (lms) rather than a more open virtual learning environment (vle). as for the student motivations and related choices, how they use, for example, social media may determine their attitude to the idea of networking in education. a recent study (pollara & zhu, 2011) demonstrates this idea and its implementation generate privacy issues between teachers and students. such issues seem to result from the fact that learners are occasionally apprehensive of educational contexts being extended to social networking sites (snss), which they perceive as related to interacting with friends and not to education (lantz-andersson et al., 2013). some uses, as dahlberg (2004) notes, may surprise the experts, as the applications of technologies may change rapidly with a new generation of users (with their specific needs and motivations) entering the digital market. such a generation change can be observed in the use of mobile phones, primarily communication devices, now—mainly entertainment centers (cf. morbitzer, 2009). new motivations resulting in new uses may also lead to abandoning a digital tool previously opted for. based on nine simultaneous ethnographic studies into the preferences of 16–18-year-olds concerning social media, run in eight countries, miller et al. (2013) discovered that teenagers are now choosing different social software (snapchat, whatsapp) over the so far unbeatable facebook. lying at the root of the withdrawal are the new e-motivations and uses, the basic being communicating rapidly, from a mobile rather than a stationary device. the second type is technological determinism, with its claim that the technological shape of the internet affects its users in a number of ways. first of all, new technologies have impact on the way we communicate: dahlberg (2004) mentions depersonalisation and disinhibition, both of potential interest in education. the former may affect the rapport between the participants of the learning situation, in a positive or a negative way. the latter may help relieve tensions, especially those associated with oral production, and help alleviate performance anxieties. in online communication there will also be hierarchy flattening and, consequently, new ways of establishing relations of power (poster, 1997), including those between teachers and learners. if medium is the message, as mcluhan (1964) claims, the very act of communicating 50 anna turula with the teacher via a democratic digital channel paves the way for a more peer-to-peer-like exchange and, inevitably, affects the language and organisation of the communication. besides, the internet offers multiple channels of communication. as a result, the new discourse—including learner-learner and teacher-learner exchanges—will be not only more direct but also increasingly multimodal. however, the internet affects not only the way we communicate but also how we learn. carr (2011) quotes numerous studies documenting the changes to cognitive functions (attention, memory, higher-order thinking) that are caused by the digital—as opposed to the traditional—exposure to text. finally, even the concept of human knowledge—now envisioned as a network (weinberger, 2012)—follows the model of the web structure. all this can be summed up by a very technologically determinist claim made two decades ago: “the internet, cyberspace, and virtual reality … are parts of our very selves … they are languages … what they do is structure seeing. they act on the systems—social, cultural, neurological—by which we make meanings” (stone, 1995, p. 167). finally, social determinism focuses on “the way outcomes are affected by social and economic structures and by the social construction of technological artifacts” (dahlberg, 2004, p. 11); “the way technology is socially embedded and constituted” (12). the present article will leave aside such interpretations and their conclusions to the effect that the way in which new technology develops is determined by who owns and controls the new media, because these issues go beyond the intended scope of the present text. instead, the author intends to concentrate on the changing social contexts and relations—including those created and maintained online—and the ways in which they affect the perception and use of digital tools in education. some of the examples given earlier in the text in relation to the uses determinism are equally well interpreted as socially determined. first of all, for both generation-specific uses of the new media (mobile phones and social networking) the important underlying factor is young age and its culture. the escape from facebook, in addition to usesdetermined causes, may equally well be an attempt to bypass the control of the facebook-using parents or withdrawing from a social network whose culture is becoming increasingly middle-age and thus unattractive. similarly, the choice of lms over vle—made by a teacher based on the intended use—may also be a manifestation of the educational culture this teacher is part of. to finish with, the claim that depersonalization of online contact may have a positive or a negative effect implies factors underlying both effects; factors going beyond artifacts, like the attitudes and preferences of the user, their view on the nature of education, and so on. the fact that some examples can be used in relation to different deterministic outlooks makes one reconsider the unidirectionality of all the three perspectives presented above, especially that there also are certain reservations 51between new technologies and new paradigms… that can be expressed in relation to all three types of determinism. subscribers to the uses determinism need to consider that “it is a mistake to assume that individual actors are in complete control of media technologies. such an assumption overlooks the structuring of actions by technological systems and neglects the social embeddedness of these systems and their users” (dahlberg, 2004, p. 6). as for the technological determinism, the interaction between the medium and the user as well as the power to influence is far from unidirectional. while new technologies shape our lives, it is also true that if and how they are used depends on a number of social factors, including social status, age or education. in relation to the latter, one of the most important determiners may be the level of digital literacy of the user: where on the tech-comfy/ tech-savvy (pegrum, 2009) continuum s/he is. those who are familiar with new technologies and use them with ease (tech-comfy) but have not yet had time to reflect upon these uses, let alone broaden their repertoire (tech-savvy), may be prone to misaffordancing in their use of digital tools (kurek & turula, 2014). consequently, it is extremely difficult—if not impossible—to find examples in which the influence between involved elements/participants will be simple and unidirectional. a good instance of such complex, multidirectional interactions between uses, tools and the social context is the one coming from miller et al.’s study. the escape of young people from the popular network is motivated by social factors (belonging to a certain culture determined by their age); but also uses factors—a want for privacy and instantaneous, nonverbal communication. the latter, which makes the younger generation choose applications like snapchat is, in turn, the outcome of ongoing technological changes, one of which is the growing iconization of online messaging—today anything is a message and non-verbality (audio, video, image, emoji) is gaining in popularity. all in all, it is hard to disagree with dahlberg when he opts for a non-reductionist perspective on the interplay between users, their motivations, the cultures underlying these motivations and the constantly changing modern technologies. new technologies, new tendencies the nmc horizon report in order to examine the contemporary network of mutual relations between uses, technologies, and social life it is important to first delineate the modern, which, in the case of technology, is an elusive concept, always ahead of the ones trying to understand and describe it. in the fast-changing world of new media, one of the most reliable sources of knowledge about 52 anna turula new technology-related tendencies in education in general and, specifically, in university teaching is the nmc horizon report (2014, 2015, 2016). it is compiled annually by two non-profit organizations: the international new media consortium and the educause learning initiative, an association for the promotion of new media in the academia. the report, which is recognized worldwide, is the work of renowned new technologies experts and practitioners from all over the globe. the panel of horizon experts works through a communication technique called the delphi method: each participant, based on extensive reading in the field of new technologies, is asked to cast multiple votes until 18 topics: 6 trends, 6 challenges and 6 important developments in educational technology are agreed upon. the aim of this is two-fold: (1) a description of newly introduced technologies; (2) an evaluation of their educational potential and a prognosis how they are going to influence world education in the five years to come. the diagnoses for the years 2014–2019, in the above-mentioned categories are described below. when it comes to the most important trends, the expert panel emphasizes the growing popularity of social media. what follows is the new model of the internet use, marked by creation, sharing, and communication, which now go hand in hand with—if not replace—the more passive receptive activities of the past. what follows, as the horizon panel predict, is an inevitable shift of the educational paradigm towards more participatory pedagogies and collaborative learning, with more emphasis on distance and blended education. in such a context learning will be experiential in the sense that students will be able to rely on their technological expertise, which, almost always, is of out-of-school origin. besides, and still within the experiential mode, schooling will need refocusing: creation of content in place of mere reception of teacher-generated materials; time and space flexibility with more learner autonomy in their management; connective learning based on communication/networking via the channels of online interaction chosen by the students; etc. in the part of the report devoted to challenges, the experts list a number of problems which need to be tackled if the above-listed trends are to be effectively translated into educational practice. the problems include: (1) low digital literacy of teachers; (2) the lack of training opportunities for the said teachers on the available tools and their affordances; (3) low flexibility of universities as institutions, and (4) the unwillingness of academia to open to groups of low educational culture. in the light of all this, as the horizon panel predict, universities may soon have to face a serious competitor: massive open online courses (moocs), offered by renowned universities via platforms such as coursera, opened, noved, and others. even if moocs are still in their infancy and their quality may be difficult to determine, they have two very important advantages: “[they] help prospective students make informed choices about which courses to take … [and], like any college courses, moocs benefit 53between new technologies and new paradigms… from critical, independent, and public evaluation from people who don’t have a stake in their outcome” (solomon, 2013, http://tech.mit.edu/v133/n2/mooc. html). in other words, the open courses pose a challenge which definitely is not to be ignored, especially in the face of all the deficiencies listed above. the last part of nmc horizon report is devoted to the most important developments the expert predict in new technologies. listed below, the innovations are indirectly ((1), (3), (5), (6), (7)) or directly ((2), (4)) connected with education.1 they include (2014, 2015, 2016): 1. a growing popularity of consumer goods such as 3d video, electronic publishing, mobile devices and apps; 2. new digital strategies: byod (= bring your own device), flipped classroom, gamification and others; 3. internet technologies: cloud computing, the internet of things, machine translation, semantic applications, etc.; 4. learning technologies: badges, learning analytics, moocs, mobile and online learning, open educational resources, ples (= personal learning environments), virtual and remote laboratories, etc.; 5. social media technologies: collaborative environments, collective intelligence, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, and others; 6. visualization technologies: 3d printing, augmented reality, information visualization and visual data analysis, volumetric, and holographic displays; 7. enabling technologies: affective computing, machine learning and many, many others. from new horizon to new paradigms a non-reductionist approach looking at all three—trends, challenges, and the prognosticated developments—from the non-reductionist perspective, we can say that there will be interplay between all three of them. first of all the trends will be both influenced by and influencing technological development. there will also be a constant tension between these trends and challenges: the more effective the ways of overcoming the problems, the more likely the development as prognosticated. on the other hand, though, consistently low literacy levels as well as the lack of institutional flexibility on the part of the universities may lead to fossilization of technology use—a manifestation of which will be web 1.0 ways utilized in 1 own categorisation (at). 54 anna turula the era of web 2.0/3.0—or misaffordancing, resulting from insufficient digital competence (cf. kurek & turula, 2014). some examples of the latter state of being can be observed in how developments in educational technology proceed in the academic poland (or, in fact, worldwide—cf. peachey, 2014). there is a strong pressure on the more modern—and, consequently, more digital—approach to tertiary education. what follows is a turn towards e-learning, which is carried out at 47% of polish universities (hołowiecki, 2014), 84% of which use the moodle platform to accommodate their distance and blended courses. this open-source learning management system, especially if used with the plugins which make individualization and gamification possible, has the potential to live up to the trends and developments described in the nmc horizon report (2014, 2015, 2016). however, everyday practice shows that moodle courses are predominantly traditional, teacher-fronted, students-as-consumers learning environments, in which learning through interaction is rare if not non-existent, and which serve mainly as repositories of handouts. the blame can be laid on the—previously mentioned— insufficient digital literacy on the part of the teachers together with organisational problems at universities (cf. the cited report, the challenges section). however, operating from a non-reductionist perspective and considering the multidirectional interplay between uses, technology, and social factors, one is certain to uncover deeper layers of cause-effect relations in this area. it is true that the trend to turn to e-learning is the result of new technological developments and the choice of how these developments are used is strongly determined by one’s digital expertise. however, and equally importantly, the underlying factor of the above-mentioned choices is social/cultural: one’s educational philosophy. in other words, the quality of moodle courses described earlier as prevailingly handout-based may very well stem from a belief that knowledge is the result of transmission rather than interaction, that it is acquired rather than constructed, and that its flow is unidirectional, from the know-all teacher to the passive student. the interplay between this belief and new technological developments will very likely result in education which, in spite of the modern medium, is very traditional in the negative sense of this word. this will obviously re-raise the question of the real meaning of modern in education relying on modern technologies; a question that can only be answered if one is operating from the non-reductionist perspective. from this perspective it is easier to see that while new technological developments do have impact on the educational culture and the available (digital) tools and their potential uses, they are also strongly influenced by the educational culture and—together with it, in a cyclical way—determine the choice of digital tools and their affordancing. if this culture is not modern, neither will be its pedagogical practices, even if informed by the latest technological developments. 55between new technologies and new paradigms… consequently, in order to trigger—or simply understand—true paradigm shifts in (academic) education, we need to operate on the level of the complex and multilevel relations between the different aspects of technological developments. only such a non-reductionist perspective allows for going beyond simplistic unidirectional assumptions as *if horizon experts prognosticate an increased popularity of social media in education, it is necessary to extend learning spaces into the most popular snss*. to make a genuine difference in how we learn and teach, networking for educational purposes—to continue with the same example—needs what lantz-andersson et al. (2013) call recurrent negotiation. there is room for such negotiation at the meeting points of the three different aspects of the circuit of technology listed by dahlberg (2004): uses, tools, and the social context. within this territory, the reflection on the idea of networking for educational purposes may start with the examination of popular uses of snss, abstracting from the tool itself. with such a starting point, the educator is likely to arrive at a model of schooling which is based on interaction, (digital) identity building, creating, sharing, etc. if this observation negotiates well with the educator’s own teaching philosophy—participatory and dialogic rather than transmissive—or if the acknowledgement of popular sns uses motivates the educator to renegotiate his/her current teaching philosophy, s/he arrives at the point where choices are made considering digital tools for implementing the teaching model. this implies going back to the very sns. however, whether it appears suitable for educational purposes is, again, a matter of negotiation between a given social medium and its social embeddedness. the latter means considering such problematic issues as privacy concerns between teachers and students (cf. the earlier-mentioned pollara & zhu, 2011), and may make the educator look for technological options similar to, but other than a given sns. all this requires a non-reductionist considering and frequent reconsidering of multiple factors. in conclusion, the whole process of modernizing schools/academia in line with the current trends, complex, and multilayered, needs to be negotiated at the different meeting points of the three aspects of new technologies in education. the next section describes such an attempt. it presents exploratory research on a blended ma seminar taught as a series of onand offline tutorials. as the complete results of the study have been presented elsewhere (turula, 2014, 2015) the description and analysis below concentrate on the non-reductionist interplay of uses, tools, and the social context. 56 anna turula negotiating between uses, tools, and the social context an insight into a study the study into the process of teacher training enhanced by new technology was carried out between february and may 2014. it was an exploratory study, carried out as action research into an ma call seminar facilitated in the blended format as a series of onand offline tutorials. the participants of the class were 9 first-year students of the tefl ma program at the pedagogical university in cracow, poland. each of the students took part in 4 tutorials scheduled at two-week intervals, 2 face-to-face meetings, and 2 digital classes via google drive. the study and its results were described in detail in previous publications (turula, 2015, turula, in press). the present article offers an insight to this study which pertains to the focus of the article: negotiating between the digital realm, with its different tools and their affordances and a social context of the digital—or blended, as is the case here—education. the starting point of the concept of this class was the teacher’s interactive and dialogic educational philosophy. it motivated the choice of the tutorial method, which relies on one-to-one encounters between the teacher and the student. in practice, a tutorial revolves around an essay which the student is asked to write for every meeting with the tutor; the essay is then read, discussed, and leads to another written work to be prepared for the following meeting. in essence, every such meeting is individualized based on the knowledge the tutor has gained about the student; and student-centered, as the tutor always shifts the focus onto the student, by asking eye-opening questions rather than lecturing. based on the teaching philosophy together with the choice of method, the criteria were formulated for the selection of the digital tool to be used in the online part of the blended class. as a result of the negotiation between the social context—understood here as the educational culture that was aimed at together with the students’ own preferences concerning the new media—and the necessary uses of the prospective digital tutorial tool(s), the following functions were required: (1) the possibility for the student to share a body of text with the tutor; (2) the possibility for the teacher and the student to comment on this text and respond to comments, synchronously and asynchronously; (3) the availability of the tool to all parties involved. based on these criteria, google drive was used as the medium. the choice complied with all the three requirements above: everybody in the group and the teacher had gmail accounts granting access to this online drive for storing, sharing, and co-editing documents, presentations, forms, etc., with the comment and chat functions available when collaborating on a given file. 57between new technologies and new paradigms… when implemented, the course practicalities were as follows: – the offline meetings lasted for 30 minutes, and each of them was devoted to essay reading (15 min.) and the following discussion, in which the tutor asked questions concerning the essay and the tutee answered them (15 min.); – the online meetings were unrestricted in time (but for the two-week time frame within which the student shared the essay online), the tutor asked questions using the comment function, the tutee answered the questions (the ask-answer process was usually repeated); occasionally, though infrequently, both the tutor and the tutee met in real time to discuss some aspects of the essay via google drive chat. the whole procedure was subject to negotiation at the meeting points of uses, tools, and the social context (already signaled in the paragraph devoted to the criteria of tool selection). the negotiation became even more complex and multilayered as the class in its blended format was implemented over the two months. evidence of this negotiation can be found in the data gathered at the end of the course by a survey in which, among other questions asked, enquiries were made about the students’ course satisfaction, as well as the perceived advantages and drawbacks of the ma seminar in its blended format. with the student general contentment with the course ranging quite high (5.33 on a scale 1–6), there is an interesting picture of the whole tuition process emerging from the comments regarding strong and weak points of each mode of the tutor-tutee interaction. while the possibility to dialog with the teacher on the one-to-one basis (9 out of 9 respondents) and the question-not-lecture mode (7/9) are listed as the strong points of both online and offline meetings, the students ascribe different, and mutually complementing, advantages to the two tuition modes. all students (9/9) value face-to-face meetings over the online encounters for the direct one-to-one contact with the tutor. at the same time, however, they admit that the digital tutorials had a definite virtue of enabling the dialog to happen in what one student referred to as slow motion: the lack of time constraints resulted in a much deeper level of processing in the tutor-tutee exchanges. most students (7/9) valued the online format for the time to think before answering the tutor’s questions which, as all of them admit, helped them better prepare for the ultimate goal of the class—writing and defending their ma thesis. the results point to two potential areas of interaction between the three aspects of the digital circuit (dahlberg, 2004). first of all, in addition to the impact of the teaching philosophy on the choice of methods and tools (described earlier), we observe a reverse influence potential: that of the technological choice impacting the quality of the teaching method in question. as the survey data show, through the use of new technologies, the traditional tutorial method gains yet another advantage: the possibility to strengthen and extend its previous potential for promoting critical thinking and reflexivity in the student. at 58 anna turula the same time, student (dis)satisfaction expressed in the survey quoted above, especially the complains about the depersonalization and lack of immediate contact typical of the digital tutorial mode, are likely to motivate the tutor to rethink course design, which may imply a shift from the addie2 instructional mode to rapid prototyping, the latter being ongoing and reflection-based. this has the potential to initiate another complex social context / uses / tools / social context negotiation and resulting in modifications in every one of the three aspects of the technology circuit. conclusions new technologies have already become an integral part of every sphere of life. education is no exception, and the importance of the new media will grow, expanding, in the years to come, into new territories, potentially beyond those prognosticated in the nmc horizon report (2014, 2015, 2016). however, the influence of the digital upon the so-called traditional is by no means straightforward, unilateral, and monoplanary. as demonstrated in the article, to change the ways and paradigms of education—or simply to understand these changes— a non-reductionist perspective need to be applied; a perspective from which one is able to grasp the complex network of mutual interactions between the three aspects of digitally enhanced education: the varied, individual, tech-informed, and socially determined motivations of the user; the tools available and subject to proper affordancing as well as socially embedded; and the social context which, mostly, is both the starting and the end point of all technological change. references carr, n. (2011). the shallows. how the internet is changing the way in which we read, think and remember. london: atlantic books. dahlberg, l. (2004). internet research tracings: towards non-reductionist methodology. journal of computer mediated communication, 9(3). retrieved from http://onlinelibrary. wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2004.tb00289.x/full hołowiecki, m. (2014). wykorzystanie e-learningu jako formy kształcenia zdalnego na uczelniach wyższych w polsce. paper read at v polski moodlemoot, częstochowa, 9–10 april 2014. 2 chronologically: analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation. 59between new technologies and new paradigms… kurek, m., & turula, a. (2014). digital teacher autonomy – wishful thinking or reality? on teacher attitudes to web 2.0 tools. in m. dodigovic (ed.), attitudes to technology in esl/efl pedagogy (pp. 112–127). dubai: tesol arabia publications. lantz-andersson, a., vigmo, s., & bowen, r. (2013). crossing boundaries in facebook: students’ framing of language learning activities as extended spaces. international journal of computer-supported collaborative learning, 8(3), 293–312. mcluhan, m. (1964). understanding media. the extension of man. new york: mcgraw-hill. morbitzer, j. (2009). interakcja człowiek – internet – ref leksje pedagogiczne. in j. morbitzer (ed.), komputer w edukacji. kraków: katedra technologii i mediów edukacyjnych, uniwersytet pedagogiczny. morbitzer, j. (2010). szkoła w pułapce internetu. in j. morbitzer (ed.), człowiek – media – edukacja. kraków: katedra technologii i mediów edukacyjnych, uniwersytet pedagogiczny. peachey, n. (2014) why do so many moodle courses suck? accessed september 5, 2016. retrieved from http://nikpeachey.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/why-do-so-many-moodle-course s-suck.html pegrum, m. (2009). from blogs to bombs: the future of digital technologies in education. perth, australia: university of western australia press. poster, m. (1997). cyberdemocracy: internet and the public sphere. in d. porter (ed.), internet culture (pp. 201–217). new york : routledge. pollara, p., & zhu, j. (2011). social networking and education: using facebook as an edusocial space. in proceedings of society for information technology & teacher education international conference 2011 (3330–3338). chesapeake. solomon, e. (2013). moocs: a review. are edx and coursera the future of university education? accessed september 5, 2016. retrieved from http://tech.mit.edu/v133/n2/mooc. html stone, a. r. (1995). the war of desire and technology at the close of the machine age. cambridge, ma: mit press. turula, a. (2014). instructional and interactive learning modes in university eand b-courses: where should we be heading in language teacher training? paper read at the pl-call 2014 international conference, warsaw, 5–6 june 2014. turula, a. (2015). kiedy dydaktyka akademicka jest nowoczesna: o potrzebie dywersyfikacji kształcenia na odległość. kultura i polityka, 16, 45–63. turula, a. (in press). university education in the digital age. in m. marczak & j. krajka (eds.), call for openness. frankfurt: peter lang. weinberger, d. (2012). too big to know. new york: basic books. the nmc horizon report: 2014 higher education edition. accessed september 5, 2016. retrieved from http://cdn.nmc.org/media/2014-nmc-horizon-report-he-en-sc.pdf the nmc horizon report: 2014 higher education edition. accessed september 5, 2016. retrieved from http://www.nmc.org/publication/nmc-horizon-report-2015-higher-educationedition/ the nmc horizon report: 2016 higher education edition. accessed september 5, 2016. retrieved from http://www.nmc.org/publication/nmc-horizon-report-2016-higher-educationedition/ 60 anna turula anna turula zwischen neuen technologien und neuen paradigmata im hochschulunterricht. eine nicht reduktionistische auffassung z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g der beitrag schildert einen teil der zwischen februar und mai 2014 im magisterseminar aus dem bereich der methodik von englischunterricht durchgeführten forschung. das seminar wurde mittels einer hybriden tutormethode geführt: die teilnehmer (n = 9) sollten vier essays schreiben und diese der verfasserin als routinemäßige tutorials (zwei arbeiten) präsentieren oder in cloud computing zugänglich machen (google drive; zwei arbeiten). die besagte studie und deren ergebnisse wurden in anderen publikationen detailliert beschrieben (turula 2015; turula wird gerade gedruckt). der hier dargestellte forschungsteil konzentriert sich auf die qualität der ausbildung von künftigen lehrern mittels neuer technologien. besondere aufmerksamkeit wurde dabei geschenkt dem didaktischen prozess im berührungsgebiet von zwei wirklichkeiten: von der welt der digitalen werkzeuge und vom gesellschaftlichen, wirklichen und digitalen kontext, in dem die lehrer und die studenten fungieren. preface we began publishing this journal in 2015. the decision to publish came from the fact that although poland has a strong presence among second language acquisition and multilinguality researchers, which is demonstrated by both the large number of conferences and also book publications appearing every year, academic journals focusing on theoretical issues as well as practical concerns of sla are fairly rare. the initial success of the journal is demonstrated by the fact that despite its short life, it is already indexed in several databases, including scopus (from 2018). thanks to this, it is also recognised by the polish ministry of higher education as a serious academic journal. we would also like to emphasize that the origins of our journal can be found in the success of the international conference on second/foreign language acquisition which has been organized for over thirty years by the institute of english at the university of silesia. it is an academic event that brings together many polish and foreign academics every may. its focus is on new trends in sla research but also on fairly un-researched issues. the conference always has a leading theme; however, scholars are invited to present their research even if it falls outside the scope of the main topic. our journal quickly became an additional channel for publication of conference papers of high academic standard. however, we also warmly welcome other contributions, those not connected with the conference itself. the whole process of paper submission is automated via an open journal system (ojs) and this embraces the article submission, referee assignment and double blind-review processes as well as the revision, copyediting, and production stages. a team of experts from the university of silesia press are involved to make the whole procedure smooth and effective. the open access system allows for the generous availability of the most recent research in the field at no cost at all, thus promoting articles published in its issues to wide audiences. we believe that our journal already serves an important need in projecting new and interesting research in sla coming both from polish and foreign theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 6 (1), 2020, pp. 5–8 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.8439 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en 6 preface scholars in the field. recently we have noticed a significant increase in submissions from all over the world, which will undoubtedly find its reflection in the upcoming volumes. the journal is published bi-annually, in june and december. as mentioned earlier, each text is peer-reviewed in a double-blind reviewing process by referees selected by us from the editorial board, but also beyond. the editorial board itself consists of both polish scholars and foreign experts in the area, and represents the wide range of research interests of its members. all updated information on the journal is available on the journal webpage at www.tapsla.us.edu.pl the present issue has a clearly visible leading theme, extending over the first four contributions, which revolves around the strategic and combined use of all learners’ linguistic resources in various communicative situations, more or less directly associated with their language learning/acquisition process. the additive approach, highlighting a united perspective of all language systems functioning as one communicative resource, is often discussed under the heading of translanguaging, while the alternative approach, focusing on switching between available separate systems, driven by local and goal-oriented needs, is traditionally subsumed under the label of code-switching, although as we will see in the papers comprising the bulk of the present issue, the distinction is not always so clear. the first paper, entitled “chinese teachers’ attitudes towards translanguaging and its uses in portuguese foreign language classrooms,” presents the results of a very interesting study among native chinese teachers of portuguese as a foreign language, working at chinese universities, on the potential benefits of using students’ l1 in the classroom. the author, jorge pinto, confirms the observations of other researchers that, contrary to the recommendations of the administrators, translanguaging practices involving the use of students’ l1, especially in the initial stages of acquisition, are conducive to more effective learning. the second contribution, by dominika dzik, titled “variations in child-child and child-adult interactions—a study of communication strategies in l3 spanish,” extends the perspective to three languages, because the communication strategies reported in the study offer evidence for intriguing strategic exploitation of all language resources which the learners have at their disposal. interesting findings demonstrate preferences for resorting to learners’ l1 (polish) or l2 (english) repertoire as correlated with the age and native language of the conversational partner. clil (content and language integrated learning), although on principle giving preference to the l2, and sometimes insisting on its exclusive use, can nevertheless accommodate code-switching practices, as demonstrated by katarzyna papaja and marzena wysocka-narewska in their study “investigating code-switching in a content and language integrated learning (clil) classroom.” the study is predominantly diagnostic in nature, aimed at finding the situations where code-switching takes place, as well as the most important reasons for that 7preface phenomenon. the authors additionally attempt to assess which instances of code-switching could have facilitating, and which have detrimental effect on learners’ progress. spanish as l3 returns as the major focus of the paper by teresa maria włosowicz “translanguaging as the mobilisation of linguistic resources by learners of spanish as a third or additional language.” in the article the multilingual perspective of the present volume reaches its peak, as the strategic use of at least five different languages is demonstrated here. a number of intriguing contrasts between students of english philology and students of romance philology are demonstrated and discussed, pertaining to the activation of learners’ linguistic resources in situations where their command of spanish proves insufficient. the fifth contribution in the present issue, by katarzyna rokoszewska, titled “intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity in speaking english at secondary school—a case study of a good, average, and poor language learner,” shifts the perspective to a very detailed and focused investigation of individual learners. somewhat to her surprise, the author finds out that all the learners mentioned in the title exhibited a similar level of lexical complexity, which she attempts to account for within the complex dynamic systems theory, a novel approach to the role of variability, highlighting the dynamic and non-linear nature of language development. the final research paper in the present issue, “metaphors we academicize the world with?—metaphor(icity) perceived in the context of academia (a case study of english philologists-to-be),” by adam palka, investigates a peculiar, but prospectively a very influential (in the context of professional l2 use) environment, of polish students of english, in the context of their developing command of selected aspects of academic discourse. the author focuses on the learners’ awareness of metaphorical encoding of reality, especially in the context of their everyday functioning in the academic environment. as in a number of previous ones, the present issue also concludes with three book reviews. the first one, by marek derenowski, presents a commentary on the monograph by sarah mercer and marion williams, entitled multiple perspectives on the self in the sla (2014), which brings together the theories formulated within many disciplines, focusing on the construct of the self, and explicates their significance for the present-day understanding of the processes involved in sla. in reviewer’s opinion, it is both comprehensive enough to appeal to a very diverse audience, and at the same time sufficiently comprehensible to serve the needs of not only advanced researchers, but also of young apprentices in the academic trade. the second publication, małgorzata bielicka’s efektywność nauczania języka niemieckiego na poziomie przedszkolnym i wcze snoszkolnym w dwujęzycznych placówkach edukacyjnych w polsce [the effectiveness of teaching german at the pre-school and early school levels in bilingual educational institutions in poland] (2017), is reviewed on by zofia chłopek. the reviewer acknowledges the value of the empirical study presented 8 preface in the book, stressing the fact that there are not many such accounts of bilingual programmes in poland with l2 other than english. one of the most valuable assets of the volume is also its development of a new rating scale of learners’ grammatical competence, which promises a potential of methodological application in other studies to come. although the reviewer notices certain drawbacks, pertaining predominantly to the content of the theoretical part, she nevertheless considers bielicka’s monograph a valuable contribution to our knowledge about teaching foreign languages to young learners. finally, the third review, by jolanta latkowska, comments on vaclav brezina’s monograph statistics in corpus linguistics: a practical guide (2018), representing a modern approach to introducing linguists to the arcana of statistical analysis. since the publication offers the readers access to a number of very useful online calculators as well as a package of extra materials available from the publisher’s website, it clearly makes a significant step beyond the traditionally understood idea of a practically-oriented resource book. it is highly recommended by the reviewer to all applied linguist requiring solid quantitative bases for their research. we hope that this issue will be of interest to all researchers working in the field of second language acquisition. at the same time, we would also like to invite polish and foreign academics to share their scholarly research with us by submitting their work to the theory and practice of second language acquisition journal published by the prestigious polish academic publisher, wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego (university of silesia press). danuta gabryś-barker adam wojtaszekhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-0308-4337 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703 theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 6 (2), 2020, pp. 163–168 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.8325 annick de houwer and lourdes ortega (eds.), the cambridge handbook of bilingualism cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019, isbn 978-1-107-17921-9, 664 pages the cambridge handbook of bilingualism, edited by annick de houwer and lourdes ortega, is a welcome recent addition to the renowned series of cambridge handbooks in language and linguistics. the volume, as the editors state in the introduction, presents a broad spectrum of research focusing on individual bilingualism in a lifespan perspective. more specifically, the editors’ intention in their selection of topics is to offer a developmentally oriented and socially contextualized perspective on the learning, use, and unlearning of more than one language or language variety. the volume consists of 27 chapters divided into six parts, a list of references, a language index, an index of place names and a subject index. the volume is dedicated to the memory of jules ronjat, a pioneer in bilingualism research, and richard schmidt, a second language researcher. this, together with the professional background of the editors, as well as the selection of authors, emphasizes the extent to which the perspectives of bilingualism and second language acquisition research are interconnected and makes the volume interesting and relevant for researchers in both fields. in the introduction, subtitled learning, using and understanding more than one language (pp. 1–12), the editors present their perspective on bilingualism. their approach to bilingualism is inclusive, that is, it includes all languages and language varieties, learned in instructed contexts or informally acquired, that an individual can at least understand to a minimal degree in whatever modality (spoken, written or signed), regardless of the precise number. it is developmentally oriented, by which they mean that bilingualism is a lifetime experience that involves the learning, use, maintenance, and unlearning of https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en anna ewert164 languages at different stages. this approach is also socially contextualized, as it demonstrates how social contexts and societal language ideologies affect bilingual outcomes. last, but not least, it is dynamic and multidimensional as it provides insights from multiple disciplinary perspectives. part i, bilingual learning and use at five stages of life, comprising five chapters, discusses aspects of bilingual development and use at different life stages. in chapter 1, becoming bilingual in early childhood (pp. 15–35), serratrice discusses bilingual language development in early childhood, that is, since birth until the age of six. the chapter traces bilingual development from the beginnings of speech discrimination, focusing next on vocabulary acquisition and grammatical development. the discussion in this chapter includes the development of language-specific gestures and touches upon the issue of language differentiation. chapter 2, bilingualism from childhood through adolescence (pp. 36–58), by bigelow and collins, focuses on school-age bilingualism, children and youth in dual language contexts. the chapter carefully analyzes the situation of migrant children learning a majority language at school, language majority children becoming bilingual in immersion contexts, language rights and language education of speakers of minority, heritage and indigenous languages, as well as language use in the community and digital spaces. chapter 3, young bilingual adults (pp. 59–75) by gonçalves, is focused on global hybrids, that is, young mobile adults in a range of contexts, underscoring the fact of global mobility in this generation. in chapter 4, bilingualism in midlife (pp. 76–100), singleton and pfenninger discuss the maintenance of two languages into adulthood, heritage languages, and bimodal bilingualism. the main focus of the chapter, however, is the role of age of acquisition and differences between child and adult second language acquisition. in this context, they include a detailed discussion of evidence of successful adult l2 learning of indigenous and regional languages, successful adult foreign language learning and successful learning by cultural and economic migrants. the last chapter in this part, language and older bilinguals (pp. 101–115) by goral, addresses a number of issues related to age-related changes in language use and processing as well as the processes of second language learning and first language loss in healthy older bilingual adults. part ii, the larger contexts of bilingualism, consisting of four chapters, elucidates the role of societal language ideologies and contexts. in chapter 6, ideologies of language, bilingualism, and monolingualism (pp. 119–134), fuller defines language ideologies as “ideas about language structure and use that index political and economic interests of individuals and the social groups and nations to which they belong” (p. 119). further on, she discusses monoglossic, standard, and pluralistic ideologies, noting how dominant language ideologies shape language practices and policies. in chapter 7, bilingualism and the law (pp. 135–151), angermeyer discusses various aspects annick de houwer and lourdes ortega (eds.), the cambridge handbook… 165 of bilingual legal-lay communication, emphasizing how language ideologies and, in particular, implicit assumptions made about language, bilingualism, and translation, manifest in the legal sphere. in chapter 8 (pp. 152–172), lo bianco discusses language planning and policies for bilingualism, mainly in the australian context, demonstrating that the practices of language policy making in education are affected by policy makers’ knowledge about bilingualism and arguing for rights-based language education that fosters proficiency bilingualism for all children. the final chapter in part ii, the economics of bilingualism (pp. 173–190) by grin, presents research in the emerging field of economics of language, providing evidence for the complex link between individual and collective biand multilingualism and economic (dis)advantages, and argues that “there are no economic reasons for advocating linguistic uniformity over linguistic diversity” (p. 187). part iii, contexts for bilingual learning and unlearning, consisting of five chapters, provides more in-depth insights into some typical routes into bilingualism. chapter 10, the nature of exposure and input in early bilingualism (pp. 193–212), while focusing on bilingual children, discusses important distinctions relevant to researchers in various fields of second language acquisition and bilingualism research, relating to the quality and quantity of input and different ways of measuring the length and intensity of exposure. in chapter 11, becoming bilingual through additive immersive programs (pp. 213—232), juan-garau and lyster discuss various types of bilingual education programs, that is, various types of immersion programs, content and language integrated learning (clil), and study abroad (sa) in terms of learning outcomes and the role of affective factors. in chapter 8, foreign language learning from early childhood to young adulthood (pp. 233–249), muñoz and spada discuss a range of issues related to second language acquisition in instructed contexts, beginning with focus on meaning and form as optimal fl instruction, through optimizing input, to ways of enhancing input in classroom instruction. a separate section is devoted to very young learners. chapter 13, supporting bilingualism in adult first-generation migrants (pp. 250–266) by simpson, starts with a presentation of the language learning contexts of bilingual migrants and then discusses policy and pedagogical support for the migrant adult language learners. the final chapter in this part, unlearning and relearning of languages from childhood to later adulthood (pp. 267–285) by keijzer and de bot focuses on l1 maintenance and attrition in children and adults, and relearning the l1 by international adoptees and heritage language speakers. part iv, the dynamics of bilingualism across the lifespan, contains four chapters with varying themes relating to language acquisition and use. chapter 15, the measurement of bilingual abilities by treffers-daller (pp. 289–306), is another methodological chapter, after meir and armon-lotem, focusing on anna ewert166 issues fundamental to bilingualism research. concerned with measurement, treffers-daller first attempts to define bilingual abilities, and then discusses selected approaches to measuring vocabulary and syntactic abilities in two languages. the chapter by biedroń and birdsong, highly proficient and gifted bilinguals (pp. 307—323), deals with the question of talent in language learning and focuses on polyglots and hyperpolyglots, savants, and young interpreters. the next chapter by de houwer, language choice in bilingual interaction (pp. 324–347), provides an exhaustive overview of research on language choice in real-time, face-to-face dyadic interactions. chapter 18, first language attrition: from bilingual to monolingual proficiency? (pp. 349–365) by köpke, is a comprehensive review of research on language attrition with a clear focus on methodology of attrition research. part v, bilingualism research across disciplines, containing five chapters, was meant by the volume editors to provides insights from disciplines usually not associated with bilingualism research, which was a fairly difficult task, as the other parts contain numerous chapters from disciplines other than linguistics or psychology. the first chapter in this part, “bilingualism and clinical linguistics” (pp. 369—389) by hammer and edmonds, provides an overview of characteristics and assessment of language deficits in typical disorders in bilingual children and adults, as well as intervention programs. in chapter 20, doing and undoing bilingualism in education (pp. 390–407), garcía and tupas, beginning their discussion with fishman’s (1977) distinction between elite and folk bilingualism, provide an overview of educational programs and practices that either foster bilingualism or promote monolingualism in bilingual minority students, eventually making a case for translanguaging pedagogies for minoritized learners. in the next chapter, second language acquisition as a road to bilingualism (pp. 408–434), ortega provides an overview of second language acquisition research in the context of bilingualism studies with a special emphasis on crosslinguistic influence. this is followed by a discussion of success in adult l2 learning, l2 learning in the context of migration and in academic contexts. the last chapter in this part, bilingualism in neurolinguistics: from dynamic to static approaches (pp. 466–479) by hernandez, provides an overview of neurolinguistic findings on bilingualism, including a discussion of the most recent models of bilingual brain representation. part vi of the volume, bilingual connections, comprises four chapters and links to related research areas. the first chapter in this part, bilingualism and sign language research (pp. 483–509) by tang and sze, provides a detailed review of bimodal bilingualism research. chapter 25, bilingualism and bidialectalism (pp. 510–523) by chevrot and ghimenton, provides a sociolinguistic, variationist account. chapter 26, bilingualism and language contact (pp. 524–543) by aalberse and muysken introduces the related perspective of contact linguistics. the final chapter, bilingualism and multilingualism annick de houwer and lourdes ortega (eds.), the cambridge handbook… 167 (pp. 544–560) by quay and montanari, espouses the perspective of those multilingualism researchers who emphasize the difference between bilingualism and multilingualism. chapter 22 in part v, bilingualism in cognitive science: the characteristics and consequences of bilingual language control (pp. 435–465) by paap, merits a separate discussion. the chapter aims to provide a concise overview of psycholinguistic research on bilingualism. the discussion in this chapter begins with an overview of research and models of bilingual lexical processing, psycholinguistic language and task switching studies. the final sections discuss autobiographical memories, research on emotions and moral judgements. these accounts are rather uncontroversial. however, in sections 3 and 4 paap decides to take an issue with the executive function and linguistic relativity research respectively. while paap is well-known among bilingualism researchers for his stance on the bilingual executive function advantage hypothesis (e.g., paap & greenberg, 2013), the debate seems far from being over, and excluding other viewpoints on the contentious issue is a significant oversight on the part of the volume editors. while discussing linguistic relativity, on the other hand, paap reviews a number of behavioral experiments conducted by athanasopoulos, overlooking the event-related potentials study by thierry, athanasopoulos, wiggett, dering, and kuipers (2009) on categorical perception of color, which leads him to the mistaken conclusion that “language affects post-perceptual judgements” (p. 459) but not pre-attentional perception. this view is simply untenable in light of available empirical evidence (mo, xu, kay, & tan, 2011; maier, glage, hohlfeld, & abdel rahman, 2014; cf. ewert, 2016 for a discussion of bilingual categorical perception) and perpetuates another myth in a field of study that already abounds in them. all in all, the volume provides a balanced overview of the numerous complementary perspectives on the growing interdisciplinary field of bilingualism research. the only field that seems to have been somewhat neglected by the editors is psycholinguistic research on bilingual language processing, where several complementary perspectives could have been presented instead of one. by presenting a vast scope of bilingualism research, the volume provides a very welcome introduction to the diverse research areas for bilingualism researchers as well as other language professionals. the excellent editorship makes all the chapters readable to a non-specialist. it is also easy to see how the different chapters interconnect, giving evidence that the multidisciplinary bilingualism research is a field of study in its own right. the volume also demonstrates the close interconnection between bilingualism and second language acquisition research. the authors of numerous chapters: singleton, lyster, de bot, treffers-daller, muñoz, ortega, biedroń, birdsong or köpke, are well-known to second language researchers, while part iii of the volume is especially relevant for language teachers. anna ewert168 references de houwer, a., & ortega, l. (eds.). (2019). cambridge handbook of bilingualism. cambridge: cambridge university press. ewert, a. (2016). space, motion and thinking for language. in v. cook & li wei (eds.), cambridge handbook of linguistic multi-competence (pp. 376–402). cambridge: cambridge university press. fishman, j. a. (1977). bilingual education: current perspectives. arlington: center for applied linguistics. maier, m., glage, p., hohlfeld, a., & abdel rahman, r. (2014). does the semantic content of verbal categories inf luence categorical perception? an erp study. brain and cognition, 91, 1–10. mo, l., xu, g., kay, p., & tan, l.-h. (2011). electrophysiological evidence for the left-lateralized effect of language on preattentive categorical perception of color. pnas, 108(34), 14026–14030. paap, k. r., & greenberg, z. i. (2013). there is no coherent evidence for a bilingual advantage in executive processing. cognitive psychology, 66(2), 232–258. thierry, g., athanasopoulos, p., wiggett, a., dering, b., & kuipers, j.-r. (2009). unconscious effects of language-specific terminology on pre-attentive color perception. pnas, 106(11), 4567–4570. anna ewert adam mickiewicz university in poznań, poland https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2771-0278 małgorzata szupica-pyrzanowska, katarzyna malesa university of warsaw, poland are they part of the equation? foreign language teachers vs. language attrition a diagnostic study a b s t r a c t non-pathological language attrition has been thoroughly investigated in the context of first as well as second language (for review, see bardovi-harlig & stringer, 2010; schmid & mehotcheva, 2012). however, still not enough is known about language attrition in a different population. foreign language teachers, who often fight an uphill battle trying to prevent their learners’ lack of progress, may also face a different challenge. namely, their own linguistic skills may regress as well. therefore, the inquiry should be extended so as to include this population. as a result, in the present study we aim to investigate the extent to which fl teachers are aware of the phenomenon of language attrition. the diagnostic study was motivated by anecdotal evidence and frequent interactions with foreign language teachers. our observations rested on the assumption that fl teachers may experience stagnation in the language they teach or may even be on the verge of language regression. twenty-one primary school non-native foreign language teachers (mean age 29) representing both rural and urban areas participated in the study. all participants had a b.a. in elementary education and were pursuing their m.a. in language teaching. in our pilot study, they were asked to complete an anonymous questionnaire including both closed-ended and open-ended questions. the preliminary analysis reveals factors contributing to language loss among foreign language teachers and suggests future research directions. keywords: foreign language acquisition, language attrition, fl teacher rationale for the study language teachers are essential components of the learning process. they create and develop language syllabi. they supervise the implementation of theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 3 (2) 2017, pp. 49–68 małgorzata szupica-pyrzanowska, katarzyna malesa50 language curricula. they are an integral part in the development of the educational process anywhere in the world (harmer, 2007). finally, they are a liaison between the language they teach with its corresponding culture and their students. hence, they are expected to be competent not only methodologically but linguistically as well. we distinguish between language (or linguistic) competence and professional (or methodological) competence and make the former the scope of the present inquiry. the term linguistic (language) competence is understood here as relating to an adequate level of language appropriateness and correctness including: one’s level of lexical knowledge, syntactic flexibility, a repertoire of registers, pragmatic understanding, the knowledge of the corresponding culture acquired while visiting the countries where the language is spoken natively. language competence is contrasted with the notion of professional (or methodological) competence which relates to one’s knowledge of methodology and pedagogy acquired in the course of studies and/or through participation in professional development initiatives such as workshops, methodological conferences, webinars, seminars, round tables where one is able to expand the scope of knowledge and ultimately gain more experience in teaching languages. we state at the outset of the paper that maintaining linguistic competence of a foreign language teacher requires constant effort, diligence, and perseverance. the present study was motivated by our observations of extramural m.a. students at the university of warsaw who already worked as elementary school foreign language teachers. the anecdotal evidence collected over the course of two years has shown that they constitute an increasingly diverse population. the foreign language teachers whom we observed not only represent different parts of poland but also different levels of english proficiency and acquisition paths. in their language production, both spontaneous and rehearsed, they tend to make a wide range of errors some of which may have already fossilized (e.g., the inconsistent use of english inflection, non-target syntactic structures, erroneous lexical choices). the anecdotal evidence of their non-target production, which prompted us to pursue the matter further, was collected through frequent writing assignments and numerous in-class discussions. our observations coincided with the results of the european survey on language competences (eslc, 2015). fourteen european countries participated in the study in which three skills were assessed: listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and writing. poland was the only country where, additionally, speaking skills were evaluated. as many as 499 polish 3rd-year junior high school students were tested in 37 schools throughout the country. the results indicated that 41% of the polish students were at the a1 level. every third student was at a2, while every fourth student represented the b1 level. the outcome was alarming considering that the participating students were nine years post-onset. while the learners in this comprehensive study were are they part of the equation?… 51 examined thoroughly, no parallel study was conducted in poland to investigate the language competences of teachers. in contrast to the survey, a thorough assessment of efl teacher competence was done in the context of content and language integrated learning (clil) implementation in italy (di martino & di sabato, 2012). the authors intended to gain insights into efl teachers’ methodological/linguistic competence and needs. the report presents and analyzes criteria for the assessment of foreign language teacher competence (e.g., the ministry only accepts certifications recognized by the governments of countries where the foreign languages to be certified are spoken natively, the list of recognized certifications is periodically updated, additional methodological training is available to those teachers whose language competence represents the c1 level of the cef). italian researchers and policy makers are in the process of gathering information regarding the exact number of teachers representing different levels of fl competence per region and stress the importance to investigate whether the level of competence teachers have self-assessed actually corresponds to real competence. they address, as well, critical issues such as the fact that most fl teachers in italy never studied the language they teach in a systematic way or “the scarce professionalism” of some fl teachers. lastly, di martino & di sabato recommend the ministry of education carry out a strict assessment of the teachers’ foreign language competence. moreover, in australia, special purpose tests have been designed to select overseas-qualified immigrants who apply for teacher education programs (the diploma of education, oral interview test of english, viete, 1998) or to assess language proficiency of, for instance, italian and japanese foreign language teachers (elder, 1994; elder et al., 1995). prospective non-native language teachers are also observed and given feedback during a classroom language assessment scheduled to detect the english language problems faced by them during their teaching practice (elder, 1993b). in the pursuit of creating adequate means of measurement and assessment, elder (2001) evaluated the tests in terms of their authenticity, usefulness, practicality, and the environment in which they are administered. still, more reliable and systematic studies on the assessment of foreign language teacher linguistic competences are needed. being a non-native language teacher is by no means a disadvantage. it is an asset. previous research shows that native and non-native language teachers are easily distinguishable, independent groups, each with its unique characteristics. benke and medgyes (2005) asked 422 hungarian fl learners of english to assess native and non-native language teachers. native language teachers were praised for their conversational skills and their abilities to conduct dynamic and lively lessons. they were perceived as having friendly personalities and being linguistic role models. in contrast, non-native language teachers were deemed to be better equipped to explain grammar-related concepts and to supply the małgorzata szupica-pyrzanowska, katarzyna malesa52 exact lexical items needed by the learners who either did not know them or were unable to retrieve the words from their mental dictionary. undoubtedly, both groups enrich the learning experience, in an identifiably different way though (similar results were obtained by lasagabaster and sierra (2005) in the basque country). to our knowledge, no such tests assessing foreign language teacher linguistic, not methodological, competences, have been created, implemented, and presented in poland. the report prepared by the institute of educational studies (instytut badań edukacyjnych, ibe) included only a description of teacher competences, not their actual assessment whereas the ibe quality control of language teaching was based on the monitoring of the teachers’ work. in practice, it predominantly involved the evaluation of syllabi, teachers’ self-assessment, and their declaration of hours worked. this is all the more important in the current fl context where teaching is done mostly by non-native speaker teachers (over 80% as per canagarajah, 1999). without a doubt, the number is higher in the context of foreign language teaching in poland where less than 5% of english teachers are native speakers (personal communication, 2017). nicholas (1993) maintains that, in general, the training received by future non-native foreign language teachers in the course of their undergraduate studies is neither sufficient nor appropriate. consequently, they are not satisfactorily prepared for classroom interaction and often fall short of students’ expectations. likewise, the training they undergo does not equip them with relevant pragmatic and discourse competences. we argue that this insufficient training deprives them of being linguistically competent right from the start, sets the tone for their professional career and, ultimately, may be one of the prerequisites for language attrition. undeniably, there are numerous factors crucial in maintaining a desirable linguistic outcome. for the purpose of the present study we turn to an under-researched area and examine language attrition as an element contributing to the deterioration of fl teacher linguistic competences. language attrition by nature, languages are intuitively associated with the processes of acquisition, learning, speech production or linguistic use. in other words, there is a strong tendency to associate languages with a gain and with managing rather than maintaining linguistic resources in different contexts. therefore, it seems less intuitive to think of them in terms of breakdown, loss or attrition. unrightfully so, as language attrition is very much a linguistic reality (szupicaare they part of the equation?… 53 pyrzanowska, 2016). in the present study attrition is understood as longstanding loss rather than temporary losses of linguistic material (brown, 1994) which is triggered by “disuse, lack of input or reduced input” (bardovi-harlig & stringer, 2010) and characterized by, but not limited to, the following features: shrinking phonetic inventories, simpler phonetic rules, lack of grammatical flexibility, smaller lexical repertoires (holmes, 2008). likewise, in our definition of attrition we assume the loss of the linguistic material that was previously possessed by language teachers and we argue for the absence of the linguistic knowledge that was once present, tangible and can no longer compete with the other, more frequently used linguistic system, in this case the l1. attrition relates to a gradual change in one’s linguistic behavior triggered by a lack of contact with a community in which the language is spoken natively. the severed or less frequent contact with the community results in one’s inability to maintain fluency or in a loss of language fluency and its proficient use. this is fuel for the argument that in order to be maintained, languages have to be constantly supplied with linguistic material. otherwise, they erode (szupica-pyrzanowska, 2016). as in the case of language acquisition, language attrition is a dynamic and non-linear process (schmid, köpke, & de bot, 2013) consisting of different transitional phases. we propose the following intermediate stages along the continuum from acquisition to attrition, or from knowing a language to knowing it less. the first stage, stagnation, is distinguished in terms of language inertia triggered by a lack of regular contact with language or its infrequent use. at this stage most foreign language users let their skills lapse. if prolonged, stagnation may lead to a phase of little variation where no new linguistic material is introduced to the speaker’s repertoire. consequently, fl users reach a plateau and cease further development. an extended plateau, in turn, may trigger language regression which, if sustained, could be a prerequisite to language attrition. considering the fl circumstances, non-pathological language attrition should never result in no knowledge at all. instead, it is rather likely to lead to the so called critical threshold, a level beyond which knowledge will resist further deterioration and will be stored in “permastore” understood as extremely long-term or lasting memory (neisser, 1984). hitherto, in the literature there is no consensus regarding the exact trajectory of the forgetting curve. on the one hand, the forgetting curve begins with a plateau during which language competence is unaffected (weltens & cohen, 1989). proponents of a different view state that lack of contact with language triggers forgetting which quickly becomes fixed and stabilizes (bahrick, 1984). thus far, the following three attrition scenarios predominated: 1. an immigrant who is a speaker of the language not spoken natively in the new country of residence and who slowly loses his native language. małgorzata szupica-pyrzanowska, katarzyna malesa54 2. a speaker of a language who lives in a place where a different language is considered more prestigious or sought-after. 3. a learner who studied a language at school and who loses the language owing to the lack of opportunity to practice it outside classroom (reilly, 1988). the aforementioned examples, however, do not include foreign language teachers. following cook (2015), we relate to foreign language teachers as foreign language users. a non-native speaker teacher is a foreign language user who has acquired another language. hence, the non-native speaker teacher is looked up to and revered by the students. after all, “he learned the language by a similar route to the students” (cook, 2015) and can resort to the students’ l1 whenever necessary and just like his students, the non-native speaker teacher has to make an effort so as to maintain his foreign language skills (llurda, 2005; macaro, 2005). although fl teachers are not a homogenous population, they, nevertheless, share certain features. for instance, they may rarely, if ever, go beyond the curriculum, they may have a restricted contact with the fl community, they may not use the language they teach on a regular basis, their language may be reduced to a metalinguistic jargon, they may speak their l1 in fl classes, they may represent similar acquisition paths. in their case “a break with a previously established linguistic tradition [that] leads to reduction in linguistic form and the creation of gaps in the individual’s linguistic repertoire in that language” (andersen, 1982, p. 87) is not as spectacular as that in the case of emigrants whose linguistic contact is often abruptly severed. non-pathological attrition may not be immediately obvious and easy to detect because speakers can use different compensatory strategies to veil its appearance (herdina & jessner, 2002). even though paths leading to attrition are different in fl teachers and emigrants, the outcome and the consequences of the process are similar. despite the fact that literature on the assessment of foreign language teacher competence is emergent, the literature on non-native teacher language attrition is scarce. włosowicz (2016) investigated 39 l1 polish foreign language teachers of english who were asked to complete a grammar test and fill out a questionnaire in which they reflected on their ways to prevent attrition and presented their attitudes towards correctness. analysis of the results indicated that the vocabulary part of the test was done the most successfully, while articles and reported speech were the most difficult. the results obtained from the grammar test were not compatible with the participants’ assessment of the task difficulty. for instance, reported speech was not regarded as challenging despite the high error rate on sentences including this syntactic structure. włosowicz concluded by stating that, even though it seems counterintuitive, teaching a foreign language could be a source of language attrition among language teachers. the reasons for the loss of language in the formal context are twofold, a regular contact with students’ errors and the need to adjust language to the learners’ level. are they part of the equation?… 55 finally, in the present study we propose a three-way paradigm shift. 1. pathological attrition (aphasia) → non-pathological attrition (healthy language users). 2. l1/l2 → fl. 3. learner’s language attrition → teacher’s language attrition. the present study aim the overall aim of the present study was to investigate and assess the level of awareness of language attrition among fl teachers of english in polish primary schools. specifically, we intended to inquire about the respondents’ beliefs, views, opinions on issues related to language attrition. also, we queried whether fl teachers relate the phenomenon in question to their own language competence. method in our diagnostic study, the participants were requested to complete a survey in pen-and-paper format. the anonymous questionnaire was given in polish and included seven openand closed-ended questions. the survey was not applied during lessons. two dates were offered to participate in the study. the questionnaire was administered during two different testing sessions given on two different days arranged to meet everyone’s schedule. the participants voluntarily signed up for the date of their choice. no specific time was allotted to complete the questionnaire, so the participants took as much time as they needed to address the questions. population twenty-one elementary school teachers (mean age 29 years) were included in the study. all were females. all had a b.a. in elementary education and were pursuing their m.a. degree in language teaching. they were second-year extramural students of the university of warsaw. on average, all had at least 7 years of teaching experience. they represented different regions of poland, both urban and rural. małgorzata szupica-pyrzanowska, katarzyna malesa56 results question 1 is knowledge of foreign languages susceptible to loss? (see figure 1). figure 1. reasons for language loss. all 21 teachers confirmed that the knowledge of a foreign language is undoubtedly susceptible to loss. the following issues were identified as potential reasons for attrition: teaching young children (48%), insufficient contact with the foreign language (29%), incompetent teachers (10%), and language interference (5%). question 2 which language aspects are prone to loss? (see figure 2). figure 2. language areas/skills prone to loss. are they part of the equation?… 57 as many as 71% of the surveyed teachers claimed that of all language aspects vocabulary is most prone to loss, 48% identified grammar, 23% – speaking and writing, while 5% considered listening as particularly susceptible to loss. as for grammar components prone to loss, the participants listed the third conditional, past perfect, and other complex tenses. in addition, vocabulary both in speaking and writing was regarded as susceptible to attrition along with productive skills in general. question 3 which aspects of a language are resistant to loss? (see figure 3). figure 3. language areas/skills resistant to loss. the aspects of a foreign language which are most resistant to loss are, in the opinion of the respondents: reading (52%), listening (38%), vocabulary (33%), grammar (26%), and pronunciation (5%). the participants emphasized that most resistant to loss are those elements of language which are most frequently used, such as everyday vocabulary and simple grammar. question 4 how could one prevent foreign language loss? (see figure 4). małgorzata szupica-pyrzanowska, katarzyna malesa58 figure 4. what prevents language loss? the participants specified several ways of preventing foreign language loss, the most important of which are contact with native speakers (57%) and reading books/newspapers (57%). the respondents were of the opinion that watching films in a foreign language (33%), listening to the radio and audiobooks (33%) and, in general, using the language actively (33%) warrants its retention. they also recommended taking part in language courses (19%), travelling (14%), using internet resources (5%), and practicing writing in a foreign language (5%). question 5 do foreign language teachers have to constantly work on their language skills? if so, why? if not, why not? (see figure 5). figure 5. why do fl teachers have to work on their language competence? are they part of the equation?… 59 all participants confirmed that foreign language teachers constantly have to work on their language skills. their responses can be grouped into four categories: (1) “[i]n order not to forget the language” (47%); (2) “[b]ecause languages change and evolve” (33%); (3) “[i]n order to provide students with good input” (19%); and (4) “[t]o advance students’ as well as one’s own linguistic knowledge” (14%). question 6 how should foreign language teachers further develop their language competences? (see figure 6). figure 6. how should fl teachers further develop their language competences? the participants identified several ways to develop foreign language competences, the most important of which was professional development (61%). according to the respondents teachers should also develop their language skills through reading (47%), as well as watching television and films in a foreign language (42%). surprisingly, only 28% of the respondents listed contact with native speakers as a preventive measure. subsequently, the respondents listed travelling (23%), practicing listening in a foreign language (9%), and using mobile apps (5%). question 7 are foreign language teachers’ language skills prone to loss? (see figure 7). małgorzata szupica-pyrzanowska, katarzyna malesa60 figure 7. are foreign language teachers’ language skills prone to loss? all participants admitted that foreign language teachers’ language skills definitely are prone to loss. however, they declared that they were neither aware of language attrition nor related it to their own competences prior to the survey. discussion we acknowledge that the sample size in our diagnostic study might have been too small to draw any major conclusions. it was, however, representative enough in a sense that certain patterns did emerge regardless of the sample size. in question 1, we inquired whether the participants confirm that foreign language knowledge is susceptible to loss. surprisingly, the preliminary analysis revealed that nearly half of the participants immediately related the question to their own profession/language experience and stated that teachers working with different age groups could be differently prone to language attrition. this finding is alarming for two different reasons. first, according to our respondents, those who teach children are more likely to attrite than the teachers whose learners are older. needless to say, the process of acquisition or knowledge accumulation has physiological manifestations. in general, teaching is manifested by passing on knowledge and, thus, leaving traces behind. teachers have a privilege not only to influence young minds but also to activate different parts of their students’ brains. in order to achieve that, teachers need to provide their learners with input whose frequency is important. further, abstract notions have to be broken down into cognitively manageable units that are easy to parse. once understood, internalized and rehearsed, the abstract notions can be comare they part of the equation?… 61 mitted to long-term memory and retrieved whenever necessary. the brain is changed by the experience. brain regions that are frequently used grow bigger owing to the formation of additional connections among neurons. in this sense, learning can be equated with creating neuro-traces either as changes in the existing connections between neurons or as new neural connections. earlier in life, learning proceeds more swiftly and effortlessly due to brain plasticity. childhood is a time of significant brain growth. cortical grey matter is at its highest volume in the prepubertal population (mills et al., 2016). the grey matter contains those areas of the brain that supervise muscle control and sensory perception (e.g., speech, hearing, seeing, memory) which are crucial in the process of learning (miller et al., 1980). the child constantly absorbs new things, shows an inquisitive spirit, embarks on new adventures, explores and experiments in the environment. this window of opportunity eventually „closes.” consequently, the educational system should protect, not fail, very young fl learners whose natural aptitude has to be supported by the teachers who understand the population they work with. second, considering the responses given by the participants in the present study, the teachers whose learners are young are not necessarily motivated to work on their own language competence. we speculate that this fact might partially stem from teachers’ failure to realize their students’ full potential and cognitive needs. the quality of an early language exposure is indeed important, though. au et al. (2002) investigated the acquisition of spanish by college students who had overheard the language as children and in some cases knew a few words. the participants neither spoke nor understood spanish and were evaluated as “heritage language” acquirers. the “overhearers” were compared to students who had no exposure to spanish before the age of 14. the members of both groups were native english speakers studying spanish as an l2. the test results indicated that the “overhearers” acquired a native like accent while the other students did not. the mere exposure to the language meaningfully present in their linguistic environment during formative years resulted in phonological attainment reached years later. furthermore, some participants in our study pointed to incompetent teachers as a possible source of language loss on the part of the students. a different perspective is assumed here. by doing so, the respondents related to their own experience of language learning which may still resonate with them. as for question 2, a number of issues arose in relation to language areas/ skills which are prone to attrition. the respondents identified speaking and writing as language areas susceptible to loss. this is in line with the findings that receptive rather than productive skills are more resistant to loss (bahrick 1984; hansen 2011). the vast majority of the participants pointed to vocabulary with low frequency of use and complex syntactic structures. in both cases the underlying assumption is that the frequency of use is a determining factor of małgorzata szupica-pyrzanowska, katarzyna malesa62 language attrition. the category of low-frequency items has been identified as “high attrition sites” (preston, 1982). in question 3, we asked which aspects of a language are resistant to loss. the vast majority of the participants identified receptive skills, reading and listening, as less susceptible, which is again consistent with bahrick (1984) and hansen (2011). everyday vocabulary and simple syntactic structures were also characterized as loss resistant. some participants conveyed that well-rehearsed elements, whether lexical or syntactic, are much more easily committed to long-term memory than their poorly-rehearsed counterparts. once more, the frequency of use emerged as a decisive factor in language retention. the next question related to the ways in which one can avoid language loss. there was a myriad of preventive measures listed by the participants, from contact with native speakers, the active use of a foreign language or attending language courses through a constant revision, to reading books/newspapers, watching movies, and travelling. all of the aforementioned measures were to guarantee an active use of a foreign language. some participants elaborated on their survey responses and added that it is imperative to stay in touch with the language at all cost and that one cannot afford to lose contact with the language one studies. the preventive measures distinguished by the participants in the present study overlap with the strategies counterbalancing attrition observed by włosowicz (2016). the participants’ responses to question 5 can be divided into those that pertained to the teachers’ own language (e.g., “to advance one’s knowledge,” “in order not to forget”) and those referring to learners (e.g., “to provide students with good input”). the teachers not only acknowledged that languages are dynamic entities which evolve and change over time, but they also emphasized the need to constantly update their knowledge of the english language. their descriptive answers that followed were humble, reflective, and revealed that the respondents understand knowledge of language to be a continuum along which one can fluctuate. below, we present some of the most profound opinions voiced by our respondents: every teacher is also a student. constant effort is required if one is to become an expert. i experienced that and i know now how quickly one can lose access to previously gained knowledge. language loss in teachers is more severe than in language learners. language learning never ends. [author’s translation] taking into consideration the answers to question 6, it is apparent that the participants misunderstood it. here, we asked how foreign language teachers are they part of the equation?… 63 should further develop their language competences. as many as 68% of the respondents replied that they improve their language competences through professional training (e.g., conferences, workshops). they seem to have mistaken professional development for language development. the responses appear compatible with what some of them stated off the record, though. unofficially, our participants admitted that they learn about new methodologies, they participate in workshops and conferences, but they do not necessarily make an effort so as to maintain their language competence through a regular contact with the language they teach. they conceded that while speaking the language in class, they rarely go beyond the subject-specific metalinguistic terminology and classroom register. in addition, the do not expand on their lexical repertoires either. they described their lexical acquisition as sporadic and incidental. it is evident that they do not attrite professionally as teachers but linguistically as language users. finally, in question 7 we narrowed down the scope of our inquiry and asked specifically whether foreign language teacher language competence could be compromised. the participants unanimously responded „yes” to the question. some teachers admitted that the survey made them realize that attrition applies not only to their learners but to their own language skills as well. once again, the participants drew attention to the fact that particularly those foreign language teachers who teach (young) children have to be vigilant. elementary school teachers are more likely to cease their language development. after all, foreign language teachers cannot be expected to interact with language learners of a limited linguistic control in the same way they communicate with (near) native-speakers (elder, 1993c). fl teachers claim to simplify the english they use in class for their students’ sake. in turn, this simplified in-class communication together with the exposure to the errors made by students do not always foster teacher’s language development. as a remedy, the respondents proposed teaching students of different age, which, in their view, will help teachers maintain their language competences and will motivate them to speak better in class. language attrition could be triggered by a lack of motivation or a burnout effect, as lack of motivation is known to correlate with language loss (mehotcheva, 2010; schmid & dusseldorp, 2010). like the participants in the study done by włosowicz, our respondents complained of the administrative work they are required to do and lack of flexibility on the part of school principles. as a final point, we wish to address the length of teaching experience. the participants in our survey had, on average, seven years of professional experience. considering it from the perspective of attrition, seven years of teaching suffice to experience language slowdown. in some measure, this is in keeping with bahrick (1984) who tested 773 individuals speaking spanish as their l2. they differed in terms of acquisition paths and incubation periods, the time małgorzata szupica-pyrzanowska, katarzyna malesa64 during which they had no contact with spanish. the incubation periods ranged from a few months to over 25 years of non-active learning. a greater intensity of attrition has been observed during early years of language non-use (0–3) than subsequent years (5–25). in light of what bahrick reported, the results of the present study appear disturbing because, unlike the spanish learners in bahrick’s experiment, our participants are expected to use the language actively. of course, the extent to which they do so remains to be determined. we can only speculate that however much language they use is apparently not enough to sustain it. novice teachers should be informed that initially, attrition proceeds rapidly and reaches a plateau at later stages. the first few years of teaching are, thus, crucial for long-term language retention. foreign language teachers have to be supported in their professional endeavors. we aim to reach out to the community of foreign language teachers and draw their attention to the phenomenon of language attrition, inform them about ways to prevent it and recognize its early stages not only in their students, but in their own language production as well. non-native language teachers have to rethink their own language competences. foreign languages have to be maintained on a regular basis or to state it in di martino and di sabato’s terms—language maintenance should not be of “a once-in-while nature but rather […] a life-long form of training” (2012, p. 77). taken as a whole, in the present study we made the following observations: (1) the level of language attrition awareness among fl teachers is low; (2) fl teachers do not seem to always distinguish between language and professional competence; (3) fl teachers are more likely to relate attrition to their students’ rather than to their own language skills; (4) teachers who teach preschool and kindergarten learners are more prone to attrition than fl teachers whose students are teenagers and adults; (5) those who teach young fl learners report to be less motivated to maintain their language skills. undoubtedly, more research is needed to examine the relation between lack of motivation and teachers’ language attrition which for now remains understudied. conclusion the benefits of studies investigating language attrition in fl teachers are at least twofold: (1) the present study and studies alike stress the importance of supporting fl teachers in their professional endeavors particularly by providing them with more opportunities to work on their language competence; (2) by raising teachers’ awareness of the problem, we aim to prevent fl loss and emphasize that changes are needed in teacher education programs so as are they part of the equation?… 65 to include the issue of attrition, self-assessment of one’s language competence, and strategies promoting regular language maintenance. moreover, most foreign language teaching programs tend to exclusively concentrate on improving teachers’ professional (methodological) competence while ignoring the importance of their actual use of language (cullen, 1994). it goes without saying that language improvement initiatives are not only expensive undertakings that require devoting considerable resources, but are also time-consuming in terms of development and implementation. by no means, it is an easy task. however, it is an imperative and urgent matter because insufficient fl teacher language competence may negatively influence their own self-confidence, sense of professionalism, and it may also prevent them from a skillful implementation of their methodological abilities, which in turn may obstruct learner progress. fl learners’ success largely depends on their teacher’s language and professional competences. lastly, in order to investigate non-native teacher language attrition it is imperative to first define the domain of teacher proficiency to understand what is being lost. we ought to determine whether teacher proficiency is different from other professional competences and establish if it is distinguishable from “general” language proficiency (elder, 2001). further, the underlying assumption of the present study also relates to the issue of an adequate teacher language assessment. this, in turn, relates to the dilemma that teacher language proficiency is not defined in a systematic and consistent way. according to elder (2001), when designing tests measuring teacher language competence, we have to compromise between “real and ideal.” it is challenging to design tests/measures which are genuinely representative of the target environment (douglas, 2000). “the construct of teacher proficiency, is clearly multidimensional, and this poses problems for the interpretation and reporting of performance” (swales, 1990, p. 52). what adds to the problem is the vastness of a possible classroom interaction or “allowable contributions” made by teachers. the present diagnostic study is just a prevue of what we intend to accomplish longitudinally. our long-term goal is to organize workshops on language attrition for fl teachers and teachers-to-be and to implement online measures (e.g., eye tracking, erp) which could determine the level of attrition and in turn inform pedagogy. meanwhile, it is necessary to rethink pedagogy and reset priorities. non-native language teacher linguistic competence and attrition merit further attention and examination to warrant long-term solutions. we begin to scratch the surface, but even now at the preliminary stage it becomes evident that what emerges is only the tip of a multilayered iceberg. małgorzata szupica-pyrzanowska, katarzyna malesa66 references andersen, r. w. 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(1994). principles of language learning and teaching. regents: prentice hall. canagarajah, a. s. (1999). interrogating the ‘native speaker fallacy’: non-linguistic roots, nonpedagogical results. in g. braine (ed.), non-native educators in english language teaching (pp. 77–92). mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. consolo, d. a. (2006). on a (re)definition of oral language proficiency for efl teachers: perspectives and contributions from current research. melbourne papers in language testing, 1, 1–28. cook, v. (2012). ‘the native speaker’ and ‘multicompetence.’ in p. robinson (ed.), routledge encyclopedia of second language acquisition (pp. 454–455; 447–450). london: routledge. cullen, r. (1994). incorporating a language improvement component in teacher training programmes. elt journal, 48(2), 162–172. di martino, e., & di sabato, b. 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(1982). how to lose a language. the interlanguage studies bulletin: isb on naturalistic and guided second language learning, 6, 64–87. reilly, t. (1988). maintaining foreign language skills. eric digest. schmid, m. s., & mehotcheva, t. h. (2012). foreign language attrition. dutch journal of applied linguistics, 1(1), 102–124. schmid, m. s., & dusseldorp e. (2010). quantitative analyses in a multivariate study of language attrition. second language research, 26(1), 125–160. schmid, m. s., köpke b., de bot, k. (2013). language attrition as a complex, non-linear development. international journal of bilingualism, 17(6), 675–683. swales, j. (1990). genre analysis: english in academic and research settings. cambridge: cambridge university press. szupica-pyrzanowska, m. (2016). language attrition – implications for second/foreign language acquisition. lingwistyka stosowana, 16(1), 97–108. małgorzata szupica-pyrzanowska, katarzyna malesa68 viete, r. (1998). culturally sensitive and equitable assessment of oral english for overseasqualified teacher trainees. journal of intercultural studies, 19(2), 171–184. weltens, b., & cohen a. d. (1989). language attrition research: an introduction. studies in second language acquisition, 11, 127–133. włosowicz, t. m. (2016). english language attrition in teachers: questions of language proficiency, language maintenance and language attitudes. 28th international conference on second language acquisition and foreign language learning, szczyrk, poland, 19–21 may 2016. małgorzata szupica-pyrzanowska, katarzyna malesa geht das auch sie an? die fremdsprachenlehrer angesichts des phänomens des verlusts der sprachkenntnisse z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g der nicht pathologische verlust der sprache wurde schon in bezug auf heimatsprache und zweitsprache genau erforscht und beschrieben (bardovi-harlig & stringer, 2010; schmid & mehotcheva, 2012). wir haben aber immer noch unzureichende kenntnisse über eine andere population, die durch verlust von sprachkenntnissen gefährdet ist, nämlich die fremdsprachenlehrer, die keine muttersprachler sind. die fremdsprachenlehrer, welche alltags gegen fehlende fortschritte bei ihren schülern ankämpfen, können auch einer anderen herausforderung ausgesetzt werden, nämlich fehlender weiterentwicklung ihrer eigenen sprachkenntnisse. so ist auch diese population in den forschungen zum verlust der sprachkenntnisse zu berücksichtigen. in vorliegender diagnostischer untersuchung bemühen sich die verfasserinnen zu ergründen, inwiefern die fremdsprachenlehrer sich über den sprachverlust im klaren sind und in welchem maße das problem sie selbst angeht. der anlass zur diagnostischen untersuchung waren die während ihrer vieljährigen hochschularbeit mit fremdsprachenlehrern angesammelten meinungen. die verfasserinnen gingen davon aus, dass sich die fremdsprachenlehrer in der zu unterrichteten fremdsprache ausgebrannt fühlen können oder auch einem rückgang ihrer linguistischen fähigkeiten unterliegen. an der untersuchung nahmen 21 fremdsprachenlehrer (durchschnittsalter von 29 j.) teil, die einen anonymen fragebogen mit geschlossenen und offenen fragen ausfüllen sollten. die rohanalyse offenbart die gründe des verlustes von sprachkenntnissen bei fremdsprachenlehrern und suggeriert die richtungen der etwaigen künftigen forschungen. schlüsselwörter: fremdsprachenunterricht, verlust der sprachkenntnisse (eng.: language attrition), fremdsprachenlehrer anna mystkowska-wiertelak, mirosław pawlak, willingness to communicate in instructed second language acquisition. combining a macro and micro-perspective. (second language acquisition). series editors: david singleton and simone e. pfenninger. bristol–blue ridge summit: multilingual matters, isbn 978-1-78309-716-6, 231 pages the book written by anna mystkowska-wiertelak and mirosław pawlak entitled willingness to communicate in instructed second language acquisition. combining a macroand micro-perspective is a compendium of knowledge on willingness to communicate and perhaps the most recent update on empirical findings in this area of second language acquisition. the volume consists of three major sections, an extensive bibliography, seven appendices and additionally author and subject indices. the volume starts with the introduction, which constitutes a convincing justification for taking up the topic of willingness to communicate (wtc), a classic construct in psycholinguistics, second language acquisition, and communication studies, just to name a few disciplines in which wtc features as a significant variable. wtc has become of special interest especially in the era of globalization, when the need for communicative effectiveness has come to the fore in the world of travel, professional and personal interaction, and, importantly, immigration. the authors place wtc within studies of contextualized individual learner differences as well as studying interaction as an important facilitative factor and in fact predictor of success in second/foreign language acquisition/learning. such an understanding derives from psycholinguistic (intheory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 3 (2) 2017, pp. 121–129 122 danuta gabryś-barker dividual determinants) and sociolinguistic (contextual) perspectives from the interaction hypothesis (1985), output hypothesis (swain, 2000), skill-learning theory (dekayser, 2007) or sociocultural theory (lantolf, 2006). first of all, this introductory part of the book presents the construct of wtc, following macintyre et al.’s (2011) understanding of it as a multidisciplinary concept deriving from psychology, linguistics, education, and communication. the authors offer a brief overview of the first empirical studies on wtc, the focus of which was on cause-and-effect and which were carried out as quantitative statistical analyses in relations to individual variables. they juxtapose these with the more recent studies of macintyre and legatto (2011) and the authors’ own research which departs from the above focus and represent a so-called situated approach emphasizing the role of immediate context and dynamic model of wtc. thus, they also suggest that perhaps because wtc is not stable and fluctuates, the dynamic systems theories (dst) proposed by larsen-freeman & cameron (2008) among others can best demonstrate the dynamic interplay of different factors. mystkowska-wiertelak and pawlak stress the role of context and in this case the polish tertiary educational environment as typical of central europe. they offer a comprehensive overview of studies as well as their own pioneering contribution in this area. the volume looks at the concept of wtc from a macro-perspective, in which variables relevant to it are identified and also from a micro-perspective, in which fluctuations of wtc are observed during specific moments of time, like for example during a single class. the three main sections of the volume focus on the following: part one, “overview of theoretical, methodological and empirical issues.” part two, “exploring wtc in a foreign language context: a macro-perspective.” part three, “investigating wtc in the course of speaking classes: a microperspective.” each section of the book has a clear structure, as it is preceded by an introductory commentary and is rounded off with a conclusion part one “overview of theoretical, methodological and empirical issues” (pp. 3–72) constitutes the background to the subsequent parts of the book. it comprises three chapters. the opening chapter one “wtc: definitions and evolution of the concept,” as the title suggests, offers a discussion of the understanding of wtc from a diachronic perspective. the authors demonstrate the origins of the concept in l1 referencing the research of mccroskey, richmond, and bear (1992) among others, and proceed in their discussion to the l2 context of wtc. in initial studies, wtc was perceived as a personality trait. however, with the work of macintyre et al. (1998) and later macintyre (2007), a hybrid model of l2 wtc was proposed. more wtc antecedents were introduced, among them anomie, alienation, communicative anxiety, motivation and contact with language. wtc started to be perceived not as a stable personality feature 123anna mystkowska-wiertelak, mirosław pawlak… but a dynamic one. such a perception had far-reaching consequences for research, as wtc became a multidimensional construct relating to psychological, linguistic, social, and pedagogical concept. chapter two “methodology of empirical investigations into l2 wtc” presents an overview of studies with focus on their design and research methods. it offers an extensive comment on quantitative studies using scales and self-report questionnaires, this critical tool being the adapted version of the l1 wtc questionnaire of mccroskey (1992). the reader will find here a representative selection of studies from the first attempts to research wtc (macintyre & charos, 1996) to more recent ones (among them, macintyre & legatto, 2010; gallagher & robins, 2015; choi, 2016). these studies are mostly large scale statistical analysis projects. however, the authors are fully aware of the evolution in research on l2 wtc and point out the shift in research methods towards mixed ones, in which both quantitative and qualitative data are collected and the new focus is not only on wtc as stable behavioral pattern, but also on dynamic changes resulting from contextual factors, such as for example a learning context, contact with language, attitude, topic focus, etc. an outline overview of studies is presented here in a tabular form (table 2.1, p. 21) to be followed by a more substantial discussion of the individual studies that offer new insights into l2 wtc. the chapter concludes with the proposal to view wtc within a complex dynamic systems framework. the last chapter in section one, chapter three: “empirical investigations of l2 wtc antecedents” presents the most important research carried out in different contexts of language learning/acquisition. the studies overviewed focus on anxiety (e.g., macintyre et al., 2002, 2003; hashimoto, 2002; clement et al., 2003; dewaele, 2007), wtc and motivation (e.g., ryan, 2002; dörnyei, 2002; noels, 2003, 2005; lockley, 2013), self-concept (dörnyei, 2005; dörnyei & ushioda, 2009; yue, 2014), age and gender (macintyre et al., 2002; baker & macintyre, 2005) and personality (macintyre & charos, 1996; ghonsooly 2012). the most extensive overview relates to the research focusing on wtc and contextual factors, both cognitive and affective, such as classroom interaction context, security and responsibility (kang, 2005), instability and thus, variability of wtc (cao, 2006), the role of a teacher in wtc (zarrinabadi, 2014), a type of task and its performance (weaver, 2007 or the authors’ own contribution to researching l2 wtc from a dynamic perspective (mystkowskawiertelak & pawlak, 2016). the authors also point to new data collection tools used in these studies such as an fl learner journal and narrative texts. the previously-mentioned multiplicity of factors perceived now as antecedents of l2 wtc adds to the difficulty of designing valid and reliable tools of measurement, of which the authors are fully aware. the next parts of the book comment on macroand microperspectives in researching wtc on the basis of the authors’ own research. 124 danuta gabryś-barker part two “exploring wtc in a foreign language context: a macro-perspective” (pp. 73–116) constitutes a well-structured sequence of three chapters. the authors’ aim here is to present the design of the study and the validation process of a new tool used as a data collection instrument. the study conducted is to contribute to further extensive l2 wtc research but it is contextualized here and focuses on a specific fl learning environment of a polish university. this part starts with chapter four “the rationale for and design of the study,” which presents the aims of the research carried out as following the tradition of large-scale quantitative studies and importantly discusses the stages of the development of a new measurement tool designed by the authors as an adapted version of existing wtc questionnaires, which is suitable for the polish context. a detailed analysis of the modifications adopted are presented and justified. in the same chapter, a detailed description of the two studies, the pilot and the study proper, is offered. the following chapter five “findings of the study” demonstrates the results relating to factors underlying the construct of l2 wtc and the relationships between them as well as their contribution to wtc of polish students studying english as a major. the authors meticulously describe the first stage of the study in which the six-factor wtc tool piloted earlier (mystkowska-wiertelak & pawlak, 2016) was implemented in a group of 107 subjects. considering their sample not to be big enough, the authors carried out the same task in a group of 614 subjects to validate the tool, which resulted in establishing an eight-factor model of wtc, at the same item-reducing the number of scale entries from 105 to 55. the eight identified factors comprise communication confidence, ought-to self, classroom environment, international posture (openness to experience), unplanned-in-class wtc, international posture (interest in international affairs), practice-seeking wtc and planned-in class wtc. these factors were presented by means of correlational analysis in their data analysis. a detailed discussion of the findings presented in the previous chapter is offered in chapter six “discussion of the findings.” it not only offers a fairly extensive commentary on their findings but is also fully aware of the limitations of their study; the authors refer to these and point out sensitive areas which may not have been fully taken into account, such as individual learner differences (id). thus, the authors suggest lines for further research. the discussion focuses on the components and correlates of wtc in polish students majoring in english. it demonstrates the relationships between wtc components and their correlates. on the basis of their analysis, a hypothesized model of wtc as predictor of l2 communication is constructed. the factors and variables identified in it are discussed comprehensively here. as mentioned above, the authors are cautious and realize that there are weak points in their research. thus, they conclude that perhaps a more fine-grained model of some constructs could be adopted (e.g., in the case of motivation or learner beliefs). also, the 125anna mystkowska-wiertelak, mirosław pawlak… fact that the sample was not really homogenous, as it embraced both b.a. and m.a. students, might constitute a weak point, too. they are fully aware that id will have a significant role in wtc. so generally, a cautious attitude to the results is expressed here and the need for more research is strongly recommended. nevertheless, some of the findings discussed are worth mentioning. interestingly, what emerges as a major finding is that readiness to speak is determined by planned and unplanned in-class wtc and practice seeking, which strongly correlates with communication confidence. part three “investigating wtc in the course of speaking classes: a microperspective” (pp. 117–186) presents in detail another study conducted by the authors, this time it is, as they put it, “a more fine-grained picture of the factors shaping learners’ readiness to contribute to ongoing classroom interaction” (p. 117). the study is contextualized and aims to demonstrate the situational and dynamic character of wtc. the opening chapter seven “the rationale for and design of the study” provides a detailed discussion of the reason for designing a study that would enrich previously-carried-out large-scale research projects and add to the understanding of the construct of wtc as a fluctuating feature of learner readiness to communicate in a specifically selected context of a fl, a conversation class. in justifying the use of a micro-perspective, the authors emphasize its complimentary character in the context to large-scale research, which results in establishing tendencies and patterns but does not tap into the individual learner differences which constitute important variables in learners’ readiness to communicate. on the other hand, a micro-perspective is rich in substance, as it is grounded in the specific context of an fl class, here, fl speaking class. additionally, at the present stage of sla research, it is generally assumed that the dynamics of the process constitute one of its main characteristics. the most recent studies cited by the authors, investigating for example the construct of motivation, are designed to account for it from a complex dynamic systems theory (dörnyei et al., 2015; macintyre, 2015). as rightly stated, a micro-perspective is compatible with recent research on motivation. at the same time, as is pointed out, there are very few studies that are actually set in real-time classroom events in which for example motivational levels are measured by “moment-by-moment fluctuations” (p. 121). the micro-perspective study of wtc presented here is an extension of previous research (pawlak et al., 2016) which was based on a single fl conversation class, whereas now more extensive data was collected in the course of three conversation lessons. the general aim of the study was to pinpoint individual and contextual variables in wtc and fluctuation of participants’ readiness to communicate. the clearly formulated questions specifically refer to the extent of fluctuation of wtc during each class, its possible patterns of and factors determining either increase or decrease in wtc, the degree of individual variation of the above and the factors significant for it and also the differences between wtc in these three 126 danuta gabryś-barker conversation classes (p. 123). the authors provide a fairly detailed description of the participants grouped in three samples of two first-year b.a. majors in english and one group of year two students. the participants are described as a relatively homogenous group due to their learning profiles, study background but also their self-perception of language ability and especially their speaking skills. an important part of this chapter focuses on a detailed description of the three conversation classes both in terms of the topics discussed (crime and punishment and dreams and imagination) and classroom management in terms of forms of work (group and pair work or whole class discussion), emphasizing simultaneously that although the topics came from the obligatory syllabus, ways of running the classes were determined by individual lecturers. out of 90 minutes, the 60–65 minutes of each class when speaking actually occurred were the focus of analysis. the data was collected by means of wtc grids (tapping into fluctuation of participants’ readiness to communicate at specified interval times and recorded (appendix 6) and end of the lesson learner questionnaires, the aim of which was to identify learner-internal and learner-external factors contributing to their wtc but also their profiles and self-perceived levels of language competence. the variables enumerated were, among others, modes of work, interlocutor and his/her language proficiency. the questionnaire also included individual comments on speaking instances in terms of most and least conducive to wtc, to be identified by the participants. additionally, the authors implemented detailed lesson plans of each conversation class as prepared by the teachers and supplemented by their comments on their execution in terms of tasks, timings, and students’ reactions to the procedure of grid filling (beeps). this chapter introduces the readers to the way of analyzing the data, presented in the following chapter. the study data was analyzed quantitatively (wtc grid) by means of descriptive statistics, qualitatively (open items in the questionnaire and teachers’ comments) by identifying recurring themes and by mixed method of both. chapter eight “findings of the study” reports in a very detailed manner on the observed dynamics of wtc in each of the classes, complemented by participants’ perceptions as to the factors having an impact on individual wtc. the text starts with a general comparison between the groups as to variation in wtc in each of them. a more fine-grained analysis is then provided for each group separately, every time focusing on the fluctuation in the levels of wtc and the factors that have an impact on it, all this being discussed from the perspective of time within the whole group and in individuals and factors influencing wtc as perceived by the students in each of the groups. the analysis is quite extensive, but meticulously presented. on the basis of the wtc grids and questionnaire responses, the authors draw their main conclusions from the extensive data gathered. the data demonstrates that wtc varies considerably and fluctuates due to different contextual and individual factors 127anna mystkowska-wiertelak, mirosław pawlak… and their interplay, either contributing positively to the increase or negatively to the decrease in readiness to communicate in a given context. chapter nine, “discussion of the findings” offers deep insights into the phenomenon of wtc as situated in the reality of fl conversation classes and within the framework of complex dynamic systems theory and can be considered a significant contribution to micro-perspective research on the phenomenon of wtc. this text is built around the answers to the five research questions posed—as well as a comment on the drawbacks and challenges the authors faced in their research. as described earlier, the five research questions posed related to: (1) the fluctuation of wtc during a speaking class in each of the groups; (2) identification of (possible) patterns of this fluctuation in relations to factors determining it; (3) contextual and individual factors and their influence on decrease or increase of wtc; (4) an individual variation and factors contributing to it; (5) the differences between three groups. the answers given to each question are extensive and grounded in the data presented in clearly designed figures and tables and then discussed at length in the text. the authors are aware of certain limitations of the study and they elaborate on those pointing out, first of all, certain limitations of the tools, for example, the disruptive character of the wtc grid or lack of additional instruments that might have enriched the data (for example, class observations, post-class interviews, etc.). it is also suggested here that perhaps more information on learner profiles such as their learning strategies and experiences or beliefs might have added to the study. the challenges experienced in the course of study are seen by the authors as including the practical difficulty caused by the necessity to interfere with regularly run classes and the need to gain the trust of the participants, as well as non-anonymous responses for the purposes of correlation of different tools’ data. in terms of suggestions for future research, the authors suggest that perhaps the parameters of this study can be used in longitudinal studies at different levels of participant language competence and also not only in language but also in content classes. additionally, recommendations are made here for a methodology with strong emphasis on the triangulation of quantitative and qualitative tools, among others, teachers’ and learners’ narratives. in the final text, “conclusions, implications and directions for future research,” the reader will find a content summary of the three sections of the book with some tentative implications for fl classroom pedagogy, which refer to guidelines for teachers in their speaking classes and address the need for awareness-raising of fl learners in terms of their attitudes, beliefs, preferences as to the topics and tasks, as well as suggestions for training in communication strategies. the final sentiment of the chapter offers encouragement to carry on research in fl learners’ readiness to communicate. the book finishes with seven appendices (pp. 192–215) containing research tools used in the studies presented, as well as some of the data collected and 128 danuta gabryś-barker an extensive references section. the authors also provide the author index (pp. 228–229) of over 140 names and the subject index (pp. 230–231) containing 41 entries. i can fully recommend the volume by mystkowska-wiertelak and pawlak as a scholarly text, which is well-written, coherent, and well-informed both on the theoretical and empirical levels. first of all, it will be of interest to researchers in second language acquisition as it offers both a historical angle and a thorough update on research into l2 wtc. it can also offer valuable insights for fl instructors at different levels of the educational process, but mostly in the context of advanced fl instruction. the text is well-structured as the authors decided to divide it into three separate and yet connected parts, moving from a thoroughly discussed theoretical background defining the basic construct (wtc), the evolution and research methodology used, which are richly illustrated in the presentation of the sample studies. this theoretical background is followed by a presentation of a set of studies designed by the authors and looking at wtc from varied perspectives. the readers will find here an example of a large-scale study in the tradition of wtc research, but at the same time, the study introduces a contextualization and adaptation to the specific domain of a polish advanced learner of english. however, the authors went further in their investigations and applied a dynamic systems model to another study presented here, a study carried out from a micro-perspective which looks the wtc as not a permanent feature but undergoing modifications even within a given didactic unit such as a conversation class. the text is very dense, however, thanks to the logical and reader-friendly structure of each chapter starting with a general introduction, which allows readers to see what to expect in each chapter of the volume and finishing with a concluding section. despite its density, it is not difficult to follow the data and arguments presented, however, it requires some concentration on the line of thinking and rich data. what i personally found interesting is the innovative study of wtc from a micro-perspective, which demonstrates the complexity of both the construct discussed and individual variation. the authors combined two of the main research interests they have been investigating for years: wtc and individual learner differences (ild). so this volume can be treated as their finest achievement. however, some minor critical remarks need to be made. first of all, it would be useful to have a tabular presentation of the summary of the study description: aims, focus, timing, participants, tools, etc. (chapter 7). as mentioned by the authors, one of the tools used in the study were the lesson plans including teachers’ comments. it is not clear whether they relate to the description of each lesson and thus they are included in chapter 7 describing the study. additionally, it would make sense to include the main findings in the concluding part of the book instead of commenting on the issues already discussed, 129anna mystkowska-wiertelak, mirosław pawlak… thus avoiding repetition. the book is very carefully edited but because it is extensive, it is inevitable that some minor slips have occurred. one of them is the incomplete heading on page 170 (research question 2). also, because of the way the appendices are presented, they are not fully referenced. each of the tools included as an appendix should be clearly described as to its source, which would for example make it possible to see the difference between appendix 1 and appendix 2, which is only clarified in the chapters themselves. it might be interesting for readers to see a sample lesson plan in the appendix section. the reader may also be a little disappointed with the subject index (pp. 230–231) as containing only 41 entries, which for a book of almost 230 pages seems to be too few. to conclude, it is clear that the minor slips pointed out do not diminish the scholarly value of the volume. congratulations to the authors. danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia in katowice, poland jorge pinto1 centre of linguistics of the university of lisbon, portugal chinese teachers’ attitudes towards translanguaging and its uses in portuguese foreign language classrooms a b s t r a c t recent research has shown that l1 use can serve important cognitive, communicative, and social functions in communicative foreign and second language learning (turnbull & dailey-o’cain, 2009). in the context of chinese universities, meij and zhao (2010) argue that there is widespread agreement among administrators that l1 should not be used in l2 classrooms and that both teachers and students should follow this norm. however, in their study, they found that translanguaging practice is perceived by teachers and students as a useful approach to achieve desired learning outcomes. other studies (cai & cook, 2015; littlewood & fang, 2011) have shown that teachers use l1 in l2 class for specific functions: addressing personal needs, giving direction in class, managing class, and ensuring student understanding. the aim of this paper is to present a study of university teachers’ attitudes towards and uses of translanguaging in portuguese as foreign language classrooms. the participants were 31 chinese teachers, all native speakers of mandarin in mainland china. they answered a questionnaire to collect information related to the importance that teachers assign to different uses of translanguaging. findings indicate that the majority of the teachers believe that the use of the students’ l1 by the teacher or students could improve portuguese learning in various ways, especially in the first levels. keywords: translanguaging, portuguese, foreign language, chinese teaching context monolingual instructional practices have long been criticized by many scholars who advocate the relevance of first language (l1) use in second language (l2) learning (cook, 2001; creese & blackledge, 2010; macaro, 2001; turnbull & dailey-o’cain, 2009, among others). the last decade has witnessed 1 the author thanks the financial support of the fundação para a ciência e a tecnologia (uidb / 00214/2020). theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 6 (1), 2020, pp. 11–30 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.7742 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5583-880x https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en jorge pinto12 an increasing interest in the roles that the languages of the students’ linguistic repertoire play in learning a new language, as nowadays many learners have multilingual competence and are integrated in a multilingual society. thus, the mixed and original character of the linguistic knowledge of multilingual students cannot be understood as the mere sum of the partial knowledge of each language (grosjean, 2001; herdina & jessner, 2000) but as a linguistic multicompetence (cook, 1996). multilingualism implies the construction of a linguistic awareness that enables learners, as they incorporate new languages into their repertoire, to seek similarities between the languages already acquired and the new ones and to develop strategies to deal with differences, thus facilitating their acquisition (gonzález piñeiro, guillén díaz, & vez, 2010). as this knowledge is evident in bi/multilingual classrooms and should be considered in language learning, we have witnessed an increasing interest in the discursive practices of bi/multilingual speakers beyond the usual codeswitching of l1–l2. in this sense, researchers have developed the concept of translanguaging to refer to bilingual or multilingual oral interaction (creese & blackledge, 2010; garcía, 2009) and to the use of different languages in written texts (canagarajah, 2011) that require flexible instructional strategies in foreign language teaching (wiley & garcia, 2016). recognizing the importance of the use of all the linguistic repertoire of learners in the portuguese foreign language classroom, we conducted a study to survey the perceptions of university chinese teachers in mainland china with regard to translanguaging. the focus is to specify and understand teachers’ beliefs and attitudes towards the possible functions and reasons of translanguaging in the classroom context. therefore, the teachers answered a questionnaire, whose results indicated that the participant teachers are in general aware of the uses of translanguaging in the classroom and believe in its importance. translanguaging in the classroom the term translanguaging in education is currently widely used in different parts of the world. this concept emerged in the 1980s with the works of williams and whittal, and afterwards, the term itself was coined as trawsieithu (in welsh) by williams (1994) to refer to pedagogical practices observed in welsh schools, where english and welsh were used for different purposes in the same lesson. later, the term was translated into english, initially as ‘translinguifying’ and then as ‘translanguaging’ (baker, 2001). the concept was developed later by many researchers in the field, and it has assumed different perspectives and uses. from a linguistic point of chinese teachers’ attitudes towards translanguaging… 13 view, translanguaging is “the deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named languages” (otheguy, garcía, & reid, 2015, p. 281). as garcía (2009) indicated, language classrooms in our century are moving from monolingualism towards translingualism, encouraging the flexible use of learners’ languages rather than treating this linguistic knowledge separately, not considering it at all, or viewing it as a negative influence. therefore, it is necessary to change the paradigm to a holistic view of language that involves a new vision of language, speakers, and repertoires (cenoz, 2017). from a pedagogical perspective, translanguaging “is planned by the teacher inside the classroom and can refer to the use of different languages for input and output or to other planned strategies based on the use of students’ resources from the whole linguistic repertoire” (cenoz, 2017, p. 194). lewis, jones, and baker (2012, p. 644), referring to williams’s (1996) consideration of translanguaging as a pedagogical theory, explained that the process of translanguaging uses various cognitive processing skills in listening and reading, the assimilation and accommodation of information, choosing and selecting from the brain storage to communicate in speaking and writing. thus, translanguaging requires a deeper understanding than just translating as it moves from finding parallel words to processing and relaying meaning and understanding. wei (2016, p. 8) argues that the transprefix in ‘translanguaging’ highlights: – the fluid practices that go beyond, that is, transcend, socially constructed language systems and structures to engage diverse multiple meaning-making systems and subjectivities; – the transformative capacity of the translanguaging process not only for language systems, but also for individuals’ cognition and social structures; – the transdisciplinary consequences of re-conceptualising language, language learning, and language use for linguistics, psychology, sociology, and education. translanguaging has been broadly accepted as an effective approach to bilingual and multilingual education (canagarajah, 2011; creese & blackledge, 2010; among others). cenoz and gorter (2017a, p. 904), in line with lewis et al. (2012), also distinguish another use of the concept, namely “spontaneous translanguaging [that] is considered the more universal form of translanguaging because it can take place inside and outside the classroom.” baker (2001, pp. 281–282) proposes four pedagogical advantages of translanguaging: jorge pinto14 – it may promote a deeper and fuller understanding of the subject matter. if learners have understood the subject matter in two languages, they have really understood it, which may not clearly happen in a monolingual situation. – it may help the development of the weaker language, as it may prevent learners from undertaking the main part of their work in their stronger language while attempting less challenging tasks through the weaker language. – it may facilitate home-school links and cooperation. if the learner is being educated in a language that is not understood by the parents, he can use the minority language to discuss the subject matter with them and be supported by them in his schoolwork. – it may help the integration of fluent speakers with early learners. if l2 learners are integrated with fluent l1 speakers, and if sensitive and strategic use is made of both languages in class, l2 ability and subject content learning can be developed concurrently. cenoz and gorter (2017b) claim that translanguaging can be used in different ways in language and in content classes. in this work, they present some contributions (concerning translanguaging in input and output, the use of the l1 as a resource in language and in clil/cbi classes, and translanguaging in writing) that demonstrate the positive effect of translanguaging involving different languages and educational contexts, showing that teachers and learners use translanguaging in the classroom to ensure understanding, and that learners adopt identical strategies for writing in different languages. l1 and target language uses in chinese foreign language classrooms studies of the teaching of english as a foreign language in china (e.g., hu, 2002) have shown that the traditional approach has been a combination of the grammar-translation method and audiolingualism, as with other foreign languages. however, as this approach has failed to develop an adequate level of communicative competence in learners, since the late 1980s, an effort has been made to introduce communicative language teaching into china. nevertheless, many teachers and learners have not really changed their traditional conception of language instruction and their practices have remained the same. recently, a new teaching model for foreign languages is being implemented, namely a combination of lecture-based teaching and interactive teaching, to ensure the students’ mastery of the target language (jie & keong, 2014). the majority of studies on the uses of l1 in chinese foreign languages classrooms concern codeswitching, not translanguaging (e.g., cai & cook, 2015; chinese teachers’ attitudes towards translanguaging… 15 cheng, 2013; meij & zhao, 2010; tian & macaro, 2012; xie, 2017). however, more recently, a few translanguaging studies have been conducted in this context (e.g., wang, 2019a, 2019b; wei, 2016). in china, even though most foreign language teachers are at least bilingual, in the context of classroom formal education code-switching tends not to be allowed (cheng, 2013). as this author states (2013, p. 1279), on the one hand, “most of the foreign language classes are language subject oriented, which makes the argument for using the l1 seem less secured”; on the other hand, national curricula hardly prescribe or suggest explicitly the classroom instructional language, more precisely, the relation between chinese and the foreign language. for instance, in the teaching curriculum for english majors (2000), just one line is devoted to the language of instruction, stating that for this purpose only english should be used. although there is no clear official guidance in this regard, codeswitching is a reality in foreign language classrooms, with its use varying according to several factors, as we will see from the studies presented below. meij and zhao (2010) found that teachers’ language proficiency, students’ language proficiency, and course types influence the frequency and length of classroom codeswitching practices that are considered useful approaches in the context of chinese universities to achieve the intended learning outcomes. littlewood and fang (2011) found variations of mother tongue use in different mainland china and hong kong school contexts. this comparative study showed that the main functions of the learners’ mother tongue include addressing personal needs, managing classroom discipline, and guaranteeing learner understanding. nevertheless, their study indicates that foreign language use should be maximized to provide a conducive learning environment by exposing students to appropriate language input. cai and cook (2015) present a list of pedagogical functions of learners’ l1 (chinese) in tertiary english language teaching, which includes explaining difficult language, giving direction in class, and managing the class and interactions between teachers and students. both teachers and learners use both languages for specific purposes. another study conducted by yan, fung, liu, and huang (2016) in seven secondary schools and four universities in southern china showed that learners tended to use more foreign language in course content-related activities and less in discussions on administrative subjects such as assignments and exams. wang (2019b) carried out research in 27 countries on students’ and teachers’ attitudes and practices related to translanguaging in chinese foreign language classrooms. she concluded that “translanguaging in foreign language classrooms has by and large contributed to giving voice to students for meaning jorge pinto16 negotiation at different levels. this has all helped to acknowledging students’ input and the importance of rapport among all classroom participants” (p. 145). wang (p. 146) pointed to some relevant aspects that should be considered in language teacher education for the development of translanguaging theories and practices: – renew knowledge on language learning: the integration of translanguaging in foreign language teaching requires the reconstitution of teachers’ knowledge of languages and their teaching. – facilitate structured translanguaging strategies: it is important to give explicit guidance to teachers; otherwise, their translanguaging pedagogy will continue to develop by trial and error. only through teachable translanguaging strategies can language teachers meet the challenges posed by the everincreasing diversity in multilingual foreign language classrooms. – develop a transformative teacher-student role: teachers leave the role that traditional teaching has given them and take on the role of facilitators who organize learning situations in collaboration with students. the new roles of teacher and student blend and identify by acquiring joint responsibility. in a multilingual classroom, teachers should create an environment that allows students to bring to the classroom the languages they know and see them as legitimate and valued as important inputs. wei (2016) conducted a study of “new chinglish” from a translanguaging perspective. he argues that new chinglish originated in a new translanguaging space in china that defies the traditional boundaries of languages. as wei says, “it is a post-multilingualism phenomenon that transcends language and languages. it is translanguaging at its best” (p. 20). in his perspective, post-multilingualism does not refer to the co-existence or co-use of multiple languages, but to the promotion of translanguaging practices while protecting the identity and integrity of individual languages, and to the expression of “one’s cultural values and sociopolitical views through a language or multiple languages that are traditionally associated with the other or others” (p. 20). the study methodology the aim of the present study is not to contend whether the l1 can be used or not in classroom, but to determine chinese-university portuguese teachers’ beliefs and attitudes towards the possible functions, reasons, and rationales of translanguaging in the context of foreign language teaching. chinese teachers’ attitudes towards translanguaging… 17 the study considered the following research questions: (1) what attitudes do chinese teachers have towards teachers’ use of students’ l1? (2) what attitudes do chinese teachers have towards the students’ use of their l1? (3) what do teachers think are the benefits and detriments of using students’ l1 in the classroom? thirty-one chinese teachers, all native speakers of mandarin from mainland china universities, took part in this study. these subjects constitute a non-probabilistic convenience sampling. the participants completed an online survey (based on mcmillan & rivers, 2011, and on nambisan, 2014) that allowed us to gather information concerning the importance that teachers place on several uses of translanguaging. we expected that the anonymity of an online survey would encourage teachers to answer honestly according to their beliefs. the survey included ten questions (nine closed-ended ones, some of them scored on a likert scale, and one open-ended question). the open-ended question sought more personal and relevant answers about the benefits and harms of translanguaging. the teachers were also asked to indicate their mother tongue (since there are also portuguese and brazilian teachers teaching portuguese as a foreign language in china) and how many years of teaching experience they had as a foreign language teacher. this research included the use of both quantitative and qualitative methods; as gass and mackey (2011) emphasise, when applied for data collection, questionnaires can provide both quantitative and qualitative knowledge. findings and discussion first, we sought to determine the primary language of instruction in portuguese foreign language classes. most participants (70.97%, 22 teachers) selected the option ‘portuguese and mandarin’ as the two languages used equally in the classroom. of the remaining teachers, five (16.13%) taught using mandarin as the main language of instruction and four (12.90%) using portuguese. in an english classroom context in china, cheng (2013) obtained different results: 60% of the teachers claimed to use more than 80% english in class, and only 6.3% of the participants used less than 60% english. in this case, the foreign language is almost always the predominant language in the classroom. jorge pinto18 12,90% 16,13% 70,97% main language of instruction in class portuguese mandar in portuguese and mandarin figure 1. main language of instruction in class. figure 1 shows that these teachers are aware of the benefits of using learners’ l1 along with portuguese, as it assists them in developing their communicative competence in the latter. these results accord with those obtained in other studies, such as bernard (2013) and liu (2011). the choices of the languages of instruction of these teachers reflect cook’s (1992) perspective when he argues that the l2 develops alongside and interacts with the learner l1 rather than developing separately from it. when asked if they believe that use of students l1 in the classroom is important for learning portuguese, 87.10% of the teachers in question said ‘yes’ and 12.90% ‘no,’ as shown in figure 2. this is in line with the answers to the first question. as storch and wigglesworth (2003) claim, l1 could be a useful tool for gaining control over the task and working at a higher cognitive level. 87,10% 12,90% do you believe that the use of the students' l1 in the classroom is important for learning portuguese? yes no figure 2. the importance of the use of students’ l1 in the classroom for learning portuguese. chinese teachers’ attitudes towards translanguaging… 19 therefore, “[t]o insist that no use be made of the l1 in carrying out tasks that are both linguistically and cognitively complex is to deny the use of an important cognitive tool” (swain & lapkin, 2000, pp. 268–269). the first question asked participants to indicate the frequency with which they observed or stimulated the use of the students’ l1 in the classroom. the items of the questions appear in three groups of uses for data description and discussion. the first group comprises situations that are related to discussing content in class: “to discuss content or tasks in small groups’ and ‘to answer teachers’ questions” (table 1). table 1 uses of translanguaging: teachers how often do you observe or stimulate the use of your students’ l1 for the following purposes? never not often somewhat often often very often [%] [%] [%] [%] [%] to discuss content or tasks in small groups 3.23 22.58 38.71 25.81 9.68 to answer a teacher’s question 12.90 29.03 45.16 3.23 9.68 the use of the students’ l1 in events related to discussing content in class are encouraged or observed ‘somewhat often’ in the classrooms by the participants. only a smaller percentage of teachers ‘never’ or ‘not often’ observe, or encourage the use of l1 in these situations. other studies (e.g., storch & wigglesworth, 2003) support this use of translanguaging to discuss content or tasks in class. this means that l1 could be a useful tool for having control over tasks and contents. the second group involves the participation of the students. the translanguaging uses included in this group are ‘to assist peers during tasks’ and ‘to enable participation by lower proficiency students.’ as shown in table 2, teachers use translanguaging frequently to help students participate, since the majority of them answer the first item ‘somewhat often’ (41.94%) and ‘often’ (32.26%) and the second ‘somewhat often’ (45.16%) and ‘often’ (32.26%). comparison of tables 1 and 2 shows that these uses are roughly as common as those related to discussing content in class, and are in line with the results of mcmillan and rivers (2011). the third group of uses refers to the treatment of subjects unrelated to class content, comprising ‘to explain problems not related to content’ and ‘to ask permission to do something.’ jorge pinto20 table 2 uses of translanguaging: teachers how often do you observe or stimulate the use of your students’ l1 for the following purposes? never not often somewhat often often very often [%] [%] [%] [%] [%] to assist peers during tasks 0.00 19.35 41.94 32.26 6.45 to enable participation by lower proficiency students 0.00 12.90 45.16 32.26 9.68 table 3 uses of translanguaging: teachers how often do you observe or stimulate the use of your students’ l1 for the following purposes? never not often somewhat often often very often [%] [%] [%] [%] [%] to explain problems not related to content 0.00 9.68 54.84 29.03 6.45 to ask permission to do something 3.23 22.58 58.06 12.90 3.23 table 3 indicates that the use ‘to ask permission’ is more common than the use ‘to explain problems not related to content,’ but there is not a significant difference between them. for the first item, teachers answered ‘somewhat often’ (54.84%), ‘often’ (29.03%), and ‘very often’ (6.45%), and for the second item, ‘somewhat often’ (58.06%), ‘often’ (12.90%), and ‘very often’ (3.23%). the percentages of the answers ‘never’ and ‘not often’ are much lower for both items, especially the first. from the two last tables we see that these uses of translanguaging are observed and stimulated more often than those related to classroom content and involve student participation. the next question asked how important they rated the possible use of translanguaging by students for certain purposes. the majority of teachers think (see table 4) that the use of the students’ l1 ‘to discuss content or tasks in small groups’ is important (54.84%), but the second item in this group, ‘to answer to teacher’s question,’ was generally considered not important (54.84%) by teachers. these results reveal a disparity between teachers’ beliefs and practices concerning translanguaging. in the first question, which asked participants the frequency with which they observed or stimulated this second use, the majority of the participants indicated frequencies of ‘somewhat often’. nevertheless, chinese teachers’ attitudes towards translanguaging… 21 although they observe or stimulate this use in their classrooms, they found it to be ‘not important.’ table 4 uses of translanguaging: students how important do you believe it is for students to use their l1 in the classroom within the following situations? not important important very important [%] [%] [%] to discuss content or tasks in small groups 35.48 54.84 9.68 to answer to teacher’s question 54.84 38.71 6.45 table 5 uses of translanguaging: students how important do you believe it is for students to use their l1 in the classroom within the following situations? not important important very important [%] [%] [%] to assist peers during tasks 16.13 77.42 6.45 to translate for a lower proficiency student 3.23 48.39 48.39 to enable participation by lower-proficiency students 3.23 54.84 41.94 the first item in the second group (see table 5) is ‘to assist peers during tasks’; this use of the students’ l1 in the classroom was considered important by participants (77.42%). this is in line with the teachers’ answers to the previous question regarding the frequency of use in the classroom. the second use of translanguaging in this group is the use of the students’ l1 ‘to translate for lower proficiency students.’ almost all the teachers thought it important (48.39%) or very important (48.39%) in their classrooms. this is in line with the importance given to translation in the teaching and learning of portuguese in china, where we still see teachers emphasize grammar, translation, vocabulary, and rote memorization (cai & cook, 2015; hu, 2002). the next use of translanguaging in this second group is ‘to enable participation by lower proficiency students,’ which was considered ‘important’ (54.84%) and ‘very important’ (41.94%) by the teachers; only 3.23% of the participants jorge pinto22 rated it ‘not important.’ the number of times teachers observed and stimulated this use in the classroom corresponds to the importance they give it (see table 2). table 6 uses of translanguaging: students how important do you believe it is for students to use their l1 in the classroom within the following situations? not important important very important [%] [%] [%] to explain problems not related to content 29.03 77.42 6.45 to ask permission to do something 61.29 35.48 3.23 the first item of the third group of the second question (see table 6), ‘to explain problems not related to content,’ was rated ‘important’ by a majority of participants (77.42%). however, the second use in this group, ‘to ask permission,’ was classified by the majority of the teachers as ‘not important’ (61.29%), which was the highest rate of ‘not important’ given by teachers to any use of translanguaging by students. the high number of ‘not important’ answers does not match the frequency of ‘somewhat often’ (58.06%) shown in table 3 with which it is observed or stimulated in the classroom. with the third question, we sought to determine how often teachers use their students’ l1 in several classroom situations so as to obtain information concerning which classroom translanguaging practices teachers use most frequently. as in the previous questions, we separated the items into three groups to facilitate analysis and comprehension. following the three-dimensional framework proposed by cook (2001) to analyse the role of the l1 in the classroom (teachers use l1 to convey meaning; teachers use l1 to organize the class; and students use l1 within the class) and the two types of translanguaging strategies proposed by garcía and wei (2014)—“teacher-directed translanguaging” to give voice, clarity, and support, and to organize the classroom and ask questions; and “student-directed translanguaging” to participate, elaborate ideas, and ask questions—we applied the following division: student-oriented purposes, content-oriented purposes, and classroom-oriented purposes. the first group, student-oriented purposes, comprises ‘to give feedback to students,’ ‘to praise to students,’ ‘to build bonds with students,’ and ‘to help low proficiency students.’ as shown in table 7, a high frequency of uses of students’ l1 in the classroom is ‘to help low proficiency students,’ with 51.61% of teachers stating that they use it often and only 3.23% stating that they never chinese teachers’ attitudes towards translanguaging… 23 make this use of translanguaging. this is followed by the use ‘to build bonds with students,’ for which 35.48% of teachers use it often and 19.35% very often; less than 20% of responders state that they never or not often use students’ l1 in this situation. some teachers also used translanguaging ‘to give feedback to students’ ‘somewhat often’ (45.16%) and ‘often’ (35.48%), and ‘to praise students’ ‘somewhat often’ (48.39%) and ‘often’ (19.35%). these last results are in line with the results of previous studies (e.g., qian, tian, & wang, 2009), demonstrating the importance of using students’ l1 to praise students, as it develops positive attitudes in students and motivates them. table 7 uses of translanguaging in different situations: teachers how often do you use students’ l1 in the classroom for the following situations? never not often somewhat often often very often [%] [%] [%] [%] [%] to give feedback to students 3.23 6.45 45.16 35.48 9.68 to praise students 9.68 16.13 48.39 19.35 6.45 to build bonds with students 3.23 16.13 25.81 35.48 19.35 to help low proficiency students 3.23 0.00 25.81 51.61 19.35 table 8 uses of translanguaging in different situations: teachers how often do you use students’ l1 in the classroom for the following situations? never not often somewhat often often very often [%] [%] [%] [%] [%] to explain concepts 0.00 12.90 45.16 35.48 6.45 to describe vocabulary 3.23 12.90 54.84 25.81 3.23 to quickly clarify during class tasks 0.00 6.45 35.48 51.61 6,45 the second group (see table 8), content-oriented purposes, includes the use of the students’ l1 ‘to explain concepts,’ ‘to describe vocabulary,’ and ‘to quickly clarify during class tasks.’ in this group, the use of translanguaging which is the most observed and stimulated is ‘to quickly clarify during class tasks,’ with 51.61% of the teachers indicating that they use l1 in this situation ‘often.’ translanguaging was also used ‘somewhat often’ in order ‘to explain concepts’ (45.16%) and ‘to describe vocabulary’ (54.84%). these uses of translanguaging are clearly present in these teachers’ classrooms since for each item jorge pinto24 the percentages for ‘never’ and ‘not often’ are below 20%. as found in previous studies regarding these uses of translanguaging (e.g., mcmillan & rivers, 2011; qian et al., 2009; tian & macaro, 2012; yan et al., 2016), the majority of participants make use of translanguaging in these situations in their classrooms. table 9 uses of translanguaging in different situations: teachers how often do you use students’ l1 in the classroom for the following situations? never not often somewhat often often very often [%] [%] [%] [%] [%] to give directions 0.00 38.71 41.94 16.13 3.23 for classroom management 0.00 25.81 41.94 22.58 9.68 the third group, classroom-oriented purposes, includes ‘to give directions’ and ‘for classroom management.’ in this group, both practices are popular among the teachers in this study (see table 9). although more teachers use the students’ l1 ‘for classroom management’ than ‘to give directions,’ the majority of the participants engaged frequently in either use, as shown by a majority of frequent-use percentages (‘somewhat often,’ ‘often,’ and ‘very often’), confirming the results of earlier studies (e.g., mcmillan & rivers, 2011). the next question seeks to determine the importance that the teachers assign to each use of translanguaging. we will follow the organization of the uses of translanguaging used in the previous question to present and discuss the data. the answers of the teachers to this question reveal that they consider their uses of translanguaging for student-oriented purposes generally to be ‘important’ or ‘very important’ (see table 10). table 10 uses of translanguaging: teachers how important is it for teachers to use their students’ l1 in the following situations? not important important very important [%] [%] [%] to give feedback to students 19.35 64.52 16.13 to praise students 45.16 35.48 19.35 to build bonds with students 25.81 48.39 25.81 to help low-proficiency students 6.45 48.39 45.16 chinese teachers’ attitudes towards translanguaging… 25 we can infer that teachers see these as relevant uses of the students’ l1 in the classroom. the use considered the most important is ‘to help low proficiency students,’ followed by ‘to give feedback to students.’ however, a high percentage of teachers consider the use ‘to praise students’ not important (45.16%). however, this does not correspond to their practice, since teachers indicated that they do it in their classes frequently (see table 7). there is thus a mismatch here between practices and beliefs, which could be related to the pedagogical environment predominant in china. the affirmation of the communicative approach in foreign language teaching is unstable and the traditional approach is still dominant (cheng, 2013; hu, 2002); therefore, teachers are equivocal between the two approaches and their practices and beliefs do not always correspond. as we can see in table 11, the uses of translanguaging in the second group, content-oriented purposes, are considered important by the majority of participants. the use to which teachers attached most importance was ‘to explain concepts,’ followed by ‘to quickly clarify during class activities’ and ‘to describe vocabulary.’ these results are in line with the frequency with which teachers promote these uses in their classrooms. however, it is interesting to note that the use for ‘describing vocabulary’ is given no higher importance since the methodology of foreign language teaching in china remains focused on learning grammar and vocabulary, as “chinese classrooms are more teachercentred and form-focused” (wang, 2019, p. 140). the results of this study show that methodological changes are underway in the teaching of portuguese as a foreign language. the majority of chinese teachers of portuguese are very young, recent graduates or postgraduates. even if they were taught at university following a traditional approach, many of them completed or are receiving their postgraduate education in portugal and brazil, where the conception and practice of language teaching is very different. we are witnessing changes in teaching practices and thus find some discrepancies between teachers’ practices and beliefs. however, overall, for the reasons already given, there is consistency between the answers about the frequency of translanguaging uses and the importance that teachers assign to each of them. table 11 uses of translanguaging: teachers how important is it for teachers to use their students’ l1 in the following situations? not important important very important [%] [%] [%] to explain concepts 6.45 70.97 22.58 to describe vocabulary 25.81 61.29 12.90 to quickly clarify during class activities 12.90 67.74 19.35 jorge pinto26 the majority of the participants consider the use of translanguaging for classroom-oriented purposes important, which again is in line with the uses frequently practiced in their classrooms. as the results show (table 12), both uses are equally important, as they have the same percentage when we add the results for ‘important’ and ‘very important.’ the number of ‘not important’ answers corresponds to the frequency of use indicated in table 9. table 12 uses of translanguaging: teachers how important is it for teachers to use their students’ l1 in the following situations? not important important very important [%] [%] [%] to give directions 35.48 51.61 12.90 for classroom management 35.48 54.84 9.68 in the last question of the survey, participants had the opportunity to express more openly what they think about the uses of translanguaging and to describe in which situations they consider the use of the student’s l1 as beneficial or detrimental. we present below some of the teachers’ answers, which are in line globally with the answers to the close-ended questions. t02: “beneficial: in the first year, as they still do not learn much. detrimental: for other years, if everything is in the mother tongue, they will not gain mastery of the logic of the portuguese language.” t04: “in translation classes, it is very important to take advantage of the students’ mother tongue. when learning portuguese as a language of communication, the influence of the mother tongue is usually negative.” t06: “at the elementary level it can be beneficial to use it, but at advanced levels it becomes detrimental.” t14: “the contrastive analysis between two languages, cultures, uses of words, is important. but the inclination to use l1 in class can be detrimental to learning.” t18: “beneficial in the clarification of complicated contents, progress of students in the initial phase of learning, understanding of the differences between the l1 and the target language, improvement of translation capacity, effective organization of classes and others; and detrimental in developing oral comprehension and speaking.” as we can see, there is a tendency to think that the uses of translanguaging at advanced levels are detrimental, unlike its use at elementary levels. this is the opposite of what cook (2001) argues, that initially l1 use is to be chinese teachers’ attitudes towards translanguaging… 27 avoided in order to maximize the learners’ exposure to the target language, but later different teaching methods can be adopted to more effectively make use of l1. another point apparent in the answers relates to the quantity of l1 used in the classroom; teachers believe that excessive use could be detrimental to learning portuguese. these results are somewhat in consonance with littlewood and fang’s (2011) proposal to maximize target language use to provide an appropriate learning environment in which students are exposed to rich and suitable language input. another interesting issue regarding these answers is to note that teachers believe that the use of translanguaging is fruitful in translations tasks but detrimental in communicative tasks. this suggests that teachers may not be fully aware of the concept of translanguaging or its contexts of use. as deng (2011) argues, the chinese learning culture can make teachers’ awareness of the multilingual reality inside a communicative classroom difficult. however, as translanguaging is a recent concept in language learning and there is a lack of explicit taxonomic structures within translanguaging pedagogies, this makes it difficult to apprehend and presents a challenge to teachers seeking to implement these strategies (canagarajah, 2011). conclusions overall, the teachers’ answers to the questionnaire showed that their practices include all uses of translanguaging in the classroom and that most of them consider these uses to be important or even very important. the findings indicate further that only a few teachers rated some of these uses as not important. the results also demonstrate that most of the participants consider the use of students’ l1 for the different purposes indicated in the questionnaire important. while almost all teachers considered the majority of the uses of translanguaging involving the students’ l1 in the classroom important, some of them considered some uses less important, such as the use of students’ l1 ‘to respond to the teacher’s question’ and ‘to ask permission to do something.’ concerning the benefits and detriments of using the students’ l1 in the classroom, teachers answered the close-ended questions fairly coherently. they indicated accessing content in portuguese that students already know in their l1 as a benefit of the uses of translanguaging by using this language to discuss content and tasks. using l1 also helps some students, particularly jorge pinto28 lower proficiency students, to keep up in class, which ultimately helps them to acquire the l2. other benefits adduced by teachers included improved ability to present clarification. the use of the l1 for this purpose increases students’ comprehension of the content being taught in class or the development of a task. references baker, c. 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(2016). perceived target-language-use survey in the english classrooms in china: investigation of classroom related and institutional factors. journal of multilingual and multicultural development, 37(1), 75–96. jorge pinto das phänomen des translingualismus im portugiesisch-als-fremdspracheunterricht aus der sicht der chinesischen lehrenden z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die neuesten studien zeigen, dass der gebrauch der erstsprache eine wichtige kognitive, kommunikative und soziale rolle im zweitund fremdsprachenunterricht spielt (turnbull & dailey-o‘cain, 2009). meij und zhao (2010) weisen jedoch darauf hin, dass ein ungeschriebenes gesetz für sowohl lehrende als auch studierende an chinesischen universitäten gilt, das die notwendigkeit der beseitigung der erstsprache im fremdsprachenunterricht betrifft. die ergebnisse ihrer studie zeigen allerdings, dass der gebrauch der erstsprache sowohl von akademischen lehrenden als auch von studierenden als begründet und hilfreich angesehen wird. andere studien (cai & cook, 2015; littlewood & fang, 2011) bestätigen die verschiedenen rollen der erstsprache als kommunikationsmittel im klassenzimmer, um inhalte zu verstehen, den lernprozess zu steuern und an die studierenden individuell heranzugehen. die vorliegende studie zeigt die herangehensweise von 31 chinesischen lehrenden an das phänomen des translingualismus und dessen funktion im portugiesisch-als-fremdsprache-unterricht. die ergebnisse des fragebogens beweisen eindeutig, dass die verwendung der erstsprache den lernprozess beim erlernen des portugiesischen, insbesondere in den anfangsstadien, unterstützt. schlüsselwörter: translingualismus, portugiesisch als fremdsprache, chinesische lehrende, chinesischer kontext beata grymska university of silesia new conceptualizations of language aptitude — the potential of working memory in second language acquisition (sla) a b s t r a c t: foreign language (fl) aptitude is generally understood as a talent for foreign language learning. for many years, it has been researched and combined with intelligence and language proficiency. at present, foreign language aptitude construct is experiencing a growing interest in its memory component which was slightly bypassed in its research history. the paper sheds light on new conceptualizations of foreign language aptitude by emphasizing the role of working memory (wm) in the second language acquisition (sla) process. it is organized into 3 sections. the first section of the paper presents a brief historical overview of the research on language aptitude based on john carroll’s work. the second part elaborates on the working memory construct, discussing baddeley’s multi-component model of wm and its functions. further discussion concentrates on a combination of two significant notions by proposing to incorporate working memory as a crucial component of language aptitude construct. in light of the issue mentioned above, the third section of the article focuses on the newest and original empirical evidence which supports the role of wm in different aspects of l2 learning, i.e. speaking and bilingual interpretation as well as vocabulary and grammar learning. its concluding part reflects upon the relevance of language aptitude, paving the way for future research. k e y w o r d s: language aptitude, working memory, second language acquisition (sla) language aptitude—a brief overview it is generally agreed that individuals have different capabilities for foreign language learning (skehan, 1998, p. 185). undoubtedly, there are people who acquire foreign languages at a fast and easy rate. but on the other hand, others have difficulties with this process no matter how hard they try and how high their motivation is (carroll, 1981, p. 85). gardner and lambert (1972, p. 2) theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 2 (1) 2016, pp. 103–118 104 beata grymska point out that people could differ in the ease and rate of achieving a satisfactory level of mastery in foreign language acquisition. the issues mentioned above are strongly connected with the notion of language aptitude. as oxford (1990, p. 74) emphasizes language aptitude seems to be a simple notion, but in fact it is complicated to define it. john carroll, an american psycholinguist whose contribution to the development of foreign language aptitude research cannot be denied, provided a comprehensive definition of language aptitude: “foreign language aptitude is considered as the individual’s initial state of readiness and capacity for learning a foreign language” (carroll, 1981, p. 86). gardner and lambert (1972, p. 2) define this term as ‘a knack’ for learning a foreign language. gardner and mcintyre (1992), however, name it a ‘cognitive sponge’ meaning that new knowledge and skills are associated with those already acquired. language aptitude can also be described as a specific talent for learning languages (dornyei & skehan, 2003). as we can see, there are many attempts to clarify this notion which slightly differ from each other and as a result we still do not know precisely what language aptitude is (arabski, 1998, p. 9; grymska, 2015, p. 30). the golden period of language aptitude research. research on language aptitude had its golden period in the 1950s and 1960s (rees, 2000) thanks to the work done by carroll, who provided the following three theses referring to language aptitude: there is a distinction between language aptitude and other cognitive abilities, including intelligence; aptitude is relatively fixed and hard to modify; and it is componential (skehan, 2014, p. 381). his fundamental contributions can be subdivided into two areas: he is the author of a fourcomponent view of language aptitude, and the second area refers to the measures of language aptitude. carroll (1981, p. 105) indicated that there are four major components of language aptitude: • phonetic coding ability—the ability to make distinctions between sounds, to associate sounds and symbols representing them and keep them in mind; • grammatical sensitivity—the ability needed for recognizing grammatical functions of words in sentences; • rote learning ability for foreign language materials—the ability to distinguish sounds and meanings at a fast rate and to retain them; • inductive language learning ability—a talent to induce both explicit and implicit rules from the chaos of language material (arabski, 1998, p. 9) and to be able to produce language based on the generalizations (skehan, 2014, p. 381). the second area of his work and contribution was more practical. as skehan (2014, pp. 381–382) indicates, carroll developed a large number of foreign language aptitude tests. together with stanley sapon, he was the author of the modern language aptitude test (the mlat) (carroll & sapon, 1959) which 105new conceptualizations of language aptitude… was devised to measure several separate components that form an individual’s aptitude to learn a foreign language (parry & child, 1990, p. 37). as gregersen and macintyre (2014, p. 66) note, the mlat measured the rate at which a person could learn a foreign language, but, which is worth emphasizing, it did not predict whether an individual could learn a language at all or not. the battery consists of five sub-tests: number learning, phonetic script, spelling clues, words in sentences and paired associates (skehan, 2014, p. 382; dornyei, 2005, p. 37). carroll’s particular view of aptitude construct and the mlat have been employed since the 1950s, beginning the golden period of language aptitude research (rees 2000). language aptitude—post-carroll research. after the publication of the mlat we can observe the culmination of further test development as aptitude measurement tools, e.g., the widely used plab (the pimsleur language aptitude battery, pimsleur, 1966), the york language aptitude test (green, 1975), the defense language aptitude battery (petersen & al-haik, 1976), the german aptitude test (miller & phillips, 1982) and vord (parry and child, 1990). another instance of aptitude measurement is canal-ft (grigorenko et al., 2000) which in contrast to the mlat is theory driven, especially based on the theory of intelligence (sternberg, 2002). it is generally agreed in the literature that the new batteries did not exceed the mlat in superiority (dornyei, 2005; sparks & ganschow, 2001; sawyer & ranta, 2001). parry and child concede: “the mlat was the best overall instrument for predicting language-learning success” (parry & child, 1990, p. 52). in order to deepen and enrich our understanding of the research on language aptitude, it is worth adding that the mlat was somewhat modified. on polish ground it functions as flat-pl (foreign language aptitude test-polish) and consists of 6 parts emphasizing the role of inductive language learning ability (see rysiewicz, 2011). most of the research studies referring to language aptitude, which spread after the creation of the mlat, can be subdivided into three areas: the research aiming at measurement of language aptitude and publication of aptitude tests; research referring to the components of aptitude construct as proposed by carroll; and research on the relationship between language aptitude and treatment (wen & skehan, 2011, p. 18). it is worth adding that even though language aptitude was criticized in the 1970s and 1980s, it is still essential in the research concerning second language acquisition (sla). wen and skehan (2011, p. 18) emphasize that the research concentrating individually on the components of language aptitude construct is scarce, especially with the memory component. as dornyei (2005, p. 63) observes, the role of working memory in second language acquisition (sla) as well as language aptitude is an area of future research which now is revealing 106 beata grymska a growing interest. more attention referring to working memory and its role in sla as the component of language aptitude will be drawn in next sections. working memory (wm) construct for the purposes of illustrating what working memory is, we must look at the following explanation by ellis (2005, p. 338): “if i ask you what 397 x 27 is, you do not look up the answer from long-term memory, you work it out.” working memory has its origin in unitary short-term memory that is the site of temporary storing of small amounts of material in short periods of time (baddeley, 1992; 2009). baddeley (1992) explains that working memory is ‘a brain system’ which is needed to hold information (the storage function of working memory) and to manipulate new information with known material (processing function). as baddeley adds, the system is necessary in keeping information in mind while performing everyday cognitive tasks, for example, remembering a phone number or doing mental arithmetic (williams, 2014, p. 427) as well as problem solving, academic achievement, mapping, language comprehension, learning and reasoning (baddeley, 1992; rysiewicz, 2013; profozic, 2013). working memory, like language aptitude, is a multi-component construct (wen & skehan, 2011, p. 21). a current model of working memory was worked out by baddeley (2015, p. 21) and consists of four components: central executive, phonological loop, visuo-spatial sketchpad, and episodic buffer. central executive is described as the core which controls entire system of working memory (baddeley, 1998, p. 50). different authors have tried to enumerate the most significant functions of the central executive and they are the following: • the central executive coordinates information coming from different sources (baddeley, pressi, della sala, logie, & spinnler 1991; baddeley & logie, 1999); • it controls two tasks which are performed simultaneously (baddeley, 1986); • supervising operations which are performed in mind (baddeley, 1996; 1997; miyake, friedman, emerson, witzki, & howeter, 2000); • the central executive enables us the access to information stored in our longterm memory (baddeley & logie, 1999). the second component of wm—phonological loop—is responsible for storing and rehearsing phonological information. in order not to forget the information which is needed, it must be kept in a special place in our mind—this means processing, and apart from this, information must be constantly rehearsed, which is called rehearsal. if the information is not rehearsed, it disappears from our 107new conceptualizations of language aptitude… memory system. such phenomenon is called retention. thanks to the functions mentioned above, phonological loop has on influence on the understanding of language and both l1 and l2 acquisition (service, 1992). the third component, visuo-spatial sketchpad, handles information referring to spatial location, color and shape as well as information concerning touch and kinesthesis. similarly as in phonological loop, in visuo-spatial sketchpad information is in constant motion (piotrowski, 2004, p. 25). the last component of wm, episodic buffer, is a new component which was added to the model a few years ago by baddeley (2000). it is a buffer kind of memory which links information between different components of wm. furthermore, it also combines information from working memory with long-term memory. baddeley and hitch (1974) add that working memory is the place of executive control as well as consciousness. furthermore, it functions as “the home of explicit induction, hypothesis information, analogical reasoning, prioritization, control, and decision-making” (ellis, 2005). it must be highlighted that this is the place where metalinguistic insights referring to l2 are developed, improved, and applied (ortega, 2009, p. 90). to deepen and enrich our understanding of working memory, two features must be analyzed. first, working memory is of limited capacity (baddeley, 2007), in contrast to long-term memory, meaning that in normal conditions, the information can exist in wm for two seconds, and after that it is forgotten unless it can be rehearsed in the phonological loop (the component of working memory that has been discussed above). the second feature of wm is called temporary activation. cowan (2005) observes that activation is a central characteristic of working memory, meaning that it is a part of the entire memory system and wm is activated in a processing event. it is important to note that working memory functions as a kind of gateway to our long-term memory, because the material we store and process in wm may become a part of long-term memory. this is the reason why wm is different from short-term memory (wen & skehan, 2011, p. 22). working memory in sla process. as was indicated in the section the golden period of language aptitude research, the height of the research on language aptitude was the 1950s and 1960s, but in those days the role of memory in foreign language learning was considered to be nothing but rote learning which takes place mechanically or refers to creating associations between information (wen, 2015, p. 10). but, the growing interest in working memory in sla has occurred since the mid-1990s (ortega, 2009, p. 90). it has been combined with one of the aspects of sla—individual differences. it is obvious that wm, being dependent on developments in modern cognitive science, may be a crucial point to evolve the concept of foreign language aptitude. wen (2015, p. 10) adds that this proposal should be based on the following condition: there are individual differences among learners in their wm which can 108 beata grymska be measured. furthermore, miyake and friedman (1998, p. 340) propose that “wm may be one (if not the) central component of language aptitude.” there are some reasons why this concept is so significant. first, the elements of language aptitude construct proposed by skehan (the model of language aptitude presented by skehan in 1998)—language analytic capacity, memory ability, and phonetic coding ability—function as cognitive elements and are strongly connected with wm. second, based on the available research findings, the process of developing skills and achieving proficiency in l1 is strongly related to the role of wm. therefore, it is likely to influence learning of l2 in a significant way. third, some research finds that for typical adults who learn l2, the stage of language acquisition can be limited, for example, from phonological or syntactic points of view, because maturational changes occur in the critical period (johnson & newport, 1989). because of this, the l2 learning process may be based on general learning mechanisms and principles more than l1 acquisition. it is the working memory which plays an important role in the acquisition of knowledge and development of skills, for example, logical problem solving or computer programming (shute, 1991; kyllonen & stephens, 1990) and this is the reason why it can be a ‘candidate mechanism’ (miyake & friedman). wen and skehan (2011, p. 24) provide that a number of sla and cognitive psychology researchers built their arguments for incorporating wm as language aptitude component on the following three assumptions: • first language acquisition is based on universal grammar while second language acquisition is built on general learning mechanisms where working memory is one of them. • first language acquisition is based on “automatic processing” while sla is strongly connected with “controlled processing” in which cognitive resources dependent on wm are necessary (wen & skehan, 2011, p. 24). • the role of wm in sla is self-evident because the elements of wm take part in different stages of sla which are “input processes, central processing and output processing” (skehan, 1998; wen & skehan, 2011, p. 24), as well as cognitive processes and operations in sla (pattern recognizing or noticing). both sla and cognitive psychology researchers have proposed to implicate wm as the crucial component of the language aptitude model, aiming at modifying carroll’s language aptitude construct or even replacing it by emphasizing the role of wm in the entire process of foreign language learning (miyake & friedman, 1998; wen, 2007; sawyer & ranta, 2001). 109new conceptualizations of language aptitude… working memory and different aspects of l2 development— research studies overview in order to understand the significant role of working memory in sla and to support the proposal for incorporating wm as a language aptitude component, it is necessary to analyze the research findings devoted to this subject. the following part of the paper will analyze the role of wm in the learning of new vocabulary and grammar in l2. further discussion will present research findings supporting the importance of wm in the development of two l2 skills: speaking and bilingual interpretation, which learners encounter from the beginning of their experience in foreign language learning. the paper will present how wm influences the speed and quality of l2 learning as well. working memory and vocabulary learning. available research shows that phonological working memory, which functions as a gateway for storing linguistic knowledge into long-term memory (baddeley, gathercole, & papagno, 1998), plays a pivotal role in vocabulary learning. baddeley et al. (1992) proposed that the phonological buffer of working memory functions as a device which is significant in the learning of new vocabulary in l1 by children. the above-mentioned thesis was based on research conducted by gathercole (1999). according to gathercole and thorn (1998, p. 142) the phonological loop influences the learning of sounds of vocabulary in a foreign language. the claim was extended from l1 to l2 vocabulary learning in the study by service and kohonen (1995)—l1 finnish students learnt english words. similar results were achieved by cheung et al. (1996) with l1 cantonese and l2 english. furthermore, papagno and vallar (1995) had similar observations for older students with the following languages: l1 italian and l2 russian. masoura and gathercole (1999) conducted another research project in which they measured short-term memory and skills at learning vocabulary in children whose l1 was greek and l2 english. there was a significant correlation between phonological memory and vocabulary measures both in l1 and l2. the findings of the research studies presented above confirm that the phonological component of working memory has a crucial influence on vocabulary acquisition. working memory and grammar learning. the following section is going to discuss the role of phonological aspect of working memory in l2 grammar acquisition. ellis and sinclair (1996) found correlations between phonological working memory and learning of morphology basing on their theoretical work which focused on chunk learning and emphasized the role of frequency. the research conducted by williams and lovatt (2003; 2005) proved that phonological working memory has an influence on the learning of familiar morphemes 110 beata grymska which is significant in grammar learning. there are also research findings on phonological memory and l2 grammar relationships which both emphasize and reject the role of vocabulary learning and its measures. french and o’brien (2008), however, claim that phonological working memory correlates with the learning of grammar in l2 which is not dependent on vocabulary learning measures. however, another study conducted by martin (2009) confirmed the importance of vocabulary in memory measures. the study measured both phonological short-term memory (pstm) and working memory, and these measures correlated strongly with grammar and vocabulary measures. the analysis confirmed that “the relationship between grammar and memory measures was mediated by vocabulary knowledge” (martin, 2009, p. 2). skehan (2014, p. 386) emphasizes that the research findings mentioned above do confirm the correlation between working memory and measures of language development, meaning that working memory can be a central component of language aptitude construct. chan et al. (2011) observe that a significant issue in the process of l2 learning refers to understanding and acquisition of a syllable structure in the target language. acquiring syllable structure refers to keeping it in mind and remembering sequences of sounds in l2, which is connected with phonemic coding ability. this is the reason why chan et al. (2011) propose incorporating non-words for repetition into the tests measuring phonological working memory, because those non-words refer to the syllable structure in the l2. in a non-word repetition task, a student needs to repeat non-words after the examiner who presents them orally. the non-words usually contain a single consonant or consonant cluster (comblain, 1999). the scholars note that there is a very domain-specific phonological element characteristic of language learning, and phonological working memory and the element of language aptitude—phonemic coding ability—shall be brought together to make the measures more specific and effective. the paragraph emphasized the role of phonological component of working memory in grammar learning which was usually based on vocabulary knowledge and its measures. the importance of vocabulary knowledge is strongly emphasized in phonological memory measures. working memory and l2 speaking. in order to understand the process of speaking better, it is necessary to analyze the language production process. according to fields, the meaning can be produced by creating and expressing it (fields, 2004). the process of speech production is much more sophisticated from a neurological and psychological perspective than other linguistic processes (scovel, 1998). in everyday life people of course are usually unaware of this process. one of the most popular models of speech production was developed by levelt (1989) and consists of four stages which are the following: conceptualization, formulation, articulation, and self-monitoring. in the 111new conceptualizations of language aptitude… first stage of speech production, we must have an idea of what we want to say (conceptualization). in the second stage, a speaker needs to change the idea into a particular linguistic plan (formulation). then the idea and plan can be expressed on the basis of articulators—the organs of speech production (roach, 2009, pp. 8–10)—this phase is called articulation. the final point in the model is called self-monitoring, because a speaker controls the speech meaning, checking what is said and how it happens. now our attention will be focused on the role of components of working memory in the speech production process in l2. our attention will be mostly focused on the phonological component of working memory which refers to phonological short-term memory. gathercole provides a good clarification of this term: the phonological loop contains a phonological store and a subvocal rehearsal process. the store is the place where verbal material is held in phonological form, and usually refers to phonemes. the material is usually stored for about two seconds, but it can be prolonged as well. according to wen (2015, p. 50) it is possible to predict narrative vocabulary at the early stage of learning l2 on the basis of phonological short-term memory (pstm). another component of working memory construct—executive working memory (ewm)—refers to l2 speech accuracy. as payne & whitney (2002) note both for fluent and less fluent l2 speakers it is necessary to use their wm resources while speaking, for example, less fluent speakers need to use their attentional resources in deciding which lexemes or phonological elements they need in utterance, checking the correctness of syntax, or in looking for suitable words in their mental lexicon. what is more, the processes mentioned above need the phonological loop to keep their calculations in mind referring to the levelt’s model (wen & skehan, 2011, p. 30). the central executive of working memory is also needed in checking whether chosen lemmas and sound structures are correct. furthermore, profozic (2013, p. 66) adds that while speaking, a learner must choose words which are suitable for the intended idea from a semantic point of view. both storage and processing functions of wm as well as their cooperation are used in the process mentioned. we also need wm to decide what information must be used and retrieved from our long-term memory. for fluent speakers, the above-mentioned processes do not occur so consciously, meaning that their attentional resources can be used in “greater subtleties of expression” (skehan & wen, 2011, p. 30). now we will put greater emphasis on some empirical evidence supporting the importance of wm in l2 speech production. the research conducted at the beginning of the 20th century confirmed that on the basis of wm, it is possible to predict l2 oral development both in computer meditated communication (see payne & whitney, 2002; payne & ross, 2005) and in the traditional classroom (mizera, 2006; o’brien, segalowitz, collentine, & freed, 2006; 2007). the phonological loop can be used differently in various stages of l2 oral develop112 beata grymska ment: at the early level of l2 speech production it helps in the development of narrative skills and at more advanced l2 levels it also contributes to the correct use of function words in (o’brien et al., 2006; 2007). these research findings were similar to the study conducted by payne and whitney, suggesting that wm plays a different role at different levels of fluency of l2 speakers. another study conducted by fortkamp (1999) examined the relationship between working memory capacity (wmc—“the limited capacity of a person’s working memory” (wilhelm et al., 2013) and l2 speech production in a group of learners whose l1 is portuguese and l2 english. the research revealed that learners with larger wm capacity have faster speech rates. working memory and bilingual interpretation. the last skill that will be discussed in the article is bilingual interpretation which is a complex task because it involves language processing (christoffels & de groot, 2006). in the process of simultaneous interpretation (si) a learner has to listen to and understand input utterance in a particular language and retain this material in wm until it can be produced in the target language. each of the tasks mentioned above needs wm resources (mizuno, 2005, p. 741). bilingual interpretation involves constant control of two languages and a person needs to understand and produce speech at the same time, and this is the reason why the role of executive working memory must be emphasized (wen & skehan, 2011, p. 33). as wen and skehan (2011, p. 33) indicate, there have been few studies addressing the relationship and role of wm in simultaneous interpretation. padilla, bajo, canas, and padilla (1996) emphasize that interpreting practice contributes to the development of wm meaning that professional interpreters have a higher working memory capacity than, for example students. kopke and nespolous (2006) presented empirical support regarding the significant role of executive working memory (ewm) in interpreting and found the differences between interpreters and a novice group in a free recall task. the research conducted by timarova et al. (2014) emphasizes the significance of ewm as well. the study confirmed that there is a relationship between working memory and simultaneous interpreting, meaning that different functions of wm are predictors of simultaneous interpreting processes. furthermore, particular features of simultaneous interpreting are connected with the central executive component of working memory. this field is still awaiting further research. working memory and speed and quality of l2 learning. as miyake and friedman (1998, p. 347) point out, the sla research confirmed the interest in the role of wm and the level of l2 proficiency as well as the process of l2 learning itself. there are not many research findings concerning the issues already mentioned, but it is important to have a look at these providing the answer for what the influence of wm on speed and quality of language acquisition is. 113new conceptualizations of language aptitude… first, available research findings suggest that: “older children are capable of juggling more information in their minds than are younger children” (miyake & friedman, 1998, p. 347). this means that they can develop knowledge in l2 more quickly than younger children do. siegel (1994) examined children’s performance in the reading span test (the measure of wm in which students need to read the sentence, state if it is true or false and remember the last word in each sentence (daneman & carpenter, 1980) and claimed that it increases between 6 and 18 years of age. miyake and freidman (1998) suggest that a larger wm capacity influences faster l2 learning. another study is associated with the quality of wm capacity associated with l2 learning. in this study (ando et al., 1992) japanese learners studied english for 20 hours, but they had not attended any english classes before. the english instruction focused on grammar and required learning new abstract rules and using them in language situations. the outcome of the research was the following: “children’s reading and listening spans in l1 before english tuition were best predictors of their post-test performance in l2” (miyake & friedman, 1998, p. 347). conclusion the current article attempted to combine two areas of research, namely, language aptitude and working memory, and to reveal the role of working memory in the sla process. presented research findings showed that different components of wm play a key role in l2 skills development. phonological component of working memory is a crucial element both in acquisition of l2 vocabulary and grammar. l2 speaking can be developed thanks to the role of phonological and executive components of wm. as far as simultaneous interpreting is considered, the significance of executive working memory was confirmed in the development of this l2 skill. we have also noted that wm capacity influences the speed and efficiency in l2 learning. on the basis of the research findings cited from recent studies, it is clear that working memory may be a crucial component of language aptitude, because thanks to it learners can develop their l2 skills. it is obvious that working memory should be a subject of further research to follow, because it will allow a detailed clarification of how wm influences and correlates with the development of particular l2 skills. 114 beata grymska references ando, j., fukunaga, n., kurahashi, j., suto, t., nakano, t., & kage, t. 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(2005). phonological memory and rule learning. language learning, 55 (s1), 177–233. 118 beata grymska beata grymska neue betrachtungsweise der sprachbegabung – leistungsfähigkeit des arbeitsgedächtnisses im prozess des zweitsprachenerwerbs z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die sprachbegabung (eng.: language aptitude) heißt talent für fremdsprachenlernen haben. viele jahre lang wurde sie samt intelligenz und sprachlicher gewandtheit zum forschungsgegenstand. heutzutage konzentrieren sich solche forschungen auf das gedächtnis, das früher von den forschern kaum behandelt war. der vorliegende beitrag präsentiert neue betrachtungsweise der sprachbegabung, die die rolle des arbeitsgedächtnisses beim zweitsprachenerwerb (eng.: second languuage acquisition) hervorhebt. der beitrag besteht aus drei teilen. der erste von ihnen stellt in grundzügen die forschungen über sprachbegabung dar und basiert dabei hauptsächlich auf john carrolls leistungen. der zweite teil handelt von dem begriff „arbeitsgedächtnis“ und betont die bedeutung und die funktionen des mehrkomponentenmodells des arbeitsgedächtnisses von baddeley. der verfasser bemüht sich, zwei bisher behandelte begriffe – sprachbegabung und arbeitsgedächtnis – zu verbinden: das arbeitsgedächtnis wird zwar ans modell der sprachbegabungseigenschaften als hauptelement des modells angeschlossen. im dritten teil werden neue und originelle ergebnisse der forschungen präsentiert, die die bedeutung des arbeitsgedächtnisses für die entfaltung verschiedener aspekte des zweitsprachenerwerbs: sprechen, bilinguales übersetzen, wortschatz und grammatik bestätigen. im resümee des beitrags wird die wichtigkeit der sprachbegabung im prozess des zweisprachenerwerbs unterstrichen. theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 4 (1) 2018, pp. 69–95 joanna masoń-budzyń university of silesia in katowice, poland new school, the same old rut? action research of unsuccessful first-year students in a high school a b s t r a c t action research is one of the tools that a ref lective teacher may use in order to solve specific problems they encounter in their daily teaching practice. the article describes action research carried out in a high school to investigate some of the reasons behind the poor performance of some first-year students. it has been observed that students’ lack of success during the first semester corresponds directly to their low results in the end-of-middle school exam, despite the fact that they were allocated to groups on the basis of a placement test. in a questionnaire survey, students ref lected upon their motivation, attitude, classroom anxiety, and assessed their performance against other group members. this article offers an analysis of the questionnaire results and attempts at presenting certain ways in which teachers could help students who did not manage to wipe the slate clean avoid some learning barriers. keywords: action research, unsuccessful students, motivation, attitude, classroom anxiety introduction professional development is an inherent part of the teacher’s job. it is expected by the authorities that teachers who want to climb the career ladder take part in various methodological conferences, complete postgraduate studies, participate in it courses, etc. this demand certainly makes polish teachers a professional group for which life-long learning is not just a slogan. but does this mean that teachers’ motivation for professional development is solely extrinsic? perhaps the busy teacher has no time left for critical reflection on their everyday teaching practice, reflection other than “talking shop” with their colleagues, which is often reduced to complaining about the youth of today? joanna masoń-budzyń70 according to dana and yendol-hoppey (2009), although reflection is an indispensable element of teacher inquiry, there is a difference between the two. reflection is coincidental, whereas inquiry is a planned and intentional activity, the results of which are more visible. but is it realistic to expect a school teacher to conduct such classroom inquiry, whose objective is to increase teaching effectiveness, to solve problems teachers face in the classroom and to gain a better understanding of the learners? being a practising teacher rather than a researcher, as apart from teaching at the university of silesia i am also a middle school and high school teacher, i decided to carry out action research, since it overlaps the areas of professional development and conventional research, and for some practising teachers may well form a bridge between the two (wallace, 1998). such teachers, however, need to bear in mind some criticisms of practitioner research, for instance insufficient evidence, lack of appropriate methodology or a personal attitude (cochran-smyth & lytle, 2009). another important point is the issue of ethics. study participants must give their “voluntary informed consent”: they must be informed about the purpose of the research, its tools, and how the findings will be made public (baumfield, hall, & wall, 2013). this article aims at describing and presenting the results of action research conducted in one of the high schools in upper silesia, poland. the purpose of the research was to investigate possible differences in motivation, attitude, anxiety, and dissatisfaction with the english lessons among two groups of students: freshmen whose semester grades were low, and those who did well and very well during the first semester. the analysis of those differences should enable the teacher to help the weaker students improve their performance. the first part of the paper briefly describes action research and highlights its importance for teacher development. the next one presents a problem that english teachers encounter at the school in question, which is significant level discrepancies among members of the same language group, reflected in their semester grades. it also discusses a questionnaire survey conducted among first-year students. the aim of the survey was to establish the relationship between learners’ performance and their motivation, attitude, anxiety, and the level of satisfaction with english classes. the question is whether students’ lack of success corresponds to their low motivation and a negative or lackadaisical attitude towards the english language. next, the results of the questionnaire are presented and discussed. finally, the article deals with measures that might be taken by the teacher to help freshmen whose performance is poor. new school, the same old rut?… 71 action research action research is one of the tools that a reflective teacher has at their disposal. it is part of the reflective cycle suggested by wallace (1998). the cycle, which is a kind of structured reflection, encompasses problems, asking questions, collecting and analysing data, and finally application of the conclusions to teaching practice. although it would be unrealistic to expect teachers to have enough time and motivation to reflect upon their performance after every lesson, critical analysis and openness to change are indispensable to maintain a positive attitude towards teaching and to avoid boring routine. teacher autonomy is necessary to introduce any change into the classroom. only an autonomous teacher may be perceived as a good manager who feels responsible for making decisions that contribute to overcoming difficulties in the teaching/learning process, which leads to better performance and better results. such a good manager is by no means an authoritarian manager, on the contrary: they are willing to share the decision-making process with the learners. both parties should be engaged, at least to a certain extent, in finding solutions to classroom problems. action research should facilitate the process, as it is precisely action research that is problem focused in its approach and very practical in its intended outcomes (wallace, 1998). it is so because “action research is conducted by or in cooperation with teachers for the purpose of gaining a better understanding of their educational environment and improving the effectiveness of their teaching” (dörnyei, 2011, p. 191). it also “brings change into a classroom which ideally results in the elimination or at least progressive minimising of the diagnosed problems” (gabryś-barker, 2011, p. 14). the problem according to the ranking of schools published every year by perspektywy, a polish opinion magazine, in 2017 the school was not ranked among the best 500 high schools in poland. there are quite a few difficulties that teachers have to cope with on everyday basis. in this paper i would like to outline one of the specific problems encountered by the teachers of english in that school. every year, freshmen, for whom learning english is compulsory, are allocated to language groups on the basis of a placement test. this is the sole criterion. there is a certain limitation, namely it is not a cross-class division, but students of one class are divided into two groups. in the course of the first semester it was noticed that in every group there were students whose joanna masoń-budzyń72 level was significantly lower, students who had problems with basic structures, which was later reflected in their semester grades, being either 2 (e) or 1 (f), the lowest grades in the polish grading scale. the first logical conclusion was that the placement test had not fulfilled its role. consequently, the following year another placement test was used. this time it was a test offered by the publisher whose course books are used during english lessons. unfortunately, this remedy turned out to be ineffective and the next school year showed the same level discrepancies. apparently, the problem does not lie solely with the placement test. perhaps there are some other aspects that the teachers must take into account before they divide freshmen into language groups. apart from that, there might be other reasons for learners’ poor performance, such as lack of motivation or a negative attitude towards english. should this be the case, the teacher ought to focus on enhancing their motivation and improving attitude. end-of-middle school examination during some paperwork i made another important observation. it was connected with students’ exam results. in the polish education system, secondary education has two levels: the 3-year middle school / lower-secondary school (gimnazjum), which is compulsory for pupils aged 13–16, and several kinds of upper-secondary schools. one of them is the 3-year general high school / upper-secondary school (liceum ogólnokształcące), at the end of which students take a national external matriculation exam (matura). educational reform, which is being implemented since 2017, has changed the country’s education system, removing middle schools and re-introducing an eight-year primary school and a four-year high school. for the time being, every polish middle school graduate sits a compulsory national foreign language end-of-school examination. there are two levels of the exam: basic and extended. in most cases the foreign language is english. in 2016 as many as 296,797 pupils took the basic english exam, whereas 48,323 pupils chose a different language. the national results for the basic level in 2016 were as follows: the mean result for a town with a population of between 20–100 thousand citizens (the population of the town where the school is located falls within that range) was 66%, with standard deviation of 25.7%. correlation between exam results and semester grades the analysis of exam results and semester grades showed that there was a correlation between those two factors. the pearson correlation coefficient, new school, the same old rut?… 73 whose value is in the range from –1 to +1, for the exam result and the semester grade variables was 0.79, which indicates that this is a strong positive linear correlation. figure 1 shows this correlation. the letter d stands for unsuccessful or “defeated” students and the letter g for the successful or good ones. figure 1. correlation between exam results and first semester grades. for the purpose of this action research a low score is a score below 60% in the basic examination, so a score below the average result, with the centile value of 48, which means that 52% of middle school graduates got a higher score in the exam. middle school exam results are neglected in the process of group allocation. in fact, very few teachers take them into account, probably because they do not realise their importance, and it requires some effort to get access to them. nevertheless, we may conclude that low exam results correspond directly to low semester notes (e, f), which shows that students who did not succeed in middle school are still unsuccessful, and apparently, we as teachers do very little to change this state of affairs. questions there arise some questions: what can be done to help those learners who did not manage to wipe the slate clean, those who did badly in the exam and middle school exam results 2016 [%] joanna masoń-budzyń74 in the first semester in a new school? should the system of allocation to language groups that functions in the school be altered? should middle school exam results be taken into consideration? should english teachers insist that all students be divided into groups so that it will be a cross-class division? this seems to be a plausible solution, but it neglects other factors. maybe there are other reasons for poor performance. perhaps those learners who have been classified as unsuccessful would be underachievers in every group, as they lack the necessary motivation and have a negative attitude towards the english language? does their motivation differ from the motivation of their more successful colleagues? do they experience any classroom anxiety or are they simply reluctant to participate in the lessons? are they dissatisfied with their english classes? the questionnaire survey in order to find answers to those questions, i decided to try on my “teacher as action researcher” hat (wallace, 1998, p. 213). at this stage, the research method had to be chosen. the basic division of research is between quantitative and qualitative research. the former deals with numbers and statistical analysis and may therefore be considered more “objective,” whereas the latter adopts a more individual approach and focuses on idiosyncratic differences. quantitative researchers follow a “meaning in the general” strategy, whereas qualitative researchers concentrate on an in-depth understanding of the “meaning in the particular” (dörnyei, 2007, p. 27). despite this, dörnyei (2007) claims that there is no real opposition between those two approaches, and advocates combining quantitative and qualitative research methods. during the intervention stage of the present research, when the researcher designs data collection tools, the quantitative approach turned out to be more appealing to an inexperienced researcher. it seemed to be more “tangible,” as it is verifiable, systematic, and precise. since an ill-constructed questionnaire might yield superficial or unreliable data, its items must be worded in a precise manner to ascertain that the respondents do not find them ambiguous. bearing in mind all the limitations and pitfalls that a teacher/researcher might encounter, since “it is often unrealistic to expect teachers to have the expertise to conduct rigorous research, the danger is that even if teachers decide to initiate an action research project, the chances are that with little background knowledge and insufficient research expertise they will produce questionable or trivial results” (dörnyei, 2011, pp. 191–192), i decided to adapt gardner’s attitude and motivation test battery for the purposes of this study. as it was recommended by wilczyńska new school, the same old rut?… 75 and michońska-stadnik (2010), gardner’s amtb was chosen because of its reliability and validity. adaptation of gardner’s amtb gardner’s questionnaire was first developed in 1985 and conducted among english-speaking canadian students who studied french as a foreign language in order to assess their attitudes, motivations, and classroom anxiety, and to evaluate the teacher and the english course. it employed the 5-point likert scale (1932). for the purposes of this study, the attitude motivation test battery (gardner, 2004) was used. it is the english language version of the amtb to be used among high school students who study english as a foreign language. the present action research was to focus on students’ motivation, attitude towards english, classroom anxiety, and their dissatisfaction with the english class, so it was clear that the questionnaire must be adapted to the context of the researched group. according to zoltan dörnyei, “the main emphasis in gardner’s model is on motivational components grounded in the social milieu rather than in the foreign language classroom” (dörnyei, 1994, p. 273). knowing that dörnyei and ushioda (2011) recommend adjusting instruments to the context where they are going to be used, i eliminated those items that were outside the scope of this action research and added others that could contribute to finding satisfactory answers to the questions posed at the beginning. the adapted questionnaire encompassed 40 items, divided into 4 subscales: a) students’ attitude towards english and learning english (7 items), b) students’ motivation (11 items), c) students’ classroom anxiety (9 items), d) students’ dissatisfaction (13 items). as it was advised by harkness (2008), the questions were translated into polish to ensure that participants would not have any problems understanding the statements. the questionnaire included both positively and negatively keyed items. the students were asked to rate each item on a 5-point likert scale (5–strongly agree, 4–agree, 3–hard to say, 2–disagree, and 1–strongly disagree for the positively keyed items; and 1–strongly agree, 2–agree, 3–hard to say, 4–disagree, 5–strongly disagree for the negatively keyed items) in order to determine their level of agreement with each statement. joanna masoń-budzyń76 pilot study a pilot study was conducted among a small group of students who did not participate in the study proper. the aim of the pilot study was to make the questionnaire more “user-friendly.” the subjects were asked to mark their answers and also to give comments that could help improve the questionnaire. after the pilot study, some items were changed not to confuse the participants, other elements were clarified or worded differently. the final version consisted of 40 statements. general participant information. fine tuning originally, all study participants were supposed to be first-year high school students whose semester grades were e or f and whose end-of-middle school exam results were below 60%. there were 33 such students. they were familiarised with the purpose of the study, their role as research participants and ensured about data confidentiality and anonymity. the survey was administered directly to the students because the sample was small enough (33), so the response rate was 100%. however, since the relationship between the initial problem at the beginning of the research project and the conceptualisation of the problem in the course of the research ought to be dynamic (wallace, 1998), my initial idea of the research was modified. the first analysis of the questionnaires made me realise that any analysis would be incomplete without comparing unsuccessful students’ results with data obtained from their successful colleagues: students whose middle school exam results were above 75% and who did well and very well in the course of the first semester. their semester grades were 4 (c), 5 (b), and 6 (a). there were 43 such students to whom the same survey was administered (response rate 100%). average students whose exam results were between 60% and 75% and their semester grade was 3 (d) did not participate in the study. eventually, the questionnaire was administered to two independent samples of learners (aged 16). group d (n = 33): learners with e and f semester grades and middle school exam below 60%. group g (n = 43): learners with c, b, a semester grades and middle school exam above 75%. the total number of participants was 76 (n = 76) out of 136 first-year students of the school. reliability of the questionnaire during statistical analysis, the reliability of the whole questionnaire and the individual subscales was checked using the cronbach’s alpha coefficient (α). new school, the same old rut?… 77 in order to calculate it and for statistical analysis the ibm spss statistics programme was used. the results for the questionnaire and each subscale are shown in table 1: the letter d stands for the unsuccessful or defeated group and the letter g for the successful one. as we can see, the questionnaire is reliable for both groups, the results being 0.88 and 0.84, respectively. table 1 the cronbach’s alpha value (α) α motivation attitude anxiety dissatisfaction all subscales group d 0.722 0.832 0.919 0.879 0.791 0.881 0.846group g 0.623 0.747 0.877 with the lowest result still above the minimum suggested by zoltan dörnyei (2007), which is 0.60, the survey results could be calculated and analysed. analysis of the questionnaire results for the four subscales survey results are presented in the form of charts (see figures 2–5). aggregated values for the four subscales and results for particular items are presented in the form of tables. subscale 1: motivation it is outside the scope of this paper to present motivation theories; nevertheless, some aspects of motivation need to be discussed from the perspective of this action research. in the final version of the questionnaire, the items concerning students’ instrumental orientation, motivational intensity and desire to learn english were included under the broad heading of motivation. instrumental orientation, as opposed to integrative orientation, is connected with practical reasons for studying a language, reasons such as getting to university or making a career. it must be remembered that gardner’s division between integrative and instrumental orientation is by no means exhaustive. there are other reasons behind learning a foreign language such as the ones described by oxford and shearin (1994), for instance “showing off to friends” or “aiding world peace.” also, integrative and instrumental orientation may joanna masoń-budzyń78 be further divided; it was done by dörnyei (2006) while investigating young hungarians learning english as a foreign language. nonetheless, it may be assumed that it is instrumental orientation that plays the most important role for foreign language learners, especially at the intermediate level (dörnyei, 1990), in my view, especially in a school situation. therefore, i focused on this type of motivation in my questionnaire. another aspect of motivation is motivational intensity, which may be defined as the effort students put into studying, doing their classroom or homework assignments. it also includes their persistence in learning, so this is a continuous activity, a process, not a single action. it appears that there must be a strong correlation between motivational intensity and being a successful foreign language learner. certainly, a motivated learner is goal-oriented and shows a desire to learn the foreign language. this desire should manifest itself in their efforts to achieve the goal and a positive attitude towards learning itself. let us see how those three aspects of motivation are interrelated when it comes to the subjects of this study. figure 2 shows the results for subscale 2–students’ motivation. the red bar represents the results of group d–unsuccessful students, the green one of successful students–group g. figure 2. students’ motivation. new school, the same old rut?… 79 the mean values and standard deviation figures are presented in table 2. table 2 overall mean scores and standard deviation for subscale 1: motivation group mean score standard deviation d 3.93 0.90 g 4.25 0.73 there is some difference in the mean scores; still, we can say that motivation in both groups is high, in case of some items even very high, with the mean above 4 for both groups. almost every participant (97%) wishes they were fluent in english; a great majority (88.5%) would like to understand the lyrics of english songs, and as many as 90.9% will not be satisfied with a low score (30%) in the basic matura exam. students acknowledge that english is beneficial for their future career and education. although motivation in the successful group is stronger, the differences tend to be relatively small. theoretically, instrumental motivation connected with career planning should not be very relevant for high school students as most of them do not think about the distant future (clement et al., 1994, cited in dörnyei, 1994). contrary to this assumption, as we can see in table 3, the questionnaire results show that there were no participants who would even moderately disagree with the statement that english is essential for their future career. table 3 studying english is important because it will be necessary to get a good job group strongly disagree moderately disagree it’s hard to say % moderately agree strongly agree d 0 0 12.1 42.4 20.9 45.5 76.7g 0 0 2.3 this could be a consequence of the acquiescence bias, which is a tendency to say yes when the participant is the so-called yeasayer who believes that the answer to a given question should be positive because it sounds correct (dörnyei, 2003). another explanation could be that the subjects simply repeated what they had heard from their parents and teachers. according to a study conducted in 2015 for cambridge english polska by millward brown among 600 parents, 86% of them consider english to be the school subject which is most important for their children’s future, and 92% believe that knowledge of english will give their children an opportunity to get a good job. a superficial look at the job advertisement section in any newspaper supports this belief. joanna masoń-budzyń80 thus, it is not surprising that even very young people, who probably do not have a clear vision of their career yet, appreciate the role english will play in their professional life. it should be emphasised at this point that the percentage of students who strongly agree with the statement that studying english is important because it will be necessary to get a good job is much higher among successful students. the declaration that english is crucial for professional success does not exactly match the energy put into learning. table 4 presents questionnaire results for the items connected with the time students spend learning english. table 4 i spend a lot of time learning english group strongly disagree moderately disagree it’s hard to say % moderately agree strongly agree d 3.0 42.4 51.5 3.0 16.3 0 4.7g 2.3 20.9 55.8 there are two items where the percentage drops, and they both concern motivational intensity—the effort which students put into attaining their goals. one could draw a conclusion that even though students in both groups realise the importance of english, very few of them spend a lot of time learning or do it systematically. only 25.4% of the participants admit that they keep up to date with english by working on it regularly. it is clearly visible that hardly any students in the unsuccessful group spend a lot of time learning english (3%), whereas their number is slightly higher in the successful group (21%). subscale 2: attitude since motivation and attitude are intertwined in the learning process, as positive attitudes increase and negative attitudes decrease motivation (brown, 2000), it is not surprising that most students, irrespective of the group, have shown a positive attitude towards english, the average being above three. researchers (gardner, 1985; morgan 1993; noels et al., 2000; dörnyei, 2005) emphasise that a positive attitude to the foreign language is crucial to language learning success; nevertheless, it does not seem to be the decisive factor. the data in figure 3 reflect students’ attitude towards the english language and towards learning english. new school, the same old rut?… 81 figure 3. students’ attitude. the mean values and standard deviation figures are presented in table 5. table 5 overall mean scores and standard deviation for subscale 2: attitude group mean score standard deviation d 3.86 0.97 g 4.32 0.72 the mean scores of the two groups demonstrate that although learners in group g have a more positive attitude toward english and learning english (m = 4.32, sd = .72), the attitude of learners in group d is also positive (m = 3.86, sd = .97) most respondents in both groups (66.7% in group d and 88.3% in group g) declare that they like the sound of english. participants in the successful group demonstrate a much higher degree of agreement with the statements concerning the attitude towards english, except for item number two. even though the difference is a slight one, it is still worth noticing that more students in the joanna masoń-budzyń82 unsuccessful group (group d 84.9%, group g 83.4%) strongly disagree with the statement that they hate the english language. the differences between groups become more significant in the attitude towards learning english, which corresponds to the results concerning motivational intensity. when it comes to declarations, both groups demonstrate a positive attitude towards learning english since 84.9% of subjects in group d and 95.4% in group g do not believe that learning english is a waste of time. difficulties arise when theoretical declarations are supposed to be put into practice. table 6 shows the results for item number 15: i like learning english. table 6 i like learning english group strongly disagree moderately disagree it’s hard to say % moderately agree strongly agree d 9.1 6.1 39.4 36.4 53.5 9.1 34.9g 0 0 11.6 the item-wise analysis of attitudes towards learning english indicates the absence of successful participants who do not like learning english, whereas in the unsuccessful group there are many who do not seem to have decided yet. many participants (15.2%) in group d do not like learning english. even though it may seem tempting to conclude that this is the reason behind their lack of success, i believe that any attempts to establish the cause and effect relationship between the fact that students do not like learning english and their low results may lead to the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc. subscale 3: anxiety classroom anxiety is a complex concept that cannot be reduced to test anxiety, communication anxiety or fear of negative evaluation. although communication apprehension, test anxiety, and fear of negative evaluation provide useful conceptual building blocks for a description of foreign language anxiety, foreign language anxiety is not simply the combination of these fears transferred to foreign language learning. rather, we conceive foreign language anxiety as a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings, and behaviours related to classroom language learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process. (horowitz, horowitz, & cope, 2012, p. 128) new school, the same old rut?… 83 according to macintyre and charos (1996), who analysed the relations between affective variables and their impact on the frequency of second language communication, language anxiety has a negative impact on willingness to communicate and on perceived communicative competence. as we can see in figure 4, anxiety is the first subscale where the red bars are higher, which means that unsuccessful students have a higher degree of classroom anxiety. figure 4. students’ classroom anxiety. the mean values and standard deviation figures are presented in table 7. table 7 overall mean scores and standard deviation for subscale 3: anxiety group mean score standard deviation d 3.35 1.32 g 2.98 1.13 the data presented above show a relatively high standard deviation for both unsuccessful (sd = 1.32) and successful (sd = 1.13) learners, which joanna masoń-budzyń84 highlights anxiety to be the most inconsistent subscale. the mean score of 3.35 shows that unsuccessful students have a relatively high level of classroom anxiety. the item-wise analysis demonstrates that both groups have a high degree of understanding why other students feel nervous about speaking english in class. the biggest differences between successful and unsuccessful students concern getting nervous while speaking english during classes. in the item “i get nervous when i am speaking in my english class,” the discrepancy reaches 35.6%, the results for group d and g being 72.8% and 37.2% respectively. it is worth mentioning that classroom anxiety is low (with the mean below 3) in the item: “i get anxious that other students will laugh at me when i speak english.” the results for this element are presented in table 8. table 8 i am anxious that the other students in class will laugh at me when i speak english group strongly disagree moderately disagree it’s hard to say % moderately agree strongly agree d 27.3 27.3 12.1 21.2 7.0 12.1 4.7g 34.9 41.9 11.6 interestingly, the majority of participants in both groups (group d: 54.6%, group g: 76.8%) disagree with the statement that they are afraid that other students will laugh at them when they speak english. still, the number of those who agree with this statement is much higher in the unsuccessful group (33.3% vs. 11.7%). considering that the level of anxiety in the unsuccessful group is generally high, with the mean above the average level, there must be reasons other than their colleagues’ negative reaction that contribute to this state of affairs. perhaps it is the teacher’s reaction that they fear. the fact that they are not afraid of being ridiculed by their peers does not mean that they are not afraid of the teacher’s negative comments or a bad grade. another reason could be that group d participants are aware of their deficiencies. their reluctance to speak may be a consequence of insufficient knowledge of english. on the other hand, it might be a question of not being used to speaking english. perhaps polish (the students’ mother tongue) was the only language of communication during their english lessons in middle school and, eventually, they will get used to new circumstances and their anxiety will lower. new school, the same old rut?… 85 subscale 4: students’ dissatisfaction the items in the last subscale, under the heading of students’ dissatisfaction, the results of which are presented in figure 5, aimed at answering the question whether students consider the level of their english class too high and whether they are disappointed with it or not. figure 5. students’ dissatisfaction. the mean values and standard deviation figures are presented in table 9. table 9 overall mean scores and standard deviation for subscale 4: dissatisfaction group mean score standard deviation d 3.31 1.11 g 2.43 0.99 the mean score of 3.31 (sd = 1.11) in the unsuccessful group shows that learners appear to be dissatisfied with their english lessons. the difference between mean scores for both groups is the most significant. when it comes to particular items, 45.5% of unsuccessful students admit that they would rather joanna masoń-budzyń86 their english course-book were easier. as many as 66.7% of them agree with the statement that they tend to give up and not pay attention when they do not understand their english teacher’s explanation of something. one statement in this subscale was exceptional. it concerned students’ expectations: more participants in group g (88.3%) than in group d (75.7%) expected that they would get good grades. as we can see, students in both groups were quite optimistic with regard to their future performance. the remaining items in this subscale show visible differences. the itemwise analysis illustrates that unsuccessful students feel that their level of english is lower than the level of other students in the group. it is also worth noticing that a vast majority of unsuccessful students are fully aware of their need to revise basic structures. there is a noticeable discrepancy between the groups. the discrepancy is even bigger for the item concerning problems with basic structures (table 10). table 10 i know i have problems with basic structures group strongly disagree moderately disagree it’s hard to say % moderately agree strongly agree d 0 24.2 33.3 24.2 16.3 18.2 0g 51.2 11.6 20.9 more than half of participants in group g strongly disagree with the statement that they have problems with basic structures, whereas there were no such responses in the unsuccessful group. in view of those results a question arises. what inhibits unsuccessful students from informing their teachers that they could use a few hours devoted to the revision of basic structures? each teacher is obligated to conduct some extra lessons. my experience shows that very few students participate in them, and those who do are the ones who want to take part in language competitions or better prepare for the extended matura exam. it would require further investigation to find out the reasons behind unsuccessful learners’ reluctance to participate in those lessons, despite the fact that they are conscious of their shortcomings. summary of the findings • students’ motivation in both group d and group g was high: 3.93 and 4.25, respectively. new school, the same old rut?… 87 • both groups demonstrated a positive attitude towards the english language and learning english with the mean values of 3.86 (group d) and 4.32 (group g). • students’ poor performance was not a result of their lack of motivation or their negative attitude toward english. • anxiety and dissatisfaction with the english course varied across the two investigated groups. • learners whose performance was poor demonstrated a higher level of anxiety and dissatisfaction with their english lessons. the mean value of anxiety was 3.35 in group d and 2.98 in group g, whereas the mean value of dissatisfaction was 3.31 in group d and 2.43 in group g. conclusion the limitations of the present study must be borne in mind. the participants were students of one school – the purposive strategy of survey sampling was used (nunan, 1992). the study was restricted to investigating only attitude, motivation, anxiety, and students’ dissatisfaction. as far as course evaluation is concerned, teacher assessment was deliberately omitted. although we regularly mark our students’ performance, polish high school teachers are not accustomed to any kind of appraisal, especially if it were an appraisal made by their students. besides, the head teacher’s permission to investigate this aspect was not granted. another limitation is that the only variable in this action research was students’ results, so it would be hard to generalise the findings. nevertheless, it seems that they might contribute to limiting the number of unsuccessful students in the school where the survey was conducted. the most significant observation is that unsuccessful students, despite their positive attitude towards english and relatively high motivation, seem to be dissatisfied with their english class level, and show a higher degree of classroom anxiety than their colleagues with better results. in other words, it is not their motivation or attitude that should be worked upon. the teachers’ efforts must focus on lowering learners’ anxiety, and meeting their specific needs to increase their satisfaction with the english lessons. in order to, at least partially, alleviate the problem, teachers should take into account end-of-middle school exam results and immediately offer freshmen whose results were low some remedial classes devoted to the revision of basic structures in order that learners have a chance to make up for their shortcomings from the very beginning of the school year. simultaneously, they will become aware of the fact that their level of english is lower than the level of joanna masoń-budzyń88 other learners. these classes shall be conducted regularly to increase students’ motivational intensity, which appears to be a key factor in foreign language learning. i dare suggest that the classes be imposed on first-year high school students with low exam results to make sure that they participate in them and, consequently, benefit from them. i would also recommend that the division into groups be a cross-class division to minimise level discrepancies among members of the same group and, in consequence, to lower the anxiety of some students. it must be borne in mind, however, that this solution might pose a real challenge because it is difficult to implement. it could complicate preparing the timetable and would require tremendous effort on the part of the person responsible for this task. it remains an open question whether it will be considered worthwhile by school authorities. apart from that, the teachers should do their utmost to utilise the high motivation and positive attitude of the weaker students. they should be encouraged to take active part in the lesson in order that they can break the language barrier. rather than wait for them to volunteer, the teacher could involve them in group or pair work, where english is the language of communication. if other students offer their help and the teacher praises the weaker students readily for any progress they make, their self-confidence is bound to increase. should the above recommendations be introduced, the first semester grades will indicate whether they have fulfilled their role. better grades may suggest that the same solutions could be tested in other schools that face the same problem. should the first semester grades not improve, it seems reasonable to expand the scope of the study to seek other factors that influence students’ performance, apart from the ones included in the questionnaire. similar questionnaires should become part of teaching practice. they could be an invaluable source of knowledge, not only about our students’ motivation and attitude, but also about their expectations concerning the content and form of their english lessons. it might be worthwhile to employ action research, which is a continuous activity, to improve the teaching/learning process. i believe that action research, although time and effort-consuming, might be interesting from teachers’ and teachers-to-be perspective. pre-service teachers and practising teachers should be encouraged to conduct this type of research as it will definitely transform them from passive into active participants of the teaching process. i am aware that polish teachers are overloaded with work, the amount of paperwork they have to deal with surpasses all expectations and additional duties discourage even the most passionate ones; nevertheless, (a) many, if not most, language teachers would like to gain a more thorough understanding of the teaching and learning process as well as the various classroom events; (b) one main purpose of applied linguistics research is new school, the same old rut?… 89 to provide answers to questions that concern these issues; and (c) currently there is a wide gap between teachers and researchers in most countries, which needs to be bridged. (dörnyei, 2007, p. 193) this paper is just an attempt to bridge that gap and to encourage teachers to act. references baumfield, v., hall, e., & wall, k. (2013). action research in education: learning through practitioner enquiry. london: sage publications ltd. centralna komisja egzaminacyjna (2016). rozkłady wyników i parametry statystyczne rozkładu wyników egzaminu gimnazjalnego w kwietniu 2016. retrieved from https://www.cke. edu.pl/images/_egzamin_gimnazjalny/informacje_o_wynikach/2016/20160615%20 gimnazjum%20wstepne%20informacje%20o%20wynikach%20rozklady.pdf central statistical office (2016). education in 2015/2016 school year. retrieved from http:// stat.gov.pl/obszary-tematyczne/edukacja/edukacja/oswiata-i-wychowanie-w-roku-szkolnym-20152016,1,11.html cochran-smith, m., & lytle, s. l. (2009). inquiry as stance: practitioner research for the next generation. new york: teachers college press. dana, n., & yendol-hoppey, d. (2009). the reflective educator’s guide to classroom research. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. dörnyei, z., & csizér, k. (2012). how to design and analyze surveys in sla research? in a. mackey & s. gass (eds.), research methods in second language acquisition: a practical guide (pp. 74–94). malden, ma: wiley-blackwell. retrieved from http://www.zoltandornyei.co.uk/uploads/2012-dornyei-csizer-rmsla.pdf dörnyei, z., & ushioda, e. (2011). teaching and researching motivation (2nd ed.). harlow: longman. dörnyei, z. (2007). research methods in applied linguistics: quantitative, qualitative and mixed methodologies. oxford: oxford university press. dörnyei, z. (2005). the psychology of the language learner. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. dörnyei, z. (2003). questionnaires in second language research: construction, administration and processing. london: routlege. dörnyei, z. (1998). motivation in second and foreign language learning. language teaching, 31, 117–135. dörnyei, z. (1994). motivation and motivating in the foreign language classroom. the modern language journal, 78(3), 273–284. gabryś-barker, d. (ed.). (2011). action research in teacher development. katowice: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego. gardner, r. c. (2004). attitude motivation test battery: international amtb research project. canada: the university of western ontario. retrieved from http://publish.uwo.ca/~gardner /docs/englishamtb.pdf gardner, r. c. (1985). social psychology and second language learning: the role of attitudes and motivation. london: edward arnold. retrieved from http://publish.uwo.ca/~gardner /docs/secondlanguage1985book.pdf joanna masoń-budzyń90 harkness, j. a. (2008). comparative survey research: goals and challenges. in e. d. de leeuw, j. j. hox, & d. a. dillman (eds.), international handbook of survey methodology (pp. 56–77). new york, ny: lawrence erlbaum. horowitz, e., horowitz, m., & cope, j. (1986). foreign language classroom anxiety. the modern language journal, 70(2), 125–132. macintyre, p., & charos, c. (1996). personality, attitudes, and affects as predictors of second language communication. journal of language and social psychology, 15(1), 3–26. morgan, c. (1993). attitude change and foreign language culture learning. language teaching, 31, 63–75. michońska-stadnik, a. (2008). pojęcie motywacji-wczoraj, dziś i jutro. in a. michońskastadnik, & z. wąsik (eds.), nowe spojrzenie na motywację w dydaktyce języków obcych (pp. 107–116). wrocław: wydawnictwo wyższej szkoły filologicznej we wrocławiu. noels, k. a., pelletier, l. g., clément, r., & vallerand, r. j. (2000). why are you learning a second language? motivational orientations and self-determination theory. language learning, 50(1), 57–85. nunan, d. (1992). research methods in language learning. cambridge: cup. perspektywy (2017). ranking liceów 2017 – śląskie. retrieved from http://www.perspektywy. pl/portal/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3239:ranking-liceow-2017-wojslaskie&catid=221&itemid=424&strona=2 polyanna [blogger’s screen name]. (2016). badanie znajomości angielskiego – dobre wieści, blog post, 29, january. retrieved from http://www.mumslittlelinguist.com/2016/01/badanieznajomosci-angielskiego-dobre.html rozporządzenie ministra edukacji narodowej z dnia 1 marca 2013 w sprawie uzyskiwania stopni awansu zawodowego przez nauczycieli. retrieved from http://isap.sejm.gov.pl/deta ilsservlet?id=wdu20130000393 smoczyńska, a. (ed.). (2014). the system of education in poland. retrieved from http://www. fss.org.pl/sites/fss.org.pl/files/the-system_2014_www_0.pdf vaughan, m., & burnaford, g. (2016). action research in graduate teacher education: a review of the literature 2000–2015. educational action research, 24(2), 280–299. wilczyńska, w., & michońska-stadnik, a. (2010). metodologia badań w glottodydaktyce. kraków: wydawnictwo avalon. wallace, m. j. (1998). action research for language teachers. cambridge: cup. joanna masoń-budzyń neue schule, dieselbe routine? eine unter den schülern der ersten oberschulklasse mit schwachen schulleistungen durchgeführte umfrage z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die aktionsforschung ist eins der werkzeuge, die ein nachdenklicher lehrer zur verfügung hat, wenn er bemüht ist, spezifische probleme in seiner täglichen arbeit zu lösen. der gegenwärtige aufsatz handelt von der in einer allgemeinbildenden oberschule durchgeführten forschung, deren ziel war es, manche gründe der schwachen schulleistungen im englischunterricht von den schülern der ersten klasse zu ergründen. obwohl die schüler in der neuen schule den einzelnen sprachgruppen aufgrund des leistungstestes eingestuft new school, the same old rut?… 91 wurden, beobachtete man, dass schlechte noten nach dem ersten semester in starker positiver wechselbeziehung zu schwachen leistungen des testes für gymnasiasten standen. es wurde eine umfrage gemacht, in der die befragten schüler ihre motivation, einstellung und angst vor unterricht beurteilen sollten. sie bewerteten auch ihre kompetenzen im vergleich mit anderen gruppenmitgliedern. im vorliegenden text werden die ergebnisse der umfrage präsentiert und die vorschläge für die lehrer angedeutet, wie diese manche bildungsbarrieren den schülern in ihrer neuen schule zu bewältigen helfen können. schlüsselwörter: aktionsforschung, schüler mit schwachen schulleistungen, motivation, einstellung, angst vor lehr-/lernprozess joanna masoń-budzyń92 a p p e n d i x 1 adapted attitude/motivation test battery (polish and english version) table 11 questionnaire items no. polish version english version 1 uczenie się angielskiego jest naprawdę pasjonujące. learning english is really great. 2 uczenie się angielskiego jest ważne, ponieważ angielski jest konieczny, by dostać dobrą pracę. studying english is important because it will be necessary to get a good job. 3 dobry wynik na maturze z angielskiego pozwoli dostać mi się na wymarzone studia. a good english matura exam result will allow me to get into my dream university. 4 uczniowie, którzy twierdzą, że stresują się na angielskim, po prostu szukają wymówek. students who claim they get nervous in english classes are just making excuses. 5 chętnie zgłaszam się do odpowiedzi na angielskim. i eagerly volunteer answers in my english class. 6 uczenie się angielskiego jest ważne, ponieważ będzie mi on potrzebny w przyszłej pracy. studying english is important because i will need it for my career. 7 nie odczuwam niepokoju, kiedy odpowia dam na lekcji angielskiego. i don’t get anxious when i have to answer a question in my english class. 8 nienawidzę języka angielskiego (chodzi o sam język, nie lekcje). i hate the english language. 9 mój poziom angielskiego jest niższy niż pozostałych osób w grupie. my level of english is lower than the level of other students in my group. 10 wolałbym, żeby podręcznik do angielskiego był łatwiejszy. i would rather my english course book were easier. 11 zależy mi na uzyskaniu wysokiego wyniku (powyżej 90%) z matury podstawowej z angielskiego. i really want to get a high score (above 90%) in the basic matura exam. 12 podoba mi się brzmienie języka angiel skiego. i like the sound of english. 13 uczenie się angielskiego to strata czasu. learning english is a waste of time. 14 ćwiczenia, które robimy na angielskim są dla mnie za trudne. the exercises we do in our english class are too difficult for me. 15 lubię uczyć się angielskiego. i like learning english. 16 wstydzę się zgłaszać do odpowiedzi na lekcji angielskiego. it embarrasses me to volunteer answers in our english class. 17 mój podręcznik do angielskiego jest za trudny. my english course book is too difficult. 18 wystarczy mi 30% z matury podstawowej z angielskiego. 30% in the basic matura exam will be enough for me. new school, the same old rut?… 93 19 uważam, że uczenie się angielskiego jest nudne. i think that learning english is dull. 20 rozpoczynając naukę w liceum liczyłem/ liczyłam na to, że będę miał/miała dobre oceny z angielskiego. when i came to this school i expected to have good grades in english. 21 chciałbym/chciałabym mówić biegle po angielsku. i wish i were f luent in english. 22 byłoby mi łatwiej, gdybyśmy poświęcili więcej czasu na powtarzanie podstaw. it would be much easier for me if we devoted more time to the revision of basic structures. 23 kiedy nie rozumiem, gdy nauczyciel angielskiego wyjaśnia coś na lekcji, wyłączam się. i tend to give up and not pay attention when i don’t understand my english teacher’s explanation of something. 24 angielski jest bardzo ważną częścią programu nauczania. english is a very important part of the school programme. 25 wiem, że nie opanowałem podstaw angielskiego. i know i have problems with basic structures. 26 nigdy nie czuję się pewnie odpowiadając po angielsku podczas lekcji angielskiego. i never feel quite sure of myself when i am speaking in our english class. 27 stresuję się mówiąc po angielsku podczas lekcji. i get nervous when i am speaking in my english class. 28 ćwiczenia z podręcznika są dla mnie zrozumiałe. i understand the exercises in my course book. 29 boję się, że inni uczniowie będą się ze mnie śmiali, gdy będę mówić po angielsku. i am anxious that the other students in class will laugh at me when i speak english. 30 poświęcam dużo czasu na naukę angielskiego. i spend a lot of time learning english. 31 poziom podręcznika mi odpowiada. the level of my english course book is right for me. 32 martwi mnie, że inni uczniowie w mojej grupie są lepsi z angielskiego niż ja. it worries me that other students in my group are better at english. 33 angielski jest jednym z moich ulubionych przedmiotów. english is one of my favourite subjects. 34 moja motywacja do nauki była silniejsza na początku roku. my motivation was stronger at the beginning of the school year. 35 uczę się angielskiego tylko po to, żeby zdać maturę. i learn english only to pass the matura exam. 36 czasem marzę o możliwości zrezygnowania z nauki angielskiego. i sometimes daydream about dropping english. 37 nie uczę się angielskiego w domu. i don’t learn english at home. 38 systematycznie uczę się angielskiego. i keep up to date with english by working on it almost every day. joanna masoń-budzyń94 39 chciałbym/chciałabym rozumieć teksty angielskich piosenek. i would like to understand the lyrics of english songs. 40 nie rozumiem, dlaczego inni uczniowie stresują się, gdy mają mówić po angielsku na lekcji. i don’t understand why other students feel nervous about speaking english in class. new school, the same old rut?… 95 a p p e n d i x 2 adapted attitude/motivation test battery key table 12 test key no. category subscale 1 positively keyed attitude 2 positively keyed motivation 3 positively keyed motivation 4 negatively keyed anxiety 5 negatively keyed anxiety 6 positively keyed motivation 7 negatively keyed anxiety 8 negatively keyed attitude 9 positively keyed dissatisfaction 10 positively keyed dissatisfaction 11 positively keyed motivation 12 positively keyed attitude 13 negatively keyed attitude 14 positively keyed dissatisfaction 15 positively keyed attitude 16 positively keyed anxiety 17 positively keyed dissatisfaction 18 negatively keyed motivation 19 negatively keyed attitude 20 positively keyed dissatisfaction 21 positively keyed motivation 22 positively keyed dissatisfaction 23 positively keyed dissatisfaction 24 positively keyed attitude 25 positively keyed dissatisfaction 26 positively keyed anxiety 27 positively keyed anxiety 28 negatively keyed dissatisfaction 29 positively keyed anxiety 30 positively keyed motivation 31 negatively keyed dissatisfaction 32 positively keyed anxiety 33 negatively keyed dissatisfaction 34 positively keyed dissatisfaction 35 negatively keyed motivation 36 positively keyed dissatisfaction 37 negatively keyed motivation 38 positively keyed motivation 39 positively keyed motivation 40 negatively keyed anxiety konrad szcześniak university of silesia in katowice, poland benefits of l1–l3 similarities the case of the dative case a b s t r a c t the present study looks at the effects of structural similarities between l1 and l3 on learner performance. the main focus is on the knowledge of the dative construction in polish learners of portuguese. portuguese and polish share a number of important similarities in their use of the dative, which include functions not found in english, the learners’ l2. the main question investigated in this study is whether learners are aware of the non-banal similarities (given that they do not occur in english) and whether they can make use of that knowledge. it is found that learners do benefit from positive transfer, but that depends on the kind of function and frequency of the dative. keywords: dative, transfer, avoidance, priming introduction the role of l1 in the learning of a foreign language has been an important recurring theme since the beginning of second language acquisition research. it has also received conflicting interpretations, ranging from proposals that transfer from l1 is of negligible importance (e.g., george, 1972), through the recognition that it does affect performance in a foreign language, usually negatively (cornips, 1992), to more nuanced analyses showing that much depends on proficiency. thus, recent studies suggest that “as proficiency increases meaning-related transfer becomes more common” (agustín llach, 2010, p. 6), while “form-focused transfer is most dominant in the early stages of language learning” (gabryś-barker, 2006, p. 145). theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 3 (2) 2017, pp. 87–110 konrad szcześniak88 in this study, i wish to focus on the role of structural similarities between an l1 and l3 in acquisition and performance. specifically, i will look at elements of grammar that are shared by the two languages, but are at the same time fairly remarkable in the sense that they are not found in the learner’s l2. this will make it possible to correlate very concrete linguistic data with performance data and revisit the long-standing debate on whether contrastive analysis is relevant to learning. i will question the view that “[i]nterference, or native to target language transfer, plays such a small role in language learning performance that no contrastive analysis, no matter how well conceived, could correlate highly with performance data, at least on the level of syntax” (whitmann & jackson, 1972, p. 40), and i will argue that similarities uncovered by comparison can in fact strongly facilitate learning. to explore the question of positive transfer, the present study examines polish learners’ perception of the dative construction in portuguese. similar studies investigated the acquisition of the dative construction in a foreign language, although to the best of my knowledge none featured the pair polish-portuguese. in one, zyzik (2006) reports on the acquisition of the spanish dative by english-speaking learners, and while the findings of that study are relevant to our discussion, the combination of languages it involved determined a focus quite unlike in the present study. that is, because there are few common uses of the dative in spanish and english, learners cannot fall back on their l1 knowledge to assist consolidation of the l2 system, so zyzik’s study did not explore the benefits of similarities. on the other hand, the present investigation looks at how certain uses of the dative construction, common to l1 and l3, can be consolidated thanks to the similarities. in the following section, a description of the dative is offered, focusing mainly on similarities between portuguese and polish, especially those points that set the two languages apart from english. the dative the dative alternation indo-european languages are characterized by the presence of the dative case, which marks indirect objects, typically expressing recipients in situations of transfer of possession (as in: pass me the salt). even in languages without overt case, like english, the dative case affects the behavior of various grammatical constructions. for example, those verbs that alternate between the dative and prepositional frames are sensitive to the nature of the entity candidate for dative case marking. while animate entities can freely receive dative case and benefits of l1–l3 similarities. the case of the dative case 89 thus alternate freely between the prepositional and dative frame (1), inanimate participants resist the alternation (2). the logic of the constraint blocking uses like (2b) is that since the dative case prototypically marks recipients and potential possessors, inanimate entities incapable of possession do not qualify for dative marking. (1) a. jordan threw the ball to carter. (prepositional frame) b. jordan threw carter the ball. (dative frame) (2) a. jordan threw the ball to the basket. (prepositional frame) b. *jordan threw the basket the ball. (dative frame) according to gropen et al. (l989) and pinker (1989), the constraint on animacy is universal, and as such can be found in many languages. indeed, such is the case of other european languages, where inanimate participants can only be expressed through a goal to-pp, but not a dative frame. in portuguese and polish, such uses are thus also anomalous. the following is a polish translation of example (2): (3) a. jordan rzucił piłkę do kosza. jordan threw ball to basket ‘jordan threw the ball to the basket.’ b. *jordan rzucił oszowi piłkę. jordan threw basket-dat ball ‘jordan threw the basket the ball.’ this shows that in their exposure to the dative system in a new language, learners should be able to rely on at least some principles operative in the functioning of dative objects that are not language-specific, but indeed common to more languages. still, there are particularities in the way the dative construction is used. some uses are common to l1 and l3, and they are especially interesting when they do not occur in l2. they will be discussed below. dative of possession of great interest is the range of meanings which are expressed by the indirect complement construction. portuguese makes use of indirect complements to indicate a possessor affected in an event (dativo de posse, bechara, 2002, p. 425; rocha lima, 2011, p. 308). konrad szcześniak90 (4) lavaram-lhe o pescoço e cortaram-lhe o cabelo. (they) washed-him the neck and cut-him the hair. (jorge schwartz, vanguardas argentinas) ‘they washed his neck and cut his hair.’ (5) […] curar-lhe a filha. (raimundo lúlio, o livro das bestas) cure-him the daughter ‘to cure his daughter’ (6) partiram-lhe os vidros e roubaram-lhe o rádio. (they) broke-him the windows and stole-him the radio (joana vilela, lisboa, anos 70) ‘they broke his windows and stole his radio.’ these uses are strikingly similar to the behavior of the polish dative, which is also typically employed to express the affected possessor. the above sentences can be translated almost word for word, save the inexistence of articles in polish: (7) umyli mu szyję i obcięli mu włosy. (they) washed him neck and cut him hair. ‘they washed his neck and cut his hair.’ (8) […] uleczyć mu córkę. cure him daughter. ‘to cure his daughter’ (9) wybili mu szyby i ukradli mu radio. (they) broke him windows and stole him radio. ‘they broke his windows and stole his radio.’ the similarity between polish and portuguese can better be appreciated when they are contrasted with english. in the construction which describes an activity directed toward an object and its possessor, polish and portuguese mark the affected possessor by means of the dative pronoun, whereas english indicates it by means of the possessive pronoun: table 1 form of dative of possession constructions in polish, portuguese, and english polish portuguese english cut him [hair] obetnij mu [włosy] cut him [the hair] corta-lhe [o cabelo] cut [his hair] benefits of l1–l3 similarities. the case of the dative case 91 ethical dative an even more remarkable similarity can be observed in the use of the socalled ethical dative (dativo ético, bechara, 2002, p. 425). here, a participant is mentioned that is not directly involved in the situation (svobodová, 2014, p. 54)—it is not an argument of the verb, but is mentioned as an “affected party,” a participant emotionally involved in the situation. the participant in question is usually the speaker. in some cases, the participant can be rendered in english as a colloquial dative (e.g., sing me a song); in other cases it is most naturally not mentioned at all (11); and in still other situations it is expressed by the malefactive on construction (12). (10) abre-me essa porta. (josé leite de vasconcellos, revista lusitana, 1917) open-me that door ‘open that door.’ (11) não me enviem cartões a essas pessoas. (bechara, 2002, p. 425)  not me send postcards to those people  ‘don’t send postcards to those people.’ (12) não me chores agora. (mário de carvalho, apuros de um pessimista  not me cry now  em fuga, 1999)  ‘don’t cry on me now.’ predictably, these uses are also available in polish (13)–(15). (13) otwórz mi te drzwi.   open me that door   ‘open that door.’ (14) nie wysyłajcie mi kartek do tych osób.   not send me postcards to these people   ‘don’t send postcards to those people.’ (15) nie płacz mi teraz.  not cry me now  ‘don’t cry on me now.’ it should be pointed out, however, that this special use of the dative construction is not very common in either portuguese or polish. it is typically only found in spoken language, and is used on special occasions, when the speaker feels konrad szcześniak92 the need to stress his or her emotional involvement toward the outcome of the situation being discussed. one can speculate that a speaker may reasonably be imagined as functioning successfully in either language, without using or hearing this element for extended periods of time. dative of opinion one point of dissimilarity between polish and portuguese is the use of the dative case to express a scenario including its participant’s perspective. (16) é-lhe claro que existe qualquer coisa de maior.   is-him clear that exists some thing of greater   (http://www.revistapassos.pt, accessed may 12, 2017)   ‘it is clear to him that there exists something greater.’ (17) é-nos proveitoso neste mundo utar.   is-us advantageous in-this world fight   (www.ocalvinista.com, accessed may 12, 2017)   ‘it is worth our while to fight in this world.’ (18) não me é possível traduzir em palavras o que sinto.  not me is possible translate in words the what (i) feel   (juscelino kubitschek, discurso de 1960)  ‘it is not possible for me to translate into words what i feel.’ it should be noted that in polish too some meanings can be expressed by means of this dative construction (19)–(20). in some cases, usage similarities are quite striking, so much so that the familiar classic line humani nihil a me alienum puto is rendered through essentially the same dative structure in both polish and portuguese (21). (19) jest mi obojętne, jakiej są płci. (mirosław bujko, złoty pociąg)   is me indifferent what are sex   ‘it doesn’t make any difference to me what sex they are.’ (20) nie było mu trudno takie rodziny znaleźć.   not was him hard such families find   (kacper zagadka, o małym królu)   ‘it wasn’t hard for him to find such families.’ benefits of l1–l3 similarities. the case of the dative case 93 (21) a. sou homem; nada humano me é estranho. (i) am man; nothing human me is strange ‘i am a human being; i consider nothing that is human alien to me.’ b. jestem człowiekiem; nic co ludzkie nie jest mi obce. (i) am man; nothing that human not is me strange ‘i am a human being; i consider nothing that is human alien to me.’ however, while polish has a rather limited selection of predicative adjectives that take dative complements, in portuguese, the construction allows any adjective that expresses the subject’s opinion toward the proposition presented in the sentence. below is a brief sample of adjectives attested in the construction: (22) a. era-lhes óbvio que... (‘it was obvious to them that…’)   b. era-lhe estranho que... (‘it was strange to him that…’)  c. é-me duvidoso que… (‘it is doubtful to me that…’)  d. é-me pouco relevante que… (‘it is not very relevant for me that…’)  e. essa questão é-me profundamente indiferente… (‘the question is profoundly indifferent to me…’)  f. é-me assustador sequer pensar… (‘i find it frightening to even think…’)  g. é-me evidente que... (‘it is evident to me that…’) the similarities between polish and portuguese, relative to english are summed up in table 2. table 2 presence or absence of three functions of the dative in portuguese, polish, and english dative of possession ethical dative dative of opinion portuguese + + + polish + + –/+ (only single adjectives) english – – – konrad szcześniak94 learnability challenge the above uses of the portuguese dative construction present a challenge for learnability theories. the most obvious question is whether they are mastered by polish learners of portuguese as a third language,1 and if so, whether their successful usage can be attributed to similarities with polish. as experienced language learners, they can be expected to be aware that uses like the ethical dative or the dative of possession are far from universally available options, since they are not found in english. their existence in polish and corresponding absence in english may prompt learners of portuguese to employ avoidance strategies on the grounds that it would be beyond belief that such evidently special l1 features could also be found in another language. even when they have witnessed similar uses, polish learners of portuguese may still avoid them in their own production, because “when great similarities exist […] the learner may doubt that these similarities are real” (gass & selinker, 1994, p. 138). on the other hand, one can also view learners’ perception of similarities more optimistically. it is equally possible that once they are noticed, such similarities may be taken advantage of in building proficiency in a l3. such a turn of events would be consistent with the idea that “[t]he use of prior knowledge, i.e. of one’s l1, could contribute to learners’ success […] at the cognitive level (objective language progress)” (gabryś-barker, 2006, p. 164). one can expect such success to be contingent on the learners’ level and prior knowledge that new competences can be built upon. this is consistent with the teachability hypothesis, which claims that […] the acquisition process cannot be steered or modelled just according to the requirements or precepts of formal instruction. on the contrary, […] teaching itself is subject to some of the constraints which determine the course of natural acquisition. (pienemann, 1989, p. 57). points of an l2 grammar can only be acquired successfully when the learner is ready for them; that is, their acquisition should be preceded by first mastering those points of grammar that are earlier and more basic in the acquisitional chronology. this presupposes a natural sequence in which the uses of dative outlined in the section the dative are arranged. thus, it is fair to consider typical transfer-of-possession uses (eu dei-lhe flores, ‘i gave her flowers’) as being the first stage in the acquisition of the dative construction. this is then 1 it is assumed here that for polish learners in general, portuguese almost always is a third language. when polish speakers become interested in learning portuguese, they already know at least english and in many cases, they are also f luent in spanish, as is the case with the subjects in the present study. benefits of l1–l3 similarities. the case of the dative case 95 followed by uses where the ‘possession’ element is present but is secondary to the construction’s focus on affectedness (dative of possession and ethical dative), which are in turn followed by uses where possession is most backgrounded and is not commonly found in l1 (dative of opinion). similar conclusions about the existence of a sequence of acquisition of the dative system are presented in zyzik (2006, p. 132). if transfer-of-possession uses have been internalized, the learner should be ready for the dative of possession and ethical dative, especially if these two applications of the dative are also present in l1. and there is good reason to believe that that is in fact what happens. it has been demonstrated that language users are sensitive to unusual patterns in the input, which are incorporated into a speaker’s linguistic knowledge as a result of mere exposure, as argued by authors like bybee (2010) and taylor (2012) who hypothesize that “each linguistic encounter lays down a trace in memory” (taylor, 2012, p. 3). specifically, what seems to happen is that as language users attend to input, certain features present in that input register in their minds as salient points likely to have a long-lived effect on their linguistic knowledge. it should be pointed out in this connection that salience and noticeability have obvious implications for second language acquisition. under the noticing hypothesis (schmidt, 1990), it is a measure of successful learners (of a foreign language) to what extent they are able to notice new elements of the input that they were not previously aware of and to go on to use these forms themselves. it is important to stress that the new features need not even be noticed consciously. a large part of knowledge is built without conscious report, as is indicated by the way people reuse elements of preceding discourse in their own production. for example, levelt & kelter (1982) show that the choice of grammatical constructions used when answering a question depends on the very question’s construction. if a person is asked at what time do you close? the answer is very likely to include the preposition at, but the preposition is equally likely to be absent in the answer if the question lacks it (what time do you close?). while speakers are clearly sensitive to the “question’s surface form [which] can affect the format of the answer given” (levelt & kelter, 1982, p. 78), most probably, they are not even aware that their answer echoed the form of the question. what such findings suggest is that the presence of an element in the input is powerful enough to prime the learners to echo that element in their own use, and the strength of priming depends on the salience and noticeability of a given element. the portuguese dative is an interesting case in the context of salience-driven priming and use, because its salience should be heightened by its remarkable similarity with polish. it is evident that such features do get noticed, for it would be rather counterintuitive to view exposure to input as having no effect on the learner’s knowledge. it would be interesting to see how the “trace in memory” envisioned by taylor (2012) translates into actual use. konrad szcześniak96 thus, the question to be explored is what effect on the learner the similarities with l1 have. are they dismissed as “suspicious,” “too good to be true” and therefore worthy of avoidance, or, on the contrary, do they contribute to priming and, in consequence, to more felicitous learning? study research questions the study aims to address the following questions: 1. can l1 knowledge be tapped in developing an l3 system in areas of great similarity? can such similarities neutralize interference from l2? one fairly peculiar use of the dative construction investigated in this study is governed by identical l1 and l3 rules, and it is therefore of great interest whether learners can transfer the construction’s specifications from l1 to l3. 2. does recent exposure to uses of a construction prime adequate use of that construction? in other words, can the learner benefit from encountering a specific use of the construction without explicit instruction regarding its function? 3. are the functions of the dative construction discussed in sections: dative of possession, ethical dative, and dative of opinion located within a natural hierarchy determining their chronology of acquisition, in line with the teachability hypothesis? participants the study involved 25 subjects, third-year students of portuguese, aged 20–23, enrolled in the spanish-portuguese program at the university of silesia in katowice. at the time of the study, the subjects had completed three years of intensive training in portuguese, attending various classes in portuguese as the language of instruction. the group included 19 females and six males. all subjects were native speakers of polish, with english being their l2 and portuguese coming as an l3. none of the subjects reported having visited a portuguese-speaking country before. benefits of l1–l3 similarities. the case of the dative case 97 task the subjects were instructed to complete ten sentences with blanks and multiple-choice options. the blanks referred to verb complements, of which six included dative objects and these were the focus of the study. the remaining four sentences contained accusative and other complements and were included to make it harder for the subjects to discover the objective of the study (which could prompt them to select the correct answers for the wrong reasons). the sentences presented to the subjects had the following format (the sheet with all sentences is shown in appendix c). the sentence in figure 1 can be translated as ‘paulo says that they broke the windows in his car and stole the radio,’ and the correct answer is c, which involves a dative complement, literally ‘broke him the windows.’ 6. o paulo diz que --------partiram os vidros no carro e roubaram o rádio. a. ele c. lhe b. o      d. dela figure 1. format of sentences used in the task. the six sentences with dative complements included two that exemplified the ethical dative, two with the dative of possession, and two with the dative of opinion. at this point it is necessary to address one possible objection, namely the possibility that filling blanks may not represent the most natural demonstration of performance. indeed, apart from completing forms or questionnaires, natural use of a language in communicative settings rarely involves tasks typical of classroom work. nevertheless, the format adopted in the study can be considered a reliable tool measuring the learner’s level of acquisition of the system. to complete the sentences, it is necessary to understand the content of the sentence, identify the semantic element of possession and associate it with the correct use of the dative construction. this may not guarantee active use in completely free-choice expression, but it does show the learner’s growing understanding, passive or active, of the dative functions. the subjects were divided into two groups, with 13 and 12 participants in each. one group was first asked to read three short paragraphs in portuguese which featured the three uses of the dative in portuguese. the idea was to measure possible effects, if any, of structural priming: does exposure to a given construction affect performance in the use of that construction with other verbs? to ensure that the subjects would not mechanically skim over the relevant uses of the dative, they were instructed to answer comprehension questions that required focusing on the information conveyed by means of the dative constructions (see figures 2 and 3). konrad szcześniak98 é-me indispensável estar perto do mar, da natureza, ouvir o silêncio, e portugal tem paisagens magníficas; impossível não regressar com energias renovadas. fonte http://caras.sapo.pt/famosos/2010-04-02-a-escolhade...-sofia-nicholson 2. a autora precisa da natureza para a. escrever sobre ela. b. tirar fotografias. c. nadar no mar. d. descansar. figure 2. a comprehension task used to prime the subjects. it is indispensable for me (lit. it is me indispensable) to be close to the sea, to nature, hear the silence, and portugal has magnificent landscapes; impossible to not come back with renewed energy. source http://caras.sapo.pt/famosos/2010-04-02-aescolha-de...-sofia-nicholson 2. the author needs nature to a. write about it. b. take pictures. c. swim in the sea. d. rest. figure 3. translation of the example shown in figure 1. three short paragraphs were also shown to the subjects in the other group (control), but the passages in this group did not include uses of the dative construction. the objective of using non-dative texts in the control group was to observe differences in the effect on performance in the case of priming and the absence of priming. the sheets with paragraphs and comprehension tasks are given in appendix a (group with priming) and appendix b (control group, no priming). results the first salient observation is a clear bias in the distribution of the correct answers among the three functions of the dative construction. the best performance is found in the use of the dative of possession (100%, 100% in group a, and 92%, 77% in b); followed by the dative of opinion (42%, 25% in a; 23%, 8% in b) and the ethical dative (8%, 0% in a; 15%, 0% in b). the uses of the dative of possession were recognized correctly by almost all subjects, whereas the ethical dative sentences were missed by a great majority of subjects, with the dative of opinion sentences faring only slightly better. it should be noted that the contrast is so strong that it cannot be a result of coincidence or random fluctuation. for example, in the primed group, 12 correct answers were given to each sentence exemplifying the dative of possession (i.e., all subjects got them right) and only one correct answer to the ethical dative examples (with 23 incorrect answers). thus, the difference between the correct answers given to the dative of possession examples and the ethical dative examples is statistically significant, with its two tailed p-value and one tailed p-value both benefits of l1–l3 similarities. the case of the dative case 99 at 0, which means there is a 100% chance the proportions are different. the percentages of correct answers are shown in figures 4 and 5. figure 4. correct choices (in %) for the sentences with the dative of possession (1–2), the dative of opinion (3–4), and the ethical dative in group a (with priming). figure 5. correct choices (in %) for the sentences with the dative of possession (1–2), the dative of opinion (3–4), and the ethical dative in group b (no priming). priming does seem to play a role, but it is stronger in the case of the dative of possession. as figures 4 and 5 illustrate, the percentage of correct answers (the first two columns) in the unprimed control group, although high, is visibly lower than in the group that benefited from priming. although the difference konrad szcześniak100 may not be statistically very significant in the case of the first sentence (with only a 52% chance that the proportions are different), the difference is much more pronounced in the second example, where there is a 91.8% chance that the proportions are different. in the first pair, the two-tailed p-value is 0.48 and the one-tailed p-value: 0.26; in the second pair, the two-tailed p-value is 0.08, and the one-tailed p-value: 0.04. in the case of the dative of opinion (examples 3–4), the chances that the differences between the results in the primed and the unprimed group are significant are 67% and 75.2%, and in the ethical dative sentences (5–6), the chances are 40% and 0%. the diminishing trend in the effects of priming can be seen in the orientation of the dotted line in figure 6. figure 6. probabilities (in %) that the proportions between primed and unprimed groups are different. discussion the examples tested did not involve typical uses of the dative case, ones that can be found in english (i.e., transfer of possession uses discussed in the section the dative alternation), so the subjects could not rely on the “universal” logic of the dative construction. to give correct answers, the subjects had to tap their knowledge of more language-specific properties of the dative construction described in the following sections: dative of possession, ethical dative, and dative of opinion. thus, the likeliest explanation of the data presented here is transfer from l1, or at least lack of strong l2 transfer. because the dative of possession is fairly common in polish, it can be assumed that when it is noticed in portuguese, it is internalized most easily. note that almost all the subjects recognized and benefits of l1–l3 similarities. the case of the dative case 101 applied correctly the use of the dative of possession in both sentences that exemplified it, in both the primed and unprimed group. to appreciate the significance of the data obtained, it is necessary to consider the two sentences in some detail. they featured two kinds of possession, namely alienable (23) and inalienable possession (24). (23) o paulo diz que lhe partiram os vidros no carro e roubaram o rádio.   art paul says that him-dat broke art windows in-art car and took art radio   ‘paulo says that they broke the windows in his car and took the radio.’ (24) a antónia acredita que foi a viagem a fátima que lhe curou o corpo.   art antónia believes that was art trip to fátima that her healed art body   ‘antónia believes that it was the trip to fátima that healed her body.’ in the example with alienable possession, the radio is seen as being possessed more “distantly”; that is, it is not an inalienable part of the subject’s body. in example (24), on the other hand, the body is a typical instance of inalienable possessum, more intuitively associated with the grammatical category of possession. the decision to include two such different kinds of possession in the sentences test was motivated by the need to avoid skewing the answers given to some types of the dative construction. that is, one would expect better performance in the case of the dative of possession relative to the other uses of the construction, if the examples used in the form were disproportionately more transparent or in any way more accessible than those representing the other uses. the inclusion of the alienable possession sentence (23) was designed to make this part of the task closer to the other uses of the dative construction in terms of difficulty. in the case of the dative of possession sentences, the alienable possession use could be considered more challenging, and indeed this is reflected in the results which are lower than for the inalienable possessive use, but only slightly. what needs to be underscored is that the sentence was nevertheless handled much better than the other uses. that is, one can conclude that the difference in performance is not due to the objective, informational content of the sentences, but due to grammatical difficulty. the dative of possession is more accessible because it is a deeply entrenched part of polish grammar, unlike the other two uses, which although present, are not as frequent. the dative of opinion and ethical dative contrast strongly with the possessive use of the dative construction in that they are considerably less common in polish. while the ethical dative functions the same way in both languages, it is far from being a basic feature of the grammar of either language. and the dative of opinion, although attested in polish, is used with a very restricted range of adjectives. as a result, learners of portuguese have limited chances of coming across instances of these functions with sufficient frequency for the construckonrad szcześniak102 tion to be noticed and internalized. when uses like the ethical dative do get noticed only sporadically, their appearance in portuguese may strike learners as either implausible or downright incomprehensible, and consequently these functions may not be recognized as such at all. the differing effects of priming for the dative of possession on the one hand, and the ethical and opinion dative on the other can be accounted for in terms of their frequency, too. it could be speculated that the uses of possession dative shown to the subjects before the task helped pre-activate the function, because it was already present in their minds in one form or another. although some effect could be observed, priming failed to translate significantly into better performance in the case of the other two datives, probably because there was little to prime: the structures were not part of the subjects’ knowledge of portuguese, so they were missed in the priming input, or the right association was not made when it came time to use the knowledge in the multiple-choice task. all this justifies the conclusion that transfer from l1 is contingent on a number of factors. one is the learners’ proficiency level. the subjects examined in the study were intermediate learners with enough experience to take advantage of the observed similarities through positive transfer from l1. this represents an evident improvement over the tendency to transfer from l2, often negatively, at lower levels of proficiency in l3 (angelovska & hahn, 2012). for example, in the case of beginning learners of portuguese, negative transfer from l2 is the only explanation for the use of the verb ser (‘to be’) in the “age description” collocation. polish students tend to build sentences like *eu sou 20 anos (‘i am 20 years’) instead of tenho 20 anos (‘i have 20 years’) because their l2 english interferes, even though transfer from their l1 polish would have been yielded the right structure. at more advanced stages, transfer tends to “even out,” with both l1 and l2 serving as sources for more positive transfer. the results of the study also justify the observation that, to the extent that the subjects’ correct responses can be attributed to transfer from l1, the effects of transfer outweigh avoidance mainly in the case of more common constructions. it seems that the reason why the subjects’ performance was more reliable in the case of the dative of possession than in the ethical or opinion dative is that the former is a more common feature of grammar and therefore more likely to have been come across, and hence psychologically more entrenched. the latter two types are, by comparison, so rare that they may have been misidentified. it should be underscored that in the multiple-choice task, the subjects were attracted by distracters that were securely not keyable – the options selected were incorrect, being either ungrammatical or semantically anomalous or both, but it was these options that were nonetheless perceived as being more acceptable than the intended dative keys. this shows that the two rare functions of the dative were misinterpreted by the subjects. benefits of l1–l3 similarities. the case of the dative case 103 finally, the data demonstrate that the role of priming also depends on the frequency of the material. while the more frequent structures benefited from the subjects’ recent exposure to relevant examples in the input, their performance on the low-frequency dative constructions barely changed at all in the primed group compared to the control. this finding can be viewed as being in conflict with the theory that priming effects increase as frequency decreases. that is, previous studies have shown that language users tend to notice and repeat those elements of input that are unusual or infrequent when compared to other forms. thus, for example, observing the passive voice in the input can be trigger enough for the speakers to build a passive sentence themselves: even though the passive voice is not a particularly unusual form, it is considerably less frequent than the active voice, and is therefore likely to stand out in the input. this regularity has been named “the inverse frequency effect: the less frequent structure primes more” (jaeger & snider, 2008, p. 1064). by virtue of being less frequent, an expression has the so called “surprisal effect” which assures its noticeability. however, as the present study of the dative construction shows, the “inverse frequency effect” seems to cease when the frequency of a given construction is too low. as such, the finding is not really a contradiction of the inverse correlation of priming strength and frequency, but instead it complements it: the inverse correlation holds for most cases of “familiar” constructions such as the passive voice or the comparative degree of adjectives, and it correctly predicts that priming will be stronger for the less frequent member of a given pair of constructions. it can be hypothesized that language users do notice constructions that are relatively less frequent provided that these constructions are recognized and comprehended reliably and adequately. on the other hand, priming does not even begin to occur for forms that remain obscure to the learner because of their low frequency and are therefore not even tempting candidates for reuse after recent exposure. this sudden cessation of the correlation can be represented graphically by means of figure 7. figure 7. inverse frequency effect with an abrupt drop for very infrequent forms. konrad szcześniak104 outlook unfortunately, there are limits to the strength of conclusions that can be drawn from the present data. as hinted above, correct answers in a multiple choice task do not guarantee correct use of the corresponding language points in the learners’ production. indeed, there is no way of knowing how learners go about the use of the dative construction in their writing or speech, because as of today, no learner corpora of portuguese output are available which could be searched for the use of specific language forms. ideally, a research design for future investigation of factors such as priming, learners’ l1, or their level should make use of triangulated experimental and corpus data as corroborating evidence. this, however, may remain a mere plan waiting for portuguese learner corpora to be created. learner corpora are available for english, such as the international corpus of learner english (icle, granger et al., 2002), and such corpora were used to investigate the use of the dative construction by polish and german learners of english (callies & szcześniak, 2008), but rare language combinations like polish-portuguese make the creation of similar tools rather unlikely any time soon. another way to supplement judgment tasks like the tool used in the present study would be to use other data collection techniques such as elicited production, because experimental data are often needed to corroborate data obtained from one source (see wasow & arnold, 2005). elicitation was not attempted here for reasons of space, but there is no theoretical reason why the learners’ knowledge of the applications of the dative should not be investigated through structured question-response tasks, where subjects are presented with pictures illustrating simple events and asked to describe who did what to whom. admittedly, this would require a larger-scale project involving a more complex setup, with a substantial number of non-dative sentences included as controls, all of which would require a discussion twice the size of the present study. nevertheless, such studies can be undertaken to verify the findings presented here. conclusions the results of the present study confirm that positive transfer from l1 can override the influence of l2 in the acquisition of an l3 especially at higher levels of proficiency. indeed, it would be counterintuitive, if not downright absurd, to find l1–l3 similarities being ignored or their knowledge not being put to work in acquisition. especially in the case of relatively common conbenefits of l1–l3 similarities. the case of the dative case 105 structions, learners seem to be aware of the correct form of l3 expressions, which correspond closely in form and function to their equivalents in l1, and then l2 appears to subside as a source of transfer. however, it is evident that avoidance, likely motivated by l2–l3 differences, does play a role when it comes to structures that are rare, albeit perfectly grammatical and natural in l1. it should be fairly uncontroversial to propose supplementing the classroom practice of such l3 forms with explicit instruction in order to demonstrate the similarities in question. contrasting the learners’ l1 and l2/l3 and pointing out common properties can be beneficial insofar as it may help raise awareness of features that would otherwise remain obscure or misunderstood. these conclusions seem especially valid in light of the effects of priming. as the results show, priming from input to immediate use is stronger for those forms that the learners are capable of recognizing in the first place, which can be seen as a restatement of the i + 1 hypothesis (krashen, 1982). that is, priming occurred most visibly for forms within the learners’ reach, when they represented input within the i + 1 range. conversely, priming decreased for rarer forms because they represented “input plus much more than one,” well beyond the learners’ competence level. to help learners benefit from priming (and transfer), their level would first need to be elevated, and one way of doing so is through explicit contrastive analysis of l1/l3. this is also consistent with the idea that, as predicted by the teachability hypothesis (pienemann, 1989), successfully internalizing such finer points of grammar appears to be subject to constraints to do with the natural course of acquisition. it seems the more advanced functions of the dative construction cannot be mastered until the learner has cleared its most basic application, the transfer of possession. it is only after this most obvious and common use of the dative has been consolidated that the learner is ready for functions like the dative of possession or ethical dative, and these in turn precede the so-called dative of opinion, a function that comes and is learned last. references agustín llach, m. p. (2010). an overview of variables affecting lexical transfer in writing: a review study. international journal of linguistics, 2(1), 1–17. angelovska, t., & hahn, a. (2012). written l3 (english): transfer phenomena of l2 (german) lexical and syntactic properties. in d. gabryś-barker (ed.), cross-linguistic influences in multilingual language acquisition (pp. 23–40). berlin–heidelberg: springer verlag. bechara, e. (2009). moderna gramática portuguesa. rio de janeiro: editora nova fronteira. bybee, j. (2010). language, usage and cognition. cambridge: cambridge university press. konrad szcześniak106 callies, m., & szcześniak, k. (2008). argument realisation, information status and syntactic weight – a learner-corpus study of the dative alternation. in m. walter & p. grommes (eds.), fortgeschrittene lernervarietäten korpuslinguistik und zweitsprachenerwerbsforschung (pp. 165–187). tübingen: niemeyer. cornips, l. (1992). syntactic interference in a bilingual community: the use of the ref lexive in intransitive variants of causative verbs. intercultural communication studies, 2 (2): 23–41. gabryś-barker, d. (2006). the interaction of languages in the lexical search of multilingual language users. in j. arabski (ed.), cross-linguistic influences in the second language lexicon (pp. 144–166). clevedon: multilingual matters. gass, susan m., & selinker, l. (1994). second language acquisition. new york: routledge. granger, s., dagneaux, e., & meunier, f. (2002). the international corpus of learner english. handbook and cd-rom. lolvain-la-neuve: presses universitaires de louvain. george, h. v. (1972). common errors in language learning. rowley, ma: newbury house. gropen, j., pinker, s., hollander, m., goldberg, r., & wilson, r. (l989). the learnability and acquisition of the dative alternation in english. language, 65, 203–257. jaeger, f., & snider, n. (2007). implicit learning and syntactic persistence: surprisal and cumulativity. in brad. c. love, ken mcrae, & vladimir m. sloutsky (eds.), proceedings of the 30th annual conference of the cognitive science society (1061–1066). washington, dc: cognitive science society. krashen, s. d. (1982). principles and practice in second language acquisition. new york: pergamon. levelt, w. j. m., & kelter, s. (1982). surface form and memory in question answering. cognitive psychology, 14, 78–106. pinker, s. (1989). learnability and cognition. the acquisition of argument structure. cambridge, ma: mit press. rocha l., & henrique c. (2011). gramática normativa da língua portuguesa. rio de janeiro: josé olympio editora. schmidt, r. (1990). the role of consciousness in second language learning. applied linguistics, 11, 129–158. svobodová, i. (2014). sintaxe da língua portuguesa. brno: masarykova univerzita. taylor, j. r. (2012). the mental corpus. how language is represented in the mind. oxford: oxford university press. wasow, t., & arnold j. (2005). intuitions in linguistic argumentation. lingua, 1(15), 1481–1498. zyzik, e. (2006 learners’ overgeneralization of dative clitics to accusative contexts: evidence for prototype effects in sla. in c. a. klee & t. l. face (eds.), selected proceedings of the 7th conference on the acquisition of spanish and portuguese as first and second languages (pp. 122–134). somerville, ma: cascadilla proceedings project. konrad szcześniak die nutzen aus den ähnlichkeiten zwischen erstsprache (l1) und drittsprache (l3). kasus: der dativ z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die vorliegende arbeit betrifft strukturelle ähnlichkeiten zwischen der erstsprache (l1) und drittsprache (l3) und deren bedeutung für die im fremdsprachenunterricht erzielten benefits of l1–l3 similarities. the case of the dative case 107 leistungen. das thema wird am beispiel der dativkonstruktion und deren anwendung von den portugiesisch lernenden polen erörtert. die polnische und die portugiesische sprache kennzeichnet eine ganze reihe von ähnlichkeiten im dativgebrauch, die solche funktionen umfassen, welche in dem englischen, das eine zweitsprache für portugiesisch lernende ist, nicht vorkommen. die arbeit soll die frage beantworten, ob sich die fremdsprachenlernenden der bestehenden und nicht unbedeutenden ähnlichkeiten (die im englischen nicht auftreten) bewusst sind und ob diese kenntnisse ihr lernen begünstigen. es wurde festgestellt, dass die portugiesisch lernenden polen im stande sind, den positiven transfer auszunutzen, das aber ist von konkreten funktionen und von der häufigkeit des dativgebrauchs abhängig. schlüsselwörter: dativ, transfer, vermeiden, bahnung konrad szcześniak108 a p p e n d i x a leitura costumes e comportamentos leia os trechos e responda às perguntas. claro que há coisas que me chateiam, como a toda a gente, mas penso sempre que tenho duas opções: posso deixar que isto me afete o suficiente para me pôr de mau humor e estragar-me o dia ou posso passar por cima, ir dar um passeio e pôr para trás das costas. fonte http://caras.sapo.pt/famosos/2015-04-24-sofia-escobar-este-ano-tem-sido-o-melhor-daminha-vida 1. podemos inferir que a autora do trecho evita que a. lhe estraguem o dia. b. muita gente pense mal dela. c. os seus amigos fiquem chateados. d. o passeio demore demasiado tempo. é-me indispensável estar perto do mar, da natureza, ouvir o silêncio, e portugal tem paisagens magníficas; impossível não regressar com energias renovadas. fonte http://caras.sapo.pt/famosos/2010-04-02-aescolha-de...-sofia-nicholson 2. a autora precisa da natureza para a. escrever sobre ela. b. tirar fotografias. c. nadar no mar. d. descansar. ele teve mãe – usamos a frase para definir homens cada vez mais raros. são os que, a qualquer hora, estão de barba feita e adequadamente vestidos. parecem ter saído do banho naquele momento. não só. são educados e gentis. não poupam obrigados, desculpe-me e com licença. dão prioridade à mulher, abrem-lhe a porta do carro e lhe puxam a cadeira no restaurante. convenhamos: o produto é cada vez mais raro, mas existe. fonte htt p:// blogs.cor reiobraziliense.com.br/dad / filho_sem_mae/ 3. segundo a autora, qual dos seguintes comportamentos não seria sinal de boa educação? a. abrir a porta a uma mulher b. oferecer banho a amigas c. estar de barba feita d. pedir desculpa benefits of l1–l3 similarities. the case of the dative case 109 a p p e n d i x b leitura costumes e comportamentos leia os trechos e responda às perguntas. fria não consigo ser, porque vejo sempre à minha frente uma pessoa a lutar pelos seus sonhos e tenho imensa empatia com os concorrentes, mas objetiva sim, pois acredito que críticas construtivas nos ajudam a crescer e evoluir. sou totalmente contra as críticas destrutivas. fonte http://caras.sapo.pt/famosos/2015-04-24-sofia-escobar-este-ano-tem-sido-o-melhor-daminha-vida 1. podemos inferir que a autora do trecho evita a. dar conselhos. b. falar com críticos. c. magoar as pessoas. d. lutar pelos seus sonhos. gosto de conviver directamente com as pessoas, partilhar, viver outras realidades. normalmente passo as férias de forma ativa, mas também para enriquecer-me pessoalmente. fonte http://caras.sapo.pt/famosos/2010-04-02-aescolha-de...-sofia-nicholson 2. a autora provavelmente a. passa muito tempo na praia. b. fica em hotéis caros. c. fala com os locais. d. vê muita televisão. seja respeitoso. boa parte das pessoas se indigna com palavrões, obscenidades, linguagem vulgar e expressões chulas. só as acolha em situações excepcionais. é o caso de manifestação de alguém quando a palavra tiver indiscutível valor informativo ou ref letir o seu estado emocional. fonte htt p:// blogs.cor reiobraziliense.com.br/dad / filho_sem_mae/ 3. segundo a autora, quando seria aceitável usar um palavrão? a. ao pedir ajuda b. ao falar com clientes c. ao sentir dor muito forte d. ao convidar amigos a uma festa konrad szcześniak110 a p p e n d i x c preencha os espaços em branco usando uma das opções sugeridas. 1. e vocês nem -------pensem em comer chocolate e gelado. nada de açúcar! a. eu b. se c. me d. meu 2. o circo chegou -------. a. -lhe b. à cidade c. nem d. -o 3. disse à polícia que não conhecia os suspeitos, nem ------tinha visto. a. ø b. suas c. os d. lhes 4. não ------voltes morto. quero-te vivo. a. te b. o c. me d. lhe 5. agora é ------óbvio que votar à direita é uma melhor opção que votar à esquerda. a. mim b. -me c. meu d. -se 6. o paulo diz que --------partiram os vidros no carro e roubaram o rádio. a. ele b. o c. lhe d. dela 7. depois de ouvir a palavra nova, o aluno escreveu --------no caderno. a. sua b. deles c. -a d. -o 8. a antónia acredita que foi a viagem a fátima que --------curou o corpo. a. seu b. dele c. a d. lhe 9. quando a ana recebeu a carta do tiago, mandou --------de volta. a. -no b. -lhe c. -a d. -o 10. quando estamos no último andar do empire state building, é --------assustador olhar para baixo. a. nós b. tanto c. -nos d. nosso theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 3 (2) 2017, pp. 11–28 ewa piechurska-kuciel opole university, poland the role of social support systems in adolescent foreign language learning a b s t r a c t in adolescents the main groups of social support are their family, peers, and teachers with whom they interact most frequently. they play a buffering role between stress and psychological well-being by helping to cope with adverse challenges, and by providing social integration. consequently, it is believed that in the situation of stress caused by the necessity to learn a foreign language (fl) as a compulsory subject, social support can be viewed as an important factor that may positively inf luence learners’ academic achievement, exposing the role of the perceived availability of significant others’ help in achieving fl success. to date, in spite of the call for research on the general functioning of the language learner as a member of the society, the study on the role of social support in the process of foreign language learning is still scarce. the existing research has though proved that perceived social support significantly predicts resilience in foreign language learning. the feelings of closeness and support the learners receive from the support network protect them from stressors, and they validate the feelings of self-esteem, competence, and personal control in the face of stressful situations. the three main support groups (parents, teachers, and peers) help learners develop their social competence, problem-solving skills, autonomy, and a sense of purpose. keywords: social support, parental support, teacher support, peer support, foreign language introduction humans are social by nature. their sociability complex enables them to create social structures and systems whose purpose is to express values, rituals, and ideas (levy martin, 2009). these social networks are made up of many cooperating and competing groups whose role is to help individuals establish and sustain their bonds with others. although personal resources are the first ewa piechurska-kuciel12 line of defense in response to stress, it appears that turning to others for support, especially when one’s resources are depleted, protects the individual from social isolation (reblin & uchino, 2008). in adolescents the main groups of social support are their family, peers, and teachers with whom they interact most frequently (camara, bacigalupe, and padilla, 2017). they play a buffering role between stress and psychological well-being by helping to cope with adverse challenges, and by providing social integration (torres and solberg, 2001). they also provide opportunities of expression of and support for appropriate social identities. consequently, it is believed that in the situation of stress caused by the necessity to learn a foreign language (fl) as a compulsory subject (piechurska-kuciel, 2008), social support appears to be an important factor that may influence learners’ fl academic achievement. to date, in spite of the call for research on the language learner as a member of the society (ushioda, 2009), the study on the role of social support in the process of foreign language learning is still scarce. the aim of this paper is to present an overview of the general research on social support carried out in the field in general human functioning, in education, and also in the field of foreign language learning. first, the basic definitions, typologies, and role of social support is presented. in the next step the support received from the main support groups in adolescence (parents, teachers, and peers) is outlined. then the main findings from empirical research on social support in the sphere of foreign language learning follow. the concluding section is devoted to the presentation of possible research directions on social support in the foreign language learning field. social support: definitions and role there are varying approaches to the concept of social support it can be broadly defined as the “process of interaction in relationships which improves coping, esteem, belonging, and competence through actual or perceived exchanges of physical or psychosocial resources” (gottlieb, 2000, p. 29). this comprehensive definition stresses the importance of communication stemming from interactions, as well as supportive outcomes it creates; that is an improvement of one’s functioning in key areas, induced by exchanges of resources of different kinds. other definitions of the term underlie the significance of one’s ability to take advantage of “social assets, social resources, or social networks that people can use when they are in need of aid, advice, help, assistance, approval, comfort, protection, or backing” (vedder, boekaerts, & seegers, 2005, p. 269). overall, it can be stipulated that social support is the perceived notion the role of social support systems in adolescent foreign language learning 13 that one is cared for, valued, understood, able to gain the assistance, and evaluation of significant others, and will be aided whenever in need. there are several overlapping typologies of social support, the basic one connected with the perception and reception of support. perceived social support can be understood as “an individual’s subjective appraisal that people in their social network care for them and are willing to provide assistance when needed” (ciarrochi, morin, sahdra, litalien, & parker, 2017, p. 1155). this highly subjective judgment can be opposed to actual or received social support. in this case the support actually performed in terms of communication, physical objects or favors is taken into consideration. its beneficial effects are crucial when the individual’s attempts to cope with stresses fail. however, perceptions of social support appear to be more influential in comparison to actual support because they reduce one’s feelings of helplessness, leading to perceiving stressful situations as less stressful (chu, saucier, & hafner, 2010). on these grounds, it can be proposed that social support is well defined as a measure of “social embeddedness (e.g., indicators assessing the frequency of contact with others), received support (e.g., measures of the amount of tangible help actually provided by social network members), and perceived support (subjective evaluations of supportive exchanges)” (dalal & ray, 2005, p. 227). in a similar vein, social support consists in “an individual’s perceptions of general support or specific supportive behaviors (available or enacted upon) from people in their social network, which enhances their functioning and/or may buffer them from adverse outcomes” (malecki & demary, 2002, p. 2). from this point of view, social support is presented as a factor indispensable for one’s successful functioning in the society. the construct of social support can also be conceptualized on the basis of five different dimensions of support, as proposed by tardy (1985). direction defines whether social support is being given or received, as well as who gives and who receives. the dimension of disposition refers to the availability of social support (available or enacted). when accessible, it provides a sense of security in an unfamiliar situation, especially when one perceives being supported. the feature of description/evaluation is connected with an individual describing or assessing their social support experience. network refers to the sources of an individual’s support network, or people responsible for providing support. finally, the dimension of content is connected with the emotional, instrumental, informational, and appraisal aspects of support. the first type (emotional) comprises perceptions of love, trust, empathy, and belonging (demaray, malecki, jenkins, & cunningham, 2012). instrumental support includes the provision of tangible resources, such as money, skills, or time that help someone in need. the information category refers to providing guidance or advice that aids in solving a problem. the last type of support (appraisal) deals with offering evaluative feedback that can be either the critical assessment of one’s performance and/ ewa piechurska-kuciel14 or instructions concerning its improvement. in this way information relevant to self-evaluation can be obtained (cutrona & russell, 1990). the individual’s need for attachment, care, and attention can be fulfilled by an optimal support system, which can enhance one’s sense of trust and life direction (kleinke, 1998). on the one hand, it reduces the effect of negative events happening, while on the other, with its buffering effect it changes the interpretation of events, promoting one’s health and well-being (cranford, 2004). accordingly, two main models of the action of social support have been hypothesised: the main effect model and the stress-buffering effect model. the main/direct effect model proposes that social support has a positive influence on the individual’s well-being, and function at all the time, irrespective of the individual’s exposure to a stress (house, landis, and umberson, 1988). in view of its strong version, an increase in social support is related to a rise in wellbeing, independently from the current level of support (cohen and wills, 1985). alternatively, the stress-buffering model posits that social support plays a role only when the individual is exposed to a stressful situation (melrose, brown, & wood, 2015), while in the absence of stress, the effects of great or small social support are similar (hashimoto, kurita, haratani, fujii, & ishibashi, 1999). both models are supported empirically with conflicting evidence, mostly proving that direct effects of social support occur consistently (aneshensel & stone, 1982), and the buffering effect appears inconsistent or weak (alloway & bebbington, 1987). in general, social support plays a beneficial role in the individual’s life. understandably, it helps to cope with adverse challenges, prevent stress, expand problem solving abilities, develop beneficial actions, and augment one’s wellbeing (tang, 2009). it also develops resilience – the ability to adapt successfully to difficult and hostile situations (ozbay et al., 2007). it satisfies one’s need for attachment, care and attention (hale, hannum, & espelage, 2005), providing companionship needed for one’s well-being. importantly, it predicts high positive affect, low negative affect, as well as high satisfaction with life (steptoe, dockray, and wardle, 2009). last but not least, social support increases happiness and makes one’s life better in general (diener & seligman, 2002). what is more, social support also plays a role in education – it enhances overall school achievement and academic competence, such as grades and test performance (e.g., ahmed, minnaert, werf, & kuyper, 2010). aside from that, there is a positive relationship between social support and school adjustment, the sense of school coherence and the ability to handle daily school hassles (danielsen, wiium, wilhelmsen, & wold, 2010). however, it is not quite clear how social support operates on school outcomes. it is though argued that this influence can be explained by means of uncertainty reduction (rosenfeld, richman, and bowen, 2000). when circumstances are stressful, such as the ones accompanying the educational process, the individual wants to develop the role of social support systems in adolescent foreign language learning 15 a sense of perceived control by means of reducing ambiguity and unpredictability. supportive communication from significant others may boost feelings of control, and help the individual recognize realistic alternatives, and develop skills needed for the learning process. more importantly, classroom atmosphere that is nurturing and encouraging at the time when social support and understanding is of utmost importance plays a significant role (harter, 2015) social support in adolescence the primary sources of social support are usually related to work and non-work related contexts (adams, king, & king, 1996). work-related sources of social support refer to supervisors and co-workers, while non-work related sources refer to spouse, family, relatives, and friends. in the adolescent’s life the basic groups of social support can be identified in relation to their family, peers, and teachers, with whom they interact most frequently (essau et al., 2011). in most cases for adolescents’ parents are sources of affection, instrumental assistance, reliable help, and appraisal to enhance feelings of value (emotional and information support), while teachers are perceived as sources of guidance (informational support), with friends being the source of companionship (emotional support) (furman & buhrmester, 1985). it has been established that among adolescents, the extent of a social support network has a tendency to remain constant over time, but its composition may change due to varying needs for healthy functioning and adjustment (cairns et al., 1995). for this reason, at this specific period a decrease in family support (nickerson & nagle, 2005), accompanied by an increase in support from friends is observed (cheng & chan, 2004). it can be attributed to the fact that the adolescents’ attempts to establish more mature and balanced relationships with their parents often lead to stress and conflict, frequently buffered by more intimate friendships and group acceptance (seiffge-krenke et al., 2013). however, the research on these types of support is inconsistent, demonstrating that teenagers may turn to friends for assistance only when their parents are out of reach (cicognani, 2011). it has not yet been established exactly why such a modification occurs; nevertheless, it can be strictly connected with adolescents’ changing roles (del valle, bravo, & lópez, 2010). prompted by biological influences, such as hormonal fluctuations and resulting physical alteration, teens also undergo intense psychological transition. at the same time, environmental influences of academic and social nature lay the groundwork for their attaining future stable adult roles. from this point of view the crucial role of social support in adolescence stems from the significance of the environmental impact, whereby ewa piechurska-kuciel16 adolescents’ successful development demands “trusting and caring relationships and autonomous self-expression, choice, and decision making” (roeser, eccles, & sameroff, 2000, p. 459). consequently, as human development is entwined in important social contexts, adolescents’ formative changes are influenced by their interactions with significant others in these contexts. in the case of family, parents and siblings are regarded most influential, while the school environment comprises teachers, but also peers who interact within a larger adolescents’ network (chen, 2005). these three support systems simultaneously influence students’ academic outcomes and general well-being of teens. thus, if adolescents are not able to identify opportunities for such relationships, a mismatch between developmental needs and unfavorable context will make them suffer from psychological and academic maladjustment. parental support can be understood as “gestures or acts of caring, acceptance, and assistance that are expressed by a parent toward a child” (shaw, krause, chatters, connell, & ingersoll-dayton, 2004, p. 4). the main role of parents is to provide a secure home for their children. as primary caregivers, they are also the main providers of social support for their children’s needs. at the same time, they impart cognitive representations and models of social relationships to their children. in this way parent-adolescent relationships are generalized, constituting the basis of adolescents’ social competence (parke, buriel, & de haan, 2007). this type of support induces a more outgoing social disposition that will help children seek relationships with friends, and adjust to higher educational institutions (holahan, valentiner, & moos, 1994). it has also been established that good relationships with parents are significant for positive self-esteem, as well as lower levels of emotional problems in adolescence, proving to be a good indicator of positive development (helsen, vollebergh, & meeus, 2000). all in all, research suggests that parents appear to be a crucial source of social support during the transition to adulthood. their support is also valuable in reference to school-related problems. stimulating and responsive parenting practices have been found to constitute important influences on a child’s academic development (topor, keane, shelton, & calkins, 2010). there are two mechanisms responsible for this phenomenon: parents deeply engaged with their child increase the offspring’s self-perception of cognitive competence, and parents engaged with the teacher and school endorse a stronger and more positive student-teacher relationship. hence, parents’ positive attitudes and interest in school can impart encouragement and help, and render assistance in their child’s school work (danielsen, samdal, hetland, & wold, 2009). obviously, not all parents are able to help their children with a specific content matter or skill, but they can boost their children’s feelings of competence and control, together with positive attitudes towards teachers (grolnick, friendly, & bellas, 2009). “[w]hen parents believe in children’s competence and have high expectations for them, provide the resources that children need to feel connected to the role of social support systems in adolescent foreign language learning 17 others, and facilitate a sense of autonomy by supporting children’s initiations and problem-solving, children’s motivation is most likely to thrive” (p. 295). parental involvement can induce a stimulating learning environment at home, in effect leading to the development of their children’s feelings of competence, direction, interest, and positive attitudes to teachers. as far as teacher support is concerned, its role is also vital due to the fact that adolescents spend much of their time at school in the company of teachers and classmates; hence, it is apparent that both parties significantly influence their development (bokhorst, sumter, & westenberg, 2010). it follows that teachers are important sources of perceived social support within the educational context as significant others identified in this part of the student’s social network. teacher support has been defined as the degree to which students feel supported, esteemed, and appreciated by their teacher (doll, brehm, & zucker, 2004). students’ perceptions regarding whether their teacher cares about them and will help them when necessary underline their successful functioning in the academic domain. in general, teachers provide knowledge, but also a positive classroom climate (ahnert, harwardt-heinecke, kappler, eckstein-madry, & milatz, 2012). understandably then, the teachers’ role is not only vital in respect to achieving academic goals, but also with regard to the regulation of emotional and social processes (furrer, skinner, & pitzer, 2014) because students learn better when they perceive their classroom environment positively. supportive teacher-student relationships help maintain students’ academic interests and more positive peer relationships (wentzel, 1998), leading to higher achievement (marchand & skinner, 2007). the link between teacher support and student success has also been recognized in empirical research set in different cultures and school levels (jia et al., 2009). whereas the majority of research investigating teacher support has mainly concentrated on academic outcomes, it has also been proved to be a significant contributor to mental health. it has been found to correlate negatively with depression, and positively with self-esteem and social skills (murberg & bru, 2009). positive perceptions of teacher support can endorse psychological wellness, such as higher levels of life satisfaction and subjective well-being (suldo, shaunessy, & hardesty, 2008). while maturing, young people also focus on their relationships with friends, which means that they tend to look for social support outside their family (levitt et al., 2005). aside from being companions in leisure activities, peers are sources of instrumental and emotional support, helping the adolescent cope with everyday stressors, and overseeing adherence to behavioral norms (wentzel, 2003). peer support then, seen as the individual’s general support or specific support behaviors from friends or peers, which enhances their functioning and buffers them from adverse outcomes, is also an important predictor of emotional well-being or emotional distress (wentzel, barry, & cauldwell, 2004). actually, this type of support happens to be the most sought after source of aid ewa piechurska-kuciel18 and backing by individuals in this specific age group. the adolescent’s social development can easily be boosted by the mutual sharing of personal, social, or ethical ideas by peers (turner, 1999). aside from that, peer support can provide a form of substitute for insufficient parental support (halpenny, greene, & hogan, 2008). in this way friends can compensate for the missing support by providing instrumental aid in the educational context: they can form study groups, share notes and experiences, and give advice about classes to take and strategies to use. these might be types of activities that parents may not provide (dennis, phinney, & chuateco, 2005). although students may differ in the levels of their personal motivation, perceptions of the learning environment, as well as their own personal characteristics, their inand out-of-class interaction with friends, and cooperation can induce effective support of learning (urdan & schoenfelder, 2006). as another factor contributing to students’ satisfaction with school, peer support may nurture their needs for relatedness, autonomy, and competence (hamm & faircloth, 2005). for this reason, students with high levels of peer support experience higher levels of school engagement (wentzel, battle, russell, & looney, 2010). consequently, this factor may be viewed as both academic and social in nature (kiefer, alley, & ellerbrock, 2015). social support in foreign language learning the foreign language learning process may be a cause for serious problems of various types with its extraordinary requirements that are not easily met by every student. aside from a regular study of the subject’s content matter, it requires using the language that has not been fully mastered, exposing the learners’ insufficient knowledge of grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation or aspects of culture. consequently, the specific language learning situation is permeated by ambiguity and its inherent characteristics: novelty, complexity, and contradiction (ehrman, 1999). as a result, the learner is likely to experience a limited sense of control, leading to increasing helplessness over the (perceived) danger (furnham & marks, 2013). the consequences of this cognitive and affective entanglement can be quite serious; starting from growing stress levels to avoidance, delay, suppression or denial, manifesting as low attainment. for this reason, social support can be viewed as an important factor that may positively influence learners’ academic achievement, exposing the role of the perceived availability of significant others’ help in achieving fl success (piechurska-kuciel, 2008). however, within the domain of foreign language learning social support has received little attention on the part of researchers, in spite of a growing need to the role of social support systems in adolescent foreign language learning 19 focus on “the language learner as an active self-reflective agent of an interaction with the social context” (taylor, 2013, p. 34). hence, the research on the role of social support in the process of foreign language learning is still scarce. it has though been proved that perceived social support significantly predicts resilience in foreign language learning. more specifically, social support from teachers, family, and friends provides fl learners with effective coping skills manifested as resilience in confrontation with unwelcoming stressful tasks and challenges in the process of language learning (rahimi, bigdeli, & rouhollah, 2014). the feelings of closeness and support the learners receive from their support network protect them from stressors and validate feelings of self-esteem, competence, and personal control in the face of stressful situations. these are aided by the growing perception of one’s social competence, problem-solving skills, autonomy, and sense of purpose (nguyen, stanley, stanley, & wang, 2015). social support in language learning is also important for developing the student’s willingness to communicate in that language (macintyre, baker, clément, & conrod, 2001), that is currently viewed as a foundation for foreign language success (yashima, zenuk-nishide, & shimizu, 2004). aside from that, positive effects of social support on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation can be observed among iranian (vatankhah & tanbakooei, 2014) and polish fl learners (piechurska-kuciel, 2013). as far as parental support for adolescents learning a foreign language is concerned, its positive relation to educational outcomes has already been established. more specifically, parental advice at home is positively associated with an improved sense of self-efficacy towards english as a foreign language, intrinsic motivation in english and academic engagement (weihua & williams, 2010). the beneficial role of parents in the foreign language learning process is also confirmed in polish students. parental support, though modestly correlated with final grades, turns out to be the most important source of social support (piechurska-kuciel, 2013). that finding can be attributed to the character of polish culture, where parents still play a very important role in the life of adolescents, thereby eliminating ambiguity. similarly, in the iranian sample, parental support stimulates l2 learners to have both integrative and instrumental motivation towards learning a foreign language (vatankhah & tanbakooei, 2014). this result is also established in the indian educational context (olusiji, 2016), as well as in albanian, where parental support is an important correlate of final grades (softa, 2016). however, the role of parents’ support in their children’s fl learning is found to be more complex, as parents can send mixed messages in terms of the usefulness of the foreign language (csizér & lukács, 2010). hence, there are contradictory findings pertaining to the role of this type of support in this specific area. for example, in chinese studies parents play the least role in affecting students’ fl motivation; mostly, as the author speculates, due to their low social and economic status, alongside with low income ewa piechurska-kuciel20 (wong, 2007). ostensibly, the role of parents in the foreign language learning process of their teenaged offspring is quite pronounced, affecting their child’s functioning in various contexts—social, educational, and private. it seems clear that teachers are the most valid source of direct support within the educational context, their role in foreign language learning appears of greatest importance due to the specificity of the process itself and the perils it generates. it is expected that in the fl classroom teachers are able to help students achieve success through their perceived strong support. better support, meanwhile, is expected to lead to more safety in the fl classroom and lower levels of negative emotions, such as anxiety (abu-rabia, 2004). also, in studies on taiwanese english-language learners, teacher academic support turns out to be the most pervasive variable in relation to language-learning anxiety (huang, eslami, & hu, 2010). the teacher who shows understanding, empathy, and consistency in behavior helps pupils start forming an identity that will assist them in coping with stress and anxiety (piechurska-kuciel, 2008). hence, students’ positive relationships with teachers correlate with their language acquisition (wong, 2007). supported learners also experience lower language anxiety levels, evaluate their language abilities highly, and receive better final grades (piechurska-kuciel, 2011). moreover, it has also been established that foreign language learners’ feelings of alienation from school and forms of cooperative learning are negatively correlated with teacher support, significantly influencing academic achievement (ghaith, 2002). thus, it can be deduced that the fl teacher’s support is generally limited to the educational context. social support received from friends allows for the extension of the student’s social network by including new friends from another cultural context (macintyre, baker, clément, & conrod, 2001). it offers students the opportunity to use the l2 for authentic communication, especially outside the classroom. moreover, learning from each other’s experiences appears a vital effect of peer support (kobayashi, 2003). another useful peer support behavior is the sharing of workload between group members (hue nguyen, 2013). by that token, learners are able to scaffold their language development in a more understandable way. thanks to peer support advice and feedback can be provided (hyland, 2016), facilitating the language learning experience and offering opportunities for academic collaboration. it is enforced by the fact that learners can share very similar experiences and more easily offer peer support when challenges arise (mompoint-gaillard, 2011). then student-student interactions enable the learners jointly to construct a scaffold that allows them to successfully complete the activity and co-construct their own system of making meaning through words in a language they have not yet mastered (li, 2011). aside from that, peer support has been found to be positively correlated with desire to learn english in the polish educational context where english is perceived as a dominant language (piechurska-kuciel, 2016). however, research results on the role of peer support the role of social support systems in adolescent foreign language learning 21 in foreign language learning are not quite conclusive. from being the most influential of the three main support groups in adolescence (wong, 2007), it may be believed to have no significant direct or indirect relationship to student fl achievement (chen, 2008). it also turns influential only when peers are highly motivated (chang, 2010). all in all, peer support, though primarily rooted in the educational context, can also permeate the wider, social context of the fl learner, especially when peers come from another background. conclusion due to the growing need for understanding how individuals operate in the society, the issue of social support still remains a developing research area. however, in the field of foreign language learning it yet demands more finetuned and thorough studies, investigating the value of specific support types, perceived and enacted, of various character: emotional, esteem, network, informational or tangible. though the role of parental support appears decisive in shaping the learners’ social dispositions responsible for their future attitudes to support, little is known about the parents’ background (education, socioeconomic status, family structure, to mention a few) that might shape their parental behaviors. moreover, the factor that may play a role in their support is the attitude to the language their children learn or their proficiency with it. as far as teachers are concerned, the value of their informational and emotional support is stressed; however, it seems worthwhile to investigate the impact of teacher support on the learner’s out-of-school behaviors, such as self-esteem and social, mostly soft skills. also, the role of peer support requires greater clarification. again, little is known about the specificity of the support coming from classmates, and from neighborhood friends. it can be expected that these influences may differ, bringing about pronounced discrepancies that may result in variable language attainment. more importantly, to date, isolated support groups have been investigated, so it is still unclear how their between-group cooperation may influence the foreign language learner’s attitudes and behavior. few attempts to analyze the mutual influence of support groups in the general context (e.g., li, albert, and dwelle, 2014) have given a promising insight into a deeper understanding of social support. however, the foreign language learning behaviors and perceptions viewed from 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(2004). the inf luence of attitudes and affect on willingness to communicate and second language communication. language learning, 54(1), 119–152. ewa piechurska-kuciel die rolle der systeme gesellschaftlicher unterstützung im prozess der aneignung von fremdsprachen bei jugendlichen z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g in der pubertät bilden die familie, die lehrer und die kollegen die wichtigsten unterstützungsgruppen mit denen die jugendlichen oft in kontakt kommen. diese gruppen spielen die rolle eines buffers zwischen dem stress und dem psychologischen wohlbefinden, indem sie bei dem zurechtkommen mit den widrigkeiten des schicksals helfen und die integration in die gesellschaft gewährleisten. man kann also annehmen, dass in der mit dem obligatorischen fremdsprachenunterricht verbundenen stresssituation die gesellschaftliche unterstützung seitens der als wichtige personen im leben des schülers wahrgenommenen 28 ewa piechurska-kuciel menschen, einen positiven einf luss auf den lernerfolg ausüben kann. obwohl es erforderlich ist, den eine fremdsprache lernenden schüler als ein gesellschaftliches wesen zu erforschen, wurden solche forschungen bis jetzt nur sehr selten durchgeführt. bisherige untersuchungen beweisen jedoch, dass die vom schüler wahrgenommene unterstützung eine wesentliche vorhersage der widerstandsfähigkeit des schülers im prozess der fremdspracherlernung ist. das bewusstsein, dass er gefördert wird, schützt den schüler vor stress, erhöht sein selbstwertgefühl und hilft, in der stresssituation nicht die kontrolle zu verlieren. die drei wichtigsten unterstützungsgruppen helfen den schülern, ihre gesellschaftlichen kompetenzen, ihre fähigkeiten probleme zu lösen, ihre autonomie und zielbewusstsein zu entfalten. schlüsselwörter: gesellschaftliche unterstützung, elternunterstützung, lehrerunterstützung, kollegenunterstützung theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 5 (2) 2019, pp. 39–57 10.31261/tapsla.7730 anna kiszczak maria curie-skłodowska university, lublin, poland halina chodkiewicz pope john paul ii state school of higher education in biała podlaska, poland text-based student questioning in efl settings: long-term strategy implementation in reciprocal reading tasks and its perception a b s t r a c t it is common knowledge for contemporary teachers at all educational levels that reading literacy and learning attainment require adopting a strategic approach. this article reports the results of the classroom-based study in which a group of english studies students were guided over a span of time in implementing text-based questions as a component of reciprocal reading tasks. the primary goal of the study was to trace changes appearing in the quality in the use of student-generated questioning in one-term reciprocal reading training and in delayed sessions, nine months later. some changes were identified in the students’ actual performance by assessing the quality of the questions the students asked throughout the training and delayed sessions. also, the students’ perceptions regarding the instruction routines they participated in were elicited by means of two interviews. the article puts forward some important insights from the study for organizing efficient classroom instruction in support of efl students’ reading and learning achievement. keywords: academic reading, reciprocal reading, students’ generated questions, strategy training introduction a strategic approach has been proved to play an important role in supporting l2/fl learners in text comprehension and disciplinary reading practice. it is broadly advocated in recent literature that the goals connected with comprehttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-9394-3782 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7273-6496 http://doi.org10.31261/tapsla.7772 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en anna kiszczak, halina chodkiewicz40 hending academic text, building content-area knowledge as well as developing linguistic competence in the contexts of second/foreign language education can be substantially enhanced by means of the implementation of appropriate reading strategies by students representing all levels of language proficiency (alexander & jetton, 2003; koda, 2005; aff lerbach, pearson, & paris, 2008; grabe, 2009; grabe & stoller, 2014, 2019; chodkiewicz, 2015, 2018; dinsmore, 2017). indeed, while exploring the role of a strategic approach in reading comprehension by means of theoretical considerations as well as empirical in vestigations, scholars report the inf luence of particular reading strategies on, among others, setting a clear purpose for reading, engaging more deeply in text analysis and information processing, building coherent text meaning, controlling text understanding, compensating for comprehension problems, and enhancing knowledge organisation and retention (duke & pearson, 2002; kintsch, 2005; graesser, 2007; klingner, vaughn, & boardman, 2015; handsfield, 2016; koda & yamashita, 2019). therefore, the need for training students formally in the implementation of a range of strategies to be relied on in educational contexts should not be overlooked. it is vital that students are not only informed about the possibility of taking a strategic approach towards reading comprehension, but that they are given a solid strategy training in the use of particular strategies. theoretical background of the study the concept of generating text-based questions by students that has gained considerable interest of teachers of different content areas at all educational levels has been acknowledged to be a fairly universal reading comprehension strategy. much of the discussion of researchers on this strategy has focused on attempts at defining it and describing its role in the complex process of reading for the purpose of learning from text. as for the terminology used in the relevant literature, student questioning is referred to by a number of labels, among others “student self-generated questions,” “question self-generation,” “student own questions,” “self-questioning,” and “reciprocal questioning” (king & rosenshine, 1993; king, 1994; chin & osborne, 2008; taboada, bianco, & bowerman, 2012). all of the terms seem to concern the same idea of text-based questioning which can be broadly explained as “an environment in which learners are encouraged or compelled to ask questions while they study material” (graesser & wisher, 2001, p. 3). the use of the strategy of questioning by students has already been the subject of investigation of several scholars representing diverse content-areas. text-based student questioning in efl settings:… 41 key areas of their research concerned types of questions generated by students (e.g., scardamalia & bereiter, 1992; watts, gould, & alsop, 1997; taboada & guthrie, 2006), the relationship between the quality of student-generated questioning and particular variables such as the level of prior knowledge or vocabulary knowledge (e.g., harper, etkina, & lin, 2003; taboada & guthrie, 2006), the influence of students’ use of the strategy of questioning on the level of their reading comprehension and the amount of content knowledge gain (e.g., king, 1994; gunn, 2008; taboada et al., 2012), or the comparison of the efficiency of student-generated questioning with other reading and learning strategies (e.g., king, biggs, & lipsky, 1984; davey & mcbride, 1986; berry & chew, 2008). however, a large body of those research studies concerned mainly l1 settings (e.g., davey & mcbride, 1986; scardamalia & bereiter, 1992; taboada & guthrie, 2006; berry & chew, 2008; gunn, 2008), whereas the incorporation of this strategy into the context of l2/fl, especially at an academic level, seems to be still under-researched. particularly scarce research has been done in order to trace the development of students’ questioning skills even though such initiatives would be of immense importance for arriving at a more complete picture, not only of the use of the strategy by students, but also of the nature of text processing when accompanied by the strategy under discussion. although scholars in the field point out at the need for providing fl/l2 students with solid training in generating their own questions, the amount of empirical studies reporting it is very limited. a relatively recent investigation of students’ questioning behaviour as influenced by formal instruction was conducted by taboada, bianco, and bowerman (2012) who set to explore some instructional steps taken in order to help students improve their text-based questioning ability. the study participants, a group of ten fourth-grade ells, was trained in generating text-based questions during a period of six weeks. the instruction was composed of three standard stages, that is, as teacher modelling, guided practice, and the independent use of the strategy. the findings of the research demonstrated positive outcomes of the intervention as it was proved that notwithstanding the initial skills of questioning and language proficiency, all the ells improved their ability to ask higher-level questions. furthermore, a meaningful correlation between questioning and reading comprehension was found. the researchers arrived at the conclusion that the strategy of questioning, if introduced and trained in an explicit way, can constitute a tool for developing science knowledge by ells who experience problems with comprehending content-area texts. while analysing research into text-based questioning in l2/fl environments, one can notice that the study by taboada, bianco, and bowerman (2012) may be perceived as an exception since most of researchers who exam ine students’ questioning skills and their role in reading either abandon strategic training or organise it in a very limited span of time (cf. miciano, 2004a, 2004b; dorkchandra, 2013; safarpoor, ghaniabadi, & nafchi, 2015). anna kiszczak, halina chodkiewicz42 student text-based questioning is frequently referred to as an element of a multiple strategic approach to reading called reciprocal reading instruction. a frequently used form of reciprocal reading is based on the combination of four reading and learning strategies (summarising, questioning, clarifying, and predicting), which help learners participate in collaborative text-based discussions (palincsar & brown, 1984). nowadays, many teachers and educators decide to narrow down or expand the number of strategies used (klingner, vaughn, & boardman, 2015) but the characteristic elements of reciprocal reading that should always be present are: scaffolded character of instruction, reciprocal dialogue, and close reading (palincsar & brown; 1983; brown & palincsar, 1986; pilkington, 2016). despite the fact that the instructional approach to reading is commonly implemented into diverse educational contexts whose objective is to enhance students’ general text comprehension skills as well as their ability of reading to learn (rosenshine & meister, 1994; cooper & greive, 2009), the amount of research studies concerning its use is limited as far as foreign language education is concerned. what is more, although the approach strongly advocates the value of text-based questioning and strategy training students should receive, the current authors are aware of only one research project (yoosabai, 2009) which has thoroughly explored the use of the strategy of generating questions as an element of a reciprocal reading session in l2/fl settings. hence, much remains to be done in order to fill this gap in research, preferably by means of longitudinal projects which would make it possible to trace not only the results of strategy training given to students but also the entire process of developing questioning skills by readers by means of performing reciprocal reading tasks. the current study is an attempt to look more deeply, although at a small scale, at how the strategy of generating students’ own text-based questions can be introduced and implemented for an extended period of time in a regular academic content-area course. the current study study purpose and research questions this study is an expansion of the authors’ research on the use of the strategy of students’ generated questions in support of the enhancement of academic reading skills and acquisition of disciplinary knowledge in efl settings (cf. chodkiewicz & kiszczak, 2019). it was a small-scale classroom-based study which involved a group of undergraduate english studies students in performing a sequence of reciprocal reading tasks which served the purpose of training text-based student questioning in efl settings:… 43 and practice in the use of the strategy of student text-based questioning. the aim of the study was twofold. first, it was to carry out a repeated assessment of the students’ actual performance while generating their own questions as part of reciprocal reading tasks performed over 13 sessions. thus the students’ evaluation covered their participation in the training and practice sessions over a period of one semester of an academic course (ten sessions), and then in three delayed practice sessions nine months later. second, of no less importance in the study was to elicit and explore the students’ perceptions regarding their performance while generating their own questions in reciprocal reading tasks. to this end, the students were interviewed twice so as to handle their responses concerning respectively the one-semester training and practice sessions and the delayed practice sessions. the following research questions were addressed in order to explore the students’ text-based questioning behaviour in the ten training and practice sessions and in the three delayed practice sessions: 1. were the students able to ask questions relevant to the content of the texts and clear to a recipient? 2. did the students pay attention to the formal quality of the questions they asked? 3. what types of questions did the students tend to generate? 4. how did the students evaluate the procedure of asking text-based questions as part of reciprocal reading tasks and their own performance? participants and study context two intact groups of second-year undergraduate students of the department of english, maria curie-sklodowska university in lublin, attending an obligatory efl didactics course, were introduced to a specially designed strategy training and practice sessions incorporated into their regular classes. their general purpose was to support the enhancement of the students’ academic skills by training them how to use the strategy of generating their own questions while performing reciprocal reading tasks. the students’ language proficiency level was estimated to fall between b2 and c1 according to the standards of the common european framework of reference for languages (coste, north, sheils, & trim, 2003). in order to offer a comprehensive qualitative analysis of the students’ actual performance and their self-reported perceptions of the procedure of asking text-based questions as part of reciprocal reading tasks, the data for the current study were gathered from a sub-sample of the population, that is, from five female and one male student. the six participants were chosen on the basis of their final exam scores in introduction to efl and in practical english so anna kiszczak, halina chodkiewicz44 that the performance of students of varying language proficiency and contentarea knowledge could be investigated. the students’ agreement to participate in the interviews was also a crucial selection criterion taken into consideration. focusing on the performance of this small group of the students over an extended period of time made it possible to trace and thoroughly examine the qualitative changes that appeared in the participants’ questioning behaviour focused upon in this study. research instruments and materials the research instruments and materials used during the reciprocal reading sessions comprised a taxonomy of questions, thirteen practice texts, reading comprehension tests, questioning forms to be filled in by the students during each reciprocal reading session, as well as the recording and the transcripts of two semi-structured interviews. the taxonomy of questions adopted in this study was developed by consulting a number of classifications of questions developed in relevant literature (graesser & person, 1994; taboada & guthrie, 2006; taboada, et al., 2012). its suitability for the present study’s objectives and clarity for the study participants was checked by piloting it (see chodkiewicz & kiszczak, 2019). taking into account the cognitive difficulty of the questions, their form and content, the questions were classified into five types, that is, factual information, description, explanation, pattern of relationships, and judgmental questions. the questions of the first type concern elementary information about the main ideas conveyed in the text and they are the least cognitively demanding kind of questions. description questions, which require a global statement about a key idea, also seem to be relatively simple, yet describing a particular concept may cover multiple facts and generalizations. a more elaborate response is needed in the case of explanation questions, which most often address a specific aspect of a concept. pattern of relationships questions, on the other hand, can be characterized as requests for information about connections or networks between two or more concepts or between their specific aspects. judgmental questions, the most cognitively challenging question type dealt with in this study, demand that readers take a critical stance on the leading ideas discussed in the text and get engaged in a deeper reflection on the information processed. additionally, in order to make the procedure of generating questions easier to follow for the students, a handout containing the questions’ classification, as well as a number of question stems and prompts widely recommended for this kind of instruction was prepared (graesser & person, 1994; king, 1994, 2008; gunn, 2008; taboada et al., 2012). the participants were encouraged to use it while creating their own questions. the taxonomy of questions established for text-based student questioning in efl settings:… 45 the study was used not only during the training and practice sessions by the students and by the teacher-researcher, but also in the process of data analysis by the two judges who evaluated the questions and identified the question types chosen by the students over the entire period of the study. for the purpose of the ten training and practice sessions as well as three delayed practice sessions 13 expository academic texts were rigorously selected, one to be used per session. these were extracts of tefl books’ chapters on the topics which concerned teaching the four language skills, storytelling, the use of games, songs, and chants, and clil in a foreign language. as it was assumed that the students would work with authentic academic texts, no changes were introduced into the original academic texts. the average level of language difficulty of the texts was calculated to be 14.8 according to coh-metrix l2 readability index (coh-metrix 3.0; mcnamara, graesser, mccarthy, & cai, 2014). the passages were on average 410-word long each. each text was accompanied with a reading comprehension test consisting of five multiple-choice questions. special questioning forms mentioned above were constructed in order to help the students in writing up their questions in an organized way during each reciprocal reading session and to be of help in the process of data collection. while completing the questioning forms, the students were supposed to provide their three questions with the answers that they believed to be accurate. they also marked if their questions were answered and received peer feedback, and decided on the final versions of their questions. two semi-structured interviews served probing the participants’ self-assessment of the efficiency of their performance in asking text-based questions, as well as their attitudes towards the implementation of the procedure of student text-based questioning in regular academic classes. in the first interview the students were asked six questions developed around the issues of the usefulness of the questioning strategy and reciprocal reading tasks, students’ individual procedure of generating questions, and their opinions on the use of particular question types. the second interview, which contained four basic questions, focused on eliciting the students’ perceptions regarding the development of questioning skills, changes in their personal questioning procedure, and potential plans of using the strategy of generating own questions in the future. research procedure, data collection, and analysis the current research study was incorporated into the regular classes belonging to the efl didactics course and lasted a total of sixteen months. whereas the first part of the project, a one-semester long strategy training, spread throughout ten classes, its second part, the delayed practice, took place anna kiszczak, halina chodkiewicz46 in three subsequent classes nine months later. this means that overall the participants attended thirteen sessions in which they performed reciprocal reading tasks with the key component of generating their own questions. it is important to note, however, that the three delayed practice sessions did not contain any further formal guidance for the students, who were supposed to draw on the questioning strategy competences they had already developed. one week after the first part of the project had finished and a week after its second part had been completed the students took part in individual semi-structured interviews. as already mentioned, the responses concerning their views and perceptions developed as a result of participating in the reciprocal reading sessions in the two parts of the study were recorded by the teacher-researcher. the long-term nature of the study enabled the researchers to discern the changes in the students’ task performance and their perceptions regarding the innovative reading routines provided to them in an academic course. the first two sessions of the study were of introductory character. more specifically, the participants were familiarised with the benefits of reciprocal reading and asking their own text-based questions, and were instructed how to formulate the five types of questions focused upon in the study. moreover, the implementation of the strategy of text-based questioning as part of reciprocal reading tasks was explained and modelled by the teacher, and then taken up by the students. at the beginning of each reading session the participants read a selected text individually and answered a set of comprehension questions based on it. then, they generated three questions related to the contents of the text and wrote them down in the questioning forms. the next stage of the session involved answering each other’s questions in pairs and giving reciprocal feedback on their form and content. subsequently, the participants worked individually again in order to correct or improve their questions, and decide on their final versions. a class discussion about the main ideas of the text read and the students’ questions was the last stage of the procedure. all the questioning forms completed by the participants were collected by the teacher to be analysed by the judges, and given back to the students. in order to evaluate the efficiency of the students’ performance, that is, the quality of all the questions formulated by the participants, special scoring system was adopted so as to assess each question on the basis on three criteria by two judges—university teachers. first, the judges decided whether a particular question was relevant from the perspective of the content of the text (1 vs. 0 points). second, the questions were assessed in terms of their clarity from the point of view of the recipient (1 point for a clearly-stated question). then, the linguistic accuracy of the question was checked—1 point was awarded if the question was correct and 0 points if it was incorrect. additionally, the judges determined which type the particular question belonged to in accordance with text-based student questioning in efl settings:… 47 the taxonomy of questions established for the study. the two judges analysed the data during three conferencing sessions; the first one took place after the fifth reciprocal reading session, the second one—after the tenth, and the last one at the end of the study, that is, after the thirteenth session. importantly, during the last conferencing session, the judges analysed all the sets of students’ questions again in order to ensure that all their judgments were appropriately made. the two semi-structured interviews made it possible to collect the relevant data at two points of time in order to observe the potential change in the students’ views, opinions, and general perceptions concerning their performance in question generation and reciprocal reading tasks both during the training and practice part and in the delayed sessions. all the students’ responses were recorded and then transcribed for the purpose of comprehensive analysis. results and discussion as a result of the analysis of all the collected data the aims of the study were successfully achieved and a number of significant findings concerning the issues focused upon were made. as intended in the study, the quantitativequalitative analysis of the research data made it possible to (1) examine the performance of six advanced users of english as a foreign language on a set of reciprocal reading tasks involving the use of the strategy of asking and answering students’ own text-based questions, and (2) get insight into the students’ perceptions of their task performance and attitudes towards the procedure they got acquainted with and implemented in their academic reading practice. it was possible to increase the understanding of the development of the students’ awareness and efficiency of the implementation of the question generating strategy, as well as its contribution to systematic practice in reciprocal reading tasks. also, due to taking a micro-level perspective, the performance of the behaviour of individual students could be explored at more depth. the first question in this study sought to determine whether the questions asked by the six participants of the study were relevant to the content of the texts and clear to a recipient. it was found that all of the 234 questions the participants generated, both during the first part of the project (180 questions) and during the second one conducted in the delayed sessions (54 questions), were relevant. in other words, the students did not encounter any problems with detecting the main ideas in the texts they read and addressing them in their questions. similarly, they generally succeeded in posing clearly stated questions. as shown in table 1, 89.4% of all the questions generated during the strategy training sessions and 96.2% asked in the delayed sessions fulfilled anna kiszczak, halina chodkiewicz48 the criterion related to the clarity of questions. these findings are consistent with those the researchers obtained from their previous study investigating the use of the strategy of generating readers’ own questions in reciprocal reading instruction at academic level (chodkiewicz & kiszczak, 2019). table 1 number of the students’ questions across the texts assessed by the raters as relevant and clearly stated (n = 18) training and practice sessions delayed practice sessions final text total text total total 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 relevant questions 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 180 100% 18 18 18 54 100% 234 100% clearly stated questions 18 14 16 15 15 13 18 17 18 17 161 89.4% 16 18 18 52 96.2% 213 91% with regard to the second research question, the findings revealed that at the beginning of the study the participants struggled with posing linguistically correct questions. overall, during the first part of the project 65 out of 180 students’ questions, that is, 36.1%, were not correct in terms of the language used. it is important to note that the problem of formulating linguistically correct text-based questions by efl students, even at an advanced level of language proficiency, has also been observed in other studies related to the topic under discussion (cf. miciano, 2004a, 2004b; dorchandra, 2013). an optimistic comment that should be made with reference to the results obtained is that the number of linguistically appropriate questions tended to increase in each task from the fourth to the ninth questioning sessions and was relatively high in the second part of the study. as demonstrated in table 2, the amount of correct questions that appeared during the first four strategy training and practice sessions was considerably lower than the average, whereas during the last two training and practice sessions and the last two delayed practice sessions, the students’ questions were formed correctly, with only one erroneous item found per text. it may be speculated that the participants improved their ability of asking linguistically correct questions, which could have been attributed to the students’ general development of language proficiency over time as well as to the systematic practice in generating their own questions on the basis of the efl didactics course materials and the increasing awareness of the problem. text-based student questioning in efl settings:… 49 table 2 number of the students’ questions across the texts assessed by the raters as linguistically correct (n = 18) training and practice sessions delayed practice sessions final text total text total total 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 linguistically correct questions 6 8 7 7 10 13 14 16 17 17 115 63.9% 15 17 17 49 90.7% 164 70% the third question in this research study concerned the types of questions the students tended to generate. it is evident from table 3 that the group of the six participants preferred to use two particular question types, that is, description questions and explanation questions. they did not change this preference even after a nine-month period of not working with the strategy of generating questions in the classroom. as a matter of fact, 30.3% of all 234 questions asked by all the participants throughout the study were description questions whereas 29.1% were explanation questions. table 3 number of particular question types generated by the students across the texts (n = 18) training and practice sessions delayed practice sessions final text total (180) text total (54) total (234)question types 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 factual information 2 2 8 3 2 3 1 1 1 2 25 (13.8%) 2 1 2 5 (9.3%) 30 (12.8%) description 8 4 3 6 10 8 3 4 4 4 54 (30%) 5 6 6 17 (31.5%) 71 (30.3%) explanation 4 2 4 7 2 5 5 6 6 7 48 (26.7%) 6 8 6 20 (37%) 68 (29.1%) pattern of relationships 3 3 0 1 4 1 8 4 5 5 34 (18.9%) 4 2 2 8 (14.9%) 42 (17.9%) judgmental 1 7 3 1 0 1 1 3 2 0 19 (10.6%) 1 1 2 4 (7.4%) 23 (9.8%) in a similar vein, the students’ resistance to the use of judgmental questions did not change across the study and only 9.8% of all the questions posed were classified as representative of this category. as for factual information questions, a slight decrease in their number could be observed from the seventh anna kiszczak, halina chodkiewicz50 training and practice session in the first part of the project. the questions of this type were also rarely asked during the delayed practice sessions as they constituted only 9.3% of all the questions generated at this stage of the study. this may have resulted from the instructions and explanations given by the teacher-researcher to the students who encouraged them to ask more cognitively demanding questions instead of questions addressing solely facts and figures. overall, the tendencies noted in the group may suggest that the students found it important to ask and learn about descriptions and explanations of main concepts and about some relationships between key ideas, however, they were not able to take a critical stance on the information conveyed in the texts. these results reflect those of miciano (2004a, 2004b) and taboada, bianco, and bowerman (2012) who also found that students tend to ask intermediate questions, which require text understanding but do not demand the activation of critical thinking skills. in order to answer the last research question the students’ personal evaluation regarding reciprocal reading practice and their performance in it was gained through two interviews that accompanied the two parts of the study. the analysis of the students’ responses has shown some remarkable insights into the way the students approached the procedure of asking text-based questions while accomplishing reading tasks and self-assessment of their performance. when asked about their opinion on the usefulness of the procedure of reciprocal reading, the participants were unanimous in the view that it helped them organise their reading and learning process and stay focused on the content of the text in order to identify the main ideas and remember them. as one of the participants, paulina, highlighted in the post-study interview, generating own text-based questions and performing reciprocal reading tasks definitely helped to systematize knowledge and organise it. she explained her view in the following way: i had to plan my goal and as a result, i focused on information which was in the text more deeply because i knew why i should do it. and i memorised better information because it was in the text and also in the questions and discussions. and it was really helpful to read the short texts like summary. i think the whole procedure helped to focus on information which was crucial for understanding the text and to organize knowledge from the whole course, and helped to prepare for the tests. what is important to emphasize is that the participants’ positive standpoint on the use of the strategy of generating their own questions while reading academic texts did not change over the course of the study, even when in the delayed practice sessions no further support in the students’ strategy implementation was formally offered. indeed, the students shared the same opinions text-based student questioning in efl settings:… 51 and provided similar justifications supporting their views during both of the interviews. however, only two students expressed their plan to ask text-based questions on their own in the future. even though the remaining participants were convinced about the benefits of working with the questioning strategy, they found it applicable mainly only while studying short texts, that is, of similar length to those they read in the classroom, and not to entire book chapters or academic articles. another strand of the interviews was to get some insight into potential changes in the participants’ questioning behaviour across all the reciprocal reading sessions. in the accounts of their individual procedures of generating questions, the six students declared that they adhered to the same cycle throughout the thirteen sessions and found it practical not to introduce any changes into it. out of the students’ descriptions of their ways of working with the texts in order to ask questions based on them, two main patterns of behaviour have emerged. four students (paweł, michalina, izabela, and monika) claimed that first they read the target text in order to perform the multiple choice comprehension task. yet, bearing in mind the next step of the procedure which concerned generating their own questions, the students already attempted to identify and underline the information they could ask about later. having answered the reading comprehension questions, they read the text again very slowly to make sure whether the ideas they had underlined were worth being asked about and learning about. they stopped reading each time when they arrived at such an idea and wrote their questions addressing it together with their own answers to them. paweł and monika finished the procedure of generating questions at this point, whereas michalina and izabela went through the text once again to ensure the relevance of their questions. slightly a different questioning routine was adopted by paulina and agata, who read each target text for the first time only with a view to answering the comprehension questions, without any reflection on the text in terms of ideas which they could subsequently address in their own questions. then, they read the text carefully and generated three questions referring to it. the last step of the procedure concerned reading the texts for the third time in order to provide answers to those questions. all of the study participants admitted that when they found the texts more demanding in terms of content, they had to read them more times. importantly, regardless of the order of the steps the students took while reading the texts and generating questions on their basis, all of the participants automatically embarked on the strategy of re-reading. as discussed above, the students did not modify their individualised ways of working with texts with the use of the questioning strategy over time, however, they reported some other changes related to their questioning behaviour. all of the students, apart from michalina, mentioned that they started paying more attention to the clarity as well as to the linguistic correctness of the anna kiszczak, halina chodkiewicz52 questions they posed. in the cases of monika, paweł, and izabela, the increase of linguistic awareness was caused by the collaborative part of the reciprocal reading procedure, that is, by the fact their questions were to be answered by their peers. monika’s comments are as follows: when i noticed that paweł didn’t understand my questions i knew it was something wrong with them. so i knew i had to change their language or be more clear what i mean. and next times i was more careful. so now, after so many classes i think that my questions are more correct than at the beginning. agata and paulina, on the other hand, claimed that it was the teacherresearcher’s feedback that they received on the quality of their questions which helped them notice some basic linguistic problems that regularly appeared in their questions. practising asking questions proved to be helpful for them to work on their linguistic performance. a crucial point needs to be raised here, namely, the participants’ perceptions related to the linguistic correctness of their questions were consistent with the objective evaluation of the questions performed by the judges, as already reported in this paper. as far as the types of questions generated by the participants are concerned, all of the students admitted that they had their own preferences for given categories of questions. what is more, the students, who participated in this study, were able to explain their preferences by referring to the characteristics of the particular types of questions they usually opted for and their role in text processing. by way of illustration, paweł, who most frequently posed judgmental questions, justified his preference by stating that: i like questions which would require personal thinking. the best would be critical thinking like you have to think about the idea in many different ways, look at this in many different views. so it requires you, for example, to compare one to another or to give your own thoughts or just to think from experience because we had those practices already so i like to ask some questions also about real-life experience and text. for me scanning the text is not enough. five out of the six study participants stated that they made attempts at using a number of question types apart from those they personally preferred, yet, they did it for different reasons. two students experimented with question categories as they felt that were expected to do it rather than make choices out of their own willingness, two students did it to test themselves on the ability of asking questions of different types, and one student did it to introduce some variety to her sets of questions. four students, agata, paulina, monika, and izabela text-based student questioning in efl settings:… 53 indicated that the handout with the taxonomy of questions was an important source of help for them in the process of generating questions representing different categories both during the one-semester strategy training as well as in the delayed sessions. overall, it may be inferred from the students’ views that they personalised the strategy of generating text-based questions and developed their own preferences and opinions concerning particular question types they drew upon over the period of the study. conclusion the present study, although limited in its size, has confirmed that asking text-based questions by efl students can be both an effective and instructionally manageable strategy in academic settings. such a view can be supported with reference to the results obtained in both the training and practice sessions, with explicit explanation and guidance provided by the teacher, and in the delayed sessions, when the students worked independently using the already practiced procedure. generally, with the appropriately chosen difficulty level of content-area texts, as also shown by the results of this study and in chodkiewicz and kiszczak (2019), efl students are capable of asking questions relevant to the content of texts, answerable and clear to the recipient, which undeniably shows that having understood the texts students are able to effectively address the text content in their questions. of some problem for english language learners, as it has been demonstrated even at an advanced language proficiency level, is to formulate linguistically correct questions (cf. miciano, 2004a, 2004b; dorchandra, 2013; chodkiewicz & kiszczak, 2019). however, the current study has also revealed that the number of linguistically appropriate questions tended to increase as a result of the amount of practice the students completed. one can conclude, then, that the use of the strategy of text-based questioning can play a role in overcoming students’ language deficiencies when this interactive element is added to receptive reading tasks. worth emphasizing is the data informing about the participants’ choice of different question types. the students showed preference for asking description and explanation questions, that is, the ones at a lower cognitive level while resisting the use of judgmental questions. this confirms the tendency observed by chodkiewicz and kiszczak (2019), as well as the results obtained by miciano (2004) and taboada, bianco, and bowerman (2012), who found that students choose to ask intermediate questions as those that do not require enacting critical thinking skills. anna kiszczak, halina chodkiewicz54 the findings from the interviews generally matched those from the objective analysis of the quality of the students’ questions, apart from the fact that some valuable information regarding the students’ views and perceptions of the use of text-based questioning was added. the participants of this study unanimously underlined that generating their own questions contributed to organising their reading and learning from text. they expressed a positive standpoint on the use of the strategy of generating their own questions over the whole course of the study. they also declared the strategy to be helpful in adopting a more individualized processing of the texts they read. as for the use of different question types, the students showed preferences for some of them, giving different reasons for their choices. among them they mentioned the role of a given question in text comprehension and content processing, satisfying the requirement of using different question types, experimenting with different question types, or testing the ability to ask particular question types. of interest has also been the description of the cycle in which the particular students implemented the strategy of text-based questioning since they embarked on varying pathways to reach their goals. to sum up, proper guidance offered by the teacher can make students more responsive to the texts they read and more reflective on the use and contribution of question generating strategy to the reading and learning process. it is also important to make students aware of taking a more critical approach in asking their own questions, as well as improving their linguistic 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(2009). the effects of reciprocal teaching on english reading comprehension in a thai high school classroom (unpublished doctoral dissertation). thailand: srinakharinwirot university. anna kiszczak, halina chodkiewicz stellen von eigenen fragen in anlehnung an einen fremdsprachigen text: zur langfristigen anwendung und wahrnehmung dieser strategie beim lesen im team z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g der strategische ansatz zur entwicklung der lesefertigkeit ist derzeit eines der wichtigsten konzepte in der sprachdidaktik. dieser beitrag widmet sich den ergebnissen einer studie, in der studierende der anglistik einem langzeittraining unterzogen wurden, in dem sie ihre eigenen fragen auf der basis eines textes formulierten, der beim lesen im team verwendet wurde. diese studie bestand aus zwei phasen: in einem semester erhielten die studierenden detaillierte erklärungen und hilfe beim verfahren der fragestellung, wobei der schwerpunkt auf den fragen unterschiedlicher tiefe der kognitiven textverarbeitung lag. neun monate später machten sie dieselben aufgaben ohne hilfe einer lehrkraft. ziel der studie war es, veränderungen in der qualität der fragen zu bewerten, die sich die studie renden in den späteren lesephasen zu zweit stellten, sowie von studierenden – mittels eines interviews – informationen über die wahrnehmung von aufgaben zur fragestellung und über die nützlichkeit dieser strategie bei dem verstehen eines wissenschaftlichen textes und der gezielten verarbeitung seines inhalts zu bekommen. die studie zeigte, dass die studierenden keine probleme damit hatten, solche fragen zu stellen, die aus der sicht des empfängers klar und inhaltlich relevant waren. durch die teilnahme an mehreren team-lesesitzungen konnten sie die sprachliche form von fragen auf englisch besser beherrschen. nach meinung der befragten ist die strategie, fragen durch den lesenden auf der grundlage des wissenschaftlichen textes zu stellen, hilfreich für das verstehen und das beherrschen des fachwissens in anlehnung an seinen inhalt. schlüsselwörter: akademisches lesen, gegenseitiges lesen, fragen von studierenden, strategietraining tammy gregersen university of northern iowa, usa aligning who i am with what i do: pursuing language teacher authenticity a b s t r a c t: this study explores the dynamic, interactive relationship between teacher identity and authenticity. through an examination of several socio-cultural (social identity, situated learning, and image text) and psycholinguistic (individual differences) second language acquisition theories, a conceptualization of identity is provided. subsequently, language teacher authenticity is characterized from both a philosophical and pedagogical perspective and connected to the notion of teacher identity. the final section of the paper presents research-based applications that include reflecting critically, redefining personal credibility, discovering one’s personal style, displaying emotion and recognizing diversity to facilitate the positive-broadening quest of aligning one’s identity (i.e., who i am) with authenticity (i.e., what i do). k e y w o r d s: teacher identity, authenticity, social identity, situated learning, image text, individual differences introduction in the repertoire of stories passed through the generations of the lakota indigenous people from the great plains of the united states comes a wise, thoughtful creation story that sets the stage for the enigmatic synergy of human identity and authenticity. it begins with the creator gathering all of creation, and saying, “i want to hide something from the humans until they are ready for it. it is the realization that they create their own reality.” the eagle said, “give it to me, i will take it to the moon.” the creator replied, “no. one day they will go there and find it.” the salmon said, “i will bury it on the bottom of the ocean.” “no, they will go there, too.” theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 1 (1) 2015, pp. 143–157 144 tammy gregersen the buffalo said, “i will bury it on the great plains.” the creator said, “they will cut into the skin of the earth and find it even there.” grandmother mole, who lives in the breast of the mother earth, and who has no physical eyes but sees with spiritual eyes, said, “put it inside of them.” and the creator said, “it is done.” this story speaks to the elusiveness of discovering one’s identity and its corollary, authenticity. taking my cue from the lakota, i address this complexity on the first day of each semester in my tesol methods class with the following words to my pre-service teachers: “i cannot teach you how to be a good language teacher. i can only show you those things which research, my own experience, and ‘best practices’ have suggested as being potentially effective. you and you alone will need to look deeply inward, find your teacher self, and discover from among the myriad of methods and techniques you will be introduced to what works best for you and the unique group of learners you have in front of you at any given moment.” for some, this invitation to explore is an exciting challenge. for others, this paucity of recipes is scary and daunting. in one word, i beseech my future teachers to be authentic—a virtue which cannot be achieved without first knowing thyself and formulating a comprehensive answer to the enigmatic question, who am i?; thus making self-identity a precursor to authenticity. authentic teachers teach like the people they are. taylor (1991, pp. 35–36) suggests: “when we come to understand what it is to define ourselves, to determine in what our originality consists, we see that we have to take as background some sense of what is significant. defining myself means finding what is significant in my difference from others.” in this paper, i attempt to make the case that teacher authenticity means acting upon the cognizance of our uniqueness. when our personal and professional identities are in sync, and when who i am and what i do are as congruent with one’s true essence as they can possibly be, it is then that together with our students, we as teachers, experience well-being. when considering the pursuit of authenticity as a personal process of engagement that is manifested in teachers’ lives and work, we acquire a deeper understanding of the kinds of practices and pedagogical encounters that enhance (and sometimes limit) learner and teacher development (malm, 2008). this incredibly intimate process of self-discovery, however, is not a static, exhaustive, and consistent experience, but rather it is multiple, fluctuating, oppositional, and shaped by powerful social forces. on the one hand, the process of identity discovery is personal, defined by an individual’s emotional, psychological, and cognitive drives; on the other, it is shaped and negotiated by social influences like power and co-constructed meaning-making. parker j. palmer (2007), in his book, the courage to teach: exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s 145aligning who i am with what i do… life, wrote, “i want to learn how to hold the paradoxical poles of my identity together, to embrace the profoundly opposite truths that my sense of self is deeply dependent on others dancing with me and that i still have a sense of self when no one wants to dance.” the present study examines the ever-shifting, synergetic relationship between teacher identity and authenticity and attempts to demonstrate how reflecting critically, redefining personal credibility, discovering one’s personal style, displaying emotion and recognizing diversity might facilitate the positivebroadening quest of aligning one’s identity (i.e., who i am) with authenticity (i.e., what i do). to begin, i attempt to scale the very slippery slope of conceptualizing teacher identity. to this end, i elucidate four theories from a second language acquisition (sla) perspective: social identity theory, situated learning, image-texts, and individual differences theory before highlighting several tenets from the discipline of education. next, i examine the conceptualization of authenticity from both a philosophical and pedagogical perspective. finally, i attempt to provide research-based applications concerning how to align our identities with authenticity. we take this self-discovery journey as teachers in the hopes of heeding our deepest personal and educational mission: “our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. as we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks—we will also find our path of authentic service in the world” (palmer, 2001). identity defined from the outset, it is important to highlight the transformational and transformative nature of identity. its formation is neither structurally determined nor context-free. individuals are intentional and exert agency as they socially, culturally, and politically explore the identities assigned by others and those that are self-acknowledged (varghese, morgan, johnston, & johnson, 2005). in juxtaposing a variety of language teacher social identity theories, we can use them to enlighten each other and to mitigate the internal limitations of each if considered alone. to this end, let us examine three different sociolinguistic paradigms—social identity theory (hogg & abrams, 1998), the theory of situated learning and communities of practice (lave & wenger, 1991) and identity as image-text (simon, 1995)—and discover where they intersect (varghese, morgan, johnston, & johnson, 2005). social identity theory promotes the notion that identity is based upon group membership and is shaped by social categories like race, nationality class, etc., 146 tammy gregersen that govern differences in power and status (tajfel, 1978). consequently, an individual’s understanding of self is continually in flux and changes over time and within different contexts. thus, group membership provides a sense of social identity and belonging in the social world and impacts one’s self-esteem and sense of pride, carrying the implication that association with a negatively valued group even for a minimal time might result in a lowering of one’s self-worth. because we simultaneously belong to a myriad of different groups, membership in one group is often more relevant and influential than in another. with such powerful social consequences, one way to increase one’s self-image is to enhance the status of the group. an example of the influence of social identity theory on language teacher identity is found in the idealization of the native versus nonnative speaker and the negative-narrowing self-perceptions that this might engender in nonnative speakers teaching a target language. although social identity theory is significant in the sense that it raises an individual’s awareness of their status in a particular group, it is limited in its dependence on conflicting, fixed social classifications and prevents teachers from tracing their developing and ever-so-individual evolution. nevertheless this theory can still offer useful insights into teacher self-perceptions, albeit more global and generic than the other two theories under investigation (varghese, morgan, johnston, & johnson, 2005). a second insightful theory implicating teacher identity is situated learning. this theory links learning and identity by characterizing learning as a process of identification in which learning and understanding transpire and evolve as individuals participate in activities and become progressively more involved. thus, communities of practice, comprised of numerous identities and levels of participation, are not precisely defined. they host members who share an appreciation about what they do and the meaning that this participation has in their lives and for their communities. in this theory learning occurs through co-participation and social engagement (lave & wenger, 1991). this view is especially significant to our current teacher identity conversation in that self-savvy teachers are as concerned with learning about their environments as they are about classroom skills (darling-hammond, 1990). learning, therefore, is much more a process of coming to be by shaping identities in real-world endeavors, and it is this kind of learning—participating in rather than being acted upon—that is an important condition for successful learning (lave & wenger, 1991). even though situated learning theories allow us to conceptualize learning and identity construction as a process of being in evolving communities of practice, there are various limitations. one of the problems is the emphasis on how individual identity develops inside the structure of group practice instead of contemplating different forms in which identities are shaped through interaction. the emphasis on the group ignores the role of personal experiences and 147aligning who i am with what i do… motivations and cannot account for the power relations and underlying ideologies within groups (varghese, morgan, johnston, & johnson, 2005). a third theory that taps into language teacher identity as a precursor to authenticity is the notion of teacher identity as a result of the co-creation of “image-text.” image-texts are created through daily school activities and reflect the familiar, emotional relationships that frequently grow out of teacher-student interaction. they are complex, multi-faceted representations, assembled with interpretations of immediate and observable experiences like classroom interaction, formal instruction, and assessment, but they are also guided by indirect and often indiscernible realities, like students’ feelings about a teacher’s ethnicity or gender, or on the other hand, a teacher’s low expectations for a class based on the socioeconomic status of the school community. a teacher’s personal stories, body language, clothes, and the connection of these with a student’s personal previous experiences might also be found in the image-text generated by the class. the image-text reflects a variety of conflicting and harmonizing voices, is open to new interpretations that are superimposed upon preceding ones, and allows for both conformity and resistance. this theory highlights the notion that as teachers we are often times invisible to ourselves but students can “read” us and respond to aspects of which we are unaware (morgan, 2002). image-texts demonstrate that as teachers we cannot always guarantee that our actions will have prescribed outcomes. we can, however, distinguish ourselves in ways that open up identity options not previously imagined, or that can inspire, for example, social practices or forms of participation we have not previously considered. at the same time, teacher identity as pedagogue carries potential dangers. teachers have considerable influence on and, in some settings, substantial power over students’ futures. therefore, the notion of image-text helps us to see that as teachers, we need to present ourselves in ways that are not directly threatening or disrespectful but instead open to novelty and new interpretations (varghese, morgan, johnston, & johnson, 2005). the three previous theories characterize identity-discovery as being formed and negotiated by social influences, but they do not directly address the individual emotional, psychological, and cognitive journeys teachers make as they seek the positive-broadening power of self-identification by personal rather than social exploration. we approach our language teaching with a myriad of different motivations and from a variety of diverse contexts. our velocities, comfort zones, fortes, linguistic proficiency, and the journeys we embark on to reach our ultimate language teaching destinations are quite various. theories that address these differences, their causes and outcomes, are collectively discussed under the umbrella of individual differences (ids) and take the form of variables such as anxiety, beliefs, cognitive abilities, motivation, learning styles and strategies, and willingness to communicate (gregersen & macintyre, 2014). while the majority of id literature focuses on learner individuality, researchers 148 tammy gregersen have also targeted teacher variables like language teacher anxiety and beliefs (horwitz, 1996; 1988), and language teacher motivation (dornyei, 2005) and there have been numerous investigations concerning the alignment of teacher and learner styles and intelligences. traditionally, most of these traits have been studied as distinct variables; however, the discipline of applied linguistics has recently experienced a surge of research in dynamic systems that recognizes the complexity of language learning and teaching. such recognition has resulted in attempts to assemble the large variety of isolated factors into coherent, cohesive systems (gregersen & macintyre, 2014; dornyei, macintyre, & henry, 2015). individual teachers are each composed of a countless number of systems that have evolved in numerous diverse ways resulting in unique personalities. each system must work congruently within itself and synchronously in combination with all the others. if our beliefs about our systems do not match the reality of them, the systems are bound to break down. consequently, externally imposed beliefs have to be integrated within a system or they become wrenches in it. each of us is composed of systems that are so complex that a great deal of introspection is necessary to realize how our own unique system really works. for example, imagine an introverted, private, serious teacher who is told that learners engage better with jokes and personal anecdotes. such techniques might work authentically for the extroverted, self-disclosing teacher, but for the reserved, thoughtful teacher, those practices would seem fake and unauthentic. moving beyond sla literature to research in general teacher education, we find concurrence with the notion that teacher identity is dynamic, that it fluctuates with time, and is impacted by a myriad of factors that are both internal (e.g., emotion) and external (e.g., life experiences) to the individual (sachs, 2005; zembylas, 2003). accordingly, identity implicates both a person and a context, and according to gee (2001), the idea of identity suggests a certain “kind of person” within a specific context. although we all have a core identity—one that is relatively stable—various iterations of this identity surface as we engage with different people and settings. gee isolates four ways of perceiving identity: 1. nature-identity (developed from nature or originating in our natural state, something akin to individual differences research). 2. institution-identity (resulting from a position acknowledged by authority, much like the categories created by society as found in social identity theory mentioned above). 3. discourse-identity (rising from the discourse or opinion of others about us, similar to the co-construction found in image-text). 4. affinity-identity (determined by one’s practices in relation to external groups, comparative to the communities of practice in situated learning). the emphasis in this view of identity is on the multifaceted nature of identity and its changing shape in terms of external influences. 149aligning who i am with what i do… olson (2008) takes a sociocultural perspective in his proposition that teacher identity is both the process that results from influences upon the teacher and the product derived from the ongoing interaction of our own teacher development. he views identity as a term for the assortment of impacting factors found in the immediate contexts of “self, social positioning and meaning systems” (p. 139)—all of which fluidly influence and are influenced in a continually shifting construct. such factors get entangled within the stream of teacher activity as we simultaneously respond to and navigate situations and interactions at any given moment. hence, identity is linked to the collective discourses that contour our own individual circumstances and our individual contributions that supplement the contributions of a community (sfard & prusak, 2005). in reviewing the three language-teacher-affiliated sociocultural theories, the psychological premises found in literature on the subject of individual differences, and the concurring literature from education research, we can see that the discovery of our teacher identities is intensely personal and psychological, as it integrates teacher’s self-images and natural predispositions, but it is also deeply social and shared in that identity also considers the collective practices taking place in institutional settings like teacher education programs, schools, and even larger collectives like culture. furthermore, teasing out language teachers’ identities is not only a process of discovery that is intricately interwoven with language and discourse, but is also embedded in a concrete real-world phenomenon. as we construct, recognize, and embrace our teacher identities in pursuit of greater authenticity, it behooves us to take account of the way teachers’ identities are individually recognized and discursively constructed and recognize the social forces to which teachers are exposed and attempt to understand the consequences these influences exert on individual self-definitions. in considering recommendations for teachers to align who they are with what they do, there needs to be sensitivity to the discourse and agency that the theory of image-text offers; however, suggestions must also consider the impact of situated learning that community-ofpractice theory proposes. yet, it is with identity theory and understanding the role of individual differences that teachers can conceptualize their individual psychological states. in short, multiple theoretical approaches are essential if teachers are not to lose sight of the real-world complexity of being true to themselves (varghese, morgan, johnston, & johnson, 2005). in an attempt to bring some kind of consensus to this discussion on identity’s definition, i end this section with sachs (2005, 15f.): “teacher professional identity … stands at the core of the teaching profession. it provides a framework for teachers to construct their own ideas of ‘how to be’, ‘how to act’, and ‘how to understand’ their work and their place in society.” this idea of teacher identity rejects the notion that it is fixed but holds instead that it is negotiated through experience and the sense that individuals make of that experience. according to 150 tammy gregersen parker (2007), “good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.” authenticity defined to understand what “authenticity” means, we have to grasp the notions of difference, originality, and the acceptance of diversity. taylor (1991) contends that in defining ourselves, we need to establish those elements that make us original while, at the same time, considering what is significant. authenticity includes creation and construction in addition to discovery, uniqueness, and recurrent resistance to the roles assigned by society. concurrently, authenticity demands openness to what is meaningful and self-definition through dialogue (taylor, 1991). because teaching is relational in nature, it is “an emotional practice” (hargreaves, 1998, p. 835). this is because “emotions are at the heart of teaching. they comprise its most dynamic qualities, literally, for emotions are fundamentally about movement.” an examination of the emotions of teaching and educational change led hargreaves to surmise that the emotional connection teachers nurture with their learners is pivotal to their decision-making about their methods, teaching contexts, and practice selections. the emotional rewards of teaching, the authority to make independent decisions, and to exercise personal discretion, initiative and creativity through their work are all vital to maintaining teachers’ senses of self and to find their meaning via communication and dialogue with learners. giddens (1991) contends that being true to himself means being true to what makes him original, and that this originality is so much his own; that it is only he who can articulate and discover it. he adds that in articulating his uniqueness, he also finds a definition of self (i.e., realizing the potentiality that is properly his own). according to laursen (2004; as cited in malm, 2008), the following characteristics are typical of authentic teachers: personal commitment, embodiment of the task, realistic teaching intentions, respect for students, close teamwork with colleagues, and persistent determination for personal and professional growth. for laursen, authenticity is one type of teachable teacher expertise directly connected to teaching quality which develops as an extension of basic, fundamental knowledge. consequently, authenticity and professionalism are not in opposition; quite the reverse: authenticity is the epitome of professionalism where no division exists between person and professionalism. another affective dimension of authenticity relates to our affinity as teachers for the subject we teach (in our case, the target language), and engaging 151aligning who i am with what i do… our learners in genuine and candid interaction around ideas that matter. such dialogue implicates virtues, such as being genuine, developing greater selfawareness, defining ourselves rather than allowing other people’s expectations to manipulate us, allowing portions of ourselves to personally interact with our learners, and critically reflecting upon ourselves, others, our relationships and the content. even more important perhaps is that teacher authenticity contains a moral dimension that urges us to explore the “horizons of significance” (e.g., standards of excellence) within which we define ourselves as educators and make decisions about the education of others. being an authentic teacher demands that we search with an eye toward that which is outside ourselves because for authenticity to be meaningful it needs to be sought by considering significant issues and asking ourselves at every turn whether what we are teaching is in the best interests of our learners. this can only be discovered through negotiation and critical reflection (kreber, klampfleitner, mccune, bayne, & knottenbelt, 2007). to sum up what has been said so far, teacher identity formation can be conceptualized as a socialization process wherein the way we think about our teaching and our teaching practices is influenced by a learning process that transpires in relationships with a community. from this viewpoint, the first idea for teachers to explore in aligning who they are with what they do is the degree to which their context interacts with their personal emotional and psychological factors. directly related to this is the extent to which teachers have a sense of agency or, in other words, a belief that socially imposed elements are provisional and to what degree a teacher deems it possible to march to his or her own drum in teaching and learning practices. furthermore, identity formation is a dynamic process that is linked to authenticity, and carries a moral value-laden dimension. thus, the question a teacher needs to ask is not only whether he or she can create a unique teacher identity from within (as opposed to a response to external expectations), but also whether there is the potential to be a unique individually-defined teacher while at the same time connecting with and committing to something significant that lies beyond. aligning our “being” with our “doing”: practical applications reflect critically. to find our “inner teacher” and embrace it, we first need to personally and critically reflect upon whether we see any relevance in the notion of authenticity. confronting this issue with honesty and integrity will require that we tap into our cognitive dimensions, as well as engage our hearts 152 tammy gregersen and search for answers to questions about whether assigning a significant role to teacher authenticity rings true and feels right. in the end, we need to define for ourselves what the end of education is all about. language teachers need to critically reflect upon the degree to which we feel we are “authentic,” to contemplate how contextual factors influence our perceptions of ourselves and our language learners, including the myriad of assumptions we hold, and the decisions we make about the what, how, and why of being a teacher and teaching (kreber et. al., 2007). because teaching with authenticity reflects a profound sense of self-awareness and self-identity, we must look inward into our own selves without judgment and be open to inquisitorial, mindful inspection to consider how we think about ourselves and our classroom behavior (cranton & carusetta, 2004; dirkx, 2006). redefine personal credibility. successful teaching is not only a technique—authentic teaching emanates from the integrity of the teacher in relation to our target language and our learners—and from the unpredictable synergy of it all. master language teachers anticipate great things from their learners and expect that their learners imagine great things of themselves (quinn & anding, 2005). additionally, learners see master teachers as something more than content experts. learners perceive great teachers as credible people (palmer, 1990). according to brookfield (1990), learners base teacher credibility on whether a teacher: (1) matches words with actions; (2) openly admits faults; (3) is seen in out-of-class contexts (i.e., is a “real” person); and (4) shows respect through active listening. citing a variety of personal correspondences, wright (2013) adds that teacher credibility also includes adapting courses to meet students’ needs so they understand the value of the content. it also means providing insight into real-world professional experience so students believe the teacher knows what he or she is talking about. credibility is particularly important for those instances when teachers need to criticize as it permits learners to realize that the commentary stems from the experience of knowing what is expected outside the four walls of the classroom. discover a style. there is not a single recipe for how to teach a language. teachers must bring their own styles and personalities into the classroom. authentic teaching implicates more than mere behavior and techniques, and according to quinn and anding (2005), it is “about the expression of who we are” (p. 488). style-savvy language teachers critically question every aspect of a class to develop a style, communicate effectively, and reveal their creativity. because there are as many “teaching styles” as there are teachers, their sheer number and diversity make it difficult for educators to discuss teaching style in relation to methods. hence, we need to find methods that value stylistic diversity and banish methodological reductionism from our professional conversations 153aligning who i am with what i do… (palmer, 1998). in other words, language teachers have no need of copying others as there is much more to motivation than methods. displaying emotion. teaching is rooted in emotions that stem from the relationships present in the classroom. as language teachers, we often ignore or minimize the potent emotional context in which our work is embedded. emotions are important in transmitting knowledge and they influence how it is received. the age-old saying, “students may never remember what you taught them, but they will never forget how you made them feel,” targets the conundrum challenging teachers every day we begin our classes: we seek our students’ attention and try to connect and engage, but it is really their emotions we must deftly distinguish, sensitively navigate, and masterfully manipulate. the power of emotion in learning is laid bare when we consider the neuroscience behind it: emotion improves our capacity to create vivid memories of even the most trivial events. hormones (norepinephrine) that are released during emotional arousal play a pivotal role in our emotional regulation of memory and enhance learning by inundating the brain with natural memory stimulants. in the classroom, we look for manifestations of these emotions in engagement or imagination. although we might also incorporate other mechanisms with the hope of stimulating these same manifestations (e.g., grouping learners, giving them a voice and a choice, or participating in a think-pair-share among a variety of other techniques to increase engagement and/or creativity), none of these necessarily cause emotion because indeed emotion does not cause learning—emotion supersedes it (tully & bolshakov, 2010). for example, if we ask learners what they remember most about their favorite childhood teacher, they would likely say little about the subject but rather they might describe how this teacher made them feel—maybe it would be the sense of excitement or discovery as they learned new things, or the supportive classroom environment that incited them to take risks and make mistakes, or the confidence they felt because they were valued as human beings. according to hansen (2001), few features in the classroom have a larger impact on learners’ educational experience than a caring relationship with their teacher. as an example, imagine two language teachers covering the same grammar lesson on the past progressive. one is impatient with learners and corrects every error. the other is supportive and sensitively and judiciously corrects. knowing only that, we can probably guess which learners will be more likely say, “i was sleeping during my last class.” learners who share caring relationships with teachers are academically more successful and demonstrate greater pro-social behavior (cassidy & bates, 2005). because how, when, and why we display emotion (and care) plays an important role in identity, aligning this facet of “who i am” with “what i do” needs reflection on our own experience with caring and emotion. often, we unconsciously care for others the way we have been cared for—for better or 154 tammy gregersen worse. james (2012) interviewed four different teachers at the same school who shared one particular learner and discovered that the teachers cared for the learner in different ways that were each congruent with the way they had been cared for as children. teachers revealed that they did not ask anyone—including the learner himself—what the learner’s needs might be. instead, the teachers made assumptions about the learner’s background based on their own childhoods. teachers who reflect on their own past histories of care will increase their understanding of “who i am” and receive insight into the kind of care they might be extending to their learners, and this will allow them to better adjust their caring to fit learners’ needs in terms of “what i do.” recognizing diversity. building connections with students through authentic teaching demands understanding the different ways that students learn and what their individual expectations are (brookfield, 1995). through direct interaction between language learners and their teachers, we can develop an understanding of learners’ past experiences and the influence such experiences have had (moustakas, 1967). assigning journal entries that prompt learners to deliberate about their views weekly classroom experiences and then using class time to address issues that learners write about might enhance the authenticity of the teacher and demonstrates the teacher’s trustworthiness to the student (brookfield, 2006). learner feedback is often the best venue for improving teacher performance. according to wiggins (2010), teachers can show authenticity by reading and acting upon feedback during a time when it can directly impact the learner making the comments, making it advisable to gather such feedback often during the course. confrontation, which is meeting to resolve conflict or controversy, may ensue, but as moustakas states, “paradoxical as it seems, only when persons can openly disagree, if this is the reality of their experience, is it possible for them to establish genuine bonds” (1967, p. 23). “if the teacher is effective, it is because she combines the element of having something important to say, demonstrate, and teach with being open and honest with students. the former quality is that of credibility, the latter the concept of authenticity” (brookfield, 2006, p. 5). grimmett and neufeld (1994) introduce a phenomenon called authentic teacher motivation that strives to use intrinsic motivation. authentic motivation occurs when teachers attempt to do not what the institution rewards, not what they themselves feel intrinsically and professionally satisfying, but that which is beneficial and essential for learners given any context and conditions. this results in doing what is right and important for the learners in all situations. they conclude that authentic teacher motivation “is moral; it is caught up in a struggle to do what is necessary and of value, not just for the organization nor just for oneself, but ultimately in the important interests of learner” (grimmett & neufeld, 1994, pp. 4–5). according to brookfield (1990), “the problem with pursuing authenticity and credibility … 155aligning who i am with what i do… is that actions associated with these ideas often seem contradictory. in pursuing one you risk the threatening of the other” (p. 175). for example, extolling our own pedagogical virtues could be construed as arrogant but failing to acknowledge them might also end in reduced credibility. authentic teachers therefore recognize the differences learners bring to the classroom. conclusion “knowing thyself” is a necessary precursor for language teachers to understanding their learners. through continual reflection and dialogue with others, teachers enhance their self-awareness. we develop empathy, accountability and the positive-broadening emotions of reciprocated care and involvement. respect for individual integrity is one of the cornerstones in a free society. as “me” and “i” interact synergistically and symbiotically and come into alignment with “what” and “who” we come to a greater understanding of the significance of being human (malm, 2008). the lakota people of the great plains have it right. if we look deeply within ourselves, we might just realize that we indeed have the power to shape our own realities. references brookfield, s. 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(1991). situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. laursen, p. f. (2004). den autentiska lararen. bli en bra och effektiv undervisare—omdu vill. [the authentic teacher. become a good and effective educator—if you want to]. stockholm, sweden; liber ab. malm, b. (2008). authenticity in teachers’ lives and work: some philosophical and empirical considerations. scandinavian journal of educational research, 52(4), 373–386. morgan, b. (2002). critical practice in community-based esl programs: a canadian perspective. journal of language, identity, and education, 1, 141–162. moustakas, c. (1967). the authentic teacher: sensitivity and awareness in the classroom. cambridge, ma: howard a. doyle publishing. olsen, b. (2008). teaching what they learn, learning what they live. boulder, co: paradig publishers. palmer, p. (1990). the active life: a spirituality of work, creativity and caring. san francisco: jossey-bass. palmer, p. (2001). now i become myself. yes magazine, blog post, 31 may. retrieved from http:// www.yesmagazine.org/issues/working-for-life/now-i-become-myself. palmer, p. (2007). the courage to teach: exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. quinn, r. e., & anding, j. m. (2005). an interview with robert e. quinn entering the fundamental state of leadership: reflections on the path to transformational teaching. academy of management learning & education, 4(4), 487–495. 156 157aligning who i am with what i do… sachs, j. (2005). teacher education and the development of professional identity: learning to be a teacher. in p. denicolo & m. kompf (eds.), connecting policy and practice: challenges for teaching and learning in schools and universities (pp. 5–21). oxford: routledge. sfard, a., & prusak, a. 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(2010). the courage to seek authentic feedback. education digest, 30, 19–21. wright, c. (2013). authenticity in teaching and leadership. journal of accounting and finance, 13(2), 36–44. zemblyas, m. (2003). caring for teacher emotion: reflections on teacher self development. studies in philosophy and education, 22, 103–125. tammy gregersen was bin ich und wie benehme ich mich: in der suche nach der authentizität der fremdsprachenlehrer z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g der artikel bezweckte, eine dynamische interaktion zwischen der identität (eng.: teacher identity) und der authentizität eines lehrers zu schildern. die von soziologischen modellen, kulturforschungen und psycholinguistischen theorien abstammenden theoretischen voraussetzungen ermöglichten, den begriff „identität“ (eng.: identity) zu konzeptualisieren. man definierte auch den begriff „authentizität eines fremdsprachenlehrers“ sowohl in bezug auf philosophie als auch pädagogik. am ende wurden die beiden termini – identität und authentizität des lehrers – dargestellt und das im zusammenhang mit entwicklung der nachdenklichkeit des lehrers, neudefinieren seiner person, entdeckung seines eigenen stils, seiner emotionalen selbstbeherrschung und akzeptanz für verschiedenheit, was dem lehrer möglich macht, eigene authentizität zu bestimmen, also die frage zu beantworten: was bin ich und wie benehme ich mich? katarzyna bańka university of silesia in katowice, poland an analysis of higher education systems of teaching chinese as a foreign language in poland and china a b s t r a c t nowadays, changing trends in terms of interest in language learning are easy to witness. in poland, more and more higher education institutions, not only public, but also private, are introducing various types of majors concerning oriental languages, such as chinese translation programs. the aim of this paper is to compare the chinese learning process in china at the shanghai normal university and in poland at the university of silesia in katowice. the article introduces a comparative outline of both types of learning processes, based on the author’s four-year experience in teaching and studying in both of the countries in question. furthermore, the paper examines and compares the results of teaching chinese both at the university of silesia in katowice and at the shanghai normal university. in the end, the author provides suggestions on how to improve the chinese learning system in non-chinesespeaking countries. keywords: teaching chinese, characters, hanzi, pinyin, language acquisition introduction the focus of this article is a comparative analysis of the chinese learning process in china and in poland. firstly, the introduction to chinese language and the learning process in general are illustrated in order to raise the readers awareness of the complex tasks students/teachers had to deal with when learning/teaching this language. secondly, the subject of the research will be examined, namely, 1st-year students of english-chinese translation program studying in poland, and a group of multinational students studying chinese in theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 3 (1) 2017, pp. 29–46 katarzyna bańka30 china. what is more, the chinese teachers of polish and chinese origin are examined. after that, the article investigates the language environments, teaching materials, methods, and strategies employed during classes. the following chapter is devoted to the explanation of the historical background of chinese and the change in the importance of chinese on the international area. it is believed that the conclusions of this research will introduce a new perspective to the chinese language learning and help to improve chinese language learning systems in non-native chinese countries. there have been various attempts of researching the field of chinese language acquisition, however, this field still remains fairly new in poland, thus the author believes this research will be pioneering in this area. the secondary goal is to highlight the importance of language learning and to enhance people’s awareness about the complexity of the oriental languages learning process, such as chinese. historical background due to globalization the number of multilingual people all over the world is growing rapidly. soon multilingualism will be treated as a global norm (chłopek, 2011, p. 35). reasons for learning languages are numerous; however, trends in teaching and learning languages change mainly depending on the geopolitical situation worldwide. in the 1950s no one in the middle and eastern europe would think that english might become the world’s most popular language used as a medium of communication across cultures and continents, not only during business meetings but also in everyday conversation. it can be observed that such change has a great impact on educational institutions, such as universities. in 1973, the university of silesia in katowice opened its institute of english in sosnowiec. students from various places in poland came to this department to learn languages. they could choose various majors, such as, for instance: culture of english-speaking countries, history of english language, teaching english, and finally, translation program (barciak, 2008, p. 225). it was a significant step forward for upper silesia, a region in the southern part of poland. in the course of time, more and more languages became popular, thus, in due time, new language majors were established at the institute of english, for instance, english-german translation program. although at that time english was still the language of mass communication worldwide, chinese started becoming increasingly popular. its popularity was due to the so-called 改革开放, that is, the open door policy in 1978. china opened its boarders to foreigners, investors, businessmen, students, and other people willing to cooperate. and although china was quite relentless an analysis of higher education systems… 31 at the beginning, we can now see that from the economic perspective, it has made a huge impact on the entire world. what is more, it was also a major step ahead for the chinese language education (shang-jin wei, 1995, p. 74). this situation reached its peak in 2006, when the institute of english (with professor janusz arabski, who was in charge of the proceedings) opened its first group of english-chinese translation program. by that time, we could witness changing trends in poland, as far as the interest in language learning was concerned. there were numerous institutions taken over by chinese investors, many business establishments were developed, where the chinese invested their money. among others, as a fine example can serve the silesia chinese center in jaworzno, which was established in 2010. it provided a welcome opportunity for young people seeking well-paid jobs, for instance, as translators in multinational companies. the new english-chinese major became a success. in 2006, it was the only one such major in poland. there were chinese language studies at other universities and confucius institutes across poland, however, none of them was even remotely similar to the major created by the institute of english. over the years, english-chinese translation program “has grown from one group up to five groups, and the number of students willing to apply during the next recruitment in 2013 [was] still growing” (hity studiów na śląsku, 2012). the research showed that the chinese translation program was the most wanted major at the university of silesia in 2012 and, as it later turned out, also in 2013 (bańka, 2013, p. 134). theoretical background in this article, the author based her findings on four years of experience she has gained at the universities in question, being both a student and a teacher. she believes that this experience enabled her to understand students and teachers from the practical point of view. the most significant chinese teaching guidelines used for the purpose of this article were the following: (1) module syllabus: chinese language course 1—chinese: module 1 (appendix 1) prepared for the university of silesia 1st-year chinese student beginners of english-chinese translation program by the teaches, lecturers, and coordinators of particular modules, and (2) multinational chinese language teaching program (yu chun chi, 2010) published by foreign language teaching and research press for a chinese organization popularizing chinese worldwide, called hanban (汉办). course books analyzed for the purpose of this article were published by beijing language and culture university press in 2007, and are called hanyu katarzyna bańka32 jiaocheng. it is a second edition of a series of course books devoted to englishspeaking chinese students on various chinese levels of education. the reason why those course books are used for the purpose of this research is due to the fact that they constitute a set of course books devoted to all the chinese module components, such as: listening, reading, writing, comprehension, speaking, and translation. however, for the purpose of this article, the author focused on investigating the course book hanyu jiaocheng vol. 1 and vol. 2 (汉语教程第 一册上 and 汉语教程第一册下). issues and challenges the following research adopted a case study approach. observation was applied as the main data collection instrument, during which the author focused on analyzing the teachers, students in both of the universities. the chinese course was integrated, the teacher taught listening, speaking, reading, and writing to one group, without division on individual classes. in china, there was only one type of class, integrated skills class which was also referred to as the comprehension class. the author has visited shanghai normal university in china, where she took part in chinese class performed by chinese teachers. additionally, the author took part in various international discussions and conferences about chinese teaching systems both in china, shanghai, and in poland, which helped her to collect necessary data for further research. apart from the observation method, a comparative analysis of chinese teaching systems in poland and china was investigated by using the collected data. chinese, 汉语, a language of the population of hans—indigenous chinese— is not only about the characters. each of them has got its own phonological equivalents called pinyin. it was introduced for the first time in the people’s republic of china in 1958, and later on in 1982 pinyin was claimed by an international standard phonetic version (iso) of chinese pronunciation (wu zhongwei, 2010, p. 10). chinese is a tonal language, it has four major tones, each tone may change the meaning of a particular word, for example, 八— bā—means: ‘eight,’ 拔—bá—means: ‘to pull up,’ 把—bǎ—means: ‘to hold in one’s hand’, and 爸—bà—means: father (yue, a. o., 2003). each word is a syllable, or a set of syllables combined together creating another word, for example, 火—huǒ—means: ‘fire’ and 车—chē—means: ‘a vehicle,’ those two words combined together give us: 火车—huǒ chē—namely: ‘a train.’ as can be seen, students encounter numerous difficulties in their learning. an analysis of higher education systems… 33 the student’s profile the first group of subjects consisted of 20 polish beginner students studying in poland. all of them being a 1st-year english-chinese translation major students. the second group, consisted of 15 students of the shanghai normal university in china. the students were of various origin, however, all of them were native speakers of indo-european languages. in both situations, students did not have any previous experience with chinese. they came to the university to study chinese without any specific knowledge about the language, culture, history, etc. their main motivation encouraging them to learn chinese (over 90% of students in both language environments) were career opportunities. the first group’s l1 was polish, l2 english, and l3 chinese, similarly, the second group’s l1 was their mother tongue (different for each students, e.g., german, spanish, french, russian, italian, etc.), l2 was usually english, and l3 was chinese. the teacher’s profile the chinese teacher at the shanghai normal university was a 40-yearold female from shanghai, well qualified (obtained ba and ma in chinese language teaching to foreigners) with great grammar preparation and all the necessary skills to teach chinese. unfortunately, her level of communication in english was quite poor, thus there were technical problems in terms of communication with the beginner students, which is a very important problem that needs to be addressed and solved. however, such situation encouraged everyone to use chinese in class, which facilitated the learning process. another issue that needs to be addressed is the fact that, although there are 56 ethnic groups in china, over 100 dialects (kaźmierczak, 2003), students across the world are usually willing to learn standard mandarin chinese; however, unfortunately, the teacher at shanghai normal university had pronunciation difficulties with sounds such as: “ji,” “qi,” “xi,” and “zi,” “ci,” “si,” pronouncing respectively “ji” as “zi,” “qi” as “ci,” “xi” all identically as: “si” and “zi,” “ci,” “si.” thus, it led to numerous misunderstandings. the chinese teacher of polish origin who participated in the research was a 26 years-old female teaching at the university of silesia in katowice, who graduated the same english-chinese translation program that the research participants. she has participated in numerous chinese teaching conferences in poland and abroad, she is now pursuing her phd in chinese language acquisikatarzyna bańka34 tion and has participated in one-year scholarship in china (nanjing university) were she studied chinese for one year. then she participated in three hanban methodological scholarships for teachers, gaining knowledge about most efficient chinese teaching and learning techniques. despite her young age, she has already been teaching chinese for four years in various academic institutions. although chinese teachers of polish origin will never be as good as chinese native speakers, their advantage over chinese teachers is that they are fluent in polish, hence they can explain certain issues, situations, and rules to polish students in their native language, not only in terms of grammar, but also in terms of phonetics, phonology, and syntax, which allows for better understanding and comparing the rules governing the two languages. mandarin chinese gained its momentum relatively recently, as the 2008 beijing olympics attracted overseas students to study chinese, hence there is still a scarce group of wellprepared teachers across poland. teaching strategies: advantages and disadvantages table 1 presents a list of topics concerning general information about the two groups of students participating in the research, and the advantages and disadvantages that facilitated or interrupted their learning process. both systems have their advantages and disadvantages. the aim of this research is not to verify which system is more efficient, but to find means to improve and optimize polish learning system of chinese. although i have enlisted a vast list of differences, i will focus on the most significant, in my opinion, issues that need to be pointed out. table 1 chinese learning process in china and in poland – a comparative analysis chinese learning at the university of silesia in katowice, poland chinese learning at the shanghai normal university, china general – 180 hours a semester; – chinese and english study; – 20–35 students in a group; – one language family students; – poor language environment; – listening exercises only in class: teachers the only medium providing listening and speaking exercises; – scarce amount of outside sources; – scarce amount of native speakers; – 360 hours a semester; – chinese study; – 15–25 students in a group; – multinational group – multilingual group; – strong language environment; – strong listening exercise: possibility of listening to various native speakers (dialects, language manners); – numerous outside sources; – numerous native speakers; an analysis of higher education systems… 35 – lack of culture related notion outside the classroom; – only indoors activities; – no outdoors activities; – teacher-centered. – rich culture related notion in the surrounding area; – indoors activities; – outdoors activities; – learner-centered. class materials – poor accessibility of the course books; – still scarce amount of audiovisual sources. – great accessibility of the course books; – numerous audiovisual sources. class language – polish, english and chinese. – only chinese. course book – hanyu jiaocheng vol. 1 – one semester. – hanyu jiaocheng vol. 1 – half of the first semester; – hanyu jiaocheng vol. 2 – the other half. listening to the recordings – at home, usually no time during class. – at home and during class. reading dialogues – out loud during class; – at home – poor. – out loud during class; – at home – mandatory. learning vocabulary – reading out loud; – learning by means of collocations; – learning stroke order; – constant writing practice; – creating stories with characters. – reading vocabulary out loud; – learning stroke order; – learning by heart; – constant writing practice. learning grammar points – well prepared grammar points followed by numerous examples; – compared to polish – student’s mother tongue. – well prepared grammar points followed by numerous examples. memorizing characters – stroke order; – reading texts; – association memorization; – creating stories with characters. – stroke order; – reading texts; – non-intuitive memorizing. examination – homework – usually every class; – dictations – each week on each module; – end of semester exam; – grammar tests; – final exam. – homework – every class; – dictations – each week on each module; – end of semester exam; – grammar tests; – final exam. table 1 continued katarzyna bańka36 classroom activities – speaking, reading, writing, listening; – watching movies; – power point presentations. – speaking, reading, writing, listening; – singing songs; – performing dialogues: acting in front of a classroom; – watching movies; – power point presentations; – other audiovisual sources. means of learning repetition obligatory mandatory, before and after the class review lessons obligatory mandatory preview the following lesson material obligatory mandatory memorizing/learning by heart – method used from time to time; – concentration on fixed phrases and culture oriented elements. – constantly used method. communication directed – communication oriented; – dialogue like exercises. – more course book shaped conversation; – lack of individual thinking. in table 1 we can observe that the amount of chinese classes in china amounts to 360 hours a semester, whereas in poland it is only half of that time, and therefore, the pace of learning is slower and less effective. students have chinese lessons only three times a week, the rest of the time is devoted to english lessons (since it is an english-chinese translation major), whereas in china students learn chinese everyday for a reasonable amount of time. in china, the course book hanyu jiaocheng vols. 1 and 2 are nearly finished in one-year course, whereas in poland it usually takes one semester or more to finish the book, which oftentimes is due to some holidays and other occasions (holidays, festivals, organization of chinese day). another issue about learning chinese in poland is that there is a poor chinese language environment outside the classroom. students have very little outside sources and chinese speakers that would facilitate learning chinese. what is more, if they try to use the internet sources, usually the material is too advanced to comprehend, especially for level a1 and a2 students. at the beginning, the only medium between the students and chinese is the teacher. a1 and a2 students’ chinese level is too poor to use the internet to read artable 1 continued an analysis of higher education systems… 37 ticles, newspapers, or surf through chinese websites. their abilities of getting scholarships are still limited, however, it changes rapidly. in 2006, only one person at the university of silesia in katowice was awarded a scholarship to go to china. fortunately, now about five to six students receive scholarships annually and this number is still growing. apart from teaching speaking, reading, writing, and listening, there are also other elements to be taught, such as culture-oriented and history-oriented pieces of information. in poland, the disadvantage is that such activities cannot take place outdoors, in museums, tea houses, or chinese restaurants, because there are no outside sources enabling us, teachers, to make the lessons more suitable for the students, and even if there were, there is not enough time for that. audiovisual and other materials make the class more interesting, however, they are only few such sources facilitating the learning process found in poland. what is more, in poland there are only five places teachers can obtain course books and other teaching materials (apart from the internet), namely, five confucius institutes which are spread across poland. however, the confucius institutes usually do not provide more than just the first parts of each particular course book available in the polish language. oftentimes, there is a problem with continuing teaching the following semesters due to the lack of further parts of the books. it is important to notice that although chinese learning method is learneroriented and most of the time the class language is only chinese, which creates a great language experience, the teachers require that students learn dialogues by heart, memorizing characters and writing each word a hundred times. those kinds of activities do not facilitate how to remember better, they do not teach logical thinking, nor how to improve language skills or senses. in china, 95% of students study only for the tests, for the results, with no conversation practice that would improve communication skills. polish learning system is based on communication in order to communicate across cultures and continents. the other issue is that chinese teachers are usually very easy going so as to have good relations with their students. thus, students learning in china feel very comfortable, and the teacher usually has no power over them, thus it often happens that they disobey and freely talk in class. what is more, due to lack of strict teachers, the students are getting more and more lazy and often use the fact that they are foreigners to skip class and travel around china. they also tend to talk in english with their teachers or persuade them to avoid tests, and the teachers usually comply. but there are also strict chinese teachers following the class curriculum, however, there are very few of such teachers. in poland, however, the teachers are too strict. the syllabuses for each chinese component are very precise, thus the lecturers have to follow the rules and organize class time the way which would enable us to cover the entire material, even though some classes are cancelled due to the previously mentioned factors. katarzyna bańka38 at the shanghai normal university the teachers usually focus on learneroriented teaching method (over 80% of class time) and due to the fact that the teacher spoke basic english, she was also forced to use the direct teaching method, speaking only in chinese in class. it is a great listening exercise, however, the students of basic level of chinese used only english in class, thus there was a problem in communication, especially in terms of introducing grammar. thus, the teacher often provided some additional help in form of flashcards, power point presentations, or handouts prepared beforehand with english explanations of the class curriculum. due to the small amount of students, the teacher had time to ask each student questions, and required reading dialogues from them, etc. there was enough time in class to ask each student to perform a certain class activity. at the university of silesia in katowice, the number of students studying chinese is bigger, thus it was difficult for the teacher to ask each student. the teacher usually divided exercises so that each student could actively participate in class and read at least one short phrase or a word, practicing their pronunciation individually. the teaching method used in class most of the time was teacher-oriented learning. due to the bigger number of students in the group it was easier for the lecturer to teach students the notion provided by a particular lesson in the course book from the imperative position. the students had to listen to the lecturer, after she provided the topic of particular class, she asked students to read out the notion, for example, from the blackboard or the course book out loud. due to the lack of time, the students read the material altogether. what is a great advantage of chinese learning system in china over the polish one is the mandatory revision of previously learned texts at home, which helps students memorize the characters introduced during a lesson better, and provides the preview of the vocabulary to be discussed during the subsequent class. in this way students prepare for classes, and therefore they know what to expect, they are familiar with the vocabulary and learn grammar more easily during class, thus the pace of language learning is faster. that is why, it takes them less time to understand the material covered in classes. during the research the author has often organized open class discussion, investigating the satisfaction level amongst students in both institutions. it turned out that students studying at shanghai normal university (over 75% of them) would prefer their teachers to be more strict and demanding. however, the other 25% said that they do not mind the teachers’ easy-going character in class, because it is the students who need to put more effort after class in improving their command of chinese. furthermore, they claim that having great language environment and plenty of opportunities to practice chinese outside classroom is what they should focus on in order to have a live contact with the language and refine their chinese language skills. an analysis of higher education systems… 39 at the university of silesia in katowice, over 40% of the students participating in the survey claimed that the teachers are too demanding in class due to the syllabuses regulations, however, they understand that there is no other source of chinese language learning outside classroom environment, thus they comply with the teaching system. the rest of the students (60%) expressed their satisfaction and received very good grades and scholarships to go to china. implications the above section provides a set of advantages and disadvantages of learning chinese both in china at the shanghai normal university and in poland at the university of silesia in katowice. i do not wish to verify which system is more efficient. what is important is to summarize all the abovementioned pieces of information and find a solution to improve the process of learning chinese in poland. table 2 illustrates the most important problems and advantages occurring in the process of learning chinese in poland at the university of silesia in katowice. table 2 the conclusions of chinese learning process at the university of silesia in katowice advantages disadvantages – communication-oriented learning; – polish teachers helping to understand chinese via polish; – teaching grammar points comparing to students’ mother tongue; – creative thinking learning methods; – learning by means of collocations; – learning by means of association. – poor language environment; – lack of well prepared books for polish students studying chinese; – lack of audiovisual materials and cultural oriented data; – no outdoor activities with language learning; – poor verification of chinese teachers send by the embassy; – small number of class hours; – narrow opportunities of receiving a scholarship; – teacher-oriented learning; – no prevision of a following lesson; – too many students in the language groups. as we can see, there are still numerous issues to be addressed. in my belief, since there are very few chinese native speakers in poland, teachers should give their students more possibilities to study among chinese people and to enable katarzyna bańka40 them to go abroad on scholarships. next, although it is very time-consuming, the teachers should feel obliged to prepare additional materials apart from the ones the course books provide. while there is one topic analyzed at one time/ during a lesson, the teacher should introduce a list of complementary vocabulary and phrases that can be used around the given subject. this kind of contextual/situational teaching enables students to find themselves in more day-to-day situations. most course books are prepared for english native speakers. hanban (汉班) have issued course books of various levels translated into polish and devoted not only to kids and youth, but also to adults. however, there are only the first volumes, without subsequnet books, so after one semester the teachers will have no source to go on with the material from. what is more, those books are translated into polish with numerous mistakes. they are not prepared for teaching chinese to polish students, thus sometimes it is difficult to comprehend the material from the texts or grammar explanations. teachers usually decide to use english versions of chinese course books for american students. this makes learning chinese more complicated, because students learn chinese (which is their l3) through english (l2) while they still think in their mother tongue (polish–l1). in consequence, teachers need to spend a considerable amount of time preparing individual handouts, flash cards, audiovisual materials, and culture-oriented data, because such teaching resources are hardly accessible in poland. apart from the fact that students at the university of silesia in katowice have only half the time to study chinese when compared to the students studying at the shanghai normal university, another constraint is that the chinese language groups are too big. in my opinion, the number of students in a group should not exceed 14–15 students. due to the increasing interest in learning chinese, the number of students willing to study this language is increasing. however, the number of qualified teachers is still insufficient. thus, the groups sometimes amount to 35–40 students. university officials should either employ more chinese teachers or accept fewer students. that is partially the reason why the class is usually teacher-oriented, since there is simply not enough time to let all the students speak. and the teacher has to keep up the pace of learning in order to meet up the curriculum. all in all, despite the differences between the chinese learning program in poland and in china, and different teaching methods, both of them bring good results and the best students become very successful at work. polish learning system of chinese at the university of silesia in katowice is still under construction, thus i believe, despite there is still much work ahead, we will succeed in creating an impeccable chinese learning system. an analysis of higher education systems… 41 research material reference yang jizhou. (2007). hanyu jiaocheng di yi ce shang. beijing language and culture university press, beijing. yang jizhou. (2007). hanyu jiaocheng di yi ce xia. beijing language and culture university press, beijing. yu chun chi. (2010). międzynarodowy program nauki języka chińskiego. beijing language teaching and research press. beijing. xu lin (ed.). (2010). międzynarodowy program nauki języka chińskiego. beijing. foreign language teaching and research press. references babicz, j. (2012). hity studiów na śląsku: filologie, architektura i logistyka. dziennik zachodni. accessed 10.12.2016. bańka, k. (2013). learning chinese: evaluation of teaching methods and the importance of culture-oriented background in the learning process. frontiers of language and teaching, 4, 134–142. barciak, a. (ed.). (2008). mądrość zbudowała sobie dom…. in. przemiany, 6(18), 220–226. chłopek, z. (2011). nabywanie języków trzecich i kolejnych oraz wielojęzyczność. wrocław: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu wrocławskiego. kaźmierczak, ł. (2003). trzy procent odmienności. przewodnik katolicki. accessed 10.12.2016. retrieved from www.opoka.pl wu zhongwei (ed.). (2010). współczesny język chiński (trans. k. achinger). beijing: sinolingua press. yue, anne o. (2003). chinese dialects: grammar. in thurgood, graham; & lapolla, randy j. (eds.), the sino-tibetan languages (pp. 84–125). routledge press. new york. shang-jin wei. (1995). the open door policy and china’s rapid growth: evidence from city-level data. growth theories in light of the east asian experience, 4, 73–104. katarzyna bańka die untersuchung von lehrsystemen der chinesischen sprache als einer fremdsprache in polen und in china z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g heutzutage beobachtet man die sich verändernden trends im fremdsprachenunterricht. immer mehr lehranstalten in polen, sowohl öffentliche als auch private, bieten verschiedene programme mit solchen orientalischen sprachen, wie chinesisch an und schaffen beispielsweise übersetzungsprogramme mit chinesischer sprache. katarzyna bańka42 der zweck des vorliegenden beitrags ist eine vergleichsanalyse des lehrsystems und des lernprozesses von der chinesischen sprache in polen an der schlesischen universität und in china an shanghai normal university. in dem ersten teil werden die lehrsysteme und die lernprozesse vom chinesischen an den beiden hochschulen miteinander verglichen. die für den beitrag durchgeführten forschungen basierten auf mehrjähriger erfahrung der verfasserin im lehren und lernen des chinesischen in den beiden hier zu untersuchten institutionen. zum schluss zeichnet sie ideen nach, welche zur besseren ausbildung im bereich der chinesischen sprache in den ländern beitragen könnten, in denen chinesisch keine muttersprache ist. an analysis of higher education systems… 43 a p p e n d i x module syllabus: chinese language course 1 – chinese: module 1 1. general information module co-ordinator academic year 2013/2014 semester(s) 1. mode of studies full-time final module grade class work completion (“zaliczenie”): the weighted average grade of individual module components. the grade for each of the five components is the weighted average of the grades for classroom attendance (20%), mid-semester tests (written and oral tests as well as dictations) (20%) and the final test (50%) additional information the module consists of five components: conversation, listening, reading, comprehension, and writing. a positive assessment of each of the five components is required to obtain a positive grade for classwork completion. 2. course description name classes teaching staff group(s) 1s1, 1s2 content outline 1. conversation (30 hours): – sounds of chinese: practice in recognition and pronunciation; – tones of chinese: practice in recognition and pronunciation; – basic grammar of the chinese language; – basic everyday phrases in the chinese language; – development of basic level speaking skills; – consolidation and practice of vocabulary through communicative spoken activities; – consolidation and practice of grammatical structures through communicative spoken activities. 2. listening (30 hours): – presentation of the pinyin romanization; – tones of chinese: description, recognition, notation, tonal “sandhi” rules; – dictation of words and tones; – development of basic level listening skills; – consolidation of the textbook-based vocabulary. 3. reading (30 hours): – practice in recognition and pronunciation of chinese characters; – learning to read chinese characters; – development of basic level reading comprehension skills; – textbook-based vocabulary building. 4. comprehension (60 hours): – textbook-based presentation and practice of words and phrases; – textbook-based presentation and practice of grammatical structures. 5. writing (30 hours): – rules for writing chinese characters; – characters radicals adequate for the recognition of approximately 1000 words; – development of basic literacy in chinese characters. katarzyna bańka44 teaching methods as in the module description contact hours 180 hours student workload 100 hours student’s self study description – doing homework; – preparing for the tests; – preparing for the dictations. class organization according to the class schedule: conversation: 15 × 2 hours listening: 15 × 2 hours reading 15 × 2 hours comprehension: 30 × 2 hours writing: 15 × 2 hours required course materials conversation: ma jianfei. 2007. hanyu kouyu sucheng: rumen pian (shang) (short term spoken chinese: threshold, vol. 1). 《汉语口语速成: 入门篇》（上）. beijing language and culture university press. listening: hu bo, yang xuemei. 2009. hanyu tingli jiaocheng (chinese listening course) (book 1 revised). 《汉语听力教程》（修订本, 第一册）. beijing language and culture university press. /lekcje 1 – 15/ reading: peng zhiping. 2004. hanyu yuedu jiaocheng (chinese reading course) (level 1, book 1). 《一年级汉语阅读教程（第一册）》. beijing language and culture university press. comprehension: yang jizhou. 2006. hanyu jiaocheng (chinese course) (book 1, part 1 revised). 《汉语教程》（修订本, 第一册, 上）. beijing language and culture university press. writing: textbooks used in other chinese module components supplementary materials additional basic level textbooks and materials, expanding students’ knowledge of vocabulary, containing texts and/or dialogues as well as grammar instructions in chinese. class web page www supplementary data 3. assessment methods name class attendance examiner(s) group(s) 1s1, 1s2 areas of assessment class attendance assessment criteria a student who does not have unjustified absences receives a very good grade. for each absence half a grade is subtracted from the total grade for attendance. grading policies attendance is checked during each class. an analysis of higher education systems… 45 additional information name active participation in classes examiner(s) group(s) 1s1, 1s2 areas of assessment a student is expected to: – do the assigned homework; – be prepared for class; – correctly perform appointed tasks; – correctly answer the teacher’s questions; – be active during classes exhibiting knowledge and skills s/he has acquired while attempting to raise the level of his or her linguistic competence through self-study activities. assessment criteria a student receives a positive grade if s/he meets the standards in the required areas of assessment. grading policies continuous assessment during classes based on the teacher’s interaction with the students and the ongoing monitoring of students’ progress. additional information name written and oral tests examiner(s) group(s) 1s1, 1s2 areas of assessment basic level language competence in the four skills (listening, speaking, writing and reading). mastery of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary taught during classes. ability to write down and read out chinese characters taught during classes. ability to use chinese language dictionaries. assessment criteria in order to pass the tests the student needs to obtain at least 65% of the maximum score. grading policies during almost each class a short test is administered on the basis of currently studied material. during the last class of the semester a longer test is administered testing the knowledge and skills acquired during the entire semester. additional information name dictations examiner(s) group(s) 1s1, 1s2 areas of assessment ability to write down chinese characters taught during classes (c. 200 basic level characters) at the pace of 15-18 characters per minute. ability to recognize and indicate the tones of chinese. 46 assessment criteria in order to pass a dictation the student needs to obtain at least 65% of the maximum score. grading policies during almost each class a short dictation takes place based on the currently studied material. additional information style guide for the authors authors are requested to submit manuscripts formatted in apa style (american psychological association, 6th ed.). all manuscripts must include an abstract in english (maximum of 250 words). after the abstract please provide keywords. main text: 12 times new roman long citations (more than 40 words): 10 times new roman, indent by 1 tab either side, one empty line above and below, no quotation marks. 1.5 spacing apa headings level format 1 centered, boldface, uppercase and lowercase heading 2 left-aligned, boldface, uppercase and lowercase heading 3 indented, boldface, lowercase heading with a period. begin body text after the period. 4 indented, boldface, italicized, lowercase heading with a period. begin body text after the period. 5 indented, italicized, lowercase heading with a period. begin body text after the period. in-text citations (examples): author’s name and date in brackets: the experience of critical incidents and effective ref lection upon them allows teachers to control their classroom actions more consciously and create critical events (ce’s), which were described earlier as intended, planned and controlled (woods, 1993). woods (1993) believes that critical events are structured and occur in well-defined staged of conceptualization . . . two authors: (ballantyne & packer, 1995) as ballantyne and packer (1995) demonstrate … three authors: (barker, callahan, & ferreira, 2009) subsequent use: (barker et al., 2009) six authors or more: lorenz et al. (1998) argued… (lorenz et al., 1998) authors whose last names are the same: (d. francis, 1985; h. francis, 2004) style guide for the authors204 online sources (unpaginated), provide paragraph or section title instead: (peterson & clark, 1978, para. 4) (moss, springer, & dehr, 2008, discussion section, para. 1) no author, provide shortened title: (“primary teachers talking,” 2007) (reflective practice, 2005, pp. 12−25) secondary citations: smith (as cited in maxx & meyer, 2000) noted that “there is . . . .” citation within citation: as it has been noted that “there is no relevance . . . (smith, 2005)” (maxx & meyer, 2000, p. 129). & vs. and: as smithson and stones (1999) demonstrated. . . . . . as has been shown (smithson & stones, 1999) . . . references selected examples (for more consult apa manual): book, one author: goldberg, a. (2006). constructions at work. oxford: oxford university press. book, two authors and more: jarvis, s., & pavlenko, a. (2008). crosslinguistic influence in language cognition. london: routledge. translated book: freud, s. (1960). jokes and their relation to the unconscious. (j. strachey, trans.). london, england: routledge & k. paul. (original work published 1905). edited book: flowerdew, j., brock, m., & hsia, s. (eds.). (1992). second language teacher education. hong kong: city polytechnic of hong kong. chapter in an edited book: goldberg, a., & casenhiser, d. (2008). construction learning and second language acquisition. in robinson, p., & ellis, n. c. (eds.), handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition (pp. 197–215). new york and london: routledge. article in a journal: hammarberg, b. (2010). the languages of the multilingual. some conceptual and terminological issues. international review of applied linguistics in language teaching, 48, 91–104. article online: tully, k., & bolshakov, v. y. (2010). emotional enhancement of memory: how norepinephrine enables synaptic plasticity. molecular brain, 13 may. retrieved from: http://www.molecularbrain.com/content/ style guide for the authors 205 bakker, a. b., hakanen, j. j., demerouti, e., & xanthopoulou, d. (2007). job resources boost work engagement, particularly when job demands are high. journal of educational psychology, 99(2), 274–284. doi: 10.1037/0022-0663.99.2.274 magazines online: miller, g. (2014, september 4). cinematic cuts exploit how your brain edits what you see. wired. retrieved from: http://wired.com/ smith, a. (2007, june 12). dying languages. the western star. retrieved from: http://www. thewesternstar.com/ blog: palmer, p. (2001). now i become myself. yes magazine, blog post, 31 may. retrieved from: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/working-for-life/now-i-become-myself e-books: bolande, v. u. (1981). on the psychology of humor. retrieved from: http://www.uf lib.uf l.edu /ufdc/ufdc.aspx?n=palmm&c=psa1&m=hd2j&i=45367 conference proceedings: souleles, n., & pillar, c. (eds.). (2014). proceedings from the first international conference on the use of ipads in higher education. paphos: cyprus university of technology. doctoral dissertation: churchwell, j. (2005). becoming an academic: factors that inf luence a graduate student’s identity commitment (doctoral dissertation). university of michigan, ann arbor, mi. reachel, l. h. (2001). native languages and toponyms: origins, meaning, and use (doctoral dissertation). available from proquest dissertation and theses database. (document id 1964749161). preface we resolved to start publishing theory and practice of second language acquisition despite the fact that poland has a strong position in second language acquisition research and that quite a large number of monographic publications in this area come out every year—often published abroad with multilingual matters or springer, among others. however, there was no academic researchoriented journal devoted to the theory and practice of sla which would be widely available to polish academia. following the publication of the first issue, however, it became clear that its scope would attract submissions from not only polish scholars but also international academics. thus far, tapsla has featured articles by such renowned contributors as david singleton, larissa aronin, jean-marc dewaele—and many other scholars representing innovative movements in sla research worldwide. the journal has become a venue for the exchange of ideas for academics at home and abroad, focusing on often unresearched issues and fairly new developments in sla studies. the editorial board consists of both polish and foreign experts in the area, and represents the wide range of research interests of its members. all updated information on the journal is available on the university of silesia in katowice, institute of english webpage at www.ija.us.edu.pl (via a special link) and the journal webpage at http://www.journal.us.edu.pl/index.php/tapsla. the present issue opens with an article by ewa piechurska-kuciel “the role of social support systems in adolescent foreign language learning,” the main focus of which is on the role family, teachers, and peers play in the academic success of adolescent fl learners. research on social support, though not very extensive, unanimously demonstrates that social support influences learners’ resilience to the stress generated by fl learning situations. it contributes to the adolescent’s development of self-esteem, autonomy, and building social competence, among many other effects. the article overviews theoretical assumptions and selected studies on social support. also, anna bąk-średnicka, 6 preface in her text “pre-service teachers’ attitudes related to family involvement in light of their school placement experience,” focuses on social support issues in relation to partnership between teachers and parents. the author reports on an empirical study conducted among pre-service efl teachers on the effects of their collaboration with their learners’ parents and its visible effectiveness and impact on their learners’ success. the author stresses that despite the ministerial guidance for teacher training programmes, hardly any time is devoted to developing trainees’ awareness of this issue, thus more emphasis should be put on it in teacher training curricula. the main concern of the article by małgorzata szupica-pyrzanowska and katarzyna malesa, entitled “are they part of the equation? – foreign language teachers vs. language attrition. a diagnostic study,” touches upon the problem of language competence deterioration in the case of foreign language teachers. the pilot study carried out in a group of ma students working as primary school efl teachers revealed the plethora of factors contributing to the stagnation and even regression in their language competences. the authors, aware of the pilot nature of their study, suggest ways of researching the issue more thoroughly. the next article by ewa cieślicka and arkadiusz rojczyk, “self-reported vs. self-rated pronunciation in a non-native language,” also focuses on non-native fl competence and, more precisely, on a non-native accent. in their empirical study, the authors observed that there were no visible differences between the way advanced students of english assessed their accent in english in general and, later on, how they rated it on the basis of their own recorded performance. the authors conclude that one’s selfimage as expressed by the subjects of the study is a fairly stable characteristic. konrad szcześniak, in his article “benefits of l1–l3 similarities. the case of the dative case,” discusses the influence of structural similarities between the polish (l1) of a speaker and portuguese (his/her l3). the author observes that the students are aware of similarities between l1 polish and l3 portuguese dative constructions and, indeed, positive transfer does occur in their performance. at the same time, it is not as frequent and widespread as might have been expected due to existing similarities in the dative case constructions of these two languages. the author discusses the reasons of this phenomenon. the present issue of the journal inaugurates a new reviews section with two recommendations. the first book review included is by larissa aronin. she fully endorses the value of kurt braunmüller and christoph gabriel’s (2012) edited volume multilingual individuals and multilingual societies published by john benjamins, which is an interesting collection of twenty-five articles on multilingualism as described from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, and recommends it as a valuable source for researchers in the field of multilingualism. the other book review included in this issue is by danuta gabryś-barker. it presents a very recent volume by anna mystkowskawiertelak and mirosław pawlak (2017), entitled willingness to communicate 7preface in instructed second language acquisition. combining a macroand microperspective and published by multilingual matters. this monographic volume focuses on individual learner differences, contextual factors, and their impact on fl learners’ willingness to communicate. it is an important publication for both sla researchers and fl classroom practitioners. we hope that this issue of the journal will be of interest to researchers working in the field of second language acquisition. we would like to invite polish and foreign academics to share their scholarly research with us by submitting their work to the theory and practice of second language acquisition journal, published by the prestigious polish academic publisher, wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego (university of silesia press). danuta gabryś-barker adam wojtaszek reviews theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 7 (2), 2021, pp. 179–185 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.8456 timothy reagan, linguistic legitimacy and social justice orono, me: palgrave macmillan (springer nature), 2019 isbn 978-3-030-10966-0, 434 pages can one language be more valuable than others? how does speaking one variety of a language translate into one’s social position? can a more just world be created if we abandon certain deep-seated preconceptions about language norms? does our teaching of some versions of a language contribute to social inequality? such stimulating questions arise after reading the blurbs and introductory parts of timothy reagan’s linguistic legitimacy and social justice (2019, palgrave macmillan). the book, which consists of eleven chapters, 66 pages of bibliography and an index, is a well-researched and broad-ranging discussion of several current themes of critical language pedagogy—an approach to social justice through the recognition of (de)legitimizing ideologies pervading some language norms/uses and, by extension, some language education practices. chapter one, language and other myths: “die grenzen meiner sprache bedeuten die grenzen meiner welt” (pp. 1–28) is a fitting introduction to some of the paradoxes plighting our perceptions of language. while theorists of language tell us that all languages are fundamentally equal (logical, exhaustive, and comprehensive), much of applied scholarship indicates the opposite, with continual debates over normativity, standardization, the status of languages visà-vis dialects, and (un)welcome language change. and yet linguistic research is not neutral: it has had profound implications for language teaching and learning, language policy, and language rights. another paradox is related to the mythology of “standardization” which hides the infinite variability of language uses: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en http:// https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.8456 katarzyna molek-kozakowska180 person by person, village by village, generation by generation, and the inevitable fuzziness in the description of actual language practice (unlike the idealized language norm). if language such as english is taught in the fl classroom, only one version of the language’s lexico-grammar is reified and fixed as a knowable subject. the correct, appropriate and, inevitably, “native-like” forms are given priority, prestige, and status, while other forms are dismissed as “wrong” production or “insufficient” proficiency. this, for reagan, is a manifestation of an ideology of language legitimacy: a form of dominance resulting from an assumption of language “ownership” by certain groups of speakers. interestingly, this ideology is still persistent in the world in which native speakers of english are outnumbered 3 to 1 by non-native english speakers! chapter two, conceptualizing the ideology of linguistic legitimacy: “primitive people have primitive languages and other nonsense” (pp. 29–76) is a sociological polemic with traditional linguistic theorizing. having established that linguistic legitimacy is a fairly subjective, yet collectively shared, way of judging that some languages are inherently superior/inferior to others, reagan challenges our common negative perceptions of (1) non-western/ european languages (which might be morphologically/syntactically much more complex than english, spanish or russian), (2) languages without a long written literary tradition (which nevertheless might have a richer oral tradition), and (3) languages without established standard orthography. borrowing the concept of “linguistic capital” from bourdieu and that of “ideology” (processes of naturalization of the social construction of reality) from fairclough, reagan discusses a set of social power relations that underpin the notions of linguistic legitimacy. while any variety of a language is legitimate in a given setting, and while formal properties of a language are not in any way correlated with cognitive or cultural “primitiveness” of any community, institutions, such as national language academies, media and particularly schools (with their middleclass bias) tend to establish prescriptivist rules and legitimize certain forms as “pure,” “proper,” or “right.” the author gives many examples of language varieties that are wrongly (de)legitimized based on their properties of supposedly “accent-less” elocution, the size of their lexicon, their assumed “logic” of their grammar, or the absence of certain grammatical categories. he concludes that all these are only socially constructed differences in prestige introduced by elite speakers with access to institutional power. he also indicates how dangerous it is in the school context for educators to form beliefs about a student’s abilities, intelligence, and potential on the basis of the language variety spoken by him or her, or how destructive it is for children’s identity to force them to adopt a linguistic variety spoken by a dominant community (whereas no-one would dare to force anyone to change their religion, gender or race to a more “legitimate” one). timothy reagan, linguistic legitimacy and social justice… 181 african american english, race and language: “you don’t believe fat meat is greasy” (chapter three, pp. 77–110) discusses one of the most divisive issues in american sociolinguistics, namely the status of african american english (aae), and its implications for classroom teaching. after a systematic overview of aae’s history, evolution and structures, the author is reporting on studies devoted to how “black english” is perceived in the society and how some of these views and stereotypes, when voiced by elite opinion-makers and reproduced in internet-based jokes, contribute to the further delegitimation of this and other dialects of american english. despite common prejudices, aae “is not slang, bad english, or illogical, nor are its speakers lazy, ignorant, sloppy, or uneducated” (p. 80). however, some scholars demonstrate that a substantial number of african american failures at school can be directly attributed to their not being sufficiently “bidialectal” to seamlessly switch from their identity-marking aae syntax and accent to “good” standard american english expected by teachers. on the other extreme, artificially elevating aae to the level of “a language of instruction” will not empower racial minorities and obliterate racist stereotypes in the society. chapter four, spanglish in the united states: “we speak spanglish to the dogs, to the grandchildren, to the kids” (pp. 111–134) discusses the history, demographics, formal variability, and functional applications of hybrid varieties of english and spanish as used by latino communities in the us. either denounced by critics and purists or celebrated as an example of cultural creativity and language mixing, spanglish has been subject to a variety of analyses from the perspective of “languages in contact.” in contrast to popular beliefs, spanglish is not just an outcome of bilingual code-switching, but rather a specific lexico-grammatical repertoire that borrows systematically from both languages and evolves progressively. regularized phonological patterns, productive lexical derivations alongside fossilized remnants, elimination of redundant categories (copula, gender), and back-translations are some of the common features documented among spanglish speakers. these findings are sometimes used to justify valorization of vernacular spanglish as a classroom resource to foster critical language awareness and critical literacies revolving around counter-hegemonic discursive practices in education. sign language and the deaf-world: “listening without hearing” (chapter five, pp. 135–174) reports on controversies and stereotypes around the status of the american sign language (asl). initially regarded as a set of gestures and facial expressions with “poor grammar,” asl was subjected to systematic linguistic description by william stokoe that proved that it was as full, complete, and sophisticated as any human language. despite the fact that linguists put premium on natural (spoken) rather than artificial (sign) languages in their theoretical and applied research, it is hard not to acknowledge sign languages as “real” languages with their varieties (british and american katarzyna molek-kozakowska182 sl are different), dialects (signing among deaf people differs from signing for hearing people), shared artistic or cultural artefacts, or cultural identities (as a community of the deaf). the main problem is, however, that manual and visual signs are supposed to correspond to spoken english, which is treated as a legitimate mode, as it imparts on the deaf their status of “literate” people. if one accepts the view of deafness as a deficit (as many do) and of the deaf as inherently inferior in relation to the hearing, one is likely to view their condition as pathological in need of a technological or medical intervention. this belief diminishes the role of the sign language as an educational and communicative resource in its own right, particularly when it comes to studying asl as a “deserving” foreign language. however, the conceptual representations within the deaf-world available through asl movements and signing spaces can be radically different from the cognitive bases of spoken language(s) and should not be treated as illegitimate. for reagan, the merits of bilingual or inclusive education for the deaf can only be achieved if the “tyranny” of the “hearing perspective” is questioned in schools and tertiary education. chapter six on yiddish, the mame-loshn: “mensch tracht, gott lacht” (pp. 175–204) traces the history and status of the language of ashkenazi jews. due to the holocaust, the language policies in eastern european countries, and the state of israel’s reviving of hebrew, the population of yiddish speakers has shrunk dramatically. the existence of diasporic, often ghettoized, judaism and the subsequent evolution of various semitic language varieties is well documented in religious studies of arameic and hebrew liturgical and ritual lexicons. yiddish is said to have developed most robustly in medieval germany (most of its words stem from middle german) and poland of the 1250s–1500s, with a continued growth in russia, moldova, or ukraine, where jewish communities were forced to assimilate and introduce slavic elements to their language. in modern times, unlike hebrew, which is associated with religion and learned male-dominated scholarship, yiddish is stigmatized as a vernacular, feminine, secularized mother-tongue (mame-loshn), or criticized as broken german––the jargon. although it was hebrew that was elevated to the status of the official language of israel through a political decision, yiddish is still spoken in some settings (also in the us) and it has a long and celebrated literary tradition, as well as a prolific presence in american language (borrowings) and culture. although yiddish in not predicted to disappear soon (with estimated 1.5 million speakers), it will depend on the social movements and cultural initiatives that aim to help pass it on to the next generations. chapter seven dwells on created and constructed languages: “i can speak esperanto like a native” (pp. 205–242), and includes a presentation of formal languages of philosophy, logic (g. leibniz’s lingua generalis) or computer science, fictional languages (j. r. r. tolkien’s sindarin, g. orwell’s newspeak), ritual/mystical languages (lingua ignota), contact languages (papua’s tok pisin) timothy reagan, linguistic legitimacy and social justice… 183 or artificial languages (volapük, neo, lingwa de planeta). the last 150 years saw a growing interest in the construction and use of international auxiliary languages, of which only esperanto became a successful planned a posteriori language spoken worldwide (by a million speakers with different degrees of fluency) under the auspices of international and local organizations. even though it is feared for its expansionism, or derided by critics of artificial codes, the author highlights the language’s literary and cultural contribution to humanity’s heritage. however, esperantists’ claim that the learning of the language enhances one’s abilities for language learning in general has yet to be confirmed. afrikaans, language of oppression to language of freedom: “dit is ons erns” (chapter eight, pp. 243–283) unveils the controversies surrounding the rise of afrikaans, first as a language of nationalism, or independent state of south africa, which, then turned to be emblematic of the discriminatory practices of apartheid introduced by powerful minority of afrikaan-speakers. now with declining numbers of speakers and loss of its prestige, afrikaans is nevertheless an interesting historical case of a minority dialect infused with dutch and english colonial lexicons elevated to the highest levels of politics, culture, education, and literature in a competitive atmosphere of a multiracial and multilingual society (sa has twelve official languages). the chapter points to the possible consequences of any “language policy” that functions as a strategy of introducing the primacy of one language over others for example, if made a medium of instruction in schools. the afrikaans case testifies to the fact that top-down technicist solutions to overcome social divisions through “linguistic engineering” are likely to encounter resistance and might even breed violence. to avoid this, reagan advocates wide-ranging consultations and appropriate provisions guaranteeing “language rights,” otherwise the imposed language will always be viewed as a tool of oppression and, sooner or later, it will lose its status, as is the case with afrikaans in sa’s higher education, which is now embracing english to the detriment of local languages. the problem signaled above is extensively discussed in chapter nine, why language endangerment and language death matter: “took away our native tongue … and taught their english to our young” (pp. 285–314) with reference to (1) causes and historical examples of languages’ endangerment and death, (2) efforts put to language cataloguing and revitalizing, as well as (3) ethical arguments if and why (mostly indigenous) engendered languages should be saved from extinction. finally, thought is given to examples of educational systems and institutionalized language policies which may become either threats or rescues to moribund languages. educational milieus that enforce language loss through (in)voluntary language switching and delegitimization of indigenous dialects are a contemporary cause of language death (cf. the history of us government’s elimination of “problematic” native minorities through boarding schools). in multilingual communities, economic, institutional, and social incenkatarzyna molek-kozakowska184 tives to use the dominant language only drive the process of loss of (vernacular) language varieties. these varieties, however, encapsulate cultural and pragmatic values, as well as scholarly data that hold the keys to the better understanding of human history, ecology or cognition. unfortunately, as the author reminds us, most attempts at language revitalization (even in the developed countries, as is the case with maori and hawai’ian) have been rather unsuccessful. chapter ten, foreign language education in the us: “but french isn’t a real class!” (pp. 315–352) tackles a thorny issue of how foreign language teaching and learning (often disparaged because only low levels of proficiency tend to be achieved) allows the ideology of language legitimacy to operate. the restricted number of languages on offer (spanish, french, german, chinese), the limited resources for teachers, and the lower status of foreign languages in the curriculum (unlike stem and english literacy) translate into disregard for this type of education. in addition, attitudes based on xenophobic stereotypes cause further delegitimation of language learning and reproduction of monolingualism and the hegemony of english despite recent investments in specialist language programs, appreciation of “exotic” languages, and recognition of heritage languages. even multicultural and globally-oriented college programs in the us that take pride in offering communicative skills and minority recognition pay little attention to language diversity (except perhaps immersion courses). for reagan, the socio-political dominance of english and the cultural imperialist spirit has to be first acknowledged in the context of american education to stop these trends. the final chapter, linguistic legitimacy, language rights and social justice: “no one is free when others are oppressed” (pp. 353–366) considers the other key notion of the book—social justice. reagan makes a strong case for addressing the attitudes and beliefs about the role of language in the construction of identity and about the importance of upholding “language rights” of disempowered communities. he sees the need to confront the fact that education is of inherently political nature (p. 361) and that the adoption of the ideology of linguistic legitimacy ultimately influences student-teacher communication, assessment practices and the design of formal curricula (let alone the replication of hegemonic values through “hidden curricula”). he notes that even democratic societies, such as the us, have educational systems that are “supportive of oppressive practices” (p. 360) that compromise the language rights of a substantial number of minority students (here understood not only in terms of ethnicity or race, but also class and gender). this book carries a thought-provoking argument for putting language and social justice into a common focus based on a broad range of examples from various societies and cultures, including the us, south africa or israel. however, the book is heavily focused on the problems currently experienced in the us and does not acknowledge the linguistic policies championed by timothy reagan, linguistic legitimacy and social justice… 185 some multilingual and multicultural (european) societies. given its concern with critical pedagogy, it is surprising to find little in-depth discussion of the hegemony of english as a lingua franca (for example in some sectors of the economy, academia, and society) and the rise of world englishes movement. nevertheless, it may provide a consciousness-raising experience for readers interested in the current developments within critical pedagogy. it may be of value to language scholars and applied linguists, education policy advisors and teacher trainers, as well as junior researchers and students of sociolinguistics interested in the issue of linguistic legitimacy. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9455-7384 katarzyna molek-kozakowska university of opole sarah mercer and marion williams, multiple perspectives on the self in the sla. bristol: multilingual matters, 2014, isbn 978-1-78309-134-8, 188 pages the book edited by sarah mercer and marion williams entitled multiple perspectives on the self in sla provides an ample and inclusive image of the ‘self’ in second language acquisition. the authors assume that such an image can be effectively created by investigating and combining insights from diverse perspectives. this manuscript successfully provides the readers with a meticulous overview of ways in which the self can be conceptualized in diverse sla frameworks. in the introduction to their book williams and mercer (p. 1) write that “in the recent years, the key role of the self in second language acquisition (sla) has increasingly been gaining recognition from sla writers, and there has been a dramatic increase of research on this topic.” a similar opinion has been presented by jane arnold, who, in her recommendation of the book, wrote: “the self has become an increasingly important focus for many areas; it is being highlighted in psychology, philosophy, neurobiology and very prominently, in research on language acquisition.” however, this increasing popularity of the concept of self has brought some confusion resulting from the variety of existing definitions and overlapping terms. in view of that, the authors of multiple perspectives on the self in sla decided to assemble a collection of perspectives and to blend them into a significant amalgamate of concepts and viewpoints on the self. almost two hundred pages of this volume encompass twelve well written, separate chapters, each of which authored by a distinguished scholar. in the first chapter, sarah mercer and marion williams succinctly present their reasons for compiling the book as well as write about the potential readers and the book organization. according to the authors, ten chapters focus on differtheory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 6 (1), 2020, pp. 185–188 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.8083 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en marek derenowski186 ent perspectives of the self whereas the intention of the introductory chapter is to set the scene for further discussion and the concluding chapter aims at putting all those perspectives together and creating a blueprint for future research. the significance of this volume is even greater due to the fact that the editors allowed the contributors to approach the concept of the self from any theoretical or empirical angle they wanted to. this diversity results in a unique compilation of more precisely defined constructs and more holistic approaches to the topic. the book continues with chapter two self-efficacy in second language acquisition, written by nicole mills, who focuses on bandura’s social cognitive theory, which implies that every person is a proactive, self-reflective, and self-regulating individual. in her work, the author successfully describes the process of self-efficacy formation by investigating a series of selected studies which clearly indicate that in order to acquire a foreign language learners need to feel competent and capable. furthermore, she states that self-efficacy beliefs of foreign language learners may be fostered through appropriate instructional choices, proper curriculum design, strategy and attribution training, as well as, instructors effectively developing students’ self-efficacy beliefs. chapter three—the dynamics of second language confidence: contact and interaction, written by canadian authors sampasivam and clement, focuses specifically on the concept of second language confidence (l2c) and how it is influenced by different types of contexts and situations. the authors provide a review of the history of development of the second language confidence and ways in which l2c can facilitate language acquisition, l2 communication, and adaptation process. a particular emphasis has been put on the role of contact with native and non-native speakers, which, according to the authors, is constantly connected with l2c. in chapter four, titled self-esteem and self-concept in foreign language learning, fernando rubio, with the use of neurogenerative model, shows how two constructs —self-concept and selfesteem—may be interrelated. the author not only provides a valuable insights into these two concepts but also introduces a new neurogenerative view of the processes of self-concept and self-esteem formation in which “individuals constantly generate new impressions of the self” (rubio, p. 41). additional significance of rubio’s work comes from the fact that it includes potential implications for traditional foreign language learning classroom practice. in the fifth chapter, identity and poststructuralist theory in sla, bonny norton takes a closer look at the poststructuralist theory and examines its helpfulness in classroom related decision making process which is supposed to support learners in discovery of their identities while using a language. the author supports her statement concerning poststructuralist theory and identity in a foreign language practice with the use of three, selected accounts from already published research. the construct of identity is also discussed in chapter sarah mercer and marion williams, multiple perspectives on the self… 187 six––dual identities perceived by bilinguals by chantal hemmi, who looks at what identity is and examines it from a number of diverse perspectives which are analyzed in relation to their significance in understanding the identities of bilinguals. the author also reports on a small-scale study on six case-studies of bilingual japanese women where she examined how these women perceived their identities and their sense of belonging in japanese society. in chapter seven—relational views on the self in sla, florentina taylor, an american researcher, investigates three main relational approaches to the study of the self that have been partially adopted in sla research. more specifically, she provides the readers with selected examples of most significant approaches to exploring the relational aspects of the self “through social interaction within and across different relational contexts in which the individual functions” (taylor, p. 92). according to the author, learners need to feel accepted for what they believe in and who they are. they also need to become more autonomous, free to self-express, and free from negative judgment. in the subsequent chapter eight—imagined and possible selves: stories we tell ourselves about ourselves—stephen ryan and kay irie explore the role of imagination in the process of becoming who we are and who we would like to be. they focus on self-image creation and projection beyond one’s actual experience and environment. according to ryan and irie, imagination is an essential and integral part of a foreign language learning process, since foreign language learners frequently express the aspiration to expand their assortment of identities (pavlenko & norton, 2007). a similar theme has been presented in chapter nine —motivational perspectives on the self in sla: a developmental view by ema ushioda, who explores developmental aspects of how motivation becomes or does not become integrated with the self as well as how the processes of integration and internalization are related to the developmental “angle in mind” (ushioda, p. 128). in chapter ten—brain and self: a neurophilosophical account—georg northoff brings a rather unfamiliar approach as he ventures into philosophical and neuroscientific contexts in order to explain the existence of the self and the role of consciousness in the process of the self creation. later, he introduces four different types of the self, the mental self, the empirical self, the phenomenal self, and the minimal self. finally, in chapter eleven—the self from complexity perspective—sarah mercer provides a more holistic perspective on the self and explains how complexity perspectives can facilitate our understanding of the self. as mercer explains, a learner’s sense of the self in relation to language learning should be viewed as highly complex and personal. therefore, its development may be difficult to predict “given the dynamic interaction of multiple internal and external processes across time and space” (mercer, p. 174). in the closing chapter, the authors take a closer look at the most important perspectives of marek derenowski188 the self presented in the preceding chapters and provide a succinct overview of definitions, research on the self, and an assortment of essential pedagogical implications for those educators who wish to become more self-reflective and self-sensitive in their everyday teaching. mercer and williams hope that this volume “has contributed another piece to the puzzle of the self in sla” (p. 184). however, the diversity of presented opinions and the difficulty of making far-reaching comparisons across different fields of study may result not in contributing another piece of the puzzle but another puzzle altogether. although the authors in the final chapter explicitly state that it was not their intention to provide clear-cut answers, a potential reader may find it slightly confusing to follow the successive chapters included in the book. all things considered, i strongly recommend reading multiple perspectives in the self in sla as it enables readers to obtain a broad, multifaceted perspective on the educational psychology and the concept of the self from renowned scholars and researchers, including richard clement, sarah mercer, stephen ryan, or ema ushioda. the book is essentially addressed to anyone with inquisitive mind, anyone who enjoys obtaining an extended view on a particular topic. furthermore, the content of the book is highly recommended for participants of postgraduate programmes, teacher trainees, teaching instructors, as well as foreign language teachers who want to develop their self-awareness. marek derenowski state university of applied sciences in konin, poland https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9615-5845 theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 7 (1), 2021, pp. 121–139 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.8228 qadri farid tayeh https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1740-627x princess alia university college/al-balqa applied university, jordan hana asaad daana https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9881-4808 princess alia university college/al-balqa applied university, jordan jordanian university students’ awareness of the different phonetic alternates of the english plural morpheme a b s t r a c t this research paper investigates the extent to which jordanian university students majoring in english are aware of the different phonetic forms or alternates of the english plural morpheme. the paper analyzes the results taken from 50 fourth-year female university students and 50 first-year female university students at princess alia university college at al-balqa applied university in amman. they were presented with randomized lists of 30 monosyllabic nonsense nouns selected to test their awareness of the various phonetic forms of the plural morpheme in english. the results showed that the fourth-year students outperformed the first-year students in producing the various phonetic productions of the plural morpheme. the groups used the same repair strategies. analogy from the mother tongue was detected in the responses of both groups. keywords: plural morpheme, phonological forms, phonetic alternates introduction the english plural regular morpheme, according to the spelling of the stem, is usually marked by the addition of either -s or -es. however, this morpheme is not always pronounced in the same way. the morpheme -s is sometimes pronounced as /s/. other times, it is pronounced as /z/. in other environments, -es is pronounced as /iz/. the fact that one morpheme has different phonetic forms is usually tackled within a branch of linguistics called morphophonolqadri farid tayeh, hana asaad daana122 ogy. this branch is concerned with the interaction that takes place between phonology and morphology. morphophonemics is defined by the routledge dictionary of language and linguistics as an intermediate level between phonology and morphology. this intermediate level describes the abstract and underlying phonological form of a morpheme that has different phonetic realizations (bussmann, 2000). hence, morphophonologically speaking, the english plural morpheme -s has only one phonological representation or, as carr (2013) refers to it, one “phonological form” (p. 115). moreover, this phonological form is subject to the application of phonological rules and is produced in three different forms according to the neighbouring sounds—namely, the preceding sounds. the fact that this mental representation of the morpheme is subject to the application of phonological rules makes of the resulting variants predictable allomorphs or allomorphic variants of the same morpheme. hence, english has one plural morpheme, -s, which has three different allomorphs: /s/ as in desks, /z/ as in bugs, and /iz/ as in churches. only one of these three phonetic forms is stored in the speaker’s mental capacity as the underlying phonological form or representation. this form is the one with the widest distribution: /s/ is pronounced immediately after voiceless sounds except sibilants; /z/ is pronounced immediately after voiced sounds (consonants and vowels) except sibilants; and /iz/ is pronounced immediately after sibilants. scrutinizing the environments in which the three allomorphs are produced, one finds that /z/ has the widest distribution compared to /s/ and /iz/. consequently, we can say that in english the plural morpheme -s has one mental representation or one phonological form, namely /z/, which is produced as /s/, /z/, and /iz/ in three different environments governed by three phonological rules (allerton, 1979). these three phonological rules, which makes their distribution complementary, are as follows: 1. /z/ → /s/ after voiceless sounds except sibilants. 2. /z/ → /z/ after voiced sounds except sibilants. 3. /z/ → /iz/ after sibilants. as we can see, the allomorphic variants of the english plural morpheme are predictable. the predictability of the distribution of these allomorphic variants is part of native speakers’ linguistic knowledge. the question raised here is whether learners of english as a foreign language develop a systematic rulebased awareness of the realizations of the english plural morpheme at any stage of the learning process. in other words, do they become morphophonemically aware of the phonetic changes that take place on the plural morpheme when it is added to the stem? jordanian university students’ awareness… 123 objectives the main goal of the current study is to investigate whether arabic-speaking learners of english as a foreign language succeed in achieving an english proficiency level which enables them to produce the allomorphic alternates of the phonological form of the english plural morpheme in the proper environment. the current study also aims at determining which of the allomorphic variants causes difficulties for those learners. therefore, this study is expected to contribute to the area of second language learners’ morphophonological awareness of the english plural morpheme. previous related studies the development of morphophonological awareness has attracted the attention of researchers in the field of the acquisition of english by monolingual children throughout the past decades (amongst many, berko, 1958; brown, 1973; cazden, 1968). studies on the acquisition of morphemes in general and the plural morpheme in particular were triggered by berko’s experiment conducted in 1958. this has been referred to as the wug test, and is cited and referred to in almost every research on the acquisition of the plural morpheme and/or other morphemes in any language. in her experiment, berko proved to adherents of structural linguistics that children apply rules to form the plural of english nouns. not only did her experiment yield evidence for the importance of the application of rules, but it also proved children’s morphophonemic awareness of the conditioned distribution of the allomorphic alternates. her subjects were able to distinguish between the three phonetic realizations of the plural morpheme -s. they were able to produce it as /s/, /z/, and/or /iz/ in different environments, even though they were exposed to nonsense words (brown, 1973). kopcke (1998) reanalyzed berko’s results and suggested that children acquire the plural allomorphic variants starting with /s/ and /z/ and ending with /iz/. d. natalicio and l. natalicio (1971) conducted a comparative research to investigate the acquisition of the english plural morpheme by english speakers and spanish speakers. they used nonsense words. they found that the two groups’ level of acquisition of the english plural morpheme was similar. they also found that both groups acquired the three english plural allomorphs in the same order. their results were in line with berko’s (1958) and kopcke’s (1998) results in that the /s/ and /z/ allomorphs were acquired first, /iz/ being acquired at a later age. qadri farid tayeh, hana asaad daana124 al-janaideh and mahadin (2015) conducted a research to investigate the acquisition of the english plural morpheme by jordanian students learning english as a foreign language. their results showed that morphophonemic awareness is important in the development of the students’ proficiency level. their results also showed that /iz/ was realized shortly after realizing /s/ and /z/. altarawneh and hajjo (2018) also investigated arabic university students’ awareness of english plural morphemes. their results showed that the arabicspeaking efl learners’ level of proficiency had a little effect on their use of the plural morphemes. they attributed the students’ errors to the differences between the english morphological system and the arabic one. research on morphophonemic awareness and the development of the three english allomorphic variants by foreign learners of english is very rare. however, except for the al-janaideh and mahadin’s (2015) study, investigating the competence of the arab learners of english in both aspects of the english inflectional plural morpheme—phonological and morphological—is also rare. it is expected that learners of a foreign language gain a level of morphophonemic development and/or awareness. even though this level of proficiency may vary, it is thought to be a general ability that learners develop a level of awareness at a particular stage of being exposed to the target language and its rules (anthony & francis, 2005; zeigler & goswami, 2005). hence, it is important to investigate the morphophonemic awareness of arab learners of english and to realize the kinds of problems or difficulties they face in order to try to find a way to facilitate the learning process for them. it is equally important to try to find ways to enhance the students’ competence. methodology subjects for the application of this study, 100 female jordanian arabic-speaking university students were tested. they were divided into two groups: 50 students were in their fourth year and 50 students were in their first year. all of them were majoring in english language and literature at princess alia university college at al-balqa applied university in amman, jordan. all the students were monolinguals whose parents were also jordanian speakers. all of the respondentswere selected randomly. jordanian university students’ awareness… 125 procedures since the purpose of this study is to test jordanians’ morphophonological awareness of the phonological conditions, which govern the distribution of the different phonetic realizations of the english plural inflectional morpheme, a list of 30 nonsense monosyllabic singular nouns was prepared for this study. these nonsense words were created in accordance with the english phonotactics, which dictates the possible combinations of sounds in english. each of the three plural allomorphs was represented by ten of the listed words. ten of the 30 nonsense nouns end in voiceless sounds except sibilants, which add the /s/ allomorph when pluralized. ten of the 30 words end in voiced sounds except sibilants and add the /z/ allomorph when pluralized. in addition, the last ten words end in sibilants and add the /iz/ allomorph when pluralized. the listed words were presented to the students in a random order so that the students would not detect any pattern. since the subjects were aware of what they were doing, being university students, there was no need to expose them to different pictures of unfamiliar objects to represent the nonsense words. accordingly, the first researcher, who was a linguist and speech therapist, read each singular item and asked the subjects to give its plural form. subjects were tested individually in the language laboratory in princess alia university college in the presence of the researchers. data were recorded by digital voice recorder and transferred to the computer as a winrar file. the researchers transcribed the recorded data after each session to avoid any misinterpretation that could have taken place due to time lag. transcribed data were saved in computer files. results the researchers analyzed and tabulated the elicited data. means and standard deviations of the total productions were calculated and a t-test was carried out to compare and contrast the subjects’ production. the following question was raised: is there any statistically significant difference at (a = 0.05) in the total production of (iz, s, z) due to the year variable? to answer this question, means and standard deviations of the total production of (iz, s, z) were used and a t-test was carried out to find out any significant differences between the production of both groups. table 1 shows the results. qadri farid tayeh, hana asaad daana126 table 1 means, standard deviations and t-test results of the firstand fourth-year students (iz, s, z) allomorphic variant year n mean std. deviation t df sig. (2-tailed) /iz/ first 50 6.08 2.671 –5.606 98 0.000 fourth 50 8.52 1.529 /s/ first 50 9.52 .614 –4.822 98 0.000 fourth 50 9.96 .198 /z/ first 50 4.40 2.807 –1.769 98 0.080 fourth 50 5.22 1.694 total first 50 20.00 5.147 –4.470 98 0.000 fourth 50 23.70 2.787 table 1 shows that there are statistically significant differences at a = 0.05 between the means of the firstand fourth-year students in the production of (iz) in favor of fourth-year students. the table also shows that there are statistically significant differences at a = 0.05 between the means of the firstand fourth-year students in the production of (s) in favor of fourth-year students. in addition, the table indicates no statistically significant differences at a = 0.05 between the means of the firstand fourth-year students in (z). finally, there are statistically significant differences at a= 0.05 between the means of the firstand fourth-year students in total in favor of fourth-year students. discussion first-year students table 2 shows the overall correct productions of the allomorphic variants of the regular plural marker in percentages as produced by first-year students. table 2 first-year students’ correct responses allomorphic variant percentage of correct responses /s/ 95.2 /z/ 42.2 /iz/ 60.8 jordanian university students’ awareness… 127 as can be inferred from table 2, the production of the allomorph /s/ almost hit the ceiling, as 95.2 per cent of the total production of the /s/ allomorph was correct. correct production of the /iz/ allomorph came next: its production scored 60.8 per cent. the /z/ allomorph scored only 42.2 per cent. table 3 shows the detailed percentages of the correct responses for each nonsense word that was used in the experiment. table 3 percentages of correct responses produced by first-year students nouns with /s/ percentage of correct responses nouns with /z/ percentage of correct responses nouns with /iz/ percentage of correct responses throp(s) 92 ferd(z) 22 flerch(iz) 42 klop(s) 100 tred(z) 18 feech(iz) 58 besk(s) 100 skug(z) 70 nuce(iz) 86 plock(s) 100 frem(z) 78 mace(iz) 72 dat(s) 100 blove(z) 70 trize(iz) 54 dight(s) 100 lin(z) 20 threez(iz) 72 kyth(s) 76 san(z) 40 fladge(iz) 40 bonth(s) 96 thill(z) 22 ladge(iz) 44 bliff(s) 100 thribe(z) 0 lish(iz) 68 groof(s) 88 stee(z) 82 frash(iz) 72 as far as the production of the /s/ allomorph is concerned, the subjects found no difficulty attaching the plural morpheme and producing it as the expected /s/ in the following words: *klop, *besk, *plock, *dat, *dight and *biff. the subjects’ correct production of these words scored 100 per cent. the word *bonth came next, scoring 96 per cent. *throp scored 92 per cent, followed by *groof, which scored 88 per cent. the production of *kyth scored the lowest percentage of the correct responses at 76 per cent. with regard to production of the /iz/ allomorph, table 3 above shows that the production of this allomorph did not go as smoothly as the production of /s/. none of the terms scored 100 per cent. the highest percentage that appeared in the production of words that would add the /iz/ allomorph was 86 per cent, scored by the word *nuce, while *mace, *threez and *frash scored 72 per cent. *lish scored 68 per cent, followed by *feech and *trize, which scored 58 per cent and 54 per cent respectively. *ladge, *flerch, and *fladge scored the lowest: the percentages of their correct production were 44 per cent, 42 per cent, and 40 per cent respectively. qadri farid tayeh, hana asaad daana128 the group of words that add the /z/ allomorph scored the lowest percentages compared to the production of /s/ and /iz/. *stee and *frem are the words with the highest percentages of correct production, as they scored 82 per cent and 78 per cent respectively. *blove and *skug came next, both scoring 70 per cent. the correct production of *san scored 40 per cent, while *thill and *ferd scored 22 per cent each. *lin and *tred scored 20 per cent and 18 per cent respectively, whereas no student achieved correct production of the plural of *thribe. as can be seen from the data analysis above, the correct production of the /z/ allomorph posed a challenge to the first-year students, even though it is confirmed that it is the mental representation or the phonological form of the english plural morpheme (carr, 2013). to put it differently, /z/ is the phonological form that is associated with the plural morpheme in the linguistic knowledge of native speakers of english. theoretically, first-year students were expected to have no difficulty producing it, especially as they had been exposed to the english language for a reasonable number of scholastic years. however, it is obvious that their competence has not fully developed yet. with regard to production of the allomorph /z/, and if the last sound of the stem is taken into consideration, no particular sound at the end of the terms can be said to have caused this production problem. this is because there is a clear discrepancy between the production of words that end in the same sound. for example, although *lin and *san both end in /n/, 80 per cent of the overall production of *lin was incorrect, while the percentage of incorrect production of *san was 60 per cent. looking at it from the perspective of natural classes does not work either. the term *frem ends in the bilabial nasal /m/; however, its incorrect production had a percentage of 22 per cent of the total production of the word. the stem with the vowel as its last segment was produced with the lowest percentage of incorrect responses (18%), whereas the stem that ends in /b/ was produced incorrectly by all. concerning the production of the allomorph /s/, stem final sounds could not yield any justification for the errors in the students’ productions. this is also because of the obvious discrepancy between the percentages scored by stems that end in the same sound. for example, although *kyth and *bonth both end in a voiceless interdental, the percentage of incorrect production of *kyth was 24 per cent, while that of *bonth was only 4 per cent. another discrepancy could be found in the incorrect production of the terms ending in the voiceless bilabial stop. incorrect production of the /s/ allomorph in *throp was 8 per cent, while *klop did not have any incorrect production. this explanation also applies to the production of the /iz/ allomorph in stems ending in sibilants. discrepancy in the production of the /iz/ allomorph was witnessed in the production of *nuce and *mace. both end in the voiceless alveolar fricative. nonetheless, the percentage of incorrect production of *nuce was 14 per cent, while that of *mace was 28 per cent. jordanian university students’ awareness… 129 students’ repair strategies it is worth noting that first-year students did not resort to deletion as a repair strategy. on the contrary, they resorted to replacement. students’ repair strategies varied and overlapped. no particular pattern in the use of the repair strategies was detected. all students’ incorrect productions of the /z/ allomorph took the form of replacing /z/ with /s/. this is illustrated in table 4. table 4 students’ replacement of the /z/ allomorph /s/ /iz/ /is/ 100% 0% 0% on the other hand, students’ incorrect productions of the /iz/ allomorph took the form of replacing /iz/ with either /z/, /s/ or, unexpectedly, /is/. replacement with the non-existent /is/ was used more frequently than /s/ and /z/. this is illustrated in table 5. table 5 students’ replacement of the /iz/ allomorph /is/ /z/ /s/ 62% 17% 21% finally, /s/ also underwent fewer instances of replacement. it was replaced by /is/, /z/ and/or /iz/. once again, replacing /s/ with the non-existing /is/ showed the highest percentage. table 6 illustrates the repair strategy for this allomorph. table 6 students’ replacement of the /s/ allomorph /is/ /z/ /iz/ 22% 18% 8% hence, first-year students did encounter problems producing the english plural allomorphic alternates. the only repair strategy that was used by the students was replacement. the replacement of the allomorphs overlapped. students’ production was not based on the phonological structure of the stem. the students’ choice of the replacement for the expected allomorph was not based on the phonological structure of the stem, either. not only did the students mix the productions of the three allomorphs of the plural, but they also created a fourth one—namely, /is/. qadri farid tayeh, hana asaad daana130 fourth-year students table 7 shows the percentages of the overall correct production of the allomorphic variants of the regular plural marker as produced by fourth-year students. table 7 fourth-year students’ correct responses allomorphic variant percentage of correct responses /s/ 99.6 /z/ 52.0 /iz/ 85.2 as can be seen from table 7, the production of the allomorph /s/ almost hit the ceiling, as 99.6 per cent of the total production of the /s/ allomorph was correct. correct production of the /iz/ allomorph came next, scoring 85.2 per cent. the /z/ allomorph scored only 52 per cent. table 8 shows the detailed percentages of correct responses for each nonsense word. table 8 percentages of correct responses produced by fourth-year students nouns with /s/ percentage of correct responses nouns with /z/ percentage of correct responses nouns with /iz/ percentage of correct responses throp(s) 100 ferd(z) 26 flerch(iz) 82 klop(s) 100 tred(z) 36 feech(iz) 90 besk(s) 100 skug(z) 84 nuce(iz) 88 plock(s) 100 frem(z) 94 mace(iz) 88 dat(s) 100 blove(z) 86 trize(iz) 80 dight(s) 100 lin(z) 20 threez(iz) 82 kyth(s) 96 san(z) 38 fladge(iz) 84 bonth(s) 100 thill(z) 32 ladge(iz) 82 bliff(s) 100 thribe(z) 4 lish(iz) 86 groof(s) 100 stee(z) 100 frash(iz) 90 as far as the production of the /s/ allomorph is concerned, it is obvious that the subjects found no difficulty producing the allomorph /s/ correctly, as its correct production scored 100 per cent for almost all the terms, except for the production of *kyth, whose correct production scored 96 per cent. jordanian university students’ awareness… 131 with regard to production of the /iz/ allomorph, table 8 shows that the subjects of this study found difficulty producing this allomorph. none of the terms scored 100 per cent. the highest percentage scored in the production of words that add the /iz/ allomorph was 90 per cent, which was scored by *feech and *frash. *mace and *nuce came next, as both words scored 88 per cent. *lish and *fladge scored 86 per cent and 84 per cent respectively, while *flerch, *threez and *ladge scored 82 per cent. *trize scored lowest among this group, with 80 per cent. table 8 also shows that the group of words that add the /z/ allomorph scored the lowest percentages of correct production compared to the percentages of production of /s/ and /iz/. all participants produced the word *stee correctly. *frem was the word with the second highest percentage of correct production, scoring 94 per cent. *blove and *skug came next: they scored 86 per cent and 84 per cent respectively. the correct production of *san scored 38 per cent, while *thill and *tred scored 36 per cent and 32 per cent respectively. *ferd scored 26 per cent and *lin scored 20 per cent. the term *thribe achieved the lowest percentage of correct responses, not exceeding 4 per cent. even though the /z/ allomorph is considered the phonological form or the mental representation of the plural morpheme in english, fourth-year subjects found real difficulty with correct production of the /z/ allomorph. as was the case with the production by the first-year students, fourth-year students’ production revealed an unexpected difficulty, especially as they had not only been exposed to the english language throughout their scholastic years, but had also been majoring in english for three and a half years. they are expected to be aware of such phonotactics of the english plural morpheme. surprisingly, their competence has not fully developed yet. the data set elicited from the fourth-year students also shows no particular phonological reason for the problems reflected in the production of the three allomorphs. there is no relationship between the last sound of the word stem and the incorrect production of the allomorph. there is a clear discrepancy between the production of the /z/ allomorph in words that end in the same sound. for example, although *ferd and *tred end in the voiced alveolar /d/, the percentage of correct responses for *ferd was 26 per cent, while *tred had a percentage of 36 per cent. such a discrepancy is also shown in the production of *lin and *san, which both end in the alveolar nasal stop /n/. the former scored 38 per cent, the latter 20 per cent. *frem, which ends in the bilabial nasal stop, scored 94 per cent. this makes it difficult to justify the production problem from the perspective of the natural classes, too. all the participants produced the stem that ends in a vowel correctly. however, only two of the participants produced the stem that ends in /b/ correctly. this explanation cannot be said to apply to the production of the /iz/ allomorph in stems ending in sibilants. the discrepancy in the production of the /iz/ allomorph can be said to be insignificant by virtue of the very close percentages of correct productions shown by word stems that end in the same phoneme. qadri farid tayeh, hana asaad daana132 stems ending in the voiceless fricative /s/ scored the same percentage of correct production (88%). stems ending in the voiceless palate-alveolar scored 90 per cent and 86 per cent. those stems, which end in the voiced affricate, scored 82 per cent and 84 per cent. overall, we can say that the discrepancy in the production of the allomorph /iz/ in stems that end in sibilants is negligible. concerning the production of the allomorph /s/, only two instances of incorrect production of /s/ were noticed in the word *kyth. the /s/ allomorph was replaced by /iz/. otherwise, the participants found no problem in the production of this allomorph. students’ repair strategies the only repair strategy this group of students resorted to in the process of producing the three allomorphic variants was replacement. a slight difference was detected between the use of the only repair strategy by the two groups. fourth-year students’ incorrect production of the /z/ allomorph took the form of replacing /z/ with /s/. this is illustrated in table 9. table 9 students’ replacement of the /z/ allomorph /s/ /iz/ /is/ 100% 0% 0% on the other hand, in the production of the /iz/ allomorph, students’ repair strategies varied and overlapped. no particular pattern in the use of the repair strategy was detected. the production of the allomorph /iz/ took the form of replacing it with either /z/, /s/ or, unexpectedly, /is/. just as for the first-year students, replacement with the non-existing /is/ was used more frequently than /s/ and /z/. this is illustrated in table 10. table 10 students’ replacement of the /iz/ allomorph /is/ /z/ /s/ 69% 16% 15% finally, /s/ also underwent only two instances of replacement. it was replaced by /iz/ in both instances. table 11 illustrates the repair strategy of this allomorph. table 11 students’ replacement of the /s/ allomorph /is/ /z/ /iz/ 0% 0% 3% jordanian university students’ awareness… 133 apparently, fourth-year students also encountered a problem with the production of the english plural allomorphic alternates. the only repair strategy that was used by the students was replacement. replacement of the allomorphs overlapped. students’ production was not based on the phonological structure of the stem. the students’ choice of replacement for the expected allomorph was not based on the phonological structure of the stem, either. not only did the students mix the production of the three allomorphs of the plural, but they also created a fourth one—namely, /is/. comparing the first-years’ results to the fourth-years’ results comparing the first-year students’ to the fourth-year students’ results makes it clear that the students’ competence has developed to a certain degree over their university years. this is obvious in the percentages shown in table 12. the fourth-year students outperformed the first-year students. table 12 total correct responses of the two groups allomorphic variant first-year students’ performance fourth-year students’ performance /s/ 95.2% 99.6% /z/ 42.2% 52.0% /iz/ 60.8% 85.2% students’ total performance 56.0% 79.0% table 12 shows a comparison between the overall performance of the firstyear students and the fourth-year students. as can be seen in the table, there is a clear development of the students’ competence regarding the different phonetic productions of the english plural morpheme. this is evident in the increased percentage of the fourth-year students’ production. however, it is clear that this competence does not yet match native speakers’ competence. it has not fully developed to the extent that their production is error-free. furthermore, table 12 shows that in their correct responses for the three allomorphic variants, both groups scored highest in favor of /s/ followed by /iz/. the allomorph /z/ saw the fewest correct occurrences in both groups’ productions. qadri farid tayeh, hana asaad daana134 although both groups encountered difficulty in producing *kyth with the proper pronunciation of the morpheme -s, the fourth-year students’ production was more accurate than the first-year students.’ since *kyth was the only term which was produced incorrectly by the fourth-year students, it is fair to overlook this incorrect production. the first-year students ran into problems with *kyth, *bonth, and *throp. the fact that the first three words end in a fricative and that /s/ is also a fricative led al-janaideh and mahadin (2015) to attribute this kind of problem to the manner of articulation of the final sound of the nonsense words. however, this interpretation fails to account for this phenomenon in this current study, because the same group’s production of *bliff scored 100 per cent. the same group erred in the production of *throp (92%); however, they scored 100 per cent in the production of *klop. the /z/ allomorph, on the other hand, scored the lowest correct responses in spite of the fact that it was expected to be produced correctly by virtue of its being the underlying phonological form of the morpheme. this is true for the production of both groups. table 13 compares the production of /z/ by both groups. table 13 the production of /z/ by both groups first-year students’ production ferds treds skugs frems bloves zins sans thills thribes stees number of incorrect productions 39 41 15 11 15 40 30 39 50 9 percentage incorrect 78 82 30 22 30 80 60 78 100 18 average incorrect 80 70 percentage correct 22 18 70 78 70 20 40 22 0 82 average correct 20 30 fourth-year students’ production ferds treds skugs frems bloves zins sans thills thribes stees number of incorrect productions 37 32 8 3 7 40 31 34 48 0 percentage incorrect 74 64 16 6 14 80 62 68 96 0 average incorrect 69 71 percentage correct 26 36 84 94 86 20 38 32 4 100 average correct 31 29 jordanian university students’ awareness… 135 we supposed that the /z/ allomorphic variant of the plural morpheme is stored mentally in the students’ capacities after being exposed to the english language formally and informally. in particular, fourth-year students were expected to excel in the production of this variant, because they were expected to have developed a competence that would enable them to realize the mental representation of the plural morpheme. however, this expectation was not realized, as can be seen from the percentages in table 13. a slight improvement can be seen in the fourth-year students’ production, but it was not up to the level of expectation. as mentioned earlier, no particular pattern was detected in the students’ responses. the stem which ends in a vowel had the highest percentage of correct production by both groups. the stem that ends in /b/, however, had the lowest percentage of correct production by both groups. among fourth-year students, 96 per cent of production was incorrect; among first-year students, all production was incorrect. stems ending in /d/ and /n/ witnessed poor production by members of both groups. the average percentages of incorrect responses by fourth-year students were 69 per cent and 71 per cent respectively for stems that end in /d/ and /n/. the first-year students performed less accurately. their average percentages of incorrect responses were 80 per cent and 70 per cent respectively. the stem ending in the bilabial nasal stop scored the second lowest percentage in the production of both groups. the fact that students in both groups tended to replace the /z/ allomorph with /s/ shows a partial agreement with al-janaideh and mahadin’s (2015) study. their study showed evidence for the attachment of /s/ instead of /z/ by members of the older group rather than the younger one. they tried to justify their subjects’ performance by stating that their subjects preferred using the voiceless /s/ after the voiced /b/ to using the voiced /z/. our data show a tendency to replace the /z/ with /s/ among members of both groups. however, this tendency decreases in the performance of the older group. this current study also showed that not only did almost all members of both groups prefer using /s/ to using /z/, but they also devoiced the last segments in *thribe, *blove, and *skug. this devoicing resulted from a kind of regressive assimilation. regressive assimilation was also attested in berko’s (1968) experiment when her subjects voiced the final /f/ in *heaf. however, our subjects preferred to devoice final segments to assimilate them with /s/ rather than voice them. the fact that our subjects tended to devoice stem final segments is consistent with peng and ann’s (2004) study. their subjects also showed a preference to devoice the stem final segment and add /s/ in the word hands, which was produced as /hants/. their explanation for this phenomenon was based on first language interference rather than english phonological rules or phonetic similarity. this first language interference justification may also apply to our subjects’ production. the reason that our students’ production of /s/ almost hit qadri farid tayeh, hana asaad daana136 the ceiling and they chose to replace /z/ with /s/ could reflect interference by the students’ mother tongue in the production of the english allomorphic variants. the arabic phoneme /s/ has only one mental representation and one phonetic production [s]. apparently, what they were producing was actually the arabic /s/ phoneme rather than the english allomorphic variants. as far as the /iz/ allomorph is concerned, students in both groups performed better when attaching /iz/ to stems ending in sibilants than when attaching /z/ to stems ending in voiced sounds. this finding of this preference contradicts findings in previous studies. berko (1958) posited that the plural allomorphic variant /iz/ was acquired last. she attributed this to the fact that children were dealing with these stems as if they were already in the plural form by virtue of the sort of sound with which each stem ended. al-janaideh and mahadin (2015) also found that this allomorph was the last to be acquired by their students. at the other extreme, the current study revealed a preference to produce /iz/ correctly rather than producing /z/. table 14 provides a comparison between both groups’ production as far as the allomorph /iz/ is concerned. table 14 the production of /iz/ by both groups first-year students’ production flerch feech nuce mace trize threeze fladge ladge lish frash number of incorrect productions 29 21 7 14 23 14 30 28 16 14 percentage incorrect 58 42 14 28 46 28 60 56 32 28 average incorrect 50 21 37 58 30 percentage correct 42 58 86 72 54 72 40 44 68 72 average correct 50 79 63 42 70 fourth-year students’ production flerch feech nuce mace trize threeze fladge ladge lish frash number of incorrect productions 9 5 6 6 10 9 8 9 7 5 percentage incorrect 18 10 12 12 20 18 16 18 14 10 average incorrect 14 12 19 17 12 percentage correct 82 90 88 88 80 82 84 82 86 90 average correct 86 88 81 83 88 jordanian university students’ awareness… 137 as can be inferred from table 14, both groups scored the highest percentage correctly producing /iz/ in stems that end in /s/ and /sh/. stems ending in /z/ came next in correct production by the first-year group, while stems ending in the voiceless palato-alveolar affricate /ch/ came next in correct production by the fourth-year students. the first-year students scored the lowest percentage of correct production of stems ending in the voiced palato-alveolar affricate / dg/ sound. the fourth-year students scored the lowest percentage of correct production of stems ending in the /z/ sound. concerning the most preferred repair strategy, both groups showed a preference for replacing /iz/ with /is/. this indicates that all members of both groups are aware of the fact that these nonsense words are singular and to pluralize them they need to be inflected. that is why none of the students left a word without the plural morpheme. however, once again, first language interference is detected in the students’ tendency to add /is/ instead of /iz/. as mentioned earlier, the arabic language has the voiceless fricative phoneme whose phonological form is /s/ and has only one phonetic realization, [s]. conclusion and recommendation this study aimed to investigate jordanian university students’ level of awareness of the morphophonemic nature of the english plural marker. partial consistency was detected between findings in this study and findings of other studies in the literature. discrepancies are reflected in the following four points. first, there is a difference in the order of acquisition of the allomorphic variants of the regular plural marker. subjects in this study tended to master the production of /s/ followed by /iz/, finally mastering /z/. in berko’s study (1958), /iz/ was acquired last. in al-janaideh and mahadin’s study (2015), /iz/ was also found to be acquired last. second, is reflected in the process of regressive assimilation. subjects in this study tended to devoice final consonants to assimilate them with /s/, whereas, in berko’s (1958) study, subjects voiced final voiceless consonants to assimilate them with /z/. however, subjects’ tendency to devoice final consonant to assimilate them with /s/ in this study is consistent with peng and ann’s (2004) study. third, which makes the results of this study differ from others, is that younger subjects in this study had a greater tendency to use /s/ instead of /z/ compared with older subjects. al-janaideh and mahadin’s (2015) older subjects, on the other hand, tended to replace /s/ with /z/ more than the younger subjects did. qadri farid tayeh, hana asaad daana138 fourth, subjects in this study tended to use /is/ in place of /iz/. this form of replacement has not been attested in any of the previous research. we hypothesize that the excessive use of /s/ instead of /z/ and /is/ instead of /iz/ resulted from first language transfer. students were applying the phonotactics of arabic to the english plural morpheme and to its various phonetic productions. in order to enhance their students’ awareness of the morphophonemic nature of the english plural morpheme, teachers are advised to draw the students’ attention to this phenomenon directly. that is to say, teachers should teach this morpheme and its phonetic variables deductively. now that the students are aware of the fact that they are learning english and are capable of realizing and understanding such complicated issues, there is no harm in pointing out the difference between the three phonetic variants of the plural morpheme explicitly and directly. steinberg and sciarini (2006) posit that older learners of a second language possess a cognitive capacity that enables them to think about, analyze and comprehend such abstract issues through explicative methods. additionally, instructors should draw their students’ attention to the phonological rules that govern the distribution of the plural morpheme in english. in addition, instructors are encouraged to use the students’ mother tongue as a facilitating factor by comparing and contrasting the status of the /s/ phoneme in both languages. it is also recommended that research be conducted and an acoustic analysis carried out to test the authentic sound of [s] produced instead of [z]. in other words, acoustic analysis will yield results that are more accurate in terms of whether or not the students devoice the [z], notwithstanding the fact that arabic speakers do not devoice final consonants in arabic. references al-janaideh, r., & mahadin, r. (2015). the acquisition of the english plural morpheme and the regular past tense morpheme by arabic-speaking students in jordan. international review of social sciences, 3(11), 512–534. allerton, d. (1979). essentials of grammatical theory: a comparison view of syntax and morphology. london: routledge and kegan paul. altarawneh, s. m., & hajjo, m. h. (2018). the acquisition of the english plural morphemes by arabic-speaking efl learners. international journal of education & literacy studies, 6(2), 34–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijels.v.6n.2p.34 anthony, j., & francis, d. (2005). development of phonological awareness. current directions in psychological science, 14(5), 255–259. https://doi.org/10.1111%2fj.0963-7214.2005.00376.x berko, j. (1958). the child’s learning of english morphology. word, 14(2–3), 150–177. (published online december, 2015). https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.1958.11659661 jordanian university students’ awareness… 139 brown, r. (1973). a first language: the early stages. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. bussmann, h. (2000). routledge dictionary of language and linguistics. london: taylor and francis. carr, p. (2013). english phonetics and phonology: an introduction. chichester, west sussex: wiley blackwell. cazden, c. (1968). the acquisition of noun and verb inf lections. child development, 39(2), 433–488. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.2307/1126956 kopcke, k.-m. (1998). the acquisition of plural marking in english and german revisited: schemata versus rules. journal of child language, 25(2), 293–319. natalicio, d., & natalicio, l. (1971). a comparative study of english pluralization by native and non-native english speakers. child development, 42(4), 1302–1306. https://doi.org/10.2307/1127817 peng, l., & ann, j. (2004). obstruent voicing and devoicing in the english of cantonese speakers from hong kong. world englishes, 23(4), 535–564. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.0083-2919. 2004.00376.x steinberg, d. d., & sciarini, n. v. (2006). an introduction to psycholinguistics. abingdon, oxon: routledge. zeigler, j., & goswami, u. (2005). reading acquisition. developmental dyslexia and skilled reading across languages: a psycholinguistic grain size theory. psychological bulletin, 131(1), 3–29. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.131.1.3 qadri farid tayeh, hana asaad daana das bewusstsein des vorhandenseins verschiedener phonetischer varianten des englischen pluralbildenden morphems unter studenten der universität von jordanien z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g im vorliegenden artikel wird einer analyse unterzogen, inwieweit die studenten der universität von jordanien in der fachrichtung anglistik das bewusstsein des vorhandenseins verschiedener phonetischer formen bzw. varianten des englischen pluralbildenden morphems haben. die analyse bezieht sich auf die ergebnisse einer umfrage, an der sich 50 studentinnen des vierten studienjahres und 50 studentinnen des ersten studienjahres an der princess alia university college, al-balqa applied university amman beteiligt haben. den teilnehmerinnen wurden listen mit je 30 zufälligen einsilbigen substantiven ohne sinn zur verfügung gestellt, um ihr bewusstsein im bereich verschiedener phonetischer formen des englischen pluralbildenden morphems zu prüfen. dabei stellte es sich heraus, dass die studentinnen des vierten studienjahres bessere ergebnisse hinsichtlich der produktion von verschiedenen phonetischen formen des englischen pluralbildenden morphems erzielten als die studentinnen des ersten studienjahres. die beiden gruppen verwendeten dieselben strategien in bezug auf die fehlerkorrektur und benutzten in ihren antworten die analogien zur muttersprache. schlüsselwörter: pluralbildendes morphem, phonologische formen, phonetische variante theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 6 (2), 2020, pp. 11–34 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.7805 sarah cox school of education, university of glasgow can an ecological, multilingual approach help us to better support reunited refugee families in scotland with language learning? a b s t r a c t this paper seeks to explore the relationship between academic literature, policy, and practice in terms of language learning within the specific context of refugee families who have recently reunited in glasgow through the british red cross family reunion integration service. the paper presents research findings from a pilot teaching study, working collaboratively with participants within their first few weeks of arriving in scotland to explore whether an ecological, multilingual approach to language learning is effective in this context. building on principles of translanguaging with participants using their full “linguistic repertoire” (garcia & kleifgen, 2010) and drawing on norton’s construct of “investment” (2013) the paper explores key themes of empowerment and identity in the classroom. the results enable us to draw conclusions regarding the balance of power in the classroom and the impact of the recognition of refugees’ own languages within the learning process. keywords: ecological approach, translanguaging, family reunion, multilingualism research context rising immigration into europe and the current shifting political climate in the uk have placed immigration and the corresponding support services for migrants at the centre of current public and political discourses. the increase in migration into europe which peaked in 2015–2016 is often referred to as the refugee crisis but is framed differently by phipps as the “crisis of hospitality” (2018). in 2015, this international humanitarian crisis saw the number of people forcibly displaced worldwide reach 65.3 million, including 4.9 million people https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4463-4107 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en sarah cox12 newly displaced from syria (scottish government, 2018, p. 14). this is the highest number of forcibly displaced people since world war two. in 2012, in response to rising immigration figures, theresa may in her position as home secretary announced plans “to create here in britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration” (the guardian, 2018) with the expressed aim of reducing immigration. the introduction of the policies of the hostile environment set the scene for much of the negative discourse concerning immigration in the years that have followed, establishing a narrative that was used very effectively by politicians within the campaign to leave the eu in the 2016 referendum. by leaving the uk, pro-brexit politicians stated the uk could ‘take back control’ of its borders and reduce immigration with this being seen as a necessary and desirable outcome. the negative discourse on immigration is also frequently linked to the debate on language learning which publicly emphasises the need for migrants to learn and speak english as a priority. the use of languages other than english is viewed with suspicion and projected as a threat to national identity with the implication that social cohesion can only be achieved if the uk shares one common language. in reality, the uk has never been a monolingual country and recent years have seen increased support for indigenous minority languages such as gaelic, scots, and welsh. however, the dominant narrative in the uk media reinforces the prioritising of english with the expressed aim that everyone should learn english. political discourses emphasise these ideas. in a report to the uk government on immigration, dame louise casey, government official, stated that the uk should set a date by which time everyone in the country “should speak english,” claiming that a “common language” would help to “heal rifts across britain” (bbc, 2018). two consecutive uk prime ministers have publicly reinforced this narrative. in 2011, david cameron, then prime minister, warned that “immigrants unable to speak english or unwilling to integrate have created a kind of discomfort and disjointedness which has disrupted communities across britain” (the guardian, 2011), the previous year, he expressed the need to reduce immigration to “tens of thousands” (the telegraph, 2010). in 2010, he also publicly stated that muslim women should learn english to help tackle extremism and that those who do not should be deported (the telegraph, 2010). david cameron is not alone in his view. in july 2019, just months before becoming prime minister, boris johnson stated “there are too often parts of our country [...] where english is not spoken by some people as their first language […] and that needs to be changed.” he continued that the most important priority for immigrants should be “to be and to feel british […] and to learn english,” claiming that “in many parts of england you don’t hear english spoken anymore” and “this is not the kind of community we want to leave to our children and grandchildren” (o’grady, 2019). these discourses can an ecological, multilingual approach help us… 13 are consistently given media attention in the uk, placing the responsibility of language learning solely with ‘the other,’ creating a sense of ‘them’ and ‘us.’ this emphasises the necessity for newcomers to adapt to the host community in terms of culture and language, promoting an assimilation style of integration. there is a stark contrast between the uk wide anti-immigrant sentiment and the way that scotland welcomes ‘new scots.’ scotland’s integration policies and language learning strategy evidence a more inclusive approach with 62% of the population of scotland voting to remain in the eu in the 2016 referendum. as immigration is a reserved matter under the control of the uk government, and the support services are devolved to scottish government, this can create tension in terms of the balance between uk policy and local support services. this is particularly relevant for glasgow, where this research took place, as it has the highest concentration of migrants in scotland. the policy context scotland has a well-established history of welcoming newcomers. as scotland’s largest city, glasgow has played a key role in this since becoming scotland’s only dispersal centre for newly arrived asylum seekers in 2000. glasgow is currently home to approximately 11% of the total dispersed asylum seeker population in the uk (migration scotland, 2019). scotland has also welcomed 2,500 syrian refugees in all 32 of its local authorities as part of the syrian resettlement program and continues to welcome refugees and asylum seekers with a range of support services for education, housing, benefits, and employment. whilst the policy context for esol delivery in england might be described as “assimilationist” (han, starkey, & green, 2010) and monolingual, scottish approaches to integration emphasise a multilingual environment and a multilateral approach to language learning (phipps, 2018) cited in (meer, peace, & hill, 2018). i will focus here on two policies which inform refugee integration and language learning in scotland: the new scots refugee integration strategy 2018–2022 and scotland’s esol strategy 2015–2020. the new scots refugee integration strategy 2018–2022 based on the “indicators of integration” framework (ager & strang, 2004), the new scots strategy provides a holistic model of refugee integration with the aim of supporting integration from day one (scottish government, 2018). the strategy sees integration as a “long-term, two-way process, involving positive change in both individuals and host communities, which leads to cohesive, diverse communities” (scottish government, 2018, p. 10). scotland sarah cox14 “values diversity, where people are able to use and share their culture, skills and experiences, as they build strong relationships and connections” (scottish government, 2018, p. 10). the policy values a collaborative approach requiring effective engagement with refugees; “for approaches to integration to succeed, they must be about working in and with local communities, as well as with refugees and asylum seekers” (scottish government, 2018, p. 11). in terms of language, the two-way integration process reflects that “refugees have the opportunity to share their language and culture with their local communities [to] promote good practice, in which the home language of refugees is used in positive ways” (scottish government, 2018, p. 54). it is recognised that language skills are not limited to improving english. the principle of sharing languages is promoted by supporting english as an additional language (eal) pupils in schools with the national strategy, learning in 2+ languages, which highlights the importance of ensuring ongoing development of pupils’ home languages, recognising that this can also help with the acquisition of a second language. although eal provision effectively supports the inclusion of home languages for children of school age, the situation for adult learners is different with no recognised strategy for how to incorporate learners’ own languages within english for speakers of other languages (esol) provision. it is important that “scotland’s linguistic diversity is promoted and as a result is valued, enabling refugees to contribute effectively to scottish society” (scottish government, convention of scottish local authorities, & scottish refugee council, 2017, p. 55) yet no specific guidance on how this relates to classroom practice is given. most current esol provision and training courses for new esol teachers remain focused on predominately monolingual teaching methods. the imbalance between opportunities for adults and children to incorporate their home languages into the learning of english also adds to the varied experiences of family members following family reunion (i will consider these factors in further detail under family reunion and the need for a multilingual approach). with no funding directly linked to the ‘new scots’ strategy, its success is dependent on existing support services. in terms of language learning this includes further education colleges, local authorities, and voluntary sector organisations. welcoming our learners: scotland’s esol strategy 2015–2020 the importance of language learning for integration is recognised within welcoming our learners: scotland’s esol strategy 2015–2020: “language skills are central to giving people a democratic voice and supporting them to contribute to the society in which they live” (education scotland, 2015, p. 6). can an ecological, multilingual approach help us… 15 it highlights the need for “relevant, accessible provision” and for the “right kind of esol” (education scotland, 2015, p. 3). the strategy aims for “the continued growth of scotland as a diverse, complex, multicultural and multilingual nation” (education scotland, 2015, p. 2) and “recognises and values the cultures of learners and the contribution that new scots make to society and the economy” (education scotland, 2015, p. 9). there is an established practice of using only english in the classroom underpinned by the longstanding belief that using solely the target language is the best way to teach. traditionally, languages have been kept separate in the classroom with little or no acknowledgement of the natural interaction between them, both internally (cognitively) and externally (interpersonally) (cook, 2001). there is a belief that teaching in this way gives maximum exposure to english, increases opportunities for learners to use the language they are learning, and makes full use of the time spent in class as learners may have limited opportunities to practise their english outside of class. as this is the accepted norm, teachers have little need or motivation for integrating learners’ own languages into their teaching. it is also based on practical reasons as esol classrooms in scotland are typically very mixed in terms of languages. multilingual teaching methods such as translanguaging are relatively new concepts and require further development in specific contexts to allow teachers to gain confidence in using them. with the importance of heritage languages recognised at policy level within new scots and the esol strategy, the large refugee/asylum seeker community in glasgow and the strong esol community already in place, scotland is in a strong position to lead on the development of translanguaging within specific contexts. academic literature signals that teaching monolingually may no longer be the best fit for our changing communities; “the increasingly multilingual and multicultural nature of global exchanges is raising questions about the traditionally monolingual and monocultural nature of language education” (kramsch & whiteside, 2008, p. 654). there is a need to recognise the “multilingual realities” of our esol learners’ lives (simpson & cooke, 2017). this research provides an opportunity to explore these themes within the specific context of reunited refugee families in scotland. i will outline the context for family reunion in the following section. british red cross family reunion integration service family reunion is a key legal route through which high numbers of refugees obtain legal protection in the uk with one in three refugees currently arriving in this way (british red cross, 2018), more than the combined total of refugees arriving through all other resettlement programmes. however, the brc report that family reunion has received inadequate funding with programs sarah cox16 such as the syrian resettlement programme receiving significantly more financial support. in response to this, the brc established the family reunion integration service in september 2018. this is the first time that uk wide funding has been allocated for this specific need. the service is expected to support 3,000 people in eight locations in england, wales, scotland, and northern ireland over the next three years providing much-needed specialist support for these families. during the difficult process of coming to the uk and seeking asylum, families can be separated for extended periods, causing distress and anxiety for family members who may lose touch. brc research highlights that due to the slow process of reunion “family reunion is a goal and aspiration that many live with for years, as they endure periods of extended separation and often anxiety about other family members’ safety” (harris, 2015, p. 40). being reunited with family members is recognised as key to well-being and is “an important step towards successful integration” (british red cross, 2018). within the uk wide project, glasgow has a specific focus on “rebuilding the family unit.” brc research indicates that “the longer the period of separation, the poorer the outcomes when the family reunites” (harris, 2015, p. 40). arriving in the uk at different times can result in family members having significantly different experiences in terms of integration and access to support services. the first family member to arrive has additional time to adjust, to learn the language and to establish a life before the joining members (most usually wife/partner and children) arrive. in addition, all benefits are paid to the ‘sponsor,’ creating a financial dependency for the joining family members who are not granted refugee status in their own right. discussions with brc staff highlighted the significant challenges faced by women who arrive in the uk in this way including accessing support services and childcare responsibilities which can make it difficult to attend activities outside the home, putting them at an increased risk of isolation. new scots highlights barriers to integration for women as: “lack of confidence; disrupted or no previous access to education; less time available, due to other caring responsibilities or lack of childcare; and family opposition to socialising, learning or working” (scottish government, 2018, p. 17). the brc highlight that these barriers may be felt even more keenly by women whose partners have already settled in the host country. at the time of writing, the current uk political crisis and the possibility of a no-deal brexit threatens existing family reunion rules. a recent article in the guardian revealed that the home office plan to end family reunion for children the day after brexit “if the uk leaves the eu without a deal, the dublin regulation, which allows for the transfer of asylum-seeking children and adults within the eu to join family members, will no longer apply to the uk.” the same article warns that “if the government fails to protect family reunification, the consequences could be fatal” (the guardian, 2019). can an ecological, multilingual approach help us… 17 this research provides a close-up view of the challenges faced by these families and their integration experiences from day one. glasgow has a strong partnership of esol providers working to support new scots with language learning. current esol classes provide opportunities for integration through inclusive approaches for people at all stages of their integration experiences with reunited refugee families accessing classes in the same way as other migrants. in the following section i will consider the ways in which the needs of these families may be different to other esol learners, particularly at the point of reunion and shortly afterwards family reunion and the need for a multilingual approach family members may have different experiences with language learning, and this can impact family dynamics as children may have more opportunities to integrate through school. in contrast, adults may have fewer opportunities to socialise and learn the language, particularly if they do not work outside the home. as a result, situations may arise where a parent has to rely on their child to communicate, creating parent-child role reversal which can place strain on relationships (harris, 2015, p. 75). in some cases, parents may also encourage children to speak english rather than their home language, which can also lead to conflicting views of how/when to use each language. the brc have highlighted the need for further research into the impact of language learning on family dynamics due to an increase in the numbers of reunited families accessing support services, suggesting that difficulties do not end at the point of reunion. brc research also shows that women benefit from learning language with their children (harris, 2015), a recommendation also made by the british council (2017). these recommendations provide a starting point for this research in addition to the policy context and the brc work, there is a significant body of academic research which recognises the benefits of multilingual learning (blackledge & creese, 2010; kramsch & whiteside, 2008; simpson & cooke, 2017) suggesting a valid alternative which may be particularly beneficial within this context. in this paper i put forward the case for how an ecological, multilingual approach can better meet the needs of reunited refugee families in scotland. i will begin by situating the research within the relevant literature which underpins my theoretical framework before presenting the pilot study and its findings. sarah cox18 literature review and theoretical framework my theoretical framework is informed by drawing together key literature on language ecology (haugen, 1972, van lier, 2004), multilingualism (blackledge & creese, 2010), translanguaging (garcía, 2010) and identity (norton, 2013; block, 2007; canagarajah, 2011). in this section i will consider each of these in turn and their relevance for this study an ecological approach to language learning haugen defines language ecology as “the study of interactions between any given language and its environment” (haugen, 1972, p. 35). an ecological approach focuses on the interaction of factors within a given context, seeing language learning as connected to the physical and social context: “language only functions in relating these users to one another and to nature i.e. their social and natural environment” (haugen, 1972, p. 35). it is also internal “part of ecology is psychological as the interaction with other languages is in the minds of bi and multilingual speakers.” language is viewed as dynamic in nature rather than having defined, inflexible boundaries. van lier states, “in ecology, practice and theory are closely interrelated, dynamic and emergent, never finished or absolute” (van lier, 2010, p. 1). van lier explains that “an ecological theory holds that if you take the context away, there is no language left to be studied […] with language it’s context all the way down” (van lier, 2004, p. 20). it considers the learning process, the actions of teachers and learners, “the multi-layered nature of interaction and language use, in all their complexity and as a network of interdependencies among all the elements in the setting” (van lier, 2010, p. 2). the place of “linguistic hospitality” within an ecological approach by incorporating learners’ own languages and acknowledging their significance we provide “linguistic hospitality” (phipps, 2012) for new scots, supporting the ‘two-way’ integration process and countering some of the effects of the current uk hostile environment. the approach values learners’ existing linguistic resources allowing us to draw on what is already known and build on this by tapping into the interaction between languages which haugen describes. as many esol learners already know several other languages, viewing these as a resource has significant benefits for language learning and confidence. acknowledging these skills also enables us to reassure learners that they are not starting can an ecological, multilingual approach help us… 19 at the very beginning of language learning and that the languages they already know have value and significance: “the meaning of a new piece of knowledge will emerge not from the syllabus but from the connections the learner will make with his/her own prior knowledge and experience” (kramsch, 2006, p. 104). multilingualism and translanguaging within an ecological framework we are beginning to see a gradual paradigm shift towards the inclusion of multilingual perspectives in foreign and second language learning environments (prada & turnbull, 2018). this shift enables new perspectives in terms of critically analysing monolingual teaching methods and considering new ways forward translanguaging (garcía, 2010; simpson, 2017) complements an ecological framework by promoting the use of learners’ full “linguistic repertoire” to complete tasks “without regard to watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named languages” (otheguy, garcía, & reid, 2015, p. 281). it gives scope for learners to co-construct meaning, mirroring the way languages are used outside the classroom. the fact that translanguaging occurs naturally among multilinguals, whether teachers teach it or not (canagarajah, 2011; garcía & kleyn, 2016; garcía & wei, 2014) has led to its popularity. cenoz and gorter recognise translanguaging as “a recent and extremely successful concept in the area of bilingual and multilingual education that has gained wide acceptance in the literature in a short period of time” (2017, p. 910). translanguaging recognises that people bring their own knowledge and experience to the learning process; a key feature of an ecological approach. it places learners firmly at the centre of their own learning in “a system which orients toward the user rather than the linguistic code” (simpson, 2017), it promotes a sense of self-worth that is not linked solely to english language level, echoing the priorities of new scots in recognising refugees’ own skills. translanguaging as practice it is recognised that further consideration of how to embed translanguaging in practice is needed as it has been criticised as pedagogically underdeveloped (canagarajah, 2011, garcía & kleyn, 2016). further research is needed to establish how it may be implemented as a suitable teaching approach in a multilingual context (lewis, jones, & baker, 2012). in practical terms, guidance on how to implement translanguaging activities is presented in the cuny-nysieb-guide (celic & seltzer, 2011). simple adaptations can be made to incorporate activities such as empowering learners sarah cox20 to use their languages and increasing visibility of other languages in the classroom, for example, by learning to say ‘hello’ in each other’s languages (garcía & wei, 2014). other suggestions include learners working together in ‘language pairs’ using the language of their choice. actively contrasting languages is also considered helpful to build vocabulary, improve reading comprehension and promote metalinguistic awareness, which is associated with enhanced language learning (rauch, naumann, & jude, 2012). focus of the current system current support systems for refugees focus on getting people in to ‘the system’, to prepare people for work, college or study. these goals are seen as key to integration but are called into question within a recent report on refugee integration in glasgow (meer et al., 2018): “the governance of language provision becomes technocratic, managerial, or disciplined towards a single goal” (wood & flinders, 2014, p. 161) namely “to facilitate language training in order to build capacity and readiness to enter the labour market” (meer, peace, & hill, 2018, p. 32). such an approach measures success of language provision in terms of employability, contradicting the holistic approach laid out in new scots. for those newly arrived, such goals can seem out of reach as they adjust to their new lives. in the case of glasgow, this new environment might be a significantly different climate and the reality that any english you might have learnt before arriving may not resemble the variety of english you hear in the local community. it is difficult to think about longer term plans when facing such profound change and in the case of reunited families these adjustments are taking place when families may be living together again after a period of many years. in this context an ecological, multilingual approach can be particularly beneficial to support those who have come to the uk under the most difficult of circumstances and are now placed within the system of our hostile environment. for many forcibly displaced persons, language is quite literally the only thing they may bring with them from their home, making its recognition incredibly important. power, balance, and identity in considering issues of power and identity, i turn to norton’s construct of investment, which counters the idea that motivation is an intrinsic character trait of the language learner and ignores the significance of unequal teacher/learner power relations (norton, 2013). norton suggests that if learners invest in the can an ecological, multilingual approach help us… 21 learning process, they understand the benefits of improved language skills and the symbolic (language, education, friendship) and associated material resources (capital goods, money) which in turn increase cultural capital and social power (norton, 2013). norton’s construct recognises the connection between investment and identity in the classroom (norton, 2013). the learning environment and approach to learning has significant implications for how invested learners feel in the learning process. norton recognises that “pedagogical practices in language classrooms can either constrain or enable students in their reimagining of possibilities for both the present and the future” (norton, 2013 p. 17) and that “classroom practices can recreate subordinate student identities, thereby limiting students access not only to language learning opportunities but also to other more powerful identities” (norton, 2013, p. 17). classroom practices where english is dominant and privileged above all other languages may not be the best way to foster the ‘investment’ which norton describes, and there are also implications for social justice. language classes have an important role in adapting to the new context a process which block refers to as “reconstruction and repositioning” (2007, p. 75). in the following sections, i will illustrate how these key themes were embedded in the pilot study and reflected in the findings. methodology research design the research is situated within an interpretivist paradigm. the aim of the study is to consider whether an ecological, multilingual approach to language learning is effective in supporting reunited refugee families in glasgow. the main teaching study, which followed the pilot, took place over a period of six months engaging three families within their first few weeks of arriving in scotland. the pilot study formed the first part of this research project and i will present the findings from this initial phase in the next section. the aims of the pilot study were to deliver four two-hour learning sessions using translanguaging methodology with three women and their children who had recently arrived in glasgow through the brc family reunion integration service and to evaluate these teaching methods and materials before leading into the main study. the content of the learning sessions was decided in collaboration with the research participants in line with the principles of collaboration within the new scots strategy, allowing participants to co-design the project. sarah cox22 data was collected via ethnographic observation during the learning sessions, field notes, participant feedback, and semi-structured interviews at the end of the pilot. the brc provided interpreters to assist with ensuring informed consent and the interviews. key findings were checked with research participants with the support of an interpreter. at the end of the pilot, the data was analysed using the six-step process of thematic analysis laid out in braun and clarke (2006). the interview data, my own observations and fieldnotes will be discussed under key findings and discussion. learning sessions the study incorporated translanguaging methodology with learners working together and using their full linguistic repertoire to complete tasks, participants worked with family members in their own language to do this. the characteristics of a co-learning relationship were embedded in the study… (brantmeier, in garcía & wei, 2014, p. 113): – all knowledge is valued; – reciprocal value of knowledge sharers; – care for each other as people and co learners; – trust; – learning from one another. our learning environment was based on: – shared power among co learners; – social and individualised learning; – collective and individual meaning-making and identity exploration; – community of practice with situated learning; – real world engagement and action. participant profiles participant l l is from eritrea and speaks tigrinya. she has a ten-year-old daughter. they were separated from l’s husband for five years before reuniting in glasgow two weeks before the pilot. l attended primary school in eritrea for three years then was unable to continue due to the war participant u u is a tamil speaker from sri lanka. she is here with her husband and two children aged 10 and 17 who also attend the sessions. u finished secondary school in sri lanka and learnt english as a foreign language for a few years at can an ecological, multilingual approach help us… 23 school. their family was separated for several years and reunited in glasgow a month before the pilot study. participant k k is from sudan. she arrived in glasgow two weeks before the project started. she speaks arabic and attends learning sessions with her two sons aged 10 and 12. they were separated from her husband for several years before coming to glasgow. key findings and discussion day one: situating the learning i had very little information about the participants before the pilot project. two days before the first meeting the brc confirmed a few key details which helped me to plan the first session. i knew the families came from eritrea, sudan, and sri lanka, the ages of their children and how long they had been in glasgow. i did not know how much english they knew or how much education they had been able to access prior to coming to scotland. with this is mind i planned the first session would cover the aims of the research and a few introductory activities to illustrate the kind of tasks i hoped to do in the sessions with the hope of engaging the learners’ investment i wanted to find out what the participants wanted from the sessions so that i could make them as tailored and collaborative as possible. the brc provided interpreters for the last hour of the first session to enable me to explain informed consent and to make sure the participants could ask any questions. as the participants had been in glasgow for just a few weeks, it was necessary for me to meet them at the brc office for the first session so i could travel with them to the university and show them the way. three women and four children (aged 10–17) were waiting for me when i arrived at the brc. two of the husbands had accompanied their wives and children to the brc and they helped me check names on a list. i noticed how nervous and uncomfortable the women and children looked. none of the group could speak more than a few words of english and outside each family group the participants did not share a language which limited their interaction with each other. the first session focused on the practicalities of getting from the brc office in central glasgow to the university. this also served the purpose of introducing participants to bus numbers, the location of the bus stops and how to use the travel tokens provided by the brc and it situated the learning within the context of glasgow. as the participants followed me to the bus sarah cox24 stop, i tried to chat to them and explain where we were going using maps provided by the brc and a lot of body language. we arrived at the school of education and stopped at the multilingual ‘welcome’ sign at the entrance to identify all the languages we knew, taking time to try to pronounce each other’s. i wanted to give everyone a sense of the university being a place where all languages were welcome as a starting point for our project. this activity also allowed me to get an idea of whether participants could read in their own language before we reached the classroom. negotiating the bus journey to and from the class proved to be a significant challenge and formed an important part of the learning within the pilot study. i also accompanied participants to the bus stop after our sessions and waited with them for the bus, but reduced this gradually to ensure a balance between support and creating dependency. learning to use the bus, including recognising the bus number, timetables, tickets, the location of the bus stop are major barriers for those newly arrived not only in terms of language but also cultural differences such as maps, buying a ticket, and money. support at this stage proved to be vital as were the travel tokens as the participants were not yet receiving benefits and would have struggled to cover the bus fare (£4.60 for an all-day ticket). without the travel tokens, it is doubtful the participants would have been able to attend working with the participants in real-life situations and physically being on the bus with them allowed us to use language in an authentic, practical way. it allowed me to understand first-hand how people cope in such situations and this informed the content of the learning sessions. it took the learning beyond language into more practical life skills. participants decided they wanted to focus on such practical topics to help them with their daily lives. via interpreters i asked participants whether this approach was useful, and they confirmed that these were topics they needed. u told me in the group interview: “yes, it’s very practical.” the tamil interpreter continued: “they’re going on the bus and they don’t know how to buy a ticket or how to talk to the driver… for example, i’m going to this place. i need a ticket to… which type of ticket?” cultural differences were also highlighted as the participants told me in sri lanka return tickets do not exist and thus they expected to buy one ticket for each single journey. van lier describes the classroom as a ‘niche’ and recognises that although this can be a safe environment, it can create a “barrier between education and the rest of living” (little, 1991, in kramsch, levine & phipps, 2010, p. 38). this is a two-way process, “an ecological approach is where what happens in the classroom responds to aspects of the context and the context is also created out of learning, teaching and language use” (kramsch, levine, & phipps, 2010, p. 8). such practical topics may be covered in community esol classes and by incorporating multilingual approaches the learning can be made more can an ecological, multilingual approach help us… 25 accessible at the early stages. teachers may not see the connection between recognising heritage languages and how to bring this into the classroom in an active way mapping single lexical items across languages to build confidence i incorporated learners’ own languages in simple ways to enhance metalinguistic awareness and make the learning accessible at this early stage. this included establishing learners’ interests and building multilingual activities around the topics they suggested. food and cooking proved to be a topic of universal interest and one that, we agreed, would help in their daily lives. this topic gave us plenty of material to work with. we began by introducing vocabulary for individual food items using images, relating each item back to learners’ own languages and bearing in mind the ideas about language comparisons noted earlier. we made a note of vocabulary, sorting pictures into piles of ‘i like’ and ‘i don’t like.’ subsequent sessions allowed us scope to work on shopping, money, and prices with roleplays with the children taking roles such as shopkeepers. connecting new words in english to lexical items in learners’ own languages helped to provide clarity and make the learning inclusive. i created simple worksheets with images of each item and space for the participants to record vocabulary in both english and their own language. as these worksheets were simple, they were also suitable for the children in the group. at first, i questioned the use of such materials as i wanted to ensure the sessions were fun and interactive rather than having everyone sit and write but i noticed that participants made notes in class and i wanted to support this. participants told me that having a written record gave them a chance to take their learning away with them and as they were working with their family members they could also practise together at home. identifying the equivalent word for each item and recording it in a structured way allowed us to slow the pace to suit everyone in the group. in the interviews, i asked if this was helpful and l told me “yes, it’s kind of like a dictionary,” u agreed, “it’s very practical.” incorporating all the learners’ languages took participants a few sessions to get used to. when we managed to get something right in each other’s language everyone seemed pleased and although progress was slow, setting up activities in this way from the start laid a solid foundation for subsequent sessions sarah cox26 learning to facilitate translanguaging in languages i do not speak one of the main questions i encountered in conversation with other teachers concerned how we can use a multilingual approach if we do not speak the same languages as the learners. esol classes in scotland are typically diverse and multilingual. this is a key point to address if teachers are to become confident using translanguaging regardless of how many different languages are spoken in class and regardless of our knowledge of these languages. the pilot saw me teach using tamil, tigrinya, and arabic when i do not know more than a few words in each of these languages and with a few adjustments i found this to be possible and productive. as garcía states, “a teacher who uses translanguaging as pedagogy participates as learner” (garcía & wei, 2014, p. 92). i became a learner within the group, facilitating and guiding the sessions but relying on the participants for input in their own languages, working with family members to complete tasks. i could not always understand what was being said, it gave me less control and although this felt strange at the start, we all adapted and committed to this way of working. participants had a more equal and active role within the learning process as a result, it shifted the balance of power away from english and away from me. these multilingual practices drew on the participants full linguistic resources and all of mine as i related each word back to tamil, tigrinya, and arabic with the use of online dictionaries and images on the screen. i relied on the participants to let me know if the definitions were correct, which also gave them a more active role in the sessions. i needed to know a few key words in each language from the very beginning and preparing a few basic phrases and flashcards helped me to facilitate the initial sessions. despite feeling that my knowledge of tamil, tigrinya, and arabic was severely lacking this also became a leveller, placing us all on a more equal footing as we tried to communicate in bits and pieces of each other’s languages. i asked learners how they felt about this and u told me: “it’s comfortable for us.” garcía provides strategies for how to overcome these issues; suggesting that learners support each other with the teacher trying to meet learners halfway: “the teacher makes an effort to make herself understood using spanish, and the students try to make themselves understood using english. in so doing, more english is being added to the linguistic repertoire of the students, and more spanish to that of the teacher’ (garcía, 2014 p. 112). this puts the ‘two-way’ process of new scots into practice in a very real sense, taking it away from policy and into everyday life as a collaborative process. monolingual teachers can find ways to incorporate translanguaging into their teaching: “it shows students how to privilege interaction and collaborative dialogue over form and thus develops their voice” (garcía, 2014, p. 112). can an ecological, multilingual approach help us… 27 ‘linguistic hospitality’ and participant ‘investment’ norton’s construct of investment was central to the project. i knew the challenges the participants faced to come to class, particularly as we started the pilot project at the beginning of february when it was already cold and dark at the time when participants needed to travel to the sessions. during the interviews at the end of the pilot i emphasised how well everyone had coped with this. l told me: “yes, because it’s a good experience for us and we’re hoping to learn more, that’s why we have to do that. i come because this is helping me.” their attendance and enthusiasm to come to the sessions despite a challenging journey echoes the ‘investment’ that norton describes (norton, 2013) and was evidenced further by my observations of their participation in the sessions, their enthusiasm, their patience and respect for each other. in bringing learners’ own languages into the sessions i observed that the participants appeared comfortable and relaxed. they appeared to enjoy taking turns to tell each other words in their languages, we looked for similarities in each other’s languages and when we found something in common everyone exclaimed “oh, same!” by the third session the women seemed comfortable with the way we were working together. partway through the session l removed her headscarf and i noticed the contrast between her body language in this session (relaxed, laughing, sitting close to me while we worked together) and the first time we met in the brc waiting room when she sat alone in the corner, making very little eye contact and looking uncomfortable. she laughed frequently at my poor pronunciation of tigrinya and corrected me patiently many times. garcía found the use of learners’ own language “enhanced personal interaction” (garcía, 2014, p. 81) and i also had a strong sense of this. hearing how difficult it was for me to get the pronunciation of their languages right provided a direct example of the effort and repetition needed to learn a new language. during the interviews l told me: “you and me we’re the same. you struggle with tigrinya and i struggle with english.” although the context and the need for each of us to learn each other’s language was vastly different, i felt it was a real success of the project that a sense of symmetry was evident to the participants and that l felt we faced similar challenges in learning each other’s language. l’s ‘investment’ in the project was clear to me when she started to initiate interaction with me in tigrinya. on leaving the second session, she touched my hand and said, “ciao ciao” (‘goodbye’ in tigrinya), this became our way of saying goodbye at the end of all subsequent meetings. i had the sense that she was trying to remind me of the words she had taught me in tigrinya, and i was careful to always respond in tigrinya rather than english. at the next session l arrived 30 minutes early, to find me setting up the classroom, she smiled widely and greeted me confidently in tigrinya with sarah cox28 “selam!”. i was pleased that she seemed comfortable enough to spend an extra half an hour with me before class started with only the few words of tigrinya and english that we shared. l continued to coach me in tigrinya as we set up the room together, boiled the kettle, put out snacks, and learnt the words for each item in each other’s language. l’s increased confidence was significant to me as i knew she had had the fewest opportunities to attend formal education and the least opportunities to learn english in the group. during the interview l told me the sessions were important to her, evidenced by her willingness to spend additional time in the learning environment. our sessions prioritised what she could do rather than what she could not. i felt that reaching this level of comfort had happened more quickly than it might have done had we worked solely in english. l’s role as co-collaborator was highlighted during the interviews when i asked if she thought my tigrinya was improving and she told me “you’re doing ok” and continued that she thought it would get better one day. we acknowledged the time it takes to learn a new language. despite our vastly different opportunities to access education, she could see how it was equally difficult for me to learn tamil, tigrinya, and arabic as it was for her to learn english, and i felt this boosted her confidence with coming to our learning sessions. this style of learning suited her, she invested in in our way of working together and found confidence in her role as co-collaborator and as a teacher of tigrinya. learning language together to support the brc aim of ‘rebuilding the family unit’ once families are reunited in the host community, children are more likely to have opportunities to integrate, make friends, and learn the language through school but their mothers may be left at home with limited opportunities to socialise. families also need time to reconnect with each other and repair familial bonds after separation. therefore, by creating learning sessions to include both mothers and children i hoped to create a space in which they could learn together and interact away from the family home, supporting each other with language learning. having learning sessions together also removed the need for additional childcare as the children could attend the sessions as an after-school activity the families appeared to enjoy the time spent together in the sessions. in the interviews u told me that she found it helpful that her daughter could help her in class when she did not understand something. i also observed that some mothers lacked confidence with written activities, waiting to see what their children had written, then copying their work. children also translated can an ecological, multilingual approach help us… 29 for their mothers in class, which the participants explained happens in their daily lives and i questioned the effect of this on the mothers’ confidence and whether this reaffirms this dynamic. in the interviews, participants felt “fine” or “ok,” as they admitted, to work with people of different ages in the sessions. l told me that she “doesn’t have strong feelings either way.” the family who attended most regularly felt it was good for them to learn as a family but that they preferred to learn with older children: “this age groups will be fine compared to kids.” u told me this was because “older age group people they will talk more so they would like to improve their communications, that’s their priority and this age groups people she is thinking will be helpful.” u continued, “they can grasp quickly compared to younger age groups so they can pick up what you’re teaching very easily.” u also told me she appreciated her daughter being in the class with her: “my daughter is picking up very quickly and i can learn from her.” support from family members outside the class was also vital. on the first day i met u’s and k’s husbands at the brc as they helped them to travel to the brc offices and i also received text messages and phone calls from them during the pilot study to check meeting times and arrangements. this support enabled us to work together to support everyone to come to the sessions and countered the barrier of lack of support from family members highlighted in new scots (scottish government, 2018, p. 17). identity, power, and voice the brc provided interpreters for the first session which proved essential to explain the research and to ensure that participants understood how the data would be used so they could give informed consent. interpreters also assisted with the interviews at the end of the pilot but were never present during the learning sessions. working with interpreters for the interviews allowed me to ask participants about their views of the research in their own language which, i felt, underpinned a multilingual approach and enabled more detailed discussion. i questioned how i could authentically capture the voices of the people i was working with if their words were always spoken and interpreted by a third party. the dynamics were also altered when the interpreters returned for the fourth session. i felt we (the participants and i) became very comfortable with each other and had got used to our limited ways of communicating across languages. when the interpreters returned for the interviews it felt slightly intrusive to have a third party through whom we needed to communicate, and it made me question the balance of power during the interaction sarah cox30 during the interviews, the participants told me how important language learning was in their lives, and how the ability to speak english gave them power and more control. l told me: “the most important thing is to learn the language because in this country we can’t communicate if we don’t have the language. this class is really useful for us.” the participants told me the sessions were helping them with their daily lives. l told me “this is all useful today learning the names for food, for everyday items and cultural things.” everyone seemed keen to participate in the activities and it seemed that this was enhanced by using learners’ own languages. u told me “tamil and english together is better.” i was encouraged that despite my lack of knowledge of tamil, this was still helpful: “we prefer to have tamil as well in the class because if you just use english, we don’t understand what you’re speaking so we are not able to follow you, it’s better if you use tamil.” participants also felt that having more participants in the class would help them to work together in their own languages outside the family group. u told me: “if there are more tamil speakers we can work together.” l stated: “from the beginning the class is good. it’s helping me like a dictionary between tigrinya and english,” adding that she liked the approach and the way of teaching. u also said: “yes, it’s comfortable for us to use our language, it’s useful for us to use tamil in the class because that helps us to learn quickly, what are you telling us in english. it is useful for us to know the exact definition.” l also found this helpful: “it’s very useful to explain things in our language… it’s very good for explanation it’s really good to use my language and english here.” as part of the group interview, we revisited the aims of the research and the reasons for working multilingually. i asked learners how they felt about this and they told me “it’s very useful, it’s a bit like having a dictionary.” none of the participants have started other english classes yet and it will be helpful if they do, as i think this will allow them to see the differences between other classes and our multilingual sessions. conclusions the pilot study consisted of only four sessions, yet it highlighted some of the benefits of an ecological, multilingual approach to language learning for reunited families. the data evidences that this was welcomed by the participants. by incorporating learners’ own languages into our own instructional practices and supporting families to learn together we can ensure language learning classrooms reflect the multilingual realities of scotland’s communities. such can an ecological, multilingual approach help us… 31 an approach enables better connections between academic literature, policy, and practice, allowing a more holistic approach and bringing learners into the centre of the collaborative learning process. support is needed to enable people to gain confidence in their own abilities to function within the new community, including practical support with getting to know the city and local travel. this could be supported by orientation style language classes in the first few weeks which allow scope for taking the learning outside the classroom to practise in real world situations such as travelling on the bus, buying a ticket and shopping in the supermarket. building these essential survival skills at this crucial part of the integration process builds confidence and reduces the risk of isolation at the point when it is needed most. it is challenging to meet these needs quickly within current esol 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(2014). rethinking depoliticisation: beyond the governmental. policy & politics, 42(2), 151–170. sarah cox wird uns ein ökologischer, mehrsprachiger ansatz dabei helfen, das sprachenlernen von zusammengeführten flüchtlingsfamilien in schottland zu unterstützen? z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g in diesem artikel wird die beziehung zwischen akademischer literatur, sprachpolitik und sprachlernpraxis im spezifischen kontext von familien untersucht, die durch den familienzusammenführungsdienst des britischen roten kreuzes in glasgow zusammengeführt sarah cox34 wurden. dargestellt werden die ergebnisse der studien zum lehrprozess, der in zusammenarbeit mit teilnehmern in den ersten wochen nach ihrer ankunft in schottland stattfand. ziel der untersuchung war es herauszufinden, ob ein mehrsprachiger, ökologischer ansatz beim sprachenlernen in diesem kontext effizient ist. in anlehnung an die prinzipien der translingualität und unter berücksichtigung der nutzung des gesamten „sprachlichen repertoires“ durch die probanden (vgl. garcia, 2010) ergründet der artikel, in bezug auf den von norton (2013) vorgeschlagenen begriff der „investition“, die schlüsselfragen des selbstständigmachens und der identität in der klasse. die gewonnenen ergebnisse ermöglichen es, schlussfolgerungen hinsichtlich der gestaltung des gleichgewichts der einf lüsse in der klasse und der bedeutung der akzeptanz der ersten flüchtlingssprache, die als ein wichtiges element des lernprozesses gilt, zu formulieren. schlüsselwörter: zweitspracherwerb, mehrsprachigkeit, translingualität, familienzusammenführung theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 3 (2), 2017 wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego • katowice 2017 editors-in-chief danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia in katowice adam wojtaszek university of silesia in katowice language editor david schauffler university of silesia in katowice editorial board janusz arabski (university of silesia, katowice/vistula university, warsaw) larissa aronin (oranim college of higher education/trinity college, dublin) jasone cenoz iraqui (university of the basque country, donostia – san sebastian) halina chodkiewicz (maria curie-skłodowska university, lublin) gessica de angelis (trinity college, dublin) anna ewert (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) tammy gregersen (university of northern iowa, cedar falls) ulrike jessner schmid (university of innsbruck, innsbruck) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities/university of warsaw) jolanta latkowska (university of silesia, katowice) peter macintyre (cape breton university, sydney) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, cracow) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) miroslaw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz/state school of higher professional education, konin) ewa piechurska-kuciel (university of opole, opole) andrzej porzuczek (university of silesia, katowice) david singleton (trinity college, dublin/university of pannonia, veszprem) eva vetter (university of vienna, vienna) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, łódź) maria wysocka (university of silesia, katowice) uznanie autorstwa – użycie niekomercyjne – bez utworów zależnych 4.0 międzynarodowe attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives 4.0 international contents preface (danuta gabryś-barker, adam wojtaszek) 5 articles ewa piechurska-kuciel the role of social support systems in adolescent foreign language learning 11 anna bąk-średnicka pre-service teachers’ attitudes related to family involvement in light of their school placement experience 29 małgorzata szupica-pyrzanowska, katarzyna malesa are they part of the equation? – foreign language teachers vs. language attrition. a diagnostic study 49 ewa cieślicka, arkadiusz rojczyk self-reported vs. self-rated pronunciation in a non-native language 69 konrad szcześniak benefits of l1–l3 similarities. the case of the dative case 87 reviews kurt braunmüller and christoph gabriel (eds.). (2012). multilingual individuals and multilingual societies (john benjamins) – by larissa aronin 113 anna mystkowska-wiertelak and mirosław pawlak (2017). willingness to communicate in instructed second language acquisition. combining a macroand micro-perspective (multlingual matters) – by danuta gabryś-barker 121 lindsey r. leacox margarita meza tammy gregersen university of northern iowa when language anxiety and selective mutism meet in the bilingual child: interventions from positive psychology a b s t r a c t selective mutism is more common than initially thought and aff licts immigrant language minority children at approximately three times the rate of monolinguals (toppelberg, tabors, coggins, lum, & burgers, 2005). children who have developmental language and/or articulation problems and children who are quiet due to anxiety or concerns about accents and limited f luency can suffer from selective mutism. this case study examines the efficacy of interdisciplinary treatment with three positive psychology interventions to treat an eightyear-old spanish-english bilingual child with selective mutism. pet-assistance therapy, music therapy, and laughter therapy were incorporated into the child’s speech-language therapy sessions to increase verbal productions across 14 weeks. results indicated that pet-assisted therapy revealed positive outcomes, with modest gains for music and laughter. implications of outcomes, collaboration, and conclusions are discussed. keywords: selective mutism, positive psychology, second language acquisition introduction afflicting immigrant language minority children at three times the rate of monolinguals, selective mutism (sm) is more widespread than originally believed (toppelberg, tabors, coggins, lum, & burgers, 2005). sm is manifest by a recurrent failure to speak in certain milieus. children with this condition are able to speak, but remain deliberately silent when in the company of theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 2 (2) 2016, pp. 61–81 62 lindsey r. leacox, margarita meza, tammy gregersen specific people or when interacting in particular settings. anxiety in the form of a social phobia is presumed to be an underlying feature (lesser-katz, 1986; black & uhde, 1992, 1995). because bilingual children of immigrant families are much more prone to it than native-born children, it is believed that one of sm’s causes stems from linguistic minority children’s concerns about their accents and limited fluency and thus remain silent. second language acquisition (sla) researchers who are familiar with the relationship of foreign language anxiety (fla) and willingness to communicate (wtc) may feel a bit of déjà vu in that they, too, have discovered links between anxiety and one’s desire to speak when given the choice. for example, maclntyre (1994) proposed that one of the variables most closely related to whether a person will choose to interact in their first language (l1) is communication apprehension (e.g., an individual’s level of fear or anxiety associated with either real or anticipated communication with others). people who experience high levels of fear or anxiety about communicating tend to avoid it—much like children with sm. he based his findings in part on mccroskey and richmond’s (1991) work which contended that communication apprehension is the leading predictor of an individual’s wtc and that there is a significant negative correlation between communication apprehension and wtc: the greater the anxiety, the more likely the person will be un-willing to communicate. applied linguists have made a recent foray into positive psychology as a means of attempting to undo the negative effects of debilitating emotions like anxiety. the inclusion of positive psychology (pp) in the context of this study is valuable because pp focuses on positive features and strengths in the human psyche and human experience, not at just the challenging and stressful facets that have long been psychology’s focus (gable & haidt, 2005). pp, with its attention on well-being, does not disregard human complications, but it addresses them from a position of strength—the factors that make humans resilient rather than what debilitates them. according to frederickson (2001, 2003, 2004), one of pp’s leading researchers on emotion, adverse emotions restrict a person’s reactions to those of survival rather than flourishing. seligman (2011) cautioned that anxiety leads to a fight-or-flight response, a set of behaviors used for continued existence, but not necessarily thriving progress. the reason that pp interventions are considered in this present study is because they are very often designed with the idea of offering resilience to those with issues such as anxiety (park & peterson, 2008). this case study report describes an interdisciplinary response, using the expertise found in applied linguistics, pp, and speech pathology to address the challenge of sm in an english-spanish bilingual eight-year-old living in the united states, who we will call marco. 63when language anxiety and selective mutism meet… about selective mutism sm is usually noticed in children when they begin school. its primary indicators include not speaking in particular social situations where speech is expected, like at school, even though the child verbally communicates in other places, like home. a child with sm does not suffer a lack of knowledge of the spoken language but rather studies indicate that it may be a symptom of social anxiety. the condition can have dramatically negative effects on social functioning (gallagher, 2002). currently, sm is seen as a condition of severe anxiety or phobia (anstendig, 1999), although children may have concomitant speech articulation difficulties (steinhausen & juzi, 1996). for an sm diagnosis, the refusal to speak must last more than one month and can last anywhere from a few months to several years. the majority of youngsters affected by this condition exhibit timid and anxious behavior in exchanges with unfamiliar people, or in any circumstances in which they perceive themselves as the focus of attention or in which they feel they are being assessed or observed. in many cases, with increased comfort and familiarization with a given social milieu, they are more inclined to speak. research suggests that such social anxiety is the fundamental source of the disorder. however, speech articulation problems are also partially responsible for sm which makes the disorder of concern to speech pathologists (mcinnes, fung, manassis, fiksenbaum, & tannock, 2004). diverse treatment strategies for children with sm have been recommended, but an analysis of published case material (dow, sonies, scheib, moss, & leonard, 1996; wright, holmes, cuccaro, & leonhardt, 1994) reveals that a systematic approach to treatment has not yet been established. according to gallagher (2002), any effective treatment provided for sm will address the child’s high anxiety in social situations and the limited opportunities the child probably has had for interaction with unfamiliar people. while individual psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and therapies involving play and the family have often been suggested for children with sm and may be important in building greater confidence and a more relaxed orientation in life, there is no evidence to date that these types of treatment are likely to be of substantial benefit. hence professionals are currently advocating for methods that reduce anxiety and build skills (gallagher, 2002). selective mutism and bilingualism applied linguists and language teachers are acquainted with the “silent period” in second language acquisition which refers to a stretch of time in which learners who are unfamiliar with a new language are building up linguistic competence through actively listening and processing the language they hear 64 lindsey r. leacox, margarita meza, tammy gregersen (krashen, 1987). this nonverbal period is a frequent and quite normal stage of a child’s second language acquisition process that usually begins when they become aware that their home language is not recognized at school and their second language (l2) proficiency is inadequate or nonexistent, thus causing the learner to stop speaking completely in that setting. the nonverbal period typically is shorter than 6 months (tabors, 1997) and can be confused with sm in bilingual children, especially when considering that immigrant and language minority children are at a higher risk (by roughly three times) of sm than those that are native born (bergman, piacentini, & mccracken, 2002). because learning an l2 takes a long time, one cannot be certain whether the youngster who meets other criteria for sm has achieved the right level of linguistic knowledge or familiarity to qualify for such diagnosis, because it is hard to ascertain where the silent period ends and sm begins. when discussing the topic of sm, the pervasive myth that l2 acquisition in children is accomplished easily, quickly, and automatically is detrimental to understanding sm in bilingual children (snow, 1997). indeed, acquiring an l2 is a complex process involving elaborate cognitive and social strategies (wong fillmore, 1979). such strategies transport learners from the preliminary nonverbal stage to developing the capacity to communicate in their new language. the usual evolution toward l2 proficiency progresses from silence to repeating words quietly and non-communicatively to practicing words and phrases in the l2, to finally “going public” with the new language (toppelberg, tabors, coggins, lum & burger, 2013; ervin-tripp, 1974; samway & mckeon, 2002; saville-troike, 1988; wong fillmore, 1979). although children progressing through the normal nonverbal period progress uneventfully through the phases described above, those with sm display no progression. they get stuck in either persistent silence or uttering phrases quietly to themselves, refusing to verbalize in circumstances that necessitate “going public.” their mutism is selective, and becomes evident in relatively unfamiliar social situations. the signs may have a tendency to be more evident in the l2, due to its dominance in school—which is the most common unfamiliar venue for youngsters with sm. furthermore, individual differences, particularly personality, can be a mitigating factor in a bilingual child’s sm (tabors, 1997). specific personality features that come into play are those that result in reticent behavior with the unfamiliar (kagan, 1997). that is to say, timid, apprehensive, and/or reticent children who are put into unfamiliar l2 situations may be more prone to reacting with mutism than children without these personality traits. when a bilingual child’s silence is acute and sustained, it merits the diagnosis of sm. for these children, mutism is manifest in both languages, in numerous unfamiliar settings, and for substantial time periods. on the other hand, normal children in the silent period of l2 acquisition typically remain nonverbal in one language, in 65when language anxiety and selective mutism meet… one or two settings, and for only a few months. even when “normal” youngsters are extensively exposed to their l2, most will not feel fully comfortable interacting in that language for six months or so. however, for these children, this discomfort will probably not result in a failure to speak. in sum, the difference between a bilingual child experiencing a typical silent period and a bilingual child with sm is that the selectively mute child has a disproportionately prolonged period of silence even after extensive l2 knowledge and exposure, their silence is evident in both languages and is displayed in conjunction with anxious, shy, and/or reticent behavior. as opposed to the negotiation and acquisition that typifies the usual learner’s silent period, sm is a condition that in part can be caused by severe social anxiety. positive psychology interventions combat negative narrowing emotion language learning is occasionally considered “a profoundly unsettling psychological proposition” (guiora, 1983, p. 8). the majority of research concerning the emotion surrounding language learning focuses on negative emotions, especially learner anxiety (dewaele & macintyre, 2014). consequences of anxiety include decreases in cognition, self-confidence, and willingness to communicate (dewaele & macintyre, 2014; horwitz, 2001; horwitz & young, 1991; macintyre, baker, clément, & donovan, 2002). in contrast, the goal of pp is to support people in their quest for well-being. rather than taking a mollifying attitude toward pain reduction or coping with disturbing experiences, pp seeks to provide means by which to develop positive emotions and increased engagement (seligman, 2011). it aims to provide another angle through which to perceive human psychology by creating mechanisms to increase strengths and attributes such as resiliency, happiness, and optimismapplied linguists in the past rarely addressed the topic of pp even though its application becomes clearly visible when reflecting on the practical human and social aspects of language learning. sensitive language practitioners are cognizant of the value of humanizing learners’ experiences of language learning by nurturing their motivation, perseverance, and resiliency, in addition to the positive emotions that are crucial for the extensive process of l2 learning. for these reasons, studying the role of pp interventions that explicitly enable the expression and development of strengths represents a valuable addition to current perspectives on l2 learning processes (macintyre & mercer, 2014), especially when negative narrowing emotions like anxiety cause a person to resort to specific action tendencies that result in refraining to speak altogether. leading the theoretical development in the area of positive emotion is barbara fredrickson, whose influential work on the broaden-and-build theory has argued for a clear differentiation between positive and negative emotions 66 lindsey r. leacox, margarita meza, tammy gregersen (fredrickson, 2001, 2003, 2006). according to fredrickson, specific negative emotions each tend to be associated with a specific action tendency, a compulsion toward a specific type of behavior. for example, anger leads to the urge to destroy obstacles in one’s path, fear leads to protective behaviors, and disgust leads to rejection as in quickly spitting out spoiled food. fredrickson’s research proposes that positive emotions produce a different type of response. the broaden and build theory states that certain discrete positive emotions— including joy, interest, contentment, pride, and love—although phenomenologically distinct, all share the ability to broaden people’s momentary thought-action repertoires and build their enduring personal resources, ranging from physical and intellectual resources to social and psychological resources. (fredrickson, 2003, p. 219) positive emotion can help dissipate the lingering effects of negative emotional arousal, helping to promote personal resiliency in the face of difficulties. positive emotions also facilitate exploration and play, leading to the opportunity to have new experiences and learn in an efficient way; this is the “broaden” side of fredrickson’s theory. the social dimension of positive emotions is closely connected with the “build” side of the theory. because people tend to be attracted to others with positive emotions, and positivity engenders both goodwill and social bonds, positive emotions help a person build resources that collectively might be considered social capital (adler & kwon, 2002). given the dependence that learners have on speakers of the language (parents, teachers, native speakers, advanced learners, and near peers), the presence of other people offers numerous resources that facilitate learning (gardner, 1985; gregersen, macintyre & meza, 2016; macintyre, baker, clément, & conrod, 2001). the differentiation of positive emotion from negative emotion in the psychology literature raises the interesting question of the relationship between positive and negative emotions in l2 learning in particular: are they two sides of the same coin, or are they different notions altogether? macintyre and gregersen (2012) argued in favor of the latter position: “positive emotion has a different function from negative emotion; they are not opposite ends of the same spectrum” (p. 193). they argue that learners’ imaginations have positive-broadening power, a perspective that is consistent with fredrickson’s (2001) description of positive emotions as actively promoting health and wellbeing and not simply being the absence of negativity. with the engendering of positive emotions in mind, we now turn our attention to three pp interventions that hold promise to increasing one’s well-being. 67when language anxiety and selective mutism meet… three interventions: pet-assisted, music, and laughter therapies pet therapy. research suggests that interventions using pet assisted therapy are effective for achieving the goal of reducing emotional stress and for enhancing mood (thompson, 2009). studies demonstrate that children report less pain, want more interaction, and want a pet at home when asked for three wishes after pet assisted therapy (braun, stangler, narveson, & petteingell, 2009; kaminski, pellino, & wish, 2002). pets have been reported to alleviate emotional distress through empathy, nurturing connections which foster social skills, providing support for self-efficacy and strengthening one’s sense of empowerment. the human-pet interaction helps develop social skills that can be transferred to relationships with people (wisdom, green, & saeide, 2009). the integration of pets into a child’s therapy provides an abundance of benefits due to the commonalities they both share: both children and pets are reliant upon and attentive of adults; they live in the present moment and provide honest feedback; their communication is principally nonverbal and concrete; and finally, animals and children know how to play naturally and to give freely (zimmerman & russell-martin, 2008). given these similarities, it is not difficult to understand that using pets in therapy is mentally advantageous by increasing a child’s attention, developing leisure skills, increasing self-esteem, and reducing loneliness. educationally speaking, pet interventions have been demonstrated to increase vocabulary, increase long and/or short term memory, and improve knowledge of concepts. finally, in the realm of motivation, children whose therapy is assisted with pets tend to be more willing to be involved in group activities, interact with others more effectively, and to be more willing to stay in treatment. for the purposes of this study, perhaps one of the most easily observable ways in which pet therapies can be beneficial is the reduction of anxiety. for children with sm or who have an anxiety disorder, one of the greatest challenges for them is to endure a situation where the focus of attention is almost entirely on them. lamentably, therapeutic settings can provoke the very anxiety that is the root cause of the child’s condition. for someone with sm whose silence is triggered by anxiety and/or interpersonal difficulties, the result of being the center of attention during therapy could prove to be paralyzing. thus, the impact of an unintimidating, undemanding animal could potentially reap positive gains. music therapy. music therapy is another pp intervention that could potentially help children with sm. according to researchers, music therapy is a psychoanalytically oriented response to children and adolescents who experience disturbances in perception, behavior, school-related issues, or physical activities. music therapy provides children with the opportunity to communicate in the context of therapeutic play, helping them increase their expressive 68 lindsey r. leacox, margarita meza, tammy gregersen ability and understand their unconscious motivations. using improvisation of the instrumental, vocal, and movement variety offers experiences with variable tiers of emotional expression. the distinctive value of such improvisations in music therapy lies in their spontaneity and unpredictability. that is to say, even before the child’s expression can be verbalized, their reaction is already being expressed through a different medium, which results in the child’s increased ability to express feelings that had previously been impossible to verbalize. although the purpose of treatments using music are often directed at inspiring emotional expression, there can be numerous additional goals like stress or anxiety relief, improvement of emotion and quality of life enhancement for illness sufferers. in experimentation, control group members who participated in music therapy (e.g., listening to a half-hour of soothing music twice daily for two weeks) demonstrated greater reductions in stress, anxiety, and depression than those who did not (chang, chen & huang, 2008). laughter therapy. one’s ability to manage and savor the positive in life is enhanced through humor. as a tool to cope, laughter and humor alleviate anxiety (kuiper & martin, 1993; moran & massam, 1999; yovetich, dale, & hudak, 1990), thus protecting individuals from the repercussions of stress (lefcourt & martin, 1986; martin & dobbin, 1988; martin & lefcourt, 2004). laughter helps to preserve a healthy perspective during difficult times and increases the visible expression of happiness, improving a person’s capacity to cope with negative-narrowing experiences (bryant & veroff, 2007). experiments in pp have provided evidence that positive emotions can undo the effects that linger following a negative emotion (fredrickson & levenson, 1998; fredrickson, mancuso, branigan, & tugade, 1999). research suggests that two different positive emotions, contentment and amusement, share the capacity to reverse negative emotional arousal. moreover, positive emotions may also undo the psychological or cognitive narrowing produced by negative emotions. this is most likely due to the notion that positive emotions broaden an individual’s momentary thought—action repertoires in ways that are irreconcilable with the continuance of negative emotion (fredrickson, 2000). albeit contentment and amusement do not always result in laughter, when combining the body of literature on laughter we find it convincing enough to examine whether it has positive effects on the anxiety accompanying sm. this study draws from applied linguistics, pp, and speech pathology. considering the inverse relationship found in applied linguistics of anxiety and wtc (and in the case of a speech pathology diagnosis of sm—a serious unwillingness to communicate) and the previous investigations that demonstrate the potential encouraging effects of pp interventions on lowering anxiety and increasing well-being, this study seeks to answer the question as to whether the incorporation of pet, music, and laughter therapies into speech pathology 69when language anxiety and selective mutism meet… treatment will increase the wtc of a bilingual selectively mute child and provide him with the courage and resilience to speak in situations in which he currently remains silent. method case study participant marco, whose family was originally from mexico and subsequently moved to the u.s., was a 7-year, 8-month-old male at his initial assessment. he had a suspected diagnosis of sm and notable past medical and social history. he only spoke to family members and did not speak at school. although somewhat withdrawn and rather fearful of social embarrassment, he did not present with social isolation and withdrawal as he was regularly observed nonverbally interacting with children on the playground and in the classroom. at home, marco’s mother and father spoke primarily spanish to him (80% of the time), and his older spanish-english bilingual brother spoke primarily english to him. marco’s mother reported she understood english relatively well but was more comfortable speaking in spanish. however, when marco chose to communicate, he primarily spoke in english. marco’s medical history began with a premature birth that required hospitalization and ventilation for three months. subsequently, he had bouts with otitis media requiring the placement of pressure equalization tubes when he was a year and a half old. he also suffered from asthma. for a club foot, he needed to wear specialized shoes. in terms of marco’s history with speech and language services, marco began receiving attention at a community clinic around the age of four for difficulties with speech sounds and grammatical constructions, but therapy was discontinued due to adequate progress after a year and a half of weekly therapy. when he started kindergarten, marco was identified for speech and language services because he was not using verbal communication, although he appeared to have adequate auditory comprehension skills. his mother brought recordings of marco speaking in english at home to quell the supposition that he did not verbalize at all. after a full evaluation, marco was diagnosed with sm, a mixed receptive and expressive language delay, and developmental delay by the speech pathology team. marco first arrived at the university clinic for an evaluation in the fall of his 1st grade year, where he attended an english-only elementary school in the midwestern united states. he had repeated kindergarten due to the difficulties encountered by his teachers in assessing his abilities because of the absence of 70 lindsey r. leacox, margarita meza, tammy gregersen verbal output. at school, marco received english speech and language therapy services, focusing on the use of a podd (pragmatic organization dynamic display) to communicate in the classroom with assistance from a special education para-educator. a podd is a form of augmentative and alternate communication that provides visual support that permits communication. marco’s mother was most concerned that he was still not speaking at school, and she noted that he had difficulties pronouncing some sounds in english. marco received three months of therapy at the university clinic with minimal to moderate gains in verbal communication in the therapy setting and at school. during his second semester of treatment, three positive behavior treatments were trialed in conjunction with his speech-language therapy, which is the focus of this study. procedures throughout the spring semester at the university speech and hearing clinic (which also is a training site for students in communicative sciences and disorders and provides services for individuals in the community who have communication and swallowing disorders), a graduate student clinician introduced different strategies to facilitate language with marco. pet-assistance, music, and laughter were each introduced systematically in conjunction with speech-language interventions to increase marco’s comfort and verbalizations throughout the semester. marco participated in a total of 26 one-on-one 50-minute sessions, over a period of three and a half months. sessions were scheduled for twice a week across 15 weeks. pet-assistance was introduced in the third week of therapy and incorporated weekly (every monday), and music and laughter were introduced during the eighth week of therapy and incorporated (every wednesday) on a rotating basis (e.g., one wednesday laughter, next wednesday music). sessions were designed with 30 minutes of speech-language intervention with 10–20 minutes dedicated to one of the three pp interventions to facilitate communication. speech-language intervention time focused on remediating marco’s phonological disorder and increasing nonverbal and verbal communication through books, games, and play activities. this was based on the research that up to 50% of children with sm present with concomitant speech and language impairment (kolvin & fundudis, 1981; mcinnes, fung, manassis, fiksenbaum, & tannock, 2004; steinhausen & juzi, 1996) along with the social anxiety. pet-assisted therapy. a certified service dog, “bumper,” came with a pet caretaker once a week for 15 –20 minutes of speech therapy for eleven sessions. an initial introduction was planned to see if the pet would be an appropriate match for marco. at the first meeting, marco was hesitant, but he 71when language anxiety and selective mutism meet… continued to participate more each session. throughout the subsequent weeks, marco engaged in different activities which required both nonverbal and verbal communication with bumper and the graduate student clinician. for example, marco was instructed by his clinician on how to command bumper to retrieve items by saying “ok, bumper” while pointing to an object. he also verbally produced a few target phrases (e.g., “get vest,” “get leash”) to give commands to bumper and to increase verbalizations. he also participated in book reading activities to increase language and literacy opportunities with bumper present. see table 1 for therapy progression. in the fifteenth and final week of treatment (session 26), the graduate student clinician and supervisor visited marco’s school to participate in a small group activity with marco and two of his peers, multiple educational support staff (e.g., school slp, special education teacher, classroom assistant), bumper, and the certified service dog’s owner. a benchmark was met when marco verbally commanded bumper to fetch items in front of his peers and educational staff. peer interaction during this group activity was facilitated, as a same-age peer helped marco hide an item to be retrieved by bumper. the team was thrilled when marco demonstrated generalization of skills learned in the clinic setting to his school environment. music. prior to the initiation of treatment, marco’s mother had reported that although marco did not sing on request, she sometimes heard him singing in his room by himself. for this reason, the team thought that music therapy might potentially produce some positive results. music was integrated for 10–20 minutes during three separate sessions, alternating weeks with laughter. music sessions consisted of the clinician and marco selecting instruments of their choice, and listening to familiar children’s songs to facilitate opportunities for language. the graduate clinician initially led the music activities, choosing an instrument and playing it. later, marco chose instruments and kept the rhythm to a song (e.g., playing on a toy xylophone). after three sessions, the music activities did not facilitate as much language output as intended but were seen via marco’s enthusiasm and engagement to be affectively advantageous. the music provided opportunities for repetitive verbal scripts where the clinician started a song (e.g., “old macdonald had a farm….”), and marco verbally finished it (e.g., “e-i-e-i-o”). this was a “cloze” task, where the clinician initiated a verbal prompt and provided wait-time for marco to fill-in-the-blank. such cloze tasks were commonly utilized with and without music throughout the intervention. see table 2 for examples of session content and progress for music and laughter. laughter. laughter sessions lasted 10-20 minutes on three separate occasions, alternating weeks with music. laughter sessions consisted of the clinician 72 lindsey r. leacox, margarita meza, tammy gregersen and marco participating in five yoga poses per session (e.g., sit like a lion and then laugh like a lion, “rawrrrahahar”). when marco first came to the university clinic for speech therapy in the previous fall semester, laughter sessions had not yet been introduced. at that time, his laughter was inaudible; he produced the facial gestures of laughing without producing sound. when laughter was initially introduced, marco was hesitant to participate and primarily watched the clinician and laughed at the clinician’s silly laughing behavior. after the first session, he was more engaged and helped to select which of the five animal poses to complete. during the laughter sessions, marco audibly laughed in a much louder manner. he appeared to enjoy these laughter sessions and demonstrated an increase in perceived loudness. see table 2 below. instruments to evaluate treatment progress, data were collected using the following: a) weekly clinical progress notes, b) parent questionnaire, and c) anecdotal information from cross-disciplinary collaborations. weekly clinical progress notes. documentation for speech-language intervention involved clinical writing known as soap notes, which were written after each therapy session to describe subjective information, objective data of session goals, assessment of performance, and planning for the next session. soap notes were written by the graduate student clinician under the supervision of the certified slp. parent questionnaire. to measure parent perception of marco’s communication abilities, a parent questionnaire was provided before and after intervention to broadly quantify preand post-treatment changes. marco’s mother answered 13 likert-type scaling questions ranging from 1 (always) to 5 (never); questionnaire items focused on the frequency of communication at school (5 items), at home (4 items), and outside of school (4 items). for example, one school scaling question asked, “when called on by his/her teacher, my child would answer” (letamendi, chavira, hitchcock, roesch, shipon-blum, stein, & roesch, 2008). items were from a previous study and translated into spanish by one of the authors of the present study. cross-disciplinary collaboration. cross-disciplinary collaboration included the communication between marco’s graduate student clinician, marco’s school slp (via email correspondence), and updates from his mother. only documented comments (i.e., soap notes, archived e-mails) were included to describe case progress. 73when language anxiety and selective mutism meet… results triangulating both qualitative and quantitative measures, this case study focuses on describing the procedures and results of three pp interventions: pet-assistance, music, and laughter. table 1 and table 2 provide examples of treatment session content and outcomes collected from the weekly clinical soap notes. there were four absences (two missed sessions for the academic calendar’s spring break; one clinician absence and one client absence for illness). table 1 pet-assistance: example session content and results from clinical writing soap notes pet-assistance session findings week 3 (session 4) marco was excited to discover that a dog would be present during the tx (i.e., treatment) session. marco was hesitant at first but quickly warmed up to bumper. marco indicated he would enjoy tx, if bumper continues to come. marco instructed bumper to perform four tricks (i.e., fetch leash, fetch vest, fetch treat, shake) for five individuals. week 5 (session 8) when prompted from clinician (i.e., “say it a little louder”), marco used a louder voice and repeated the task. marco was hesitant to command bumper to “get leash” and “get vest” but did so hesitantly. marco used his soft voice (a loudness rating of 2) to introduce bumper to a new friend (i.e., another graduate student clinician). marco verbally communicated in 5 out of 5 opportunities and used his voice (rated at a loudness rating of a 3) to ask a question. after one model (i.e., “say bye”), marco said “bye” to the clinician at the end of the session. week 8 (session 13) marco was hesitant to command the dog. marco required multiple verbal cues while commanding bumper. marco produced words to finish cloze tasks during the book activity through verbal and visual prompts (e.g., clinician looked at marco with puzzled face). marco greeted the clinician at the beginning and end of tx session but required an elicitation (e.g., “what do you say?”). week 13 (session 21) mom reported that marco has a best friend at school, who he says ‘hello’ to everyday. mom reported marco has asked for a dog. marco participated in pet therapy and commanded bumper to fetch by saying “ok, bumper.” marco also completed a book activity, “brown bear, brown bear.” marco produced an 8-word sentence to the graduate student clinician (i.e., “red bird, red bird, what do you see?”) when completing a repetitive book activity with bumper during speech therapy. 74 lindsey r. leacox, margarita meza, tammy gregersen table 2 laughter & music: example session content & results from clinical writing soap notes laughter music early week 8 (session 14) marco was hesitant to engage in the yoga activity but participated more once he felt comfortable. marco showed great emotion (laughing, rolling on floor, etc.) during the yoga activity. marco also presented with balance [difficulties] during 3 out of the 5 yoga poses (plane, lion, turtle, giraffe, lady bug). early week 10 (session 16) the clinician began playing the first song during music therapy and arranged the instruments. the clinician gave no instructions and began playing an instrument of her choice. marco began playing with the clinician and continued throughout the whole activity. middle week 11 (session 18) marco displayed enjoyment and increased laughter during laughter therapy. mom reported that marco approached and said “hi” to one child on the playground during recess. she reported being very happy with the progress marco has made. middle week 12 (session 20) the clinician implemented the use of a “loud” and “soft” column to increase the loudness of marco’s verbalizations when conversing with unfamiliar listeners. this acted as motivation for marco to get more checkmarks in the loud column. marco enjoyed the music therapy and required to prompting to play with the instruments. late week 13 (session 22) marco displayed enjoyment and increased laughter during laughter therapy. late week 14 (session 24) marco participated in music. marco used his quiet voice to say “hi” to the supervisor for the first time. parent questionnaire table 3 presents pretest to post-test changes on the parent questionnaire. overall, maternal perception (from total questionnaire items) resulted in significant changes from average likert scale scores of 4.15 to 3.46 ( p < 0.01). differences were noted between the three areas of school, home and family, as well as outside of school. 75when language anxiety and selective mutism meet… table 3 parent questionnaire preand post-test likert scales scale areas pretest(jan 2015) posttest (may 2015) delayed posttest (feb 2016) delayed posttest (may 2016) total items school home & family outside of school 4.15 4.6 2.75 5.0 3.46 3.8 2.0 4.5 3.54 3.4 2.75 4.5 2.54 3.0 1.0 3.5 note. a school item example was, “when called on by his/her teacher, my child would answer.” the client’s mother responded on scale of 1 (always) to 5 (never). question items were adapted from letamendi, chavira, hitchcock, roesch, shipon-blum, stein, & roesch, 2008 and translated into spanish by one of the authors. cross-disciplinary collaboration after the first pet-assistance session, marco’s mother had the annual iep (individualized educational plan) meeting with the team at his school to review his progress. the following is an excerpt from the bilingual slp supervising marco’s graduate student clinician (and author): the school reported he is talking more but not yet to the teacher or in a large group (but to his 1-on-1 assistant, as well as the 2 other boys who receive special education services). mom shared with the school team how we trialed bringing the dog into therapy and that he spoke in a louder voice and spoke also with unfamiliar speakers, which he normally wouldn’t do. the school said they’d be open to having the dog come – yay! (but teased that maybe the dog would have to come every day then). the school slp reported positive gains (e.g., marco was observed to quietly say “hi” to a peer at school on the playground during week 11 of treatment). marco’s willingness to communicate more in depth with the school personnel outside of the university clinic is one indication of progress. additionally, the school and school district’s cooperation to permit a visit with bumper demonstrated the value of this experience. discussion results show that pet-assistance therapy facilitated the most gains, which may be due to the increased intensity (every week for additional minutes) in 76 lindsey r. leacox, margarita meza, tammy gregersen comparison to the music and laughter. although music demonstrated some added enjoyment, music did not appear to have the same positive changes in verbal communication as the other to positive psychology interventions. laughter facilitated gains in the nonverbal domain by inciting voiced and audible laughter, as compared to previous inaudible laughter. to compare dosage intensity, pet-assistance included eleven, 15–20 minute sessions, while laughter and music only included three, 10–20 minute sessions each. an important “side product” variable that transcended the interventions that may have contributed to marco’s advancing progress was the positive rapport that the graduate student clinician was able to establish with marco, as evidenced by the favorable comments by marco’s mother. she saw the positive relationship built with the graduate student clinician as a key contributor to his progress and motivation in therapy. research suggests that in fluency therapy for clients who stutter, the client-clinician therapeutic relationship contributes to 30% of change, 40% from the client and his/her environment, and only 15% from the selected fluency technique. the remaining 15% contribution of change comes from hope and expectancy (asay & lambert, 2004; zebrowski & arenas, 2011). a clinician’s attributes of empathy, warmth, and genuineness are valuable as well (guitar, 2014). gregersen, macintyre, and meza (2016) address issues of pp in l2 learning and attribute the development of rapport in the form of social capital as one of the main contributing factors to the success of their study’s participants. in fact, they suggest that the effects of the pp exercises in their study were secondary to the effects of the relationships that were built. one year follow-up marco continued with speech language therapy to address his speech sound disorder and continued limitations in verbal communication outside of the home setting. however, he continued to make waxing and waning gains. due to the training setting of the university clinic, marco had a new graduate student clinician in the fall semester after the inclusion of the three pp interventions. the change in clinician led to some initial regression in verbal communication at therapy. over time and re-establishing client-clinician rapport, marco began to make progress again. therapy included stimulus fading, which consisted of gradually increased exposure to marco’s fear-evoking stimuli, combined with differential reinforcement (muris & ollendick, 2015) and the creation of a difficulty hierarchy of verbal and nonverbal communication. marco began recording short verbal messages on his mother’s cell phone at home and sending these messages to his graduate student clinician. this is notable progress as marco recorded these messages with his ‘full’ voice in place of a whisper. 77when language anxiety and selective mutism meet… also, one year post trial of the three positive behavior treatments, marco’s mother requested another session with bumper. conclusion parallels can be drawn between the inverse relationship that applied linguists have found between language anxiety and wtc in an l2 and the social anxiety that often times serves as the catalyst for a child’s sm. moreover, positive psychologists have recommended interventions that are meant to increase a person’s well-being and self-esteem. among them are exercises that include pets, music, and laughter. in this inter-disciplinary case study, we reported the results of a selectively mute youngster whose speech pathology therapy included these three elements. in triangulating weekly clinical soap notes, the responses from a parental questionnaire and correspondence from the cross-disciplinary collaborative team, we could ascertain that positive steps had been made in increasing marco’s verbal output in those social milieus that had previously left him mute. we conclude that from a clinical perspective, pet-assistance, music, and laughter therapy may be clinical tools underutilized by speech language pathologists, as these therapeutic strategies are not typically within the scope and practice of that discipline. however, given the underlying anxiety children with sm may have, these resources may be incorporated as part of the interdisciplinary team approach that is recommended for service provision (giddan, ross, sechler, & becker, 1997). epilogue marco’s mother reported that an opportunity arose for marco to adopt a dog of his own, which he was very excited about. marco’s mother also reported he will be attending a science camp in the summer, indicating his desire to participate despite his communication and social challenges. 78 lindsey r. leacox, margarita meza, tammy gregersen references adler, p. s., & kwon, s. w. 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(2008). connecting with kids: the eagala model with young children. eagala in practice, 18–21. lindsey r. leacox, margarita meza, tammy gregersen die sprechangst und selektiver mutismus bei einem zweisprachigen kind – die der positiven psychologie entnommenen behandlungsmethoden z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g selektiver mutismus ist ein phänomen, das häufiger als man früher vermutete auftritt, und die kinder der immigranten etwa dreimal häufiger als einsprachige kinder betrifft (toppelberg, tabors, coggins, lum & burgers, 2005). am selektiven mutismus können leiden: kinder mit sprechstörungen und/oder aussprachefehlern und die aus furcht vor unrichtigem akzent oder ärmlichem wortschatz wortkargen kinder. die vorliegende fallstudie untersucht die wirksamkeit der interdisziplinären behandlung eines achtjährigen kindes mit anwendung von den drei in positiver psychologie angewandten behandlungsverfahren. logopädische therapeutische sitzungen, an den der patient 14 wochen hindurch teilnahm, wurden um tiergestützte therapie, musiktherapie und gelotologie erweitert. ihre ergebnisse zeigen, dass tiergestützte therapie positive resultate brachten, während musiktherapie und gelotologie nur ansatzweise dazu beitrugen, das behandlungsziel zu erreichen. in dem beitrag werden auch erörtert: forschungsfolgen, möglichkeiten weiterer zusammenarbeit und schlussfolgerungen. grzegorz cebrat państwowa wyższa szkoła zawodowa in tarnów how to write an american death notice: some guidelines for novice obituarists a b s t r a c t the article aims at helping non-native speakers of english to write death notices, following the requirements of american tradition of the genre. it is based on the theoretical research into the genre, carried out by its author, who analyzed 1076 contemporary new york times notices, according to moves and steps model of genre analysis by j. swales and v. bhatia. having distinguished the death notice from the obituary, the author presents the communicative functions of the genre and its structure, consisting of seven moves, each made up of one to seven steps. their presentation and brief analysis is accompanied by 100 patterns and templates, which allows intermediate (b1–b2) students of english to create their own texts successfully step by step. keywords: american obituary, death notice, genre analysis aims of the project, methodology, and resources in the modern, globalized world, the issue of commemorating the dead worldwide has become significant: the rise of specialized websites, such as legacy.com, dedicated to hosting obituaries and death notices has enabled anyone that is willing to commemorate the deceased that they loved, admired or respected, to create their own text, submit it to the online edition of a british, american, canadian or australian newspaper, or upload it to a memorial site. therefore, it seems important that a non-native speaker of english should be able to write a short text that will comply with the standards of the genre, which is deeply rooted in british or american funeral tradition. it is not only the language competence, but first and foremost, cultural competence and theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 2 (2) 2016, pp. 101–123 102 grzegorz cebrat genre awareness that are required from a novice obituary or death notice writer (henceforward called an obituarist) so that his/her text could fulfill all fundamental requirements of the genre, since breaking the rules and principles, author’s negligence, improper register and style, incorrect or misleading information may offend or hurt the feelings of the decedent’s family, and meet with negative response of the community the deceased lived in. our article will concentrate solely on some basic communicative and linguistic aspects of the informative death notice, as we believe that, in comparison to that of the obituary, a text representing this genre is not only easier to prepare and write for a non-native speaker of english, but also more likely to be applied in a real life situation. furthermore, we expect an average student of english at the intermediate level (b1–b2) to be able to create their own text, following the templates, patterns, and lexicon provided in our article. the analysis is based on a larger project: the research into the contemporary american death notice (cebrat, 2016), in which the author carried out the genre analysis of a corpus of 1843 texts, including 1076 informative death notices (the remaining texts represent other subgenres: anniversary, condolence, and farewell notices) by following two analytical frameworks: john swales’s (1990) rhetorical move/step analysis, and vijay bhatia’s (1993) procedure for analyzing genres, and implementing the typology of the death notice, as proposed by jacek kolbuszewski (1997). the corpus contains all death notices published in the new york times in the period october 1–december 31, 2012, and downloaded from legacy.com website, the major provider of american obituaries and death notices. it should be remembered that all the structures, patterns, and templates proposed in the moves and steps structure of the informative death notice section below, were implemented in authentic texts, and thus, they represent the real state of the american death notice. it is strongly recommended that the teachers who are willing to practice writing death notices should invite their students to download some authentic notices from legacy.com and analyze their content, form, and function. however, before proceeding to the analysis, we have to define the genre of the death notice. obituary vs. death notice—confusable terms in our analysis it is important not to confuse two related press genres: the obituary and the death notice (also known as the death announcement). major traditional comprehensive dictionaries define the former as “a record or announcement of death or deaths, especially in a newspaper, usually compris103how to write an american death notice:… ing a brief biographical sketch of the deceased” (‘obituary’ in oxford english dictionary) or “notice of the death of a person, published in a newspaper or other periodical, accompanied by a biographical sketch which may be brief or extended” (‘obituary’ in webster’s new international dictionary); however, surprisingly, they lack any definition of the latter. only recently have the editors of the recent edition of oed online altered their definition, stating: “a record or announcement of a death, esp. in a newspaper or similar publication; (in later use) (also) spec. an appreciation appearing in a newspaper or news broadcast, of an eminent or well-known person who has recently died, typically including a brief biography” (‘obituary’ in oed online): its first part can roughly refer to the concept of the death notice, whereas the second might correspond to lengthy texts, written by professional obituarists. that distinction is clearly manifested in specialist dictionaries and encyclopedias; for instance, encyclopedia of death and dying states that an obituary “…can be described as a published notice of the details of a person’s death together with a biography cataloguing his or her life” (p. 334); whereas death notices “…are inserted in local newspapers by family and friends and are also known as paid obituaries” (p. 334). nigel starck, an obituarist and researcher into obituary practices in press, emphasizes that difference arguing that “this is particularly the case in the united states, where paid obituaries—in effect, lengthy death notices often incorporating a detailed life history—are common… that classified advertising headed obituaries or paid obituaries is often applied to what are, in reality, death notices” (starck, 2006, pp. 32–33). therefore, for most british and american newspapers, the term ‘obituary’ has been reserved for staff-written texts, which can be seen as news items telling something of the deceased’s life story rather than simply supplying biographic information; on the other hand, death notices or death announcements are treated as paid advertisements, and are used to refer to short texts written by families, friends or colleagues of the deceased (or funeral directors); they usually provide very basic information about him or her. preliminary considerations—aims of writing a death notice what an aspiring obituarist has to remember while setting about to write an informative death notice is the set of its crucial communicative functions, which involve: 1. informing the reading audience about a person’s death, its causes and circumstances, major facts concerning his/her biography, and his/her predeceased and survivors. 104 grzegorz cebrat 2. informing possible participants about the time, date and venue of services, donations and contributions. 3. honoring the deceased by highlighting his/her most highly valued and memorable traits as well as the most significant accomplishments. yet, such a notice does not only provide the information about the deceased and his/her postmortem celebrations, but also may help its author(s) express feelings of loss and grief resulting from death and provide psychological closure by the actual process of writing a death notice. furthermore, its publication establishes a community, which helps the bereaved family feel connected to other people that the deceased was related to, and if it is hosted online, at specialized websites, for example legacy.com, other mourners are invited to share their memories of the deceased (e.g., by contributing to a memorial book dedicated to him/her. optionally, its author(s) may thank particular community members (e.g., healthcare professionals, hospice staff, and friends) who might have helped in the terminal period of the life of the deceased. finally, a death notice can perform other important social functions: educate the community about facts concerning the deceased that may be unknown to, respected and highly regarded by its members, and last but not least, create historical or public record of death for further scholarly or private research, and, consequently, be stored in family records and help future genealogical research. having established the communicative purposes of the notice we can now proceed to the presentation of its structure and contents. the moves and steps structure of the informative death notice a great majority of analyzed informative notices consist of seven moves, of which only move 1 and move 2 should be regarded as obligatory; the remaining ones are typical yet optional; thus, they may be omitted: for example, move 5 or/and move 6, if an obituarist wishes to economize, or move 7, if the funeral arrangements are unknown, unspecified, or the funeral has already taken place. likewise, it is not necessary to include all the steps that each move is realized with: the only obligatory step in move 1 (identification component) is step 1 (the name of the deceased), as no notice can commemorate an anonymous person, other steps of that move only provide additional identification of the deceased; similarly, the content of move 4 (biographical component) depends on the person’s biography, and, obviously, the obituarist’s awareness of facts and details concerning his/her life. 105how to write an american death notice:… move 1: identifying the deceased: name, age, occupation, and place of residence: the identification component (ic) step 1: the name of the deceased. as alana baranick et al. (2005, p. 36) argue, the primary function of any obituary (and it can be added here, of any death notice) is to identify the deceased to a wide audience of readers through biographical information. it can be stated that generally it is a person’s name that can differentiate him/her from or confuse him/her with another person— presenting a reader with a regrettable situation that all obituarists wish to avoid. the majority of newspapers or websites require a notice to begin with the surname of the deceased, followed by his/her first and middle names, and optionally, by his/her professional or academic title: (1) doe—john david, phd in the case of a married woman, her maiden name can be given in parenthesis, preceded with the term ‘nee’: (2) doe—jane mary (nee wilson) additionally, if the person was commonly called with his nickname or the diminutive form of his/her given, it can be mentioned in quotation marks: (3) smith—joseph, known as “little joe” step 2: age at death. the simplest way of informing about the age of the deceased is to follow the conventional press patterns of following a person name with digits within commas (optionally preceded by ‘aged’), or with the dates of birth and death given in parentheses: (4) doe—john david, 87, or doe—john david, aged 87, (5) doe—jane mary (oct. 23, 1935—may 15, 2016) alternatively, the information may conclude the first sentence of the notice (move 2) by means of the phrases ‘at … years of age’ or ‘at the age of….” (see (8)). steps 3 and 4: occupation or profession, the recent place of residence. since a person may be well-known for his professional achievements, position or status, this information also helps identify him/her; it predominantly follows his name and age (and place of residence, if named): 106 grzegorz cebrat (6) doe—john david, phd, 87, professor of english at harvard university, the final piece of information to help readers of a notice identify the deceased is his/her place of residence; it follows the pattern: the name of the city and the abbreviated name of the state if s/he lived in the usa, or county (britain); it seems advisable to provide the name of a voivodship if s/he lived in poland. to sum up, move 1 can be summarized as the following sequence (optional components are parenthesized): (7) surname + given name(s) + (professional title) + (maiden name/ nickname/diminutive) + (age) + of + (place of residence) + (occupation) move 2: providing information concerning death circumstances (dc) the choice of verb it has been observed that obituarists notify readers about the death of a person by providing a set of details: predominantly, its date and/or day (93.2%), and less frequently its place (33.6%), cause (17.7%), and a manner a person died (21.4%) (cebrat, 2016, p. 174). customarily, the information is disclosed in a simple affirmative sentence (commonly the initial sentence of a notice), whose subject performs the identifying function, presented above as move 1; its adverbials contain more or less detailed information when, where, from what, and how a person died. the analysis has also revealed that the commonest verbs are ‘died’ (44%) and, its euphemistic synonym, ‘passed away’ (26%); very few obituarists (only 2%) decided to use other euphemistic expressions: ‘departed this world,’ ‘left,’ ‘expired,’ ‘went to/entered eternal rest,’ or ‘was called to rest.’ in the case of notices for clergymen or devout christians, it can be written that the deceased ‘was promoted to glory,’ ‘began new life in the kingdom of heaven,’ or ‘passed into life eternal’ (cebrat, 2016, pp. 175–179). in almost every third notice the verb has been entirely omitted; however, such ellipsis does not hinder the correct interpretation of a text, and, since it is published in the obituary section of a newspaper or memorial website, the meaning of the sentence can be properly deduced (see pattern (11)). steps 1 and 2: the date and place of death. it is a common practice to provide readers with the full date of death, although the year can be omitted, as it is clearly evident, since an informative notice is customarily published within few days or weeks after death. the day of week can be added; yet rarely is the more precise information about the time of death necessary; it is sufficient to write: ‘on the morning of wednesday, november 21.’ on the other hand, some obituarists tend to state only the day of the week, for instance, 107how to write an american death notice:… ‘died last monday,’ as they assume that readers, knowing the date of publication, will calculate the date of death. we believe that such a practice may be highly inconvenient, particularly if the notice is to be hosted online, and might be read in the subsequent months or even years. the information concerning the place of death is usually provided if a person died in a city or town different from his/her place of residence (see (11)). however, an obituarist may specify it, by stating ‘at home,’ ‘at his/her home,’ ‘at his greenwich village home’ (especially, if the deceased had more than one place of residence), ‘at mount sinai hospital’; moreover, it can be combined with the information on the manner and cause of death (the latter is usually mentioned if a person died in hospital; see step 3 and 4: the cause and the manner of death subsection below). thus, taking into consideration move 1 and 2, we suggest that the initial sentence of a death notice might follow one of basic patterns exemplified below: (8) doe—john david, phd, professor of english at harvard university, passed away on june 5, 2016 at the age of 87. (9) doe—john, 87, went to eternal rest on sunday, june 5, 2016. (10) doe—jane mary (oct. 23, 1935 – may 15, 2016), a native new yorker, died in seattle wa. (11) doe—jane mary, 81, of new york, on may 15, 2016 in seattle wa. steps 3 and 4: the cause and manner of death. presenting the cause of death remains a controversial issue, and a substantial number of obituarists decide either to omit it or deal with it in a most vague manner (cebrat, 2016, p. 182). we should not expect to find in any notice that a person died from diseases regarded as “unmentionable,” such as aids or syphilis, or his/her death resulted from drugs or alcohol abuse. if an obituarist wishes not to mention the specific cause of death, or does not know it, s/he can refer to it with a vague euphemistic phrase: ‘after a brief/short illness,’ which might be interpreted as heart attack, stroke or cardiac arrest, or ‘after a long illness,’ which should be understood as a synonym of cancer, alzheimer’s disease, dementia, or other chronic illnesses. an elderly person may die from ‘natural causes’ or ‘declining health.’ however, if s/he does want to state it, s/he can either write about it in a straightforward manner, for example: ‘died of/from complications related to pneumonia,’ ‘passed away on october 4th as a result of a sudden massive stroke,’ ‘suffered from heart attack and died,’ or more euphemistically, ‘succumbed to complications of cancer.’ in the case of cancer and other prolonged or chronic diseases, an obituarist may employ the metaphor illness is war. a person lost his/her war and was defeated by death; nevertheless, an obituarist can emphasize the length of the decease (see (12)) or his/her perseverance, courage, and patience displayed while coping with the terminal disease s/he had to 108 grzegorz cebrat endure, by means of a verb phrase ‘lost his/her battle/‘fight/struggle’; the noun can be additionally premodified with an adjective ‘brave,’ ‘brief,’ ‘courageous,’ ‘hard,’ ‘heroic,’ ‘long,’ ‘noble,’ or ‘valiant’ (see (13)): (12) doe—jane mary, 81, of new york, on may 15, 2016, after a seven year battle with ovarian cancer. (13) doe—john david, died at home on june 5, 2016, after a valiant, graceful, and dignified battle against the cancer. (14) doe—jane mary (oct. 23, 1935—may 15, 2016) lost her courageous fight with ovarian cancer. if death resulted from a fatal accident, an obituarist may provide readers with more detailed information on its causes and circumstances. we argue that it seems to be the matter of the utmost importance, particularly if the deceased was a young person as his/her death is regarded as premature, unfair, and unjustified. therefore, notice readers expect obituarists to provide them with more detailed information on its causes and circumstances: (15) smith—tom, aged 26, died on december 11, 2015 of injuries sustained in a motor vehicle accident in yonkers, ny. the way a person died can be expressed by means of an adverb, for instance ‘suddenly,’ ‘unexpectedly,’ ‘peacefully,’ or ‘quietly’: the first two terms may suggest that death resulted from heart attack or stroke, and can be regarded as a synonym of the phrase ‘after a short illness’; whereas the last two can be interpreted as euphemistic synonyms of a dying person being unconscious, asleep or comatose. alternatively, a brief prepositional phrase can be used: ‘with dignity,’ ‘at/in peace,’ ‘in his/her sleep’, ‘with clarity and vigor,’ or a clause, providing additional information that would account for unsuspected and unpredictable death: ‘s/he died suddenly on october 10th while preparing to go to work.’ if that is a case, an obituarist can emphasize the fact that death occurred in presence of a person’s family ‘in the company of his/her loving family,’ ‘surrounded by his/her family,’ ‘surrounded by family and friends,’ ‘with family at/by his/her side.’ thus, pattern (13) can be extended into (16): (16) doe—john david, died peacefully at home, surrounded by his family, on june 5, 2016, after a valiant, graceful, and dignified battle against the cancer. finally, to avoid a lengthy and clumsy statement, move 1 and 2 can be expressed in two sentences, for instance, combining (6) and (16). 109how to write an american death notice:… (17) doe—john david, phd, professor of english at harvard university, passed away on june 5, 2016, at the age of 87. he died peacefully at home, surrounded by his family, after a valiant, graceful, and dignified battle against the cancer. we strongly advice novice obituarists to avoid the collocation ‘died tragically,’ being literal translation of polish ‘zmarł(a) tragicznie,’ and suggesting that death did not result from natural causes. in fact, death of each person is always a tragic experience for survivors. move 3: presenting the predeceased and survivors: the family component (fc) comparing obituary practices in the usa, britain, and australia, nigel starck comments on special attention paid by american professional obituarists to the concluding section of staff-edited obituaries, which is devoted to the family of the deceased: “the closing stages of american obituaries are magnanimous in terms of devoting space to surviving family. offspring, and their home towns, are named; siblings are accorded similar recognition; grandchildren are enumerated” (stark, 2006, p. 228). this observation is shared by isabel marzol, who argues that the ‘family stage,’ as she calls the fc, usually takes up one or two paragraphs, and comprises two pieces of information: “the trajectory of the deceased in family terms (marriages, divorces, offspring, and deceased members) and the surviving members” (marzol, 2006, p. 70). we have observed that, contrary to that in staff-edited obituaries, the position of the family component in death notices is not fixed, and the fc hardly ever concludes them, as the common practice is to finish the notice with move 7. if shorter texts (up to about a hundred and fifty words) are considered, the fc occupies a more prominent position and immediately follows moves 1 and 2; however, in longer texts, in which obituarists concentrate on presenting and evaluating the life of the deceased, it is usually placed after moves 5 and 6. the survivors’ list may begin with the phrase: ‘s/he is survived by…,’ which can be reduced to ‘survived by…’; or deleted entirely. survivors are customarily enumerated in the order of importance: spouse, children (in order of date of birth, and their spouses), grandchildren, great-grandchildren, parents, grandparents (if alive), siblings, and other relatives. the list can be concluded with the names of friends—and pets. dead family members are listed separately; in that case the sentence begins with the phrase: ‘s/he was predeceased by…,’ ‘s/he was preceded in death by…’ or ‘predeceased by,’ or his/her name is preceded by the term ‘late.’ each listed relative is presented with a phrase 110 grzegorz cebrat denoting the relationship of the decedent to him/her; optionally, the place of survivor’s residence can follow his/her name, according to the formula below: (18) adjective/adjectives + kinship term + of + relative’s/relatives’ name(s) + of + place of residence it can be exemplified by the following imaginary example: (19) john is survived by his beloved wife mary, dear son frank of washington, dc, adoring daughter susan smith of chicago, il. he was predeceased by his loving parents, william and susan doe of houston, tx. he also leaves behind his beloved cat, seymour. if the survivors’ list immediately follows the initial sentence, it can commence with ‘s/he was…,’ which tends to be omitted; in that case, death notice readers do not have to be informed that the list contains survivors’ names only; however, if obituarists wish to list the predeceased relatives, the phrase ‘predeceased by’ is obligatory to avoid confusion: (20) beloved husband of betsy. devoted father of sam and nora. cherished son of shirley and a.j. loving brother of holly and richard. predeceased by sister muriel. if obituarists wish to include the names of present or former spouses of decedent’s relatives or any additional information, they can insert them within parenthesis immediately after the relatives’ names; additionally, in the case of the decedent’s spouse, the period (in years) of their marriage can be stated as well. in the case of a complex network of family relationships, the survivors’ list can be split into two or more sentences for the sake of clarity, as in the following example: …ellie is survived by her loving husband of 67 years irving lazaroff; her beloved children daniel, barbara and william; adored grandsons cameron and byron lazaroff-puck, (barbara and former spouse wolfgang puck’s sons) and benjamin and timothy lazaroff, (william and daughter-in law irene’s sons); and john hanwell, barbara’s loyal partner. other surviving family members include sister-in-law sylvia berkowitz, (widow of ellie’s brother harold), and their sons barry berkowitz, ellie’s godchild, (his wife linda), and brother douglas berkowitz, (his wife marleta); diane weiss schildkraut and edward weiss (his wife renee) children of her beloved late sister jean and late brother-in-law michael weiss; dear first cousin selma solomon and her darling second cousins robert berke and wife sheila, 111how to write an american death notice:… along with many great nieces, nephews and cousins…. (death notice for ellie lazaroff, published in the new york times on oct. 4, 2012) american obituaries and death notices share a tradition of modifying a kinship term with an appropriately selected adjective that subjectively appraises the relationship between the deceased and the survivors/predeceased. the set of adjectives used in the sub-corpus is limited: the commonest adjective, ‘beloved’ is predominantly used to refer the bond that, in the opinion of obituarists, was the most important and strongest, hence ‘beloved wife/husband,’ ‘beloved mother/ father’ or ‘beloved grandmother/grandfather’; ‘loving’ as well as ‘cherished’ are used more widely and can appear in a collocation with any kinship term. on the contrary, the use of other adjectives tends to be limited to representatives of particular generations, for example ‘adoring,’ ‘adored,’ ‘proud,’ or ‘doting’ are predominantly used while referring to parental and grandparental generations (including aunts and uncles), whereas ‘dear’ is mainly used to value relatives of the same generation (brothers, sisters, cousins) and friends. likewise, the use of ‘devoted’ is generally limited to the closest relatives (wives, parents and children, in particular), ‘caring’ to the closest female relatives (mother, wife or sister), and ‘loyal’ to wives, brothers, friends, and partners (see cebrat, 2016, p. 198, for the frequency of adjectives used in the fc). move 4: presenting the deceased: the biographical component (bc) the biographical component either precedes or follows the family component (move 3). the bc can comprise seven steps that highlight consecutive periods of a person’s life, beginning with his/her birth and family background, through periods of education, military service, employment to retirement; and regard both his/her professional and private life; however, they are not necessarily sequenced in the chronological order. step 1: date and place of birth; step 2: parents and family background. presence or absence of particular steps depends entirely on obituarists’ choices and preferences; they can focus on some and omit others, rearrange their order so as to emphasize those moments or aspects of a decedent’s life, activities or achievements that, in their opinion, are worth commemorating. however, it is essential that obituarists collect and analyze all the necessary data before they set out to create that component of a notice so as to make the story of the decedent’s life accurate, lively, and memorable. if a person’s biography follows a traditional chronological pattern, the information concerning the date and place of his/her birth, parents and (and, optionally, remote ancestors) should definitely begin the bc: 112 grzegorz cebrat (21) s/he was born + in + place on + date + to + parents’ names (22) s/he was born in + place + on + date. his/her parents were…. step 3: childhood, education and marriage. information about education involves listing schools, colleges, and universities that the deceased attended, as well as diplomas and certificates s/he was awarded, and degrees s/he held. it may be limited to enumeration of names of schools, faculties, and degrees earned in each: (23) she graduated from school/college/university in year with a degree in + field. (24) he was a graduate of the public school system in city, he went on to earn his ba in from college/university, and his ma in field from college/university. he also pursued doctoral work at university. alternatively, it may emphasize exceptional achievements in sports and education, as well as membership in college sports teams and honor societies, such as phi beta kappa or sigma chi: (25) he excelled in both sport and sport, and was an exceptional student. a graduate of high school in 1981, he then matriculated to university, where he received undergraduate and graduate degrees in field, graduating summa cum laude and elected to honor society. to make a more vivid picture of the deceased an obituarist can also recall some memorable or joyful events from decedent’s childhood: (26) she had fond childhood memories of going to … with her mother, visits with her grandparents, swimming in … river when visiting her uncle samuel. (27) he spent his childhood in … where his paternal grandfather was a…. his summers were spent at the home of his maternal grandparents in…. there, he spent his days biking miles around the lake, fishing, and boating with his many cousins. finally, an obituarist can refer to the decedent’s marital status, providing information on the name(s) of his/her spouse, date of their wedding or the length of their marriage, and the names of their children. 113how to write an american death notice:… (28) s/he married name, his/her high school sweetheart in year. they had number children/sons/daughters: names. they divorced in year. s/he remarried in year. her/his late second husband/wife name died in…. s/he is survived by her/his third husband name. this section of the bc can be reduced or omitted entirely if an obituarist intends to create an extended family component to be filled in with relevant information. step 4: military service, awarded medals and decorations. if the deceased was a veteran, his military service and its details, such as its length and type, the dates of entry and separation, the dates of oversees service, the unit with which he served, the attained rank, as well as earned medals and decorations, should be included in the bc. that information can be expressed briefly in one or two sentences chosen from the following set: (29) during wwii, he served as major in the united states army. (30) during wwii, he was commissioned as second lieutenant in the united states army corps of engineers and promoted to first lieutenant. (31) his military service was a source of pride. (32) he was proud of his service in the united states navy. he served from year to year and was honorably discharged. (33) he was stationed in france with the unit number/name. (34) he was wounded in the battle of name on date and spent years recuperating in army hospitals. (35) he was awarded the purple heart and the bronze and silver stars. (36) he served in the us army; earning the purple heart. step 5: employment, accomplishments, awards, honors and other recognition, retirement. what follows the information about decedent’s education and/or military service is the chronological presentation of his/her professional career, and/or government or church service. the amount of information varies, depending on the type of job, and number of places of employment, promotions, posts, and positions. as a minimum it contains the type of job and/or position, name of place, and period of employment, which can be presented in one or two sentences: (37) after moving to location in year, s/he began working for company as a position. s/he retired in year. 114 grzegorz cebrat yet, if s/he held more positions, his bc may resemble his/her cv, emphasizing his/her promotions and accomplishments in professional career; if applicable, awards and other forms of recognition should be enumerated. the set of the following five templates is by no means comprehensive, and is up to the obituarist in charge to select which facts of the decedent’s professional biography ought to be highlighted: (38) s/he enjoyed a long career as profession/occupation. beginning in year as position, he worked his/her way into and up the field. that was truly his professional passion and calling. he served as a position, and was promoted to position in year. after number years, he became position, retiring in year. marty was qualities and was awarded with name of award. (39) his/her professional life began with position in company name. he worked for company name before accepting a position as a position with company name in year. at company name, he successfully rose from position (year) to position (year) and, finally, to position (year). (40) after college/university his/her professional career included positions rising from instructor to full professor and chair of the department of faculty at university in years, and dean of college/faculty at the university in years. (41) following the war, he joined the company name as a position. after numerous positions, including time as position at company name, he became chairman and ceo of company name in year, and held that position for number years before retirement. he was a director of company name. he served as chairman of the name board. in addition, he worked tirelessly for numerous civic organizations. he received an honorary title from university in year. having completed the presentation of the decedent’s professional career, an obituarist can proceed to describing his/her life after retirement: (42) after his/her retirement s/he served on the board of organization/ club/charity. (43) after his/her retirement, s/he spent winters in florida and travelled extensively visiting countries around the world. (44) after number years of outstanding contributions to the success of company name s/he and spouse’ name moved to their retirement residence in location, in year. 115how to write an american death notice:… (45) s/he retired in the year devoting his/her later years to travels around the world with his wife/her husband, including enjoying time at their second home in location. steps 6: voluntary work; step 7: private life: hobbies, sports, and/or special interests, activities, passions, and other enjoyment. apart from professional career obituarists may emphasize the importance of voluntary work, and decedent’s membership in charities and other non-profit organizations: religious, fraternal, political, as well as his/her other affiliations, and the positions s/he held, both in employment and retirement period: (46) s/he began the first of many volunteer positions with organization (47) s/he continued her volunteer career at…. (48) s/he was a founding member/trustee of…. (49) s/he served in executive leadership or board member positions to many organizations. (50) s/he was honored to have served in…. (51) s/he was a generous and anonymous patron/supporter of institution(s) and countless local charities and foundations. (52) s/he often contributed his time and skills to…. (53) s/he was always available to offer a helping hand to…. it is the best idea to conclude the biographical component by presenting the less formal yet more intimate picture of decedent’s life: his hobbies, sports, activities, and passions that might have been unknown to general public. obituarists may tell a funny anecdote, quote his/her favorite words or phrases, recall memorable events or speeches, interests or pastimes they shared. it has to be remembered that the style of treatment the private life of the deceased and his/her activities in a notice seems to reflect the attitude of its authors to him/her and the relationship between them; it may range from the solemn style of the notice written by decedent’s co-workers or subordinates to intimate and heartfelt memories of the closest friends. death notices can be a way to show their authors’ unique perspective on decedent’s life and to share a sense of humor. this is, perhaps, the most difficult and demanding component of a notice, requiring originality and imagination—therefore we do not suggest any fixed patterns or templates to imitate. 116 grzegorz cebrat move 5: evaluating life and achievements of the deceased by presenting his/her personal qualities and attributes: evaluative component (ec) personal qualities and attributes of the deceased are listed after the presentation of the private life of the deceased; thus his/her bc may be concluded with a statement summarizing his/her personal traits, and evaluating his life and accomplishments in a single sentence: (54) s/he was a(n) adjective(s) man/woman. yet, obituarists are advised to provide readers with more detailed evaluation, by enriching their list of qualities and attributes with scenes of the decedent’s life or anecdotes that will illustrate or exemplify the traits they have presented. they can emphasize the lasting and profound positive impact of the deceased, his/her life and attributes on the society s/he lived in, particularly on their families, colleagues and friends—and the obituarists themselves. they can also point at the decedent’s unique qualities while referring to feelings of overwhelming grief and irreplaceable loss: (55) s/he was beloved by friends for his/her…. (56) s/he leaves scores of relatives and friends who benefitted from his/ her…. (57) everyone s/he met was struck by his/her…. (58) his/her … was remarkable and he made a positive impact on many lives. (59) s/he was a profoundly spiritual person whose qualities were evident to all who knew her. move 6: expressing survivors’ emotions: the farewell message component (fmc) the purpose of the farewell message component (fmc) is to express emotions caused by a person’s death (step 1), promise to keep him/her in obituarist’s memories (step 2), and wish him/her eternal peace (step 3). it is the only component of the entire text in which its author(s) can address the deceased, who is regarded here as a virtual reader of the notice, in contrast to real addressees, that is, living members of the community. step 1: expressing the loss caused by death. the declaration of loss is expressed with active or passive structures with the verb ‘miss,’ optionally 117how to write an american death notice:… preceded by an adverb ‘deeply,’ ‘greatly,’ or ‘sorely.’ it is either the whole person that is missed or his/her particular qualities; in the latter case move 5 is either optional or can be combined with move 6, so as to avoid repeating the decedent’s attributes and qualities. it is also worth remembering that this declaration is the only component within the notice that may reveal its authorship, since informative death notices remain, by convention, unsigned. therefore, obituarists may optionally insert either their own names (i.e., survivors’ names; see templates below) or a collective term denoting the mourners’ group (e.g., business partners, colleagues, neighbors, friends, etc.) that submitted or uploaded the notice: (60) john doe/you will be (deeply/greatly/sorely) missed (by survivors’ names /term denoting the mourners’ group). (61) jane doe was/you were a(n) attribute(s) person/woman who will be (deeply/greatly/sorely) missed (by survivors’ names /term denoting the mourners’ group). (62) john’s/jane’s/your personal qualities will be (deeply/greatly/ sorely) missed (by survivors’ names /term denoting the mourners’ group). (63) term denoting the mourners’ group will miss your/his/ her personal qualities. step 2: promising remembrance. additionally, obituarists may declare that they will remember the deceased and/or his/her qualities; steps 1 and 2 can also be joined into a single pattern, as in (64): (64) john doe/you will be (deeply/greatly/sorely) missed and (always/forever) remembered (for personal qualities) (by survivors’ names /term denoting the mourners’ group). (65) jane doe/you will be (always/forever) remembered. step 3: wishing the deceased eternal peace. optionally, the fmc, is concluded with a traditional religious expression, characteristic of inscriptions that appear on headstones and tombs (r.i.p.), wishing the deceased eternal rest and peace: (66) may s/he rest in peace (67) may you rest in peace (68) rest in peace 118 grzegorz cebrat either of the abovementioned sentences can conclude the entire text of the notice if its author does not know the details of, or does not intend to inform its readers about the funeral arrangements. move 7: informing about funeral arrangements: funeral information component (fic) obituarists have to attach utmost importance to detailed and precise information concerning funeral arrangements, for, by publishing it, a decedent’s family and/or other mourners invite notice readers participate in all or some ceremonies, inform them that they have already taken place or are to be held in unspecified time in the future, or, on the contrary, their participation in the funeral or other ceremonies is restricted, and only presence of certain categories of mourners is requested. step 1: providing information concerning the funeral and other ceremonies and attendance restrictions. funeral information component (fic) is required to be highly informative, accurate, and detailed: notice readers are expected to find out the time and venue of the funeral service/mass, reception, the date and place of interment. additionally, it may contain information about the persons, for instance, the name of an officiating priest. if the ceremonies are to take place, the structures should contain a verb in the future tense: (69) a memorial service/funeral will be held on date at time at venue. (70) funeral on date at time from the … funeral home, address, followed by a mass of christian burial at … church, address at time. burial will be at … cemetery, address at time. (71) mass of christian burial will be celebrated on date at time at … church, address by priest’s name. (72) priest’s name will officiate. (73) a special gathering to remember and celebrate the life of john doe will be held on date at time at venue. if deceased or his/her family demanded the funeral service be attended by the closest relatives only or there is no service at all, their wish is expressed directly in the fic; in such a case, obviously neither time nor place of the ceremony is specified in a notice: (74) services will be private for immediate family only. (75) in accordance with jane doe’s wishes, there will be a graveside service for immediate family/ there will be no funeral service. 119how to write an american death notice:… (76) burial/interment private. (77) as john wished, his body will be cremated and there will be no funeral service. in some cases the deceased expressed their special wish concerning the way their bodies should be dealt with, which provides the reason for the not holding funeral ceremony: (78) his/her body has been donated to yale medical school. (79) his/her ashes are to be placed at sea according to his/her wish. if the ceremonies have already taken place, they should be referred to in the past tense and do not have to be so detailed: (80) his/her ashes were put to final rest in place on date. (81) services were held in place, where he was laid to rest on date. finally, if the details of any ceremony has not been determined yet, such information should also be included: (82) a memorial service will be held in june, contact the family for location and time. (83) a memorial service/mass will be held at venue on a date to be determined. step 2: providing information regarding funeral home in charge. the fic may contain specific information concerning the funeral home that is to provide (or provided) funeral services for the deceased. since contemporary funeral homes provide a wide range of on-line services, their directors inform the public about the possibilities their on-line services offer, for instance, webcasting of a funeral service, posting on-line tributes or condolences, sharing memories in a memorial guest book, accessing a full obituary, uploading photos and stories, etc. in such a case, the funeral parlor in charge provides the information about its services and e-mail address: (84) services will be handled/made by…. (85) complete obituary, funeral details and online guest register are available at…. (86) please visit … to sign the online guestbook. (87) for additional information or to watch a webcast of the service, visit…. 120 grzegorz cebrat step 3: providing family/friends contact information. optionally, the decedent’s relatives or friends provide their phone numbers or e-mail address in case notice readers have any inquiries about the funeral celebrations. they can also inform them about a possibility of sharing their recollections, memories or thoughts of the deceased, or request to have condolences addressed directly to them and not via a funeral parlor: (88) any questions regarding the service please call/email…. (89) please email/call … for details or celebration. (90) remembrances can be sent to…. (91) thoughts, testimonials and condolences may be emailed to…. step 4: suggesting donation. in the final step of the fic obituarists or the decedent’s family can suggest a charity or a list of charities to receive donations, or suggest sponsoring a charity of decedent’s own choice; thus, instead of purchasing flowers, mourners are expected to contribute unspecified amount of money to honor him/her. their request should include the contact information (name, address, telephone number, email address, link to a webpage or a bank account): (92) in lieu of flowers, donations in his/her memory may be made to…. (93) his/her family asks that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to…. (94) to honor him/her, the family would appreciate donations be sent to…. obituarists may additionally explain why a particular charity was chosen by the decedent or his/her family: (95) contributions may be made in his/her honor to…. it was a cause dear to decedent’s name heart. alternatively, mourners are free to contribute to a charity of their choice: (96) contributions in decedent’s name memory can be made to any of the causes s/he served and loved, and are much appreciated by his/ her family. finally, they may suggest another, uncommon or original, manner of commemoration: (97) to honor decedent’s name, please plant a tree in…. 121how to write an american death notice:… optional constituents obituarists may include other non-standard components, for instance religious or literary quotations, or the decedent’s expressions of gratitude to individuals (relatives, friends, physicians, nurses or caregivers) or communities (hospital or hospice staff) that cared for the decedent and helped them cope with his/her terminal decease; it can be inserted between moves 5 and 6 or 6 and 7: (98) special thanks (from his/her family) to … /go to … (for …) (99) the family is very/eternally/deeply grateful to … (for …) (100) the family wishes/would like to thank … /express/extend/their appreciation/gratitude to…. a quote may commence or conclude a notice; the choice of an appropriate text depends on the preferences of the obituarist or the decedent’s family, and may range from a mourning psalm to lyrics of his/her favorite song. some conclusive advice we wish to conclude our analysis by providing a novice death notice writer with some final advice. while reading our article s/he should have noticed that this is a complex genre, as it combines a notice of a death, a story of a life, a record of the decedent’s extended family, information about a funeral service, a request for memorial donations, and many more. thus, s/he should remember that all the information must be covered, accurately and completely; s/he should check whether no important information is omitted, forgotten, or incorrect, and no names are misspelled. thus, checking and proofreading before submitting or uploading the text is obligatory. it is also worth remembering that a death notice ought to comply with the classic requirement de mortuis nil nisi bene, and should not contain any negative aspects of the decedent’s life, his/her failures, or disappointments. nevertheless, it should not be boring, but compelling to read, so as to help its readers to find more about the decedent’s life. for many deceased, their death notice might be the only text ever written about them in their whole life, which, moreover, will be stored in family archives for future generations. the final advice is aimed at teachers, who should always keep in mind that the topic of death and the practice of reading and writing death notices is a delicate matter: it may unleash in some students emotions that they may find difficult to cope with (for instance, we would strongly discourage teachers from making students write notices of each other—it is safer 122 grzegorz cebrat to choose a fictitious character or historical figure). additionally, it might be worth considering to precede those activities with discussion concerning emotions evoked by death and loss, and ways to cope with them, which include writing a death notice. references baranick, a., scheeler, j. & miller, s. (2005). life on the death beat: a handbook for obituary writers. portland, or: marion street press. bhatia, v. (1993). analysing genre: language use in professional settings. london: longman. cebrat, g. (2016). death notice as a genre: an analysis of the new york times online edition. (unpublished doctoral dissertation). sosnowiec: uniwersytet śląski. encyclopedia of death and dying (2001). g. howarth & h. leaman (eds). new york: routledge. kolbuszewski, j. (1997). z głębokim żalem: o współczesnej nekrologii. wrocław: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu wrocławskiego. marzol, c. i. (2006). dying for more: generic functionality and the representation of social actors in british and spanish obituaries headlines. in c. neumann, r. alastrué, & c. auría (eds) actas de v congreso internacional aelfe. proceedings of the 5th international aelfe conference, pp. 119–126. oxford english dictionary (1989). 2nd edition. oxford: oxford university press. oxford english dictionary online (2013). www.oed.com starck, n. (2006). life after death: the art of the obituary. melbourne: melbourne university press. swales, j. (1990). genre analysis: english in academic and research settings. cambridge: cambridge university press. webster’s third new international dictionary (1961). cambridge, ma: riverside press. grzegorz cebrat wie schreibt man eine private todesanzeige im amerikanischen stil – einige hinweise für angehende autoren z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g der beitrag ist ein kurzer und bündiger ratgeber für diejenigen, die aus verschiedenen gründen eine solche todesanzeige schreiben wollen, die den amerikanischen anforderungen für diese gattung entsprechen wird. in seinen theoretischen voraussetzungen beruht er auf die von dem verfasser im rahmen seiner dissertation durchgeführten untersuchungen zu dieser gattung in gegenwärtigen amerikanischen zeitungen. mit hilfe des von j. swales und v. bhatia entwickelten forschungsmodells von bewegungen und schritten (eng.: moves and steps) hat der verfasser 1076 in der tageszeitung the new york times veröffentlichten todesanzeigen analysiert. er nennt solche eigenschaften der gattung, die sie von ei123how to write an american death notice:… ner traueranzeige (eng.: obituary) unterscheiden: die kommunikationszwecke und die sieben bewegungen umfassende und aus 1–7 schritten bestehende struktur. der analyse liegen 100 modelle von strukturen und mustern zur ergänzung bei, die dem schüler der mittelstufe im englischen (niveau b1 – b2) erlauben, seinen eigenen originellen text zu schreiben. kurt braunmüller and christoph gabriel (eds.). 2012. multilingual individuals and multilingual societies. amsterdam–philadelphia: john benjamins. isbn 978-90-272-1933-6 (hb). isbn 978-90-272-7349-9 (eb). (humburg studies on multilingualism, issn 1571-4934; v.13) 474 pages the volume’s number is 13 in john benjamin’s reputable series hamburg studies on multilingualism. defying superstition, the book with its editors’ foreword, 25 chapters, name and subject indexes is a commendable enterprise. this excellent publication presents a stimulating panorama of research carried out by the collaborative research center on “multilingualism.” the three main areas of investigation: (1) the acquisition of multilingualism, (2) historical aspects of multilinguals and variance, and (3) multilingual communications, are among the main foci of contemporary research on multilingualism. at present, the term multilingualism is a buzzword. a deluge of books, articles, and projects have appeared, and along with positive aspects of this long awaited change, sometimes the word multilingualism is used as an attraction in a book or article title, unsupported by the contents. unlike those, this volume is really about multilingualism and its treatment of various linguistic phenomena goes beyond the monolingual paradigm. part one, “how language is acquired and lost in multilingual settings: first and second language acquisition, foreign language learning and language attrition” deals with the vast variety of linguistic phenomena, such as morphology, syntax, morphosyntax, segmental phonology, and discourse theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 3 (2) 2017, pp. 113–120 larissa aronin114 production. it also covers the subfields of foreign language learning, and second and third language acquisition (sla and tla), involving a range of languages. manuela schönenberger, monika rothweiler, and franziska sterner open the volume by reporting on their study on successive bilingual children in the chapter entitled “case marking in child l1 and early child l2 german.” based on spontaneous production data from bilingual l1 turkish children, and experimental data from monolingual and bilingual children with turkish, polish or russian as their l1, and german as l2 for all of them, the authors examined the early l2 acquisition with regard to whether it resembles l1 acquisition, or shows similarities to adult l2 acquisition in the domain of grammar. susanne e. carroll, in her “first exposure learners make use of top-down lexical knowledge when learning words” breaks good news for learners and teachers, as she emphasizes the importance of the first exposure to a target language. she argues that even minimum exposure to continuous speech may result in rapid learning, even when target words contain novel l2 sounds. this study suggests a more nuanced approach and presents a refreshing well-based counter-weight to balance traditional discussions of frequency effects. the contribution highlights the rapid rate at which sound forms are created and mapped to referents, and is convincing in regard to the powerful role of l1 lexical knowledge on l3 word learning. the three next chapters of this section expand evidence on early bilingual acquisition. “the emergence of a new variety of russian in a language contact situation: the case of a russian swedish bilingual child,” by natasha ringblom adds new shades of meaning to our knowledge of bilingual child development. the multilingual, rather than monolingual point of departure in such an investigation would seem to be more effective. in “the acquisition of gender agreement marking in polish: a study of bilingual polish-german-speaking children,” by bernhard brehmer and monika rothweiler describe the development of gender marking in a group of simultaneous, or successive bilingual children from age 2:11 to 6:5, growing up in germany. it was found that unlike monolingual children, for bilingual polish-german children, the acquisition of gender assignment and gender agreement in polish is not accomplished in early childhood. natalia gagarina examines “discourse cohesion in the elicited narratives of early russian-german sequential bilinguals.” comparing the narrations of bilingual children with monolingual russian-speaking children and adults, allowed the author to expand the evidence on bilingual advantage over monolinguals. in particular, bilinguals of all age groups produce longer utterances and use more word tokens per story, in comparison to monolinguals due to the greater sensitivity of bilinguals in establishing cohesive ties in discourse. nelleke strik in “wh-questions in dutch: bilingual and trilingual acquisition compared,” compares bilingual and trilingual acquisition of dutchkurt braunmüller and christoph gabriel… 115 french, and dutch-french-italian, in five and seven year-old bilingual and trilingual children. monolingual children and adult learners were control participants in elicited production tasks, thus increasing the scope and reliability of the study. the data from this study generally point to qualitative differences of multilingual development, as compared to monolingual development. with that, among the findings is the fact that the production of qualitatively different structures is restricted, and that the age of the learners reflects on their use of inversion. the author accounts for this data with the help of a theory of transfer based on derivational complexity. the contribution by alexandra żaba and conxita lleó, “german segments in the speech of german-spanish bilingual children,” presents new data on early bilingual acquisition of consonants and discusses the possibility of the delay linked with particular vowels and consonants. the authors state that the dissimilarity in production of segments in l1 as compared to monolinguals, and consonants involved in german voicing contrast, contribute to a delay in the bilinguals’ target-like acquisition of sounds, whereas vowels normally do not. cristina pierantozzi offers the contribution on “agreement within early mixed dp: what mixed agreement can tell us about the bilingual language faculty.” in their chapter, “gender marking in l2 learners and italian-german bilinguals with german as the weaker language,” antje stöhr, deniz akpinar, giulia bianchi, and tania kupish consider the mastery of grammatical gender by adult simultaneous bilingual speakers, and highly proficient l2 learners. exploring the knowledge of gender assignment and agreement, and the implications of differences in this area between users and learners is productive. “a bidirectional study of object omissions in french-english bilinguals,” by michaela pirvulescu, ana t. pérez-leroux, and yves roberge contributes to the debate on the effects of bilingualism. by focusing on object omissions, the authors argue that at least in the domain of null-object possibilities, bilinguals experience delay, as compared to monolinguals, in the rate of production. with that, the authors indicate that development of bilinguals and monolinguals is comparable, and attribute the effects in the rates of omission they found, to the retention of the default null object representation, and to the nature of bilingual input. french is learnt more efficiently as an l3 than as an l2, in the settings of swiss primary schools, because students who previously learnt a foreign language can use their skills in english as a resource when learning french. this very important, clear, and convincing case is argued by andrea haenni hoti and sybille neinzmann in the chapter “foreign language reforms in swiss primary schools: potentials and limitations.” the authors describe the study which they carried out comparing the two models of foreign language teaching, and the competencies of the children from both programs in the french larissa aronin116 language. the authors based their research on the tenets of third language acquisition (tla). they also found that one year later the initial advantage of the more experienced learners had disappeared. this, and other far-reaching implications of the study are significant, both for theoretical understanding of multilingualism, and for its practical implementation in education. the section is concluded by the chapter: “ ‘multilingual brains’: individual differences in multilinguals—a neuro-psycholinguistic perspective.” julia festman reports on two research projects representing two lines of research— one, comparing early and late trilinguals on a sentence processing task using f mri, and the other, which deals with bilinguals who were found to be different in how they switch unintentionally between their two languages. the second line of research carried out by festman distinguishes two groups of bilinguals termed “switcher” bilinguals, and “non-switcher” bilinguals, in accordance with their behavior when switching the languages. festman indicates that there might be a relationship between switching behavior and control abilities. in terms of the executive control, “what distinguished both groups most is their in/ability to prevent errors of cross-language interference in monolingual settings, that is, when a specific target language is required” (p. 213). as for the neuro-linguistic line of investigation of the multilingual brain, the author discusses a number of significant studies in that domain and presents the work of elise wattendorf and her colleagues. comparisons between early (before age 6) and late (after age 6) multilinguals among other things, suggest that early bilingualism leads to structural plasticity, and reveal that the “early bilingual brain differs from the late bilingual brain during sentence production, but not during language perception tasks.” along with that, the chapter provides a well-focused overview of the most recent research on multilingualism, with a focus on individual differences and the brain. the chapter is, in fact a state-of-the art overview of contemporary neuropsycholinguistic research on multilingualism, not just bilingualism, and acknowledges “the strong impact the knowledge of a third language has on language processing” (p. 209). the ten articles of part two “how language changes in multilingual settings: contact-induced language variation and change,” convey a broad range of issues on variation and changes in morphology, phonology, structure of language varieties in contact, using the data from old languages such as old swedish, middle high german, and medieval latin, and contemporary language varieties: faroese, danish, occitan, french, italian, spanish and polish, to name only some. this section also includes the chapter by svenja kranish, juliane house, and viktor becher in which “changing conventions in englishgerman translations of popular scientific texts” are discussed at length. kurt braunmüller and christoph gabriel… 117 i found the next two studies especially absorbing and solid. martin elsig in “subject-verb inversion in 13th-century german and french: a comparative view” offers meticulous systematic comparison and analysis of the data extracted from old french and middle high german, aimed at defining whether the sources of the inversion in old french and middle high german are the same, or different. the author defies the plausible-sounding assumptions, and arrives at the conclusion that by the mid-thirteenth century, the speakers of old french and of middle high german drew on different grammars for subject inversion. in the abstract of his contribution “multilingual constructions: a diasystematic approach to common structures,” steffen höder argues that multilingual perspective on language contact phenomena is more adequate, than referring to the effect of such phenomena on the monolingual systems. taking this as a point of departure, and extending the concept of diasystematicity to languages and multilingualism, the author postulates that in situations of stable and intense language contact, a “pro-diasystematic” change takes place. this means, according to the author, that interlingual correspondence is regulated in such a way that the higher proportion of common structures, and a lesser proportion of idiosyncrasies is found between two contacting languages. the common system is simplified to the effect that it loses its languages’ specific restrictions, and becomes productive in the other language as well. caroline heycock and hjalmar p. petersen provide a comprehensive description, thorough analysis, and insightful observations on a rich system of modern faroese pseudo-coordinations, in comparison with the same phenomenon in mainland scandinavian languages. csilla-anna szabó and then bernhard brehmer and agnieszka czachór continue investigation into the structure of contacting languages, one of which is german. the first of them, is the case of two unrelated languages, in the chapter “toward a fused lect: mixed germanhungarian concessive conditionals in a german dialect in romania.” on the basis of detailed examination of linguistic material from the multilingual speech community in romania, szabó reports on the strong structural similarities and lexical material from hungarian, in the german dialect of this community, which the author, following auer’s typology (1998), believes to be the process of emerging a new bilingual grammar of a fused lect. the second contribution dealing with the aspects of structure is: “the formation and distribution of the analytic future tense in polish-german bilinguals.” brehmer and czachór investigated how german patterns are involved in the formation of the analytic future tense in the polish used by its young speakers in germany. the findings have implications for the issue of language attrition. the three following contributions, each very good in its own right, celebrate the tenacity of “small” varieties, in contact with bigger languages and reveal the complex dynamism of multilingual reality. this cluster of chaplarissa aronin118 ters deals with phonological systems of languages in contact. in “perception and interpretation of intonational prominence in varieties of south african english,” sabine zerbian examines prosodic differences in varieties of the same language, english, against the multilingual background of south africa. the author addresses the perception of intonation and the interpretation of focus marking through prosodic means, by the listeners who are speakers of contact languages of the bantu group, unrelated to english. the propitious research design allowed the researcher to discover significant differences in perceptions of intonational differences between black south african english on the one hand, and other varieties of south african english on the other hand, and to come up with a number of other findings. this well-written paper also introduces readers to the realm of african multilingualism, the nature and manifestations of which are considerably different from the european multilingualism, for example (brann, 1991; anchimbe, 2007). “the prosody of occitan-french bilinguals” by raféu sichel-bazin, carolin buthke, and trudel meisenburg captivates by its measured narration and comprehensive methodology. the reader sees in detail the nuances of how, and in which aspects, the varieties drawing on latin, french, and occitan, developed each in their own way, and how, being close territorially, they mutually influence each other, again, in different ways in certain aspects. “diachronic prosody of a contact variety: analyzing porteño spanish spontaneous speech” by andrea peškova, ingo feldhausen, elena kireva, and christoph gabriel continues investigation into romance historical linguistics in another place and time. the authors take us to buenos aires where the spanish variety of porteño is spoken, allegedly influenced by massive italian immigration between 1830 and 1950. the authors meticulously trace and consider the historical and linguistic causes of the changes and the persistence of porteño spanish. their study is also notable for its methodological rigor, and in that, dissimilar to other diachronic studies of prosody, the researchers employed recordings for their comparison. ariadna benet, susana cortés, and conxita lleó illuminate “devoicing of sibilants as a segmental cue to the influence of spanish onto current catalan phonology.” the study can be said to belong to the diverse areas of phonology and sociolinguistics; and its findings are relevant to educators and linguists alike. the different results on vowel and voiced sibilant production in catalan obtained in two areas of barcelona indicate that a phonological change in the situation of language contact can be caused by a combination of internal and external linguistic factors. part three, “how language is used in multilingual settings: linguistic practices and policies,” contains three contributions of good quality dealing with the reality of multilingual practices and the challenges faced by the participants of these particular multilingual settings. kurt braunmüller and christoph gabriel… 119 in “explaining the interpreter’s unease: conflicts and contradictions in bilingual communication in clinical settings,” kristin bührig, ortrun klishe, bernd meyer, and birte pawlack elegantly single out and define the elusive, and therefore unresolved problems in medical translation. they also formulate the problem within the theoretical framework and present it as a practical task to be dealt with. the approach is to offer classes for nurses who frequently have to undertake the job of translation, taking into consideration, and building course content that would resolve around the issues identified by nurses themselves. the domain of healthcare is increasingly aware of the acute need for bilingual and multilingual services (see, e.g., georgiou, 2013). measuring in multilingualism has always been a challenging enterprise. the more praiseworthy is the successful attempt of evaluating speech accommodation between pharmacists and patients. to my mind, the study by myfyr prys, margaret deuchar, and gwerfyl roberts, “measuring bilingual accommodation in welsh rural pharmacies” is exemplary, creative, innovative, and very practically minded. it turns out that speech accommodation is widespread within bilingual clinical encounters. no doubt, then, that measuring it and might lead to greater opportunities to improve communications skills of medical professionals. to this end, the authors have developed a formula with the help of which they suggest calculating the relative proportion of welsh and english words, and determine “how much the speaker changes his proportion of welsh versus english words over time in relation to the proportion being used by the interlocutor” (p. 419). the volume concludes by the chapter “becoming bilingual in a multilingual context: a snapshot view of l2 competences in south tyrol” written by chiara vettory, katrin wisnievski, and andrea abel. using the data of an extensive linguistic and psychosocial survey, the authors collected information on the competences of south tyrolean schoolchildren in their l2—italian for the german speakers and german for italian speakers and revealed salient differences. competence is not exclusively language related as extra-linguistic factors exert notable influence, too. among the findings is that “school type appears to be the strongest predictor of l2 proficiency” (p. 451) in these particular sociolinguistic settings. apart from supplying data of special interest to the local reality of south tyrolean bilingualism, the findings provide additional evidence and food for thought to educational research in multilingual settings. to conclude, the contributions are all different in numerous ways, but together they constitute a comprehensive picture of multilingual individuals and multilingual societies. a variety of diverse kinds of multilingualism are treated here, manifesting the super-diversity of multilingualism, both from diachronic and synchronic perspectives. other beneficial characteristics of this serious and important volume on multilingualism research are that a number of contributions, in the best traditions of science, while treating traditional assumptions larissa aronin120 in the field with knowledge and care, justifiably dare to defy them if they feel it necessary and come up with novel ideas and insights. one could wish, perhaps, that the abbreviations of the key terms (e.g., “dp” on p. 137) commonly used in specific linguistic disciplines, be deciphered at their first appearance in the text, rather than later. readers may not quickly recall terms in disciplines other than their own, and for novices to the subject will benefit from greater accessibility to the contributions. this minor suggestion does not diminish the value of the volume in any way. on the whole, multilingual individuals and multilingual societies is an excellent source for information on multilingualism and multilinguals, full of insights and inspiration for practical work and future studies. references anchimbe, e. a. (ed.). (2007). linguistic identity in postcolonial multilingual spaces. newcastle: cambridge scholars publishing. aronin, l. & singleton, d. (2012). multilingualism. amsterdam: john benjamins. auer, p. (1998). from codeswitching via language mixing to fused lects: toward a dynamic typology of bilingual speech. interaction and linguistic structures, 6, 1–28. brann, c. m. b. (1981). trilingualism in language planning for education in sub-saharan africa. paris: unesco. ref. ed-81/ws/116. georgiou, v. (2013). managing language diversity in the irish health services. in d. singleton, j. a. fishman, l. aronin, & m. ó. laoire (eds.), current multilingualism: a new linguistic dispensation, 317–337. berlin: mouton de gruyter. larissa aronin oranim academic college of education, israel theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 6 (1), 2020 wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego • katowice 2020 editors-in-chief danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia, katowice adam wojtaszek university of silesia, katowice language editor david schauffler university of silesia, katowice editorial board janusz arabski (university of silesia, katowice/vistula university, warsaw) larissa aronin (oranim college of higher education/trinity college, dublin) jasone cenoz iraqui (university of the basque country, donostia – san sebastian) halina chodkiewicz (maria curie-skłodowska university, lublin) gessica de angelis (trinity college, dublin) anna ewert (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) tammy gregersen (university of northern iowa, cedar falls) ulrike jessner schmid (university of innsbruck, innsbruck) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities/university of warsaw) jolanta latkowska (university of silesia, katowice) peter macintyre (cape breton university, sydney) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, cracow) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) miroslaw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz/state school of higher professional education, konin) ewa piechurska-kuciel (university of opole, opole) andrzej porzuczek (university of silesia, katowice) david singleton (trinity college, dublin/university of pannonia, veszprem) eva vetter (university of vienna, vienna) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, łódź) maria wysocka (university of silesia, katowice) this publication is indexed in the following databases: scopus, ceeol, polindex (pbn), worldcat, public knowledge project index, oai-pmb data provider registry, bazhum, mla directory of periodicals, erih plus creative commons attribution-sharealike 4.0 international (cc by-sa 4.0) https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en contents preface (danuta gabryś-barker, adam wojtaszek) 5 articles jorge pinto chinese teachers’ attitudes towards translanguaging and its uses in portuguese foreign language classrooms 11 dominika dzik variations in child-child and child-adult interactions―a study of communication strategies in l3 spanish 31 katarzyna papaja, marzena wysocka-narewska investigating code-switching in a content and language integrated learning (clil) classroom 51 teresa maria włosowicz translanguaging as the mobilisation of linguistic resources by learners of spanish as a third or additional language 65 katarzyna rokoszewska intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity in speaking english at secondary school––a case study of a good, average, and poor language learner 107 adam palka metaphors we academicize the world with?––metaphor(icity) perceived in the context of academia (a case study of english philologists-to-be) 143 reviews sarah mercer, marion williams (2014). multiple perspectives on the self in the sla (bristol: multilingual letters)––by marek derenowski 185 contents4 małgorzata bielicka (2017). efektywność nauczania języka niemieckiego na poziomie przedszkolnym i wczesnoszkolnym w dwujęzycznych placówkach edukacyjnych w polsce (poznań: wydawnictwo naukowe uam)––by zofia chłopek 189 vaclaw brezina (2018). statistics in corpus linguistics. a practical guide (cambridge: cambridge university press)––by jolanta latkowska 195 style guide for the authors 203 theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 7 (1), 2021, pp. 149–153 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.8447 ali h. al-hoorie and peter d. macintyre (eds.), contemporary language motivation theory. 60 years since gardner and lambert (1959). bristol: multilingual matters, 2020, isbn 978-1-78892-518-1, 344 pages the publication of gardner and lambert’s article on motivational variables in 1959 marked the beginning of a new theoretical framework and gave rise to a novel line of enquiry that has resulted in an unabated succession of books, articles, research projects, dissertations, and theses addressing the theme of the social psychology of language learning. the appeal of the theory seems never to have withered; on the contrary, the socio-educational (se) model inspires new generations of scholars and students who challenge or expand it to build their own understanding of motivation for second language acquisition. to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the publication of gardner and lambert’s seminal work, his colleagues, former students and their present students have compiled an anthology, contemporary language motivation theory. 60 years since gardner and lambert (1959), comprising contributions on a wide range of topics, from sociology, social psychology, language acquisition to methodology that attest to the incessant impact of gardner’s thought. the festschrift’s editors, ali h. al-hoorie and peter d. macintyre, open the volume with a quote explaining, in gardner’s own words (1985, p. 166), that any theory’s value is measured not only by its ability to elucidate and expound relevant phenomena but also “[by] its ability to provide suggestions for further investigations, to raise new questions, to promote further developments and open new horizons.” this volume proves that gardner’s theory has met the criteria. in the foreword, zoltan dornyei, while writing mostly about himself, acknowledges the relevance of gardner’s notion of integrativeness to the study of motivation, echoing his earlier declaration that the recognition of the social anna mystkowska-wiertelak150 dimension of second language learning was “the most important milestone in the history of l2 motivation research” (dörnyei, 1994, p. 519). noteworthy is also the fact that robert gardner himself contributed a chapter (“looking back, looking forward”) to this volume, presenting an overview of the 60 years of research he and his colleagues conducted before and after his se model was formulated, involving the construction of the attitude motivation test battery and subsequent structural equation modelling of the processes underlying the se framework, as well as considering directions for further developments inspired by his theory. the diverse chapters that make up the volume have been grouped under four headings: part one: second language development/applied linguistics, part two: social psychology/sociology, part three: historical/ methodological issues, and part four: discussants. part one comprises four contributions mostly theoretical in character that look into how various aspects of se theory resonate with other frameworks or more recent developments in second language acquisition. part one opens with the chapter by tammy gregersen, peter macintyre, and jessica ross, “extending gardner’s socioeducational model to learner well-being: research propositions linking integrative motivation and the perma framework” that accentuates analogies between gardner’s integrative motivation and seligman’s (2011) perma model, and positive psychology in general. the authors first present origins and stages of development of the se model and positive psychology, discuss components of the perma framework and show how its dimensions correspond to gardner’s theory. the chapter ends with three propositions for empirical exploration of the overlap between the two theories, which proves that the novel approach offered by positive psychology could inspire innovative thinking about now classical motivational constructs. mercé barnaus in “teacher’ and learners’ motivation in multilingual classrooms” takes the perspective of european language education policies to trace the impact of motivation and attitudes on success and failure rates in language learning. she recognizes the significance of the social dimension in language development and encourages building communities of practice that could bring together linguistically and culturally diversified learners and teachers whose cooperation, collaboration, sharing of ideas and viewpoints can be performed in project work and content-based teaching. the contribution by peter macintyre, jean-marc dewaele, nicole macmillan, and chengchen li, “the emotional underpinnings of gardner’s attitudes and motivation battery,” revolves around the affective dimension of the se model and attitudes/motivation test battery (amtb). inspired by a more recent understanding of the difference between negative and positive affect as qualitatively distinct types of influences rather than opposite ends of the same spectra, the authors present accounts of two studies that examined correlations between the amtb and the positive and negative affect schedule, the tool that uses two distinct scales to tap into positive and ali h. al-hoorie and peter d. macintyre (eds.), contemporary language… 151 negative emotions. the results show that positive emotions affect learners’ attitudes towards different aspects of language learning that in turn support integrative motivation. james p. lantolf and merill swain, in their chapter “perezhivanie: the cognitive-emotional dialectic within the social situation of development,” employ vygotsky’s notion of perezhivanie, a construct whose complexity and uniqueness evades a simple translation into “emotional experience, as it comprises both the how and what is experienced: an activity and its content. the authors elaborate on the idea of inseparability of emotion and cognition and show how the socially grounded perezhivanie can be used to reexamine basic assumptions underlying second language acquisition. they also encourage further research informed by various theoretical models to see the extent of overlap and difference in ways the connection between emotionality and cognition is understood. part two consists of three papers representing the social psychological or sociological perspective revolving around notions of identity, motivations, and investment. the first of them, “identity, adaptation and social harmony: a legacy of the socio-educational model” contributed by sara rubenfeld and richard clément contains an overview of research into the impact of the relationship between learners’ own and target language communities on language development in and out of the classroom, as well as a summary of various nonlinguistic outcomes of language learning of cognitive, affective and behavioral nature. jorida cila and richard n. lalonde in “what’s in a name? motivations for baby-naming in multicultural contexts” summarize their research aimed at understanding motivations behind the choice of names for children born in bicultural families in canada. gardnerian notions of integrative and instrumental motives account for a preference for ethnic names that accentuate links to heritage culture as well as a preference for mainstream canadian names, which suggests a need to integrate with the new ethnolinguistic community, also to prevent prejudice or discrimination. bonny norton’s chapter, “motivation, identity and investment: a journey with robert gardner,” is a slightly nostalgic journey through time and an account of a dialogue continued over the years between the author’s own and robert gardner’s work. the scholar describes inspiration and support gardner’s ideas have provided and elaborates on ways in which her own theories have evolved. part three, historical/methodological issues comprises five contributions, which, as the title explains, concentrate on issues related to methods of data collection and analysis applied to investigate various aspects pertaining to the se framework, alternative models, and other related phenomena. it transpires that gardner’s thought not only advanced the theory of motivation but also contributed to developments in research methodology in the field. rebecca oxford in “snapshots in time: time in gardner’s theory and gardner’s theory across time” considers the issue of time and change presenting seven snapshots anna mystkowska-wiertelak152 of gardner’s work that exemplify his use of terminology, understanding of the place of an individual in his theory, a dynamic character of motivation, an interplay between affect and cognition, as well as applicability of se theory for teaching and learning. in the third chapter in this section “researching l2 motivation: re-evaluating the role of qualitative inquiry, or the ‘wine an conversation’ approach,” ema ushioda, in a largely personal tone writes about her own contribution to language motivation research in the form of qualitative enquiry. she takes the 30 years’ perspective to readdress and reevaluate the role of qualitative research paradigm, once a peripheral but today mainstream approach to the study of l2 motivation. focused on quantitative research, in turn, is the chapter authored by paul t. tremblay, “quantitative methods in second language learning motivation research: gardner’s contributions and some new developments.” here the author discusses gardner’s applications of quantitative methods to the study of individual differences, motivation, and attitudes, including factor analysis and structural equation modelling and how these practices have influenced the field. moreover, within this tradition, the author presents more recent statistical procedures applicable to the study of motivational variables. jennifer claro in her “identification with external and internal referents: integrativeness and the ideal l2 self” proves that the concept of gardnerian integrativeness cannot be easily replaced by dörnyei’s ideal l2 self as the two relate to different loci of control, one external and the other internal. instead, the author offers a model that incorporates both constructs in the form of active internalization with external and internal sources, operating in a complimentary way. this part of the book closes with john edwards’ contribution, titled “history, philosophy and the social psychology of language,” which acknowledges the centrality of garden’s work to the emergence and development of the social psychology of language. in his essay, edwards provides a broad historical and philosophical perspective on the field, not without criticisms, and notes its influence onto other areas, such as the sociology and politics of language, and applied linguistics. in the final section of the book, three discussant chapters consider gardner’s contributions from various perspectives. phil hiver and diane larsenfreeman in their “motivation: it is a relational system” employ complexity theory to reflect on the relational character of language learning motivation. elaine horwitz in “how robert c. gardner’s pioneering social-psychological research raised new applied questions about second language acquisition” looks at the impact of gardnerian thought on the field of second language acquisition and howard giles in “epilogue: gardner’s far-reaching impact beyond language learning” in a warm and personal tone reflects on gardner’s career and contributions with an emphasis on their importance to the field of the social psychology of language. ali h. al-hoorie and peter d. macintyre (eds.), contemporary language… 153 the volume al-hooire and macintyre edited to honor and celebrate gardner’s 60 years of legacy offers a comprehensive account of the history as well as the present day advances of the se model. links between the se framework and second language acquisition, applied linguistics, social psychology and methodology presented here clearly demonstrate the scale of impact of gardner’s ideas. the picture that emerges from the volume put together by top researchers is that of an esteemed and outstanding scholar, inspiring teacher and colleague, and a friend. references dörnyei, z. (1994). understanding l2 motivation: on with the challenge! the modern language journal, 78, 515–523. gardner, r. c. (1985). social psychology and second language learning: the role of attitudes and motivation. london: edward arnold. gardner, r. c., & lambert, w. e. (1959). motivational variables in second-language acquisition. canadian journal of psychology, 13(4). 266–272. seligman, m. e. p. (2011). flourish: a visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being. new york: atria books. anna mystkowska-wiertelak institute of english studies wrocław university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9930-3030 theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 6 (2), 2020, pp. 133–159 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.7809 katarzyna holewik university of silesia in katowice, poland peer feedback and reflective practice in public service interpreter training a b s t r a c t the paper discusses the importance of student-generated feedback, that is, peer feedback and self-assessment in public service interpreter training. the importance of peer feedback and self-assessment is widely recognised in teaching and learning and benefits include: promoting analytical and critical thinking skills, students’ active participation in the learning process, promoting a collaborative model of teaching and learning, students’ responsibility and autonomy, to name but a few. however, their beneficial character can also be observed in public service interpreter training. the aim of the pilot study conducted among trainee interpreters (ma students) of public service interpreting course was to examine interpreting quality and compare positive (strengths) and negative aspects (weaknesses) of trainee interpreters’ performance identified by them by means of peer feedback and ref lection (self-assessment). the trainees participated in simulated public service interpreting sessions and later were asked to ref lect on their own as well as their peers’ performance. as seen from data analysis, there are discrepancies between peer feedback and ref lection in the perception of students’ strengths and weaknesses and a negative trend can be observed in the case of ref lection. keywords: self-evaluation, peer evaluation, ref lection, public service interpreting training, interpreting quality introduction assessment is considered an essential aspect of the process of teaching and learning. the aim of assessment, when used effectively, is to assist students to learn, enable teachers to monitor students’ progress, identify their strengths and areas for improvement as well as inform teachers whether students achieved their learning objectives, to name but a few. an aspect which is inextricably https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0874-1770 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en katarzyna holewik134 linked to assessment is feedback, which can be provided by a teacher, peers or students themselves. it is vital to note that “the responsibility for learning is in the hands of the teacher and the learner, and therefore they both must act to have the best outcomes for learning” (mcfadzien, 2015, p. 17, emphasis added k. h.). therefore, it is essential to allow learners to take a certain amount of control of their learning. this can be achieved by peer feedback and students’ self-assessment. learner independence, which is one of the goals of student-conducted feedback, appears to be particularly crucial at the tertiary level, where students are required to take the initiative and responsibility for their own learning. there are mutual benefits of student-conducted assessment both for students and teachers, as rightly stated by brew (1999): assessment and learning must increasingly be viewed as one and the same activity; assessment must become an integral part of the learning process. […] when teachers share with their students the process of assessment— giving up control, sharing power and leading students to take on the authority to assess themselves—the professional judgment of both is enhanced. assessment becomes not something done to students. it becomes an activity done with students. (brew, 1999, p. 169) the fact that assessment should be “an activity done with students” appears to have applicability particularly in the context of public service interpreting classes, which are practical in nature and where trainee interpreters need to obtain hands-on experience useful in their future practice. not only do they need to possess knowledge and skills in interpreting, but also ability to reflect critically on their own performance in order to identify and evaluate the areas for improvement and devise their own action plan, as well as listen to, understand and respond to the remarks of their future clients about their performance. it is argued in the paper that those skills can be learnt and achieved by means of reflection and peer feedback, which are the scope of the paper. considering the importance of the topic in the interpreter training, there appear to be limited comparative studies on peer feedback and self-assessment (bartłomiejczyk, 2009; fowler, 2007; hartley et al., 2003), particularly in the field of public service interpreting training, which is the scope of the paper. previous studies, mostly related to conference interpreting, generally tend to concentrate on one method, that is, either self-evaluation (russo, 1995; bartłomiejczyk, 2007; postigo pinazo, 2008; z. lee, 2015; y. lee, 2005) or peer feedback (wang & han, 2013; pallero singleton, 2015; su, 2019) or compare self-assessment and teacher’s assessment (y. lee, 2016; j. lee, 2018). the aim of the pilot study conducted among trainee interpreters was to examine interpreting quality and compare positive (strengths) and negative peer feedback and ref lective practice… 135 (weaknesses) aspects of trainee interpreters’ performance by means of reflection (self-assessment) and peer feedback. the study aimed to address the following research questions: – what aspects of their own and their peers’ performance do trainee interpreters perceive as strengths and weaknesses? – are there any discrepancies between peer feedback and reflection? which components of trainee interpreters’ performance tend to be prioritized over others? – do trainee interpreters tend to be critical and report more negative than positive aspects of their own and their colleagues’ performance? the paper is organized in the following way. the paper begins by describing the role of assessment and feedback in the process of teaching and learning. then, it discusses the importance of peer feedback, self-assessment and reflective practice in public service interpreting together with their limitations. next, the paper describes the pilot study used, its analysis and results. concluding remarks and suggestions for further research are discussed in the final part. it should be noted that it is beyond the scope of this paper to examine in detail the reflective practice applied during classes, which is a part of a larger study. only the evaluation stage of gibbs’ (1988) reflective cycle, which focuses on identifying strengths and weaknesses, will be commented upon. the role of the assessment and feedback assessment is a crucial element of education and an essential part of the teaching and learning process. summative assessment, which tends to be most frequently applied in the classroom, allows teachers to establish students’ knowledge and skills (taras, 2005), achievement and progress (anderson, 1989, 1990) as well as identify their strengths and weaknesses. formative assessment, on the other hand, given to students throughout the course, enables teachers to observe how and if they are progressing and assists in improving their performance. it also allows teachers to reflect on their teaching, adjust the methods used or modify the content of the course (harmer, 2007). both types of assessment play a pivotal role in students’ motivation, their achievement of goals and can contribute to their level of satisfaction, or dissatisfaction, with the course. the paper focuses on formative assessment, which in the context of interpreter training, is used to provide continuous feedback on trainee interpre ters’ progress (z. lee, 2015). katarzyna holewik136 however, when it comes to motivating students and contributing to their progress, it seems it is not merely assessment itself that counts, but feedback they receive (mcfadzien, 2015; shin et al., 2016). feedback, which is considered “the most powerful single moderator that enhances achievement” (hattie, 1999), can be teacheras well as student-conducted. while the importance of teacher feedback is unquestionable, it is often suggested to complement it with student-conducted feedback, that is, peer feedback and self-assessment (black & wiliam, 1998). not only does it actively involve students in the process of learning and fosters “a relationship of engagement between lecturer and students” (d’hayer 2013, p. 328), but also contributes to the overall amount of feedback students are exposed to (black & wiliam, 1998). there is ample evidence of the advantages of student-conducted feedback such as, student autonomy and responsibility, “a reflective approach to learning” (cao, 2017), problem detection and solving or mutual learning both for those receiving and providing feedback, to name but a few. a more detailed discussion is provided in the next section with reference to interpreting studies. importance and benefits of peer feedback, self-assessment and reflective practice for public service interpreters the paper argues that the ability to reflect on one’s own performance and evaluate others should become a part of formative assessment and interpreter training. they are as crucial as systematic maintenance and improvement of interpreter’s knowledge and skills—due to the fact that interpreting is a practice profession (dean & pollard, 2013), where reflective practice is considered a pivotal element of everyday practice. highlighting the unquestionable value of training and formative assessment, niska rightly states: “i don’t think any test can be a substitute for proper training, nor is testing per se a remedy for a lack of interpreters. tests don’t produce interpreters; proper education does” (1998, p. 275, emphasis added k. h.). there are numerous benefits of studentconducted feedback which can be observed in the case of interpreter training and these are detailed below. first, attention is drawn to peer feedback and next reflective practice is commented upon. peer feedback creates a learning environment which is learner-centered and collaborative, and knowledge becomes constructed through social sharing and interaction (liu et al., 2001). the need for a constructivist approach to translator training has been observed by kiraly (2000, p. 194) who maintains that it aims at “emancipating learners and to making them able to think for themselves and peer feedback and ref lective practice… 137 to depend on each other, on their individual capabilities for independent learning.” in such an environment, trainee interpreters become actively involved with their peers and learning becomes “an interactive constructive process” (kiraly, 2000, p. 39) and “takes place as the outcome of active mental processing and when learners perceive meaningful connections between new and acquired information” (moser-mercer, 2008, p. 10). as a result, trainees identify problems and attempt to solve them and therefore feedback becomes beneficial both for its recipients and providers. this in turn, leads to increasing trainees’ responsibility and autonomy in the learning process and also enables them to concentrate on their own learning. in her study, pallero singleton (2015) aimed to obtain opinions of conference interpreting students on peer feedback and its usefulness by means of an online survey and an email interview. when it comes to interpreting skills, students in pallero singleton’s study noticed the benefits of peer feedback in terms of language skills, analytical skills, interpersonal skills, and speaking skills (i.e., presentation and delivery). she has also found out that students hold positive opinions and recognise the value of peer feedback since it contributes to learner autonomy and self-reflection and that it is “mutually beneficial.” some of the comments given by the participants were as follows: “giving feedback can help you to reflect on your own performance or on techniques.” “feedback is something positive—regardless its content—and it is interesting even for the person giving it.” the educational value of peer feedback for both parties is also recognised by fowler (2007, p. 261), who claims that “[a]ssessing one’s peers also makes one more aware of the shortcomings in one’s own work, and so this task acts as a learning instrument for the assessor. it is just as challenging a task as doing the translation […].” due to the fact that peer feedback tends to engage a group of students, which was the case in the current study, comments which interpreting students receive are likely to be more individual (bijami et al., 2013) and personalized. students may express their opinions in a distinctive way and focus on different aspects of the same skill or behaviour. not only may peer feedback be considered more individual, but also more comprehensible, since it is conducted by peers, not the teacher. students are likely to use less metalanguage, and thus their comments may be better understood, especially by weaker students. furthermore, as clarke (2008, as cited in cao, 2017) notes, “looking at the work of others can help pupils to understand the different approaches they could have taken [...] that there are different ways of achieving success.” in other words, by analyzing strengths and weaknesses of their peers, students are likely to either katarzyna holewik138 aim at avoiding their mistakes or incorporating their peers’ strengths into their own practice, which leads to active learning. finally, receiving peer feedback (and also teacher feedback) can develop in trainee interpreters the ability to respond to constructive feedback, a skill which is highly beneficial for future interpreters. in their future career, the trainees will need to possess the ability to accept criticisms and dissatisfaction from their clients, be open-minded as well as learn how to respond to them. it is also crucial to develop their awareness of low quality feedback that may be merely negative or “in the form of complaints” (lee, 2005), thus hardly constructive. trainee interpreters should learn how to respond to such feedback and not get discouraged by it. as regards self-assessment, many of the benefits are akin to peer feedback, such as ensuring student autonomy (hartley et al., 2003), greater understanding of learning objectives, standards and goals they are aiming for (clarke, 2008; y. lee, 2005), contributing to students’ progress due to their active involvement (cao, 2017) or awareness of both strong and weak points of their own performance (russo, 1995). given that self-assessment applied in the study focuses on reflective practice, benefits of reflection in the context of interpreter training will be commented upon here. reflection, as noted by boud, keogh, and walker (1985, p. 19), “[…] is an important human activity in which people recapture their experience, think about it, mull it over and evaluate it. it is this working with experience that is important in learning.” however, since the experience alone does not automatically need to lead to learning (gibbs, 1988), the aim of reflective practice is to have a careful look at one’s own experiences and analyse them to improve one’s own performance as well as avoid the mistakes and decisions that have been made. there are numerous tools for reflection such as portfolios, logs, logbooks, peer discussion, group discussion, reflective journals, and reflective essays (z. lee, 2015), guided commentaries (norberg, 2014), self-assessment reports (y. lee, 2005), blogs or diaries. the reflective model suggested by gibbs (1988), applied in the study, can be considered useful for trainee interpreters. the model (figure 1) promotes experiential learning and by means of reflection “learners can gain new insights into the experience” (z. lee, 2015, p. 38). due to its cyclical nature, students are able to focus on the experience step by step and in detail. it is argued that it is the stages of evaluation, analysis, conclusion and action plan which are particularly important for students to actively explore the experience (gibbs, 1998). learners consider strong and weak points of their performance (evaluation), draw conclusions from the experience (analysis), consider alternative steps which they could have taken (conclusion) and think how they can act in the future should a similar situation happen (action plan). the current paper does not aim to investigate all of the stages of the reflective cycle, but draws attention only to the evaluation stage, that is, describing peer feedback and ref lective practice… 139 positive (strengths) and negative (weaknesses) aspects of trainee interpreter’s performance. figure 1. gibbs’ reflective cycle (gibbs, 1988) in addition to autonomy and active involvement, reflective practice promotes trainee interpreters’ responsibility for their own learning, since it is only for them to decide how much they will learn from the experience. their success depends on how specific and clear they are when describing their experience to start with, how well they identify their strengths and weaknesses and alternative steps to be taken, and finally how clear and specific their action plan will be. consequently, reflective practice focuses on problem detection, problems solving and critical thinking skills, and can also assist interpreters making informed and balanced decisions. such skills are fundamental for interpreters, particularly in public service settings, where interpreters are often faced with dilemmas, not necessarily of a linguistic nature. it is important to stress that not only does reflective practice contribute to trainee interpreters’ learning, but also plays a crucial role in professional development since it can promote good professional behaviour and routines. katarzyna holewik140 self-evaluation enables trainees as future interpreters, to become reflective practitioners and raises their awareness of how vital it is for practice professions (such as teachers, doctors, and public service interpreters) to reflect on their action for the purposes of “professional growth and improved work outcomes” and effective decision-making in their everyday practice (dean & pollard, 2013, p. 140). as described above, peer feedback and self-assessment can be considered highly beneficial for interpreters. however, what might bring even more benefits would be combining them together with teacher feedback, because then “[…] the trainee has the opportunity to gather feedback about her own performance from a range of different sources, all of whom may have a different perspective” (fowler, 2007, p. 257, emphasis added k. h.). incorporating all types of feedback is also likely to contribute to increasing students’ confidence in their own skills and to a belief that “they have the potential to perform better tomorrow than today” (choi, 2004, as cited in lee, 2016, p. 93). three-dimensional feedback, however, which is a part of a larger project of the author, is beyond the scope of the paper. student-conducted feedback can have numerous benefits for interpreting trainees and teachers alike, as was demonstrated in this section, provided that certain conditions are fulfilled. these include knowledge of “the theoretical aspects of interpreting” (fowler, 2007, p. 261), students’ knowledge and understanding of the assessment criteria (fowler, 2007; y. lee, 2005; pallero singleton, 2015), clear and transparent assessment criteria (bartłomiejczyk, 2007; fowler, 2007; su, 2019; y. lee, 2005; z. lee, 2015), prior instruction by the teacher and student training in how to provide peer and self-assessment (fowler, 2007; y. lee, 2005, p. 4; black & wiliam, 1998), and “careful coaching and supervision” (y. lee, 2005, p. 3). these conditions are vital since learner autonomy is not an automatic skill for every student (y. lee, 2005). moreover, “the fear of the unknown” and lack of experience and/or know ledge may result in students’ lack of interest or discouragement in such types of feedback. having discussed the importance and benefits of student-conducted feedback in the context of public service interpreting training, let us now turn to the next section, which attempts to outline the design of the study. the study the intent of the study was to examine interpreting quality and compare positive (strengths) and negative (weaknesses) aspects of trainee interpretpeer feedback and ref lective practice… 141 ers’ performance by means of reflection (self-assessment) and peer feedback. qualitative data collection methods applied in the study were retrospection and observation. the study, as stated in the introduction, aimed to address the following research questions: – what aspects of their own and their peers’ performance do trainee interpreters perceive as strengths and weaknesses? – are there any discrepancies between peer feedback and reflection? which components of trainee interpreter’s performance tend to be prioritized over others? – do trainee interpreters tend to be critical and report more negative than positive aspects of their own and their colleagues’ performance? purposive sampling was employed to select the participants. participants in the study were final year postgraduate students (n = 40) attending the translation and interpreting program with chinese, german, and arabic at the institute of english (university of silesia in katowice). trainee interpreters were attending a public service interpreting course, which runs for one semester during their final year. due to a large group size, during public service interpreting classes trainees were divided into three groups. the trainees were familiar with the teacher, who delivered translation and interpreting classes for them in the previous years. they had prior interpreting experience and had attended simultaneous and consecutive interpreting classes for six semesters (at the undergraduate and postgraduate level). they also took translation classes (general and specialized translation) and subjects such as theory of translation and interpreting and methodology of translation and interpreting research. the students’ working languages were polish and english. for the purpose of the study, trainee interpreters participated in simulated scripted role plays (healthcare setting) performed in a triad. the interpreters provided bi-directional translation (english-polish, polish-english) and the mode of interpreting was consecutive with or without notes. the average length of a simulated role play was seven minutes. for the purpose of the study, due to a large group size, trainees were divided into three groups of ten students. the scripts for the role plays belonged to similar genre (medical interpreting) and had similar degree of difficulty and length for all students. trainees had freedom in the selection of primary participants for their role plays. since the aim of the study was to investigate positive (strengths) and negative (weaknesses) aspects of trainee interpreter’s performance, they were asked to undertake self-assessment in the form of written reflection as well as provide written peer feedback to their colleagues. in order to provide peer feedback, participant observation was employed. while watching the performance of their colleagues, trainees were asked to note down comments focusing on strengths and weaknesses (as many as, in katarzyna holewik142 their opinion, would be observable). rules of peer feedback were made explicit to students (cao 2017). they were asked to provide constructive, specific, and honest feedback for every trainee who acted as a public service interpreter and advised to avoid vagueness. it is worth noting, however, that trainees had prior opportunities for peer and self-assessment, observing and assessing their peers during simulated role plays practiced throughout the semester, since, as fowler (2007, p. 257) rightly states, “in general, the more opportunities for observation of interpreted role-plays they have, the more they will learn.” they also had prior experience in providing feedback during simultaneous interpreting classes in the past. what is more, trainees were familiar with the assessment criteria for the course (fowler, 2007; su, 2019; y. lee, 2005; z. lee, 2015) and aspects of the public service interpreter’s role and behaviour, and were asked to apply them while providing peer feedback. such knowledge is essential so that students are aware of what to comment upon (norberg, 2014). introducing peer feedback ahead of the introduction of reflective practice is recommended by the author of the paper on the grounds that providing peer feedback is likely to be easier for students (cao, 2017). to ensure the spontaneity of expression, it was decided to allow students freedom with regards to the choice of language, or mix of languages to provide their peer feedback, the practice also suggested by bartłomiejczyk (2007). to undertake self-assessment after the completion of the interpreting task, trainee interpreters were asked to produce a piece of reflective writing. reflective writing is relatively common to many courses, for instance at british universities, where it often becomes a core feature of the assignments, yet is not so prevalent at the universities in poland. therefore, it was decided to attempt to incorporate it into interpreter training practice. the primary aim of the task was to enable the trainee interpreters to think critically about the experience, that is, the interpreting task, and learn from it. reflective writing was adopted for the purpose of the public service interpreting course to allow trainee interpreters—future interpreters, to become reflective practitioners and raise their awareness that it is vital for practice professions (such as teachers, doctors, and public service interpreters) to reflect on their action for the purposes of “professional growth and improved work outcomes” and effective decision-making (dean & pollard, 2013, p. 140). nevertheless, it is argued that the ability to conduct such practices effectively in the future depends on trainee interpreters’ exposure to it during training. after completing their interpretation in the role plays, trainee interpreters were asked to write a reflection. it was decided that written format will be beneficial for the trainees since previous studies show that reflective practice in interpreter training takes the format of diaries, blogs, logbooks, reflective journals, and reflective essays (z. lee, 2015), self-assessment reports (y. lee, 2005) or guided commentaries with respect to translator training (norberg, peer feedback and ref lective practice… 143 2014). due to the fact that trainees have not previously been exposed to reflective writing and due to time constraint, a more structured approach was adopted. trainees were presented with a handout with gibbs’ reflective cycle, divided into six stages (see figure 1), and questions corresponding to each stage, which they were asked to answer. as stated previously, the paper does not aim to focus on all of the stages of reflective writing, but only draws on the data from the evaluation stage, which aimed at stating positive (strengths) and negative aspects (weaknesses) of trainee interpreters’ performance.1 in the evaluation stage, trainees were asked to enumerate at least two or three items in each category. at the beginning of the class, they were briefed how to attempt the task and had an opportunity to familiarise themselves with the materials as well as to ask questions. while completing their reflective writing, trainees were asked to conduct self-evaluation “with the target audience in mind” (su, 2019, p. 180). such a practice was employed to draw trainees’ attention to a degree of a public service interpreter’s responsibility in the interaction and consequences of their actions. to ensure the spontaneity of trainee interpreters’ input, it was decided not to impose any time limit. in other words, students were able to take as much time as needed to provide a written reflection of their performance. the majority of trainees seemed to spend an average of twenty minutes on the task. similarly to peer feedback, they were allowed freedom with regards to the choice of language used (bartłomiejczyk, 2007). while completing their reflective writing, trainees were able to consult the scripts of the role plays if they wished to assist their memory. to ensure appropriate conditions for reflective writing, trainees were asked to go into a classroom next door in order to be able to complete the task without being disturbed. five of the students, however, decided to sit at the back of the classroom and complete their reflection there. finally, trainee interpreters were given the option of reflective writing to be anonymous or could include their name if they wished. in addition to peer feedback and self-assessment, feedback was also completed by the teacher, and trainee interpreters’ performances were voice recorded for the purpose of teacher feedback. to avoid increasing the trainees’ anxiety it was decided not to use video recording. while producing their reflective writings, the trainees were not presented with audio recordings, the practice which they were used to during almost every simultaneous interpreting class. such a decision was motivated by the fact that in their future practice as public service interpreters in the institutions such as police, court or city halls, it will be rather impossible for them to record their own performance for the purposes of reflective practice. yet, it is hoped that as professionals they will still reflect on the assignments, areas they could improve and decisions they made. this will be their reflection-on-action (schön, 1983), a skill which is so 1 ref lective practice is, however, a part of a larger study of the author of the paper. katarzyna holewik144 vital for practice professions. after the sessions, trainee interpreters were able to consult peer feedback as well as received a detailed teacher feedback. also, in an informal whole class discussion, trainees were asked about the usefulness of peer feedback and self-evaluation with regards to their learning. qualitative data collection methods used in the study are subject to certain limitations, as observed in existent literature. the limitations of observations and reflective practice are commented upon below in the context of the current study observations can be considered intrusive to a certain extent (creswell, 2014; flick, 2015) and consequently, likely to be stressful for the subjects under observation. it is worth noting that in the observations carried out for the purpose of the study to obtain peer feedback, the observers were the colleagues with whom trainees were familiar with, and thus some rapport had already been established. it could then be argued that this allowed for the alleviation of stress levels and anxiety to a certain extent. another commonly mentioned limitation of observations is potential bias and subjectivity (creswell, 2014). in other words, in the context of the pilot study, the fact that observers were acquainted with their colleagues could possibly affect the quality of their peer feedback. as far as reflective writing is concerned, trainees could avoid disclosing certain details about their own performance, particularly the negative ones, or quite the contrary, be too selfcritical (black & wiliam, 1998). yet, it is important to stress that subjectivity seems an inherent element of qualitative research and certain steps can, and should, be taken to minimize it. in the current pilot study, the observers providing peer feedback were asked to apply and focus on the assessment criteria for the subject, which they were familiar with and which were used during prior peer assessments. what is more, they were instructed to provide such a constructive feedback that they themselves would wish to receive from their peers. trainees engaged in reflective writing were asked to provide honest comments about their own performance, and were ensured that their reflections would only be shared with the teacher for the purpose of the study. in addition, “to balance out the subjective influences of individuals,” investigator triangulation was applied (flick, 2015, p. 218; flick, 2018). this means that trainees obtained feedback from their peers and the teacher2 as well as reflected on their own performance. this way, they were able to compare three types of feedback and also obtain a comprehensive perspective. finally, the quality of observation is considered to depend on the skill of the observer “to observe, document, and interpret what has been observed” (kawulich, 2005, p. 6; creswell, 2014), while the quality of self-evaluation—on 2 please note that the teacher assessment is not, however, the scope of this paper, but is a part of a larger study of the author of the paper. peer feedback and ref lective practice… 145 the skill to reflect in detail. these aspects seem to be particularly true when they are not conducted by professional researchers, that is, in the context of classroom peer observation and self-evaluation. a viable solution to minimise this problem is to train students in providing constructive peer feedback and self-evaluation and ensure they become a constant element of the classes. such practices were encouraged by the author of the study during simultaneous interpreting classes. however, as stated previously, it is vital to bear in mind that, students’ knowledge and understanding of the assessment criteria for the course are inherent elements of successful training (fowler, 2007; su, 2019; y. lee, 2005; z. lee, 2015). analysis the study places itself within the qualitative research paradigm and thus qualitative approaches were applied in the data analysis. all of the trainees’ comments, from peer feedback as well as reflection, were coded (initial coding) according to a skill or behaviour they described. next, a thematic analysis was conducted and codes were aggregated into five themes (creswell, 2014). lastly, there followed counting the number of occurrences of the codes and themes, that is, qualitative data transformation (creswell & plano clark, 2007) or “quantitizing” (sandelowski, 2003; sandelowski et al., 2009). the themes, which corresponded to the assessment criteria categories, were: presentation and delivery, accuracy and fidelity, interpreting skills and strategies, interpersonal competence and non-verbal communication. one of the categories not mentioned by the trainees, yet listed in the assessment criteria for the subject, was cultural awareness. the first three categories are in line with wu’s (2010) interpreting categories for simultaneous interpreting. the final two categories included skills particularly essential for public service interpreting, that is, interpersonal competence and non-verbal communication (toledano buendia & aguilera avila, 2017; van den bogaerde et al., 2016). each of the five categories comprised of the following subcategories: – presentation and delivery: pronunciation, intonation, clear voice, pace/tempo, fluency, seriousness/composure, professional behaviour; – accuracy and fidelity: content accuracy, omissions, additions, grammar (correctness), minor errors/ slips, terminology; – interpreting skills and strategies: asking for clarification, asking for repetition, asking for explanation, comprehension, code switching, memory, focus and concentration, note taking, reaction/responsiveness, stress management; katarzyna holewik146 – interpersonal competence: rapport/attitude towards participants, communication skills, decision making, trust, empathy/concern; – non-verbal communication: eye contact, gestures, body language, facial expressions. all trainees completed and submitted peer feedback and reflection. the great majority of trainees did not seem to experience difficulties with providing constructive peer feedback and overall a good quality of feedback can be reported. peer feedback did not contain any “personal” or irrelevant comments and all trainees’ comments were related to the actual performance of their peers. the majority of comments were “moderately elaborate” (see table 1), that is, “specifying the problems and their locations, or illustrating the problems with examples” (su, 2019, p. 181). there were only three instances when peer feedback seemed rather vague and “the least elaborate” (su, 2019, p. 181) or similar comments were repeated for several students. an overall good quality of peer feedback could indicate that trainees are well aware of assessment criteria applied in public service interpreting classes and key concepts in public service interpreting (fowler, 2007). the comments in reflective writing appeared natural, rather detailed and reflecting trainees’ feelings immediately after their performance. the comments were also longer than those for peer feedback. this can be attributed to a greater amount of time devoted to writing them, which on average was 20 minutes, while in terms of peer feedback it was 6–7 minutes. table 1 contains examples of trainee interpreters’ peer feedback and reflection. the symbol ‘-----’ indicates that no comments were given. with regards to the language chosen, 30 out of 40 trainees (75%) chose english to provide their peer feedback and 38 out of 40 (95%) used english in their reflection. as stated previously, in both cases they were informed that either polish or english was acceptable. given that the aim of the study was to observe whether trainee interpreters display tendency to be critical and report more negative than positive aspects of their own and their colleagues’ performance, figure 2 illustrates the distribution of positive and negative comments with respect to peer feedback and reflection. to understand what aspects of their own and their peers’ performance trainee interpreters perceive as strengths and weaknesses, as well as explore possible discrepancies between peer feedback and reflection, the distribution of the five categories obtained in the qualitative analysis in the context of peer feedback and reflection is displayed in figures 3 and 4. peer feedback and ref lective practice… 147 table 1 examples of strengths and weaknesses from peer feedback (pf) and reflection (r) category positive (strengths) negative (weaknesses) presentation and delivery (pf) she is calm and speaks clearly. good pace and fluent. (pf) she can express emotions well. an expressive interpretation. (r) i believe it was a good interpretation, almost no repetitions, a smooth flow of conversation was maintained. (r) quick reactions, there were no long pauses in my translation. (pf) his voice was really monotonous. (pf) she was stuttering. (r) i had some problems with being serious. (r) flow of speech. i got confused and there was an unnecessary pause in the conversation. accuracy and fidelity (pf) she does not omit anything. really close to the original. (pf) a really good knowledge of terminology (r) i didn’t add anything, i was not trying to alter the message (r) i didn’t have any problems with terminology. i was prepared. (pf) sometimes she does not translate short answers. (*trainee’s underlining) (pf) his choice of vocabulary in polish, e.g. when speaking to the patient he used “dehydracja” which would be too difficult to understand. (r) i lacked specialised vocabulary, i had to ask the doctor to explain and repeat many times. (r) the fact that he did not know one term caused serious communication problems. interpreting skills and strategies (pf) he wasn’t afraid to ask for repetition once – when he didn’t hear something. (pf) good that she asked for clarification and didn’t try to make things up. (r) i was concentrated on my task, not on the fact that i feel stressed (r) i translated fluently, i had no problems with memory (pf) she used omissions if she did not know the the terminology. (pf) she could take notes but she didn’t. she missed some information because of that (r) i was stressed and i know that i had to start sentences a few times to make them sound natural in polish and to make the conversation understandable for both sides. (r) sometimes i couldn’t understand what the doctor was saying. interpersonal (pf) shows interest in what’s going on, creates the feeling of trust. (pf) she showed concern about the situation, emotions. (r) i think my attitude towards people situation was sad (a death of a family member), so i tried to show empathy. (r) i have no problems concerning interpersonal skills. i like working with people (natural). it would lead to positive perception of the interpreter. (pf) -----------------(pf) -----------------(r) doesn’t always know how to cope with difficult situation (r) -----------------non-verbal communication (pf) really good eye contact. (pf) he smiled and was very polite. (r) i had a good eye contact with both a nurse and a patient. (r) she kept eye contact with both parties. (pf) a really poor eye contact which makes the whole situation overly formal. (pf) he was using a lot of hand gestures. (r) too many facial expressions. (r) i did not look at the other participants often. katarzyna holewik148 results and discussion data comparing the distribution of positive (strengths) and negative (weaknesses) aspects of trainee interpreters’ performance by means of reflection and peer feedback is displayed in figure 2. as can be seen from the figure, it is apparent that these two methods of providing feedback yielded significantly different results as far as reflection is concerned, there was a tendency among trainee interpreters for reporting more negative (58%) rather than positive aspects of their performance, which is in line with the findings of bartłomiejczyk (2007, 2009) who, in her study on simultaneous interpreting, also noted a negative trend in students’ self-assessment (56.2%). however, z. lee (2015) in her study of student logbooks as a form of reflective practice, reported approximately equal numbers of segments coded for positive performance and negative performance. the positive ones accounted for 757 of all 1655 segments coded (about 45%), while the negative ones for 792 (about 47%). this differs to some extent from the findings presented here. on the contrary, a positive trend can be observed within peer feedback. the majority of trainee interpreters identified more strengths (62%) than weaknesses (38%) in their colleagues’ performance. these results are in contradiction to bartłomiejczyk (2009) who reported a negative trend in the case of peer feedback (57.7%). the tendency for being critical when providing peer feedback has also been mentioned by fowler (2007, p. 256), who claims that “there is always the temptation for students to focus on the negative, rather than the positive, aspects of an interpreter’s production.” such results would suggest that public service interpreting trainees display a tendency to be less critical of their colleagues than conference interpreting trainees (bartłomiejczyk, 2009), while appear to be more self-critical figure 2. positive (strengths) and negative (weaknesses) aspects of trainee interpreters’ performance from reflection and peer feedback peer feedback and ref lective practice… 149 the quantitative data illustrating the distribution of the five categories obtained in the qualitative thematic analysis in the context of peer feedback and reflection is presented in figures 3 and 4. the former figure presents positive aspects (strengths) of trainee interpreters’ performance, while the latter negative ones (weaknesses). the analysis of the responses revealed that trainee interpreters tend to pay attention to multiple aspects of the interpreter’s behaviour and appear to be aware of the complexity of the public interpreter’s role in the interaction. this was reflected in their numerous and diverse comments, which are distributed across almost all of the categories, as is demonstrated in figures 3 and 4 (apart from one noticeable exception in the case of reflection, where none of the trainees focused on interpersonal competence while reflecting on their own weaknesses). such findings indicate that trainees consider paralinguistic aspects an integral component of public service interpreting apart from the linguistic ones – the most significant ones for interpreters. this in turn, would imply that some of them recognise a public service interpreter as a visible agent (angelelli, 2004) and co-participant in the interaction (roy, 2000; wadensjö, 1998) with a dynamic “role-space” (llewelyn-jones, & lee, 2014), and not merely a conduit or a channel. the multifaceted character of the comments also implies a diversified type of feedback received by the trainees from the teacher, an aspect of teacher feedback suggested by bartłomiejczyk (2007). figure 3. the distribution of the five categories (strengths) 0.50 0.45 0.40 0.35 0.30 0.25 0.20 0.15 0.10 0.05 0 0.25 0.10 0.23 0.24 0.24 0.46 0.19 0.13 0.09 0.07 [%] katarzyna holewik150 figure 4. the distribution of the five categories (weaknesses) the results of the study show that there are discrepancies between peer feedback and reflection in the distribution of the categories in terms of positive aspects (strengths) and negative aspects (weakness) of the trainee interpreters’ performance. first, positive aspects of both peer feedback and reflection will be commented upon, followed by the negative ones. when it comes to strengths (figure 3), in the case of peer feedback the comments are distributed evenly among the first three categories, that is, presentation and delivery (25%), interpreting skills and strategies (24%) and accuracy and fidelity (23%). however, there is a noticeable difference with regards to the first two categories within reflection. there are almost half as many comments related to presentation and delivery (10%), yet it yielded a higher score than in the study conducted by bartłomiejczyk (2009) where it scored merely 4.5%. this indicates that public service interpreting trainees tend to pay slightly more attention to their own presentation and delivery than conference interpreting trainees (simultaneous interpreting). this could be attributed to the fact that they are not seated in the booth, but are visible to the primary participants, thus are aware of the fact that anything they do can be immediately noticed by them. nearly half of the total comments from reflection focused on interpreting skills and strategies (46%), which is almost double in comparison with peer feedback. this was in some part due to the fact that stress management (15%) was one of the subcategories, and it is widely known that interpreting is considered a highly stressful activity (adams, 2017; toledano buendia, & aguilera avila, 2017). it is also worth noting that memory, focus, and concentration con0.45 0.40 0.35 0.30 0.25 0.20 0.15 0.10 0.05 0 0.25 0.17 0.42 0.38 0.21 0.39 0.02 0 0.10 0.06 [%] peer feedback and ref lective practice… 151 stituted 11% of the comments on interpreting skills and strategies. appropriate stress management and good memory are vital skills for interpreters, and without the second one in particular, interpretation would hardly be possible. this implies that trainee interpreters recognise the importance of these skills in their work and almost a quarter feel confident about them. the remaining two categories, that is, interpersonal competence and nonverbal communication produced quite similar results, with the overall number of responses being slightly higher for peer feedback than reflection in both categories. it is especially worth noting that interpersonal competence yielded a relatively high score, especially within peer feedback (19%). trainee interpreters considered it almost as fundamental as presentation and delivery, accuracy and fidelity and interpreting skills and strategies, that is, the categories with the highest scores. such results point to the trainees’ greater awareness of the importance of interpersonal skills in public service interpreting (toledano buendia & aguilera avila, 2017; van den bogaerde et al., 2016). finally, least attention was devoted to non-verbal communication in both peer feedback (9%) and reflection (7%). a similar trend has also been noted in terms of weaknesses. it is rather surprising particularly when it comes to peer feedback, where trainees who provide it become the observers and thus should be able to recognise whether non-verbal behaviour was displayed appropriately or not, and comment on it in a greater detail. as regards weaknesses (figure 4), the dominant category within peer feedback was accuracy and fidelity (42%), which yielded the second highest score (38%) in the case of reflection. the tendency for the trainee interpreters to be rather critical and negative especially when reflecting on accuracy and fidelity corroborates the findings of bartłomiejczyk (2009), who also noted a negative trend within this category in students’ self-assessment. in the study by hartley et al. (2003, p. 10) accuracy was the second most reported aspect by professional interpreters who provided feedback for trainees (the first category was coherence, that is, “making sense, no contradictions”). such a strong focus on accuracy and fidelity in the current pilot study could be attributed to the fact that these two are considered most important aspects for interpreters whose task, first and foremost, is to provide faithful and accurate translation. what is more, the need for accuracy and fidelity seems particularly crucial in public service interpreting, where the interpreter’s translation choices may have severe legal consequences, result in wrongful convictions, withstand scrutiny in court or impact on patient’s health or even life, which trainee interpreters seem to be quite aware of the dominant category within reflection was interpreting skills and strategies (39%). as pointed out previously in the case of strengths, this is partly due to the fact that stress management (24%) was one of the subcategories. the results indicate that trainee interpreters consider themselves more stressed or katarzyna holewik152 nervous than they appear in the eyes of their peers (only 10% in the case of peer feedback). the difference between peer feedback and reflection implies that trainees are either able to manage stress quite well without fully realizing it, or that it takes the form of facilitative rather than debilitative anxiety (alpert & haber, 1960) and thus becomes less noticeable for their peers. presentation and delivery received slightly more attention within peer feedback (25%) than reflection (17%). a similar trend was also reported for strengths. such results are partly consistent with bartłomiejczyk (2009), who noted significantly more negative comments with regards to peer feedback (26.6%) as opposed to self-assessment (2%). the results of the study concerning the category of presentation and delivery are, however, contrary to the studies by hartley et al. (2003) and z. lee (2015), in which it was rated as the most dominant category in students’ self-assessment. yet, relatively small differences between peer feedback (25%) and reflection (17%) indicate that, quite surprisingly, trainee interpreters themselves were to a certain extent able to recall and reflect on negative aspects of their own performance, not only their peers – the observers. it is worth noting that significantly less attention has been devoted to nonverbal communication in both peer feedback (10%) and reflection (6%). low scores for non-verbal communication are similar both for strengths and weaknesses. this finding partly accords with that of z. lee (2015), who reported that non-verbal behaviour was mentioned least in her students’ consecutive interpreting self-assessment and accounted merely for 9 of all 1655 segments coded. the results from the study indicate that greater awareness needs to be fostered with regards to non-verbal communication and its importance in public service interpreting (krystallidou, 2017). conversely to the data reporting on strengths (figure 3), interpersonal competence received least attention among trainee interpreters. this, however, could be attributed to the fact that trainee interpreters believed interpersonal competence was displayed appropriately due to the fact that they were familiar with the trainees acting as primary participants in the role plays, and consequently, for example, rapport and trust had already been established. thus, there was perhaps no need for negative peer feedback or reflection. lastly, it is important to note that none of the trainees mentioned cultural awareness skills both in peer feedback and reflection, which were discussed during the course as one of the key competencies for public service interpreters. a highly plausible explanation for this might be that all participants in the role plays were from the same culture, and therefore there were no cultural differences or misunderstandings to be commented upon. peer feedback and ref lective practice… 153 concluding remarks the intent of the pilot study was to examine interpreting quality and investigate differences between peer feedback and self-assessment (reflection) in terms of positive aspects (strengths) and negative aspects (weaknesses) of trainee interpreters’ performance in public service interpreter training. the study has shown that there are significant discrepancies between peer-feedback and self-assessment (reflection) and that overall more negative aspects are reported in reflection than in peer feedback. this reflects students’ tendency for self-criticism. thus, it seems reasonable to complement reflective practice with peer feedback, which as the results of the study suggest, tends to be positive overall. in this way, it is likely that a balanced student-conducted feedback could be achieved, thanks to which students might be able to identify some positive aspects of their performance (however small they may be), and not merely weaknesses. consequently, a more positive attitude and motivation for learning can be fostered. the findings suggest that both peer feedback and reflection can be considered valuable tools for public service interpreting training. firstly, it is demonstrated by numerous and diverse comments provided by trainee interpreters focusing on different aspects of the public service interpreter’s skills and behaviour, not merely those of a linguistic nature. this would suggest that trainees understand the assessment criteria (fowler, 2007; su, 2019; y. lee, 2005; z. lee, 2015) and are aware of crucial aspects of the public service interpreter’s behaviour, and are able to apply them to their own learning. however, as stated before, comments from peer feedback tended to be less elaborate than those in reflective writings. to address this issue, extra training sessions on how to provide effective and more elaborate feedback should be considered in a future study. what is more, the study has shown that peer feedback seems to be particularly beneficial when evaluating interpersonal and non-verbal communication since by acting as observers of the situation, peers are much more likely to notice those aspects. as far as reflective practice is concerned, it would also be possible for trainees to reflect on their own interpersonal and non-verbal communication skills in greater detail provided their performances were video recorded. however, this was not the case in this study and should be considered in further research. when it comes to drawing trainees’ attention to the importance of cultural awareness, to which none was drawn both in peer feedback and reflection, a rather effective solution might be to engage some minority languages speakers, such as erasmus exchange students, as one of the primary participants in the role plays. this may be an enriching experience especially as regards trainees’ cultural awareness skills, and also non-verbal behaviour which tends to differ from one culture to another. katarzyna holewik154 applying both types of student-conducted feedback in the public service interpreting course was a positive experience both for trainees and the teacher, and is very likely to become a permanent feature of the course. there was no formal measurement of trainees’ satisfaction, which was performed in y. lee’s (2005) and wang and han’s (2013) study. however, in an informal whole-class discussion during a feedback session, trainees considered the experience positive and useful, despite it being time consuming. the measurement of trainees’ satisfaction will be taken into account in a further study. some trainees’ comments can be found below: ti1: it was good to write it down because i did not realise all the things. (about reflection) ti2: i had a general idea that i had problems with this and this but when i started writing it and analysing it question by question, i found out that i had overall more pros and cons than i realised at the beginning. (about reflection) ti2: if we want to improve we should do such things, to ask some questions to ourselves. this is quite helpful, but takes time. (about reflection) ti3: when peers evaluate us, it helps to realise some mistakes and some things that they as a person, who is not a part of the situation, see, how they can actually see things. (about peer feedback) ti4: it was good to get feedback from each possible side. however, it took some time. from the perspective of the teacher, the application of both types of studentconducted feedback was also a positive experience. it allowed trainees to be actively involved in the learning process, recognise the value of their own work, and most importantly obtain feedback from different perspectives, which was also noted by fowler (2007). reflective practice seemed to contribute to their analytical, critical thinking and problem-solving skills and made trainees aware why it is vital to reflect on their own performance. it was visible that the majority of trainees were indeed engaging with it and did not treat it as a “tick off the box” activity. lastly, it was also hoped that sharing similar difficulties and weaknesses may motivate trainees and build their self-confidence since they were able to realise that their peers also experienced similar problems during their interpretation. however, it is argued that peer feedback and reflective practice should be complemented with teacher feedback to allow students to obtain multidimensional and even more comprehensive perspective. previous research shows that “students value various types of feedback and appreciate these feedback experiences” (y. lee, 2016, p. 166). the combination of studentpeer feedback and ref lective practice… 155 conducted and teacher feedback is also essential to minimize subjectivity of student-conducted feedback. the findings in this pilot study are subject to certain limitations. video recording was not used during simulated role plays. as stated previously, it was decided not to include it in order not to increase students’ stress, the level of which, as reported in some reflections, seemed already quite high. in a further study, however, video recording shall be taken into account due to its pedagogical value. as suggested by coffey (2014, p. 86), video recording can be considered “a means by which a teaching episode can be captured more permanently to be used as a point of reference for reflection” and also “the best way of encouraging self-awareness and critical thinking in the student” (fowler, 2007, p. 258). however, a voluntary participation in the study will be suggested, since it is likely that some students may not wish to be video recorded. next, in order to allow for a detailed reflection and to allow more time for completing it, trainees may be asked to complete their reflective writing the same day at home while watching the recordings. to obtain a more complete account from peer feedback, apart from describing strengths and weaknesses of their colleagues, trainees could also be asked to evaluate them, that is, provide possible reasons of their peers’ behaviour and offer solutions. such practice was advocated in su’s study (2019) on peer review in simultaneous interpreting training. this would correspond to the evaluation stage in gibbs’ reflective cycle (gibbs, 1988) applied in the reflection. finally, to learn about trainees’ experiences of student-conducted feedback and enable them to voice their opinion of their role as “a feedback giver and receiver” (wang & han, 2013), a questionnaire should be administered and/or qualitative interviews conducted, as suggested by y. lee (2005). such feedback on feedback will allow the teacher to obtain a more comprehensive perspective on the usefulness of student-generated feedback as “it is necessary for teachers and students to engage in dialogue on feedback and make optimal use of it” (lee, 2018, p. 167, emphasis added k. h.). the need for a multidimensional view of feedback seems unquestionable due to its benefits, as illustrated by previous research and the current pilot study. incorporating multidimensional feedback into public service interpreter training can promote “a classroom culture of questioning and deep thinking, in which pupils learn from shared discussions with teachers and peers” (black & wiliam, 1998, p. 9). trainee interpreters need to be able to critically reflect on their own performance, respond and act on feedback received from their clients when they become professional interpreters. this, however, can only be achieved through their active participation in the learning process and experience of student-conducted feedback during their training. katarzyna holewik156 references adams, h., & rosales-dominguez, l. 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(2019). interpreting quality as evaluated by peer students, the interpreter and translator trainer, 13(2), 177–189. https://doi.org/10.1080/1750399x.2018.1564192 peer feedback and ref lective practice… 159 katarzyna holewik peer-evaluation und selbstevaluation in der didaktik des gerichts und behördendolmetschen z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g dieser artikel soll die schlüsselrolle der evaluation durch studierende, d.h. der selbstevaluation (ref lective practice) und der peer-evaluation (peer feedback) in der didaktik des dolmetschens hervorheben. als vorteile der selbstund peer-evaluation im didaktischen prozess kann folgendes genannt werden: förderung des kooperativen lernens, einbeziehung und aktivierung der studierenden, entwicklung kritischer und analytischer denkfähigkeiten sowie erhöhung der autonomie und verantwortung der studierenden. ziel dieses artikels ist es, die ergebnisse einer pilotstudie zur wahrnehmung der eigenen und fremden übersetzung im hinblick auf die übersetzungsqualität vorzustellen, sowie die stärken und schwächen der übersetzung vergleichend zu analysieren, auf die die studierenden mittels der selbstevaluation (ref lective practice) und der peer-evaluation (peer feedback) verwiesen haben. die untersuchung wurde unter studierenden der englischen philologie (fachrichtung: übersetzungswissenschaften) im unterricht im gerichtsund behördendolmetschen durchgeführt. die ergebnisse zeigen, dass es signifikante unterschiede zwischen der eigenen evaluation der übersetzung und der peer-evaluation gibt. im fall der selbstevaluation herrschen negative urteile vor, wodurch eine tendenz der studierenden zur selbstkritik zu beobachten ist schlüsselwörter: didaktik des dolmetschens, selbstevaluation, peer-evaluation, gerichtsund behördendolmetschen, schulung von dolmetschern preface this journal came out for the first time in 2015. its foundation was built upon our belief that although poland has a strong presence among second language acquisition and multilinguality researchers, which is demonstrated by the large number of conferences and also book publications appearing every year, academic journals like this one, concerned with both theoretical issues and the practical concerns of sla, are not that numerous. the initial success of the journal is demonstrated by the fact that despite its short life, it is already indexed in several databases, and it made its first appearance in scopus in 2018. thanks to this, it is also recognised by the polish ministry of higher education as a scholarly journal in linguistics. it is of importance that the theory and practice of second language acquisition journal is published by the prestigious polish academic publisher, wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego (university of silesia press). we should also ascribe the origins of our journal to the success of the international conference on foreign/second language acquisition (icfsla), an academic event that has been organized for over thirty years by the institute of english at the university of silesia in katowice (institute of linguistics since 2020). icfsla brings together many polish and foreign academics regularly every may. its focus is on new trends in sla research, but it also prides itself on promoting fairly unresearched and new issues in sla. although the conference always has a leading theme, scholars are also invited to present their research even if it falls outside the scope of the main topic. our journal has become an accepted channel for the publication of selected conference papers of high academic standard. at the same time, we warmly welcome other contributions, those not connected with the conference itself. we also accept for inclusion in each volume reviews of academic books recently published in poland and abroad, which would be of interest to our readers. it is additionally an important vehicle for promoting sla research carried out by polish academics and published by polish publishers, who maintain high theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 6 (2), 2020, pp. 5–8 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.9903 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en 6 preface academic standards, but who are not that easily accessible abroad and so not tending to reach a wider academic audience. the whole process of paper submission is automated via an open journal system (ojs) and this embraces the article submission, referee assignment, and double blind-review processes as well as the revision, copyediting, and production stages. the production process is in the hands of a team of experienced professionals from the university of silesia press, who do their best to make the whole procedure smooth and effective. all the issues of our journal are available free via the ojs system for reading and pdf download. the open access policy allows for the availability of the most recent research in the field at zero cost, thus promoting the articles published in its issues to global readerships. we strongly believe that our journal serves an important need in disseminating new and interesting research projects and studies in sla of both polish and foreign scholars in the field. we have noted a palpable increase in submissions from all over the world, which is reflected in the contribution to the most recent volumes. the journal is published bi-annually and the contributions can be uploaded by the prospective authors continuously, without any calls for paper. the selection of articles and book reviews for the upcoming volumes is done on the basis of acceptance of the text on completion of the process of reviewing and revising. as mentioned earlier, each text is peer-reviewed in a double-blind reviewing process by referees selected by us from the editorial board, but also beyond. the editorial board itself consists of polish scholars and foreign experts in the area and represents the wide range of research interests of its members. all updated information on the journal is available on the journal webpage at www.tapsla.us.edu.pl. the present issue consists of texts which are miscellaneous in their focus, however, the opening article continues the theme of the previous one, codeswitching and translanguaging. sarah cox—in her text “can an ecological, multilingual approach help us to better support reunited refugee families in scotland with language learning?”—focuses on the language learning experiences of refugee families in glasgow reunited through the british red cross and investigates in her pilot study the relationship between academic literature, policy and the practice of language learning—drawing on the translanguaging theories of garcia and kleifgen (2010) and norton (2013). the author comments on an ecological multilingual approach implemented in refugee classrooms to demonstrate empowerment, identity, and the need for recognition of their linguistic repertories. also, the second article in the volume by teresa maria włosowicz entitled “the influence of living and working abroad on the identities of researchers and native speaker teachers” draws readers’ attention to issues of identity as functioning in foreign context, but this time the subjects are academics and native speaker teachers. using extensive sources (among others block, 2009; hall, 2012; pavlenko & blackledge, 2004; dewaele & 7preface li, 2012), the author defines and describes the construct of identity, and identity in abroad contexts. włosowicz intended to demonstrate that an openminded hybrid identity mentioned in other studies of such subjects would be also present in her project participants. however, this is not entirely the case, as what is observed in the present study is that the native language and the family are more dominant aspects of the subjects’ identity than the foreign context in which they live, but at the same time not denying its positive value for their personal enrichment. in the next text by meihua liu entitled “a study of chinese university english majors’ l2 motivational self,” the author looks at one of the most important affective dimensions of sl/fl learning that is motivation and presents an interesting empirical study investigating chinese english majors’ l2 motivational self. the study follows the l2 motivational self system as presented by dörnyei (2005, 2009). the positive results of the study demonstrate not only chinese students’ high motivation to learn english but also their positive attitudes towards learning it, which leads the author to offer some pedagogical implications for the efl classroom and a proposal for new avenues of research. arkadiusz rojczyk and andrzej porzuczek in their text “detection of non-native speaker status from backwards and vocoded content-masked speech” investigate speech rhythm as a cue to non-native pronunciation and describe two methods of speech manipulation that allow us to identify native versus non-native speech, otherwise inaccessible to listeners. unfortunately, it was observed that the subjects in their study were not able to detect non-native accent in polish learners of english in their manipulated samples. in his text “the dynamics of needs in a course in english phonetics for in-service primary school teachers of english,” oleksandr kapranov discusses the developmental character of the needs expressed by a group of in-service teachers participating in a course of efl phonetics as part of their professional qualifications. these teachers’ needs evolve from just getting formal qualifications at the beginning to becoming real role models for their learners in terms of fluency of speech and intonation as well as sources of exposure to english towards the end of the course. also, katarzyna holewik, in her text “peer feedback and reflective practice in public service interpreter training,” looks at the educational settings in which future public interpreters are being trained. her major focus is on the role of self-assessment (self-reflection) and peer feedback (peer-reflection) in this process as the stimuli for development of analytical/critical thinking skills, active participation, and collaboration in the learning process. this pilot study conducted among m.a. trainee interpreters aimed to assess their interpreting performance by means of peer feedback and self-assessment and compare their outcomes. the analysis demonstrated visible differences between peer feedback and reflection in the assessment of strengths and weaknesses of students’ performance in a cycle of simulated public interpreting session. 8 preface the present issue also contains two reviews of recent book publications in sla. the first one, the cambridge handbook of bilingualism, edited by annick de houwer and lourdes ortega (2019) (reviewed by anna ewert) is a valuable addition to the series of cambridge handbooks in language and linguistics, dedicated to the memory of jules ronjat, who is considered a pioneer of bilingualism studies. as a handbook, consisting of six parts (27 chapters), it offers a broad range of topics in the field of individual bilingualism in a lifespan from an all-inclusive, developmental and socially contextualised perspective. all the texts are written by experts and renowned scholars in the field. the second review is of the monographic volume by dorota werbińska the formation of language teacher identity. a phenomenographic-narrative study (2017) (reviewed by joanna rokita-jaśkow). the book discusses an important issue in (fl) teacher professional development, which is (emerging) teacher identity and the development of teacher knowledge. using extensive sources on teacher development, her own observations as a teacher trainer and pre-service teacher’s narratives, the author proposes her own original framework for developing language teacher identity. we sincerely hope that the readers will find the present issue of interest and value to their own research in the field of second language acquisition, foreign language teaching and learning. at the same time, we would also like to ask polish and foreign academics to keep supporting the journal by sharing their scholarly research with us, by submitting their original work and book reviews of recent high level publications for the next few volumes. danuta gabryś-barker adam wojtaszekhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-0308-4337 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703 dorota owczarek adam mickiewicz university, poznań advanced fl students’ self-perception of their language identity a b s t r a c t: this article reports the results of a study of self-perception of their language identity by advanced fl students. the aim of the study is to observe what students’ language choices are and what guides them in these choices. the concepts related to bi/multilingualism are taken into consideration, following cook’s opinion (1992, p. 558) that l2 users should be compared to bilinguals rather that monolinguals. the perception of the language self is related to language competence acquired in formal education. the findings will be referred to recent research on language and identity in a foreign language context conducted elsewhere, and suggestions for further study in the field will be provided. k e y w o r d s: language identity, bi/multilingualism, language competence the importance of being multilingual is above all, social and psychological rather than linguistic. beyond types, categories, methods, and processes is the essential animating tension of identity. (edwards, 2009, p. 23) introduction bilingualism and multilingualism seem to be very broad terms which contain a number of different subcategories (pavlenko, 2007; edwards, 2013), as well as an array of concepts. in the report of the linee project on multilingualism in europe the following key concepts are listed: culture, discourse, identity, ideology, knowledge, language policy and planning, multi-competence and power and conflict. studies of bi/multilingualism focus on a variety of issues, such as gender (pavlenko et al., 2001), emotions (pavlenko, 2007), identity (kramsch, 2009), the impact of bilingualism on language development (białystok, 2005), theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 1 (1) 2015, pp. 51–68 52 dorota owczarek and the role of power relations in second language acquisition and identity formation (b. n. peirce, 2000), to name just a few. the problem of identity is common to all of the above-mentioned studies, which is pursuant to david block’s postulate: indeed, in fl and, in particular, sa contexts, it is important to explore how the symbolic capital of language learners mediates language learning activity and ultimately the kind of identity work that takes place. in fl contexts, long-term expectations regarding academic achievement might differ considerably along social class lines, with high expectations being inclusive of a positive disposition toward the study of an fl and low expectations framing such study as being of little use. (block, 2007, p. 872) most studies of multilingualism and bilingualism concern expats or immigrants. however, with the advent of english as a lingua franca there appears a substantial number of cases of academic research devoted to fl context with the focus on the influence of english on learners’ identities (atay & ece, 2009; er et al., 2012; guerra, 2012; zacharias, 2012). some researchers also focus on other languages than english (kramsch, 2009; coffey & street, 2008). nevertheless, a predominant fashion is to examine the issue either in sla context or limit it to two languages, i.e. the vernacular language and a foreign one. what does it mean to be bi/multilingual? in the longman dictionary of contemporary english for advanced learners a bilingual person is defined as somebody who is able to speak two languages equally well, whereas a multilingual one is the speaker who is capable of using several different languages. bialystok observes (2005, p. 581) that bilingualism is “a continuous dimension that describes the relative proficiency a person holds over two languages.” pavlenko (2007, p. 4) differentiates between monolingual speakers with long foreign language exposure, and those who speak two or more languages, and she terms them bilingual and multilingual respectively. she, after cook (1999; 2002), makes a clear division between second language learners and foreign language learners, where foreign language learners are those who learn a language in the classroom and/or by themselves, and second language users are those who use a language for real life purposes. foreign language learners differ from second language learners in that they do not use their language outside of the learning context. pavlenko uses the term bilingual/ 53advanced fl students’ self-perception of their language identity multilingual/l2 user to refer to those who use the second language outside of the learning context, no matter what their proficiency level is. concepts at play in bi/multilingualism the first concept, language proficiency, is measured by language proficiency tests equated with linguistic skills such as listening, writing, speaking, and reading (bialystok et al., 2005; ehrlich, 2001). yet, according to hammemberg (2010, p. 94) it is a problematic issue as proficiency can vary in each language and it is difficult to determine the level of proficiency at which a language becomes one’s own language. proficiency also means adopting appropriate linguistic practices by regular users of the language and then adjusting them to one’s personal preferences (ohara, 2001, p. 231). a concept of multi-competence introduced by cook (1992) which denotes various language systems grouped together in one’s mind seem to overcome the problems posed by the difficulties connected with assessing one’s proficiency, but above all it positions a bi/multilingual person with his/her distinct state of mind in opposition to a monolingual speaker. in other words, the bi/multilingual speaker is a specific speaker with a unique linguistic system. this view is shared by kramsch (2009, p. 44), who, quoting halliday, says that the way bilinguals deal with linguistic diversity makes them different from monolingual subjects. the next concept is the identity/subjectivity of a language user. a multilingual speaker has been termed by kramsch (2009) a multilingual subject, where prominence is given to the subjective aspects of language acquisition. furthermore, this switch to identity in discussing multilingualism in postmodern times opens up new possibilities for looking at the issue from a new perspective, i.e. to see motivation as investment, an anxiety state as socially constructed silence, and the inability to say something as a symptom of power relations (peirce, 2000). thus, subjectivity appears as an entity constructed in a particular moment of time and speaking rather than the static body of an individual who speaks two or more languages. moreover, it enables one to view one’s self in various dimensions, such as one’s competence (intelligence), or sense of humor (social attractiveness). traditionally, the motivation of a learner was seen in two categories, i.e. instrumental and integrative (lambert & gardner, 1972), but b. n. peirce (2007) introduced the term investment which in a more informed way explains the learner’s drive to study a fl. who i am is partly described by the choice of what languages i want to speak. therefore, investment is a concept which is tied to one’s identity. it involves both personal as well as social elements. the 54 dorota owczarek decision to study foreign languages and the language choice are based on one’s interests, as well as the assumed symbolic value of a chosen language which can make the speaker a different person. according to kramsch (2009, pp. 15–17), language users become other people when they speak another language. the use of language may have a subjective relevance for learners. they may have heightened perceptions and emotions, may be more aware of their body movement, or have the feeling of a lost or an enhanced power. they use languages and their power to be what they want to be. this desire is the inner force thanks to which they can shape their subjectivity and become the subjects they want to be. a language creates a possibility to escape from or to explore the self. a multilingual subject is someone for whom language is not only an asset but also self-fulfillment. language acquisition is fraught with emotions. pavlenko (2007) claims that emotions are the first condition for the embodiment of the language, and that languages learnt in the classroom lack such embodiment as they are not emotionally loaded. the only emotions learnt at school are connected with language anxiety. speakers whose languages were acquired with the engagement of emotional memory perceive their language selves as emotional, embodied, and natural, and speakers who acquired their languages through declarative memory see their selves in l2 as detached and unemotional or even fake (pavlenko, 2007, p. 189). true though this might be, it is also true that advanced language learners use their language outside the classroom, where emotions are revealed. these emotions guide them through their interactions allowing the speaker to get involved in a conversation or disallowing for such an involvement and positioning him/her as a silent listener/observer. pavlenko observes (2007, p. 209) that bilinguals in some situations (usually on emotional grounds) refuse to speak one language and then they need to find a replacement. does this situation concern fl learners? is it only silence they are left to? despite her different approach, pavlenko says important things for fl learning and her observations lead to some important questions on bi/multilingualism in an fl learning context. finally, a scrutiny of the physical objects multilingual speakers use or feel attached to may indicate how far the speakers go beyond the classroom limits and their objects may shed some light on their identity. as aronin (2012, p. 182) says, “an object is a representation of its user” and belongs to the user’s private sphere. some objects may have a strong emotional value. some may be language-defined objects if they bear an inscription. some, if they offer a linguistic choice, may reveal one’s language identity. in sum, the desire to speak a foreign language, and in particular the desire to speak a foreign language well, seems to be a way to become a unique, exceptional human being. an issue that has intrigued me for a long time is whether those who study a foreign language at the advanced level, choose to work with this language 55advanced fl students’ self-perception of their language identity and work on its development in a foreign context perceive themselves as bi/ multilingual and if so, what elements are involved in this process and how such people feel in those situations, where they use a language to establish new contacts, at dorms or on exchange visits, or via the internet. hence they use the language for everyday practices, even if their use is different (limited), when compared to that of immigrants or expats. though they gain the basics in the classroom, they move forward beyond the classroom walls. the findings presented here come from a pilot study carried out in february 2014. the main research question was: how do fl learners at the advanced level see and aspire of themselves, and in consequence what is their perceived language identity? the main question asked was: do foreign language users see themselves as bi/multilingual speakers? the supporting questions referred to fl learners’ self-perceptions as related to key elements in bi/multilingualism. methodology participants and method. the research group consisted of 103 people (n = 103), 18—third year students and 81—second year students of the applied linguistics department at adam mickiewicz university, who study english and german, german being their major, and one additional language (l4) of their choice, either french, spanish, italian or russian, and four family members, who speak at least one foreign language. for data collection an introspective approach (pavlenko, 2012) was chosen as the focus of interest was on the students’ own assessment of the problem in question. the students’ self-perception of their language identity was examined by the use of self-assessment procedures (edwards, 2013), which reveal one’s opinions about the speakers of certain varieties of languages and provide an insight into the learner’s beliefs, as well as shed some light on her/his attitude towards the surrounding world (research area report c 2009, p. 4). questionnaire-based studies of bilinguals were also conducted by pavlenko and dewaele (pavlenko, 2012). the respondents were given a questionnaire with 13 open-ended questions and one closed question. they were questioned in polish and asked to provide answers to the following open-ended questions: (1) what language do you speak at home? (2) what is the language of the community you live in? (3) how do you understand the concept of language proficiency? (4) what languages have you been learning and for how long, and how do you assess your proficiency in these languages? (5) how do you assess your ability to express yourself in reference to humor, personality, and intelligence in a particular language? (6) 56 dorota owczarek does any of these languages pose a problem and if so of what kind? (7) do you feel that the right to use any language is limited, what language and when? (8) which language is helpful in achieving set goals? (9) in what situations do you use a language? (10) what is your attitude towards fl communities? (11) how has learning an fl benefited you? (12) do you feel different when speaking different languages? and (13) what material objects are essential to your language studies? in the last closed question the respondents were to state whether they see themselves as a monolingual, bilingual or multilingual speaker. (for the original questionnaire see appendix 1.) the respondents were instructed that the questionnaire was for scientific purposes only and were given the prescribed time of 30 minutes. the answers obtained for questions 1–13 were scrutinized and divided into categories, thus leading to establishment of nominal scales, which were further computed into descriptive statistics for frequencies of the established categories. finally, the results were compared within the studied group by means of inferential statistics suitable for nominal scale, chi-square test. results and discussion the respondents make a homogenous group, polish being both their first language and the language of the community they live in. the respondents’ understanding of language proficiency, as the study revealed, is similar to the definition of language proficiency as the overall level of language achievement and four skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening. the highest scores were ascribed to the following categories: high language competence (29%), good communicative skills (27%), a very good command of language (15%), and accurate language use (15%). see table 1 for all the categories of the respondents’ understanding of the concept. the age of acquisition (aoa), the age at which the l2 learning started (pavlenko, 2012, p. 407), can be crucial for language fluency, despite contradictory views on this matter, like the one that post-puberty learning of an fl does not exclude high competence in a fl (muñoz, 2006; snow & hoefnagel-höhle, 1978). in the studied group the average age of beginning to acquire english and german is 12 and 11 respectively. so, the respondents were young/old enough to achieve language fluency. however, the sd signifies some variability within the studied group. the context of language acquisition (coa), which can be instructed or mixed (pavlenko, 2012, p. 407), for the respondents is instructed. the results are presented in table 2. 57advanced fl students’ self-perception of their language identity table 1 the concept of language proficiency no. category % 1. high language competence 29 2. good communicative skills 27 3. a very good command of a language 15 4. accurate language use 15 5. the connection between language and thought 9 6. speaking fluently or fast 7 7. equal to native speakers’ abilities 5 8. ability to use the language 5 9. cultural background knowledge 1 10. ability to express one’s self 1 11. functioning in a society that uses this language 1 12. expressing emotions 1 13. high language awareness 1 14. understanding sense and context 1 15. expressing humor 1 16. good pronunciation 1 17. knowledge of technical terms 1 18. ability to discuss more difficult subjects 1 19. it has various meanings, but for me… 1 20. no answer 2 table 2 age and context of acquisition language length of study (mean) length of study (sd) aoa (mean) context % english 9,679612 4,570716 12,14896 instructed 95 german 10,6068 3,339933 11,22178 l3 1,761765 1,369255 20,04881 mixed 5 l4 1,078947 0,845957 20,82857 (n = 90) / a respondent’s age mean = 21,82857 (sd = 3,321345) different languages offer different possibilities for self-expression and the self can be different in different languages (pavlenko, 2001; kramsch, 2009). bilingual speakers will show some preferences among their languages, when choosing one language over another depending on a communicative situation. the question on the choice of language revealed that there is a great variety of choices among the respondents depending on the situation. l1 was preferred by less than half of the respondents in all the situations given in the questionnaire. english seems to be a language appropriate to express one’s sense of humor (38%) and german—a language to express one’s intelligence (26%). it should be borne in mind that the answers may reveal the respondents’ beliefs 58 dorota owczarek rather than the real situation, as attitudes consist of feelings, thoughts, and predispositions to act in a certain way (edwards, 2003). however, the answers indicate that there exist some linguistic preferences among the study group. for all answers see figure 1. figure 1. language preferences. for bi/multilinguals creating one’s identity in another language/culture, for example learning how to respond to various levels of hierarchy or social status is vital (jarvis & pavlenko, 2008, p. 110). the results of the research indicate that fl speakers experience the feeling of social distance and higher status of the native speaker, but in general the focus of the respondents is on linguistic problems, where these (49%) outnumber personality ones (7%). the respondents are mainly focused on their linguistic competence, with sociocultural matters receiving only a little of their attention. figure 2 presents all the answers in this respect. figure 2. languages and problems. note: 1 – grammar; 2 – not long enough period of studying; 3 – vocabulary; 4 – pronunciation; 5 – problems with communication; 6 – no opportunities to communicate; 7 – alphabet; 8 – language as a barrier to communication; 9 – reluctance to learn; 10 – lack of good basics; 11 – inability to understand native speakers; 12 – fear of mistakes; 13 – false friends; 14 – interlocutors not being open; 15 – shyness; 16 – stress; 17 – laziness; 18 – no problems. 59advanced fl students’ self-perception of their language identity bonny norton (2000) observes that in a natural context of sla the right to speak is directly linked to identity construction. the limitation of this right, caused by an unequal distribution of power, hinders such a possibility. the majority (86%) do not feel their right to speak any language is limited. 14% of those who think otherwise cite situations like: (1) late at night in the street due to the lack of tolerance towards germans in poland (5%), (2) when people are more fluent than i am (3%), (3) when i cannot use polish in an fl class (2%), (4) when i choose words very slowly, when i’m afraid of being laughed at, or (5) because french is being pushed out by english and german (figure 3). figure 3. the right to speak a language (a); the situations when the right is being taken away (b). students are motivated by what they imagine they can achieve or become, e.g. translators, teachers, immigrants, travelers. for the majority of the respondents foreign languages are means to get a good job, german—60% and english—48%. their motivation, the driving force to construct their identities through the languages they study (kramsch, 2005), can be seen as making an investment, which better explains the differences in use of various languages in different contexts (norton, 2000). their language choices appear as means to fulfil their desires based on the imagined power of the language (kramsch, 2009, p. 22). their goals include: (1) to get a good job, (2) to communicate, (3) to travel, (4) to develop oneself, (5) to finish studies, (6) to emigrate, (7) to learn about a foreign culture, (8) to meet people, (9) to study abroad, (10) to get a certificate, and (11) to show dominance. figure 4 shows the respondents’ preferences as to listed goals. 60 dorota owczarek figure 4. languages and set goals. according to dwight atkinson (2010) language as part of one’s identity is part of one’s self, linked to one’s experience, and based on the learner’s interaction with the environment. the answers do not show how this experience is gained or what the nature of that interaction is, but just point to the fact that the respondents extend the context of language use outside the classroom, which in turn creates good grounds for language embodiment, but needs further and deeper investigation. the situations provided involve their private life, in a dorm for example, where 47% use english, 24% – german, and 8% – l4, or travelling (24% use english, 23% – german, and 3% – l4). all the situations listed by the respondents are presented in figure 5. figure 5. context of language use. note: 1 – informal situations, i.e. in a dorm; 2 – when travelling; 3 – at work; 4 – for entertainment; 5 – new media (internet, online chats); 6 – international organizations; 7 – erasmus exchange programs; 8 – to maintain contact with family; 9 – whenever possible. language learning, like any other type of learning, brings about a change in one’s mental state (doughty & long, after atkinson). in the studied group the impact of language studies on one’s personality was recorded. 76% of the respondents observe a positive change, and 9% said they had not changed at all. figures 6 and 7 show the respondents’ answers to the observed change and 61advanced fl students’ self-perception of their language identity positive change in detail respectively. the answers, however, do not allow us to probe deeper into the observed issues. figure 6. observed change. figure 7. positive change. note: 1 – open; 2 – self-confident; 3 – knowledgeable; 4 – aware of cultural differences; 5 – better mental abilities; 6 – sensitive to meaning; 7 – more communicative; 8 – better organizational skills; 9 – richer vocabulary; 10 – aware of mother tongue; 11 – more travel opportunities; 12 – wiser; 13 – better job perspectives. the affective side is an integral part of one’s language identity. the results of the study allow us to look at language emotionality (pavlenko, 2012) to some extent. the study revealed that the students’ attitudes to fl communities, which are likely to strengthen or weaken an individual desire to integrate with an l2 community, are positive or neutral. the question on the attitude towards fl communities did not reveal any strong prejudices. however, biased attitudes were evinced when respondents commented on their emotions connected with various languages. namely, they feel cold or serious when speaking german or describe it as a “harsh” language. the negative emotions listed by the respondents (9.5%) point to linguistic anxiety or stress, in compliance with affective filter theory. positive emotions (23%), like joy or satisfaction, are connected with the language achievements and self-fulfillment of the learner (see the discussion on emotional intelligence in barzeger & sadr, 2013). 47.5% of the respondents claim they do not experience any emotional change. the character 62 dorota owczarek of the survey, which was built of short questions and answers, does not allow for an in-depth analysis of the respondents’ emotions in their linguistic choices, nor can we see how these impact the subject position in order to further make legitimate claims about the respondents’ embodiment of their foreign language, as pavlenko postulates (2007, p. 200). the observed change is shown in figure 8. figure 8. languages and feelings. the emotions cited by the respondents are presented in table 3. table 3 positive and negative emotions positive negative category % category % joy 30 uncertainty 11 satisfaction 9 stress 6 self-confidence 6 constrained 6 feeling at ease 6 feeling order and precision 3 feeling intelligent 3 feeling funny 4 pride 2 anger 1 warm home feelings 2 feeling not so good 1 cosmopolitan 2 feeling dominance 1 good mood 2 feeling formal 1 curiosity 1 feeling pompous 1 people have more to say 1 feeling strange as people don’t speak this language 1 feeling at a loss 1 feeling exotic 1 boredom 1 the language offers a variety of interpretations 1 coldness 1 firmness 1 seriousness 1 “harsh” language 1 63advanced fl students’ self-perception of their language identity according to aronin (2012), an object represents its user. objects deemed important in fl learning by the respondents are mostly those linked to language study materials and represent an fl learner in an instructed context. other objects (postcards, mp3, cds, films, series) signify an informal context, where the learner engages with an fl for entertainment. objects like postcards or chat rooms suggest a language user who is interested in maintaining contact or experiencing live conversations. when an object offers a linguistic choice, for example a harry potter book, a beloved possession of one of the respondents, the polish (l1) translation of the english (l2) original is preferred. the objects represent both public and private spheres. the list of all objects is provided in table 4. table 4 objects of everyday use important for fl learners objects % blogs 1 books 15 cds 6 colored fineliners 1 computers 14 course books 6 dictionaries 10 films 4 magazines 1 mp3 3 newspapers 2 postcards 1 radio and tv 10 series 1 slips of paper with new words 2 though the perception of language selves varies among the studied group, as indicated by the number of categories obtained for each question, yet in light of the evidence gathered, three groups among the advanced fl speakers emerge: a monolingual, a bilingual, and a multilingual group. the answers in the study point to the fact that respondents assessed their language identity in compliance with the assessment of their language proficiency. the chi-square test run for the correlation between the respondents’ language proficiency and their language identity ruled out variation due to chance alone. the null hypothesis was rejected, χ2 = 0.036809 , p. = 0.05, χ2 < p. (see table 5 and figure 9). 64 dorota owczarek table 5 language fluency (n = 103) language fluency frequency% fluent in two foreign languages 29 fluent in one foreign language 44 fluent in neither 27 figure 9. fluency and perceived identity. conclusions comparing the results of this research to other findings in this area is problematic due to the sociocultural specificity of various studies. however, in making a selection i focused mainly on the findings of the research that concerned the formal education of students who exhibited multilinguistic competence, whether acquired in a formal setting only (atay & ece, 2009; guerra, 2012; zacharias, 2012) or in formal and natural settings combined together (marshall, 2010). the findings of this research are partly in line with those presented by zacharias (2012), who reports that encounters with native speakers appeared to magnify linguistic insecurity, and nonnative status is seen as a drawback. while in zacharias’s research all of the participants appeared to be fully aware that the use of english in public spaces would project negative identities, in my research this observation could be made in reference to german. in guerra’s study (2012), conducted among portuguese students in a country which is linguistically homogenous, the suggestion that identifying a foreign language as a marker of one’s identity has to do with the user’s competence level in the language was confirmed. his other observation that curricula which lack sociocultural elements in language training(s) might be a deterrent to including the foreign language as a marker of identity may also hold true for the situation 65advanced fl students’ self-perception of their language identity revealed in my research. however, the overwhelming majority of participants in guerra’s study characterized english as a language which belongs to whoever uses it and see it as a global language for international communication. despite the fact that poland, like portugal, is also a homogenous country, polish students do not share this view. they see english as a language which can make them bi/multilingual. atay and ece (2009), guerra (2012), marshall (2010), and zacharias (2012) report in their studies that the first language is seen as the most important language in the life of a human being and in formal education one’s core identity is derived from the assumed first language culture. the results of the group studied in my research indicate that this is true only for some of the respondents. finally, the questionnaire used in this study allows us to analyze students’ identities and their emotions only in very broad terms. it is possible to say that the respondents’ perceptions of their language identities are partly the result of the system of formal education focused on accuracy, but the study does not provide for a deeper scrutiny of their identity construction. a follow-up study is needed in order to say whether fl learners can construct new selves and transfer native selves to a foreign culture, and whether formal education can lead to language embodiment, and appropriation of the symbolic values of the studied language in a formal context. 66 dorota owczarek a p p e n d i x 1 „i zaczęli mówić obcymi językami”* 1. język używany w domu ............................................................................................. 2. język społeczności, w której jest mój dom .............................................................. 3. co oznacza wyrażenie „biegły w języku”? .................................................................................. 4. języki, które studiuję/uczę się/ uczyłam się lp. czas nauki (podaj lata) forma nauki (podaj rodzaj szkoły lub rodzaj zajęć) język zaznacz (v) język, w którym jesteś biegły 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. w którym języku najlepiej możesz wyrazić: swoją inteligencję .......................................................... osobowość ...................................................................... poczucie humoru ............................................................ 6. który język stanowi dla ciebie problem? ............................. jaki to problem? ............................. 7. czy uważasz, że są sytuacje, w których odbierane ci jest prawo do używania języka, który znasz? jaki to język? ....................................... jakie to sytuacje? ....................................... 8. który język postrzegasz jako środek do realizowania stawianych sobie celów? język .............................................. cel/e .............................................. język .............................................. cel/e .............................................. język .............................................. cel/e .............................................. język .............................................. cel/e .............................................. 9. w jakich sytuacjach posługujesz się językami, które znasz? język .............................................. sytuacje/kontekst .............................................. język .............................................. sytuacje/kontekst .............................................. język .............................................. sytuacje/kontekst .............................................. język .............................................. sytuacje/kontekst .............................................. 10. co myślisz o krajach/społecznościach, których język/i studiujesz?.............................................. 11. czy nauka języków zmieniła ciebie? jak? .................................................................................. 12. czy używając różnych języków czujesz się inaczej? jak zmieniają się twoje odczucia? język .............................................. odczucia .............................................. język .............................................. odczucia .............................................. język .............................................. odczucia .............................................. język .............................................. odczucia .............................................. 13. jakie przedmioty użytkowe były/są ważne lub wpłynęły na twoją naukę języka? przedmiot/y .............................................. język .............................................. przedmiot/y .............................................. język .............................................. 14. uważam siebie za osobę : a) monolingwalną, b) bilingwalną, c) wielojęzyczną. rok ur.: .................................................................. płeć: k m mogę i chcę wziąć udział w wywiadzie indywidualnym online. mój adres mailowy: ................. * ta ankieta jest anonimowa i służy wyłącznie celom naukowym. 67advanced fl students’ self-perception of their language identity references aronin, l. 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(2012) efl students’ understanding of their multilingual english identities. electronic journal of foreign language teaching, 9(2), 233–244. dorota owczarek die perzeption von der identität eines bilingualen studenten mit fortgeschrittener sprachkompetenz z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g in dem artikel werden ergebnisse der forschungen über selbstperzeption der sprachidentität in der fachschaft fremdsprachenoberstufe präsentiert. die forschungen sollten aufzeigen, was für einen griff tun die studenten bei bestimmung ihrer sprachidentität (ich begreife mich als einsprachige, zweisprachige, mehrsprachige person) und wovon lassen sie sich dabei leiten. in der diskussion über zweisprachigkeit/mehrsprachigkeit der studierenden gebrauchte man begriffe, die die betrachtungsweise v. cooks (1992) berücksichtigen. cook behauptet, dass die benutzer von der angelernten sprache formal gesehen eher für zweisprachige als einsprachige personen gehalten werden sollten. man wollte vor allem ergründen, auf welche art und weise die befragten ihre sprachidentität für den fall definieren, dass sprachkompetenz in verschiedenen sprachen unter formalen umständen, d.i. in der schule erworben und entwickelt wird, und wie sie das auf eigene sprachkompetenz beziehen. die forschungsergebnisse wurden den in anderen ländern durchgeführten forschungen gegenübergestellt. die verfasserin sieht auch die notwendigkeit, weitere forschungen auf dem gebiet anzustellen. katarzyna rokoszewska jan długosz university in częstochowa intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity in speaking english at secondary school―a case study of a good, average, and poor language learner a b s t r a c t complex dynamic systems theory (cdst) focuses on second language development (sld) as opposed to second language acquisition (sla). emphasising internal complexity of the language system as well as dynamic and non-linear nature of language development, it represents a new approach to the role of variability which is rooted in developmental psychology. this approach agrees with research findings from the 1980s which identified different types and causes of variability, but it treats variability as the main factor responsible for language development and not as a peripheral phenomenon. intra-individual variability, defined as differences in the level of a developmental variable within individuals and between repeated measurements, is said to have a positive inf luence on language development at various levels of proficiency. the present paper describes the third part of the case study whose aim is to analyse intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity in speaking english as a foreign language at secondary school in the case of a good, average, and poor language learner. the first part of the case study examined this phenomenon with respect to general measures of complexity, accuracy, and f luency, whereas the second part—with respect to specific measures of syntactic complexity. the results of the third part of the case study show some significant differences between the learners in terms of lexical variation as opposed to density, sophistication, and frequency but hardly any such differences in intra-individual variability, pointing at the same time to a weak positive relationship between this type of variability and the rate of development. keywords: complex dynamic systems theory (cdst), lexical complexity, variability, learner corpus, speaking theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 6 (1), 2020, pp. 107–142 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.7929 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4479-0385 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en katarzyna rokoszewska108 introduction complex dynamic systems theory (cdst) is an umbrella term recently coined by de bot (2017) to refer to both complexity theory (larsen-freeman & cameron, 2008) and dynamic systems theory (verspoor, de bot, & lowie, 2011). according to this theory, language is a dynamic system consisting of internally complex subsystems which develop at different rates in a non-linear fashion. informed by microgenetic studies in developmental psychology, the theory represents a new approach to the role of variability in second language development (sld). the supporters of this theory accept empirical findings from the 1980s which refer to types and causes of variability, but they primarily focus on intra-individual or developmental variability, arguing that it is the main factor influencing language development (van dijk, verspoor, & lowie, 2011). intra-individual variability is defined as “differences in the level of a developmental variable within individuals and between repeated measurements” (van geert & van dijk, 2002, p. 341). in order to examine this kind of variability, dense, longitudinal data based on communicative language use need to be collected. so far few such studies have been conducted (verspoor, lowie, & van dijk, 2008; spoleman & verspoor, 2010), which indicates the need to investigate this phenomenon. the first part of the present case study (rokoszewska, 2019a), which focused on intra-individual variability in the emergence of complexity, accuracy, and fluency in speaking english at secondary school, and the second part, which focused on this phenomenon in syntactic complexity (rokoszewska, 2019b in press), indicate statistically significant differences between the good, average, and poor language learner in the development of these language subsystems but no such differences in intra-individual variability, pointing, at the same time, to a positive relationship between the learners’ level of intraindividual variability and the rate of development of language subsystems in speech at this level. the present paper will focus in more detail on the role of intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity in speaking english as a foreign language at secondary school in the case of a good, average, and poor language learner. variability in sla and sld in second language acquisition (sla), variability is construed differently in homogenous and heterogenous competence models. the homogenous competence model is based on chomsky’s (1965) theory, in which linguistic compeintra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity… 109 tence consists of invariant rules which categorically state what is grammatically correct in a given language. stylistic variability is treated as non-systematic and as such it does not constitute a part of language competence but performance. the heterogenous competence model is used in sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic approaches. in the sociolinguistic approach, communicative competence (hymes, 1971) is said to consist of variable rules which say what grammatical forms will probably appear in some contexts. variability is said to result from social factors, such as social context, dialect or social groups connected with age, class, and ethnicity. it is treated as systematic and as such it constitutes a part of communicative competence. the sociolinguistic approach is represented mainly by labov’s (1970) studies of variability caused by situational and linguistic factors, bailey’s (1973) study of synchronic variation expressed in wave theory, and decamp’s (1971) and bickerton’s (1975) studies of pidgin and creole languages in guyana. in the psycholinguistic approach, variability is connected with psycholinguistic factors, that is, internal factors which influence processing l2 in different conditions. this approach is represented by levelt’s (1989) and de bot’s (1992) planning models of speech production and ochs’s (1979) studies of planned and unplanned discourse. ellis (1994) provides a useful model of variability in learner interlanguage. generally, he distinguishes between horizontal variability, that is, variability evident in interlanguage at a single point in time, and vertical variability, that is, variability evident in interlanguage over time. vertical variability refers to the route of sla, namely, the order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes and the sequence of stages in the acquisition of questions, negations, and relative clauses. ellis (1994) also distinguishes between intra-learner variability, that is, variability within the learner, and inter-learner or individual variability, that is, variability between learners caused by individual learner differences, such as age, intelligence, language aptitude, cognitive styles, motivation, personality, etc. in his model, variability in interlanguage is divided into systematic and non-systematic variability. systematic variability is further divided into individual variability, explained above, and contextual variability, which refers to the linguistic and situational context (tarone, 1983). non-systematic variability is further divided into performance variability and free variability. performance variability results from psycholinguistic factors, such as the user’s emotional or physical condition, under which the user is not able to perform his or her competence, which leads to slips of the tongue, hesitations, and repetitions. this type of variability, in line with chomsky’s (1965) theory, is not a part of the user’s competence. free variation stands for random use of two or more alternate forms. according to ellis (1994), the level of free variation is low in native speakers’ language but high in learners’ interlanguage. learners use two or more forms at random to realize the same meaning in the same situational, linguistic, and discourse contexts, to perform the same language function, and katarzyna rokoszewska110 in tasks with the same type of information processing. such variation is said to be random and to result from incorrect form-function relationships. it is also hypothesized to be an important mechanism in interlanguage development as it occurs at a high level at the early stages of sla, but later it diminishes to make the interlanguage system more advanced and efficient. this is described in gatbonton’s (1978) diffusion model, according to which l2 development consists of two phases, namely, the acquisition phase, during which learners first use a given form in every situation or context, then introduce the second form and use the two forms in free variation, and the replacement phase, during which learners restrict both forms to their correct environments. studies summarized by ellis (1994) indicate that, on the one hand, interlanguage variability is to some extent contextual in that l2 learners’ production of selected phonological or syntactic features systematically varies depending on such factors as the formality of the social context, the complexity of the linguistic context, the continuum of styles ranging from the vernacular to the careful style as well as attention, planning, and types of tasks. on the other hand, the studies indicate that some part of interlanguage variability is haphazard, which is due to unsorted form-function relationships. having provided a detailed summary of the role of variability in sla, ellis (1994) concludes that it is a very complex phenomenon which remains unexplained to a large extent. in second language development, a new approach to variability has been proposed by the proponents of complex dynamic systems theory (cdst). this approach is rooted in developmental psychology, in which variability has become the main focus of interest since the 1990s. having analyzed numerous microgenetic studies in this area, the most influential of which is thelen and smith’s (1994) study, siegler (2006) makes a few important claims in his position paper. firstly, he claims that intra-individual variability in the use of strategies is observed in all learners of different age at all stages of learning and levels of proficiency. secondly, he points out that learners’ development in the acquisition of a skill or strategy is not neat but characterized with periods of regression and progression, regression being the biggest in the case of rapid learning. what is more, the periods of regression and progression correspond to the periods of low and high variability which alternate in a cyclical way (siegler, 2006). thirdly, he argues that high intra-individual variability has a positive influence on learning in that new strategies are added and more advanced strategies are efficiently used. he also points out that small differences in the so called initial conditions have a serious effect on subsequent development in that learners who use more advanced strategies at the beginning progress faster than learners who use less advanced strategies. most importantly, however, siegler (2006, p. 481) concludes that studying intra-individual variability in second language development is important in order to “(a) predict change, (b) analyse change, and (c) understand change mechanisms.” intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity… 111 in complex dynamic systems theory, language is defined as a complex dynamic system which “consists of subsystems which are never entirely stable and may exhibit a great deal of variability, particularly during stages where the whole system is undergoing intensive development” (verspoor, de bot, & lowie, 2011, p. 39). in line with thelen and smith’s (1994, p. 342) study, variability is treated as “a metric of stability and a harbinger of change.” larsen freeman, and cameron (2008) explain that if variability is low, the system has stabilised for a given aspect of language for some period of time. if variability is high, the language system is changing and moving towards another state or stage in development until it settles down again. in other words, the language system is going through a transition period before it settles down again at a different level or attractor state. verspoor, de bot, and lowie (2011) point out that the relationship between variation and change is multilateral. one the one hand, variation leads to flexible and adaptive behaviour, which is a prerequisite to development because without variation there is no selection, but on the other hand, such free exploration in performance causes variability. in other words, variation and selection lead to the storage and repetition of the behaviour which has been more often successful than the behaviour which has been less successful. in this sense, variability in the system is a precursor of change and development. furthermore, it is generally assumed that free variability takes place at the early stages of language development because the learner tries out different forms to express a given meaning (verspoor, de bot, & lowie, 2011). such variability will appear in all language subsystems because the learner is not able to master all of them at once. in addition, the learner’s language subsystems will compete for different resources. the allocation of a greater amount of resources to one subsystem will cause trade-offs between these subsystems (verspoor, de bot, & lowie, 2011). in other words, second language development, which usually involves a general increase of complexity, accuracy, and fluency, will be characterised by trade-offs between particular language components which are more visible in spoken than written data. so far few studies on intra-individual variability have been conducted within the cdst framework. van geert and van dijk (2002) demonstrated new tools to study this phenomenon in developmental data. verspoor, lowie, and van dijk (2008) conducted a study on the basis of the data earlier used by cancino, rosansky, and schumann (1978), who found out that the developmental stages of english negative constructions were similar in first and second language acquisition. in their case study, verspoor et al. (2008) showed that the learners’ learning trajectories were different and highly variable. however, despite the significance of some developmental peaks, intra-individual variability in these trajectories was not statistically different among the learners. larsen-freeman (2006) discovered substantial inter-individual and intra-individual variability in katarzyna rokoszewska112 language development of five chinese learners of english on the basis of their oral and written narratives elicited every two months on the same topic over the period of half a year. more specifically, she showed the existence of this phenomenon not only with respect to single language features but, in line with the cdst framework, with respect to whole language subsystems, such as accuracy, fluency, and lexical and grammatical complexity. spoleman and verspoor (2010), in a case study of a dutch learner of finnish, focused on the relationship between different measures of syntactic complexity and accuracy, arguing that intra-individual variability occurred in the vicinity of developmental jumps and signalled transition phases between two periods. kowal (2016), who examined the dynamics of complexity, accuracy, and fluency in polish adult learners of swedish, emphasised the importance of both interand intra-individual variability and concluded that the three subsystems, separate at the beginning of language development, become gradually integrated in the learner’s mind so that the discrepancy between them diminishes, leading to similar levels of proficiency. pfenniger’s (2019) longitudinal study, which traced language development of children who were learning english in minimal, partial, and full content and language integrated learning (clil) programmes in austria and switzerland for eight years, provides some evidence that higher intra-individual variability precedes significant growth in the trajectories of individual learners with respect to various indices of language development. the present case study of a good, average, and poor language learner focuses on intra-individual variability in the emergence of complexity, accuracy, and fluency in speaking english as a foreign language at secondary school. in the first part of the case study, the research questions referred to (1) the learners’ results on the development of syntactic complexity, lexical complexity, accuracy, and fluency in oral production at secondary school, (2) the types of relationships which can be observed between these variables over time, (3) the rate of development of these variables, (4) the levels and patterns of intra-individual variability in the development of these variables, and (5) the influence of intra-individual variability on the rate of development of these variables (rokoszewska, 2019a). the second part of the case study addressed the same research questions but with respect to such measures of syntactic complexity as general sentence complexity, subordination, coordination, and nominalisation (rokoszewska, 2019b). in general, the results of the first two parts of the case study indicate that there exist some statistically significant differences between the good, average, and poor language learner in the development of particular variables and that these variables form different dynamic relationships in the case of different learners. the results also show that the differences in intra-individual variability in the development of these variables are statistically insignificant. nevertheless, the relationship between the learners’ level of intra-individual variability and the rate of development of language subsystems in speech at this level is positive. intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity… 113 the third part of the present case study will examine the phenomenon of intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity in speaking english as a foreign language at secondary school in the case of a good, average, and poor language learner. lexical complexity or richness is construed as a multidimensional phenomenon which consists of a number of interrelated components, such as lexical density, sophistication, variation, and frequency. lexical density (ure, 1971) refers to the ratio of lexical words to all words in a text. lexical sophistication or rareness stands for the proportion of advanced words in a text (read, 2000). lexical variation, also called lexical diversity (malvern, richards, chipere, & duran, 2004) and lexical range (crystal, 1982), measures the range of vocabulary displayed in a text. lexical frequency indicates the proportion of word types from different frequency levels (laufer & nation, 1995). lexical complexity may be investigated by means of various measures (wolfe-quintero, ingaki, & kim, 1998; malvern et al., 2004), some of which will be used in the present case studysumming up, the cdst approach to variability is different than the approaches offered so far. in the nativist approach, variability was not taken into consideration as the main aim was to find universal and systematic patterns of language development. in the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic approaches, the main aim was to discover external causes of variability. in the cdst approach, variability is said to be a potential driving force of development and a potential indicator of the ongoing process (van geert & van dijk, 2002). method as it has already been mentioned, the present paper describes the third part of the case study whose general aim is to investigate intra-individual variability in the emergence of language in oral production at the level of secondary school. the first part of the present case study (rokoszewska, 2019a) focused on intra-individual variability in the emergence of complexity, accuracy, and fluency in speaking english at secondary school while the second part focused on this phenomenon in syntactic complexity (rokoszewska, 2019b). the results of the first part of the case study show that the good learner produced more complex, accurate, and fluent language in speech than the average learner and poor learner whose language did not differ. the results of the second part of the case study were similar as it was found out that, in the case of syntactic complexity, the good learner produced more complex language in terms of subordination and nominalisation, but not coordination, while the language of the average and poor learner was the same. furthermore, both parts of the katarzyna rokoszewska114 case study reveal a diversity of dynamic relationships between selected variables which may be supportive, competitive, pre-conditional or dual but which are not always the same for the good, average, and poor learner. in addition, the patterns of intra-individual variability illustrate that the periods of higher variability are interchanged with the periods of stability in different language subsystems in the case of all three learners. although these patterns seem to be qualitatively unique for each learner because of time, duration, and intensity, there are no statistically significant differences between the learners in intraindividual variability in particular language subsystems. finally, the results indicate a positive relationship between the learners’ level of intra-individual variability and the rate of development of language subsystems in speech at the level of secondary school. having investigated the phenomenon of intra-individual variability in speaking english at secondary school with respect to general measures of language development and more specific measures of syntactic development in the case of a good, average, and poor language learner, it is necessary to focus on particular measures of lexical development in order to investigate the phenomenon in question more thoroughly. hence, the aim of the third part of the case study is to investigate the phenomenon of intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity in speaking english as a foreign language at secondary school in the case of a good, average, and poor language learner. as already explained, intra-individual or developmental variability is defined as differences in the level of a particular variable within an individual learner between repeated measurements conducted over a longer period of time (van geert & van dijk, 2002). in line with larsen-freeman and cameron (2008), the term emergence refers to microgenetic growth in the development of a particular language subsystem which is observed at many regular measurement points in a time series. the research questions are as follows: 1. how does lexical complexity emerge in speaking english as a foreign language at secondary school in the case of a good, average, and poor learner? 2. what is the developmental rate of different measures of lexical complexity in l2 english speech in the case of these learners? 3. what are the levels and patterns of intra-individual variability in the development of lexical complexity in l2 english speech in the case of the learners? 4. what is the influence of intra-individual variability on the rate of development of lexical complexity measures in this context? the research method is a corpus-based case study which constitutes a part of a larger quantitative and qualitative research project. the case study is dense and longitudinal as it is based on repeated measurements of learners’ speech conducted over a longer period of time. the case study is also exploratory as intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity… 115 its aim is to analyse intra-individual variability in language development of a good, average, and poor learner, which will be followed by a quantitative study whose aim will be to analyse language behaviour of the whole group and subgroups of particular types of learners. this type of study has been chosen since the proponents of cdst claim that “if we really want to find out how an individual or (group) develops over time we need data that is dense (i.e. collected at many regular measurement points), longitudinal (i.e. collected over a longer period of time), and individual (i.e. for one person at a time and not averaged out)” (van dijk, verspoor, & lowie, 2011, p. 62). they also point out that “only a few case studies focusing on the variability patterns in sld have been conducted so far […] and more longitudinal dense case studies are needed to discover the possible developmental l2 patterns for individual learners and groups of learners” (van dijk, verspoor, & lowie, 2011, p. 84). the case study is based on three mini-corpora selected from the learner developmental corpus of spoken english which consists of 106 mini-corpora (ca. 2,100 recorded interviews) built on the basis of the study conducted at one of secondary schools in czestochowa in 2014–2017. the chosen mini-corpora trace language development of a good, average, and poor language learner in oral production at secondary school.1 each mini-corpus is built of 21 interviews which were conducted once a month over the period of three years (table 1). the procedure of building the mini-corpora involved conducting, recording, storing, transcribing, verifying, and analysing the interviews on the basis of samples consisting of ca. 200 words. the interviews were semi-structured in that the questions had been prepared in advance but during the interview some additional questions were asked if necessary. the interviews were of descriptive and argumentative character and referred to topics that were covered during english lessons on the basis of the learners’ coursebook. before the interview, the learners knew a general topic but did not know the questions to avoid preplanned speech. the aim of the interviews was to elicit data produced under “relatively natural conditions,” that is, “data where all aspects of the linguistic production process are, as far as possible, fully under the control of the learner” (schmid, verspoor, & macwhinney, 2011, p. 39). following the study by laufer and nation (1995), the interviews were integrated with the learners’ formal assessment so that they would not treat the interviews as purely additional assignments. the learners were assessed by the interviewer on the basis of the school internal criteria developed by the board of english teachers. after each interview, the learners were given some feedback and points from one to six, the average of which was put into the register in the form of a grade at the end of each semester. the interviewer’s experience as a language teacher 1 at the time of the research project, secondary school in poland included three grades consisting of learners at the age of 16–19. since september 1, 2019, it has included four grades consisting of learners at the age 15–18. katarzyna rokoszewska116 and teacher trainer based on her specialisation in second language acquisition and methodology of teaching foreign languages contributed to the validity and reliability of the assessment. table 1 research design in time series research design in time series data semester 1 semester 2 sept. oct. nov. dec. jan. feb. march april may june grade 1 org. test 1 fashion test 2 internet test 3 music test 4 education winter break test 5 ecology test 6 pets test 7 work test 8 holidays grade 2 org. test 9 books & films test 10 shopping test 11 friendship test 12 christmas winter break test 13 family test 14 health test 15 fame test 16 home & living grade 3 org. test 17 love test 18 tv test 19 crime winter break test 20 terrorism test 21 tolerance end of schoolyear matura exam in the present study, a number of variables has been identified. the independent variable refers to intra-individual variability in the development of lexical complexity operationalized as the differences in the level of lexical complexity measures between regular oral tests within individual learners. the scale for this variable is interval. to be more precise, lexical complexity is understood as consisting of lexical density, sophistication, variation, and frequency. lexical density (ld) is defined as the number of lexical tokens, that is, nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, per total number of tokens (laufer & nation, 1995). lexical sophistication (ls) refers to the number of more advanced tokens per total number of lexical tokens (laufer & nation, 1995). lexical variation (lv), often treated as an equivalent of lexical complexity, is operationalized in terms of sophisticated or complex type-token ratio (cttr), which takes into account the length of the sample (ellis & barkhuizen, 2005; larsen-freeman 2006). lexical frequency refers to the percentage of words used by the learner at different frequency levels (laufer & nation 1995) based on bnc coca core-4, that is, a list of the first 3,000 words and words off this list which is based on the british national corpus (bnc) and the corpus of contemporary american english (coca). the dependent variable refers to the rate of development of lexical complexity measures operationalized as the differences in the level of these measures between the first and the last test. the scale for this variable is interval. the intervening variable may be defined as the influence of variability on second language development, the scale for this variable being interval. the moderator variable refers to learners’ age determined by means of the nominal scale. the control variables, measured by the nominal scale, refer to learners’ nationality, course-book, number of english lessons per week, and no longer stay in the target language country. intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity… 117 research instruments used to gather data involved the oral interviews mentioned above, whereas the instruments used to analyse data included lexical complexity analyser (ai & lu, 2010) and compleat web vocabulary profiler (cobb, 2018) as well as a number of cdst procedures (verspoor, lowie, van geert, van dijk, & schmid, 2011). these procedures involved smoothing raw data by means of polynomial trendlines of the 2nd degree to show general trends, normalising and detrending data to visualise intra-individual variability as a moving range of minimum and maximum scores, and checking the statistical significance of the differences in intra-individual patterns by means of a resampling procedure called a monte carlo analysis. the subjects in the present case study were three 16-year-old secondary school learners who had been learning english for about ten years by the time of the study and who attended classes with an extended english programme (4–6 lessons per week), not participating in extra-curricular english courses at the time of the study. they were selected from the sample of 106 subjects on the basis of the points given for a placement test, a written assignment and an oral interview conducted at the beginning of secondary school. the good learner (gl) obtained an average of 5.5 points, the average learner (al) (3.45 points), and the poor learner (pl) (2.17). more detailed information about the subjects is summarised in table 2. table 2 the subjects in the case study good learner average learner poor learner gender female male male age 16–19 (grades 1–3) exposure to l2 10 years (grade 1); 4–6 lessons (1–3 grades)—extended english programme no extra classes, no longer stay in an l2 country residence city village city education (f/m)*) higher / higher secondary / higher higher / higher employment (f/m) white collar worker/ white collar worker blue collar worker/ white collar worker white collar worker/ white collar worker english (f/m)**) very good / basic basic / average very good/ basic gpa 5.01 4.25 3.54 grades in eng. 5.17 3.92 2.67 final exam (%) basic extended oral basic extended oral basic extended oral 100.0 98.0 100.0 70.0 66.0 77.0 98.0 – 96.0 classification (pts./ grades) test speak. writ. test speak. writ. test speak. writ. 6.0 (93pts.) 5.0 5.5 3.0 (61pts.) 3.75 3.5 1.0 (36pts.) 2.0 3.5 total—5.5 pts. total—3.42 pts. total—2.17 pts. *) f/m—father/ mother **) the students’ opinions about their parents’ knowledge of english. katarzyna rokoszewska118 results the development of lexical complexity the results of the present study (table 3) show that with respect to the development of lexical variation, the sophisticated type-token ratio was 4.40 for the good learner (gl), 4.04 for the average learner (al), and 3.91 for the poor learner (pl). the rate of development for the good learner is equal to 0.73 as this learner obtained the score of 4.08 on the first test, that is, test 1 in grade 1, and the score of 4.81 on the last test, that is, test 21 in grade 3. at the same time, the learner’s minimum score was 3.76 (test 7, grade 1), while the maximum score was 5.02 (test 11, grade 2), which yields the variation equal to 0.15 in the whole data set. the average and poor learner obtained the following results for the rate of development: al (0.28), pl (–0.22), as well as for variation: al (0.21), pl (0.10) (see table 3). in addition, it may be observed that the general trend in the development of lexical variation in speaking english at secondary school is rather stable in the case of all three learners (figures 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3). table 3 the development of lexical complexity in l2 english speech—raw data the development of lexical complexity—raw data lex. variation lex. density lex. sophistication gl al pl gl al pl gl al pl test 1 4.08 3.75 3.88 0.48 0.52 0.50 0.15 0.26 0.25 test 21 4.81 4.03 3.66 0.44 0.49 0.48 0.21 0.18 0.19 rd 0.73 0.28 –0.22 –0.04 –0.03 –0.02 0.06 –0.08 –0.06 min. 3.76 3.14 3.27 0.41 0.40 0.36 0.03 0.10 0.12 max. 5.02 5.15 4.41 0.55 0.56 0.60 0.31 0.26 0.35 cv 0.15 0.21 0.10 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 mean 4.40 4.04 3.91 0.46 0.48 0.48 0.18 0.18 0.21 sd 0.39 0.47 0.33 0.04 0.04 0.06 0.07 0.06 0.07 anova (p=0.05) 0.001 0.505 0.217 tukeykramer test gl≠al gl≠pl al=pl – – intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity… 119 figure 1.1. gl–lexical variation. figure 1.2. al–lexical variation. figure 1.3. pl–lexical variation. with respect to lexical density (table 3), the learners obtained the following results: gl (0.46), al (0.48), pl (0.48), the results for the rate of development being gl (–0.04), al (–0.03), pl (–0.02) with the level of variation equal to 0.00 for all of them. the general trend in the development of lexical density katarzyna rokoszewska120 in speaking english at secondary school is rather stable for all three learners, though a very slight decrease may be noticed through the whole period in the case of the good and poor learner and, in the middle of this period, for the average learner (figures 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3). figure 2.1. gl–lexical density. figure 2.2. al–lexical density. figure 2.3. pl–lexical density. intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity… 121 with respect to lexical sophistication, the learners’ results were as follows: gl (0.18), al (0.18), pl (0.21), the results for the rate of development being gl (0.06), al (0.08), pl (–0.06) with variation of 0.00 for all learners (table 3). the general trend in the development of lexical sophistication indicates some decrease in the middle of the observation period for the good learner and a substantial decrease for the average and poor learner in the whole period (figures 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3). figure 3.1. gl–lexical sophistication. figure 3.2. al–lexical sophistication. figure 3.3. pl–lexical sophistication. katarzyna rokoszewska122 the differences between the learners’ results (table 3), analysed by means of one-way anova, are statistically significant in terms of lexical variation but not lexical density and sophistication. yet, a further analysis of the results on lexical variation, conducted by tukey-kramer test,2 that is, a means differentiation test, reveals that the differences between the good learner and average learner as well as between the good learner and poor learner are statistically significant, but the difference between the average learner and poor learner is not. subtle differences between the learners are exemplified on the basis of test 2 (see appendix). the orthographic transcripts include texts which were first extracted from the interview and cleared from pauses, hesitations or disfluencies, and then processed by the two computer programmes mentioned above. the development of lexical frequency the results of the study on the development of lexical frequency in speaking english at secondary school (table 4) indicate that the good learner on average uses 91.67%, the average learner—90.58%, and the poor learner—88.75% of words that belong to the first 1,000 words on the bnc coca core-4 list. the learners obtained the following results on the rate of development: gl (–0.15), table 4 the development of lexical frequency l2 english speech—raw data the development of lexical frequency—raw data data lexical frequency (1k) lexical frequency (2k) lexical frequency (3k) lexical freq. (off list) gl al pl gl al pl gl al pl gl al pl test 1 91.51 87.50 87.04 2.36 4.89 4.32 2.36 3.80 4.32 3.77 3.80 4.32 test 21 91.36 90.63 91.17 3.18 4.17 2.94 2.73 2.08 2.45 2.73 3.12 3.43 rd –0.15 3.13 4.13 0.82 –0.72 –1.38 0.37 –1.72 –1.87 –1.04 –0.68 –0.89 min. 82.67 82.67 76.14 0.98 0.96 1.00 0.45 0.00 0.00 0.49 0.00 0.51 max. 96.38 95.55 95.34 9.90 9.00 14.20 4.50 5.63 9.42 7.61 6.38 8.24 cv 14.87 13.44 26.23 5.01 5.60 10.27 2.00 1.78 5.04 2.32 2.69 4.67 mean* 91.67 90.58 88.75 2.83 4.02 3.79 1.51 1.16 0.92 2.24 1.32 2.69 sd 3.95 3.76 5.25 2.29 2.43 3.28 1.45 1.37 2.30 1.56 1.68 2.21 anova (p=0.05) 0.144 0.229 0.338 0.296 *) the geometric mean shows the central tendency in a set of numbers by using the product of their values; suitable to show a typical value in a set of numbers expressed in percentages; always lower than the arithmetic mean. 2 detailed results of this test are not provided as it involves the comparison of absolute difference and critical range. intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity… 123 al (3.13), pl (4.13) and on variation: gl (14.87), al (13.44), pl (26.23). the general trend is rather stable for the good and poor learner (figures 4.1 and 4.3), with a very slight increase at the end of the observation period in the case of the former and in the middle for the latter. in the case of the average learner, the trend shows a substantial increase in the middle and some decrease towards the end of the period (figure 4.2). figure 4.1. gl–lexical frequency (1k). figure 4.2. al–lexical frequency (1k). figure 4.3. pl–lexical frequency (1k). katarzyna rokoszewska124 with respect to the second 1,000 words (table 4) on the bnc coca core-4 list, it is shown that the good learner on average used 2.83%, the average learner—4.02%, and the poor learner—3.79% of these words. the learners’ results on the rate of development were as follows: gl (0.82), al (–0.72), pl (–1.38). their results on variation were: gl (5.01), al (5.60), pl (10.27). figure 5.1. gl–lexical frequency (2k). figure 5.2. al–lexical frequency (2k). figure 5.3. pl–lexical frequency (2k). intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity… 125 the general trendline shows a slight increase for the average learner, a slight increase and then decrease for the good learner, the opposite being true for the poor learner, in whose case first a slight decrease and then increase are observed (figures 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3). with respect to the third 1,000 words (table 4), it is observed that the good learner on average used 1.51%, the average learner—1.16%, and the poor learner—0.92% of words from this frequency band. the learners’ results on the rate of development were as follows: gl (0.37), al (–1.72), pl (–1.87). their results on variation were: gl (2.00), al (1.78), pl (5.04). the general trend indicates a substantial decrease in the development of 3,000 words in speaking english in the middle of the observation period in the case of all three learners (figures 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3). finally, with respect to the use of words which are not included in the first 3,000 words (table 4), the results show that the good learner used 2.24%, the average learner—1.32%, and the poor learner—2.69% of such lexical items. the learners’ rate of development equalled: gl (–1.04), al (–0.68), pl (–0.89), whereas their variation was: gl (2.32), al (2.69), pl (4.67). the general trend figure 6.1. gl–lexical frequency (3k). figure 6.2. al–lexical frequency (3k). katarzyna rokoszewska126 figure 6.3. pl–lexical frequency (3k). illustrates a slight decrease in the case of the good learner and a substantial decrease in the case of the average and poor learner (figures 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3). figure 7.1. gl–lex. frequency (off list). figure 7.2. al–lex. frequency (off list). intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity… 127 figure 7.3. pl–lex. frequency (off list). summing up, the learners’ lexical frequency profiles (lfps), which show 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 words and words off the list, are as follows: the good learner—91.08%; 3.40%; 2.10%; 2.70%; the average learner—90.66%; 4.65%; 2.13%; 2.56%, and the poor learner––88.90%; 4.83%; 2.86%; 3.40%, there being no statistically significant differences between them. the learners’ profiles are exemplified on the basis of test 2 (appendix). the patterns of intra-individual variability the patterns of intra-individual variability in the development of lexical variation in speaking english at secondary school indicate rather high variability throughout the whole observation period for the good learner. in the case of the average and poor learner, variability is rather low at the beginning (al—tests 1–10; pl––tests 1–7) and rather high later on (al—tests 10–21; pl—tests 7–13 and 15–21) (figures 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3). in all three cases, the bandwidth becomes broad at the end of the observation period, which is indicative of potential change and development in this variable. figure 8.1. gl–variability in lex. variation. katarzyna rokoszewska128 figure 8.2. al–variability in lex. variation. figure 8.3. pl–variability in lex. variation. intra-individual variability in the development of lexical density in english l2 speech at secondary school in the case of the good learner is rather high in the first half (tests 1–11) but rather low in the second half (tests 12–21) of the observation period (figure 9.1). in the case of the average learner, variability is the biggest in the middle of the observation period (figure 9.2). figure 9.1. gl–variability in lex. density. intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity… 129 figure 9.2. al–variability in lex. density. figure 9.3. pl–variability in lex. density. in the case of the poor learner, it is rather low, with two periods of moderate variability (tests 1–5 and 11–16) (figure 9.3). such a stable variability pattern indicates little change in the subsystem and the allocation of cognitive resources to a different language subsystem. the patterns of intra-individual variability in the development of lexical sophistication in speaking english depict a period of high variability (tests 2–6) before a period of stability (tests 7–12), followed by moderate variability (tests 13–21) in the case of the good learner (figure 10.1). in the case of the average learner, the pattern illustrates two periods of variability (tests 1–8 and 10–21), the second one being greater (figure 10.2). in the case of the poor learner, the pattern reveals low variability in the first half (tests 1–9), followed by high variability in the second half (tests 10–21) of the observation period (figure 10.3). the patterns of intra-individual variability in the development of words which belong to the first frequency band, that is, the first 1,000 words, may be described as rather stable patterns of moderate variability. such variability can be observed especially in such periods as tests 10–14 in the case of the good learner, tests 1–8 and 10–21 in the case of the average learner, and tests 1–5 and 10–14 in the case of the poor learner (figures 11.1, 11.2, and 11.3). katarzyna rokoszewska130 figure 10.1. gl–variability in lexical sophistication. figure 10.2. al–variability in lexical sophistication. figure 10.3. pl–variability in lexical sophistication. intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity… 131 figure 11.1. gl–variability in lex. freq. (1k). figure 11.2. al–variability in lex. freq. (1k). figure 11.3. pl–variability in lex. freq. (1k). the patterns of intra-individual variability in the development of words which belong to the second frequency band, that is, the second 1,000 words, clearly show two periods of high variability in the case of the good (tests 3–8 and 10–14) and average learner (tests 1–8 and 10–16) (figures 12.1 katarzyna rokoszewska132 and 12.2). in the case of the poor learner, variability is high at the beginning (tests 1–5) and then low till the end of the observation period (figure 12.3). figure 12.1. gl–variability in lex. freq. (2k). figure 12.2. al–variability in lex. freq. (2k). figure 12.3. pl–variability in lex. freq. (2k). intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity… 133 the patterns of intra-individual variability in the development of words which belong to the third frequency band, that is, the third 1,000 words, show rather high variability throughout the whole observation period in the case of the good learner. in the case of the average and poor learner, variability is low for the major part of the observation period (al—tests 1–13; pl—tests 1–16) but high towards the end (al—tests 14–21; pl—tests 16–21). figure 13.1. gl–variability in lex. freq. (3k). figure 13.2. al–variability in lex. freq. (3k). figure 13.3. pl–variability in lex. freq. (3k). katarzyna rokoszewska134 the patterns of intra-individual variability in the development of words which are off the list, that is, beyond the first 3,000 words, in the case of the good learner, show a period of high variability (tests 8–12) which is preceded and followed by the periods of low variability (tests 1–7 and 13–21) (figure 14.1). in the case of the average learner, a rather stable pattern of low variability can be observed, indicating little activity in the language subsystem and a focus on a different part of language system (figure 14.2). in the case of the poor learner, the initial period of higher variability (tests 1–6) is followed by a short period of low variability (tests 7–9) and a rather stable period of moderate variability (tests 10–21) (figure 14.3). notwithstanding the analysed patterns of intra-individual variability in the development of lexical complexity and frequency, a monte carlo analysis proves that the differences between the good, average, and poor learner in these aspects are statistically insignificant, except the differences between the good and average learner in lexical sophistication and the off-list vocabulary (table 5). figure 14.1. gl–variability in lexical freq. (off list). figure 14.2. al–variability in lexical freq. (off list). intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity… 135 figure 14.3. pl–variability in lexical freq. (off list). table 5 intra-individual variability in lexical complexity—a monte carlo analysis (p<0.05) data intra-individual variability in lexical complexity lex. soph. lex. dens lex. var. freq. (1k) freq. (2k) freq. (3k) freq. off list gl&al .025 .660 .000 .527 .196 .935 .050 gl&pl .693 .000 .000 .871 .609 .945 .238 al&pl .987 .790 .000 .874 .881 .582 .783 finally, the relationship between the learners’ rate of development and intra-individual variability in the emergence of various measures of lexical complexity, calculated in terms of spearman’s rho values, is weak, positive, and statistically significant for all learners (.7726) (table 5). however, looking at individual results, the above is true in the case of the average (.7357) and poor (.7404) learner but not in the case of the good learner, whose result (*–.1139) is statistically insignificant. table 6 the rate of development and intra-individual variability in lexical complexity—correlation the rate of development & intra-individual variability in the development of lexical complexity good learner average learner poor learner all learners *–.1139 .7357 .7404 .7726 katarzyna rokoszewska136 discussion the aim of the present study was to investigate the role intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity in speaking english as a foreign language at secondary school in the case of a good, average, and poor language learner. with respect to the development of different measures of lexical complexity, it is observed that lexical variation in the language produced in speech by the good learner was higher than in the case of the average learner and poor learner between whom, in turn, no difference has been found. at the same time, however, the good learner’s speech was characterised with the same level of lexical density and sophistication as the average learner’s and the poor learner’s speech. what is more, the learners’ lexical profiles did not differ statistically. all three learners used mainly the most frequent words (1,000 words) while speaking english, using only a few percent of words which belong to the second and third 1,000 words, the same being true for words off the list. on the one hand, it is rather surprising to find out that the learners can talk about such a variety of topics mainly on the basis of the first 1,000 words in english, but on the other, it is well-established that the use of vocabulary in spontaneous interaction is a sophisticated process in which l2 learners tend to rely on early acquired, easily accessible language material. what is more, such use of lexis may be indicative of the gap between recognition and production of lexis as well as between the use of lexis in controlled and free production (laufer, 1998; schmitt & meara, 1997, laufer & goldstein 2004). based on the visual data analysis, it may be said that in line with the cdst framework the learners’ learning trajectories in the development of lexis are individual but the differences are more visible in the case of lexical sophistication and higher frequency bands than in the case of variation, density, and the first frequency band. these findings are to some extent reflected in the patterns of intra-individual variability. in general, shorter and longer periods of lesser and greater variability seem to appear at different times in lexical development of all three learners. however, the patterns of intra-individual variability among the three learners appear to be more similar with reference to lexical variation, density, and the first frequency band but not sophistication and the remaining frequency bands. what is more, the good learner’s variability patterns often include periods of rather high variability which contrast with the average learner’s and poor learner’s periods of low variability. in line with the cdst framework, this indicates some activity and change in the system in the case of the former, and lack of activity and development in the case of the latter. despite the fact that some qualitative differences may be detected in the learners’ intra-individual variability on the basis of advanced visualisation intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity… 137 techniques, from the statistical point of view, most of the patterns analysed are not meaningful. however, it is necessary to verify these findings on a bigger sample of learners. as far as the relationship between the learners’ level of intra-individual variability and the rate of development of lexical complexity is concerned, it has been generally found out that there exists a weak and positive relationship between the two variables. it needs to be pointed out that such a relationship may vary in different language sub-systems and in the case of individual learners. although this preliminary finding seems to indicate some support for the claim that intra-individual variability has a positive influence on language development, it should constitute the basis for a larger-scale research. conclusions summarising, it is important to reiterate that complex dynamic systems theory (cdst) acknowledges a dynamic, non-linear and highly variable nature of the development of complex and interactive language subsystems. cdst researchers claim that intra-individual variability has a positive influence on language development and that it should be studied with respect to whole language subsystems by means of a number of specific tools and procedures, which should lead to new insights in second language development. the third part of the case study presented in this paper, which focuses on intra-individual variability in lexical complexity, yields a more comprehensive picture of the role of this phenomenon in language development of the good, average, and poor learner. in contrast to the first two parts of the case study (rokoszewska, 2019a & 2019b), which showed that the language produced by the good learner was better than the language of the average and poor learner in terms of complexity, accuracy, fluency and most measures of syntactic complexity, the third part of the study showed that, as far as lexical complexity is concerned, the language of all three learners was the same in terms of almost all lexical measures. this shows that the learners were as if more preoccupied with the development of other language sub-systems than lexical complexity. as the first part of the case study showed (rokoszewska, 2019a), the good learner developed syntactic complexity, fluency, and accuracy at the cost of lexical complexity. the average learner developed accuracy at the cost of fluency and both syntactic and lexical complexity. the poor learner developed his syntactic complexity and fluency more than lexical complexity but at the cost of accuracy. thus, the third part of the case study points to the katarzyna rokoszewska138 need and challenge to help learners use lexically denser, more sophisticated and more varied language while communicating in a foreign language. like the first two parts of the case study, this part renders some support for the existence of individual learning trajectories, apparently different periods of high and low variability occurring at different times whose patterns do not have to be meaningful but random, and for the fact that, in general, the level of intra-individual variability might indeed influence learners’ development of lexical complexity. nevertheless, these qualitative empirical findings should be quantitatively verified on a bigger sample of learners, which would render a more comprehensive picture of group and individual lexical behaviour. references ai, h., & lu, x. 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(1998). second language development in writing: measures of f luency, accuracy, and complexity (report no. 17). honolulu: university of hawaii, second language curriculum centre. a p p e n d i x sample texts produced by a good, average and poor learner in speech (test 2) a) a good learner: i use the computer for search different information, to surf the net. and i think it is very useful invention because for example when i do not have enough time to search different information in books or something like that, i can find every single information in the internet. and it does not take much time to find it. i use the computer for listening and downloading music because music is my real passion and for watching films, also. and i think that the computer is better than tv because i can do everything. and on tv i can only watch films. and when i have connection to the internet, i can watch films on the internet. but the computer, i think it is better. i think that the main advantage of mobile phones are that you can use them in every single place because they are small. and you can take them everywhere. it only depends on the signal because there are some places, there are no signal. and you can talk to your friends even when you are away. and also the newest models of the mobile phones have connection to the internet. you can surf the net. b) an average learner: i use computer to surf the internet make, no, make documents or presentations, sometimes play games. but i usually use computer to, to listen music because i like it. i play games on my computer, on the my computer about twice a week for an hour because it is. but i prefer to program or change settings in my computer. so i am in class with expanded information technologies. i have mobile phone. i always have mobile phone with me because i like call to my friends or parents. it is better than, it is better that when i do not have mobile phone. also i use my mobile phone to take photos. so i do not need, needed a camera. sometimes i play games on my mobile phone, too when i am not, when i bored. when i am not, when i am not in school, i surf the internet for example to check my. yes, yes, the cons of mobile phone is that it can be stole or lost. and mobile phone needs electromagnetic fields and radiation which it is harmful to our brain and body. intra-individual variability in the emergence of lexical complexity… 141 c) a poor learner: i use my computer for play games, listen to music and watch a video, watch video, yes, no, chat with my friend. and that is it is only. so, a pros is a, take photos, play games and surf the internet, call, yes. it is emit electromagnetic and a. yes, and a money for my mobile phone is a expensive. it is all. a signal is a good. it is a pros, yes, pros. a battery on a smartphone, it is a low. so pros internet is a chat with friends, play online games and listen music and maybe watch a social networking sites. yes, hackers, cybercriminals and it is a little dangerous because they does not they do not know who watch this photo, yes, yes, no, only pros. we can use a information on the sites and learn. no, i do not know. i think the life with no mobile phones and computer is a boring or only boring. yes, because we have a information for mobile phone and computers. and if we do not have this this electrical, electrical items, we do not have this information. yes, because we do not play games, listen to music, no. table 7 lexical complexity—a good, average and poor learner (speaking test 2) lexical complexity—a good, average, and poor learner (test 2) data words density sophistication variation freq. 1k freq. 2k freq. 3k fr. off-list gl 200 0.45 0.13 5.00 90.0 4.5 3.0 2.5 al 188 0.47 0.26 4.23 88.8 3.2 1.6 6.4 pl 200 0.48 0.28 3.60 88.5 1.0 5.0 5.5 katarzyna rokoszewska interne varianz eines lernenden im prozess der entstehung der lexikalischen komplexität im sprechen auf englisch auf dem niveau einer oberschule – fallstudie eines leistungsguten, -mittleren und -schwachen lernenden z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die theorie dynamischer komplexer systeme befasst sich mit dem prozess der entwicklung der sprache im kontrast zu ihrer aneignung. indem die interne komplexität des sprachsystems sowie der dynamische, nichtlineare charakter der sprachentwicklung betont werden, zeigt die theorie eine neue herangehensweise an die rolle der varianz dar, die aus der entwicklungspsychologie abgeleitet wird. dieser ansatz steht im einklang mit den ergebnissen der forschungen der 1980er jahre, in denen verschiedene arten und ursachen der varianz identifiziert wurden, behandelt jedoch die varianz als ein für die sprachentwicklung verantwortlicher hauptfaktor und nicht als eine periphere erscheinung. es wird angenommen, dass sich die interne varianz eines lernenden, die als die zwischen wiederholten messungen bei einzelnen lernenden beobachteten unterschiede im niveau einer bestimmten entwicklungsvariable definiert wird, auf die sprachentwicklung auf verschiedenen ebenen der sprachbeherrschung positiv auswirkt. nach der durchführung der ersten beiden teile einer fallstudie, die auf dem mündlichen sprachkorpus eines lernenden beruhte, die der internen varianz in bezug auf die sprachliche komplexität, korrektheit, flüssigkeit und insbesondere auf die syntaktische komplexität gewidmet waren, beschreibt dieser artikel den dritten teil katarzyna rokoszewska142 der oben genannten studie, die darauf abzielt, dieses phänomen im prozess der entstehung der lexikalischen komplexität im sprechen auf englisch als fremdsprache auf dem niveau einer oberschule am beispiel eines leistungsguten, -mittleren und -schwachen lernenden zu analysieren. im allgemeinen zeigen die ergebnisse der studie statistisch signifikante unterschiede unter lernenden in der lexikalischen differenzierung im kontrast zur lexikalischen dichte, komplexität oder häufigkeit, sie zeigen dennoch keine solchen unterschiede in der internen varianz eines lernenden, wobei auf eine schwache positive beziehung zwischen dieser varianzart und dem tempo der lexikalischen entwicklung hingewiesen wird. schlüsselwörter: theorie dynamischer komplexer systeme (cdst), lexikalische komplexität, lexikalische differenzierung, korpus eines lernenden, sprechen theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 7 (2), 2021, pp. 187–191 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.9613 christina gkonou, mark daubney, jean-marc dewaele, new insights into language anxiety: theory, research and educational implications bristol: multilingual matters, 2017 isbn: 9781783097715, 226 pages the book edited by christina gkonou, mark daubney, and jean-marc dewaele entitled new insights into language anxiety: theory, research and educational implications provides a very interesting overview of current theory, research, and practice in the field of language anxiety. it brings together a range of perspectives concerning this very complex and dynamic psychological construct that, for approximately four decades, has consistently attracted the attention of second language acquisition (sla) researchers who have widely acknowledged that language anxiety described as “the worry and negative emotional reaction when learning and using a second language” (gregersen & macintyre, 2014, p. 3) can impede the learning of the target language and consequently hinder academic success. apart from that, it has also been shown to diminish the willingness to communicate and have a “corrosive influence on the very lifeblood of l2 learning itself—the enthusiasm and motivation necessary to engage and embrace another language other than one’s own” (daubney, dewaele, & gkonou, 2017, p. 1). at the same time, as the editors have rightly noted, even though language anxiety has been studied for about forty years, not many books on the topic have been published over the same period. consequently, we might say that the main objective of the monograph in question is to fill this gap and clarify the many confusing aspects about language anxiety by presenting the latest studies by renown language anxiety researchers, focusing both on the theoretical and pedagogical implications for future investigation, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.9613 katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia188 as well as making useful suggestions for reducing the influence of language anxiety in a classroom setting. the more than two hundred pages of this volume encompasses twelve well written, separate chapters, each of which is authored by a distinguished scholar/s, and which are grouped into three parts. the first section (chapters 1, 2, & 3) offers a theoretical discussion of current trends in language anxiety research but also addresses the misinterpretations of the horowitz et al.’s (1986) concept of foreign language classroom anxiety. the second part of the book (chapters 4–9) analyses several empirical studies on language anxiety focusing on diverse research designs and instructional settings. in the third part (chapters 10–12), we can find some pedagogical implications in the form of practice activities and coping strategies. the volume under review starts with chapter one that serves in lieu of a formal introduction by focusing on the aims and objectives of the book, as well as its major themes and structure. the editors decided to assemble a collection of perspectives that rises to the challenge of conceptualizing and addressing anxiety from fresh perspectives, through different lenses and in relation to areas that have been little studied. they advocate a more varied and fine-grained approach to studying language anxiety as well as taking a more interdisciplinary perspective concerning the topic. the book continues with chapter two: an overview of language anxiety research and trends in its development, written by peter d. macintyre who proposes an overview of approaches regarding language anxiety dividing them into three phases, reflecting both historical trends and assumptions about the topic. the first one is called the confounded approach, as the research on language anxiety was adopted from various sources without focusing that much on situating language anxiety within the language learning context. the second phase is described as the specialized approach, in which researchers focused much more on placing and studying language anxiety from a language learning perspective. the third and the most recent phase has been contextualized as the dynamic approach in which anxiety is studied in connection with a complex array of language learning experiences. chapter three entitled on the misreading of horwitz, horwitz, and cope (1986) and the need to balance anxiety research and the experiences of anxious language learners by elaine horwitz offers a literature review on the components of language anxiety utilizing a facilitative–debilitating dichotomy and describing the relationship between anxiety and language learning achievement. it highlights the fact that focusing on offering assistance to anxious learners is of crucial importance as “[…] it is essential to remember that research on language anxiety was initiated from the experiences of anxious language learners and its ultimate goal is to make language learning more comfortable for vulnerable learners” (horwitz, 2017, p. 44). the author also addresses the christina gkonou, mark daubney, jean-marc dewaele… 189 misreading of the concept of foreign language classroom anxiety proposed in 1986 (horowitz et al., 1986) stating that simplifying the construct of language anxiety to just a composite of communication apprehension, test anxiety, and fear of negative evaluation results in failing to grasp the essence of the experiences of anxious language learners. the second part of the book, which focuses on the empirical studies regarding language anxiety, opens with a very interesting chapter titled anxiety and l2 self-images: the “anxious self” by erdi şimşek and zoltán dörnyei. the authors of the chapter used a mixed-method approach to explore the “anxious selves” of english language learners in turkey. they based their research on mcadams’s “new big five” model (mcadams & pals, 2006), which consists of three levels (namely, dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations and integrative life narratives), and treats personality as the interaction of these three tiers. their findings suggested that “conceiving anxiety in terms of a dynamic combination of three relatively distinct facets offers a more nuanced understanding of how anxiety affects the learners’ performance across various communication situations, language tasks, content areas and contextual conditions other than the traditional dichotomy of trait and state anxiety”(şimşek & dörnyei, 2017, p. 65). according to the authors, the novel aspect of mcadams’s model helps in viewing the way learners form cohesive verbal accounts of their relevant experiences as an integral part of the overall holistic anxiety construct. the next chapter entitled are perfectionists more anxious foreign language learners and users? by jean-marc dewaele is, as noted by the author, the first systematic quantitative investigation into the link between perfectionism and foreign language (classroom) anxiety (flca). his study on three different samples of informants from various countries, linguistic backgrounds and sociobiographical variables (age, gender, education level, number of languages known) revealed a significant positive relationship between perfectionism and flca showing a relationship between flca and the ‘doubt about actions’ and ‘concern over mistakes’ subscales, which suggests that the more concern over mistakes and the more doubts that participants have, the higher levels of reported fla/flca. in chapter six, social anxiety and silence in japan’s tertiary foreign language classrooms, jim king and lesley smith focus on the relationship between social anxiety and the silence of second language (l2) learners within a japanese english as a foreign language (efl) classroom context employing clark and wells’s (1995) seminal model of social anxiety. the authors’ mixed-method data analyses uncovered that social anxiety is the main factor in learners’ avoidance of talking and “[…] this silence of social inhibition appears to be well supported by unhelpful pedagogical practices on the one hand and higher-level sociocultural themes relating to the value of discretion and caution in public encounters on the other” (king & smith, 2017, p. 107). their research katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia190 shows that clark and wells’s (1995) model of social anxiety is a framework through which we can better understand the cognitive processes and in-class behaviors of silently anxious learners. chapter seven titled do you see what i feel? an idiodynamic assessment of expert and peer’s reading of nonverbal language anxiety cues, written by tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, and tucker olson, presents an idiodynamic approach to exploring recognizable nonverbal manifestations of language anxiety. the main objective of the study was to examine fluctuations in language anxiety operating in real time by analyzing the mentioned emotion as part of a dynamic system that is in a state of constant flux and which interacts with other influencing variables at any given moment. the authors of the chapter asked their participants, first, to record their heart rate while presenting during a spanish class and, second, to watch their presentations and ‘idiodynamically’ self-rated the moment-to-moment fluctuations in their language anxiety levels. the analysis of findings pointed to a number of important factors affecting language anxiety that are very difficult to elicit in more traditional approaches. in the subsequent chapter eight, towards an ecological understanding of language anxiety, christina gkonou explores language anxiety through the lens of brofenbrenner’s (1979) nested ecosystems model, thus adding a fresh empirical perspective to the investigation of this construct. qualitative data analysis has revealed that environments which are not prominently linked to the microsystem or the present classroom (i.e., the mesosystem, the exosystem and the macrosystem) can play a key role in the experience of language anxiety in the microsystem. chapter nine, exploring the relationship between anxiety and advanced hungarian efl learners’ communication experiences in the target language: a study of highvs. low-anxious learners, written by zsuzsa tóth, examines how fla impacts on and shapes advanced learners’ experiences of using the target language (tl), focusing on oral communication. in her study, english major students with high and low levels of fla were first asked to have one-on-one conversations with a native-speaking interlocutor and then to reflect on this experience immediately after the encounter. an analysis of the findings indicated that learners’ higher expectations towards themselves as l2 speakers, together with a fear of not being able to achieve the desired level of competence after long years of language study, are key elements of anxiety at more advanced levels of proficiency. the third part of the book features the pedagogical implications for lowering the levels of language anxiety and starts with chapter ten titled anxious language learners can change their minds: ideas and strategies from traditional psychology and positive psychology, by rebecca l. oxford. the author explains that the nature of language anxiety is related not only to christina gkonou, mark daubney, jean-marc dewaele… 191 social anxiety, but also to a more generalized form of anxiety, as well as to low emotional intelligence and lack of optimism, flow, agency, and hope. consequently, she puts forward an array of interventions for anxious learners that could be used in a classroom setting. in chapter eleven entitled the links between self-esteem and language anxiety and implications for the classroom, fernando d. rubio-alcalá explains the differences between anxiety, fear, anguish or stress and self-esteem, selfconcept and self-efficacy and discusses the relationship between self-esteem and language anxiety. this very interesting chapter offers much needed analyses regarding the interaction of self-esteem and anxiety in the foreign language classroom context, as well as a range of applicable anxiety-reducing activities and strategies for classroom implementation, including guidelines for teachers’ rapport, methodological orientations and learning activities. the final concluding chapter co-authored by the three editors brings together the main themes presented in the volume showing that language anxiety is in fact a very diverse and complex notion that needs to be examined from a number of different perspectives. consequently, they advocate an interdisciplinary approach to language anxiety with the use of different research methods which will allow for a more holistic view of this complex notion. the summary of the different chapters shows that the volume under review indeed offers new insights into research on language anxiety. it highlights the fact that language anxiety should be viewed as a dynamic concept that needs varied research methods, an interdisciplinary approach and a holistic perspective. at the same time, it could be argued that presenting some more detailed information concerning the psychological roots of language anxiety would strengthen the theoretical overview included in this volume. all things considered, i strongly recommend reading new insights into language anxiety: theory, research and educational implications as it enables readers to obtain a broad and multifaceted perspective on language anxiety as such but also on the research designs and important trends one can consider while planning to study this complex notion. the book is essentially addressed to sla researchers, teacher trainees, teaching instructors, foreign language teachers, but also to anyone with an inquisitive mind who wants to obtain an extended view on language anxiety and develop their self-awareness. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4896-0521 katarzyna ożańska-ponikwia university of bielsko-biała, poland theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 6 (2), 2020, pp. 35–65 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.7762 teresa maria włosowicz university of economics and humanities in bielsko-biała (wseh) the influence of living and working abroad on the identities of researchers and native speaker teachers a b s t r a c t the study investigates the inf luence of living and working abroad on the identities of researchers and native speaker teachers. following block (2009), hall (2012), and pavlenko and blackledge (2004), identity is assumed here to be dynamic and multiple, where the different identities of a person can be more or less relevant in a given context (hall, 2012, p. 33). moreover, identities at the time of globalization tend to be hybrid (marotta, 2011) and, in the case of migration, they can be bicultural (comănaru, noels, & dewaele, 2017), but as comănaru et al. (2017, p. 539) observe, each bicultural person’s identity is different, depending on his or her life history, language proficiency, psychological traits, etc. simultaneously, there is evidence that multilingualism increases cognitive empathy (dewaele & li, 2012) and makes people more open-minded (włosowicz, 2019), so it could be assumed that the participants would recognize their hybrid identities as an enrichment rather than a threat to their native identities, even though identification with their native languages and cultures, with their families, etc. would remain an important part of their identity. the research tool used in the present study was a questionnaire completed by forty native speaker teachers and researchers living abroad. as the results show, the participants’ identities are indeed highly complex, hybrid, and inf luenced by different factors, however, the native language and the family remain very important components of identity, unlike, for example, one’s profession. still, they also admitted that foreign language knowledge enriched them culturally, intellectually, and emotionally. keywords: identity, multilingualism, mobility, linguistic and cultural awareness https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8767-9332 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en teresa maria włosowicz36 introduction the purpose of the study has been an investigation of the identities of researchers and native speaker teachers working abroad. the target group (language teachers and researchers) was chosen on purpose. it was assumed that they would have higher linguistic and cultural awareness connected with their professions and that they would thus be more aware of the changes in their identity produced by constant contact with another language and culture, or even with other languages and cultures, since many native speaker teachers move from one country to another, as in the case of some english teach ers or german teachers sent by the deutscher akademischer austauschdienst (the german academic exchange service). in fact, such changes might be assumed to be relatively subtle. more precisely, as a hybrid identity (cf. marotta, 2011) develops, it is gradually enriched by the language user’s intercultural experience, but while some elements of identity may change, others may remain stable. as marotta (2011, p. 197) observes, in reference to anthias (1999, as cited in marotta, 2011, p. 197, see section identity and mobility below), a hybrid identity does not have to mean greater openness, but in some cases, it may just involve the incorporation of minority cultural ideas and practices by members of the dominant culture. certainly, here the situation is more complex: even though foreign language teachers and researchers belong to a minority in the country where they live, they may actually be regarded as members of a dominant culture, for example, teachers of english as a global language in a country whose language is hardly ever studied abroad the study focused, in particular, on how living in a foreign country on the one hand, and knowledge of foreign languages on the other, influenced the respondents’ identity, their perception of their native language and culture, as well as their objectivity in both research (in the case of researchers) and teaching, and in their approach to their native language and culture. indeed, the participants were all bilingual (one person) or multilingual (i.e., at least trilingual), although their language repertoires varied both in terms of the languages known and the proficiency levels. it could therefore be assumed that, while the participants would be aware of the changes in their identity, their identities would also be very complex and varied, which would be reflected in their responses to the questionnaire. special attention was paid to the dynamic process of identity development and the different elements of identity which had changed due to the participants’ residence in non-native countries and, to some extent, due to their multilingualism and contact with other cultures, as well as to those elements of their identity which they perceived as stable and relatively immune to such influences. it was also attempted to find out what the inf luence of living and working abroad… 37 the participants generally identified with, and which elements of identity varied to a greater extent and were thus more individual. identity and mobility by and large, identity seems to be quite difficult to define and, while different definitions have been proposed, they vary considerably. on the one hand, some researchers equate identity with ethnicity or cultural identity and thus regard it as pre-determined and stable. for example, friedman (1994, pp. 29–30, as cited in tong & cheung, 2011, p. 58) defines “cultural identity” as “the attribute of a set of qualities to a given population,” which is “not practiced but inherent, not achieved but ascribed.” he adds that it is “expressed as heritage, or as cultural descent” (friedman, 1994, pp. 29–30, as cited in tong & cheung, 2011, p. 58), which is learnt by all individuals and reflected in their individual behavior. in a similar vein, hall (2004, p. 3, as cited in block, 2009, p. 218) claims that “one’s identity can be thought of as the particular set of traits, beliefs, and allegiances that, in short or long term ways, gives one a consistent personality and mode of social being.” on the other hand, gee (1999, p. 39, as cited in block, 2009, p. 218) distinguishes between “socially situated” and “core identities.” while he defines socially situated identities as “the multiple identities we take on in different practices and contexts,” core identities, in his view, constitute “whatever continuous and relatively “fixed” sense of self underlies our continually shifting multiple identities” (gee, 1999, p. 39, as cited in block, 2009, p. 218). however, as pavlenko and blackledge (2004, p. 5) remark, assuming a oneto-one correlation between language and ethnic identity reflects a monolingual and monocultural bias. an example of that approach is the definition of ethnic identity as “a subjective feeling of belongingness to a particular ethnic group” (noels, pon, & clément, 1996, p. 246, as cited in pavlenko & blackledge, 2004, p. 15). identity is not fixed, but rather, it evolves over time, and it can be negotiated, asserted, challenged, defined, etc. in different social contexts. block (2009, pp. 218–219) questions gee’s (1999) concept of a fixed, underlying sense of self and suggests that a better definition of identity is that proposed by weedon (2004, p. 19, her emphasis, as cited in block, 2009, p. 219): “the ‘limited and temporary fixing for the individual of a particular mode of subjectivity as apparently what one is.’” thus, identity can only temporarily be perceived as fixed, but it changes over time. from the point of view of the so-called “left” theories of identity based on lacan’s (1977, as cited in block, 2009, p. 225) teresa maria włosowicz38 work, identity is “fluid and unstable” (block, 2009, p. 225), in response to both changes in the environment and to certain emotions. indeed, just as a speaker’s dominant language can change as a function of his or her country of residence (elwert, 1973, as cited in hoffmann, 2001, p. 15), identity can also be influenced by moving to another country or even becoming multilingual. as maines (1978, p. 242, as cited in panicacci & dewaele, 2017, p. 421) observed, “identities migrate every bit as much as bodies.” if, following weedon (2004, as cited in block, 2009, p. 219), one assumes that identity is subjective and can be defined by what one apparently is, it can be supposed to be connected with one’s self-perception, which can certainly change. as panicacci and dewaele (2017, p. 423) conclude on the basis of a body of earlier research: in summary, the literature suggests that migrants’ personality profiles, cultural orientation and self-perception are pieces of a complex puzzle. while no researcher would disagree that migration experiences trigger changes across all aspects of an individual’s psyche (dewaele, 2016), nobody has yet—to our knowledge—investigated the cumulative effects of personality, cultural orientation and sense of feeling different. such a research is challenging since the directionality of the relationship between the variables can never be completely established. it can therefore be seen that identity and personality are interconnected. as has been remarked above, hall (2004, p. 3, as cited in block, 2009, p. 218) regards identity as the set of traits which contribute to a consistent personality. still, as mijatović and tytus (2016, p. 231) have shown, the relationship between bilingualism and biculturalism on the one hand and a changed self on the other is highly complex. while bilinguals are sensitive to feedback from their interlocutors and adjust to it, bilingualism and biculturalism do not necessarily mean feeling different while using one language or the other. one trait which contributes to a feeling of a changed self is agreeableness, which makes speakers seek harmony and thus change one’s behavior to please the interlocutor. last but not least, as mijatović and tytus (2016, p. 231) observe, “[a] crucial role could further be attributed to cultural differences, a bilingual’s proficiency in the l2 as well as varying emotionality of both languages.” while, in the course of time, one acquires experience with two or more languages and cultures, one also tries to keep that experience coherent. as drabarek (2018, p. 13) observes, one “strives towards a sense of continuity and inner identity by integrating past and present experiences.” in her view, “the content of identity will include individual beliefs, interests, needs, motivations, but also one’s way of thinking determined by axiological criteria” (drabarek, 2018, p. 13). according to her (drabarek, 2018, p. 14), identity might be regarded as synonymous with identification, which is related to social bonds, common the inf luence of living and working abroad… 39 interests, and the internalization of certain values. in the case of multilingual and multicultural individuals, these relationships can be even more complex, as their proficiency in the different languages varies even more and the language users’ experience with different cultures can be more varied too. however, language is a salient marker of identity (giles & byrne, 1982, as cited in pavlenko & blackledge, 2004, pp. 4–5), therefore, minority groups whose ethnolinguistic vitality (including the boundaries between the native and the second language) is weaker, learn the l2 and assimilate more easily than those whose ethnolinguistic vitality is stronger. even so, identity does not have to be connected with a single language. sometimes it is even difficult to determine a person’s native language and some multilingual participants indicate two native languages (kashema, 2003, pp. 163–164; müller-lancé, 1999, p. 86; włosowicz, 2011, p. 496). as boutan (2003, pp. 138–139) has concluded, it is the language of the mother rather than that of the country. certainly, learning the national language is a necessity for the country’s citizens, but, at the same time, their native, minority languages should not be neglected (boutan, 2003, p. 149). undoubtedly, there are differences between immigrants and other minority language speakers whose languages are not prestigious and who experience language anxiety and even subtractive bilingualism and l1 loss (herdina & jessner, 2002; sharwood-smith, 1989; van gelderen et al., 2003), and native speaker teachers and researchers, but exposure to the foreign language and culture and everyday contact with its speakers are likely to influence the foreign teacher or researcher, too. at this point, it is worth mentioning that this may also differ according to the person’s native language and the language of the country. following giles and byrne’s (1982, as cited in pavlenko & blackledge, 2004, pp. 4–5) suggestions concerning the role of ethnolinguistic vitality, there might be supposed to be a difference between a speaker of a less prestigious and less widely taught language (for example, a romanian researcher in france) and a native speaker teacher of a more prestigious language (such as a native speaker of english in poland), as well as a speaker of a language of a comparable status (for instance, a spanish speaker in france). at this point, it can be concluded that not only are identities dynamic and change over time, but they are also multifaceted or even multiple if different aspects of our identity are regarded as a number of “intersecting social identities” (hall, 2012, p. 33). according to hall (2012, p. 33), the relevance of our identities changes from one context to another, for example, a person’s identity as an american tourist is more relevant in one context, while in another the same person’s most relevant identity is that of an english language teacher. the fact that identities can be multilingual and multicultural has given rise to the notion of hybrid identity. according to marotta (2011, p. 189), in the contemporary, globalized world, identities are often hybrid, or based on teresa maria włosowicz40 “the intermingling or mixture of people from different cultural backgrounds.” similarly, in their study on migrants’ acculturation, personalities and selfperceptions, panicacci and dewaele (2017, p. 434) observe: the coexistence of different cultures and languages in migrants’ minds might induce a sense of hybridity, especially visible in individuals’ psyches. however, migrants’ appreciation of local practices and their ability to regulate emotional responses have the potential to minimise the sense of alienation emerging from switching languages, possibly transforming it in a sense of enrichment. undoubtedly, migration—including employee mobility, student mobility, etc.— influences individuals’ identities very strongly. as comănaru, noels, and dewaele (2017, p. 526) point out, migration contributes to the complex dynamics of current societies, and individuals living in these changing contexts need to juggle their affiliations with the various social and cultural groups with which they interact, and, if possible, integrate them into a coherent sense of self. one of the kinds of hybrid identity is bicultural identity, which is the result of the integration of two cultures. in their model of bicultural identity integration, roccas and brewer (2002, as cited in comănaru et al., 2017, p. 528) propose four different orientations in managing multiple cultural identities: 1 hyphenated identities (a fusion of both the heritage and the host culture); 2. cultural dominance (the host culture perceived as preferable); 3 compartmentalization (alternating between both groups, as a function of contexts); 4. integrated biculturalism, or “the formation of the identity as a world citizen, rather than belonging to one or more cultural groups” (comănaru et al., 2017, p. 528). on the basis of their study, comănaru, noels, and dewaele (2017) conclude that bicultural people are different, and the patterns of bicultural identity are influenced by such factors as “life histories, family dynamics, language proficiency” (comănaru et al., 2017, p. 539), as well as other personal, psychological, and contextual factors. it can be supposed that also the participants in the present study had developed largely bicultural identities or even, given their increased linguistic and cultural awareness as linguists and/or language teachers, they had reached “integrated biculturalism.” the inf luence of living and working abroad… 41 increased language awareness and tolerance in multilinguals in general, multilingualism is not limited to the knowledge of foreign or second languages, but it is connected with a number of cognitive and affective effects. following grosjean (1992), it is assumed here that a bilingual is a person who uses two languages regularly, but is not necessarily fluent in both. for example, a native speaker teacher living in a foreign country may possess basic competence in the country’s language, but contact with that language and culture enriches him or her intellectually and, arguably, can also influence his or her identity. in fact, even a minimal knowledge of l2 means that one is no longer monolingual (de angelis, 2007, p. 127). similarly, a multilingual does not have to be fluent in all three or more languages. therefore, assuming that there are different degrees of biand multilingualism, including, for example, minimal bilinguals (cf. safont-jordà, 2005, p. 26), it must be stated that all the participants in the study were bilingual or multilingual. however, it must be remembered that there are qualitative differences between bilingualism and multilingualism, which is why models of multilingual competence should be based on multilingualism and not on bilingualism (hufeisen, 2018). according to the factor model 2.1 (hufeisen, 2018, pp. 184–186), in contrast to l1 acquisition, based on neurophysiological factors and such learner-external factors as the learning environment and input, the factors involved in l2 learning additionally include educational aims, the cultural heritage, the l1, which is already in place, affective factors (motivation, attitudes towards languages and cultures, life experiences, the perceived language distance, etc.) and cognitive ones, such as language awareness, metalinguistic awareness, learning strategies and experiences, etc. on the other hand, l3 learning includes, apart from the factors already involved in learning l1 and l2, “foreign language specific factors” (hufeisen, 2018, p. 186), for example, the previous interlanguage(s) and the l3 interlanguage, as well as “foreign language learning experiences and strategies,” such as “the ability to compare, transfer, and make interlingual connections” (hufeisen, 2018, p. 186), which means increased language awareness developed while learning the l2. indeed, as shown by jessner (1999), multilingual learners possess increased language awareness. yet, as the present study focuses on identity, language awareness is relevant here only to the extent to which it allows multilingual teachers and researchers to reflect on their language biographies and on the influence of foreign language learning, and especially mobility, on their identity, while the awareness of language structures is beyond the scope of this paper. moreover, as shown by dewaele and li (2012), multilinguals have a higher level of cognitive empathy, defined as “the intellectual/imaginative apprehenteresa maria włosowicz42 sion of another’s mental state” (lawrence et al. 2004, p. 911, as cited in dewaele & li, 2012, p. 355). yet, mere knowledge of multiple languages is not enough, as the effect is stronger in the case of frequent use of those languages (dewaele & li, 2012, p. 362). as dewaele and li (2012, p. 363) conclude, multiligualism, combined with the frequent use of multiple languages, increases cognitive empathy and thus the ability to adopt the interlocutor’s point of view, which makes multilinguals more skillful in conversation. in fact, multilinguals perceive themselves as more open-minded and tolerant thanks to their knowledge of multiple languages (włosowicz, 2019). however, as admitted by the participants, tolerance of other cultures is not unlimited, for example, if tormenting animals is a part of another culture, it cannot be tolerated. similarly, even though knowledge of other languages increases openness and tolerance and can contribute to international understanding, it is not legitimate to assume that it can lead to peace in the world, as international relations are highly complex and peace depends, in particular, on political and economic factors (włosowicz, 2019, p. 225). therefore, as multilingualism increases different aspects of language awareness and, given greater cognitive empathy and the ability to see the world through the interlocutor’s eyes, also cultural awareness, it can be assumed that the participants in the present study were aware of the effects of multilingualism and mobility on their identity and that their answers would provide interesting insights into the role of mobility in multilingual identity development. however, taking into consideration the complexity and dynamics of language biographies, it must be remembered that, while certain observations might be common to a number of respondents, individual experiences could vary considerably and might not necessarily depend on the language repertoires or the status of the languages involved. the study participants the study was carried out with 40 participants teaching languages and/or academic subjects such as linguistics, literature, language teaching methodology, etc., doing research or teacher training. one respondent (l1: polish), in addition to teaching academic subjects and english as a foreign language in norway, teaches history and philosophy in norwegian at a secondary school. similarly, an l1 spanish speaker teaches spanish geography and history in spanish at a bilingual secondary school in poland. one frenchman living in the inf luence of living and working abroad… 43 poland, in addition to teaching and research, makes professional translations and works as a consultant for french language examinations and advertisements. only one person (a polish l1 speaker living in slovakia) is a manager and administrator in an international ngo, rather than a teacher or a researcher. the participants’ language biographies are indeed complex. their l1s include: english (9), polish (7 participants, 4 of whom chose the questionnaire in english and 3 in french), spanish (5; in fact, two indicated spanish and galician) and one spanish-english bilingual, german (5), russian (4), french (2) and one french-dutch bilingual, hungarian (2, they filled in the english questionnaire), and portuguese (1), uzbek (1, questionnaire in english), greek (1; she lives in france, but she chose the english version) and romanian (1; questionnaire in french). as was mentioned above, only one of them is bilingual (in grosjean’s (2012) sense), as she is a native speaker of english living in poland and possesses a communicative (by her own admission) level of polish. all others possess various levels of competence in three or more languages, from the beginner level (a1) to near-native (c2). the second or foreign languages in their language repertoires include: english (28 respondents), french (24), german (18), polish (12), italian (12), russian (11), spanish (10), latin (5), portuguese (4), norwegian (3), catalan (2), ukrainian (2), swedish, dutch, chinese, japanese, slovak, czech, finnish, breton, irish, korean, bosnian, esperanto, belarusian, serbian, croatian, greek, welsh, hebrew, and yiddish (one person each). they live and work in the following countries: poland (14 participants), france (11) austria (4), spain (2), italy (2), the united kingdom (1), norway (1), slovakia (1), the czech republic (1), portugal (1), finland (1), and kazakhstan (1). one (l1: english) respondent wrote he lived in germany but worked in poland and, similarly, one german l1 participant wrote: “poland (and germany).” by the time of the study, they had lived there from 1.3 years to 36 years (mean 15.67 years, sd = 9.944). however, for twenty-four of them, the current country of residence is not the first foreign country they have lived in, as they used to live and work or study in other countries as well, both in europe (for example, in norway, germany, denmark, russia, italy, france, spain or sweden) and on other continents (the united states, japan, south korea, georgia). it can thus be assumed that their experience of living abroad was sufficient to exert some effects on their identity and also to make them aware of those effects method the research tool used in the study was a questionnaire sent to the participants be email. as identity is a highly personal matter, the participants had teresa maria włosowicz44 the possibility of filling out the questionnaire in their native languages, or at least in their dominant foreign languages (they had a choice, but the english version was the basic one and they all received it as a point of reference). the questionnaire was written in five language versions: english, french, german, spanish, and portuguese. (the english one is presented in the appendix at the end of the article.) the questionnaire included two kinds of questions: closed (both multiple choice questions and marking responses on a five-point likert scale, from 1—completely disagree, to 5—fully agree) and open ones, which involved commenting on the influence of knowing foreign languages and living abroad on their identity. such a form was chosen in order to allow a combination of mixed methods—both qualitative and quantitative—which, according to dörnyei (2007, pp. 45–46), is better than qualitative or quantitative methods alone, by eliminating the weaknesses of both approaches and increasing their strengths. while quantitative research is regarded as “systematic, rigorous, focused and tightly controlled” (dörnyei, 2007, p. 34) and enjoys a high reputation, averages do not reflect the complexity of individual lives, “[s]imilar scores can result from quite different underlying processes” (dörnyei, 2007, p. 35) and they are not sensitive enough to explain the reasons for the phenomena observed. by contrast, qualitative research can better make sense of complex and dynamic phenomena and answer “why” questions, but at the same time it may focus on individual stories and not be sufficiently generalizable, and there is a risk of creating theories that are either too complex or too narrow, based on individual cases (dörnyei, 2007, p. 42). in the case of mixed methods, complex issues can be analyzed on multiple levels and the qualitative component adds depth to the results of the quantitative analysis, so the validity of research and the generalizability of results are improved (dörnyei, 2007, pp. 45–46). in the present study, general tendencies revealed by the mean values of responses marked on the likert scale can be supplemented with the participants’ autobiographical narratives. as gabryś-barker and otwinowska (2012) have shown, personal narratives can reveal a lot about the development of multilingual systems, of learning strategies, language awareness, motivation, etc. it can thus be assumed that even short narratives (because of time limits, answering the open-ended questions) could provide interesting insights into the development of the participants’ identities. the research questions were as follows: first, what factors can be observed to influence the participants’ identities and to what extent? second, how do they perceive the development of their identities? third, what do the results reveal about the identities of multilingual teachers and/or researchers living in foreign countries? the inf luence of living and working abroad… 45 results first of all, the participants were asked what they did in the foreign countries, that is, whether they were teachers of their native language or another language, teachers of academic subjects, researchers, or whether they did something else (table 1). as they could indicate more than one kind of work, the sum of the percentages is more than one hundred. however, as was remarked in section “identity and mobility” above, it could be supposed that the status of the participants’ native languages in their countries of residence could also play a role in the development of their identity and their perception of it, as well as in the kind of work they did. for example, a polish l1 speaker in france was more likely to be a researcher and/or a teacher of academic subjects (linguistics, literature, language teaching methodology, etc.) than a teacher of polish. by contrast, an english or a french l1 speaker in poland could be a teacher of his or her native language as well as a researcher or a teacher of academic subjects. however, a foreigner may not necessarily teach his or her native language, but also a non-native language, such as english. therefore, the participants were divided into three groups: “more prestigious l1 speakers,” “less prestigious l1 speakers,” and “speakers of comparably prestigious languages.” certainly, this division is relative, as different factors can influence the status of a language, but it can be assumed that english as the world language is the most prestigious and the most desired language abroad, also in terms of the demand for native speaker teachers (holtzer, 2001; szczurkowska, 2007), so all native english speakers were classified as “more prestigious l1 speakers.” the same category included, for example, french, german, and spanish teachers and researchers in poland and in other countries whose languages are not widely studied, such as finland or the czech republic, and consisted of 21 participants. by contrast, table 1 the types of work done by the participants in the foreign countries work type all (40) more prestigious l1 (21) less prestigious l1 (15) comparable languages (4) n % n % n % n % teaching academic subjects 27 67.50 15 71.43 9 60.00 3 75.00 research 25 62.50 13 61.90 11 73.33 1 25.00 teaching one’s native language 19 47.50 17 80.95 1 6.67 1 25.00 teaching a foreign language 6 15.00 2 9.52 4 26.67 0 0.00 other 7 17.50 5 23.81 1 6.67 1 25.00 teresa maria włosowicz46 speakers of less popular and less widely taught languages than those of the countries of their residence (e.g., native speakers of polish, greek or russian in france) were classified as “less prestigious l1 speakers” (15 participants), while speakers whose languages had comparable prestige (e.g., a native spanish speaker living in france or a polish speaker in slovakia) were labelled “speakers of comparably prestigious languages” (4). the percentages are calculated for all the participants and for each group separately. as the figures indicate, the type of work done by the participants seems to depend on their native languages. while 80.95% of the more prestigious l1 speakers teach their native languages abroad, this is done by only one less prestigious l1 speaker (6.67%) who teaches portuguese in france. on the other hand, the percentage of participants doing research abroad is higher among the less prestigious l1 speakers (73.33%) than among the more prestigious l1 speakers (61.9%). because of the demand for their native languages, more prestigious l1 speakers are more likely to work abroad as language teachers, but, as the results show, they also tend to teach academic subjects (71.43%) more often than speakers of less prestigious l1s (60%). for example, academics who are native english speakers can teach english linguistics or literature abroad. in order to find out whether the type of work actually depended on the participants’ l1s, a chi-square analysis was carried out for the three groups and the results proved marginally significant at p = 0.01088 (df = 8). (the difference would not be significant at p < 0.01, but admitting p < 0.02, it might still be regarded as significant.) therefore, there is a certain relationship between the status of one’s native language and the kind of work done abroad. the next question concerned the languages they used in their countries of residence, as it was also assumed that language use played a role in the development of multilingual repertoires and could also influence the participants’ perception of their identity, for example, as more hybrid. the results are presented in table 2. table 2 the participants’ language use in their countries of residence language use all (40) more prestigious l1 (21) less prestigious l1 (15) comparable languages (4) n % n % n % n % english as l1 9 22.50 9 42.86 0 0.00 0 0.00 english as a foreign language 20 50.00 9 42.86 8 53.33 3 75.00 native language (not english) 16 40.00 11 52.38 5 33.33 0 0.00 the country’s language 32 80.00 18 85.71 10 66.67 4 100.00 other 8 20.00 2 9.52 4 26.67 2 50.00 the inf luence of living and working abroad… 47 again, they are calculated for all the forty participants as well as for each group separately, and the sums of the percentages exceed one hundred, as the respondents could indicate more than one language. as the results show, most of them (80%) do use the language of the country they live in, whether their native language is more (85.71%) or less (66.67%) prestigious than the country’s language, or comparable in status (100%). english is certainly also used, whether as a native or a non-native language (in the case of one participant, english is also the country’s language, but he marked it only once, “english as a non-native language”), but, apparently, in the long run it is not enough if one lives in a foreign country, which supports szczurkowska’s (2007, p. 42) observation on the limitations of english as a global language. not surprisingly, speakers of more prestigious l1s use their native languages more often (52.38%) than speakers of less prestigious ones (33.33%), but they cannot use them everywhere either. undoubtedly, a french l1 speaker can use french at the university department where he or she teaches, but he or she would be unlikely to communicate in french in poland, for example, in shops. by contrast, the “other” category included languages used only in particular contexts, for example, esperanto, or spanish as the native language of a participant’s husband. the chi-square analysis comparing the use of languages by the three groups did not show any statistically significant difference between them, p = 0.08152, df = 8. this can be explained by the fact that, even though native speakers of english and other international languages were more likely to use their mother tongues abroad, they also used the languages of their countries of residence, just like the speakers of less widely used l1s, and that english as a foreign language was used by all groups. as for their attitudes towards the languages and cultures of their countries of residence, the participants were asked whether the language had become a part of their identity, whether they felt more emotionally attached to their native language or to still another foreign language, etc. (see questions 2b and 2c in the questionnaire). they could mark more than one answer because, given the complexity of the phenomena under investigation, one could, for example, know very well a language and regard it as a part of one’s identity, but still be more strongly attached to one’s native language. the percentages of their attitudes towards the countries’ languages are presented in table 3. as the results indicate, for most of the participants (57.5%), the language of the country of residence has become part of their identity, especially in the case of speakers of less prestigious l1s (86.67%). it is possible that, while integration into the target society involves the use of its language, which, in turn, influences one’s identity, speakers of less prestigious languages, who cannot use their l1s in the foreign countries, are more likely to integrate the country’s language into their identities. however, regular use of a language teresa maria włosowicz48 does not have to mean emotional involvement, as 20% of the speakers of less prestigious l1 and 25% of the speakers of languages of a comparable status claimed they were not emotionally attached to the country’s language, while only 4.76% of the more prestigious language speakers claimed not to be emotionally attached to it. quite surprisingly, the proportion of the participants less attached to the country’s language than to their native languages was relatively low (22.5%), and highest among the speakers of more prestigious l1s (33.33%), which suggests that, even though the native language remains an important part of one’s identity (see below), one also becomes emotionally attached to the language of one’s country of residence. (it could have been supposed that a higher percentage of the participants would stress the fact that, despite knowing the country’s language well, they were less attached to it than to their native languages.). table 3 the participants’ attitudes towards the languages of their countries of residence attitudes towards the languages all (40) more prestigious l1 (21) less prestigious l1 (15) comparable languages (4) n % n % n % n % it is a language i know very well, so it has become a part of my identity. 23 57.50 8 38.10 13 86.67 2 50.00 it is just a language i teach or write in, but i do not feel emotionally attached to it. 5 12.50 1 4.76 3 20.00 1 25.00 i know it very well, but i feel less emotionally atta ched to it than to my native language. 9 22.50 7 33.33 2 13.33 0 0.00 i know it well, but i am more emotionally attached to another foreign language. 5 12.50 1 4.76 3 20.00 1 25.00 it is reserved for particular situations, such as talking with friends, but i do not teach or write in it, so my attitude towards it is quite personal. 5 12.50 4 19.05 0 0.00 1 25.00 i only have basic competence in it, so i can make myself understood in everyday life, but i do not identify with it. 3 7.50 3 7.50 0 0.00 0 0.00 i do not know it at all. 2 5.00 2 9.52 0 0.00 0 0.00 the inf luence of living and working abroad… 49 table 4 the participants’ attitudes towards the cultures of their countries of residence attitudes towards the cultures all (40) more prestigious l1 (21) less prestigious l1 (15) comparable languages (4) n % n % n % n % i have adapted to it very well and, in a way, i feel at home here. 32 80.00 15 71.43 13 86.67 4 100.00 i have adapted to it well enough to live in this country, but i still regard it as a foreign culture. 8 20.00 5 23.81 2 13.33 1 25.00 i do not feel the need to adapt to it, as i only work here as a researcher and/ or a teacher. 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 i have tried to adapt to it but i have failed. 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 i identify only with my native culture and i feel completely alienated here. 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 i identify only with my native culture, but this count ry’s culture is interesting and i enjoy discovering it. 2 5.00 2 9.52 0 0.00 0 0.00 other 3 7.50 3 14.29 0 0.00 0 0.00 it can be seen (table 4) that the overwhelming majority of the participants (80%) became adapted to the foreign cultures, especially the speakers of comparable languages (100%; here the cultures were also to some extent similar, for example, polish and slovak) and those of less prestigious l1s (86.67%). certainly, even respondents who had adapted to the foreign cultures could still regard them as foreign (20%), but no-one felt alienated, no-one felt any need to adapt to the country’s culture, and no-one had failed to adapt to it, which suggests that foreign language teachers and researchers’ high levels of linguistic and cultural awareness help them to recognize the need for adaptation and to adapt to the target culture better. the three groups’ answers were then compared by means of a chi-square test, but the difference between them did not prove to be statistically significant, p = 0.116, df = 12. similarly, the three groups’ attitudes towards the cultures of the countries they lived in were compared by means of a chi-square test and, again, the difference between them was not statistically significant, p = 0.51217, df = 6 (the three items with 0% of positive responses in all groups were excluded). this indicates that neither the participants’ attitudes towards the languages nor towards the cultures of their countries of residence depended on the relative status of their native languages, and that members of all the groups had adapted to the foreign languages and cultures. teresa maria włosowicz50 to investigate the participants’ views on identity, they were asked, first, what they immediately thought of in connection with their identity, and, second, what they associated it with. the first question seems to have been quite difficult and, as one participant remarked, it was not a matter of an immediate decision. however, many participants did provide some immediate associations and wrote such things as: “work,” “irish, followed by polish and european,” “belgian european londoner,” “multicultural, multilingual, traveller, teacher,” “earthling,” “unclear question: first of all, an educated european catholic,” “orthodox christianity, romania” (my translation from french), “my family (a difficult question),” “russia and france” (my translation from french), “it depends on many factors, it can be spanish, english or french” (my translation from spanish), “my native region” (my translation from german), “polish, but also a little french” (my translation from french), “nationality, customs, habits” (my translation from spanish), “[i think] about perspective/perspective-taking and, through the stay abroad, about a change of perspective” (my translation from german), etc. as the responses show, their identities are not only varied, but also often hybrid table 5 shows the percentages of the things the respondents identify with, calculated both for all the participants and for each group. again, the percentages exceed a hundred percent, as the participants could indicate more than one answer table 5 things the participants identify with element of identity all (40) more prestigious l1 (21) less prestigious l1 (15) comparable languages (4) n % n % n % n % their nationality 22 55.00 12 57.14 8 53.33 2 50.00 their native language 25 62.50 11 52.38 12 80.00 2 50.00 their family 22 55.00 9 42.86 12 8.00 1 25.00 being an international rese archer or language teacher 12 30.00 7 33.33 4 26.67 1 24.00 their profession or specialization 15 37.50 9 42.86 6 40.00 0 0.00 the country where they work 16 40.00 9 42.86 6 40.00 1 25.00 the university, school or company where they work 7 17.50 4 19.05 2 13.33 1 25.00 being a citizen of the world 12 30.00 4 19.05 6 40.00 2 50.00 a hybrid identity 23 57.50 10 47.62 11 73.33 2 50.00 difficult to say 3 7.50 1 4.76 2 13.33 0 0.00 other 10 25.00 9 42.86 1 6.67 0 0.00 the inf luence of living and working abroad… 51 it can thus be observed that the participants identify most strongly with their native language (62.5%), especially among the speakers of less prestigious l1s (80%). this might be surprising, as speakers of more prestigious l1s might be supposed to be proud of their languages and cultures, and only 52.38% of them claimed to identify with their native languages. it is possible that speakers of less prestigious l1s regard the mother tongue as a salient marker of identity, or else they might lose their identity and simply become members of the dominant society. at the same time, it is possible that more international languages, especially english, are no longer such strong markers of identity; for example, english might be regarded as the global language in the first place, rather than a marker of british, irish, etc. identity, that is why its native speakers might identify with it less strongly than, say, poles with polish. however, taking into consideration the next result, the former interpretation seems more plausible. the majority of the participants (57.5%) marked a hybrid identity, yet, while this tendency was particularly pronounced among the speakers of less prestigious l1s (73.33%), only 47.62% of the speakers of more prestigious l1s indicated a hybrid identity. thus, one may agree with giles and byrne (1982, as cited in pavlenko & blackledge, 2004, pp. 4–5) that the ethnolinguistic vitality of a language plays a role here: prestigious languages such as english or french may have enough ethnolinguistic vitality to prevent their speakers from being “absorbed” by the dominant society. still, some caution is needed here because, as was mentioned above, the status of an l1 in a foreign country is relative. for example, portuguese is a relatively international language, as it is spoken in portugal, in brazil, in mozambique, etc., but in france it is obviously less prestigious than french. the next, equally strong points of identification, were the family and one’s nationality (55%). however, there are visible differences between the groups: while the speakers of less prestigious l1s very strongly identified with their families (80%) and less strongly with their nationalities (53.33%), those of more prestigious l1s showed the opposite pattern: 57.14% identified with their nationalities and only 42.86% with their families. by contrast, the percentages of the participants who identified with the countries where they lived and worked (40%), with their professions (37.5%) and with being international researchers or teachers (30%) are undoubtedly lower. this suggests that the profession is not a salient point of identification. still, also only 30% identified with being citizens of the world (only 19.05% of the speakers of the more prestigious languages, more among those of less prestigious (40%) and comparable (50%) languages), which indicates that, while a hybrid identity may incorporate one’s nationality and identities related to one or a few countries one has lived in, being a citizen of the world is too broad a concept to identify with. even so, while speakers of the more prestigious l1s rarely thought of themselves as citizens of the world, such a broad identity was more acceptable for speakteresa maria włosowicz52 ers of less prestigious l1s and those of a comparable status, so the status of a language may also play a role in one’s identification with one’s nationality or, on the contrary, with being a world citizen. finally, the “other” category included a number of different things, from religion, being european or being a eu citizen, gender, hobbies, books, personal experience, ancestry, regional identity, or even the local people’s attitude towards foreigners. however, the chi-square test carried out in order to check whether the participants’ identification with particular things depended on the status of their native languages (more prestigious, less prestigious or of a comparable status) did not reveal a statistically significant difference between the three groups, p = 0.78, df = 20. thus, even though some differences can be observed, they are not significant and the participants’ identity (following drabarek, 2018, it is assumed here that identity can be regarded as identification) does not depend on the status of their native languages. the next part of the questionnaire focused more precisely on the participants’ perception of the influence of living and working abroad on their identities. the means and standard deviations of the results marked on the likert scale are presented in table 6, both for all the participants and for each of the three groups. in general, the participants’ identities have been enriched by all the languages they know and they are quite unanimous about it, as the mean is 4.6923 (sd = 0.655). this is particularly visible in the case of the speakers of less prestigious l1s (mean = 4.8667, sd = 0.5164), but even speakers of more prestigious l1s recognize the identity-enriching potential of multilingualism (mean = 4.5714, sd = 0.7464). it has also been influenced by all the languages they know (mean = 4, sd =1.1239), in particular, by the best-known language (mean = 4.2, sd = 0.964) and, especially in the case of the impact of the best-known language, the respondents are fairly unanimous. however, living in a foreign country, regardless of their fluency in the country’s language, seems to have had less impact on their identities, but there are bigger differences between them (mean = 3.667, sd = 1.352). it is possible that, either, the very fact of living abroad has a lesser effect on a person’s identity than the character of his or her interactions with people, the length of his or her stay, the cultural differences between the native and the foreign countries, or that such effects are subtle and more difficult to notice than the effects of multilingualism, especially if the native and the foreign cultures are not very different. this hypothesis might be supported by the high standard deviation: while some participants noticed considerable changes in their identities brought about by living abroad, others did not. in fact, the way in which the statement was formulated, that is, that residence in a foreign country had an effect on one’s identity regardless of one’s fluency in the language, seems to support this result too. it can be supposed that knowing the country’s language allows one to make friends and to integrate the inf luence of living and working abroad… 53 better into the society than, for example, speaking only english as an international language (szczurkowska, 2007, p. 42), that is why in the former case the effect on identity is greater. another possibility might be that the participants agree that living in a foreign country influences one’s identity, but some of them disagree that the influence is independent of their language proficiency. an example might be a german living in poland, who used to live in georgia for three years, and who indicated no proficiency in polish or georgian. he marked “1” (“completely disagree”), which suggests that language competence is an important factor and its lack makes it more difficult to experience an impact of living abroad on identity. table 6 the participants’ perception of the influence of living abroad on their identities statement all more prestigious l1 less prestigious l1 comparable languages knowing a foreign language/foreign languages has enriched my identity. mean 4.6923 4.5714 4.8667 4.667 sd 0.655 0.7464 0.5164 0.57735 my identity has been influenced by all the languages i know. mean 4 3.6 4.333 4.75 sd 1.1239 1.095 1.1127 0.5 my identity has been influenced the most by the language(s) i know best. mean 4.2 4.056 4.4615 4.5 sd 0.964 0.8726 0.9674 0.577 my identity has been influenced the most by living in a foreign country, regardless of whether i am fluent in its language or not. mean 3.667 3.7895 3.231 4.25 sd 1.352 1.357 1.235 1.5 living in a foreign country has changed my perception of my native language and/or culture. mean 4.1842 4.222 4.4 3 sd 1.159 1.2154 0.91 2 because of living in a foreign country and having some experience of its culture, i can look at my native culture more objectively. mean 4.3077 4.3 4.4667 3.75 sd 0.922 0.65695 0.9155 1.893 speaking or writing in a foreign language, i can be more objective as a researcher or a teacher than while using my native language, because i am less emotionally involved. mean 2.368 2.238 2.3077 3 sd 1.344 1.261 1.3156 1.633 because of living in a foreign country, i feel even more strongly attached to my native language and culture than i would be if i lived in my native country. mean 2.8 2.619 2.8 3.75 sd 1.471 1.4655 1.373 1.893 i identify with the international academic community more than with any particular language and culture. mean 2.7632 2.05 3.4286 4 sd 1.4225 1.05 1.4525 1.1547 teresa maria włosowicz54 at the same time, living in a foreign country does have an effect on one’s perception of one’s native language and culture. taking a distance and changing one’s perception of one’s native language and culture is a fairly visible result of living abroad (mean = 4.1842, sd = 1.159). more precisely, one acquires a more objective look at one’s own native culture (mean = 4.3077, sd = 0.922), and in this respect the participants seem quite unanimous. this applies especially to the speakers of less prestigious l1s (mean = 4.4667, sd = 0.9155), but also to those of the more prestigious l1s (mean = 4.3, sd = 0.65695), which suggests that, because of contact with another culture, speakers of international languages (especially english, but also french, german or spanish) can develop more objective views of their native cultures. however, such a changed perception of one’s native culture can be a mixture of both positive and negative observations. as a greek l1 respondent living in france remarked, she was aware of greek flaws and greek habits to which she had not paid attention before, but she had also got to appreciate greek culture more and was becoming more and more nostalgic with time. however, in the participants’ opinion, living in a foreign country and using a foreign language rather than the native one does not necessarily influence one’s objectivity as a researcher or a foreign language teacher (mean = 2.368, sd = 1.344). while looking at one’s native culture from a distance, one acquires a more objective approach to it, in contrast to people living in their native country and speaking their native language all the time, but a researcher has to be objective, whether he or she lives in his or her country or abroad. thus, they may have learnt to be objective at the time of learning research methodology (during their studies, doctoral studies, etc.) and living abroad did not have much influence on their objectivity as researchers. similarly, being a foreign language teacher requires some objectivity and the participants acquired it during their studies or teacher traineeships, rather than during their residence abroad. it is also possible that what they disagree with is the suggestion that they are more objective because of lower emotional involvement than if they used their l1s. a researcher should be objective and avoid an emotional bias while writing in any language, whether native or non-native. yet, as the standard deviation is quite high, the participants’ opinions differ and some of them regard themselves as more objective teachers and/or researchers thanks to their residence abroad and foreign language use, while others do not. in contrast to the above statements, which presupposed some changes in one’s identity or some distance towards one’s native culture, the next one concerned the opposite question: whether, because of living abroad, they actually felt more attached to their native cultures. it was possible that, because of some cultural differences and misunderstandings, they were more aware of belonging to a different culture and thus felt more emotionally attached to it. however, as the results show, living in a foreign country does not generally make one the inf luence of living and working abroad… 55 more strongly attached to one’s native culture than if one lived in one’s native country (mean = 2.8, sd = 1.471). on the other hand, identity is more strongly connected with one’s language and culture than with being a member of the international academic community. the participants do not generally identify more with the international academic community than with any language and culture: mean = 2.7632, sd = 1.4225. the highest level of identification with the international academic community was observed among the speakers of languages of a comparable status (mean = 4, sd = 1.1547), but, possibly, it is because three of them are academic teachers and/or researchers and one works for an international ngo. indeed, the lowest mean (2.05, sd = 1.05) was observed among the speakers of more prestigious l1s, who are often teachers of their l1s but not necessarily researchers, so they may not necessarily identify with the international academic community. however, as was already mentioned above (see table 5), the participants did not generally claim to identify with the international academic community, so both these results are consistent the participants were also asked to evaluate on a five-point likert scale statements concerning their emotions and attitudes towards the languages of their countries of residence. item 3b was aimed at respondents being able to speak the language, and item 3c—at those who did not speak the country’s language sufficiently well, but, as it turned out, participants with a basic knowledge of the country’s language filled in both 3b and 3c, at least partly. moreover, only in the more prestigious l1 group were there respondents who admitted to no or insufficient knowledge of the languages of their countries of residence, so the earlier division into groups could no longer be used in the analysis. rather, the means and standard deviations were calculated for the responses to items 3b and 3c. while speaking the language of the country they live in, the participants do not feel much different than while speaking their native languages, though their opinions in this respect differ (mean = 3.083, sd = 1.5). however, they no longer think the same way as a typical native speaker of their l1s (mean = 4.147, sd = 0.9888). they generally disagree that speaking the foreign countries’ languages they feel less authentic than when they speak their mother tongues (mean = 2.556, sd = 1.4029), and they even more strongly disagree that they do not feel authentic at all (mean = 1.7059, sd = 1.0597). at the same time, they generally admit that, while their identities are multilingual and multicultural, as language teachers and/or researchers, they can look at all those languages and cultures more objectively (mean = 4.09, sd = 0.9799). on the other hand, respondents who do not speak the country’s language (sufficiently), do not really identify with their countries of residence (mean = 3, sd = 1.095). yet, they disagree that they identify only with their l1s and feel no need to learn the language of the country (mean = 1.5, sd = 0.83667). by contrast, they would rather integrate into those cultures better, but here their teresa maria włosowicz56 opinions differ (mean = 3.833, sd = 1.472). to some extent, their knowledge of other languages allows them to observe the foreign countries’ cultures better and adjust to them (mean = 3.6, sd = 0.8944), and also, arguably, as teachers and/or researchers they can look at their native cultures more objectively, even though they do not speak the languages of their countries of residence well (mean = 3.75, sd = 0.957). the former result suggests that, while the knowledge of foreign languages increases cultural awareness, getting to know a particular culture well requires learning its language. the latter indicates that being a researcher or a language teacher might theoretically make one more objective about one’s native culture and related cultures, but this is not necessarily the case last but not least, the participants’ comments reflect their experiences, attitudes and to some extent the development of their identities. some examples are presented below. example 1 (a polish l1 speaker living in spain): […] as a english young learner in england and an adult spanish learner in spain i have always identified myself with the target community which resulted from the need to communicate and integrate. consequently, i developed various language identities from polish (native) being affected by and developed into english which in turn has been influenced by the spanish one. this complex transition process made me look at various cultural differences in perspective. i became more tolerant and objective. moreover, i feel significantly less emotionally attached to my native language. finally, the experience of living in different countries has considerably enriched my international identity, at the same time decreasing the level of attachment to any particular […] language or culture. example 2 (a polish l1 speaker living in norway): knowing other languages helps to see how my native language is a member of the european family of languages—with all the mutual influence on the form of loan words etc. it makes my perception of my country’s culture as less special, less exceptional but, on the contrary, as part of the common european tradition and an important contributor to this tradition. more inclusive rather than exclusive. example 3 (an english l1 speaker living in poland): learning polish has had a huge impact on my self-awareness. i now realize that i can learn other languages and, as a result, learn about new cultures. while i sometimes get a bit frustrated with certain aspects of polish culture, the inf luence of living and working abroad… 57 it has given me fresh insights into the things i take for granted as a british citizen, and i do have more of an objective position when i reflect on my own country.) example 4 (a hungarian l1 speaker living in austria): i believe all the listed things have an impact on one’s identity, or to be more personal, they have had an impact on mine, and it is also true that languages are important for me, but i do not identify myself with any or all languages i know. i use the language as a tool, i enjoy using it to have access to “new worlds” and people. as the examples indicate, foreign language learning and living abroad increase one’s cultural awareness and influence one’s identity, but the effects can differ from one person to another. while some people’s identities become more hybrid, others just take a more objective look at one’s native culture. similarly, for one person a foreign language can become part of his or her identity and for another just a tool. therefore, even though the impact of foreign languages and cultures on identity is generally undeniable, its role in the development of particular people’s identities is highly individual. conclusions in general, the participants’ identities are indeed highly complex and influenced by a number of factors. to answer the research questions, first, the most important factors seem to be the knowledge of foreign languages, especially that of the language of one’s country of residence, and language use during one’s stay abroad. living in a foreign country definitely influences one’s identity, but, as the participants themselves admit, not independently of one’s proficiency in the country’s language. on the one hand, multilingualism has been associated with a number of benefits, such as cognitive empathy and improved social skills (dewaele & li, 2012) as well as increased openmindedness and tolerance (włosowicz, 2019), so it can be assumed that, being multilingual, the participants were able to adapt to the foreign cultures better, which, in turn, affected their identity. on the other hand, knowledge of the country’s language, rather than just english as the global language, allows one to make friends and to integrate into the foreign society more easily (szczurkowska, 2007), so those who knew or learnt (as in the case of the englishwoman who learnt polish in example 3) the language of the teresa maria włosowicz58 country of residence could, arguably, understand the culture better and thus adapt to it. undoubtedly, multilingualism is connected with higher linguistic and cultural awareness, so as a factor influencing one’s identity, it should be considered more broadly, not only as the knowledge of several languages, but also as a complex system of linguistic and cultural knowledge, combined with increased awareness. in fact, as the participants admitted, multilingualism had enriched their identities. a certain role is also played by the status of the native language in relation to the language of the foreign country, but it must be remembered that there was considerable variation among the participants. the fact that more speakers of less prestigious l1s indicated a hybrid identity than speakers of more prestigious l1s suggests that, on the one hand, a less prestigious l1 speaker more strongly needs to learn the country’s language because he or she is unlikely to use his or her native language there, which allows him or her to integrate into the dominant society and develop a hybrid identity. on the other hand, to avoid being absorbed by the dominant culture, one needs to preserve one’s identity, for example, by maintaining one’s native language. however, such factors as nostalgia and identification with one’s family help one to preserve one’s native identity to some extent. even though there were visible differences between the three groups in terms of the percentages of particular answers, the differences proved not to be statistically significant, so the status of the native language turned out to be a less important factor than it might have seemed. second, the development of the participants’ identities appears to be both complex and dynamic and, at the same time, largely individual. generally, they admit that the foreign countries’ languages have become part of their identities (57.5%), especially in the case of speakers of less prestigious l1s (86.67%), who had to learn the languages well in order to communicate. they also adapted to the foreign cultures well, and no-one failed to adapt or felt no need to. especially at the cultural level, the results indicate a subtle interplay between the linguistic and cultural awareness of the participants as both multilinguals and teachers or researchers, the interest in the target culture and the need to adapt to it, and, finally, an effect on their identities. they also notice a change in their perception of their native cultures, in particular, the development of a more objective approach. third, the most important component of the identities of teachers and researchers living abroad seems to be the native language, as indicated by 62.5% of the participants, which confirms giles and byrne’s (1982, as cited in pavlenko & blackledge, 2004) statement that language is a salient marker of identity. what is particularly interesting is the fact that more participants indicated a hybrid identity (57.5% of all the respondents, and as many as 73.33% of the speakers of less prestigious l1s) than claimed to identify with their nationthe inf luence of living and working abroad… 59 alities (55% of all, 57.14% of the more prestigious l1 speakers, 53.33% of the less prestigious l1 speakers, and 50% in the case of languages of a comparable status). however, a hybrid identity does not necessarily mean being a citizen of the world: rather, one identifies with one’s native language/nationality and the country one lives in. the family is also a very important component of identity, while one’s profession or workplace is much less important, just like being a member of the international academic community. moreover, some participants provided their own responses, ranging from religion, through the native region on the one hand and being a european or even an earthling on the other, to such personal items as books and clothes. therefore, while a hybrid identity may be characteristic of teachers and researchers working abroad and the native language may also serve as a salient marker of identity for them, identification with one’s family seems to be a rather universal component of identity what is particularly salient is the complexity of the participants’ identities, which cannot be easily generalized and summarized in a few sentences. as one of them remarked, if the present author wanted a simplified answer, he could just quote the nationality indicated in his passport. indeed, the respondents themselves perceive their identities as very complex and, as the comments show, they admit that learning languages increases one’s awareness of other cultures, tolerance, as well as awareness of the place of one’s native language among other european languages, and it enriches one culturally, intellectually, and emotionally. at the same time, it makes one more objective, especially as regards one’s native language and culture, because objectivity as a teacher or researcher is acquired mainly through study and professional work. this might offer some implications for the training of foreign language teachers and researchers, who are mostly also academic teachers. first, apart from acquiring detailed knowledge of the language one is going to teach, some multilingual competence combined with linguistic and cultural awareness would be advisable. in fact, one may learn practical grammar, vocabulary, language teaching methodology, etc., but awareness-raising activities do not seem to be frequently included in the program of philology studies. second, as living abroad and taking a different perspective makes people more objective, it might be capitalized on more in teacher and researcher training. for example, student exchange programs, such as erasmus scholarships, might include more traineeships abroad for future teachers, rather than just lectures and classes. similarly, there might be more exchange programs for doctoral students where they would learn to do research in other countries, broadening their perspectives as future researchers and academic teachers teresa maria włosowicz60 references anthias, f. 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(2019). multilingual competence as an important component of contemporary teacher education. in o. mentz, & h. p. burth (eds.), border studies. concepts, positions, and perspectives in europe. conceptions, positions et perspectives en europe. konzepte, positionen und perspektiven in europa (pp. 208–234). wien–zürich: lit-verlag. a p p e n d i x the questionnaire used in the study (english version) questionnaire sex: f /m 1a) l1: l2: level of proficiency: l3: level of proficiency: what other languages have you studied? please, indicate your proficiency levels: 1b) which country do you live and work in? how long have you lived there so far? have you lived and worked in other countries in the past? if so, please, indicate where you lived and how long you lived there. 1c) what do you do in the foreign country? (you can choose more than one answer.) □ i teach academic subjects such as linguistics, literature, etc. □ i do research. □ i teach my native language to foreigners. □ i teach a foreign language (not my native language). □ something else (please specify) 1d) what language(s) do you use in the foreign country, both at work and in other situations? (you can choose more than one answer.) □ english (as a native language) □ english (as a non-native language) □ my native language (if it is not english) □ the language of the country (if it is a bilingual or a multilingual country, please, specify which one: ) □ another language (please specify) if you use more than one language, which of these languages do you use the most often? the inf luence of living and working abroad… 63 2a) if you think of your identity, what do you immediately think of? what do you associate your identity with? (you can choose more than one answer.) □ my nationality □ my native language □ my family □ being an international researcher or language teacher □ my profession or specialization □ the country where i live and work □ the university/school/company where i work □ being a citizen of the world □ a hybrid identity (partly my nationality and partly the country i live in) □ difficult to say □ something else (please, specify) 2b) what is your attitude towards the language of the country you live in? (you can choose more than one answer.) if it is a bilingual or a multilingual country, please, specify which language you are referring to. □ it is a language i know very well, so it has become a part of my identity. □ it is just a language i teach or write in, but i do not feel emotionally attached to it. □ i know it very well, but i feel less emotionally attached to it than to my native language. □ i know it well, but i am more emotionally attached to another foreign language. if so, please, specify the language and explain why. □ it is reserved for particular situations, such as talking with friends, but i do not teach or write in it, so my attitude towards it is quite personal. □ i only have basic competence in it, so i can make myself understood in everyday life, but i do not identify with it □ i do not know it at all. 2c) what is your attitude towards the culture of the country you live in? (you can choose more than one answer.) □ i have adapted to it very well and, in a way, i feel at home here. □ i have adapted to it well enough to live in this country, but i still regard it as a foreign culture. □ i do not feel the need to adapt to it, as i only work here as a researcher and/or a teacher. □ i have tried to adapt to it but i have failed. □ i identify only with my native culture and i feel completely alienated here. □ i identify only with my native culture, but this country’s culture is interesting and i enjoy discovering it. □ other (please, specify) 3a) to what extent do you agree with the following statements? (1 – completely disagree, 5 – fully agree) □ knowing a foreign language/foreign languages has enriched my identity. 1 2 3 4 5 if so, in what way? □ my identity has been inf luenced by all the languages i know. 1 2 3 4 5 □ my identity has been inf luenced the most by the language(s) i know best. 1 2 3 4 5 □ my identity has been inf luenced the most by living in a foreign country, regardless of whether i am f luent in its language or not. 1 2 3 4 5 teresa maria włosowicz64 □ living in a foreign country has changed my perception of my native language and/or culture. 1 2 3 4 5 if so, in what way? □ because of living in a foreign country and having some experience of its culture, i can look at my native culture more objectively. 1 2 3 4 5 □ speaking or writing in a foreign language, i can be more objective as a researcher or a teacher than while using my native language, because i am less emotionally involved. 1 2 3 4 5 □ because of living in a foreign country, i feel even more strongly attached to my native language and culture than i would be if i lived in my native country. 1 2 3 4 5 □ i identify with the international academic community more than with any particular language and culture. 1 2 3 4 5 3b) to what extent do you agree with the following statements? (1 – completely disagree, 5 – fully agree.) please, answer these questions only if you can speak the language of the country where you live, at least to some extent. □ speaking the language of the country where i live, i feel different from when i speak my native language. 1 2 3 4 5 □ i know more than two languages and speaking each of them makes me feel different (not only in terms of possible communication difficulties, such as insufficient vocabulary knowledge, but mainly in terms of the emotions the language makes me feel). 1 2 3 4 5 □ because of living in a foreign country and knowing a foreign language/foreign languages, i no longer think the same way as a typical native speaker of my l1. 1 2 3 4 5 □ speaking the language of the country where i live, i feel less authentic than when i speak my native language. 1 2 3 4 5 □ i only use this country’s language as a tool for teaching, lecturing, writing, etc., but when i speak it, i do not feel authentic at all. 1 2 3 4 5 □ the main problems i have encountered here are caused by cultural, not linguistic, differences. 1 2 3 4 5 □ my identity is to some extent multilingual and multicultural, but at the same time, being a researcher or a foreign language teacher, i can look at all these languages and cultures more objectively. 1 2 3 4 5 3c) to what extent do you agree with the following statements? (1 – completely disagree, 5 – fully agree.) please, answer these questions only if you cannot speak the language of the country where you live, or if you only have basic competence in it. □ even though i do not speak its language (well), i identify with this country and its language to some extent. 1 2 3 4 5 □ i identify with my native language and culture only, that is why i feel no need to learn the language of this country. 1 2 3 4 5 □ i only use this country’s language for basic communication, so i cannot identify with it. 1 2 3 4 5 □ i would like to learn the language in order to integrate into this culture better. 1 2 3 4 5 □ even though i do not speak this particular language well, i know a few other languages and this allows me to observe this country’s culture more accurately and adjust my behaviour to it. 1 2 3 4 5 □ even though i do not speak this particular language well, as a researcher or a foreign language teacher, i can look at it and at my native language, as well as at the related cultures more objectively. 1 2 3 4 5 the inf luence of living and working abroad… 65 4) in a few sentences, please, comment on the impact of learning languages, travelling abroad, doing research in linguistics/literature/culture, working in a foreign country, etc. on your sense of identity. you can do it in your native language even if it is not english. teresa maria włosowicz der einfluss der fremdsprachenkenntnisse und des kontakts zu einer fremden kultur auf die identität von wissenschaftlichen mitarbeitern und lehrkräften – im ausland lebenden muttersprachlern z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g der untersuchungsgegenstand ist der einf luss des lebens und arbeitens im ausland auf die identität von wissenschaftlichen mitarbeitern und lehrkräften – muttersprachlern. in anlehnung an block (2009), hall (2012) sowie pavlenko und blackledge (2004) wird angenommen, dass die identität dynamisch und vielfältig ist, wobei unterschiedliche identitäten derselben person mehr oder weniger relevant in einem bestimmten kontext sein können (hall, 2012, s. 33). darüber hinaus können identitäten in zeiten der globalisierung hybrid (marotta, 2011) und im fall der migration bikulturell sein (comănaru, noels & dewaele, 2017). die identität jeder bikulturellen person variiert allerdings, wie comănaru et al. (2017, s. 539) betonen, in abhängigkeit von ihrer lebensgeschichte, ihren sprachkenntnissen, ihren psychologischen merkmalen usw. außerdem gibt es hinweise darauf, dass die mehrsprachigkeit die kognitive empathie (dewaele & li, 2012) und die aufgeschlossenheit des geistes erhöht (włosowicz, 2019), so dass man davon ausgehen kann, dass die probanden ihre hybriden identitäten eher als bereicherung und nicht als bedrohung für ihre einheimischen identitäten betrachten, obwohl die identifikation mit ihrer muttersprache und kultur, mit ihrer familie usw. ein wichtiger teil ihrer identität bleibt. das forschungsinstrument war ein fragebogen, der von vierzig wissenschaftlichen mitarbeitern und lehrkräften – im ausland lebenden muttersprachlern – ausgefüllt wurde. wie die forschungsergebnisse beweisen, sind die identitäten der befragten in der tat sehr komplex, hybrid und werden durch viele faktoren beeinf lusst. muttersprache und familie bleiben jedoch, z.b. im gegensatz zum beruf, sehr wichtige komponenten der identität. die probanden gaben auch zu, dass die fremdsprachenkenntnisse sie kulturell, intellektuell und emotional bereichert hatten. schlüsselwörter: identität, mehrsprachigkeit, mobilität, sprachliches und kulturelles bewusstsein theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 7 (1), 2021, pp. 99–120 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.7791 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7795-9189daria pańka university of warsaw polish-english code-switching in the language of polish facebook users a b s t r a c t social networking services, such as facebook, are important channels of communication both for monolingual users and for those having various degrees of proficiency in l2, with the latter deploying expression both from l1 and l2. it can, therefore, be presumed that communication on fb plays a role in practicing the use of l2. one of the phenomena that can be examined in relation to that are various forms of code-switching. there is an immense research gap related to polish-english code-switching appearing on this sns. to obtain a full picture of the issue, the paper identifies and discusses types, strategies, and functions of polish-english code-switches found in posts and comments published by poles on facebook in 2014–2019. it also indicates possible applications of fb tools and materials including cs in foreign language teaching and learning and shows how facebook enables “social learning” (mallia, 2013). the research is based on a corpus constructed by the author of this article. an integrated approach with both qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis is used in the paper. three main cs types (intrasentential, intersentential, and tag-switching) and strategies (alternation, insertion, and congruent lexicalisation) have been attested in the material. the code-switches mostly indicate in-group membership but also, for example, introduce humor, quotes, and signal a lack of l1 equivalents. the study points out that there are certain relations between the types, strategies and functions. the results of the research are collated with the recent studies on polish-english and indonesian-english cs on facebook. keywords: code-switching, social media, facebook, the polish language, the english language social networking services (snss), such as facebook (fb), are recognized as one of the most popular means of communication (jedamska, 2015), important both for monolingual users and for those having various degrees of proficiency in l2 (with the latter deploying expression both from l1 and daria pańka100 l2). it can, therefore, be presumed that communication on fb plays a role in practicing the use of l2. this sns sheds a new light on various language contact phenomena, including code-switches. switching between non-european languages and english that occurs on facebook has already been touched upon by various researchers (e.g., alhazmi, 2016; dovchin, 2017). however, there is an immense research gap related to polish-english code-switching (cs) appearing on this social networking service. to obtain a full picture of the issue, the paper identifies and discusses types, strategies, and functions of polish-english code-switches found in posts and comments published by poles on facebook within the last five years (2014–2019). it also indicates possible applications of fb tools and materials including cs in foreign language teaching and learning and shows how facebook enables the so called social learning (mallia, 2013). there are few studies referring to the general use of facebook in education but no discussion addressing it in the light of code-switching was noted. the research is based on a corpus constructed by the present author. an integrated approach with both qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis is used in the paper. code-switching—theoretical background concept of code-switching to start with, code-switching is defined as “the alternate use of two languages or linguistic varieties within the same utterance or during the same conversation” (hoffman, 1991, p. 110). certain researchers (e.g., gonzalez, 2008) argue that cs encompasses only languages—they do not include language varieties in their descriptions of this notion. according to manfredi, simeonesenelle and tosco (2015), code-switches as well as borrowings are recognized as outcomes of language contact. research devoted to code-switching used in spoken or written language may be divided into structural and sociolinguistic discussions (boztepe, 2003). the former dimension addresses mainly grammatical facets of this phenomenon while the latter direction concentrates on: (1) code-switching as a notion which should be analyzed from the perspective of discourse, (2) the correlation between cs and social factors. boztepe (2003) adds that those perspectives do not contradict but rather complete each other. consequently, analyzing both of the dimensions seems to be essential; however, it will not be possible to elaborate on the social aspect of using code-switches by polish facebook uspolish-english code-switching… 101 ers in the practical part of the present study since 50% of the authors of the research material have private profiles. as a result, socio-demographic information concerning those speakers is not accessible. therefore, the paper will concentrate on linguistic issues connected with polish-english code-switching occurring on facebook. when it comes to reasons for code-switching (also referred to as “functions of code-switching”), walid (2019) lists among them: solidarity, social status, topic, affection, persuasion, the lack of specific vocabulary in a given language. błasiak (2011) suggests that code-switching results from insufficient linguistic competence of a given speaker concerning one or all of the used languages. however, bullock and toribio (2009) present an opposite view: “cs does not represent a breakdown in communication, but reflects the skillful manipulation of two language systems for various communicative functions” (p. 4). in the classroom context, nordin et al. (2013) highlight that the majority of the surveyed esl learners show positive attitude to codeswitching. the students claim that cs helps them understand the foreign language (fl). differences between borrowings and code-switches it is necessary to mention differences between borrowings and codeswitches here since one of the fundamental stages of the present study will be to distinguish between examples of the structures and further analyze only code-switches. grosjean (2008) proposes a closer look on the form of those two phenomena and the basic difference between them: a code-switch is a complete shift to the other language for a word, a phrase, or a sentence whereas a borrowing is a morpheme, word, or short expression taken from the less activated language and adapted morphosyntactically (and sometimes phonologically) to the base language. (p. 44) in practice, one can see that there are also cases of borrowings that do not assimilate into the recipient-language system at all; therefore, they may bear some resemblance to code-switches. in order to detect differences between borrowings and code-switches, i have created a comparison of their features in table 1. daria pańka102 table 1 differences between borrowings and code-switches no. code-switches borrowings 1. appear before borrowings(halmari, 1997) appear after code-switches (halmari, 1997) 2. are more restricted when it comes to their use – individual (halmari, 1997) are less restricted in their use – societal (halmari, 1997); established loans reveal a tendency to be “recurrent in the speech of the individual and widespread across the community” (poplack, 2004, p. 590) 3. are completely unadapted(halmari, 1997) may be adapted in terms of morphology, phonology and syntax (halmari, 1997; poplack, 2004) 4. have temporary character(manfredi et al., 2015) do not have temporary character, they are fully incorporated into the recipient-language system (halmari, 1997; poplack, 1990) 5. belong to speakers’ parole(schmidt, 2014) since languages in contact are integrated, loans belong to speakers’ langue (schmidt, 2014) 6. are related to performance(panocová, 2015) are connected with competence (panocová, 2015) 7. cannot be used by monolinguals (haspelmath, 2008) can be used by monolinguals (haspelmath, 2008) halmari (1997) observes that borrowings are preceded by code-switching in time. this difference is connected with the process of adaptation. first, foreign linguistic forms are quotes, preserving original shapes, only later, they may become integrated into the recipient language. haugen (1956, p. 40) specifies the form of code-switching, claiming that it appears when fully unassimilated words are observed in somebody’s utterance. as opposed to code-switches, borrowings can be adapted to a given language (halmari, 1997; poplack, 2004). since code-switches are similar to quotes, they have an individual character (halmari, 1997). borrowings can be used by a given speaker and then become propagated among a linguistic community and shared by its different members. code-switches are claimed to be non-recurrent and ephemeral (manfredi et al., 2015) as opposed to borrowings (poplack, 2004). also, code-switches and borrowings may be addressed with reference to the terminology of chomsky and de saussure. temporary code-switches represent parole and performance while borrowings relate to the notion of langue and competence (panocová, 2015; schmidt, 2014). finally, studies show that monolingual speakers are not capable of using code-switches but they can introduce borrowings into their utterances (haspelmath, 2008). in order to code-switch, a speaker must be at least bilingual. polish-english code-switching… 103 after indicating the differences between code-switches and borrowings, it is necessary to establish criteria distinguishing between the structures that will be applied in the present study. they read as follows: – the degree of assimilation (macswan, 1997, pp. 74–75)—it addresses an adaptation level of a given foreign linguistic element in terms of morphology and phonology; – the frequency of occurrence (myers-scotton, 1993, p. 162)—if a foreign form occurs in a relatively large corpus more than twice, one can categorize it as a borrowing. the criteria will be especially crucial when differentiating between codeswitches and unadapted borrowings because both phenomena are not integrated into the recipient-language system. types and strategies of code-switching the present section focuses on types and strategies of cs. according to błasiak (2011), code-switching can appear at different levels of an utterance. in connection with this fact, linguists propose distinct kinds of cs. one of the most popular typologies of code-switching is a division presented by gonzalez (2008, p. 13). she introduces: – intersentential code-switching—code-switches occur within different sentences, for example, czy życzliwa dusza, której p. xyz dał worksheet, wrzuciłaby go na maila? much appreciated. – intrasentential code-switching—code-switches appear within a single sentence, for example, uczelnio, you are of genious.1 along with the above distinction, romaine (1995) proposes the third kind of code-switching. she introduces the so called tag-switching, which refers to inserting a tag in a given language into the utterance in another language (romaine, 1995, p. 122), for example, to jeszcze się zgadamy jak coś, right? (pańka, 2019, p. 119). linguists identify tree strategies of using code-switching that will be addressed in the practical part of the present study (błasiak, 2011): – alternation—the change of a code concerns grammar as well as lexicon. gabryś-barker (2007) specifies that this strategy concerns introducing whole sentences of a foreign origin. – insertion—an element from one language is inserted into the structure of another linguistic system. myers-scotton (2006, p. 241) adds that “[c]lassic 1 the two listed examples from pańka (2019, p. 119). the original spelling was preserved and all the proper names were removed from the texts. daria pańka104 codeswitching includes elements from two (or more) language varieties in the same clause.” – congruent lexicalisation—occurs when a grammatical structure is shared by two languages and elements from both languages can fill it lexically. this kind of cs probably does not involve any structural limitations. it needs to be also stressed that there are certain rules that limit the occurrence of cs. one of them is equivalence constraint, which states that codeswitching often appears in places where the combination of elements of two different languages does not contravene their grammars (poplack, 1981). 1.4 code-switching on facebook it is necessary to focus on the state of the art on cs occurring on the most popular social networking service in the world, that is, facebook (hamada, 2012). richter and koch (2008, pp. 1–2) describe sites of this type in the following way: social networking services (sns) are application systems that offer users functionalities for identity management (1) (i.e. the representation of the own person e.g. in form of a profile) and enable furthermore to keep in touch (2) with other users (and thus the administration of own contacts). (richter & koch, 2008, pp. 1–2, emphasis original) the issue of cs on facebook has been touched upon by various researchers so far. there are examples of studies that analyze switching between english and the following languages: arabic (alhazmi, 2016), hindi (jamatia, gambäck, & das, 2015), indonesian (syam & furwana, 2018), malay (bukhari, 2015), mongolian (dovchin, 2017), spanish (solorio et al., 2014), thai (kongkerd, 2015). in the majority of the aforementioned cases, the switching involves english and non-european languages. to my knowledge, the only studies devoted to polish-english code-switching appearing on facebook were conducted by dąbrowska (2013a, 2013b).2 in her research, she addresses types and functions of english code-switches in polish on the basis of a corpus comprising (only) posts published by native polish facebook users in 2012–2013. taking into account the dynamics of the expansion and evolution of snss, an update on the situation of polish-english cs on facebook appears to be timely. aiming to provide current data and their analysis, this study will also hark back to dąbrowska’s results in order to draw 2 the first study is a paper focusing on the cs, the second one is a monograph devoted also to many other issues than this phenomenon. therefore, later on, only the former discussion will be addressed. polish-english code-switching… 105 some conclusions concerning any possible changes in the use of cs over the last years. dąbrowska (2013a) does not clearly identify the number of words of the material; however, she informs that it includes 150 posts written by polish facebook users. as a consequence, her corpus appears to be much smaller than the one used in the paper. this obviously results from the fact that it has been collected for only one year. when it comes to the cs typology used by dąbrowska (2013a), the author applies the types proposed by gonzalez (2008) and romaine (1995) in her study. nevertheless, she uses a different term for “tag-switching,” that is, “extra-sentential code-switching.” as regards the functions of the code-switches, dąbrowska (2013a, pp. 73–75) provides the following list of them: introducing humor, a light and friendly tone; marking in-group membership, language economy, a lack of equivalent vocabulary in the l1, context specificity, a reinforcement of uttered meanings, quotes, inclusion of others who do not speak the polish language. functions of cs in esl classroom settings seem to be quite different – teachers usually apply it to give instruction, feedback, check comprehension, explain grammar and differences between languages as well as discuss tests (nordin et al., 2013). while analyzing pamona-indonesian code-switching on facebook, luke (2015) applies cs types proposed by hoffman (1991) in her study: – intra-sentential—occurring within a phrase, a clause or a sentence, – intra-lexical—appearing within a word, – involving a change of pronunciation—including changes in phonological structure. due to the fact that the code-switches found in the present study do not occur at phonological/morphological levels, the types introduced by gonzalez (2008) and romaine (1995) will be used in the paper. luke (2015) utilizes also reasons for cs provided by hoffman (1991): talking about a particular topic, quoting somebody else, expressing group identity, strengthening or softening request or command, lexical need, excluding other people when a comment is intended for only a limited audience, being emphatic about something, interjections, repetition used for clarification, intentions of clarifying the speech content for interlocutor. it should be stressed that clarification is frequently mentioned as a reason of cs use in classrooms (nordin et al., 2013). one may observe that many of luke’s reasons (the first six categories) as well as walid’s motives (2019) mentioned earlier (e.g., solidarity, the lack of vocabulary) correspond to the cs functions proposed by dąbrowska (2013a). syam and furwana (2018) analyze types of indonesian-english code-switches on fb and reasons for using them, using only a qualitative method. they utilize the same typology as in the present study; however, they add some new daria pańka106 motives for cs: the activation of the speakers’ speech repertoire, code-switching as style markers, framing discourse, separating feelings from facts, clarifying the speech content for the interlocutor. in the study, i will apply the functions proposed by dąbrowska (2013a) and add the aforementioned categories by syam and furwana (2018) to the division. the results of the present research will be confronted with the findings of the three authors in order to obtain a wider view on cs. snss and language learning snss give a possibility of language learning in formal and informal settings (mallia, 2013). in the context of the sites, different studies (e.g. malerba, 2011; mallia, 2013) highlight the role of social learning, where education entails cooperation. this kind of learning has its roots in social-constructivism, which highlights interaction between people in the development of meaning (vygotsky, 1978). mallia (2013, p. 149) paraphrases the stance of blattner and fiori (2009, p. 18), claiming that among sns members, “knowledge is constructed in a community of practice where users ‘share similar interest’ and have ‘pedagogical potentials’ […].” the sns environment facilitates studying thanks to integration with others, enhances users’ self-confidence, learning motivation and autonomy (mallia, 2013). facebook members enjoy studying that involves interaction in english and receiving peer feedback. also, the notion of incidental (unintentional) learning should be mentioned here as sns users may participate in it through observation, social interaction, repetition, and problem solving (mcferrin, 1989; rogers, 1997). what is crucial here, “[t]he boundaries between learning providers and learners have crumbled: learners have entered the sphere of content production, can create their contents (learner generated content)” (malerba, 2011, p. 142). there are few studies related to applications of facebook in fl learning/ teaching. researchers indicate the following fb tools that might be helpful in this context: groups (tafazoli & chirimbu, 2013), notes, update status, upload photos (saddhono et al., 2019). polish-english code-switching… 107 material and methodology of the study research material the study is based on a corpus constructed by the author of this article. crystal (2008, p. 17) defines “a corpus” as “[a] collection of linguistic data, either written texts or a transcription of recorded speech, which can be used as a starting-point of linguistic description or as a means of verifying hypotheses about a language […].” the discussed written material includes polish posts and comments which were published on facebook in 2014–2019. it was decided to gather texts only from one sns in order to obtain homogeneity of the research material. for the corpus, the author selected only public texts3 (due to ethical issues) that covered a variety of topics. the material has been constructed for a few years in order to obtain enough data for a valid statistical analysis. currently, the corpus consists of 60,000 words; however, it is being successively extended. the author extracted a total of 824 posts and 2,272 comments from facebook. any entries including only emojis, emoticons or other images were removed from the material. the register of the language collected is mostly informal. the users are both public and private persons (90 users in total) having, respectively, fan pages and private accounts. they are friends of the author of this article or people followed by her (any texts of random users were removed from the corpus). in order to obtain a balanced material, it was decided to collect texts written by 45 public persons and 45 private users. thirty of the facebook users (33.3%) are men and 60 of them (66.7%) are women. english is a foreign language for them. there was no possibility to collect full information concerning their sociodemographic data due to facebook privacy settings. research methodology the methodology of the cs analysis applied in the study involves the following steps: 1. creation of the corpus, 2. searching the corpus for constructions of english origin, 3. division of the constructions into borrowings and code-switches (based on their assimilation degree and occurrence frequency), 4. uploading the corpus into wordsmith tools, 5. quantitative and qualitative analyses of the code-switches. 3 users can determine a type of access to each post (public/private). daria pańka108 first, the author systematically built up a corpus by copying posts and comments with correlated metadata from facebook to a text file. then, she searched it for constructions of english origin and separated code-switches from borrowings, applying the two criteria: the degree of assimilation and the frequency of occurrence. next, the author uploaded the corpus in a text file to a program enabling searching patterns in languages, that is, wordsmith tools. she studied the instances of cs quantitatively, referring to the length and frequency of the code-switches, and qualitatively, identifying and discussing types, strategies and functions of the code-switching. thanks to the concordance search option available in the software, she was able to analyze the contexts in which the code-switches appeared. the results are presented in the following section of the paper. data analysis code-switches appearing in the corpus—general information the present part of the paper focuses on the findings of the study. the codeswitches occur 370 times in the corpus. english proper nouns are not counted as the cs instances. moreover, all of the aforementioned code-switching types have been noticed in the material: – intrasentential cs—82% of the instances (303 code-switches), – intersentential cs—11% of the instances (41 code-switches), – tag-switching—7% of the instances (26 code-switches). clearly, the first type is the most frequent and the last one appears the least often in the material. since it is not possible to present all of the code-switches here, the author attempts to provide some examples from each group. all surnames, names of brands and political parties appearing in the material are removed from the instances provided below. table 2 illustrates the examples of the code-switches4 belonging to all of the three types. 4 the code-switches are underlined in the sentences. the original spelling of the posts and comments is preserved. polish-english code-switching… 109 table 2 examples of code-switches found in the corpus types of code-switches examples of code-switches intrasentential code-switches 1. dzień staje się piękniejszy, kiedy w końcu przyjdzie czas na home spa. 2. na początek mam do zaprojektowania landing page. 3. skoro blogerzy stali się demode dla branży […] przyszedł czas na influencerów i aktualnie pompowany jest balonik z logo influence marketing. 4. w każdym innym wypadku środki przeznaczyłbym na inne, sprawdzone metody digitalowe, jak programmatic. 5. mimo, że wielu nazywa nas fit couple, czy „celebrytami”, my po prostu żyjemy po swojemu. 6. p.s. challenge dla was to nie zaśmiać się podczas oglądania. 7. xxx – oficjalne family photo z najlepszych czasów dla serwisu. 8. żarty się skończyły. za print screen dziękujemy pani xxx. 9. meanwhile w drodze do białegostoku. co to się stanęło!? 10. well done, xxx. 11. przypominamy wam naszą rozmowę z beauty boys. 12. fake, ale głęboko prawdziwy. 13. dziś wspomnienie xxx, ulubionego świętego mojej babci, a więc jako tribute dla świętej pamięci babci yyy. 14. good job, xxx! 15. brakuje mi jeszcze xxx krytykującej yyy. ale to kwestia czasu; niebawem na 100% jakiś media worker się jej o to zapyta. 16. dołączając się do koncertu życzeń, jakby ktoś chciał seminarium u p. xxx in exchange za seminarium u p. yyy to proszę o info. 17. deadline is just a kwestia umowna. intersentential code-switches  1. a nie sam, bo tak sobie postanowiłem. bullshit! 2. widziałam lepszy hit. „moje oczy zrobione z wody wylewają oceany pełne łez”. deal with it. 3. już jutro pierwszy post, żebyśmy mogli lepiej się poznać, i poznać wasze potrzeby. stay tunned. 4. morning, peops! dzisiaj rozpoczynam kolejną serię ze słownictwem […]. 5. wymowa powoduje odruch wymiotny, nawet jeśli są szeptane. enjoy… if you dare! 6. tu znajdziecie kurs biblioteczny, który trzeba zrobić do nie wiadomo kiedy. no deadline. 7. bitwa o tron. mission complete. tag-switches 1. by the way, znasz ten kawałek? 2. pójdziemy tam razem, fine? 3. sama to zrobiłam, if you know what i mean. 4. to be honest, nie znajdziemy nic lepszego. 5. no więc pisaliśmy już o tym, decyzja została podjęta, indeed. the following sections are devoted to the individual types of the codeswitches. intrasentential code-switches appearing in the corpus as far as the intrasentential code-switching is concerned, one-word code switches are the most numerous (150 occurrences). the longest code-switches daria pańka110 include four words; however, they occur the least frequently (ten occurrences). in general, the shorter code-switches are, the more frequently they occur in the corpus. syam and furwana (2018) observe that sns users are usually unaware of intrasentential code-switches. this may be related to the fact that the constructions are mostly short and, as a result, the shift does not disturb the flow of writing. the one-word code-switches represent different parts of speech, such as nouns (e.g., challenge, fake, tribute) as well as adjectives (e.g., programmatic), verbs (e.g., go) and adverbs (e.g., meanwhile), which are less frequent. as far as the last code-switch is concerned, the word (occurring at the beginning of a post) together with an intersentential code-switch appearing at the end of the published text (“let’s see this.”) fulfil the function of framing discourse. syam and furwana (2018) highlight that such switching that occurs at boundaries attracts and holds the interlocutor’s attention. the two-word code-switches create phrases, often involving collocations, as those presented in table 2, for example, landing page, fit couple, family photo, print screen, well done. some of the code-switches play the role of separating feelings from facts, where personal opinions are given in one language and facts/proper names are provided in the other, for example, well done, xxx.; good job, xxx!. the threeand four-word code-switches usually comprise simple clauses. most of the code-switches that include more than one word create authentic phrases and they are not accidental combinations; their components are syntactically adjusted. however, there appear also certain instances of the code-switches which do not contain full grammatical units. this refers to examples 16 and 17 showed in table 2. in both of the cases, the code is switched in the middle of a grammatical unit. in the former fragment, instead of introducing a complete english construction “in exchange for” into the post, its author uses “in exchange za” (“za” is a polish equivalent of “for” in this context) and continues the sentence, utilizing the polish language. example 17 seems to be even more interesting. most of the words in the sentence are of english origin. the switch ends after the article “a,” which is a grammatical element not existing in polish. notwithstanding the fact, it is put in front of a polish noun phrase. the whole sentence seems to comply with english patterns since the structure “kwestia umowna” is not inflected. on the basis of the above, it is likely that the sentence was supposed to be written in english in full but the author did not know the english equivalent of the polish phrase. as far as the strategies of the code-switching are concerned, two of them have been observed in the instances of the intrasentential code-switching: 1. the insertion of english fragments into the structure of the polish sentences, for example, mimo, że wielu nazywa nas fit couple, czy “celebrytami”, my po prostu żyjemy po swojemu. polish-english code-switching… 111 2. the congruent lexicalization, where polish and english linguistic elements appear with different frequency, for example, prawdziwy man i jego woman to wszystko. the intrasentential code-switches involve lexis connected with everyday life (e.g., snow, nothing personal, romantic, face, family photo, challenge) but also technical vocabulary that can be assigned to three major thematic categories: – it (e.g., programmatic, landing page, full version, print screen), – social media (e.g., fit couple, influence marketing, media worker), – beauty and cosmetics (e.g., home spa, beauty boys). moreover, the intrasentential code-switches belonging to the domains of it and social media constitute 60% of all of the code-switches occurring within the sentences. basically, these constructions closely refer to the discourse in which they appear. it should be also highlighted at this point that some of the introduced terms do not have equivalents in the polish language as the concepts which they designate seem to be quite new for poles. that might be one of the reasons for the code-switching. the lack of the counterparts in polish concerns, for example, the following constructions whose meanings were not noted in dictionaries such as diki (a polish-english, english-polish dictionary, https:// www.diki.pl) and wielki słownik języka polskiego (a dictionary of the polish language, https://wsjp.pl): home spa (“domowe spa”), fit couple (“para kochająca sport”), influence marketing (“marketing influencerów”), print screen (“zrzut ekranu”), beauty boys (“chłopcy, którzy się malują”).5 apparently, even if any user tried to create his/her own polish counterparts while writing, some of them could turn out to be quite long (as exemplified by the polish equivalents of “fit couple” and “beauty boys” above). consequently, another motive for introducing the english versions in those cases might be the language economy. when it comes to “fit couple,” the code-switch may also fulfil the role of a quote since the author of the post writes that many people use this phrase with reference to him and some other person. in fact, the user cites somebody’s words despite the lack of quotation marks. intersentential code-switches appearing in the corpus the intersentential code-switches do not include technical language. the constructions comprise from one to four words. the most frequent are the two-word structures and the least numerous—the four-word code-switches. the one-word instances represent three parts of speech, that is, nouns (which appear the most often in the material), verbs, and adjectives. the longer codeswitches involve phrases creating, for instance, collocations (example 7) and 5 all the polish equivalents were proposed by the author of this paper. daria pańka112 idioms (example 3). what is important, the second quoted example shows that not all of the analyzed code-switches constitute correct english structures since it contains a spelling mistake (a double ‘n’ instead of a single ‘n’). the mistake was noticed and notified by other users in the comments—one may observe here an instance of peer correction. however, it was probably of an unintentional character since, as dąbrowska (2013a, p. 68) mentions, any incorrect structures reveal that “the author’s knowledge of english is imperfect,” which is an unwanted situation since one is evaluated by other users all the time. moreover, some of the code-switches cannot be recognized as genuinely existing structures in the english language, for example, może macie jakąś fajną grę/pomysł na ciekawe zajęcia stopniowanie przymiotników?? thanks from the mountain… the underlined construction is also a mistake (a calque). nevertheless, it does not appear in the material accidentally—the author aims to obtain a humorous effect and a friendly tone by applying a literal translation from polish into english in her post. this code-switch also shows that the user feels comfortable and safe in the community—it highlights in-group membership. although the code-switch occurs only once in the corpus, it seems to be a more popular structure. the structure is a manifestation of a linguistic hybrid, called “ponglish” (błasiak, 2011). it occurs, for example, in the material collected by błasiak (2011) that consists of utterances of poles living in great britain. as a consequence, this code-switch seems to be multifunctional—it can also fulfil the role of a quote. one can notice that in most of the cases, the code-switches occur at the end of the posts or comments (as in examples 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7 provided in table 2). this probably results from the fact that those english elements serve as an addition to the main content and, in some of the instances, as a summary. they take the form of questions, exclamations, and imperative sentences. the aforementioned fragments may be contrasted with the following example: morning, peops! dzisiaj rozpoczęłam kolejną serię ze słownictwem […]. here english “morning, peops!” appears at the beginning of a post. however, still, the part conveying the main content is written in polish—the english elements fulfil only the function of a short greeting. moreover, one can note that this code-switch includes very informal language. this informality is strengthened by the use of an exclamation mark (in fact, typical of greetings). apart from the reinforcement of the uttered meanings, other functions of the code-switch may be observed. it indicates the context specificity—the author of the post (a teacher) manages a fan page devoted to learning english; therefore, the free use of polish-english code-switches seems to be predictable here. also, the mentioned code-switch shows in-group membership (english is a common interest of the user and her followers) and constitutes a style marker—indicates casual relations between the teacher and the users following her. polish-english code-switching… 113 as far as the other exclamations are concerned, one of the users (a public person) includes in his post the impolite word “bullshit.” obviously, by using an exclamation mark, he tries to reinforce the uttered meaning and draw special attention to his words. as dąbrowska (2013a) mentions, such cases carry an expressive value. interestingly enough, at the same time, the author of the post aims at introducing a lighter tone of the impolite word by writing it in english, not in polish. the code switch may be recognized as a style marker, showing sincere and open relations between the author and his followers. the user even addresses the people observing him in the following way: “wy, jako moi internetowi przyjaciele” (“you, as my internet friends”). in one of the posts (“szczęśliwego dnia kobiet! happy women’s day!”), the function of the inclusion of others who do not speak the polish language was noticed. the text was created in two versions by a very popular public person in poland who has also followers from other countries and wanted to reach as many users as possible with her wishes. since the code-switches of this type appear in separate sentences, they do not interfere with the polish fragments in terms of grammar. as regards the strategy of the code-switching, the alternation of the linguistic codes may be observed. tag-switches appearing in the corpus as has been mentioned earlier, the tag-switches are the least frequent in the corpus. they include from one to six words. the one-word code-switches are the most numerous (seven occurrences) and the six-word code-switches appear the least frequently (only one occurrence). the instances of this cs type involve adverbs (e.g., by the way, indeed), adjectives (e.g., fine) and more complex structures, such as subordinate clauses (e.g., to be honest; if you know what i mean). the code-switches occur both at the beginning and at the end of the sentences, serving as additional elements, interjections. they do not convey any meaningful content and include any technical terms. however, as syam and furwana (2018) rightly notice, tag-switches may be used due to their attractiveness and popularity. this is the case when it comes to the above examples (utterances including such fragments may be frequently noticed, for example, in english-language films/series). moreover, most of the code-switches fulfil the functions of introducing a light and friendly tone and marking ingroup membership (e.g., by the way and if you know what i mean were used in a conversation between english philology students). the english elements do not interfere with the grammar of the polish fragments. this is related to the character of the tag-switches—they include full grammatical units and are always separated from the rest of the words daria pańka114 in the sentences by commas. as far as the strategy of the code-switching is concerned, the insertion of the english elements into the polish sentences may be observed. concluding remarks to conclude, the contemporary use of english by polish facebook users is visible, for example, in the form of code-switches. the informal register of the language used in the present material naturally encourages the use of english since, as dąbrowska (2013a, p. 64) notices, facebook gives its users a “sense of safety and acceptance” and a space for interaction with others. as a result, this sns creates a great environment for learning and practicing english in various forms in users’ daily lives. the research demonstrates that there is a considerable research gap related to polish-english code-switching appearing on facebook. the results of the paper are confronted with the findings of dąbrowska (2013a) and syam and furwana (2018). the code-switching analyzed in this research appears at different grammatical levels and uses distinct patterns—it includes all of the three major cs types and strategies. the study shows that the types and strategies are closely related, which results from the character of the individual types. in the intrasentential cs, alternation is not possible since it requires introducing whole sentences— obviously, it occurs as the only strategy in the intersentential cs. in the tag-switching, which includes single words/fixed constructions within sentences, only insertion was possible. as regards the functions, the lack of l1 vocabulary appears only in the intrasentential cs as it frequently involves the use of terms. the reinforcement of the uttered meanings is typical of the intersentential cs—the easiest way to strengthen the expression of a given text was to code-switch in a separate sentence. as the tag-switches are only interjections, they reduce the formality of the sentence. the majority of the code-switches appear within sentences; the tag-switches are the least frequent. in dąbrowska’s study (2013a), the tag-switches also constitute the smallest group; however, the distribution of the intraand intersentential code-switches is similar. a cs type which does not occur in both of the studies is code-switching within the word level (noticed in syam and furwana, 2018). in the present paper, most of the one-word code-switches include nouns (in the study of syam and furwana, 2018, some of the users utilize english conjunctions in their texts—they are not present here). within the multi-word constructions of english origin, distinct syntactic structures such as collocations and idioms were found. when it comes to the complex code-switches, there is polish-english code-switching… 115 no limit concerning sentence types—they contain not only statements but also questions, exclamations, and commands. this means that the users feel freely using cs and probably have a good command of english. in most of the cases, the authors of the posts and comments create genuinely existing structures of foreign origin and stick to the equivalence constraint (similar results in dąbrowska, 2013a). this results from the users’ willingness to be understood by their interlocutors. english is their foreign language; therefore, they make mostly safe choices. as dąbrowska (2013a) highlights, the reason for that is a fear of making mistakes. the users try to be cautious since in written communication, the incorrect forms are especially visible. however, there are certain single artificially created constructions that aim, for example, at bringing humor into the conversations and structures including spelling mistakes—some departures from standard english also appear in dąbrowska’s study (2013a). quite different results were obtained by syam and furwana (2018)—most of the analyzed users do not follow the grammatical rules. the function of marking in-group membership appears the most frequently (similar results in luke, 2015, but different in dąbrowska, 2013a, where humorous undertones occur the most often), which suggests that the solidarity with other users is particularly important for the fb members. a command of english seems to be particularly important for any user aiming to fully identify with the facebook community in linguistic terms. some of the intrasentential code-switches include technical vocabulary related to it, social media, beauty and cosmetics. these are the spheres of our life which appear to be rapidly developing nowadays. some of the code-switches currently do not have equivalents in polish. the issue of lexical topics related to these spheres should probably be taken into consideration while establishing fl teaching curricula. code-switching fulfils also many other functions in the corpus: language economy, context specificity, style marker, reinforcing the uttered meanings, introducing a light and friendly tone or quotes, separating feelings from facts, framing discourse. consequently, the code-switching may be recognized as a useful linguistic strategy. all of the functions of dąbrowska (2013a) were noticed in the paper; two of the motives of syam and furwana (2018) were not observed: the activation of the speakers’ speech repertoire and clarifying the speech content for the interlocutor. the comparison of the studies shows that the character of code-switching depends on a language (more differences were noticed between the present paper and the research of syam and furwana, 2018). facebook might serve as a fl teaching/learning tool. first, as has been noticed, the posts and comments published on this sns include linguistic mistakes not only within the code-switches. teachers can use the material in an error correction task, for example, polish students could identify mistakes in english fragments and students learning polish as a foreign language could look for mistakes in polish fragments. second, there are a number of fan pages daria pańka116 founded, for example, by teachers that spread knowledge about languages. the use of code-switches by public persons (who might be a kind of role models) can encourage the use of similar structures by their followers as “fans of celebrities may seek to imitate or impersonate a certain celebrity’s behavior in order to increase their own personal self-esteem” (min, 2019). moreover, the users may also join school-, interestor even job-related groups, where they can practice foreign languages. in such groups and outside of them, facebook members may learn not only from the teacher6 (school groups) but also from each other by active discussion with native and non-native speakers, sharing ideas in l2, cooperation, identifying others’ linguistic mistakes, providing peer feedback and establishing the understanding of new foreign terms (social learning). all of these can be facilitated by the following fb tools: update status, comment, video chat, instant message, facebook apps, facebook quiz. the learning may be incidental—the users can enrich their foreign vocabulary by reading posts/comments of other people that include cs. the observation of new lexical items in such a form may arise interest and engagement in verifying their meaning. in general, facebook can be identified as “personal learning environment” (siemens, 2006)—users create and manage their own learning spaces there, for example, they decide which linguistic fan pages to follow, which linguistic groups to join. due to the limitations related to the facebook privacy settings, it is recommended that further research should endeavor to gain socio-demographic data on users of this sns, for example, by means of a questionnaire. it would be particularly helpful to investigate the code-switches in the light of the users’ command of english. to date, there has been disagreement on whether cs results from insufficient or high linguistic competence of speakers using different 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(2018). an analysis of code switching in facebook: a discourse approach. journal on english language teaching & learning linguistics and literature, 5(1), 1–16. tafazoli, d., & chirimbu, s. (2013). social networking: using facebook in teaching english idioms. world of linguistics and communication, 1(30), 1–6. vygotsky, l. s. (1978). mind in society. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. walid, r. m. (n.d.). why do people code switch: a sociolinguistics approach. arab open university. retrieved august 22, 2019, from http://www.academia.edu/2649532/why_do_ people_code-switch_a_sociolinguistic_approach. wielki slownik języka polskiego. accessed september 1, 2019. retrieved from: https://www. wsjp.pl. daria pańka codeswitching zwischen polnisch und englisch in der sprache polnischer facebook-nutzer z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g social media, wie facebook, sind wichtige kommunikationswege sowohl für einsprachige anwender als auch für nutzer mit verschiedenen fremdsprachenkenntnissen (die letzteren übernehmen die strukturen der mutterund fremdsprache in die konversation). im resultat kann man annehmen, dass die kommunikation via facebook eine gewisse rolle bei der verwendung von fremdsprachen spielt. einen der aspekte, der in dieser hinsicht analysiert werden kann, bilden verschiedene formen von codeswitching. in bezug auf das codeswitching zwischen polnisch und englisch, das in diesem sozialen netzwerk vorkommt, besteht eine wesentliche forschungslücke. für einen kompletten überblick über das dargestellte problem werden im vorliegenden artikel an angeführten polnisch-englischen beispielen bestimmte typen, strategien und funktionen von codeswitching in posts und kommentaren, die von polnischen facebook-nutzern in den jahren 2014–2019 erstellt wurden, identifiziert und erläutert. darüber hinaus wird im text auf die anwendungsmöglichkeiten von facebooktools und materialien zum codeswitching bei dem fremdsprachenlehren und -lernen hingewiesen und der aspekt des „sozialen lernens“ (mallia, 2013) mittels facebook angesprochen. daria pańka120 die untersuchung basiert auf einem korpus, das von der autorin des vorliegenden artikels entwickelt wurde. in der untersuchung wurde eine integrative – d.h. qualitative und quantitative methode eingesetzt. im analysierten material lassen sich drei haupttypen (satzinterner, satzübergreifender, parenthetischer) und -strategien (alliteration, parenthese, entsprechende umstellung von lexemen) des sprachcodeswitching unterscheiden. das codeswitching deutet hauptsächlich auf die zugehörigkeit zur bestimmten gruppe hin, kann aber auch humor bzw. ein zitat in die aussage einleiten oder das fehlen von äquivalenten in der muttersprache signalisieren. aus dem artikel ergibt sich, dass es gewisse abhängigkeiten zwischen den typen, strategien und funktionen des codeswitching gibt. die resultate der betreffenden analyse werden mit ergebnissen der neuesten untersuchungen über das polnischund indonesischenglische codeswitching auf facebook zusammengestellt. schlüsselwörter: codeswitching, social media, facebook, polnisch, englisch vaclav brezina, statistics in corpus linguistics: a practical guide. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2018, isbn 978-107-12570-4, 296 pages curiously and notably, the study of language, in all its various forms, has always been constrained by language, which, unlike in other fields, is both an object and a tool of linguistic analysis. it should come as no surprise then, that to a researcher instilled with an acceptance of this epistemo-methodological duality, the prospect of using a nonlinguistic maths-based metric to obtain insight into how populations speak and write may appear a little daunting, if not completely disheartening. indeed, given that statistics is understood mainly as an instrument and process of quantitative—that is, numerical—data analysis, such feelings may seem to be firmly grounded. vaclav brezina’s book statistics in corpus linguistics: a practical guide marks a departure from the traditional maths-centred presentation of statistical measures by foregrounding topics central to corpus research and language-based studies. because the book comes with free statistical calculators, lancaster stats tools online, developed at lancaster university, the focus is on understanding the principles of statistical thinking relative to linguistic datasets and variables, rather than the precise mechanics of number crunching that can be performed by the available online software. additional materials in the form of answer keys, datasets, and teaching slides can be obtained from a companion website at lancaster. the volume consists of eight chapters, a final remarks section, references containing 181 entries, and a subject index. the chapters are designed as standalone units devoted to specific topics in research. each chapter is structured in the same format, consisting of: – a brief introduction explaining the aims of the chapter, theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 6 (1), 2020, pp. 195–201 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.8497 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en jolanta latkowska196 – ‘think about’ tasks which set the context for the presentation of the topic of each subsection, – a concise note on how to report the statistics discussed in research papers, – a practical application section which presents corpus studies offering novel insights into language use, for example: do the british talk about the weather all the time? or, do speech and fiction use more definite articles than general prose and academic writing? the sections illustrate queries that can be answered by applying the statistical measures commented upon in particular chapters. – thought-provoking exercises on the procedures described in the chapter, and – a revision section (‘things to remember’) and an advanced reading list for readers wishing to expand their knowledge of the chapter’s subject matter. the adopted presentation format testifies to the author’s desire to demystify statistics and help linguists and like-minded researchers apply it in a wide range of research, including that involving smaller datasets. frequent references to authentic studies and to their practical implications make this task more effective and intellectually captivating. an additional strength of the book is that, alongside statistical principles, it introduces the fundamentals of corpus linguistics. in fact, it is an exhaustive compendium of expert knowledge relating to how the multiple layers of language are represented in the existing corpora and how they can be investigated and made sense of using corpus tools and statistical procedures. the information is organized in a lucid, logical and coherent manner; the style is straightforward, concise, and reader-friendly. in what follows, i provide an overview of the eight chapters by offering a critical appraisal of their contents and educational value. chapter 1—introduction: statistics meets corpus linguistics (pp. 1–37) advances the perspective that “statistics in corpus linguistics is about mathematical modelling of a complex linguistic reality” (p. 5). consequently, it introduces the scientific premises of statistics, as well as basic statistical concepts with a view to relating them to linguistic data. to this end, notions like descriptive statistics, frequency distribution, outlier, standard deviation, effect size, and many more are elaborated upon based on relevant corpus samples. the chapter also raises issues in the building of language corpora, setting up criteria for corpus representativeness and offering advice on how to avoid potential bias in the construction of corpora. as regards corpus size, the recommendation is to link it to research objectives and the investigated language point. finally, the principles of data visualization are embarked upon. here the author warns against the risk of data misinterpretation, which can be reduced if researchers visually familiarize themselves with the trends displayed in their results. vaclav brezina, statistics in corpus linguistics: a practical guide… 197 throughout the chapter, as throughout the entire book, brezina demonstrates robust theoretical knowledge of the field, combined with first-hand experience of its practical application. the latter, in particular, is revealed through various practical tips, such as that “preparing the spreadsheet in the appropriate format is as important as the statistical analysis that follows” (p. 6). chapter 2—vocabulary frequency, dispersion and diversity (pp. 38–65) introduces the reader to the complexities of quantitative analysis of the lexicon. the chapter opens with the statement that in corpus linguistics, a word, intuitively regarded as the prime exponent of lexico-semantic content, may be represented by four different units: tokens or running words, types, lemmas, and lexemes. each offers different advantages and disadvantages to research and produces different error patterns. for example, performing a simple procedure such as a word count involves counting tokens, but different analysis tools operate on somewhat different notions of a token, which presents a challenge for accuracy and replicability. the next two sections discuss the measures of word frequency and dispersion, alongside average reduced frequency, a measure that combines frequency and dispersion, thus providing information on the most prominent words in a language—that is, the most frequent and evenly distributed words. the last concept addressed in the chapter is that of lexical diversity. although specialist literature contains multiple examples of measures of lexical diversity (malvern & richards, 2002), most of which show sensitivity to text length, the section focusses on the select few that best illustrate the concept and/or are the most robust. of practical value to the reader will be the remark that the mathematical equations that abound in the chapter serve an educational purpose only and that the calculations involved can be performed automatically at the companion website. what also deserves mention is the richness of contextual corpus-drawn detail that accompanies the presentation of new measures and makes their abstract mathematics more relevant to languageoriented research. chapter 3—semantics and discourse: collocations, keywords and reliability of manual coding (pp. 66–101) continues with the subject of vocabulary, shifting focus from words in isolation to words in context. this, in brezina’s opinion, is instrumental in establishing word meanings which become apparent through the analysis of recurrent word use patterns. to understand these patterns, corpus linguistics looks at collocations and related association measures, the subject of the first thematic section of chapter 3. since there is no one measure to suit all research purposes, the author goes to great lengths to demonstrate the available pool of procedures, stressing the need for researchers to make informed choices from among their options. the subsequent sections expand the topic of collocations by elaborating on collocation graphs and networks as a way of visualizing word connections and their intensity, and by introducing the techniques of keywords and lockwords as metrics for conducting intercorpus jolanta latkowska198 comparisons. as could be expected of a book by a leading corpus linguist, the sections offer a wealth of methodological detail, including advice on choosing adequate corpora, dealing with absent words and applying the right statistical tests. concerning the latter, the interested reader will find here a criticism of the traditional log-likelihood statistic and a recommendation to use the more robust simple maths parameter (kilgariff, 2009). the final theme of the chapter is inter-rater agreement, an issue in tests that require subjective judgement and evaluation, such as deciding on a word’s positive or negative connotations. in conclusion, considering the breadth and depth of the information it provides, coupled with the clarity of presentation, the chapter is a comprehensive resource for novice and experienced researchers alike. chapter 4—lexico-grammar: from simple counts to complex models (pp. 102–138) narrows the focus down to lexico-grammatical features. in corpus linguistics, the ‘label’ refers to specific constructions or expressions, such as articles or passives. the chapter compares and contrasts the two research designs used in analyses of lexico-grammar—the whole corpus design and the linguistic feature design—elaborating on the explanatory value of their output. it then goes on to illustrate the application of simple cross-tabulation and chi-squared tests, and outlines the conditions for their use and potential weaknesses, such as sensitivity to sample size. a useful tip for researchers is that with corpus datasets, which are usually massive, the expected frequency assumption tends to be easily met. for more complex computations involving multiple heterogenous—that is, categorical and scale—variables, the recommendation is to run logistic regression and build a model configuring the variables concerned. the procedure and stages inherent in the process are meticulously described in the chapter. nevertheless, chapter 4, gives the impression of being overly abstract and mathematical, which may be a challenge to the unaccustomed reader. on the other hand, since regression models are popular measures with enormous explanatory power, the mathematics may be necessary to help researchers understand the perspective on language data that logistic regression provides. indeed, the author himself offers a reminder that it is essential to understand the basic principles of the test and the interpretation of the output. the computation can be performed automatically by computers. chapter 5—register variation: correlation, clusters and factors (pp. 139– 182) examines the topic of the relationships that hold between linguistic variables in different registers and genres. the most straightforward relationship is that of correlation, which is represented by pearson’s and spearman’s correlations. the chapter explains both with clarity and in detail. the author warns against placing too much trust in statistical significance because in the case of correlation it is directly related to the number of observations (p. 144). therefore, the correlation coefficient should be reported together with the convaclav brezina, statistics in corpus linguistics: a practical guide… 199 fidence interval. linguistic variables may also function as defining features or descriptors. statistics offers a technique called hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis, which visualises patterns of category (group) membership based on two features (descriptors), and as such is demonstrated in the next subsection of the chapter. when the number of the variables to consider rises, as may be the case with register comparisons, it is necessary to use a variant of cluster analysis in the form of multidimensional analysis. it is by far the most complex of the techniques discussed in the book, chiefly on account of the necessity to group (load) tens or even hundreds of descriptors (variables) into factors representing more general features. here, once again, brezina shows his masterful grasp of statistics and research methodology as the procedure is described step-by-step with multiple examples and authentic datasets (biber 1988), as required by each stage. chapter 6—sociolinguistics and stylistics: individual and social variation (pp. 183–218) uses the notion of style and stylistic variation in speech and writing to set the context for interand intragroup (speaker) comparisons. the chapter begins with an evaluation of labov’s and biber’s approaches to individual and social variation and their implications for the identification of variables in research. it then embarks on an analysis of whether the speaker’s gender is related to the frequency of use of personal pronouns. the statistical techniques recommended for the process include welch’s independent samples t-test, which compensates for unequal variances (one of the t-test’s assumptions). as has been the custom in the present book, the procedure is explained with replicable clarity and precision. as an additional bonus, often overlooked by older statistics textbooks, the chapter comments on the need to calculate an effect size and offers an interpretation of the measure. in a similar vein, other related statistical tests are discussed, including one-way anova, posthoc tests and the nonparametric mann-whitney u test and the kruskal-wallis test. it cannot escape notice that these tests are the classics of inferential statistics and as such are household terms not only in corpus research but also in other fields such as second language acquisition. the next issue taken up by the author is correspondence analysis, whose output visualizes the linguistic characteristics of individual speakers in a manner similar to cluster analysis discussed in chapter 5. in turn, a reader with an interest in forensic linguistics will find that mixed-effects models have the capacity to identify the author of a particular text based on the individual’s choice of words. a special merit of the chapter is that by sifting through data and performing analyses that only a few years ago seemed nearly impossible, it reveals the enormous exploratory potential that the application of statistical methods to linguistics may create. chapter 7—change over time: working diachronic data (pp. 219–256) looks at ways of analysing linguistic change in historical or diachronic corjolanta latkowska200 pora. since such data tend to be limited to written records and are often biased towards certain genres or types of author, researchers are advised to consider their options carefully and make “the best use of bad data” (p. 222). the chapter presents a handful of techniques with a focus on probing stability and change over time as significant variables in the evolution of language. they include analyses of the percentage change of variables and the nonparametric bootstrapping test, which allows comparisons of two corpora representing different points in time through multiple resampling of the available material. the other recommended procedures involve different forms of visualisation such as cluster analysis, the peaks and troughs technique and its extension called usage fluctuation analysis. the chapter ends with a resumé of the author’s explorations into the realm of seventeenth century colour terminology which demonstrates implementation of the ideas discussed in the chapter. chapter 8—bringing everything together: ten principles of statistical thinking, meta-analysis and effect sizes (pp. 257–282) is a summary of the rules and guidelines regarding good practices in statistical analysis. it opens with a list of ten principles that ensure the precision and rigour of research findings. these include attention to detail during the data processing stage, informed choices of statistical procedures coupled with transparency of their presentation, reporting effect sizes in addition to p-values, and visualizing data to highlight patterns, to mention just a few. the author also stresses the importance of pooling findings together to obtain a global perspective on a specific research query. this can be done through meta-analysis, which synthesizes research results by comparing the effect sizes of compatible studies and calculating a summary effect. the discussion ends with advice on how to use, interpret and report the various effect sizes introduced in the book. perhaps one of the author’s most fitting comments on good practice in research is that found in ‘final remarks’ (pp. 283–284). it reads as follows: ‘students often ask me what the best statistical test is to use with corpora […] i usually respond: in many cases, the most powerful statistical technique is common sense’ (p. 284). without doubt, vaclav brezina’s volume, together with the companion website, is a powerful resource for linguistic research. the point i have been trying to make in this review is that, as a resource, it is also flexible and versatile because the principles of analysis it lays out so competently can be applied to any collection of texts, including those by second/foreign language learners and multilinguals. further, since the majority of bibliographical sources referred to in the book were published after the year 2000, the book provides a most recent state-of-the-art review on the subject. a potential lacuna is a lack of information on how to process data prior to statistical analysis. this is essential in the light of the fact that many statistical tests require specific variables that vaclav brezina, statistics in corpus linguistics: a practical guide… 201 need to be extracted from annotated corpora, using dedicated software. also, some of the calculators at the companion website require training and are not intuitively easy to work with. overall, however, the volume is an unrivalled theoretical and practical toolbox for researchers wishing to understand research reports, and construct and analyse their own datasets, and as such should be a top entry on each applied linguist’s reading list. jolanta latkowska university of silesia in katowice, poland https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9478-7689 theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 5 (2), 2019 wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego • katowice 2019 editors-in-chief danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia, katowice adam wojtaszek university of silesia, katowice language editor david schauffler university of silesia, katowice editorial board janusz arabski (university of silesia, katowice/vistula university, warsaw) larissa aronin (oranim college of higher education/trinity college, dublin) jasone cenoz iraqui (university of the basque country, donostia – san sebastian) halina chodkiewicz (maria curie-skłodowska university, lublin) gessica de angelis (trinity college, dublin) anna ewert (adam mickiewicz university, poznań) tammy gregersen (university of northern iowa, cedar falls) ulrike jessner schmid (university of innsbruck, innsbruck) hanna komorowska (university of social sciences and humanities/university of warsaw) jolanta latkowska (university of silesia, katowice) peter macintyre (cape breton university, sydney) anna niżegorodcew (jagiellonian university, cracow) aneta pavlenko (temple university, philadelphia) miroslaw pawlak (adam mickiewicz university, kalisz/state school of higher professional education, konin) ewa piechurska-kuciel (university of opole, opole) andrzej porzuczek (university of silesia, katowice) david singleton (trinity college, dublin/university of pannonia, veszprem) eva vetter (university of vienna, vienna) ewa waniek-klimczak (university of łódź, łódź) maria wysocka (university of silesia, katowice) this publication is indexed in the following databases: scopus, ceeol, polindex (pbn), worldcat, public knowledge project index, oai-pmb data provider registry, bazhum, mla directory of periodicals, erih plus creative commons attribution-sharealike 4.0 international (cc by-sa 4.0) https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 7 (2), 2021, pp. 155–175 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.8514 xiaoyan li https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1209-7722 kyushu university, japan learning japanese onomatopoeia through a narrative-evaluation e-learning system a b s t r a c t in japanese, onomatopoeia are important for expressing feelings and experiences. for students of japanese, they are difficult to acquire, especially the nuances of meaning. we propose an e-learning system to enhance the efficiency of teaching the nuances of onomatopoeia in three steps—both explicit and tacit—to non-native speakers of japanese. we synthesize a new learning strategy for students learning japanese onomatopoeia, using narrative strategies to mimic the process by which native speakers learn. the first step is the teaching of the formal rules governing explicit nuances. in the second step, the learners create new onomatopoeia in accordance with those formal rules. in the final step, feedback is provided by evaluating the onomatopoeias created by the learners, using a narrative strategy support system to provide implicit teaching. to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method and learning system, we conducted an experiment involving two groups of subjects in the japanese language department of a university in shanghai, china. while group a (23 students) got feedback about the appropriateness of their onomatopoeic constructions from the native speaker researchers’ narrative interpretations, group b (22 students) only reviewed the database material in a manner similar to that used in traditional classrooms. the e-learning system was found to have a significant effect on the acquisition by non-native learners of japanese of a working understanding of, and skill in the use of, onomatopoeia. keywords: onomatopoeia, tacit nuance, narrative interpretation, e-learning system, second language teaching according to jasso (japan student services organization), 298,980 international students were studying in japan as of may 1, 2018, and 64% of them expressed a desire to work in japan. learning japanese is a necessity for those international students. moreover, the japan foundation reported that there were 3,846,773 formal learners of japanese outside of japan as of 2018. one challenging aspect of learning japanese is that there are more than 5,000 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en http:// https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.8514 xiaoyan li156 onomatopoeias in the japanese dictionary, with people using even more in daily conversation. onomatopoeia are used to describe sounds, mental states, movements, and feelings. they play an integral part in language; they are used frequently in everyday conversation to help bring events to life through vivid depiction and enactment (perniss, thompson, & vigliocco, 2010). when learned via traditional educational methods, onomatopoeia are typically memorized one by one, each in a specific context. however, most learners of japanese can neither remember that huge array of onomatopoeia, and nor clearly comprehend the nuances of those onomatopoeia. in this study, we examine the effectiveness of learning onomatopoeia nuance through a narrative evaluation approach. based on the results of our verification experiment, we propose an e-learning system to help non-native learners of japanese to understand japanese onomatopoeia and be sufficiently familiar with them that they are able to use them. literature review onomatopoeic constructions are heavily influenced by cultural and linguistic nuances; studies have shown that they are difficult to master for non-native japanese language learners (ivanona, 2006). there are several reasons for this difficulty. firstly, while there are 5,000 to 7,000 onomatopoeia in most japanese dictionaries, in daily conversation people use even more onomatopoeia than are officially listed. secondly, inferring their meanings is difficult for the non-native. onomatopoeia are verbal expressions of sounds and of people’s sensibilities. a sensation can be described with various words, and may be hard to explain. for example, a patient might use words like zukizuki (ずきずき), gangan (ガンガン) and piripiri (ぴりぴり) to tell a doctor that she/he has a headache, and jinjin (じんじん) and gishigishi (ぎしぎし)” can be used to describe some kind of bodily ache. thirdly, there are similar expressions with different nuances. for example, garagara (がらがら) can be used to express both a very parched throat and a train that has only a few passengers. moreover, a lack of equivalent or similar expressions in the learner’s first language is also an important reason for difficulty in acquiring onomatopoeias (chen, shirozu, & matsushita, 2013). in conclusion, onomatopoeia are complex and difficult to acquire: they are used to express feelings and sensations; a single onomatopoeia may have several meanings; and there may be no equivalent word in the learner’s first language (watanabe, 1997). when dealing with onomatopoeia by means of traditional learning methods, some problems can appear in dictionaries or teaching material. in those methods, onomatopoeia are typically remembered one by one, each in a specific learning japanese onomatopoeia through a narrative-evaluation… 157 context. for example, it is very common to learn onomatopoeia by reciting an illustrative sentence provided in a dictionary or teaching material, and/or by repeatedly practicing selection problems. however, with such methods, the learning is limited to use in a specific context, so it remains difficult to develop full knowledge of an onomatopoeia completely (mikami, 2003). occasionally, target words may be quoted in excerpts from literary works, in which case comprehending an onomatopoeia requires comprehension of the work’s cultural background. in that case, even with examples provided by an onomatopoeia dictionary, onomatopoeia can still be difficult for a second language learner to understand. on other occasions, when a specific word is not presented well in a sentence, the situations in which the word should be used will be obscure. furthermore, comprehension is also difficult when abstract words are frequently used in explanations of meanings. in addition, some teachers of japanese use manga as teaching material; they typically report that manga can heighten student motivation (kumano, 2010). it is also claimed that using manga makes it easier to understand the situation in which the language occurs, because manga contains many pictures that provide contextual clues (murakami et al., 2008). however, it is considered difficult to accurately convey the meaning and use of onomatopoeia with a single image. even among native speakers of japanese, onomatopoeia use varies subtly due to individual difference. although japanese contains a wide range of well-established onomatopoeias, native japanese speakers often create their own neologisms. moreover, it is considered that spontaneously created onomatopoeias are better accepted emotionally among friends (sharlin, 2009; uno, kaji, & kitsuregawa, 2010). for the above three reasons, the teaching of nuances of japanese onomatopoeia is not a well-developed practice. we define situational nuance as a tacit nuance, where the deep meaning of a word is too obscure to be expressed in words. in order for students to understand and be able to utilize onomatopoeia, they should not only learn onomatopoeia by the traditional method mentioned above, but also study subtle tacit nuances. in this study, we set out to answer the following research questions, as a foundation for the creation of an e-learning system for japanese onomatopoeia learning: • what is an effective method for learning both explicit and tacit nuances of japanese onomatopoeia? • how do learners modify their compresence of onomatopoeia after receiving narrative native speaker feedback? purpose and methodology in this study, we explore new methods for learning onomatopoeia in the second language context. we think it is more important to understand the comxiaoyan li158 plexity of onomatopoeia use in real life than to be able to generate the correct answers to questions, especially for the understanding of nuance. therefore, here we create a situation in which the learners are required to create their own onomatopoeias rather than choosing from among existing ones, since onomatopoeia also constitute a creative aspect of linguistic expression for native japanese speakers (sharlin, 2009; uno, kaji, & kitsuregawa, 2010). since second language learners of japanese do not possess the same level of nuance knowledge as native speakers, having l2 learners create their own onomatopoeias by following word-formation rules should be an effective approach to mastering the relationship between word/phoneme and explicit nuance. for l2 learners of japanese to learn to create their own onomatopoeia, they need the prerequisite knowledge of japanese basic word-formation rules and structure. the word-formation rules characterize the explicit nuances of onomatopoeic words. tamori (2010) proposes some nuance rules for creation of onomatopoeia with a certain inflection and phonology. for instance, one rule is that structures of two syllables repeated twice (i.e., abab, e.g., baribari, sarasara) express the nuance that the action lasts continuously up to the present. such rules express an explicit nuance in japanese onomatopoeia (table 1). table 1. word-formation rules based on tamori, 2010 rule-based word creation 繰り返し型 sound repetition abab type 関わっている動作が今まさに続いているというニュアンスを表す。繰り返しの連続した継続 の動作であると感じられる。repetition means the action described persists up to the present. example:落とした消しゴムがころころと彼女の足下に転がっていった。 促音 sokuon (double consonant) ab っ type 非常に瞬間的な区切り目がつくというニュアンスを表す。「繰り返し型」に対して、 一度限りの単一の動作が瞬間的で急な終わり方であると感じられる。represents the nuance of instantaneous breaks/segments/divisions between syllables. this is a one-off, single action felt to be momentary and abrupt. example: おにぎりはころっと木の根元の穴へ転がり落ちていきました。 phonological rules 濁音の効果 the effect of stronger sounds ・ 濁音は無声音より描写している音が大きい。louder sound. example: ころころ/ごろごろ坂を転がる。 ・ 濁音は無声音より分量や数が多い。more volume or numbers. example: たらたら/だらだら汗をかく。 ・ 濁音は無声音より関わっている動作や状態の程度が激しい。higher degree of involved action or state. example: びりびり/ぴりぴり電気がくる。 ・ 濁音は無声音より否定的なニュアンスを含む。negative nuances. example: きらきら/ぎらぎら光る。 さ行の滑らかさ smoothness of the “sa shi su se so” initial syllables ・ [s]は日本語においても英語においても「滑らかさ」を表す。[s] represents “smoothness” in both japanese and english. example: 穂がさわさわ波立つ光景を思い浮かべる。 learning japanese onomatopoeia through a narrative-evaluation… 159 swain (1985) points out that in addition to comprehensible input, output practice is also effective, because when learners express their intended messages, they notice gaps between their expressions and the standard expression. this is an instance of the process in which a person builds a hypothesis based on his or her own knowledge, creates a language output, examines its validity vis a vis a model, and revises the hypothesis according to that feedback (gass, mackey, & pica, 1998; muranoi, 2007). this output—feedback—revision loop is considered an effective method for acquiring knowledge without explicit explanation. in this study, we create a structured e-learning system to support learners of japanese in understanding and familiarizing themselves with japanese onomatopoeia. in the method inherent in the system, the learners proceed through three phases: 1. learning the rules for forming onomatopoeias (forming explicit nuance); 2. creating onomatopoeias in accordance with those rules; 3. obtaining native speaker feedback about their generated onomatopoeias. this empirical study consists of hypothesis formation, database structuring, and a verification experiment. e-learning system based on a narrative-evaluation approach creation of a pilot system to begin, we created a structured e-learning system based on the three elements—rule learning, onomatopoeia creation, validate from feedback—mentioned in the last chapter. regarding the provision of feedback, we decided to avoid using the five-point relative estimation scale used in our previous study (yang et al., 2015). the students were confused by the five-point grading system in that study, because they could not understand the evaluation criteria based on numbers alone. also, we wanted to gain insights into how they acquired the tacit nuances under the new system, even though the learning effect would be verified. in the design of this preliminary study, we replaced the five-point relative estimation scale with a narrative-based evaluation. in the pilot study, we combined the above three steps to form a process (method) for the teaching of explicit and implicit nuance of japanese onomatopoeia. as for rules for the formation of onomatopoeia, we adopted the typical rules for formation of japanese onomatopoeias described in tamori (2010). then, we assigned the subjects two creation tasks involving application of the learned word-formation rules. the first task is to combine the morphemic rule xiaoyan li160 of “repetition” and the phonemic rule of “the effect of voiced sound” (abab type). the second is to combine the rules of “use of sokuon” and “the smoothness of ‘sa’ and ‘su’” (abっtype). we constructed a feedback database from the narrative interpretations and also prepared a pre-test and post-test for verification of learning effectiveness. when using onomatopoeia, even native speaker interpretation of the context will vary slightly from person to person. therefore, in the creation of the narrative interpretation presented here, native speakers were asked to simulate their self-reflection on the implicit nuances that come into play unconsciously. they then transformed their self-reflection into words by intentionally utilizing metaphor or analogy, and finally write down the words that they will introduce to the readers. in order to reduce the cost of creating the database, we organized a few evaluators to evaluate, on a five-grade evaluation scale, all the onomatopoeic words that fit the double creation task. in our previous study (yang et al., 2015), we set two experimental creation tasks for students learning onomatopoeia, the abab type and the abっ type (っpronounced as sokuon, meaning double consonant), to ascertain the most effective methodology for use in the main test. there are more than 5,000 japanese onomatopoeia; more than 30% are abab type, and most of the others are of the abっtype. that is the basis for our choice of examples of these two major types. since the onomatopoeias created by the learners may not exist, we call this process “creation” rather than generation. based on the results, onomatopoeic words that scored two or higher became the target words for valuation in narrative interpretation, a two-step process. step 1: among the 1410 onomatopoeic words that were in accordance with the word formation rules in our two-create task, 174 had an average value of more than two on the five-point scale evaluation. we asked 15 japanese native speakers to give narrative interpretations of those 174 words. each native speaker interpreted 11 or 12 words. step 2: we shared the nuances from the interpretations on the website and asked all 15 native speakers to vote agree/disagree on each one. if they agreed with a narrative interpretation, they were to push the agree bottom. if they did not agree with a narrative interpretation, they were to contribute a new nuance. the percentage of the vote for each onomatopoeia determined the order in which the onomatopoeia were shown to the learners of japanese. other nuances would be presented below the nuance assigned highest priority by the native speaker voting for best interpretation. figure 1 is an example of the narrative interpretation feedback shown to learners using the system. learning japanese onomatopoeia through a narrative-evaluation… 161 preliminary verification experiment to verify the effectiveness and operability of the proposed method and the learning system, we conducted a preliminary experiment. the participants consisted of 36 international students at kyushu university, japan, 35 chinese and one korean, of average age 24.56 years (sd = 2.20). all of them had passed level n1 of the japanese language proficiency test, meaning that they had the japanese reading and writing ability required for participation in the experiment. the participants were divided into two groups. the experimental procedure was as follows: a) according to the design of the e-learning system, the participants were given 15 minutes to learn the word-formation rules provided as hard copy. b) the creation tasks1 were assigned to the participants. this step was conducted in a computer environment. each task required that 10 onomatopoeia be submitted following the requirements presented on the site. the participants were asked to create a total of 20 onomatopoeia. after a participant entered a newly created word in the blank space provided on the screen, the feedback from the database would be displayed. while group a received feedback about the appropriateness of their onomatopoeic constructions in the form of native speaker narrative interpretation, group b simply received numerical feedback on a five-point relative estimation scale. as shown in figure 1, the percent figure 1. an example of narrative interpretation feedback 1 in our preliminary verification experiment, we used task 1 (大粒の雨が—屋根に打つ) and task 2 (猫はドアの隙間を—と抜けて飛び出していった). onomatopoeia frequently created by the students are shown in appendix 1 (a). xiaoyan li162 native speaker vote determined the order in which the onomatopoeia were shown to group a. other nuances of each onomatopoeia were presented to the participants below the nuance given the highest average native speaker evaluation in the voting for best interpretation. c) a questionnaire2 was administered concerning (a) participant motivation to learn onomatopoeia and (b) participant subjective impression of the study. the questionnaire was administered to all participants to determine the accessibility of the learning system, and to identify aspects in need of improvement. the results of the questionnaire survey were analyzed to compare the learning effects of the two treatments. figure 2 presents the knowledge attained by the two groups after using the e-learning system. as can be seen in figure 2, our approach improved the effectiveness of learning of nuances and onomatopoeia for both groups: 94% of group a and 89% of group b members considered this system to be useful for learning nuances. moreover, 100% of group a members evaluated the learning method as appropriate or very appropriate for wider application in second japanese language learning. we also solicited comments and advice about this narrative interpretation learning system by means of a free response questionnaire. the learners evaluated studying onomatopoeia by reading narrative feedback from native speakers as very efficient. some learners reported improved self-confidence in the creation of new onomatopoeia, saying that although it took time to understand what native speakers were saying about the tacit nuances, there was a feeling of learning real japanese. 0 1 2 3 4 5 easy to use easy to understand enjoyable to use useful for learning nuance efficiency useful for learning onomatopiea group a group b figure 2. questionnaire results 2 please refer to appendix 1 (c). learning japanese onomatopoeia through a narrative-evaluation… 163 the evaluation of system was not uniformly unanimous: 33% of group a and 39% of group b reported that it was difficult or a little difficult to use (figure 2). we explored the reasons for that reaction through interviews with selected learners. two main reasons were identified: (1) the content was not interesting, because all the sentences were related to the weather; and (2) the database gave feedback on new words in ascending order of evaluation, so learners who created new onomatopoeias using words further down the list had to make more effort to return to the top of the screen for the next iteration. construction of the “pa” row database and improvement of the e-learning system based on the results of the preliminary verification experiment, we decided to use some familiar and easy to create onomatopoeia in the verification experiment. we found that a large number of onomatopoeia begin with characters from the “pa” row.3 in japanese, with the exception of some loan words, the “pa” row contains only onomatopoeia (hamano, 2014). about one-sixth (asano, 1978) or one-seventh (kakehi et al.) of all onomatopoeias begin with a character from the “pa” row. for that reason, we constructed a “pa” row database. we also improved this system by changing to a descending order for word lists, so that when a new word is created, it appears at the top of the word list. the “pa” row database allowed us to address some of issues identified earlier, and to create a wider range of topics, as seen in figure 3, to avoid monotony (e.g., all sentences about weather). construction of the “pa” row database. as mentioned above, onomatopoeia occur heavily in the “pa” row, with the abab type the most common. we created a double-item task for the context of the onomatopoeia. one item was “the food is （この食べ物は している)” where onomatopoeia which completed the phrase would describe the state or texture of the food. the other item was “this unknown living thing is (この未知の生き物は している)” where the onomatopoeia which would complete the phrase would describe what the living thing looks like or what it would feel like (figure 3). 3 japanese syllabaries are organized in the form of tables with vowel columns and consonant rows. the “pa” row consists of the p consonant combined with the five vowels of japanese to give the sounds pa, pi, pu, pe, and po. xiaoyan li164 figure 3. creation tasks 3 and 4 (www.lixiaoyan.jp/1-2/) we decided the following requirements for onomatopoeia creation. (1) the “pa” row database should be built using the abab type. (2) a should be one of the sounds in the “pa” column, that is to say, one of the 5 kana ( pa, pi, pu, pe, po). (3) b should be one of the other sounds that follow japanese phonetic rules (44 basic and 21 contracted syllables). we put all possible abab combinations meeting those requirements (a total of 325; 5 × 44 + 5 × 21) into an excel file. then we asked three japanese native speakers to evaluate (on a five-point rating scale) the probability that each letter string would be used as an onomatopoeia. based on the results, onomatopoeic words that scored two or higher were designated as target words to be evaluated in narrative interpretation, which involved the following two steps. step 1: among the 325 “pa” row words that obeyed the rules of word formation in our two-create task, 99 onomatopoeic words had an average assigned value of more than 2 on the five point scale. we asked five japanese native speakers to give narrative interpretations of these 99 words. each native speaker interpreted 19 or 20 words. step 2: we shared the nuances from the interpretations on the website and asked the five native speakers to vote on them. if they agreed with the narrative interpretation, they were to push the agree button. if they did not agree with a narrative interpretation, they were asked to add a new nuance. remediation of the e-learning system. as mentioned in creation of a pilot system, we structured the e-learning system and set two creation tasks, one of abab type, the other abっtype. based on learner feedback in our preliminary verification experiment, we added two tasks involving creation of onomatopoeia with initial kana from the “pa” row.4 4 please refer to appendix 1 (d). learning japanese onomatopoeia through a narrative-evaluation… 165 figure 4. flow of learning system the flow of the learning system and the procedure for verification of the experiment are shown in figure 4. a pre-test is given to the participants to measure the entry level of onomatopoeia competence. then the participants are asked to learn the word-formation rules within a set time. the main objective is that the learners will learn the nuances of the onomatopoeias through the creation tasks. the learners receive narrative feedback from the database each time they create an onomatopoeia. they modify their methods when they recognize a gap between native speaker narrative and their own perception. through that process they internalize the new awareness, including tacit nuances. a post-test is given after the learners have completed the e-learning system. learning effect is defined as the difference between the pre-learning and post-learning test scores. a statistical analysis of the pre and post-test results is conducted to compare the learning effect for the two groups. verification experiment verification procedure. in june 2017, to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method and the e-learning system, we conducted a verification experiment in june 2017. the participants were 75 chinese students in their third year in the japanese language department of a university in shanghai, china, but the group was reduced to 45 to remove outliers in language ability. the remaining participants had n2 japanese language proficiency test xiaoyan li166 certificates, so they had the reading and writing ability required to perform this experiment. the participants were divided into two groups, group a consisting of 23 students, group b of 22 students. before the experiment, the participants were told that the aim of the experiment was to develop an onomatopoeia learning system for second language learners of japanese, and that in light of that objective, they were expected to take the experimental tasks seriously. in the pre-test, the average score for group a was 15.04 (out of 30); for group b 15.36. t-test results showed no significant difference in onomatopoeia comprehension between the two treatments (t = 0.858 < t 0.05 = 1.68, 44). after the pre-test, all participants were given a 30-minute traditional lecture5 on the word-formation rules,6 accompanied by examples of onomatopoeia from the “pa” row. group a and group b were then seated in different rooms. group a participants were presented with a cloze task and were instructed to create an onomatopoeia and enter it in the blank space (figure 3). the rules for creating the onomatopoeia were those presented in the mini-lecture, and the character length of the word to be created was pre-determined. if the word entered was in accordance with the word formation rules, native speaker evaluation of the word was given as feedback on a five-point evaluation scale from 1 “not suitable” to 5 “appropriate.” for words receiving an evaluation greater than 1, feedback was also provided regarding the appropriateness of the onomatopoeic construction, in the form of native speaker narrative interpretation. on the other hand, group b received only learning material for study, similar to the process in traditional classes. the learning material was a database of words that had received an evaluation of 4 or more, that is, most correctly formed onomatopoeia. finally, all the participants were asked to complete a post-test. experimental results. the average post-test score for group a was 18.17 (out of 30), for group b 16 (figure 5). the learning effects of the two groups were determined by comparing the pre-test and post-test results. t-test showed a significant correlation between learning method (creation, learning) and test time (pre, post) (t = 1.58 < t0.05 = 2.015, 44), that is, there was a significant improvement in performance between the pre-test and post-test in group a, and group a post-test performance was significantly higher than that of group b. in other words, only group a had learning effect. 5 the lecture is referred to as a “mini lecture” because it took only 30 minutes, compared to the standard lecture length of 90 minutes in japanese and chinese universities. 6 the word-formation rules were almost the same as those taught in the preliminary study, which are shown in table 1. learning japanese onomatopoeia through a narrative-evaluation… 167 figure 5. result of verification experiment discussion in this study, we addressed two research questions. what is an effective method for the learning of japanese onomatopoeia, including both explicit and tacit nuances? how do learners modify their compresence of onomatopoeia from native speaker narrative feedback? in this chapter we set out to answer these questions. the e-learning system used here for teaching the tacit nuances of onomatopoeia, based on a narrative-evaluation approach, consists of three steps. first, the word-formation rules for representation of the explicit nuances of onomatopoeic words are taught. a knowledge of word-formation rules is non-intrusive and forms the basis for the development of autonomous and independent learners, especially for vocabulary production, creativity, understanding, and even proficiency (balteiro, 2011). second, the learners create new onomatopoeic words, applying those word-formation rules. third, the subjects receive feedback in the form of native speaker evaluation of the onomatopoeias created. the results of the experiment demonstrate that an evaluation approach utilizing narrative interpretation is more effective than simple provision of feedback in the form of a five-point relative evaluation or mere review of study material in the manner used in traditional classrooms. the subjects learned explicit nuances by learning word-formation rules, and learned tacit nuances by creating onomatopoeias; modifying their linguistic hypotheses in light of narrative feedback; and constructing their own tacit nuances. the results show that the e-learning system presented here, based on a narrative-evaluation approach, is an effective method for the learning of japanese onomatopoeia and their explicit and tacit nuances. xiaoyan li168 the meanings of words can be likened to an iceberg. dictionary meanings and explicit nuances are like the tip of the iceberg above the surface, while the tacit nuances which we use subconsciously are like the submerged, much larger part of the iceberg, as shown in figure 6, based on weaver (1986). the part ‘above the surface’ is relatively easy to grasp, but the part hidden ‘underwater’ is very difficult for learners to understand. this ‘hidden’ part of onomatopoeia is what is referred to as tacit knowledge. figure 6. the ‘iceberg analogy’ of language meaning tacit knowledge has two components. one component can be converted to explicit knowledge using metaphor or analogy; the other part cannot be fully converted to explicit knowledge—it can only be learned from experience (eraut, 1985). even native speakers may perceive different nuances for one onomatopoeia, and their judgement of usage in a specific context may vary considerably. moreover, depending on the occasion or situation, nuance may vary within a given context. thus, it is difficult to account for such diversity or fluctuation. it is thought that people learn tacit nuance from their experience and use of language from infancy, not only by passively accumulating language experience, but also by expressing themselves, eventually acquiring full fluency in their mother tongue. we improved the feedback database by including an evaluation based on narrative interpretation utilizing narrative interpretation, where learners can learn tacit nuances which then become explicit. as shown in figure 7, students learn explicit nuances in the course of learning word-formation rules, learning japanese onomatopoeia through a narrative-evaluation… 169 creating onomatopoeias, getting narrative feedback to modify their linguistic hypotheses. in the process of that cyclic learning, learners gain an awareness of tacit nuances, which cannot be expressed linguistically, then internalize the new awareness and create output again to continue their learning experience. through this approach, language learners can get feedback, repeat their hypothesis refinement and construct their own implicit nuances. in particular, for the learning of explicit nuances of onomatopoeia, we extract word-formation rules from existing onomatopoeias and have the learners memorize those rules. then, to learn tacit nuances, the learners are asked to use the rules to create onomatopoeias suitable for given contexts. in this way, the learners become able to express their own nuances. this approach answers our second research question as to how learners can modify their compresence of onomatopoeia by means of native speaker narrative feedback. figure 7. the stages of the e-learning system li & umemoto (2013) and li (2017) characterize the interaction of tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge as a process of articulation, socialization, consolidation, and internalization, iterating in a spiral fashion. this harmonizes with the findings of this study, where the same language learning spiral is achieved through the sequence: learning the tacit nuances of japanese onomatopoeia as articulated by native speakers; being socialized through an e-learning system; consolidating own knowledge with established sources of nuances; and arriving at a new internalized awareness of onomatopoeia. it is expected to be an effective method for use in a learning system to support understanding and then creation of onomatopoeia. xiaoyan li170 conclusion we propose an e-learning system to support second language learners of japanese in the learning of both explicit and tacit nuances of onomatopoeia through an evaluation approach utilizing narrative interpretation. the results demonstrate that the system is highly effective as a learning tool; the promising results of the preliminary test are supported by the results of the subsequent verification test used to ascertain the validity of the first set of results. the stages of this learning system are: repetitive learning of word-formation rules; creation of onomatopoeic words by applying those word-formation rules; and receiving feedback in the form of native speaker narrative interpretation. the three stages only constitute a complete method when used in combination. word-formation rules and narrative feedback are the elements of tacit nuance that can be converted to explicit knowledge by means of metaphor or analogy. tacit nuance cannot be completely converted to explicit knowledge: learners only learn from active experience, in this case the creation of onomatopoeias. this process (repetitive learning of word-formation rules; creation of new onomatopoeias; and attaining new awareness from narrative interpretations) is sufficient for the acquisition of explicit and tacit nuances of onomatopoeia. here the interaction between native speakers and learners is not face to face, but they do interact in an asynchronous manner that allows the learner to effectively create new knowledge through the spiral process of articulation, socialization, consolidation, and internalization. promising directions for future research include addition of new types of onomatopoeia to the e-learning system and enrichment of the narrative interpretation database. we plan to put this e-learning system to practical use so as to broaden the scope of language learning approaches available to learners. references balteiro, i. 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(in japanese). a p p e n d i x 1 top 5 most frequently created onomatopoeia for each creation task. task 1: 大粒の雨が—屋根に打つ ざわざわ ばらばら ぼかぼか だらだら ぼたぼた task 2: 猫はドアの隙間を と抜けて飛び出していった さらっ さりっ すらっ さくっ すすっ task 3: この食べ物は している ぴちぴち ぽよぽよ ぴくぴく ぱらぱら ぽきぽき task 4: この未知の生き物は している ぷるぷる ぷよぷよ ぺこぺこ ぺちょぺちょ ぽつぽつ xiaoyan li172 b. all onomatopoeia questions used in the tests are taken from past questions of the japanese language proficiency test (n1 & n2) and modified by author for clarity. b.1. pre-test question 1: please judge whether the following onomatopoeia usage is natural. if you think it is natural, put a ˅ inside the brackets. (multiple selections possible) (a) 1. だれでも二週間で英語がぺらぺらしゃべれる方法が書いてあります。( ) 2. 不合格と知り、彼は掲示板の前にぺらぺらと崩れ込んだ。 ( ) 3. ぺらぺらしていたが、だいぶ頭にきていたんじゃないかな。 ( ) 4. その店にあったぺらぺらの小さい広州市内地図を買った。 ( ) 5. まるで自分が作ったようにぺらぺら説明していたが、彼は自分では何もしていないんだよ。 ( ) (b) 1. 休日は家でぷりぷり過ごすのがいちばんだ。 ( ) 2. 新鮮でぷりぷりした貝は潮の香りがした。 ( ) 3. あのウェイトレス、ぷりぷり怒って行ってしまって呼んでも来てくれない。( ) 4. 折り箱をぷりぷり壊し、束ねて捨てる。　 ( ) 5. 水から上がった犬は体をぷりぷりと振って水をはね飛ばす。 ( ) (c) 1. よほどありがたかったとみえて、母は電話にぺこぺこ頭を下げて礼を言っていた。( ) 2. お皿がみんなぺこぺこだ。熱湯に入れて洗剤で洗ってくれ。 ( ) 3. 長年使って底がぺこぺこになったなべを今でも大事そうに使っている。 ( ) 4. 太郎と花子がスリッパをぺこぺこと鳴らしながらやってきた。 ( ) 5. 寝ぼうして朝飯を食べずに出てきたんで腹がぺこぺこだ。 ( ) question 2: please judge whether the following onomatopoeia usage is natural. if you think it is natural, put a ∨ inside the brackets. (please select one) (a) 1. 高い空に雲がぱかぱかと浮いている。 　　　　　　　　　　 ( ) 2. 高い空に雲がぴかぴかと浮いている。 　　　　　　　　　　 ( ) 3. 高い空に雲がぷかぷかと浮いている。 　　　　　　　　　　 ( ) 4. 高い空に雲がぺかぺかと浮いている。 　　　　　　　　　　 ( ) 5. 高い空に雲がぽかぽかと浮いている。 　　　　　　　　　　 ( ) (b) 1. すくいあげた網の中で小魚がぴかぴかはねていた。 　　　　　 ( ) 2. すくいあげた網の中で小魚がぴきぴきはねていた。 　　　　　 ( ) 3. すくいあげた網の中で小魚がぴちぴちはねていた。 　　　　　 ( ) 4. すくいあげた網の中で小魚がぴとぴとはねていた。 　　　　　 ( ) 5. すくいあげた網の中で小魚がぴやぴやはねていた。 　　　　　 ( ) (c) 1. 袋に穴があいていて、持ちあげると小豆がぱたぱたこぼれ出た。 ( ) 2. 袋に穴があいていて、持ちあげると小豆がぱしゃぱしゃこぼれ出た。 ( ) 3. 袋に穴があいていて、持ちあげると小豆がぴろぴろこぼれ出た。 ( ) 4. 袋に穴があいていて、持ちあげると小豆がぴしゃぴしゃこぼれ出た。 ( ) 5. 袋に穴があいていて、持ちあげると小豆がぽろぽろこぼれ出た。 ( ) learning japanese onomatopoeia through a narrative-evaluation… 173 b.2. post-test question 1: please judge whether the following onomatopoeia usage is natural. if you think it is natural, put a ˅ inside the brackets. (multiple selections possible) (a) 1. 雨がぱらぱら落ちてきた。( ) 2. 花見の宴会も始まったが、15日は平日のため見物客はぱらぱらだ　( ) 3. ボーイフレンドの運転の乱暴さにいつもぱらぱらさせられる。 ( ) 4. 私は日記をぱらぱらとめくってみました。( ) 5. １週間に１度部屋をぱらぱらと掃いて、掃除は終わりです。 ( ) (b) 1. 純子さんはぽりぽり涙を流していた。( ) 2. ピーナッツをぽりぽりかじりながらテレビを見る。 ( ) 3. 空き地のままの区画には丈の高い雑草がぽりぽりと生えている。 ( ) 4. なんだか照れくさくて、テレビの前で頭をぽりぽり掻いてしまいました。( ) 5. まだ大学でのぽりぽりだから、よろしくご指導ください。 ( ) (c) 1. 鳥は朝になるとかごから出たくて、ぱたぱた羽をはばたかせて催促する。( ) 2. 子供は目にごみがはいったらしく、涙ぐんで目をぱたぱたさせていた。( ) 3. あの子は小学校のときからぱたぱたして利発な子だった。( ) 4. ぱたぱたといそがしくうちわを使う。 ( ) 5. 鼻の頭をぱたぱたたたいてお化粧直しをしている。 ( ) question 2: please judge whether the following onomatopoeia usage is natural. if you think it is natural, put a √ inside the brackets. (please select one) (a) 1. このパンはぱくぱくでおいしくない。 　　　　　　　 　 ( ) 2. このパンはぱきぱきでおいしくない。 　　　　　　　　 ( ) 3. このパンはぱこぱこでおいしくない。 　　　　　　　　 ( ) 4. このパンはぱさぱさでおいしくない。 　　　　　　　　 ( ) 5. このパンはぱちぱちでおいしくない。 　　　　　　　　 ( ) (b) 1. （これは）ぷよぷよのおなかを鍛える体操（です）。 　　　　　 ( ) 2. （これは）ぷつぷつのおなかを鍛える体操（です）。 　　　　　 ( ) 3. （これは）ぷすぷすのおなかを鍛える体操（です）。 　　　　　 ( ) 4. （これは）ぷらぷらのおなかを鍛える体操（です）。 　　　　　 ( ) 5. （これは）ぷちぷちのおなかを鍛える体操（です）。 　　　　　 ( ) (c) 1. ひと口食べたとたん舌がぴくぴくするほど辛くて、あわてて水を飲んだ。 ( ) 2. ひと口食べたとたん舌がぴりぴりするほど辛くて、あわてて水を飲んだ。 ( ) 3. ひと口食べたとたん舌がぷりぷりするほど辛くて、あわてて水を飲んだ。 ( ) 4. ひと口食べたとたん舌がぷくぷくするほど辛くて、あわてて水を飲んだ。  ( ) 5. ひと口食べたとたん舌がぺこぺこするほど辛くて、あわてて水を飲んだ。 ( ) xiaoyan li174 c. 実験後アンケートpost-experiment questionnaire: 1. この学習システムの操作は、難しかったですか。was it difficult to operate this learning system? 2. この学習システムについての説明は十分ですか。is the description of this learning system sufficient? 3. この学習システムは楽しいと思いますか。do you find this learning system enjoyable to use? 4. この学習システムは、擬音語・擬態語の学習に役に立つと思いますか。do you think this learning system is useful for learning onomatopoeia? 5. 新しい擬音語・擬態語を学習する際に、またこの学習システムを利用したいと思いますか。would you like to use this learning system again when learning new onomatopoeia? 6. 擬音語・擬態語の学習においてこの学習システムのどういうプロセスが役に立つと思いますか。（複数選 択可）what process in this learning system do you think is useful in learning onomatopoeia and mimetic words? (multiple selections possible) ルールの学習 learning rules オノマトペの創作プロセス creation process for onomatopoeia フィードバックをもらえる receiving feedback その他 other 7. この学習システムによって、オノマトペのニュアンスを学習できたと思いますか。do you think you could learn the nuances of onomatopoeia with this learning system? 8. あなたが今までに使ったことがある学習方法と比べると、この学習システムはより効率が高いと思います か。 do you think this learning system is more efficient than the learning methods you have used so far? 9. この実験を通じて、擬音語、擬態語に興味を持つようになりましたか。did you become interested in onomatopoeia through this experiment? 10. この実験を通じて、これから擬音語・擬態語をもっと勉強しようと思いましたか。do you want to study more onomatopoeia through this experiment? 11. この実験を通じて、日本語に興味を持つようになりましたか。did you become interested in japanese through this experiment? 12. この実験を通じて、これから日本語をもっと勉強しようと思いましたか。do you want to study more japanese through this experiment? 13. ほかの分野の学習においても、この学習システムを使いたいと思いますか。do you want to use this learning system for learning in other fields? 14. この学習システムについてのご意見・ご感想を書いてください。（自由記述）please write your opinion about this learning system. (free description) 15. この学習システムを通じて、日本語また日本人の表現の仕方についての気づきを書いてください。（自由 記述）please write down your awareness about japanese and japanese expression through this learning system. (free description) d. there are four creation tasks in our e-learning system in total. task 1: 大粒の雨が 屋根に打つ。 heavy rain hits the roof . task 2: 猫はドアの隙間を と抜けて飛び出していった。the cat jumped through the door gap　　. task 3: この食べ物は している. this food is . task 4: この未知の生き物は している. this unknown creature is . learning japanese onomatopoeia through a narrative-evaluation… 175 xiaoyan li das lernen japanischer onomatopoetika durch ein narrative-evaluation-basiertes e-learning-system z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g im japanischen sind onomatopoetika wichtig, um gefühle und erlebnisse auszudrücken. für studenten der japanischen sprache sind sie schwer zu erlernen, insbesondere ihre bedeutungsnuancen. deswegen wird ein e-learning-system vorgeschlagen, um den nichtmuttersprachlern des japanischen die nuancen der onomatopoesie in drei schritten – sowohl explizit als auch implizit – effizienter zu vermitteln. im resultat wird eine neue, auf narrative strategien gestützte und den lernprozess von muttersprachlern imitierende lernmethode für studenten entwickelt, die japanische onomatopoetika lernen. der erste schritt ist das lehren der formalen regeln von expliziten nuancen. im zweiten schritt kreieren die studenten neue onomatopoetika anhand der formalen regeln. im letzten schritt erfolgt ein feedback, indem die von den studenten kreierten onomatopoetika bewertet werden. dabei wird ein unterstützungssystem für narrative strategie verwendet, um implizites lehren zu ermöglichen. um die effektivität der vorgeschlagenen methode und des lernsystems zu verifizieren, wurde ein experiment mit zwei gruppen von probanden an der fakultät für japanische sprache einer universität in shanghai in china durchgeführt. während die gruppe a (23 studierende) ein feedback über die angemessenheit ihrer onomatopoetischen konstruktionen von den muttersprachlichen forschern erhielt, überprüfte die gruppe b (22 studierende) nur den datenbankinhalt, ähnlich wie im traditionellen unterricht. es wurde festgestellt, dass das e-learning-system einen signifikanten effekt auf den erwerb eines praktischen verständnisses von onomatopoetika und die fähigkeit, sie zu verwenden, von nichtmuttersprachlern des japanischen hat. schlüsselwörter: onomatopoesie, implizite nuance, narrative interpretation, e-learningsystem, zweitsprachenunterricht teresa maria włosowicz university of social sciences, cracow, poland english language attrition in teachers: questions of language proficiency, language maintenance, and language attitudes a b s t r a c t the present study aims to investigate the attrition of english in english language teachers whose native language is polish. it focuses on the attrition of more advanced vocabulary and structures which are taught in english philology departments at universities, but which may not be necessary for teachers who teach at the lower levels of education and, as a consequence, they may be especially prone to attrition. at the same time, the study includes a questionnaire aiming to reveal the participants’ attitudes towards linguistic correctness and their strategies of language maintenance. as the results show, some attrition can indeed be observed, yet it must also be remarked that the teachers do try to maintain their proficiency levels in english by using the language in various ways, such as reading books and articles in english, watching films in english, talking to native speakers, etc. keywords: language attrition, advanced users of english as l2, english language teachers, language maintenance introduction the purpose of the study has been an investigation of language attrition in polish teachers of english, their attitudes towards linguistic correctness, and their strategies of language maintenance. on the one hand, it can be assumed that english language teachers’ levels of proficiency in english are relatively high. in principle, their levels should be c2 or at least c1, as these are the levels graduates from english philology departments are expected to have while leaving university (c2 if they have a master’s degree, while a graduate theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 3 (1) 2017, pp. 75–100 teresa maria włosowicz76 with a bachelor’s degree may have c1). on the other hand, however, language attrition is a natural process that takes place in biand multilingual systems when speakers are faced with the task of managing two or more languages (herdina & jessner, 2013, p. 753). certainly, the most spectacular examples of attrition can be observed in emigrants who either have no contact with their native language any more, or who are exposed to a deteriorated version of their native language (for example, simplified, full of borrowings from the dominant language of the country, etc., sharwood-smith, 1989), but any bilingual speaker who stops using one of his or her languages, or certain words and structures in the language, is prone to attrition. in fact, like emigrants, teachers are also exposed to erroneous input, which, in their case, contains learners’ errors. as a result, foreign language teachers who stop maintaining their levels of l2 proficiency are likely to undergo attrition, especially of structures which they do not use on a daily basis, for example, because they are not included in the school curriculum. still, instead of contenting themselves with maintaining a level of knowledge sufficient for teaching, for example, at primary school, teachers should apply various strategies of language maintenance and, as will be shown later in this article, many of them actually do. at the same time, teachers’ active involvement in language maintenance can be assumed to be related to attitudes towards the target language and its norms. in other words, a positive attitude towards language accuracy may result in language maintenance, which counteracts attrition, whereas an indifferent attitude might lead to the abandonment of the language maintenance effort and to increased attrition of the teachers’ competence in english. in fact, as will be discussed in more detail below, research (e.g., cherciov, 2013; riemer, 2005) shows that a positive attitude itself is not a sufficient predictor of language maintenance, unless it is accompanied by a real language maintenance effort. therefore, apart from the participants’ attitudes towards the english language in general and linguistic correctness in particular, their ways of maintaining their proficiency levels will be taken into account. last but not least, it must be remembered that the attrition of english observed in the present study should be considered in probabilistic rather than absolute terms. even though english philology graduates can be assumed to have studied certain words and structures, it is difficult to establish which ones they actually processed deeply enough and internalized, and which ones they memorized only temporarily, to pass a practical english exam, but which they have not used since. however, forgetting such items would also constitute attrition, even if the participants did not even remember learning them. certainly, qualitative methods, such as interviews and questionnaires, might be helpful to some extent, but the examples, albeit fairly typical, might still differ from the examples they encountered during their studies. the situation english language attrition in teachers:… 77 is even more complex in the case of vocabulary, which is so vast that, while at the basic (a1–a2) levels it can be supposed that the names of food items, clothes, etc. are taught everywhere, at the advanced (c1–c2) levels there may be considerable diversity, depending on the texts read and discussed during the studies. however, as certain topics, such as work, travel, social problems, etc. are part of most advanced english curricula, it could be safely assumed that the participants were familiar with such expressions as ‘a golden handshake,’ ‘asylum seekers’ or ‘a white-collar worker.’ therefore, if the participants turned out not to retrieve them from memory, it was more likely that they had forgotten them than they had never encountered them. moreover, as more than one word is usually possible in a context (dubin & olshtain, 1993), the use of non-target words was accepted here as correct as long as those words met the semantic and collocational constraints of the context, except for idiomatic expressions, which do not allow any variation. even so, failure to recognize an idiom and the use of a non-target word (e.g., ‘a golden watch’ instead of ‘a golden handshake’) could still be classified as ‘partly correct,’ provided that the response made sense. to sum up, while the participants’ failure to produce words and structures which should be known to an english language teacher with a c1 or c2 level of proficiency can generally be assumed to constitute evidence of language attrition, the results should be treated with caution, as, theoretically, a particular person might not have encountered a given word or structure. still, the words and structures used here are taught during english philology studies, so they are more likely to have been forgotten than not to have been encountered at all. even if they were practiced very briefly and not internalized properly, this is also a case of attrition, as “inexperienced items” (preston, 1982, in sharwood-smith, 1989) constitute one of the “high attrition” sites (cf. section on language attrition below). language attrition in general, language attrition can be defined as “[t]he non-pathological decrease in a language that had previously been acquired by an individual” (köpke & schmid, 2004, p. 5, in cherciov, 2013, p. 717). in other words, unlike, for example, aphasia, language attrition is not caused by an illness or a brain lesion, but rather by the gradual deactivation of a language that has not been used for some time. in fact, as andersen (1982, p. 86) has remarked, teresa maria włosowicz78 language attrition is a special case of variation in the acquisition and use of a language or languages and can best be studied, described, documented, explained and understood within a framework that includes all other phenomena of language acquisition and use. it can thus be regarded as a form of language development, even though its result is a decrease rather than an increase in language competence. in fact, sharwood-smith (1989, p. 188) describes attrition as a competence change which diverges from the norm instead of converging towards it. as in the case of acquisition, such a change can involve both external input and internal restructuring. as andersen (1982, p. 87) puts it, [r]estriction in language use accompanied by a break with a previously established linguistic tradition (or norm) leads to reduction in linguistic form and the creation of gaps in the individual’s linguistic repertoire in that language. in immigrant communities, l1 attrition can be viewed as acquisition in which speakers acquire an altered version of their l1 from ‘more advanced’ attriters, which can be structurally simplified, but also ‘enriched’ with lexical borrowings from the l2, which either replace l1 elements or denote phenomena specific to the l2 culture (sharwood-smith, 1986; 1989). of course, in the case of language teachers, this break with a previously established tradition or norm is not as visible as in the case of emigrants, but losing contact with correct english taught at university and exposure to learners’ errors can be supposed to have a similar effect. moreover, what undergoes attrition may be language competence or control (sharwood-smith, 1989, p. 190). in other words, the underlying competence may remain intact, but the speaker may lose the ability to control his or her production of that language, for example, because access to some rules has become inhibited. in a similar vein, schmid, köpke, and de bot (2013) describe attrition as a dynamic and non-linear process, which affects different components of language proficiency, for example, fluency, accuracy, and complexity. according to dynamic systems theory (herdina & jessner, 2013, p. 753), language attrition results from the cognitive load placed on the speaker who faces the task of managing two or more language systems. as herdina and jessner (2013, p. 752) remark, the gradual process of language attrition takes place as the (dynamic) language system “undergoes a process of transformation to meet the altered communicative needs of the individual.” undoubtedly, a change in the speaker’s needs, such as moving to a social context in which a certain language is no longer needed, can contribute to language attrition. however, apart from language needs, researchers have suggested several facenglish language attrition in teachers:… 79 tors which can influence the process of language attrition. predictions about the rate of language attrition concern, on the one hand, personal background factors (specifically, the age of onset and the length of residence) and, on the other hand, input and exposure, including the use of the target language. last but not least, language maintenance depends to some extent on personal attitudes (schmid, köpke, & de bot, 2013, p. 676). however, as schmid, köpke, and de bot (2013, p. 676) remark, the role of each factor can be very difficult to investigate. over long time periods, attrition does not progress linearly (de bot & clyne, 1994; schmid & dusseldorp, 2010, in schmid, köpke, & de bot, 2013, p. 676). still, the development of language systems is non-linear by definition, as it proceeds in phases of acceleration and retardation (herdina & jessner, 2002, pp. 89–91). herdina and jessner (2002, p. 91) define gradual language loss as “an inversion of language growth,” which constitutes a process of adapting to the speaker’s communicative needs. however, language attrition is much more difficult to investigate than language acquisition or aphasia and has thus largely been ignored by research. as herdina and jessner (2002, p. 96) observe, first, language attrition is much less spectacular than abrupt complete language loss, second, speakers try to counterbalance attrition by means of compensatory strategies, and, third, at least at the early stages, language attrition “expresses itself in the form of an increased scatter of performance” (herdina & jessner, 2002, p. 96). in fact, measuring language attrition poses a serious challenge to linguistic research. first, as herdina and jessner (2002, p. 96) have remarked, there is no explicit performance measure which might capture the scatter of performance at the early stages of attrition. second, designing tasks to measure attrition is very difficult: if the participants focus on one aspect of the language (for example, lexical access or grammatical rules), they are likely to perform better and the task will not detect attrition effects reliably (schmid, köpke, & de bot, 2013, p. 678). they therefore conclude that the best way to investigate attrition is to test the participants’ speaking skills, because “[n]atural speech requires the rapid online integration and processing of information from many different levels” (schmid, köpke, & de bot, 2013, p. 679). as a result, a number of trade-off effects between complexity, accuracy, and fluency can be observed, for example, focusing on the structure may lead to a loss of fluency or to errors in other structures (a loss of accuracy), while the avoidance of certain structures may result in decreased complexity. still, recording speech requires direct contact between the investigator and the participant. consequently, as the present study consisted of a test of english language competence and a questionnaire, which could also be distributed by email, it was decided to limit it to the written tasks for practical reasons. the participants could therefore do the test and fill in the questionnaire in their free time, and return them to the researcher afterwards. even though this study design did not tap, for example, teresa maria włosowicz80 the decrease in fluency, it can be supposed that some decrease in complexity and accuracy could still be observed in relation to the requirements posed on english philology students at polish universities. of the hypotheses concerning the order of l2 attrition, the most frequently cited one is the regression hypothesis (‘first in, last out’), often in combination with the critical threshold hypothesis (‘best learnt, last forgotten’) (bardoviharlig & stringer, 2010, pp. 15–16). as moorcroft and gardner (1987, p. 339) conclude, the structures most prone to attrition are recently learnt ones, which suggests “that a thoroughly learned structure is relatively immune to language loss.” however, another factor which contributes to the attrition of structures is their markedness. in reference to l1 attrition, seliger and vago (1991, p. 13) hypothesize that if either l1 or l2 contains an unmarked rule, then the unmarked rule will be retained and the marked one will disappear. however, if both languages contain marked structures, the l1 structure (or, in the present study, the l2 structure) will not be attrited. in a similar vein, preston (1982, in sharwood-smith, 1989, p. 101) includes marked items in his list of high attrition sites or areas which are particularly prone to attrition. other high attrition sites include, for example, items learnt last, low-frequency items, inexperienced items (i.e., those which the speaker does not use or is not exposed to any more) low information-load and low functional-load items, synonymous items (of a pair of synonyms, one disappears), and irregularities. in relation to the present study, the above hypotheses can be applied especially to the attrition of complex but infrequent grammatical structures which are on the english philology syllabus, but which are not used in everyday english, or which are not included in the school curriculum, such as, for example, more complex uses of reported speech, or inversion after ‘no sooner,’ ‘only,’ ‘rarely,’ etc. on the one hand, they may have been learnt last and, consequently, practiced the least. at the same time, as such structures are largely specific to english, they may be regarded as marked. it can therefore be supposed that attrition in english language teachers results in the loss of less frequent grammatical structures as well as advanced vocabulary. it can thus be seen that language attrition can involve the gradual loss of different language skills, not only of accuracy, but also of fluency and complexity, which can be assumed to be particularly visible in teachers whose contact with english is limited mainly to teaching. if a teacher uses only simple structures and basic vocabulary which are included, for example, in the primary school curriculum, he or she may forget certain less frequent structures or lose control of their use, for example, be unable to retrieve them quickly enough. as a consequence of language attrition, language skills have to be constantly maintained, which requires making an effort included by herdina and jessner (2002, p. 130) in the following formula: english language attrition in teachers:… 81 gle ≅ lae + lme gle – general language effort lae – language acquisition effort lme – language maintenance effort in other words, it must be remembered that acquiring a language is not enough, as the language skills already acquired need to be maintained by regular practice. undoubtedly, this requires a positive attitude both to the language as such and to linguistic correctness. an attitude has been defined by ajzen (1988, p. 4, in baker, 1995, p. 11) as “a disposition to respond favourably or unfavourably to an object, person, institution, or event,” and, it can be added, also to a language. according to baker (1995, p. 11), attitudes can be measured and, consequently, “the specification of objects, persons, institutions or events is important and valuable in constructing measurement scales.” in the present study, attitudes towards linguistic correctness are measured by means of a fivepoint likert scale, ranging from one (completely disagree) to five (fully agree). as baker (1995, p. 12) explains, an attitude consists of a cognitive component, an affective one and readiness for action. however, attitudes may not always be clearly defined, as irrational prejudices and fears may be in conflict with formally stated beliefs (baker, 1995, p. 12). as a result, attitude measurement may only be based on overtly stated attitudes and ignore hidden beliefs. similarly, readiness for action does not yet mean that action will actually be taken. indeed, as cherciov (2013) has shown, a positive attitude is not enough to counterbalance language attrition if it is not accompanied by an effort to maintain one’s language skills. in her study of language attrition in romanian l1 speakers living in canada “a positive attitude was instrumental only if it was conducive to an active effort to maintain the l1” (cherciov, 2013, p. 730, her emphasis). similarly, riemer (2005) investigated the role of motivation in the maintenance of l2 french by german l1 speakers. in particular, she focused on the influence of motivation at the end of the l2 acquisition phase (“erwerbsphase”) on the maintenance of french language speaking and reading comprehension skills in the “incubation phase” (“inkubationsphase”), that is, at the time when they no longer studied french actively, but when their l2 competence was still subject to some cognitive maturation and restructuring, called “residual learning” (riemer, 2005, pp. 218–219). as her results show, although its impact was weak, motivation indeed influenced l2 maintenance, yet, as in cherciov’s (2013) study, its role could be ascribed to seeking contact with french in the incubation phase (riemer, 2005, p. 230), for example, in the form of reading french books and periodicals, listening to french music, or exchanging emails in that language (riemer, 2005, pp. 228–230). however, unlike reading and writing, listening to music does not correlate with the maintenance of l2 teresa maria włosowicz82 skills (riemer, 2005, p. 229), which indicated that counterbalancing attrition requires more active language use. it can thus be assumed that, in the context of the present study, even though english language teachers do use english in their work, the maintenance of more advanced structures would also require their active use, or least their processing while reading. finally, as szupica-pyrzanowska (2016, p. 117) has observed, learners are particularly prone to attrition because of limited contact with the target language, therefore teachers are faced with the challenge of helping them to maintain their language skills. it might be argued that teachers are not actually learners any more, but just as l1 can undergo attrition in an l2 environment, so can even an advanced l2 if it is not used frequently enough, or if its use is restricted to a limited number of words and structures. therefore, apart from providing learners with opportunities to use english actively, teachers should, arguably, also seek opportunities to use english in order to prevent its attrition. the present study participants the study was carried out with 39 teachers of english (l1—polish) teaching in different kinds of schools, from primary school to university, as well as language schools and private tutoring. more precisely, they taught at: primary schools (15), secondary schools (15), middle schools (14), kindergartens (6), technical colleges (5), vocational schools (5), english philology departments (6), university or college departments other than english philology (3), language schools (7), and companies (4). they also gave private classes to children who had difficulty learning english (20), to gifted children (13), to children who were neither particularly gifted nor had learning difficulties but wanted to learn more english than the school curriculum provided (19), and to adults (16). obviously, the sum exceeds thirty-nine, but the majority of them worked in more than one place. most of them (31) had a master’s degree in english philology, three held a doctor’s degree in english philology (linguistics or applied linguistics), three held a bachelor’s degree in english philology, and two held master’s degrees in other disciplines and had english language teaching qualifications (cpe, post-graduate studies). thirty-four of them were female and five were male. they had completed their studies between one and thirty-three years before participating in the study (mean: 10.26 years, sd = 8.0935). english language attrition in teachers:… 83 last but not least, they were asked how often they had contact with english apart from teaching, which meant the opportunity to use english in contexts requiring more words and structures than were on the school syllabus, for example, talking to native speakers or reading books and watching films in the original. fourteen of the participants stated they had contact with english every day, eleven—a few times a week, and five—once a week. less frequent contact with english was rare: the answer ‘once in a few weeks’ was chosen by two participants, ‘once a year’ by two, ‘once in a few months’ by three, while one person chose ‘other’ and one did not provide any answer at all. method the instrument used in the study was a written survey consisting of two parts, an english language test with an overview of advanced vocabulary and grammar (c1–c2), followed by a questionnaire concerning the participants’ language biographies, problems of language attrition encountered by them in everyday life as well as in the test, attitudes towards linguistic correctness and strategies of counterbalancing attrition, or reasons for not doing so (see appendix at the end of the article). however, the items were quite typical and even the sentences were similar to items which the participants might have encountered at university or in a cpe textbook. even though the test was quite unpopular with the participants and some potential participants even refused to co-operate when they saw it, it was necessary to make them aware of the attrition processes already taking place, as self-evaluation is not always reliable. as was already mentioned above, the participants could return the tests and the questionnaires to the researcher by email, but they were explicitly instructed to rely on their knowledge and not to use any dictionaries or grammar books. the test consisted of six tasks examining various areas of english language proficiency: (1) reported speech (5 sentences), (2) conditionals (5 sentences), (3) article use (5 sentences), (4) error correction (5 sentences containing different kinds of grammatical errors, one error per sentence), (5) key-word transformations (10 sentences) and (6) vocabulary, including idioms (filling gaps in 10 sentences). unfortunately, given the limited availability of the participants, both in terms of finding teachers willing to participate (as has already been mentioned above, several teachers refused, most probably for fear that revealing their language attrition might jeopardize their reputations as teachers, even though the survey was anonymous) and of the time they could devote, it was impossible to carry out a more extensive study, combining the written test with an oral teresa maria włosowicz84 interview. however, in future research, it would be advisable to investigate the attrition of teachers’ oral skills in english. the research questions were as follows: 1. what areas can language attrition be observed in? does the correctness of the responses depend on the area examined by a particular task? 2. what do english language teachers do to counterbalance attrition? 3. what are the participants’ attitudes towards linguistic correctness in english, especially from their point of view as teachers? results for the purpose of the analysis, the participants’ responses were divided into the following four groups: 1. correct: usually there was one correct answer, but some variation was allowed, as long as the other response was also correct, for example, because it was a word that also fitted in the context. in fact, gap-filling always involves some variation. as dubin and olshtain (1993) have demonstrated, even native speakers’ responses in gap-filling tasks vary considerably, which is due to the fact that different words can be used in the same context, from synonyms and other semantically related words (e.g., hyperonyms) to words chosen on the basis of different interpretations of the same incomplete sentence. 2. partly correct: a partly correct answer could be either a non-target answer, especially in the case of vocabulary (e.g., ‘a golden medal’ instead of ‘a golden handshake’), a non-target grammatical structure which might be theoretically possible in a certain context (though a little awkward in the target context, e.g., ‘the novel was written by a british writer philippa gregory…’) or the omission of a part of the target sentence (e.g., using the backshift of tenses in reported speech, but not changing the deixis, e.g., from ‘last year’ to ‘the previous year’). punctuation mistakes (e.g., no comma between the clauses in a sentence starting with an if-clause) counted as ‘partly correct’ if the rest of the sentence was correct. 3. incorrect: the sentence contains a more or less serious error, or the word (in the vocabulary task) does not fit in the context. 4. avoidance, which meant giving no answer at all, or providing only an insufficient part of the answer, for example, one word instead of a whole grammatical structure. in general, even though there was no fixed key to the grammar and vocabulary tasks, given the possibilities of variation mentioned above, the participants’ responses were evaluated on the basis of the rules of the usage of reported speech, conditionals, articles, and, in the key-word transformations english language attrition in teachers:… 85 and the vocabulary task, of the semantic and syntactic properties of the words and expressions. overall, as the results show, the participants provided more correct responses than incorrect ones. table 1 percentages of correct, partly correct and incorrect answers as well as of avoidance, provided by the participants in the different components of the test degree of correctness reported speech conditionals articles error correction key words vocabulary % correct 54.36 57.44 48.20 67.69 67.69 66.15 partly correct 20.00 23.08 15.38 2.56 11.54 14.10 incorrect 25.64 12.82 36.41 29.74 15.13 11.28 avoidance 6.67 5.64 8.46 the results were compared by means of a chi-square test in order to determine whether the correctness of the responses depended on the area under investigation. the difference proved to be statistically significant at p < 0.001, df = 15: χ²obs = 157.64054, χ²crit = 37.697, χ²obs > χ²crit this shows that the difficulty of the tasks and, consequently, the correctness of the results, depended on the type of structures covered by each task. the easiest part was the vocabulary, also because more than one option was often acceptable (in fact, in gap-filling tasks, it is much easier to meet semantic than syntactic or collocational constraints, włosowicz, 2016a), while articles seem to have been the most difficult. indeed, article use is often context-dependent and cannot easily be limited to such rules as, for example, those which govern the use of conditionals (cf. sajavaara, 1986). in fact, some of the participants seem to have forgotten some rules of article use (e.g., the use of the definite article to refer to groups of people, e.g., ‘the unemployed’, or idiomatic expressions such as ‘i pronounce you man and wife’), possibly because they had acquired them relatively late (as the regression hypothesis would suggest) and had not practiced them long enough. another source of difficulty in article use is the fact that articles do not exist in polish (demonstrative pronouns, such as ‘ten,’ ‘ta’ or ‘to’ (‘this one’ in the masculine, feminine, and neuter), which are sometimes translated into english by the definite article, are not articles) and, consequently, the correct usage of english articles poses polish l1 learners, teresa maria włosowicz86 even advanced ones, considerable difficulty (włosowicz, 2012; zielonka, 2009). it can thus be supposed that, like marked structures, article use is particularly prone to attrition; in fact, less frequent rules of article use, such as the ones mentioned above, can actually be regarded as marked. however, reported speech also seems to have been quite difficult for the participants, because they either failed to use the backshift of tenses (e.g., ‘agnes said that the following month caroline and gordon will have been married for ten years’), or they tended to overuse it (‘alice told sylvia that if she had been her, she would have taken the job they were offering her’). in fact, some idiosyncratic errors were also observed, for example: ‘alice told sylvia that if she was her, she would take the job she was offering to’, ‘alice told sylvia that if she was her she will take the job,’ or: ‘alice told sylvia that if she was her, she would took job they were offering to her.’ what might also be relatively disquieting is the proportion of errors in the error correction task (29.74%), which suggests that some teachers already have problems distinguishing correct structures from incorrect ones. at the same time, they do not seem to notice it, as the mean value of the responses to the statement ‘i have more and more difficulty distinguishing erroneous structures and usages from correct ones’ is only 2.15 (sd = 1.01). finally, the lack of avoidance in reported speech, article use and error correction is due to the fact that the participants at least tried to do every sentence, while in vocabulary, key-word transformations, and conditionals, they sometimes left the whole word or sentence gap blank. in general, typical examples (e.g., a conditional sentence starting with ‘if’ or ‘provided’) were easier than less typical ones (e.g., ‘should the parcel be delayed/not arrive on time, please, call our customer service,’ and ‘were john more responsible, he wouldn’t have lost his job.’). this shows that the less typical ones are more marked and are thus more prone to attrition. indeed, in polish conditional sentences almost always contain a function word which signals the presence of a conditional (‘jeżeli,’ ‘jeśli,’ ‘gdyby,’ etc.), while, as the examples show, english allows conditional sentences without ‘if,’ where the conditional is signaled by an auxiliary. some examples of the participants’ errors with attempts to explain their possible causes are presented in table 2. table 2 examples of errors made by the participants and the problems associated with them component participants’ errors problems detected reported speech margaret suggested to go for a walk. the verb ‘to suggest’ requires a gerund (margaret suggested going…) reported speech alice told sylvia if she had been her, she would have taken the job they were offering her. ‘if i were you’ refers to the present, so no change to the third conditional is necessary. english language attrition in teachers:… 87 conditionals should not the parcel arrive on time, call our customer service. word order; target: should the parcel not arrive on time… conditionals if olivia obtained a french language certificate, she could work for a french company now. failure to use a mixed conditional; target: if olivia had obtained a french language certificate, she could work for a french company now. conditionals agnes said that, by the next month, caroline and gordon will have been married for ten years. incorrect deixis (target: the following month), no backshift of tenses. articles queen elizabeth made a speech about condition of unemployed. adjectives used as nouns referring to groups of people require ‘the’; the ‘of’ phrase here should start with ‘the’ (the condition of the unemployed). articles at the end of the wedding ceremony, a priest said: ‘i now pronounce you a man and a wife’. contextually determined definiteness (the priest who married the couple); a fixed phrase (i pronounce you man and wife). articles the queen elizabeth made the speech about condition of the unemployed. some titles do not require the definite article; ‘a speech’ was not specific in the context; the ‘of’ phrase should start with ‘the’. articles at the end of wedding ceremony, priest said: ‘i now pronounce you man and wife.’ attrition of the (possibly imperfectly acquired) rule of using the definite article before nouns and noun phrases. error correction if i wasn’t interested in psycholinguistics, i wouldn’t go to professor frost’s lecture yesterday. failure to use a mixed conditional (i wouldn’t have gone); assuming the form ‘if i were’ to be incorrect. error correction mark wanted to see himalayas, so he flew to the nepal. (according to the participant, this sentence is correct.) possible attrition of the rules of article use (target: the himalayas, nepal). key-word transformations little known were the news for jane that her sister was going to break. failure to recognise the structure ‘little did jane know…’ key-word transformations in the 19th century, teenage girls weren’t let by parents to go out on their own. ‘let’ changes to ‘be allowed to’ in the passive voice; the saxon genitive instead of the plural may be a mistake. vocabulary as evidence of his role in the assassination of the prime minister came to light, the accused was sentenced guilty. failure to retrieve the collocation ‘to plead guilty’. vocabulary there is no idea in buying a violin if you are not going to play it. overgeneralization of the expression ‘to have no idea’; forgetting the expression ‘there is no point in…’ the participants were also asked to evaluate the difficulty of the tasks on a 5-point likert scale (1—very easy, 5—very difficult). table 2 continued teresa maria włosowicz88 table 3 the mean values and standard deviations of the levels of difficulty selfreported by the participants value reported speech conditionals articles error correction key-word transformations vocabulary mean 1.920 1.840 2.350 2.235 2.320 2.387 sd 1.074 1.053 1.120 1.0439 0.902 0.942 the mean level of difficulty for reported speech was 1.92 (sd = 1.074), for conditionals: 1.84 (sd = 1.053), for articles: 2.35 (sd = 1.12), for error correction: 2.235 (sd = 1.0439), for key-word transformations 2.32 (sd = 0.902), and for vocabulary: 2.378 (sd = 0.942). one the one hand, this suggests that the participants are quite confident of their english language skills and do not find advanced tasks very difficult. on the other hand, these self-evaluation results only partly overlap with the actual correctness of the responses: certainly, articles were regarded as difficult and the participants’ performance reflects it, but while reported speech was evaluated as fairly easy, quite a lot of errors were observed and, conversely, though the vocabulary task was regarded as quite difficult, the answers were generally correct. it is possible that, while in the case of grammar it was easier to retrieve the rules, the vocabulary task required more effort (comprehension, lexical item retrieval, etc.). predictably enough, lack of time to maintain their knowledge of english contributes to the participants’ language attrition (mean: 3.47, sd = 1.31), as they are quite busy teaching (mean: 3.079, sd = 1.32). however, they are fairly strongly motivated to maintain their english (mean: 3.868, sd = 1.09) and profit from every opportunity to use english (mean: 4, sd = 1.15). in fact, they do not think their english is good enough and does not require any improvement. table 4 reasons for possible language attrition and the participants’ motivation to improve their english value too little time too busy teaching strong motivation profiting from every opportunity… rarely outside the classroom enough for the school curriculum good enough, no need to improve too much admin. work mean 3.470 3.079 3.868 4.000 2.703 1.605 1.737 3.130 sd 1.310 1.320 1.090 1.150 1.310 0.974 1.030 1.398 english language attrition in teachers:… 89 as for the participants’ attitudes towards linguistic correctness, they were generally positive and the participants believe linguistic correctness to be important. even though they often have to simplify the english they use so that the pupils or students can understand it (mean: 3.97, sd = 1.11), this does not mean that they do not care about correctness. in fact, most of the participants admit that, when they notice they have made a mistake in english, they correct it immediately in order not to mislead their pupils or students (mean: 4.289, sd = 0.802). if they are not sure, they also promise to look up the word or structure (mean: 4.289, sd = 1.037) and avoid giving evasive answers, for example, that such a word does not exist in english (mean: 1.26, sd = 0.69). while preparing their classes, they generally look up their answers in the key (mean: 3.237, sd = 1.42), but few of them limit themselves to consulting the key without doing the exercises (mean: 2.59, sd = 1.33). moreover, even though teaching can be really time-consuming and teachers do not have much time to maintain and improve their english, it also motivates them to improve their english constantly (mean: 3.97, sd = 1.2). still, they are sometimes unsure about the correctness of what they have just said or written in english (mean: 3.316, sd = 1.04), they notice that they have become less fluent in english (3.289, sd = 1.49) and that they have forgotten quite a lot of vocabulary and grammar structures since they finished their studies (mean: 3.15, sd = 1.39). they also admit that they have become relatively more tolerant of learners’ errors (mean: 3.25, sd = 1.08) and they tend to regard fluency as more important than accuracy (mean: 3.34, sd = 0.9087). while a lack of time to maintain one’s english may be assumed to be a cause of attrition in any advanced english language users, be they teachers or, for example, company employees, the latter two items require closer attention. on the one hand, these tendencies are not very pronounced, as the means indicate that, although the participants admit that they have become more tolerant of learners’ errors and that they attribute more importance to fluency, they do not strongly agree with such statements. this suggests that their attitudes towards linguistic correctness remain positive and that, as teachers, they feel obliged to keep up certain standards. on the other hand, as the now prevalent communicative approach postulates focusing on reaching communicative goals, teachers have to apply such principles to their teaching. however, despite the unquestionable importance of communication skills, the application of the communicative approach is sometimes misguided, leading to excessive tolerance of errors, as long as basic communicative goals are achieved (rychło, 2008; włosowicz, 2012). therefore, teachers should strike a balance between developing learners’ communication skills and accuracy, in order not to become too tolerant of errors, which might discourage them from maintaining their english language skills and thus lead to attrition. teresa maria włosowicz90 table 5 the participants’ attitudes towards language correctness and their perception of their own english attitudes and observations mean sd more tolerant of learners’ errors 3.2500 1.0800 more difficulty in distinguishing errors from correct forms 2.1500 1.0100 greater importance of fluency over accuracy 3.3400 0.9087 having forgotten a lot from their studies 3.1500 1.3900 correcting oneself immediately 4.2890 0.8020 unsure about correctness 3.3160 1.0400 being less fluent 3.2980 1.4900 simplification for pupils 3.9700 1.1100 teaching as a source of motivation to improve one’s english 3.9700 1.2000 checking the compatibility of answers with the key 3.2370 1.4200 using the key only 2.590 1.3300 finding learners’ questions too difficult 2.3590 1.0600 promising to look things up 4.2980 1.0370 giving learners evasive answers 1.2600 0.6900 frustration with learners’ lack of motivation 2.3160 1.3170 english limited to the school curriculum 2.5380 1.2980 as for the participants’ strategies of counterbalancing attrition, the following strategies are used by the numbers of participants indicated in brackets: – reading in english (books, online articles, newspapers, magazines, etc. (31); – watching films in english (35); – reading newspapers and magazines in english (16); – reading articles on the internet (31); – doing exercises from textbooks for advanced (e.g., cpe-level) learners (12); – speaking english while travelling abroad (29); – speaking english with foreigners, who are native (13) or non-native (18) speakers of english; – speaking english with polish friends, especially english philologists (5); – corresponding with native speakers (11) or other foreigners (9) in english; – chatting online in english with native (12) and non-native speakers (11); – other ways of using english, such as translation and listening to the bbc radio (6). english language attrition in teachers:… 91 only one person claimed to use no english language maintenance strategies. in summary, the participants themselves admit in the questionnaire that they have little time to maintain and improve their english (they are busy teaching, they have a lot of administrative work to do, etc.), and that the test had made them aware of how much they had forgotten since their studies; generally, they do not agree with the statement that their english is good enough and does not require improvement. however, many of them also state that they take advantage of every opportunity to use english. conclusions on the basis of the results, it can be supposed that teaching causes some language attrition, due to contact with learners’ errors as well as the use of a limited number of words of structures, adjusted to the learners’ level. for example, teachers have less contact with words and structures which are not part of the school curriculum. as one of the participants commented in the questionnaire: the last statement ideally sums up my answers. the level of my students and pupils at school and kindergarten doesn’t require to improve my qualifications. sometimes, when i give private lessons, i am asked about something more difficult and i have to deliberate it. of course, i would like to improve my english, but work and duties at home do not leave me too much free time. the statement the respondent was referring to was: ‘i feel that my english has become limited mainly to the words and structures included in the school curriculum.’ even though few of the participants were as sincere as the above mentioned one was, it might be assumed that more of them encounter similar problems. even though some attrition can be observed in all the areas under investigation, such areas as articles and reported speech seem to have undergone more attrition than, for example, conditionals and vocabulary. it is also rather disquieting that in the error correction task the participants overlooked a number of errors. in fact, the structures which caused them particular difficulty (e.g., mixed conditionals, the use of conditionals in reported speech, article use which went beyond the basic rules of definiteness and indefiniteness, etc.) are more likely to appear in a c2 level textbook than in everyday english, which provides evidence in favor of moorcroft and gardner’s (1987) conclusion that structures acquired last and not practiced long enough are particularly prone teresa maria włosowicz92 to attrition. as the results of the chi-square test show, the correctness of the responses does depend on the type of task. however, teachers are also aware of this fact and try to maintain their english language skills, counterbalance attrition, and improve their english. as the results of the questionnaire show, the majority of the participants do more than one thing to maintain and develop their english language skills; they mostly read books and articles and watch films in english, but they also speak english in poland and abroad, with native and non-native speakers of english, as well as with other poles who are english philologists. as for the participants’ attitudes towards the english language and linguistic correctness, they are undoubtedly positive and the participants understand the need to maintain and improve their english. they are motivated to do so and try to profit from every opportunity to use english. however, lack of time often prevents them from devoting as much time to the improvement of their english language skills as they would like to. this proves cherciov’s (2013) statement that a positive attitude is not enough to prevent attrition if it is not accompanied by a concrete effort. in conclusion, english language teaching can be regarded as a profession that requires life-long learning. one of the participants, an academic teacher with a master’s degree, who teaches practical english skills to english philology students, wrote: “i’m under the impression that my english has improved considerably over the years due to the constant challenge i have to face in my teaching work and new subjects that i teach.” thus, as the two practically opposite quotations indicate, the impact of teaching on teachers’ english language competence can be either positive or negative, depending on such factors as the requirements of the job or, as discussed earlier, exposure to errors, which might lead to excessive tolerance of them and even to the acquisition of erroneous structures. in particular, it seems important whether the teacher is obliged to improve his or her language skills or, on the contrary, whether his or her job is limited to teaching beginners basic vocabulary and structures. another limitation of the present study is that, while some attrition could be observed and while it was reported by some of the participants themselves, its extent is difficult to research more quantitatively. on the one hand, as herdina and jessner (2002, p. 96) have remarked, attrition is generally difficult to investigate, among other things, because speakers try to counterbalance it, which is also the case of the teachers under analysis. not only do they counteract attrition by maintaining their english language skills, but it is also possible that for the same reason they provided some of the non-target responses. instead of retrieving the target words, they may have looked for other words—or structures, as in the key-word transformations—which could also be acceptable. on the other hand, attrition research is also probabilistic because the initial state of linguistic competence before the onset of attrition is usually unknown and has to be english language attrition in teachers:… 93 established approximately and, similarly, the lengths of the incubation phases (which term, in the present study, does not refer to a time when the participants did not use english much, but when they no longer studied english as regularly and intensively as they had done at university) could vary. however, this is allowed by attrition research methodology: for example, in riemer’s (2005) study, the participants had studied french for at least two years and the incubation phases lasted between 12 and 240 months (the mean was 80.45 months). it can thus be seen that the group does not have to be homogeneous and that, actually, the participants’ language attrition can also vary. in fact, the initial state in the present study can be established relatively precisely, as it is based on a typical english philology curriculum and the requirements usually posed on students. however, given the fact that not only does language attrition occur in teachers, but they also maintain their english on their own, it would, arguably, be advisable to organize some workshops or webinars, and perhaps to prepare some materials, which would help teachers to identify the elements of their knowledge of english that were especially prone to attrition and to counterbalance it in a more regular and systematic way. yet, this would require larger-scale research and more cooperation on the part of teachers. unfortunately, as has been mentioned above, some teachers refused to take part in the study as soon as they saw the test, claiming that they had already taken all english language tests in their lives. still, it is possible that they realized they had forgotten some of the structures involved and, rather than testing themselves and checking in what areas their english had deteriorated, they refused to participate in the study. therefore, some future research should also be carried out on the methodology of testing teachers’ knowledge of english so as not to discourage them from participating. for example—also for the purpose of investigating the attrition of oral skills—a study might be carried out in the form of informal interviews about the participants’ interests related to the english language and perhaps english literature and culture, so that they could talk spontaneously, which could reveal a decrease in fluency, accuracy, and/or complexity. moreover, in order to compare the effects of teaching practice, including exposure to learners’ errors, with attrition in english philology graduates who do not teach, a similar study might be carried out with english philologists who work in international corporations and who, despite using english on a daily basis, may be exposed to errors made by their foreign colleagues such as engineers, economists, etc., who may be fluent in english but less focused on accuracy, as the present author’s (włosowicz, 2016b) study on adult learners’ expectations indicates. in addition, it would be advisable to research the influence of the level of english taught on teachers’ english language proficiency: for example, it might be investigated whether attrition is more likely in kindergarten or primary school teachers, who use simple structures and are exposed to a lot of errors made by beginners than, for instance, in secondary school or university teachers. teresa maria włosowicz94 references ajzen, i. 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(2012) errors in the m.a. theses of english philology students: a matter of competence or control? in m. dakowska & i. banasiak-ryba (eds.), foreign language didactics and its application in the educational setting (pp. 185–209). łódź–warszawa: społeczna wyższa szkoła przedsiębiorczości i zarządzania. włosowicz, t. m. (2016a). gap-filling in english as l2 as a form of text construction using contextual cues. in h. chodkiewicz, p. steinbrich, & m. krzemińska-adamek (eds.), working with text and around text in foreign language environments (pp. 173–190). switzerland: springer international publishing. włosowicz, t. m (2016b). adult learners’ expectations concerning foreign language teachers and the teaching-learning process. in d. gabryś-barker & d. gałajda (eds.), positive psychology perspectives on foreign language learning and teaching (pp. 267–285). switzerland: springer international publishing. zielonka, b. (2009). must acquisition of articles be so difficult? in m. wysocka (ed.), on language structure, acquisition and teaching. studies in honour of janusz arabski on the occasion of his 70th birthday (pp. 379–388). katowice: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego. teresa maria włosowicz der verlust der englischkenntnisse bei englischlehrern: sprachkompetenz, aufrechterhaltung der sprachfähigkeiten und einstellung zur sprache z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g der zweck der studie ist eine untersuchung des verlusts der englischkenntnisse bei englischlehrern, deren muttersprache polnisch ist. sie konzentriert sich auf den verlust von vokabeln und grammatischen strukturen auf fortgeschrittener ebene, die an den fakultäten für englische philologie von universitäten gelehrt werden, aber die den englischlehrern, insbesondere auf niedrigeren bildungsstufen, nicht unbedingt nötig sind und die, aus diesem grund dem sprachverfall (language attrition) besonders ausgesetzt sind. gleichzeitig enthält die studie einen fragebogen, der bezweckt, die einstellung der probanden zur sprachlichen korrektheit und deren strategien zum aufrechterhalten der sprachkompetenz zu untersuchen. wie die ergebnisse zeigen, lässt sich wirklich ein gewisser sprachverfall beobachten, es ist jedoch zu bemerken, dass sich die lehrer selbst bemühen, ihr kompetenzniveau im englischen aufrechtzuerhalten, indem sie die sprache auf verschiedene art und weise gebrauchen, zum beispiel indem sie bücher und artikel auf englisch lesen, sich englischsprachige filme ansehen, sich mit muttersprachlern unterhalten, usw. teresa maria włosowicz96 a p p e n d i x the form used in the study: the english language test and the questionnaire part one: english language test 1) change the following sentences into reported speech: 1. margaret: ‘let’s go for a walk! the weather is beautiful today.’ margaret suggested ______________________________________________________ 2. kate: ‘grandma, did you have spanish classes when you were at school?’ kate asked her grandmother ________________________________________________ 3. alice: ‘if i were you, i would take the job they are offering you.’ alice told sylvia _________________________________________________________ 4. agatha: ‘when will you finally finish the book you started reading last year?’ agatha asked charles _____________________________________________________ 5. agnes: ‘next month caroline and gordon will have been married for ten years.’ agnes said _____________________________________________________________ 2) paraphrase the following sentences, using the appropriate conditionals: 1. i had an opportunity to go to zakopane with my friends, but i chose to stay at home, so i did not climb giewont. if ___________________________________________________________________ 2. the parcel might not arrive on time. in such a case, please, call our customer service. should _______________________________________________________________ 3. we’ll go to the mountains next weekend as long as the weather is fine. provided ______________________________________________________________ 4. olivia was advised to obtain a french language certificate, but she did not obtain it. that is why she cannot work for a french company now. if ___________________________________________________________________ 5. john is quite irresponsible, that is why he has lost his job. were _________________________________________________________________ 3) use the right articles. if you think no article is necessary, please, mark the blank with a tick, a minus sign, etc. 1. ____ queen elizabeth made _____ speech about _____ condition of ______ unemployed. 2. ____ monday before ____ last, jack bought ____ pineapples at ____ two pounds ____ kilo. 3. nick left in ___ hurry, was hit by ___ car and spent ___ few months in ____ hospital. 4. at ____ end of ____ wedding ceremony, ___ priest said: ‘i now pronounce you ___ man and ___ wife.’ 5. ____ novel was written by _____ british author philippa gregory, who specializes in ____ historical novels about ____ english kings and queens. 4) correct the errors in the following sentences. there may be more than one error in a sentence. 1. hindi is one of the languages using in india. _________________________________ 2. mark wanted to see himalayas, so he f lew to the nepal. _________________________ english language attrition in teachers:… 97 3. if i weren’t interested in psycholinguistics, i wouldn’t go to professor frost’s lecture yesterday. ___________________________________________________ 4. alexandra said she had enjoyed watching football since she had been a child. _____________ 5. rarely victoria travels during the holidays because she prefers to stay at home and knit. __ __________________________________ 5) key word transformations: paraphrase the following sentences, using the words given in capital letters. example: arabic is much more difficult to learn than english. near english is nowhere near as difficult to learn as arabic. 1. thank you for the f lowers you brought me on my birthday, but that really wasn’t necessary. have you __________________________________ f lowers on my birthday. 2. jane had no idea of the bad news she was going to hear from her sister. know little ___________________________ her sister was going to break. 3. however hard you try, you won’t get a job at harvard university. might try __________________________________ a job at harvard university. 4. you won’t pass the exam if you don’t study hard. unless you __________________________________ study hard. 5. i’m sorry, but i must tell you the whole truth bluntly. it was extremely rude of you to laugh at mr smith’s funeral! mince i’m sorry, ___________________________: it was extremely rude of you to laugh at mr smith’s funeral! 6. they stole phil’s car yesterday. had phil _____________________________ yesterday. 7. amy dyed her hair black in order not to be confused with her twin sister. avoid amy dyed her hair black ________________________________ with her twin sister. 8. helen likes all of michael jackson’s songs, apart from smooth criminal. of helen likes all of michael jackson’s songs _______________________ smooth criminal. 9. in the 19th century, parents did not let their teenage daughters go out on their own. to in the 19th century, teenage girls _________________________ go out on their own. 10. everybody knows that the actor has divorced his wife to marry a fashion model. knowledge it _________________________________ divorced his wife to marry a fashion model. 6) vocabulary: fill in the gaps in the following sentences with the appropriate words. 1. on retirement, peter received a golden ______________ from the company. 2. there is no __________ in buying a violin if you are not going to play it. 3. the word ‘vitamin’ is ___________ from the latin word for ‘life’. 4. _____________ has it that this castle was built by king arthur. 5. a law-_________ citizen would never take bribes. 6. as a secretary, eve is a white-__________ worker. 7. the president’s mistake was so funny that the audience found it hard to keep a _____ face. 8. don’t even try to persuade me to smuggle gold into china, as i have no __________ of breaking the law. 9. as evidence of his role in the assassination of the prime minister came to light, the accused ___________ guilty. 10. the refugees are __________ seekers. they are iraqi christians persecuted in their country for their faith. teresa maria włosowicz98 part two: questionnaire sex: f__/m__ 1. native language:________ l2:__________________ level of proficiency: ____________________________ l3:__________________ level of proficiency: ____________________________ what other languages have you studied? please, indicate your proficiency levels 2. a) degree in english philology: b.a./m.a./ph.d. b) year of obtaining your master’s degree: _______________ if you graduated less than a year ago, please, indicate the month too: ___________ if you have only a bachelor’s degree, please, indicate the year you obtained it: _________ if you also have a ph.d., please, indicate the year of obtaining it in addition to the year of obtaining your master’s degree: ___________________ (in the latter case, do you think that working on your ph.d. improved your english language skills? if so, in what way?) c) where do you teach english? (you can choose more than one answer.) □ at a kindergarten □ at a primary school □ at a middle (junior high) school □ at a secondary (high) school □ at a technical college □ at a vocational school □ at a college or university, at a department other than english philology □ at the english philology department of a college or university □ at the polytechnic □ at a language school □ in a company or companies □ i give private classes to children who have difficulty learning english □ i give private classes to gifted children □ i give private classes to children who do not have much difficulty learning english, but who just take extra classes outside school □ i give private classes to adults □ other (please, specify) ___________________ 3. a) what do you do in order to maintain your level of proficiency in english? (you can choose more than one answer.) □ i read books in english □ i watch films in english □ i read newspapers or magazines in english □ i read articles in english on the internet □ i do exercises from textbooks for advanced learners, such as cpe textbooks □ i practise conversation with a native speaker of english □ i speak english with foreigners who are not native speakers of english □ i speak english while travelling abroad □ i correspond with native speakers of english □ i correspond in english with foreigners who are not native speakers of english □ i chat with native speakers of english, for example, on facebook □ i chat with foreigners in english, for example, on facebook english language attrition in teachers:… 99 □ i speak english with polish friends who are also english philologists □ other (please, specify) ______________ b) apart from teaching, how often do you have contact with english? □ every day □ a few times a week □ once a week □ once a month □ once in a few weeks □ once a month □ once in a few months □ once a year □ other (please, specify) _______________________ c) to what extent do you agree with the following statements? (1 – completely disagree, 5 – fully agree) □ i have too little time to maintain or improve my english. 1 2 3 4 5 □ i am too busy teaching to devote time to improving my english. 1 2 3 4 5 □ i have a strong motivation to use english and improve it as much as possible. 1 2 3 4 5 □ i do my best to profit from every opportunity to use english. 1 2 3 4 5 □ i rarely have any opportunity to use english outside the classroom. 1 2 3 4 5 □ i feel no need to improve my english because the vocabulary and grammar i know are enough for the school curriculum. 1 2 3 4 5 □ i think my english is good enough and does not require any improvement. 1 2 3 4 5 □ instead of focusing on english, i have too much administrative work to do. 1 2 3 4 5 comments: 4 a) how do you perceive the inf luence of teaching on your level of proficiency and attitude to english? (please, indicate to what extent you agree with the statements below. 1 – completely disagree, 5 – fully agree) □ i gradually become more tolerant of my pupils’ or students’ errors in english. 1 2 3 4 5 □ i have more and more difficulty distinguishing erroneous structures and usages from correct ones. 1 2 3 4 5 □ i adopt a communicative approach in which f luency is more important than accuracy. 1 2 3 4 5 □ i feel that i have forgotten quite a lot of the vocabulary and grammar i learnt during my studies. 1 2 3 4 5 □ if i notice that i have made a mistake speaking english to my pupils or students, i correct it immediately. 1 2 3 4 5 □ i am sometimes unsure about the correctness of what i have just said or written in english. 1 2 3 4 5 □ i feel that i have become less f luent in english than i was during my studies. 1 2 3 4 5 □ i have to simplify certain rules and meanings so that my pupils or students can understand them more easily. 1 2 3 4 5 □ teaching english motivates me to improve my english constantly, which i do as much as possible. 1 2 3 4 5 □ while preparing my classes, i always check the compatibility of my answers with the key in order to make sure that i have done the exercises correctly. 1 2 3 4 5 □ while preparing my classes, i look up all answers in the key, but i have no time to do all the exercises myself at home. 1 2 3 4 5 teresa maria włosowicz100 □ i sometimes find my pupils’ or students’ questions about the english language too difficult to answer. 1 2 3 4 5 □ if i find a pupil’s or a student’s question too difficult, i promise to look up the word or structure and answer him or her later. 1 2 3 4 5 □ if i find a pupil’s or a student’s question too difficult, i give him or her an evasive answer, for example, that such a word does not exist in english, even if it may actually exist. 1 2 3 4 5 □ i am frustrated with my pupils’ or students’ lack of motivation to learn english, which decreases my motivation to maintain and improve my english language skills too. 1 2 3 4 5 □ i feel that my english has become limited mainly to the words and structures included in the school curriculum. 1 2 3 4 5 comments: □ have you noticed any other effects of teaching practice on your proficiency in english? (if so, please, describe them.) how difficult were the tasks in the practical part of the study for you? (1 – very easy, 5 – very difficult) □ reported speech 1 2 3 4 5 □ conditional 1 2 3 4 5 □ articles 1 2 3 4 5 □ error correction 1 2 3 4 5 □ key word transformations 1 2 3 4 5 □ vocabulary 1 2 3 4 5 please, explain why (you may choose more than one answer): □ i forgot some of the words, idioms and structures i had learnt during my studies. □ some of the words, idioms and structures seemed completely new to me. □ i had some of the words on the tip of my tongue, but i could not recall them fully. □ i was unsure about the grammatical structures which i do not regularly use. □ i got out of practice in solving grammar and vocabulary tests. □ i do not do such exercises with my pupils or students. □ during my studies, i rarely practised reported speech/ conditionals/ articles/ error correction/ key word transformations/ gap-filling tasks. (please, indicate which task types you rarely practised.) □ i found it hard to guess what words, idioms or structures were expected in some of the sentence contexts. □ other (please, specify) ________________________ thank you very much. theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 6 (2), 2020, pp. 67–85 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.8326 meihua liu https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5951-4167 tsinghua university a study of chinese university english majors’ l2 motivational self a b s t r a c t as a highly important affective variable, motivation has always been a focus of research in second/foreign language (sl/fl) learning and proved to play a critical role in sl/fl learning. even so, considering the complex and dynamic nature of sl/fl motivation, it always deserves research. guided by the newly proposed framework of l2 motivational self system (dörnyei, 2005, 2009), the present mixed-method study hence explored chinese english majors’ l2 motivational self. one hundred and one english majors from a prestigious university in beijing answered the questionnaire and 15 of them were interviewed in the present study. analyses of the data revealed the following main findings: (1) the participants were generally highly motivated to learn english, had vivid images of themselves as proficient english users in the future, had positive appraisals of their l2 learning experiences, and had a moderately good perception of their ought-to l2 self, (2) senior students reported having significantly higher ideal l2 self and held more positive attitudes towards english learning experience. based on these findings, some pedagogical implications and suggestions for future research are discussed keywords: l2 motivational self, l2 motivation, ideal l2 self, ought-to l2 self, l2 learning experience introduction as one of the most important individual variables in second/foreign language (sl/fl) learning, motivation has been investigated by researchers from different perspectives (dörnyei, 2005, 2009; gardner, 1985; macintyre & charos, 1996). meanwhile, because of globalization, english has become a lingua franca for international communication in various fields, while interculhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en meihua liu68 tural communication and education in other languages have also been growing fast. along with these, research on sl/fl motivation prospers. under such circumstances, the dominant sl motivation theory—the socio-educational and then socio-psychological model—loses its explanatory power (lamb, 2004). researchers thus have been trying to reconceptualize sl/fl motivation. the major change during this process is the explicit inclusion of the contemporary notions of self and identity into the core of sl/fl motivation. consequently, l2 (second language) motivational self system proposed by dörnyei (2005, 2009) has received great attention among researchers and educators. based on the results of a large scale longitudinal study (csizér & dörnyei, 2005; dörnyei & csizér, 2002; dörnyei, csizér & németh, 2006), dörnyei and his colleagues reinterpret gardner’s integrativeness as “an internal process of identification within the person’s self-concept” rather than “identification with an external reference group” (ushioda & dörnyei, 2009, p. 3). dörnyei (2005) further develops this reinterpretation by drawing on the theory of possible selves (markus & nurius, 1986) and self-discrepancy theory (higgins, 1987) to build a new model of l2 motivation, namely l2 motivational self system (l2mss), which provides researchers with a systematic framework of how to interpret learner’s motivation through a self system perspective. thereafter, l2mss has been tested and examined on diverse groups of learners in various contexts either via the l2 motivational self system questionnaire developed in dörnyei et al. (2006) or interviews (dörnyei & csizér, 2002; dörnyei et al., 2006; pawlak, 2016a, 2016b; ryan, 2009; taguchi, magid, & papi, 2009). even so, more research on l2mss is needed considering the diversity of learners, complexity of sl/fl learning and motivation, and increasingly faster globalization (boo, dörnyei, & ryan, 2015; dörnyei, 2014). thus, the present study aimed to explore chinese university english majors’ l2 motivational self via a mixed method. literature review situated in anglophone and francophone communities in north canada, the social-educational and then socio-psychological approach proposed by gardner and lambert (1972; gardner, 1985) was based on the tenet that learners’ attitudes toward the target language and the language community greatly affect their final sl/fl learning outcomes. this approach distinguishes two distinct constructs in l2 motivation—instrumentality and integrativeness and claims that integrativeness plays a more important role in l2 learning. instrumentality refers to “the practical value and advantages of learning a new language” (gardner, 1985, p.133) and integrativeness is the desire to “come closer to the a study of chinese university english… 69 other language community” (gardner, 2001, p. 5). countless research has confirmed the importance of learners’ attitudes toward the target language and roles of instrumental and integrative motivation (allard & landry, 2009; clement & gardner, 2001; liu, 2007; masgoret & gardner, 2003; noels, 2001). meanwhile, the research shows that instrumentality and integrativeness cannot capture the complex and dynamic nature of sl/fl motivation and that instrumental and integrative motivation are not opposite ends of a continuum either. hence, along with the development of gardner’s motivation theory, a number of theories have been advanced to expound the role of motivation in sl/ fl learning, such as self-efficacy theory (bandura, 1986), attribution theory (weiner, 1986, 1992), self-determination theory (deci & ryan, 1985, 2002), expectancy of success theory (wigfield & eccles, 2000), and goal theory (locke & latham, 1990). correspondingly, more motivational concepts emerge like intrinsic, extrinsic motives, external regulation, introjected regulation, and identified regulation. as defined by gardner and lambert (1972), integrativenesss reflects language learners’ genuine interest in the target language and its community (sometimes even complete assimilation with native speakers). in this sense, there should be a clearly identifiable l2 community for the learners (dörnyei & csizér, 2002). this, nevertheless, is definitely impossible for a vast number of fl learners. in many fl, including efl (english as a foreign language) contexts such as china, language learners seldom have direct contact with any l2 group, where integrative motivation seems to hardly account for their learning of the target language. for them, integration with l2 community does not make any sense (kaylani, 1996; lamb, 2004; liu, 2007). on the other hand, it is often desirable for them to meet with native speakers, to study or travel abroad, and/or find a more satisfying job, all of which interact with one another and work on their sl/fl motivation (lamb, 2004). this is further evidenced in the results of a 10-year long longitudinal study on hungarian students’ attitudes towards learning five foreign languages (dörnyei & csizér, 2002; dörnyei et al., 2006). this study not only highlighted the importance of integrativeness but also demonstrated considerable overlapping impacts of the underlying factors of l2 motivation (dörnyei et al., 2006). based on these results, dörnyei (2005) expands its original definition and reinterprets it as a language-specific facet of a learner’s ideal l2 self. correspondingly, dörnyei (2005, 2009) incorporates the notion of self into l2 motivation with reference to the concept of possible selves proposed by markus and nurius (1986), which represents how individuals think about their desired or future selves. as discussed in markus and nurius (1986, p. 954), possible selves fall into three types: (1) “ideal selves that we would very much like to become,” (2) “selves we could become,” and (3) “selves we are afraid of becoming.” since the notion of possible selves centers on a person’s view of his/her future, it manifests his/her enduring hopes, goals, aspirations, and fears. hence, possible meihua liu70 selves act as ‘future self-guides,’ which helps explain “how someone moves from the present toward the future” (dörnyei, 2009, p. 11). this concept thus provides a conceptual link between possible selves and motivation. meanwhile, higgins’s (1987) self-discrepancy theory explains how this self system functions, according to which the domains of the self cover the actual self, the ideal self and the ought self. the actual self is the representation of the qualities that one or people important to him/her believe he/she possesses (higgins, 1987). the ideal self refers to the representation of the attributes that one hopes to possess (e.g., wishes and aspirations), and the ought self is the representation of the attributes that others think he/she should possess (e.g., duties and obligations) (higgins, 1987). this theory assumes that there is often a discrepancy between one’s actual self and the ideal/ought self, which drives people to make efforts towards their self-guides. alternatively, motivation derives from people’s desire to reduce the discrepancy between one’s actual self and the ideal/ought self (higgins, 1987). drawing on these theories of selves, dörnyei (2005, 2009) proposes the l2 motivational self system (l2mss) theory which involves three components: ideal l2 self, ought-to l2 self, and l2 learning experience. ideal l2 self refers to the l2-specific facet of one’s ideal self, which is a powerful motivator to learn the l2 because of the desire to reduce the discrepancy between one’s actual and ideal selves (e.g., traditional integrative and internalized instrumental motives). ought-to l2 self concerns the attributes that one believes one ought to possess to meet expectations and to avoid possible negative outcomes. this dimension corresponds to higgins’s ought self and thus to the more extrinsic types of instrumental motives. l2 learning experience involves situated and executive motives related to the immediate learning environment and experience (e.g., classroom atmosphere, teacher-student relationship, and experience of success/failure). to explore this l2 motivation, the l2 motivational self system questionnaire (l2mssq) was developed (dörnyei et al., 2006; taguchi et al., 2009), which generally has 56 items and covers eight dimensions: l2 motivation, ideal l2 self, ought-to l2 self, l2 learning experience, integrativeness, instrumentalitypromotion, instrumentality-prevention and international posture. then both the l2mss and the l2mssq have been tested and validated in various studies with a primary focus on english as the target language (alshahrani, 2016; chen, 2015; csizér & kormos, 2009; dörnyei & al-hoorie, 2017; dörnyei & csizér, 2002; islam, lamb & chambers, 2013; papi & abdollahzadeh, 2012; pawlak, 2016a; pawlak, 2016b; rajab, far, & etemadzadeh, 2012; ryan, 2009; taguchi et al., 2009; yashima, 2009). these studies reveal that: (1) the ideal l2 self correlates strongly with integrativeness; (2) l2mss’ components all correlate with learners’ intended efforts to learn english, (3) instrumentality can be divided into two distinct types—instrumentality-promotion and a study of chinese university english… 71 instrumentality-prevention, with the former having higher correlation with the ideal l2 self; and (4) l2mss’ components all correlate with learners’ intended efforts to learn english. for example, liu’s (2010) study of chinese efl learners found that the ideal l2 self had stronger explanatory power in learners’ motivation than integrativeness. the study also showed that the ideal and ought-to l2 selves contributed more to l2 motivation for higher level learners while the l2 learning experience mattered more for lower level learners. kim’s (2011) longitudinal study of two korean esl students’ ideal l2 self and ought-to l2 self showed that instrumentality could be merged to either the ideal l2 self or the ought-to self based on the internalized degree of instrumentality. one hundred and seventytwo chinese students aged 13–15 participated in dörnyei and chan’s (2013) study of the relationship between learner characteristics, learners’ future l2 self-guides and learning achievement in english and mandarin chinese. the study revealed a consistently positive relationship between the ideal self and the criterion measures and confirmed the importance of a broad imagery capacity in the development of individuals’ future self-identities. the study also showed that the ideal-self images associated with different languages formed different l2-specific visions, which might affect the potential interaction of learners’ self images. yu’s (2015) research of 190 chinese college students showed that most college students had high ideal l2 self and positive l2 learning experience, that the ideal l2 self explained more variance in students’ motivation, and that english majors’ ideal l2 self was higher than that of non-english majors’ while there was no significant difference in their ought-to l2 self. even though many studies have been done within the framework of l2mss which have revealed interesting findings, more research is required considering its explanatory power and the complex and dynamic nature of sl/fl motivation (boo et al., 2015; dörnyei, 2014). hence, the present study sought to examine chinese english majors’ l2 motivational self within the framework of l2mss. research design participants. one hundred and one english majors (thirty male and seventy-one female) from a prestigious university in beijing answered the questionnaire in the present study, of whom 33 were first-year students, 35 second-year students, and 33 third-year students. as english majors, they all were (quite) proficient in english, and the higher their years of study, the more proficient in english they tended to be. at the time of data collection, the participants had been learning english for an average of 13.7 years. among them, 69 (68.3%) meihua liu72 had been to english-speaking countries for short-time travel or study and 25 (24.8%) had stayed in english-speaking countries for more than three months. meanwhile, 15 (thirteen female and two male) survey respondents (five from each year) participated in semi-structured interviews. instruments. data in the present research were collected via questionnaires and semi-structured interviews, as detailed below. the l2 motivational self system questionnaire (l2mssq). to explore chinese english majors’ l2 motivational self, a short form l2mssq was adapted from that used in taguchi et al. (2009) and yashima (2009) in the present study: only items centering on ideal and ought-to selves were selected. since l2 motivation and learning experience are highly related to ideal and ought-to selves, items on these two dimensions were also included in the present study. hence, with a cronbach’s alpha of 0.901, the resultant short form l2mssq (see appendix) had 25-item and included four dimensions: (1) criterion measures (six items) (a = 0.784) assessing learners’ l2 motivated behaviors toward learning english, (e.g. ,‘i think i am doing my best to learn english’), (2) ideal l2 self (seven items) (a = 0.819) indicating students’ view of themselves as successful l2 speakers (e.g., ‘i often imagine myself speaking english as if i were a native speaker of english’), (3) ought-to l2 self (seven items) (a = 0.746) suggesting students’ or significant others’ view of the importance of learning english in order to avoid negative outcomes (e.g., ‘i study english because close friends of mine think it is important’), and (4) l2 learning experience (five items) (a = 0.844) reflecting the extent to which students liked english learning (e.g., ‘i like the atmosphere of english classes’). all the items were placed on a six-point likert scale ranging from 1 (‘strongly disagree’) to 6 (‘strongly agree’). the higher the score, the greater the motivation. the background information questionnaire. this questionnaire aimed to collect demographic information about the participants such as age, gender, and year of study semi-structured interview. the interview guide was developed based on the questionnaire items to elicit more of the participants’ inside views of their motivation to learn english. the leading questions involved their perceptions of ideal l2 self, ought-to l2 self, and l2 learning experience, such as “describe the efforts you have made in order to improve your english ability,” “describe the person with high english proficiency,” and “ describe a situation where you use english fluently.” procedure. the study was conducted during the second term of an academic year. all the questionnaire items were translated into chinese and double-checked, which was then administered to students online along with a consent form. concurrently, five students from each grade were recruited for the semi-structured interview (creswell, 2009). each interview lasted for about 15 minutes. all interviews were conducted primarily in chinese, with a study of chinese university english… 73 a mixture of english, so that students could express their ideas freely (kim, 2011). all the interviews were audio-recorded. data analysis. all the survey data were analyzed with spss 20.0. means and standard deviations of l2mssq were calculated to explore the profiles of the participants’ l2 motivational self, and one-way anova was run to reveal differences in l2mssq among students in different years of study. the interviews were transcribed, double-checked, and then were subjected to thematic content analyses (richards, 2009) conducted by two raters with an inter-rater reliability score of .92. example themes were strategies to improve english proficiency, perceptions of ideal l2 self, and future career plans. to protect interviewees’ privacy, a number was assigned to each interviewee, which was then used when their remarks were reported in this paper. results survey results to explore the profiles of the participants’ motivational self system, means, and standard deviations (sd) of l2mssq subscales were computed, the results of which are presented in table 1. table 1. means and sds of l2mssq subscales the whole sample (n = 101) year 1 (n = 33 ) year 2 (n = 35) year 3 (n = 33) mean sd mean sd mean sd mean sd l2 motivation 3.84 0.74 3.80 0.75 3.93 0.66 3.79 0.86 ideal l2 self 4.94 0.71 4.71 0.75 4.93 0.71 5.18 0.69 ought-to l2 self 3.30 0.83 3.16 0.80 3.39 0.89 3.34 0.87 l2 learning experience 4.25 0.82 4.25 0.85 4.21 0.64 4.29 0.98 as shown in table 1, the participants scored 3.30 to 4.94 on the l2mssq subscales, generally (far) above the scale midpoint 3.5, especially on ideal l2 self (mean = 4.94) and l2 learning experience (mean = 4.25). this finding indicated that the students had high expectations of themselves as being successful l2 speakers, had quite positive attitudes towards english learning, had high motivation to learn english and had a moderately good expectation of their ought-to self. a similar pattern was observed for the participants in meihua liu74 three different years of study. meanwhile, comparison of l2mssq subscale scores revealed that, for both the whole sample and the subsamples of different years of study, ideal l2 self scored the highest, followed by l2 learning experience and l2 motivation respectively, and ought-to l2 self scored the lowest. alternatively, the participants highly believed that they would become successful speakers of english, enjoyed learning english, had moderately high motivation to study english, and were moderately affected people surrounding them (e.g., teachers, parents, and friends, etc.) in learning english. in addition, comparison of l2mssq subscale scores across years of study showed that the 2nd-year students scored the highest (mean = 3.93) while their 3rd-year peers scored the lowest (mean = 3.79) on l2 motivation, that the 3rdyear students scored the highest (mean = 5.18) while their 1st-year peers scored the lowest (mean = 4.71) on ideal l2 self, that the 2nd-year students scored the highest (mean = 3.39) while their 1st-year peers scored the lowest (mean = 3.16) on ought-to l2 self, and that the 3rd-year students scored the highest (mean = 4.29) while their 2nd-year peers scored the lowest (mean = 4.21) on l2 learning experience. yet post hoc one-way anova (duncan’s) results showed that significant difference occurred only between 1st-year and 3rd-year students in ideal l2 self (f = 3.31, p = 0.04), as shown in table 2. table 2. anova results of l2mssq components mean square df f p location of sig. difference (p = .05) l2 motivation 0.26 2 0.42 0.66 / ideal l2 self 1.74 2 3.31* 0.04 1st-year & 3rd-year ought-to l2 self 0.92 2 1.21 0.33 / l2 learning experience 0.11 2 0.08 0.92 / interview results when asked about how to study english well (better), the interviewees listed a series of motivational efforts, as summarized in table 3. the most frequently mentioned efforts were accomplishing compulsory assignments (13/86.7%), reading english books and novels (10/66.7%) and watching programs in english (e.g., english movies, tv series, talk shows, etc.) (6/40%). for example, “i try to improve my reading ability by reading english books and novels, through which i can develop my sense of english. i have been reading english a lot.” (no.5, 1st-year). a study of chinese university english… 75 table 3. interviewees’ self-reported motivational efforts to study english (n = 15) interviewees’ motivational efforts frequency/percentage [%] 1. accomplishing compulsory assignments 13/86.7 2. reading english books and novels, etc. 10/66.7 3. watching programs in english (e.g., english movies, tv series, talk shows, etc.) 6/40 4. listening to programs in english 4/26.7 5. practicing english language tests 4/26.7 6. communicating with native speakers 3/20 7. learning english vocabulary (words, phrases and idioms, etc.) 3/20 8. reciting english texts 2/13.3 9. writing diaries in english 2/13.3 meanwhile, the interviewees voiced their perceptions of their ideal l2 self in terms of language, culture, and career, as reported in table 4. linguistically speaking, the interviewees hoped to speak english fluently (13/86.7%), to speak english like native english speakers (9/60%), to be good at english writing (6/40%), and to think in english directly (6/40%). the following are some examples of their remarks: “i will speak english better and better in the future and will be able to communicate with professors and discuss academic topics fluently in english with them” (no. 12, 3rd-year), and “i expect to write confidently in english and be proficient at academic writing” (no. 3, 1st-year). in terms of culture, the interviewees expected themselves to understand more about english cultures (8/53.3%) and native english speakers’ way of thinking (5/33.3%), to get along with people from different cultures (5/33.3%) and be more tolerant to different cultures (4/26.7%), and to expand their worldview (4/26.7%). in terms of career, most respondents expected to take careers directly related to english (7/46.7%) or those requiring (high) proficiency in english (7/46.7%). as reported by no. 11 from year 3, “i imagine myself communicating fluently and freely with interviewers in a job interview i understand all the questions and make quick responses.” “i imagine myself discussing with my professors on academic topics confidently and fluently” (no. 12, 3rd-year). to summarize, their idealized l2 self was generally a person who could use english well or even freely, understand english cultures and use english in their future careers meihua liu76 table 4. interviewees’ self-reported ideal l2 self (n=15) aspect interviewees’ self-reported ideal l2 self frequency/percentage[%] language 1. speaking english fluently 13/86.7 2. speaking english like native english speakers 9/60 3. being good at english writing 6/40 4. thinking in english directly when using it 6/40 5. discussing academic topics fluently in english 4/26.7 6. understanding various types of materials written in english 3/20.0 7. speaking english beautifully 3/20.0 8. being good at academic english writing 2/13.3 9. being a highly proficient english user 2/13.3 culture 1. understanding more about english cultures 8/53.3 2. understanding native english speakers’ way of thinking 5/33.3 3. getting along well with people from different cultures 5/33.3 4. being more tolerant to different cultures 4/26.7 5. expanding the worldview 4/26.7 career 1.    having careers directly related to english (e.g., translators, interpreters, english professors and teachers) 7/46.7% 2. having careers requiring (high) proficiency in english (e.g.,) 6/40 3. no specific ideas 4/26.7 4. having careers which don’t require english proficiency 2/13.3 table 5 summarizes the respondents’ perceptions of their ought-to l2 self. as many as 46.7% of the interviewees reported that their parents played a significant role in motivating them to learn english. as no. 1 (1st-year) recalled, “my parents want me to learn english well because they think learning english is really meaningful.” 40% of them confided that they studied english and chose to major in english to get admitted to their ideal university in china. concurrently, most interviewees reported enjoying english learning in general (11/73.3%), liking content courses (9/60%), and feeling dissatisfied with language courses (8/53.3%), as reported in table 5. as no. 11 from year 3 remarked, “i’m quite involved in learning english because it gives me a sense of accomplishment”; and “i always enjoy learning english because it is interesting” (no. 6, 2nd-year). even so, it was worth noting that junior students complained a lot about the courses offered by the department of english, especially language courses, when asked about their attitudes towards specific english courses. they attributed this to three reasons: too simple content, unsystematic design of certain courses, and unpleasant classroom atmosphere. a study of chinese university english… 77 table 5. interviewees’ self-reported ought-to l2 self and learning experience (n = 15) dimension self-reported ought-to l2 self and learning experience frequency/percentage[%] ought-to l2 self 1.   studying english because my parents think it is good. 7/46.7 2. learning english in order not to be rejected by my ideal university. 6/40 3. learning english because my friends think i can learn it quite well. 3/20 l2 learning experience 1. enjoying english learning. 11/73.3 2. enjoying content courses (e.g., linguistic courses). 9/60 3. being dissatisfied with language courses. 8/53.3 4. enjoying the classroom atmosphere. 3/20 since many students were already (quite) proficient in english, most language courses available to them were too simple for them, as an interviewee commented, “i think the language courses for us english majors are too simple and sometimes i have a feeling that i am taking courses designed for non-english majors. to be honest, i am disappointed” (no. 5, 1st-year). the interviewees were not satisfied with the design of certain courses either, just as no. 6 from year 2 commented, “…let me take writing courses as an example. we have four writing courses in a series. of course, i expected this series to be systematically designed. to my surprise, there is quite much overlapping in the contents of these 4 courses.” some students complained that “there is not enough interaction between teachers and students in language classes, which is boring and makes me sleepy” (no. 4, 1st-year). as fewer language courses and more content courses were provided in senior years, students’ negative comments on language courses decreased and more positive comments were remarked. for instance, no. 13 from year 3 said, “…content courses like sociolinguistics, introduction to linguistics, american literature are so interesting. they are all good and i learn a lot from them.” discussion the present study revealed that the respondents were generally highly motivated to learn english, consistent with the findings in similar studies both in and outside chinese efl contexts (allard & landry, 2009; alshahrani, 2016; chen, 2015; csizér & kormos, 2009; dörnyei & al-hoorie, 2017; dörnyei & csizér, 2002; masgoret & gardner, 2003; noels, 2001). this was largely because meihua liu78 as english majors, they had clear goals about english learning and were more obliged to study english well to understand information documented in english, which in return helped enhance their english proficiency and made them more motivated to study the language. to improve their english proficiency, they adopted a number of strategies varying from accomplishing compulsory assignments to meeting course requirements, to reading english books and novels, similar to those reported in existing studies (lu & liu, 2015). meanwhile, this study showed that the students saw themselves as successful english users in the future. they had quite vivid images of themselves as successful l2 users in terms of language ability, culture, and career. the participants not only had a general idea of being proficient english users but had more specific expectations of their english ability, such as communicating with professors on academic topics fluently in english and speaking english as well as native speakers did. they also expected themselves to understand english cultures and english way of thinking. at the same time, most interviewees clearly stated that english would play an indispensable role in their future professional lives. they envisioned themselves having careers which required high proficiency in english, such as english teachers, professors, translators or business consultants in international companies. in summary, as found in csizér and kormos (2009), alshahrani (2016) and pawlak (2016a, 2016b), the respondents of the present study had a high vision of their l2 ideal self. this might be partly because as english majors, they had much more exposure and access to english and english-speaking people and thus integrated themselves more with english and the english culture than other efl learners, as reported in yu (2015). in addition, most participants reported having positive appraisals of their general english learning experience, as found in similar esl/efl contexts (csizér & kormos, 2009; liu, 2010; yu, 2015). the respondents also voiced factors that could affect their attitudes towards classroom learning, such as course content being simple and having inadequate interaction between the instructor and students. this indicates that it is necessary to design courses substantially and appropriately, plan lessons properly, and create a friendly and supportive classroom atmosphere (dörnyei & al-hoorie, 2017; papi & abdollahzadeh, 2012). this also further confirms that students’ in-class experience plays a significant role in their evaluation of l2 learning experience, thus affecting their l2 motivation. in addition, the participants reported having a moderate view of their oughtto l2 self, similar to their peers in other chinese efl contexts (liu, 2010; yu, 2015). this might be largely because the respondents chose to study english well themselves and were less affected by people around them, indicating that personal interest and one’s own ideal self play a more significant role in l2 motivation and sl/fl learning. a study of chinese university english… 79 lastly, although not a focus in the present research, the present study revealed that the 3rd-year students scored significantly higher in the l2mss scales than their 1st-year peers, indicating that they had significantly more vivid and potent images of themselves as being successful english users than the latter. interview remarks also revealed certain differences in l2 motivation self such as perceptions of future careers and l2 learning experience between students in different years of study. this might be probably due to the difference in their years of study: students become more concerned with the future when approaching graduation. nevertheless, other factors such as personality and instructors might also play a role. consequently, differences in l2mss among students with different backgrounds are worth exploring and should be a focus for future research conclusions and implications the present mixed-method study explored chinese english majors’ l2 motivational self within dörnyei’s (2009) l2mss framework. the main findings were: 1. the participants were quite motivated to learn english and exploited a variety of learning strategies to improve their english proficiency; 2. they had (fairly) high expectations of their ideal l2 self: they generally envisioned themselves as successful english users in terms of language ability, culture and career; 3. they generally had positive attitudes towards their english learning experience; 4. they had moderate expectations of their ought-to l2 self; and 5. the 3rd-year students had significantly higher expectations of their ideal l2 self than their 1st-year counterparts. the interviewees in different years of study also expressed different opinions about their l2 motivational self, as shown by their remarks previously presented, though the difference was not detailed in the present paper. the importance of motivation in language learning has already been confirmed by a plethora of studies (csizér & kormos, 2009; papi & abdollahzadeh, 2012; liu, 2010; alshahrani, 2016). hence, it has always been an important issue to enhance students’ motivation to study the target language. various strategies can be implemented by course instructors to increase students’ sl/ fl motivation, such as encouraging positive self-reflection and evaluation, creating a pleasant and supportive classroom atmosphere, providing motivational feedback, and setting realistic and achievable goals, as discussed in the current meihua liu80 literature (guilloteaux & dörnyei, 2008; papi & abdollahzadeh, 2012) and reported by the participants in the present research. meanwhile, it is important to understand students’ needs, design courses accordingly and systematically, substantiate course content, and conduct classroom instruction constructively and friendly. this can be done by organizing formal and informal seminars and talks between teachers and students to design course syllabi and lesson plans of high quality. this will not only help students learn more but also increase their positive attitudes towards learning of the target language and their satisfaction with their learning experience, ultimately enhancing their motivation to study the language, as reported by the interviewees in the present study and discussed in dörnyei (2009). moreover, the present study showed that students in senior years had higher expectations of their ideal l2 self than those in junior years. therefore, it might be helpful to guide students to make subtle adjustments to their desired selves to make different aspects of their ideal l2 self more harmonious with each other. for example, career guidance activities where graduates can share their views on the role of english in their future career can be held. through such activities, students can strengthen the link between different aspects of their ideal l2 self, thus not only being highly motivated to learn english but also taking more specific strategies to operationalize their vision despite these interesting findings, some limitations existed in this study due to various constraints. the main limitation was that the present study only examined the participants’ l2 motivational self while ignoring other aspects of l2 motivation such as integrative, instrumental motivation and international posture. a more comprehensive examination of l2 motivation would have helped better understand the participants’ english learning motivation and reveal interrelationships between l2 motivation components, which should be done in future research. moreover, though the present study revealed certain differences in the measured l2mssq scales, the differences were not detailed (systematically). future research can focus on this to reveal a fuller picture of sl/fl motivation in learners of various backgrounds. finally, since l2mss involves various aspects of sl/fl learning, it offers a new window for research on fl/sl motivation. coupled with the complex and dynamic nature of sl/fl motivation (boo et al., 2015; 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(2016b). another look at the l2 motivational self system of polish students majoring in english: insights from interview data. theory and practice of second language acquisition, 2(2), 9–26. rajab, a., far, h. r., & etemadzadeh, a. (2012). the relationship between l2 motivational self-system and l2 learning among tesl students in iran. procedia social and behavioral sciences, 66(66), 419–424. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2012.11.285 richards, l. (2009). handling qualitative data. thousand oaks, ca: sage. ryan, s. (2009). self and identity in l2 motivation in japan: the ideal l2 self and japanese learners of english. in z. dörnyei & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identity and the l2 self (pp. 120–143). bristol: multilingual matters. taguchi, t., magid, m., & papi, m. 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(2015). college students’ l2mss. ma thesis, jiangxi normal university, china. a p p e n d i x the l2 motivational self system questionnaire (lmssq) directions: this part has 25 items (1–25), please tell us how much you agree or disagree with the following statements by simply circling a number from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree) lmssq items 1 2 3 4 5 6 1. i’m working hard at learning english. 1 2 3 4 5 6 2. i spend lots of time and energy studying english. 1 2 3 4 5 6 3. i think that i am doing my best to learn english. 1 2 3 4 5 6 4. i can overcome the difficulties and remove interferences when i learn english. 1 2 3 4 5 6 5. if my teacher would give the class an optional assignment, i would certainly volunteer to do it. 1 2 3 4 5 6 6. compared to my classmates, i think i study english relatively hard. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7. whenever i think of my future career, i imagine myself using english. 1 2 3 4 5 6 8. i can imagine myself living abroad and using english effectively for communicating with the locals. 1 2 3 4 5 6 meihua liu84 9. i can imagine myself speaking english with international friends or colleagues. 1 2 3 4 5 6 10. the things i want to do in the future require me to use english. 1 2 3 4 5 6 11. i can imagine a situation where i am speaking english with foreigners. 1 2 3 4 5 6 12. i can imagine myself writing english e-mails frequently. 1 2 3 4 5 6 13. i always imagine myself communicating in chinese as if i were a native speaker of chinese. 1 2 3 4 5 6 14. i study english because close friends of mine think it is important. 1 2 3 4 5 6 15. if i fail to learn english, i’ll let other people down. 1 2 3 4 5 6 16. studying english is important to me because an educated person is supposed to be able to speak english. 1 2 3 4 5 6 17. studying english is important to me in order to gain the approval of my peers/ teachers/ family. 1 2 3 4 5 6 18. it will have a negative impact on my life if i don’t learn english. 1 2 3 4 5 6 19. i consider learning english important because the people i respect think that i should do it. 1 2 3 4 5 6 20. learning english is necessary because people surrounding me expect me to do so. 1 2 3 4 5 6 21. i like the atmosphere of my english classes. 1 2 3 4 5 6 22. i find learning english really interesting. 1 2 3 4 5 6 23. i always look forward to english classes. 1 2 3 4 5 6 24. learning english is one of the most important aspects of my life. 1 2 3 4 5 6 25. i really enjoy learning english. 1 2 3 4 5 6 meihua liu eine studie zur ego-motivation beim erwerb einer zweitsprache bei chinesischen studierenden der englischen philologie z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g als eine bedeutende affektive variable hat die motivation immer die aufmerksamkeit der forscher des lernprozesses einer zweit-/fremdsprache (sl/fl) auf sich gezogen und spielt dabei eine schlüsselrolle, was in den bisherigen untersuchungen nachgewiesen wurde. angesichts der komplexität und dynamik verdient die motivation dennoch aufmerksamkeit. angeregt durch das vor kurzem von dörnyei (2005, 2009) vorgeschlagene „modell der motivierenden persönlichkeit der zweitsprache“ untersucht diese studie das „motivierende ego“ von chinesischen studierenden der englischen philologie, indem die gemischten forschungsansätze angewendet werden. 101 studierende der renommierten peking-universität nahmen an der umfrage teil, und 15 davon beteiligten sich auch am interview. die analyse der gesammelten informationen ergab folgendes: 1) die probanden waren im allgemeinen a study of chinese university english… 85 zum lernen hoch motiviert, hatten ihre deutlich herauskristallisierte vision von sich selbst als künftig kompetente verwender des englischen, schätzten ihre bisherigen erfahrungen mit dem sprachenlernen positiv ein und bewerteten ziemlich zuverlässig die mängel ihres eigenen „zweitsprachlichen ichs“; 2) studierende der letzten jahre erklärten einen deutlich höheren sprachstandard als ihre gewünschte „zweitsprachliche identität“ und stellten eine positivere wahrnehmung ihrer eigenen sprachlichen erfahrung dar. diese schlussfolgerungen ermöglichen es, die diskussion über pädagogische implikationen zu entwickeln und die richtungen für weitere studien zu umreißen. schlüsselwörter: motivierende l2-persönlichkeit, motivation zum erlernen einer zweitsprache, ‚ideales ich‘, sprachlernziele, spracherfahrung priya ananth middle tennessee state university, tennessee, usa masaaki kamiya hamilton college, new york, usa the effect of prosody on disambiguation: a case of universal quantifier and negation a b s t r a c t: this study is concerned with l2 japanese learners’ interpretation of scopally ambiguous sentences containing negation and universal quantifier using prosodic cues. it has been argued, in previous literature, that native adult speakers of english as well as japanese interpret such sentences both on their surface (total negation) and inverse scope (partial negation) readings in the presence of prosodic cues. the present study shows, however, that l2 japanese speakers predominantly favor the total negation reading even in situations where the prosodic cues point them to the partial reading. these outcomes indicate that l2 learners of japanese do not attach “optimal relevance” to prosodic cues when disambiguating scopally ambiguous sentences. the results also imply that for l2 japanese learners, clues other than prosody may be required to carry out disambiguation. k e y w o r d s: prosody, disambiguation, negation, prosodic cues, relevance theory introduction prosody has an influence on pragmatic and semantic interpretations (e.g., lieberman & sag, 1974; ladd, 1996; jackendoff, 1972; ward & hirschberg, 1985, among others). the scope interaction between universal quantifier and negation presents an interesting phenomenon. consider (1) below from jackendoff (1972) which uses prosodic nuances to distinguish total and partial negation. (1) all the students didn’t sleep. ‘no student slept.’ (total negation) ‘it is not the case that all the students slept.’ (partial negation) theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 1 (1) 2015, pp. 97–123 98 priya ananth, masaaki kamiya this sentence contains a universal quantifier ‘all’ and negation, both of which are scope-bearing items. due to the interaction of these two, the sentence can have either a total negation or partial negation reading as shown above. speakers of english or german disambiguate sentences such as (1) by different prosodic patterns (a-/baccents) in english (jackendoff, 1972) and a rise-fall contour in german (buring, 1997). recently, nakanishi (2007) discovered that adult japanese speakers are sensitive to the phonological contours of the japanese equivalent in (2). (2) minna-wa ne-nakat-ta. all-top sleep-neg-past ‘none of the students slept.’ (total negation) ‘not all the students slept.’ (partial negation) previous experimental research has shown that native speakers rely on prosodic cues to disambiguate structurally ambiguous utterances during speech production and comprehension (e.g. krajlic & brennan, 2005; lingel, pappert, & pechmann, 2006; schafer, speer, warren, & white, 2000; snedecker & tueswell, 2003), pointing to an important connection between prosody and meaning in language processing. fultz (2007) has shown that even less proficient late l2 learners may be similarly sensitive to this connection between prosody and meaning during l2 speech perception. in japanese, nakanishi (2007) and hattori et al. (2006) have shown evidence of a correlation between prosody and disambiguation involving universal quantifier and negation in adult and children native speakers of japanese respectively. however, little work has been done to investigate whether l2 learners of japanese use prosodic cues to disambiguate scopal ambiguities during l2 speech comprehension. the present study addresses this gap by investigating experimentally whether l2 japanese adult learners can correctly comprehend scope interactions between negation and universal quantification followed by the topic marker ‘wa.’ the results of previous studies imply that native speakers of japanese (both adults and children) were able to interpret ambiguity involving universal quantifier and negation by effectively using prosodic effects while expending minimum processing effort. the question that arises is whether or not such a tendency (or strategy for disambiguation) is available to second language users as well. we discovered that l2 japanese speakers did not seek out the clue for disambiguation in prosody. the control group of native japanese speakers, however, did seek out the prosodic cue for disambiguation. the l2 japanese participants in the present study seem to follow the “relevance theory” (sperber & wilson, 1986; wilson & sperber, 2004) in which they consider some factor as the most optimal one to process the interpretation. although we did not 99the effect of prosody on disambiguation… investigate other potential factors in this paper, at least prosody does not stand out as the most optimal cue in this study. this paper will be organized as follows: in section two, we will review the previous studies about the relation between prosody and interpretations. in particular, we will look at the interaction between universal quantifier and negation in english and japanese, and will present the research questions of this study. in section three, we will lay out the experimental design. in section four, we will report the results of the experiment. in section five, we will discuss the theoretical implications as well as the answers to our research questions based on the results of the experiment. in section six, we will present our conclusions along with future questions. previous studies two types of ‘wa’, prosody, and experimental findings in japanese. this section explains the important ingredients of scope interactions such as (2) in japanese. consider example (2) from the previous section: (2) minna-wa ne-nakat-ta. all-top sleep-neg-past ‘no student slept (total negation).’ ‘it is not the case that all students slept (partial negation).’ as the english equivalents show, example (2) is ambiguous as either total negation or partial negation. one of the keys to understanding the source of ambiguity is the type of particle ‘wa.’ kuno (1973, p. 38) accounts for two types of particle ‘wa’: (3) a. ‘wa’ for the theme of a sentence: ‘speaking of…, talking about…’ john-wa gakusei desu. john-tt student is 1 ‘speaking of john, he is a student.’ b. ‘wa’ for contrasts: ‘x…, but…, as for x’ ame-wa hutte imasu ga… rain-ct falling is but ‘it is raining, but…’ 1 the authors added thematic topic (tt) and contrastive topic (ct) in the gloss. 100 priya ananth, masaaki kamiya as the examples in (3) show, the particle ‘wa’ means either the topic of the sentence (thematic topic: tt) as in (3a) or contrast (contrastive topic: ct) as in (3b). due to the homophonic nature, ‘wa’ can be ambiguous. (4) watakusi-ga sitte iru hito-wa party-ni kimasen desita. i-nom know people-tt/ct party-loc come-neg-past ‘speaking of the persons whom i know, they did not come to the party.’ ‘(people came to the party, but) there was none whom i know.’ (kuno, 1973, p. 48) kuno (1973, p. 47) claims that noun phrases before the thematic ‘wa’ do not receive prominent intonation, while those preceding the contrastive ‘wa’ receive prominent intonation. based on kuno’s observations, nakanishi (2007) investigated the relation between the types of ‘wa’ and prosodic contours. japanese is a pitch-accent language. a specific pitch is associated with each mora in a word (tsujimura, 2014). nakanishi had five native speakers of japanese speak sentences that contain either tt or ct (the examples are cited from nakanishi, 2007, p. 179). (5) a. tt ‘wa’ * * naoya-wa nonbiri-si-teiru.2 naoya-top relax-do-prog ‘naoya is relaxing.’ b. ct ‘wa’ * * * * naoya-wa nonbiri-si-teiru ga maria-wa nonbiri-si-tei-nai. naoya-top relax-do-prog but maria-top relax-do-prog-neg ‘naoya is relaxing, but maria is not relaxing.’ nakanishi measured out the fundamental frequency f0. 3 in particular, she measured the value of the f0 peak immediately before and after ‘wa’ (nakanishi, 2007, p. 179) and discovered that native speakers of japanese give different prosodic contours to two types of ‘wa’. namely, the values of f0 before and after ‘wa’ are about the same when ‘wa’ acts as a tt. on the other hand, the value of f0 after ‘wa’ is relatively lower than the f0 value before ‘wa’ when it is 2 the star marks indicate the accent location. in nakanishi (2007), different markers were used to indicate the locations of accents. 3 f0 is an acoustic correlate of the psycho-acoustic percept of pitch of the voice (nakanishi, 2007, p. 179). 101the effect of prosody on disambiguation… a ct. observe the following prosodic patterns (example 6 cited from nakanishi, 2007, pp. 179–180). note that p1 and p2 are f0 values. (6) tt pattern ct pattern nakanishi further investigated the correlation between prosodic patterns of two types of ‘wa’ and scope interactions between a universal quantifier and negation. recall example (2): (2) minna-wa ne-nakat-ta. all-top sleep-neg-past no student slept (total negation). it is not the case that all students slept (partial negation). nakanishi read examples such as (2) with two distinct prosodic patterns (one is tt and the other is ct) to four japanese informants and asked for the relevant interpretations. according to nakanishi (2007, p. 183), her informants agreed that tt corresponds to the total negation reading, while ct corresponds to the partial negation reading. hence, she concludes that two prosodic patterns of ‘wa’ correspond to different scope interpretations in japanese.4 to summarize so far, it appears that native speakers of japanese are sensitive to phonological contours to distinguish ambiguous sentences, especially when universal quantifier and negation are in conjunction with the two types of ‘wa.’ prosody and interpretations in english. japanese is not the only language that disambiguates scopally ambiguous sentences. jackendoff (1972), ladd (1996), liberman and sag (1974), as well as ward and hirschberg (1985) among others, claim that there is a correlation between phonological contours and scope interpretations. jackendoff’s examples 8.159 and 8.160 (1972, p. 352) are given below as (7a) and (7b). 4 nakanishi (2007) attempts to account for the correlation between the prosodic patterns and the interpretations in alternative semantic framework (büring, 1997). however, we will not adhere to this particular theoretical framework of this phenomenon in this paper. rather, we would like to investigate whether or not l2 japanese speakers interpret ambiguous sentences using the same strategy as native speakers of japanese. also see hattori et al. (2006) for the japanese-speaking children’s interpretations of the interaction between universal quantifier and negation. they report that the japanese-speaking children have the same interpretations as adults. 102 priya ananth, masaaki kamiya (7) a. all the men didn’t go. (“a accent:” surface scope) b. all the men didn’t go. (“b accent:” inverse scope) these examples are ambiguous, representing total negation and partial negation. according to jackendoff (1972), the phonological contours correspond to the relevant interpretations as shown above. namely, when the sentence ending falls as in (7a), it means total negation (a-accent). on the other hand, when the sentence ending falls and rises as in (7b), it is partial negation (b-accent).5 ward and hirschberg (1985), pierrehumbert and hirschberg (1990), and steedman (1991) claim that the type of pitch accent on the focused quantifier such as ‘all’ also affects interpretation. so it is not entirely clear which of the two claims holds true. to investigate this point, leddon (2003) conducted two types of experiments: production and comprehension tests. unlike jackendoff’s examples, leddon used ‘every’ for universal quantifier. for the production task, leddon had adult native speakers of english read stories to children that included ambiguous sentences. these sentences were produced by adult native speakers of english and were recorded. for the comprehension task, leddon made use of the recorded sentences from the production task. she had adult native speakers of english listen to the sentences to judge the relevant readings. according to leddon, no prosodic pattern emerged in the ambiguous sentences (production test). moreover, the results of the comprehension test showed that the participants were not sensitive to the phonological patterns to interpret ambiguous sentences. in addition, leddon’s participants preferred a partial negation reading to a total negation reading, regardless of the intonational contour found at the end of the sentence. hence leddon concludes that intonation did not have an effect on perceived interpretation, and the perception of a given interpretation was not affected by prosody. rather, intonational contour is only indirectly related to interpretation of ambiguous sentences in the line of reasoning given by ward and hirschberg (1985). it is worthwhile to mention here that in recent experimental research done on children’s interpretation of ambiguous english sentences containing both negation and a quantifier (musolino, 1998; musolino et al., 2000; musolino & gualmini, 2004; gualmini, 2004; musolino & lidz, 2006, among others), two clear conclusions have been drawn. first, that at a certain point in their language development, children (unlike adults) predominantly access total scope interpretations. and second, that children can overcome such difficulty and become able to access the partial scope interpretation when 5 precisely speaking, the presupposition contains negation in a-accent, while the focus is negated in b-accent. 103the effect of prosody on disambiguation… these sentences are accompanied by additional contexts that satisfy the felicity conditions for the use of negative statements. relevance theory. this section explains the theoretical framework of “relevance theory” that will be later incorporated in the discussion to explain how l1 and l2 japanese speakers interpret ambiguous sentences involving uq and negation. with respect to how a speaker achieves comprehension, sperber and wilson (1986) as well as wilson and sperber (2004) proposed a pragmatic account called “relevance theory” which involves two factors—cognitive effect and processing effort. according to this theory, “an input is relevant to an individual when it is processing in a context of available assumptions yields a positive cognitive effect” (wilson & sperber, 2004, p. 608). wilson and sperber (2004, p. 609) claim: (8) a. other things being equal, the greater the positive cognitive effects achieved by processing an input, the greater the relevance of the input to the individual at that time. b. other things being equal, the greater the processing effort expended, the lower the relevance of the input to the individual at that time. in other words, according to relevance theory, relevance is assessed in terms of (a) (cognitive) effect factor and, (b) effort factor. in general, other things being equal, the more (cognitive) effect processing an input achieves, the more relevant it will be. and the less effort processing an input requires, the more relevant it will be. thus, in relevance theoretic terms, l2 japanese may consider some cues as more relevant than others. to sum up, while nakanishi’s (2007) study with japanese adults confirmed that added cues (prosodic in their case) play a role in access to the partial negation readings in japanese, leddon (2003) concluded in her production study with l1 english speakers that prosody does not play a role in disambiguation of structurally ambiguous sentences. this leads to the question how l2 learners comprehend scopally ambiguous sentences containing negation and universal quantifier, and how their comprehension is influenced by additional cues such as prosody. in other words, how much is prosody relevant to processing ambiguous sentences, and can the results be explained using relevance theory? research questions for this study. in the above subsections, we laid out the results of previous studies regarding disambiguation by prosody. the primary purpose of leddon’s and nakanishi’s studies was to investigate whether or not prosody plays an important role in disambiguation. it is certainly true 104 priya ananth, masaaki kamiya that prosody is a key factor in disambiguation, but it is also true that prosody is not the only clue for disambiguation. therefore, one thing that these previous studies indicate is that prosody may or may not be a relevant factor for disambiguation for l2 japanese speakers. in other words, it may be the case that some factors for disambiguation are parameterized, and the speakers of the language put a priority on one factor over the other. theoretically speaking, human recognition tends to be geared to maximization of relevance (cognitive principle: relevance theory; sperber &wilson, 1986; wilson & sperber, 2004). in terms of such a formal theory, native speakers of japanese tend to be geared to prosody as maximization of relevance. this may or may not be the case with l2 japanese speakers. also, recall that l1 english children tend to interpret scopally ambiguous sentences in total negative scope reading, but when the felicity condition is met, they are able to interpret both total and partial negative scope readings (gualmini, 2004). in light of the previous studies, we propose the following research questions: 1. do l2 japanese speakers differentiate total versus partial negation by prosody? 2. if yes to the above, how? 3. do l1 japanese speakers differentiate total versus partial negation by prosody? (although nakanishi conducted this experiment, she had only four informants.) 4. if yes to the above, how? in order to answer these questions, we conducted an online picture matching task that will be described in the next section. experiment the study: overview. the aim of this study was to investigate whether l2 japanese speakers resorted to interpreting scopally ambiguous sentences (into partial and total readings) using prosodic cues that were provided as part of the context. this study consisted of an online version of a picture matching task in which the target language was japanese. the particular focus of the study was on scope interactions of the universal quantifier minna ‘all’ and negation, yielding two distinct readings—total negation and partial negation. of interest was whether l2 japanese speakers would appropriately differentiate these readings using prosodic cues and how far or close they would be to the responses from the control group consisting of l1 japanese speakers. 105the effect of prosody on disambiguation… participants. this study included 33 adult l2 learners of japanese (mean age = 21.51, sd = 1.66) whose levels ranged from beginning high to advanced. the control group consisted of 33 adult l1 japanese speakers (mean age = 41.06, sd = 8.89). all of the l2 japanese participants were enrolled in undergraduate japanese language classes at universities in the united states. all of the l1 japanese participants were qualified teachers of japanese at universities and office workers in the united states. a demographic questionnaire was administered prior to conducting the experiments, which elicited background information, including age, nationality, total number of years of instruction, and length of stay in japan. the l2 proficiency scale for the experimental group was based on the classes they were enrolled in at that time (1st year = level 1; 2nd year = level 2; 3rd year = level 3). all participants signed a written consent and were assigned an identification code such that their responses remained anonymous. method and materials. an online version of a picture matching task (kamiya & look, 2012) was designed for the experiment. in this task, each of the short stories (a brief lead-in sentence and the target sentence) was narrated in the target language and was illustrated with two pictures presented on power point slides. the narration of the story was digitally recorded and embedded into each slide. additional prosodic cues were provided for each slide. depending on how the test sentence was presented (using specific prosodic cues controlled to indicate partial or total reading), the interpretation matched the left or the right picture. participants chose one of the two pictures, and were given an opportunity to write a comment on why they chose that interpretation. to illustrate with an example, the present study involved an interpretation task designed to tap learners’ interpretations of scope readings using prosodic cues. the task presented learners with stories that depicted events that either had a partial negative reading or a total negative reading with the universal quantifier. (2) below illustrates the two readings in japanese. (2) minna-wa ne-nakat-ta. all-top sleep-neg-past ‘none of the students slept.’ [total negation = wa marks topic] ‘not all the students slept.’ [partial negation = wa marks contrast] a screen shot of a sample slide with the embedded target sentence is given below (figure 1). the full list of test sentences is given in the appendix. (audio clue) lead in + target sentence: ‘computers are convenient, but all the students didn’t have them.’ 106 priya ananth, masaaki kamiya figure 1. sample slide of the test sentence. when creating the target sentences, we investigated the average f0 before/after ‘wa’ in our sentences. let us say that f0 before ‘wa’ is p1 and after ‘wa’ p2: table 1 average f0 before/after ‘wa’ p1 p2 difference between p1 and p2 total negation 155.5 hz 245.1 hz 89.6 partial negation 193.1 hz 136.3 hz 56.8 as can be seen in table 1, there are different patterns in japanese prosody when it comes to ‘wa.’ for total negation, p2 is higher than p1, while for partial negation, p1 is higher than p2. qualtrics software was used to create the online test and the responses were automatically recorded on excel spreadsheets. the test had an introduction page, where participants read a short background narrative about a foreign student studying in japan, who has to complete a class assignment involving listening to audio clips and transcribing the notes by way of interpreting the audio recordings. the introduction page was followed by a warm-up phase which had five pre-test questions. the pre-test questions checked the participants’ knowledge of the universal quantifier, negation, total reading, and partial reading. the main experimental task consisting of 30 questions followed the warm-up phase. the 30 questions were divided into 16 test questions (eight each for partial and total interpretation), and 14 distractor sentences. it was estimated that the tests could be completed in 30–40 minutes depending on the version (l1 or l2). 107the effect of prosody on disambiguation… procedures. the experimenters contacted the japanese language classes as well as the native japanese speakers face to face or via email and solicited voluntary participation for the study. candidates were briefed about the goals of the study and the directions on how to do the online questionnaire. the instructions were made available in both oral and written formats. they were told that their participation would take about 30–40 minutes. the students were made aware that they would remain anonymous and their responses would be used only for research purposes and would not be used to evaluate their classroom performance. they were also informed that their refusal to participate or discontinuation of participation would never result in prejudice against them. those who agreed to participate were asked to give their signed consent and to send back their background questionnaires via email. after receiving the two completed documents, the experimental and control groups were divided up such that half of the participants from each group were given a brief training session aimed at ensuring that they understood that the semantic interpretation of the sentences may change due to the prosodic cues (sentences used for the training session are included in the appendix). they were given examples from structures other than those used in this study. the remaining half of the participants did not receive this training. after completing the training phase, a link to the experiment was sent via email to the participants along with a cryptic identification code. the participants were asked to complete the experiment within a week. results first, let us look at the overall trends in responses in terms of percentages of correct answers for the experimental and control groups. l2 japanese learners without training answered total negation 76.6% and partial negation 30% of the time. those with training answered total negation 79.8% and partial negation 27% of the time. as for the l1 japanese speakers (i.e. the control group), those without training answered total negation 89.0% and partial negation 62.5% of the time. on the other hand, those with training answered total negation 85.2% and partial negation 86% of the time. these results are illustrated in figure 2 below. 108 priya ananth, masaaki kamiya figure 2. percentage of correct answers in japanese test. the main goal of the analyses was to determine if the responses by the l1 and l2 japanese speakers to the target sentences differed depending on the scope interactions (i.e., total negation or partial negation). since each participant responded to the sentences in both the total and partial negations, multivariate m-anova was performed with the type of negation (total or partial) as the dependent variables and training (no training vs. with training) and nationality (american vs. japanese) as the between subject factors (independent variables). there was no interaction found between training x nationality f (2, 123) = 1.223, p = 0.298. the interactions were further examined by running a general linear model for the test. there was a significant difference found between experimental and control groups with f (2, 63) = 21.896, p = 0.000 and particularly on partial scope with f (1, 64) = 24.71, p = 0.000. the independent samples t-tests (two-tailed) also confirmed that the l1 japanese speakers (control group) did significantly better than the l2 japanese speakers (experimental group) on partial negation t (64) = −4.971, p = 0.000. the mean for the control group on partial scope was higher than that for the experimental group: 5.90 (sd = 3.07) and 2.30 (sd = 2.81) respectively. let us now turn to participants’ justifications for the choice of their responses. beginning with the l1 japanese control group, 24 participants mentioned that prosody was a key factor to determine the choice. their main reasons were “the stress on ‘minna’ and the stress on the predicate’, ‘the pronunciation of ‘minna’, whether or not there is a stress on ‘wa’, or ‘it sounds like that’.” one of the participants said that s/he could not think of any reason, but realized that the stress on minna is a key which s/he noticed half way through the test. five out of 24 japanese speakers (who gave phonology as a reason) noticed that prosody is a reason from the 1st question. five out of 24 noticed prosody as a reason 109the effect of prosody on disambiguation… from the 2nd question. six out of 24 noticed at the 3rd, 4th, and 5th questions. so, among 24 who stated prosody as a reason, 16 noticed it earlier in the test. four l2 japanese learners mentioned that they used prosody as a clue for the choice. they said ‘“it is about tone’, ‘something about tone of voice’, or ‘it is about the sound of minna’.” the four participants mentioned prosody as their reason at the 2nd, 3rd, 7th and 12th questions respectively. as a corollary to our study, we also conducted a second round of experiments offering a bidirectional component to our original objectives. the aim of this second part was to examine if l1 and l2 english speakers responded differently to scope interactions between negation and universal quantification in the presence of prosodic cues in english sentences. in order to be able to compare findings across the two experiments, procedures were analogous and experimental tasks were translation equivalents of each other. the same participants were employed for the second experiment and it was conducted after a gap of one week from the first one. the procedure was just like the japanese counterpart. namely, we had a native speaker of english read an ambiguous sentence such as ‘all the students didn’t sleep’, intending either total or partial negation (see full list in the appendix). for the english patterns, we measured the minimum and maximum of f0 in ‘all’. it seems that there is not much difference between maximum and minimum of f0 when it is intended to be read as total negation (the difference = 11.9 hz). on the other hand, there is a big gap between the minimum and maximum of f0 on ‘all’ when it is intended as the partial negation (difference = 89.9hz) (table 2). table 2 average minimum and maximum of f0 ‘all’ minimum maximum difference total negation 94.2 hz 106.1 hz 11.9 partial negation 108.4 hz 198.3 hz 89.9 below we will report the findings from the second experiment. first, the overall trend in responses in terms of percentages of correct answers for both groups of participants (l1 and l2 english speakers) was as follows. regarding the english test, l1 english speakers (american nationals) without training answered total negation 72.5% and partial negation 30% of the time. on the other hand, american nationals with training answered total negation 68% and partial negation 37.5% of the time. about the english test taken by l2 english speakers (japanese nationals), those without training answered total negation 64.8% and partial negation 32.8% of the time. on the other hand, those with training answered total negation 66.9% and partial negation 47.7% of the time. these results are summarized in figure 3 below. 110 priya ananth, masaaki kamiya figure 3. percentage of correct answers in english test. since each participant responded to the sentences in both the total and partial negative scope contexts, multivariate m-anova was performed with the type of negation (total or partial) as the dependent variables and training (no training vs. with training); nationality (american vs. japanese); and test version (english vs. japanese) as the between subject factors (independent variables). there was no interaction found among training x nationality x test type f (2, 123) = 0.405, p = 0.668. moreover, there was no interaction between training x nationality f (2, 123) = 1.223, p = 0.298, or between training x test type f (2, 123) = 0.025, p = 0.975. however, the m-anova indicated a significant interaction between nationality and test version on the two dependent variables (total and partial negative scope) with wilks’s lambda value6 = 0.82 and f (2, 123) = 13.82, p = 0.000. further, the tests of between-subjects effects revealed that the interaction between nationality and test version was significant on partial negative scope with f (1, 124) = 8.93, p = 0.003, and not on total negative scope with f (1, 124) = 1.94, p = 0.166. next, the interactions were further examined by running a general linear model m-anova between test version and nationality factors. let us look at the two test versions (english and japanese) and the performance of the japanese nationals and the american nationals on the two test versions. for the english test version, there was no significant difference found between the american and japanese nationalities f (2, 63) = 0.218, p = 0.805. however, for the japanese test version, there was a significant difference found between american and japanese nationalities with f (2, 63) = 21.896, p = 0.000 and particularly on partial scope with f (1, 64) = 24.71, p = 0.000. the inde 6 in statistics, wilks’s lambda distribution (named for samuel s. wilks), is a probability distribution used in multivariate hypothesis testing, especially with regard to the likelihood-ratio test and multivariate analysis of variance. 111the effect of prosody on disambiguation… pendent samples t-tests (two-tailed) also confirmed that on the japanese test the japanese nationals did significantly better than the american nationals on partial negation t (64) = −4.971, p = 0.000. the mean for the japanese nationals on partial scope was higher than that for american nationals: 5.90 (sd = 3.07) and 2.30 (sd = 2.81) respectively. next, let us look at the two nationalities (american and japanese) and their performance on the two test versions (english and japanese). for the american nationals, there was no significant difference found between english and japanese test versions with f (2, 63) = 0.392, p = 0.677. on the other hand, for the japanese nationals, there was a significant difference between english and japanese test versions with f (2, 63) = 20.373, p = 0.000, and significant on both the total negative scope and partial negative scope. for total scope, f (1, 64) = 9.70, p = 0.003. the mean for the japanese test version was higher than that for the english test version: 6.94 (sd = 1.71) and 5.27 (sd = 2.55) respectively. for partial scope, f (1, 64) = 13.76, p = 0.000. the mean for the japanese test version was again higher than that for the english version: 5.91 (sd = 3.08) and 3.21 (sd = 2.83) respectively. the independent samples t-tests (two-tailed) also confirmed that the japanese nationals did significantly better on the japanese test than on the english test on both total negative scope t (64) = −3.19, p = 0.002 and partial negative scope t (64) = −3.73, p = 0.000. finally, a set of independent t-tests (two-tailed) was carried out to confirm any significant differences between japanese and americans for their first language l1, second language l2, length of stay in the target country as show in table 3. table 3 independent t-tests for japanese and americans japanese means american means t p (two tailed) l1 total 6.96 5.60 –2.36 *0.021 l1 partial 5.90 2.81 –4.06 *0.000 l2 total 5.27 6.21 –1.6 0.114 l2 partial 3.21 2.27 +1.35 0.181 length of stay in target country 15.54 0.19 +11.38 <*0.0001 it is interesting to see the results of the independent t-tests between the american and japanese groups for the overall performance on their first and second languages. for their native languages, there was a significant difference (p < 0.05) between the japanese and american groups of participants for both the total and the partial readings. for their second languages however, statistically there was no significant difference between the two groups of partici112 priya ananth, masaaki kamiya pants for both the total and the partial readings. note that although there was a significant difference found in the length of stay in the target country by the respective groups, there was no reflection of this fact in the difference in the performance of the l2 groups. let us also look at participants’ justifications of the choice of their responses in the second experiment (english test). twelve japanese reported that they made use of prosody as a clue. their comments included ‘the stress on didn’t and stress on all’, ‘pronunciation of all’ or ‘the emphasis on all’. two of them noticed it at the 1st question, and four of them at the 2nd question. therefore, half of the participants observed that the phonological contour is the reason for the ambiguity even in the english test. eight american respondents also mentioned that prosody was the key to answer the questions. their comments included ‘the tone of the speaker’s voice’, ‘the way to read all the students, ‘emphasis on all’, or ‘accent on all.’ one of the participants mentioned that 15 out of 16 questions are about the stress on all, but only 3 questions were correct. out of 8 native speakers of english, 5 of them considered the sound as a reason at the 2nd question, which is early in the test. the next section will examine the results of the two experimental tests and their theoretical implications. discussion the motivation for the current study was to examine whether or not learners of japanese are able to interpret ambiguous sentences based on prosody. from the viewpoint of l1 japanese, prosody before/after the particle ‘wa’ helps them to distinguish total negation from partial negation (kuno, 1973; hattori et al., 2006; nakanishi, 2007). however, there is no experimental research available that supports l2 japanese learners’ interpretation of these two readings. at the end of section two, we raised the following research questions: 1. do l2 japanese speakers differentiate total versus partial negation by prosody? 2. if yes to the above, how? 3. do l1 japanese speakers differentiate total versus partial negation by prosody? 4. if yes to the above, how? let us answer these questions based on the results of our experiment. there was a significant interaction between the experimental and control groups particularly on partial negation. this indicates that the l2 japanese learners tend 113the effect of prosody on disambiguation… to interpret the test sentences as total negation reading. it is not surprising that the control group performed better overall as this confirms nakanishi’s study. the statistically significant difference between l1 and l2 japanese speakers’ performance on partial negation indicates sensitivity (or lack thereof) to the phonological contours of the particle ‘wa.’ based on the correct percentages of total and partial reading responses, both groups showed a strong tendency towards total negation interpretations. in other words, without context but just sound, it seems that the total negation reading is the default case. let us again look at the percentage of correct responses as tabulated below (see table 4). table 4 japanese test results total negation % partial negation % j1 with training 85.2 86.0 j1 without training 89.0 62.5 j2 with training 79.8 27.0 j2 without training 76.6 30.0 as reported in the previous section, four l2 participants indicated prosody as a reason. this implies that some participants were aware of the phonological difference for the relevant interpretations. then, why is their population so small? we will return to this issue when we consider the theoretical implications. regarding the l1 japanese speakers, 24 of them resorted to prosody as the reason to choose their answers. overall, the l1 japanese speakers are aware of the prosodic cues used for disambiguation. to explain our results, we will make use of the “relevance theory” (wilson & sperber, 1986; 2004). relevance theory consists of the following two principles: (1) cognitive principle: that human cognition is geared to the maximization of relevance; and (2) communicative principle: that utterances create expectations of optimal relevance. according to wilson and sperber, the goal of inferential pragmatics is to account for the way the hearer infers the speaker’s meaning on the basis of the evidence provided (wilson & sperber, 2004, p. 250). in addition, an input is considered to be relevant to an individual when a positive effect is yielded for the processing. wilson and sperber (2004, p. 609) claim: (8) a. other things being equal, the greater the positive cognitive effects achieved by processing an input, the greater the relevance of the input to the individual at that time. b. other things being equal, the greater the processing effort expended, the lower the relevance of the input to the individual at that time. 114 priya ananth, masaaki kamiya as the relevance of an input to an individual says, it seems that relevant information (or optimal relevance) has to do with how an individual interprets a sentence. importantly, ‘the greater the processing effort expended, the lower the relevance of the input to the individual at that time’. in terms of this condition, the learners of languages may be parameterized into two classes in the current study. namely, there are participants who consider prosody to give positive cognitive effects and those who do not. the optimal relevance of processing a sentence may be related with grammar. in the present study, the acquisition of two types of ‘wa’ eliminates potential ambiguity from sentences for native speakers of japanese. the two types of ‘wa’ differ in not only meaning but also prosody. both pieces of information are *relevant* to the native speakers of japanese. on the other hand, it is not necessary for the l2 japanese speakers to expunge anything in the ambiguous test sentences of the present study. therefore, l2 speakers consider prosody to be not as optimal information as other possible factors (e.g., context). in other words, based on the above two conditions, it could be conjectured that the cognitive effect due to the prosodic cues is not very large in the case of partial negation readings. the absence of enough positive evidence in the environment to identify partial negation readings from prosodic clues necessarily increases the listener’s corresponding processing effort. therefore, the relevance to these sentences is not maximized to the extent of accurate identification. the unambiguous alternative of the partial negative reading using “not all…”—such as “not all the students came to class”—has a larger cognitive effect due to the availability of positive evidence in the environment, and hence lower processing effort. optimality seems to be carried over to second language acquisition. this was the reason why we witnessed that the l1 japanese group seeks for prosody as a clue due to the optimal relevance for interpretations, while it was not the case with l2 japanese. because prosody may not be optimally relevant, it may be the case that they do not pay careful attention to the two types of ‘wa’ during l2 learning. in order to increase the cognitive effect and the optimal relevance of the test sentences in the present study, a preceding contextual clue also needs to be tested out. in case of american nationals, it could be the case that the additional preceding context will provide that extra contextual effect and hence reduce the processing effort. as for the results of the second round of experiment (english test) with l1 and l2 english speakers, there is no significant difference between the american and the japanese nationals. however, as the result section showed, the tests of between-subjects effects revealed that the interaction between nationality and test version was significant on partial negation. observe that summorizes the result from the english test. 115the effect of prosody on disambiguation… table 5 english test results total negation % partial negation % e1 with training 68 37.5 e1 without training 72.5 30 e2 with training 66.9 47.7 e2 without training 64.8 32.8 based on the correct percentages, both nationals showed a strong tendency towards total negation interpretations of the english sentences. in other words, without context but just sound, it seems that the total negation reading is the default case. these results can be explained using relevance theory as well. the percentage of correct responses is lower in partial reading as compared to total reading because the cognitive effect of the prosodic cues is not very large in the case of partial readings. and this is supported, in part, by the lack of sufficient positive input in the natural environment that would reinforce the interpretation of partial readings for these sentences. the above results are analogous to the results obtained in the goss and nakayama (2011) study, where english native speakers seem not to be sensitive to prosody for disambiguation of structurally ambiguous sentences in japanese. the purpose of goss and nakayama is to figure out how accurately l1 and l2 japanese give a pause in the following examples when they read aloud, especially ambiguous sentences. the following phrases are unambiguous np (goss and nakayama, 2011: modified their example (5)): (9) a. [ookii [natsu no miitingu]] b. [[yasui apaato no] [soto]] ‘the large meeting in the ‘outside of the cheap summer’ apartment’ (right branching modification) (left branching modification) the following example is ambiguous with different interpretations in (a) and (b): (10) abunai mati-no koosaten a. [[abunai] [mati no koosaten]] b. [[abunai mati no][koosaten]] ‘the dangerous intersection in ‘the dangerous town’s the town’ intersection’ (right branching modification) (left branching modification) goss and nakayama report that there are preferences by l1 and l2 japanese. while l1 japanese gives accurate answers for right branching modification 116 priya ananth, masaaki kamiya (88% for right and 79% for left), l2 japanese show preference for left branch modification over right branch modification (53% for right vs. 77% for left). goss and nakayama assume that l2 japanese speakers’ preference for left branching modification may be due to their l1 preference (i.e., left branch modification for english; goss and nakayama cite works by fodor, 2002; jun, 2003; maynell, 2005) (l1 transfer might have occurred). surprisingly, the accuracy rate for syntax-prosody matching of ambiguous sentences by l1 japanese is 79%, which is close to l2 japanese 74%. hence, it may be conjectured that there must be a preferred prosody-syntax match such as left-branching modification or right-branching modification, depending on the participants’ first language. however, goss and nakayama suggest that the mismatch between production (prosody) and interpretation exists even for l1 japanese speakers. they suspect that learners may consider prosody as “extraneous or secondary information” when acquiring japanese. in other words, their study supports the argument that prosody was found to have lower optimality for the l2 japanese speakers to produce structural ambiguity. in the present study, there seems to be a preference (or a tendency) to interpret one pattern over the other pattern (in our test sentences, total negation is preferred). but prosody is not optimal enough to turn around such a preference when it comes to ambiguity resolution. conclusion and future study the aim of this study was to examine if l2 japanese learners use prosody to disambiguate the total and partial negation readings of sentences involving negation and universal quantifier. based on the results of this study, it was shown that l2 japanese speakers were not able to use prosodic cues to disambiguate the scopally ambiguous sentences used in this study. their performance was better on identifying the total negation reading as opposed to the partial negation reading, which can be explained using the cognitive principle defined under the relevance theory. in this study we only investigated the usefulness of prosody in disambiguation. the next step would be to examine the effect of a preceding context on disambiguation. in previous empirical studies, while prosody and/or context have robustly been utilized to control the meaning of any utterance, another corollary that needs investigation is a “no clue” condition, that is, to not provide any clues—contextual or prosodic—and examine if the participants are sensitive to the ambiguities of these constructions in their written form. these issues will be taken up in our next study. 117the effect of prosody on disambiguation… acknowledgements. the authors are listed as alphabetical order. both authors equally contributed to this paper. we would like to thank the audiences of the 26th international conference on foreign/second language acquisition at the university of silesia, szczyrk, poland and the 27th conference of the japanese language teachers’ association of the northeastern region of the united states at mit for their valuable comments, especially danuta gabryśbarker and adam wojtaszek, the editors of this journal. we are grateful to the participants of this study. we also appreciate the insightful comments given to us by dr. mineharu nakayama and wendy look. 118 priya ananth, masaaki kamiya a p p e n d i x 1 experimental stimuli training session sentences (1) soo desu ka  (raising the end) vs. soo desu ka  (lowering the end) ‘is it so?’ ‘it is so.’ (2) ii desu  vs. ii desu  ‘good’ ‘no thanks’ (3) really  vs. really  (4) is that right  vs. is that right  pretest sentences (p1) sooda to biiru-ga arimasita. lisa to mari-wa soda-o nomimasita-ga, john to naoya-wa biiru-o nomimasita. ‘there was soda and beer. lisa and mari drank soda, while john and naoya drank beer.’ (p2) kyoo-wa tomodati-no tanzyoobi desu. minnade puresento-o kaimasyou. ‘today is our friend’s birthday. let’s all buy her a present together.’ (p3) omosirosoona geemu-ga arunode minnade geemu-o simasita. ‘the game looked interesting, so all the students played it together.’ (p4) tomodati-ga pai-o tukutta node minnnade pai-o tabemasyoo. ‘my friend made a pie, so let’s all eat it together.’ (p5) lisa to mari-wa ikimasitaga, naoya-wa ikimasendesita. ‘lisa and mari went, but naoya did not go.’ test sentences (1) computer-ga benri desu ga, minna-wa motteimasendesita. (total negation) computer-nom convenient is but all-top had not ‘computers are convenient, but all the students didn’t have them.’ (2) ame-ga hutteiru node kasa-ga irimasu ga, minna-wa arimasen. (partial negation) rain-nom falling so umbrella-nom necessary but all-top have not ‘it is raining and they need umbrellas, but all the students don’t have them.’ (3) computer-ga benridesu ga, minna-wa tukaimasen desita. (total negation) computer-nom convenient is but all-top use did not ‘computers are convenient, but all the students didn’t use them.’ (4) geemu-ga omosirosoo desu ga, minna-wa simasendesita. (partial negation) game-nom interesting is but all-top did not ‘the game looked interesting, but all the students didn’t play it.’ (5) omosiroi hon desu kedo, minna-wa yomimasendesita. (total negation) interesting book is but all-top read did not ‘it is an interesting book, but all the students didn’t read it.’ (6) kyoo-wa gakkoo-ga arimasita ga, minna-wa ikimasendesita. (partial negation) today-top school-nom there was but all-top go did not ‘today they had school, but all the students didn’t go.’ (7) spring break-de biichi-ni ikimasu ga, hotel-wa takai node, minna-wa tomarimasen. 119the effect of prosody on disambiguation… spring break-at beech-to go but hotel-top expensive because all-top stay did not (partial negation) ‘during spring break they will all go to the beach. but since the hotel is expensive, all the students will not stay there.’ (8) keetaidenwa-wa benri desu ga, minna-wa motteimasendesita. (partial negation) cellphone-top convenient is but all-top have not ‘cell phones are convenient, but all the students don’t have them.’ (9) asita-wa tesuto desu. coffee-ga arimasu ga, minna-wa nomimasendesita (total negation) tomorrow-top test is coffee-nom there is but all-top drink did not ‘tomorrow is test. there was coffee there, but all the students didn’t drink it.’ (10) party-ga arimasita kedo, minna-wa ikimasendesita. (partial negation) party-nom there was but all-top go did not ‘there was a party, but all the students didn’t go.’ (11) nihongo-no syukudai-wa asita made desu ga, minna-wa simasendesita. (total negation) japanese-gen homework-top tomorrow until is but all-top do did not ‘the japanese homework was due tomorrow, but all the students didn’t do it.’ (12) kanji-wa muzukasii kedo, minna-wa benkyoosimasendesita (partial negation) kanji-top difficult but all-top study did not ‘kanjis are difficult, so all the students didn’t study them.’ (13) pai-o tukuritakattanodesu ga, minna-wa tukurimasendesita. (total negation) pie-acc make wanted is but all-top make did not ‘although they wanted to make pies, all the students didn’t make them.’ (14) oisisoona keeki-ga arimasita ga, minna-wa tabemasendesita (partial negation) delicious cake-nom there was but all-top eat did not ‘the cake looked delicious, but all the students didn’t eat it.’ (15) omosirosoona geemu-ga utteimasu ga, minna-wa kaimasendesita. (partial negation) interesting game-nom selling but all-top buy did not ‘there was an interesting looking game in the market, but all the students didn’t buy it.’ (16) omosirosoona eiga-ga arimasita ga, minna-wa mimasendesita (total negation) interesting movie-nom there was but all-top watch did not ‘the movie seemed interesting, but all the students didn’t watch it.’ filler sentences (1) kyoo-wa tesuto-ga arimasita. minna-wa yoku dekimasita. todaytop testnom there was alltop good did ‘today there was a test. all the students did well on it.’ (2) oisisoona aisukuriimu-ga arimasita. minna-wa kaimasita. delicious ice creamnom there was alltop bought ‘there was ice-cream that looked delicious, so all the students bought it.’ (3) science-no zyugyoo-ga arimasita. minna-wa yoku wakarimasita. sciencegen classnom there was alltop good understood ‘there was a science lesson today, and all the students understood it well.’ (4) oisisoona ringo-ga arimasita. minna-wa tabemasita. delicious applenom there was alltop ate ‘the apples looked delicious, and all the students ate them.’ (5) sooda-ga arimasita. minna-wa nomimasita. sodanom there was alltop drank ‘there were pop drinks, and all the students drank them.’ (6) computer-wa benri nanode minna-wa motteimasu. 120 priya ananth, masaaki kamiya computertop convenient so alltop have ‘computers are convenient, so all the students have them.’ (7) ame-ga hutteite kasa-ga irimasu ga, minna-wa arimasu. rainnom falling umbrellanom necessary but alltop have ‘it is raining and they need umbrellas. all the students have them.’ (8) computer-wa benrinanode, minna-wa tukaimasita. computertop convenient so alltop use ‘computers are convenient, so all the students used them.’ (9) omosiroi nihongo-no hon-ga attanode, minna-wa kaimasita. interesting japanesegen booknom there was so alltop bought ‘there was an interesting japanese book, so all the students bought it.’ (10) spring break-de hoteru-ni ikimasu. minna-wa tomarimasu. spring break-for hotel-to go alltop stay ‘during spring break they’ll go to a hotel, and all the students will stay there.’ (11) oisisoona coffee-ga arimasita. minna-wa nomimasita. delicious coffeenom there was alltop drank ‘the coffee looked delicious, so all the students drank it.’ (12) nihon dewa keetaidenwa-wa benri nanode, minna-wa motteimasita. japan in cellphonetop convenient so alltop have ‘cell phones are convenient in japan, so all the students had them.’ (13) omosirosoona eiga-ga arimasita kara, minna-wa mimasita. interesting movienom there was because alltop watched ‘the movie seemed interesting, so all the students watched it.’ (14) omosirosoona hon nanode, minna-wa yomimasita. interesting book so alltop read ‘the book seemed interesting, so all the students read it.’ english version pretest sentences (1) there was soda and beer. lisa and mari drank soda, while john and naoya drank beer. (2) today is our friend’s birthday. let’s all buy her a present together. (3) the game looked interesting, so all the students played it together. (4) my friend made a pie, so let’s all eat it together. (5) lisa and mari went, but naoya did not go. test sentences (t1) computers are convenient, but all the students didn’t have them. (total negation) (t2) it is raining and they need umbrellas, but all the students don’t have them. (partial negation) (t3) computers are convenient, but all the students didn’t use them. (total negation) (t4) the game looked interesting, but all the students didn’t play it. (partial negation) (t5) it is an interesting book, but all the students didn’t read it. (total negation) (t6) today they had school, but all the students didn’t go. (partial negation) (t7) during spring break they will all go to the beach. but since the hotel is expensive, all the students will not stay there. (partial negation) (t8) cell phones are convenient, but all the students don’t have them. (partial negation) (t9) there was coffee there, but all the students didn’t drink it. (total negation) 121the effect of prosody on disambiguation… (t10) there was a party, but all the students didn’t go. (partial negation) (t11) the japanese homework was due tomorrow, but all the students didn’t do it. (total negation) (t12) kanjis are difficult, so all the students didn’t study them. (partial negation) (t13) although they wanted to make pies, all the students didn’t make them. (total negation) (t14) the cake looked delicious, but all the students didn’t eat it. (partial negation) (t15) there was an interesting looking game in the market, but all the students didn’t buy it. (partial negation) (t16) the movie seemed interesting, but all the students didn’t watch it. (total negation) filler sentences (f1) today there was a test. all the students did well on it. (f2) there was ice-cream that looked delicious, so all the students bought it. (f3) there was a science lesson today, and all the students understood it well. (f4) the apples looked delicious, and all the students ate them. (f5) there were pop drinks, and all the students drank them. (f6) computers are convenient, so all the students have them. (f7) it is raining and they need umbrellas. all the students have them. (f8) computers are convenient, so all the students used them. (f9) there was an interesting japanese book, so all the students bought it. (f10) during spring break they’ll go to a hotel, and all the students will stay there. (f11) the coffee looked delicious, so all the students drank it. (f12) cell phones are convenient in japan, so all the students had them. (f13) the book seemed interesting, so all the students read it. (f14) the movie seemed interesting, so all the students watched it. references büring, d. (1997). the great scope inversion conspiracy. linguistics and philosophy, 20, 175–194. fodor, j. d. (2002). prosodic disambiguation in silent reading. nels, 32, 113–132. fultz, a. (2007). prosody in syntactic disambiguation in english-french interlanguage. proceedings of the annual boston university conference on language development, 32, 394–405. gualmini, a. (2004). some knowledge children don’t lack. linguistics, 42, 957–982. goss, s., & nakayama, m. (2011). prosodic production and sentence comprehension in l2 japanese. second language, 10, 33–50. hattori, n., ayano, s., herrick, d., stringer, d., & sugisaki, k. (2006). topics in child japanese. in y. otsu (ed.), proceedings of the seventh tokyo conference on psycholinguistics (pp. 103– 120). tokyo: hitsuji publishing company. jackendoff, r. (1972). semantic interpretation in generative grammar. cambridge, ma: mit press. jun, s.-a. (2003). prosodic phrasing and attachment preferences. journal of psycholinguistic research, 32(2), 219–249. kamiya, m., & look, w. (2012). prosody and scope interactions in l2 japanese learners. l2 prosody workshop. north wales, uk: bangor university. 122 priya ananth, masaaki kamiya krajlic, t., & brennan, s. e. (2005). prosodic disambiguation of syntactic structure: for the speaker or for the addressee? cognitive psychology, 50, 194–231. kuno, s. (1973). the structure of the japanese language. cambridge, ma: mit press. ladd, r. (1996). intonational phonology. cambridge: cambridge university press. leddon, e. m. (2003). suprasegmental cues to meaning in child-directed speech. qualifying paper. northwestern university. leddon, e. m., lidz, j., & pierrehumbert, j. b. (2004). suprasegmental cues to meaning in child-directed speech. cuny sentence processing conference. university of maryland, college park, md. liberman, m., & sag, i. (1974). prosodic form and discourse function. chicago linguistic society, 10, 416–427. lingel, s., pappert, s., & pechmann, t. (2006). the prosody of german pp-attachment ambiguities: evidence from production and perception. poster presentation at the 12th annual conference on architectures and mechanisms for language processing (amlap). the netherlands, nijmegen. maynell, l. (2005). prosodic effects of relative clause attachment in english. unpublished manuscript. the ohio state university. musolino, j. (1998). universal grammar and the acquisition of semantic knowledge. phd thesis, university of maryland. musolino, j., crain, s., & thornton, r. (2000). navigating negative quantificational space. linguistics, 38(1), 1–32. musolino, j. and gualmini, a. (2004). the role of partitivity in child language. language acquisition, 12(1), 97–107. musolino, j., & lidz, j. (2006). why children aren’t universally successful with quantification. linguistics, 44(4), 817–852. nakanishi, k. (2007). prosody and scope interpretations of the topic marker wa in japanese. in c. lee et al. (eds.), topic and focus: cross-linguistic perspectives on meaning and intonation (pp. 177–193). springer netherlands. pierrehumbert, j., & hirschberg, j. (1990). the meaning of intonational contours in the interpretation of discourse. in p. r. cohen, j. morgan, & e. e. pollack (eds.), intentions in communication (pp. 271–311). cambridge, ma: mit press. schafer, a., speer, s., warren, p., & white, d. (2000). intonational disambiguation in sentence production and comprehension. journal of psycholinguistic research, 29, 169–182. snedecker, j., & tueswell, j. (2003). using prosody to avoid ambiguity: effects of speaker awareness and referential context. journal of memory and language, 48, 103–130. sperber, d., & wilson, d. (1986). relevance: communication and cognition. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. steedman, m. (1991). structure and intonation. language, 67, 260–296. tsujimura, n. (2014). an introduction to japanese linguistics. third ed. malden, ma: john wiley & sons ltd. ward, g., & hirschberg, j. (1985). implicating uncertainty: the pragmatics of fall-rise intonation. language, 61, 747–776. wilson, d., & sperber, d. (2004). relevance theory. in l. horn & g. ward (eds.), the handbook of pragmatics. malden, ma: blackwell publishing ltd. priya ananth, masaaki kamiya prosodie vs. mehrdeutigkeit bei allgemeinem quantor und bei negationen z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die in dem artikel geschilderte empirische forschung zeigt, auf welche weise die das japanische als zweite sprache lernenden die, eine negation und einen quantor (eng.: universal quantifier) enthaltenen mehrdeutigen sätze bei prosodischen signalen (eng.: prosodic cues) interpretieren. frühere forschungen bewiesen, dass die japanische sprache lernenden erwachsenen bei prosodischen signalen solche sätze entweder als völlig negativ (eng.: total negativ) oder teilweise negativ (eng.: partial negativ) interpretierten. derzeitige forschung hat diese ergebnisse in frage gestellt, indem sie besonders die völlige negation als vorherrschende interpretation von mehrdeutigen sätzen darstellte, selbst bei den prosodischen signalen, die nur eine partielle negation bestätigen würden. die verfasser gelangten zum schluss, dass die japanisch lernenden personen den prosodischen signalen bei interpretation von mehrdeutigen sätzen keine große bedeutung beimessen und wahrscheinlich andere merkmale für eindeutige interpretation der sätze ausschlaggebend sind. the effect of prosody on disambiguation… 123 theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 7 (2), 2021, pp. 83–107 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.8594 alejandra montero-saizaja https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9835-6069 university of la rioja, spain gender-based differences in efl learners’ language learning strategies and productive vocabulary a b s t r a c t gender is a key factor in the field of second language acquisition (sla), where its impact on language learning strategies (aslan, 2009; oxford & nyikos, 1989; sumarni & rachmawaty, 2019) and productive vocabulary (canga alonso & arribas garcía, 2014; fleckenstein, 2018; jiménez catalán & moreno espinosa, 2004) has been investigated. however, to our knowledge, there is a lack of research of gender on language learning strategies in relation to productive vocabulary in english as a foreign language (efl). the present study aimed to pursue three objectives. the first one was to ascertain whether male or female learners employed more language learning strategies. the second objective was to determine whether male or female learners had more productive vocabulary. finally, the third objective was to investigate whether there was a statistically significant relationship between language learning strategies and productive vocabulary. the sample consisted of 51 efl learners (20 males and 31 females) in the second year of spanish non-compulsory secondary education (equivalent to the 12th grade). the strategy inventory for language learning (sill) questionnaire (oxford, 1990) and the productive vocabulary levels test (pvlt) (laufer & nation, 1995, 1999) were the instruments employed in order to measure the informants’ language learning strategies and controlled productive vocabulary respectively. afterwards, students’ answers were processed electronically and analyzed quantitatively. results revealed that females used language learning strategies significantly more than males, but there were not statistically significant differences between them regarding productive vocabulary. moreover, a positive correlation was found between language learning strategies and productive vocabulary. keywords: gender-differences, language learning strategies, productive vocabulary, efl learners, second year of spanish non-compulsory secondary education https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en http:// https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.8594 alejandra montero-saizaja84 since the 1970s, research in the field of second language acquisition focused on the differences between males and females in language use: vocabulary, grammar, and speech. indeed, women’s language was considered inferior to the language use of their male counterparts (lakoff, 1973; pavlenko, 2001). concerning sla and fla, a traditional concern was to ascertain whether males or females were better language learners. at first, the informants were only considered as males or females, referring to their biological characteristics (ehrlich, 1997; sunderland, 2000). afterwards, other differences were analyzed (ekstrand, 1980; norton & pavlenko, 2004), such as motivation or context, which is the view that predominates nowadays. those gender differences, which can be physical, social, cultural or a combination of them, have been the focus of research in different areas of sla and fla, such as listening comprehension (boyle, 1987; namaziandost, savzevar, & hashemifardnia, 2018), vocabulary and learning strategies (noprianto & purnawarman, 2019; oxford & nyikos, 1989), or learning styles (lau & gardner, 2019; reid, 1987). regarding the field of vocabulary acquisition, there is scarcity of research respecting gender and vocabulary. some aspects measured were vocabulary size (gu, 2010), vocabulary level (harji, balakrishnan, bhar, & letchumanan, 2015), or receptive vocabulary (agustín llach & terrazas gallego, 2012; jiménez catalán & terrazas gallego, 2005–2008). there are inconclusive results because no research has been found that measures the same aspects employing the same test, methodology and educational level, from which objective outcomes could be determined. the aim of this study is to account for the role of gender in both language learning strategies and productive vocabulary in efl learners in the second year of spanish non-compulsory secondary education. the first section provides an overview on gender and its relationship with sla or fla, focusing more on the influence of gender on language learning strategies and productive vocabulary. a report of the study conducted with its methodology, main findings found and interpretation of the same follows. this paper concludes by pointing out the limitations of the study and some lines for further research. an overview of gender gender and second/foreign language acquisition the field of gender and sla or fla has been the focus of research since the 1970s. at first, studies focused exclusively on sex as a male/female binary opposition, only considering it as a biological category (ehrlich, 1997; sunderland, gender-based differences in efl learners’ language learning strategies… 85 2000). the center of attention was sex differences in language use (vocabulary, grammar, and speech), which usually implied female disadvantage. accordingly, individual differences (e.g., social and cultural factors) have been left behind. these individual differences seem essential to ascertain why a person is a better language learner than another, since sex does not assure that. from 1990 onwards, only individual differences were included in subsequent studies because they were thought to have a significant impact on the acquisition of a second or foreign language. those divergences, that could be physical, social, cultural or a combination of them, were highly relevant for second and foreign language teachers, as they let them know how diverse their students were (hugar, 1982). this means that learners differ from one another because of the internal (e.g., motivation, emotion) and external factors (e.g., context, type of test) that surround them. therefore, this approach completely excludes sex as a biological category. another viewpoint is to consider gender as both a biological category and a psychological, social, and cultural factor to ascertain its role in the acquisition of a sl or fl. however, as hugar (1982) and saville-troike (2006) claim, there is no research about how sex, recognized as a biological factor, influences second or foreign language acquisition. studies might have focused and still focus on gender as a social and cultural factor because it gives more enriching results for sla and fla. the sole consideration of biological differences only reveals sex-related differences and excludes other significant factors (physical, social, cultural) that contribute to learning. gender differences have been investigated in several areas in sla and fla, such as listening comprehension (boyle, 1987; namaziandost et al., 2018), language achievement (burstall, 1975; ekstrand, 1980), vocabulary and learning strategies (noprianto & purnawarman, 2019; oxford & nyikos, 1989), or learning styles (oxford & ehrman, 1995; reid, 1987). the general belief is that females are better language learners, but this is not always the case. in a nutshell, there are inconclusive findings because some scholars declare the superiority of females over males (ekstrand, 1980; lópez-rúa, 2006), others claim that males are better language learners than females (andreou, vlachos, & andreou, 2005; boyle, 1987), and no significant differences have been disclosed (bacon, 1992). gender and language learning strategies the first research on language learning strategies dates back to the mid1970s, when an approach was adopted to determine why some learners were more successful than others in learning a second language. some scholars (naiman, frohlich, stern, & todesco, 1978; rubin, 1975; stern, 1975) drew attention to good language learners to determine their characteristics in second alejandra montero-saizaja86 language learning. according to rubin (1975, pp. 45–47), a good language learner: (1) was a great guesser; (2) had an urge to communicate; (3) was willing to apply his/her knowledge; (4) focused on form; (5) practiced the language; (6) observed both his/her and others’ speech; and (7) focused on meaning. since then, language learning strategies have been thoroughly investigated (cohen, 1998; o’malley & chamot, 1990; oxford, 1990, 2011) because they have been considered as influencing the way learners learn a sl or fl. several definitions have been proposed during the 1980s and 1990s. oxford (1990, p. 8) defines language learning strategies as “steps taken by the learner to make learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self-directed, more effective, and more transferrable to new situations.” for chamot (1987, p. 71), they refer to the “techniques, approaches or deliberate actions students take in order to facilitate the learning, recall of both linguistic and content area information.” however, there appears to be no consistency among scholars concerning the nature of these strategies, that is, whether they are mental, behavioral, or both mental and behavioral. regarding the mental component, cohen states that they are “the steps or actions consciously selected by learners either to improve the learning of a second language, the use of it, or both” (1998, p. 5). oxford only considers behavior, and describes them as “behaviours or actions which learners use to make language learning more successful, self-directed and enjoyable” (1989, p. 235). on the other hand, o’malley and chamot (1990) and oxford (1990) declare that they are both thoughts and behaviors that learners apply to understand, learn, and retain new information. it should be considered that not only are language learning strategies mental and behavioral processes, but they also depend on other variables, such as age, gender, proficiency, personality, context, and purpose of learning. these factors will influence learners’ choice of these strategies, which would allow teachers and researchers to acknowledge the way learners learn a second or foreign language. through strategy training, teachers could instruct learners in these strategies so that they could become more independent in the learning process. other features of learning strategies are that they are problem-oriented, flexible, and support learning both directly and indirectly (oxford, 1990). concerning taxonomies, scholars have proposed many classifications (cohen, 1998; o’malley & chamot, 1990; oxford, 1990, 2011; wenden, 1983) (see table 1). oxford divides learning strategies into two classes: direct and indirect. direct strategies involve “working with the target language itself in a variety of specific tasks and situations.” they comprise memory, cognitive and compensation strategies. memory strategies help learners “store and retrieve new information,” cognitive strategies allow learners to manipulate or transform the target language, and compensation strategies “enable learners to use the new language for either comprehension or production despite limitations in knowledge” (oxford, 1990, pp. 14, 37, 47). indirect strategies “support and manage gender-based differences in efl learners’ language learning strategies… 87 language learning without directly involving the target language.” they include metacognitive, affective, and social strategies. metacognitive strategies “provide a way for learners to coordinate their own learning process,” while affective strategies refer to the positive emotions and attitudes that are produced in the learning process, and social strategies involve the use of language for communication and interaction (oxford, 1990, pp. 15, 136). the strategy inventory for language learning (sill) (oxford, 1990), as it will be discussed in the methodology, considers the strategies proposed by oxford in 1990. these are the strategies that are going to be analyzed in this study because they seem to be more detailed and inclusive. table 1 taxonomies of language learning strategies scholars taxonomies of language learning strategies wenden (1983) self-directing strategies: knowing about language, planning and self-evaluation o’malley and chamot (1990) cognitive, metacognitive and social/affective oxford (1990) direct strategies: memory, cognitive, and compensation indirect strategies: metacognitive, affective, and social cohen (1998) cognitive, metacognitive, affective, and social oxford (2011) strategies: cognitive, affective, and sociocultural-interactive metastrategies: metacognitive, meta-affective, and metasociocultural-interactive research has correlated language learning strategies with several different variables, such as age (griffiths, 2003; sepasdar & soori, 2014), course level (lópez aguado, 2011; yaacob et al., 2019), cultural background (el-dib, 2004; oxford & ehrman, 1995), learning styles (baltaoğlu & güven, 2019; oxford & ehrman, 1995; tabanlioğlu, 2003), proficiency (mutar, 2018; oxford & nyikos, 1989), vocabulary size (gorevanova, 2000; rahimi & allahyari, 2019), or years of study (oxford & nyikos, 1989). nevertheless, the relationship between language learning strategies and gender has not been as widely researched as the above-mentioned variables. part of this study will be devoted to this issue because it is believed to be advantageous for teachers and researchers to acknowledge the types of learning strategies that both male and female learners employ so that more instruction could be given in the strategies that students do not use that often. scholars have mostly explored the relationship between language learning strategies and gender in primary, secondary, and university efl learners world-wide (see table 2). therefore, this section will analyze a summary of studies throughout history to ascertain whether male or female learners use more language learning strategies. alejandra montero-saizaja88 in oxford and nyikos (1989), and oxford and ehrman’s research (1995) in the usa, female university students were reported to use more language learning strategies than males. the same occurs with turkish efl learners (aslan, 2009; oflaz, 2019; salahshour, sharifi, & salahshour, 2013; yilmaz, 2010), whose studies proved female advantage. the disparity in these investigations was that all accounted for university students, except salahshour et al. (2013) whose sample comprised high school learners. along the same lines, research with spanish and polish university informants (garcía herrero & jiménez vivas, 2015; lópez aguado, 2011; pawlak, 2013) concluded that females make a larger use of learning strategies. similarly, investigations conducted with asian learners (ghadessy, 1998; goh & foong, 1997; khan, shah, & ahmad, 2018; lan & oxford, 2003; tamada, 1996) purported that women employ more learning strategies than men. the only difference was that lan and oxford’s (2003) sample was composed of 6th graders, instead of university students. alhaisoni (2012) and alhaysony (2017) focused on saudi arabian university learners, but no significant differences in these strategies were encountered between males and females. in the same manner, nisbet, tindall, and arroyo (2005), marzban and barati (2016), and alsohbani (2018) concurred with these outcomes, but their samples came from chinese, iranian, and turkish students, respectively. however, the first two studies dealt with university learners, whilst alsohbani (2018) examined 10th, 11th, and 12th graders. by contrast, research conducted in singapore by wharton (2000), in turkey by tercanlioglu (2004), and in indonesia by sumarni and rachmawaty (2019) demonstrated that men exceed women in their use of language learning strategies. table 2 a summary of studies on gender and language learning strategies study instruments participants’ background findings oxford and nyikos (1989) sill university studentsn 1200 (m: 600; f: 600) usa females oxford and ehrman (1995) sill university students n 520 (m: 273; f: 247) usa females tamada (1996) sill university studentsn 24 (m: 10; f: 14) japan females goh and foong (1997) sill university studentsn 175 (m: 125; f: 50) singapore females ghadessy (1998) sill university studentsn 602 (m: 284; f: 318) hong kong females warton (2000) sill university studentsn 676 (m: 442; f: 234) singapore males lan and oxford (2003) sill 6th th grade students n 379 (m: 202; f: 177) taiwan females gender-based differences in efl learners’ language learning strategies… 89 tercanlioglu (2004) sill university studentsn 184 (m: 44; f: 140) turkey males nisbet, tindall and arroyo (2005) sill university students n 168 (m: 29; f: 139) china no significant difference aslan (2009) sill university studentsn 257 (m: 153; f: 104) turkey females yilmaz (2010) sill university studentsn 140 (m: 23; f: 117) turkey females lópez aguado (2011) ceta university studentsn 805 (m: 287; f: 518) spain females alhaisoni (2012) sill university students n 701 (m: 434; f: 267) saudi arabia no significant difference pawlak (2013) sill university studentsn 280 (m: 84; f: 196) poland females salahshour, sharifi and salahshour (2013) sill high school students n 65 (m: 25; f: 40) turkey females garcía herrero and jiménez vivas (2015) sill university students n 135 (m: 42; f: 93) spain females marzban and barati (2016) sill university students n 100 (m: 40; f: 60) iran no significant difference alhaysony (2017) sill university studentsn 134 (m: 66; f: 68) saudi arabia no significant difference alsohbani (2018) sill 10 th, 11th and 12th graders n 83 (m: 40; f: 43) turkey no significant difference khan, shah and ahmad (2018) sill university students n 160 (m: 97; f: 63) pakistan females oflaz (2019) sill university studentsn 110 (m: 35; f: 75) turkey females sumarni and rachmawaty (2019) sill university students n 24 (m: 12; f: 12) indonesia males gender and productive vocabulary vocabulary plays a crucial role in sla and fla (laufer, 1998; meara, 1990; nation, 1990) because knowing the vocabulary of a language, learners would be able to communicate effectively. consequently, examining learners’ vocabulary size would allow both teachers and researchers to ascertain learners’ threshold vocabulary level and whether more instruction is needed so that students can read and comprehend texts (laufer, 1998). it would also be helpful for learners to know the aspects in which they need to improve to make their learning more successful. cont. table 2 alejandra montero-saizaja90 the studies that have investigated the relationship between gender and vocabulary acquisition in sl or fl learning are not only scarce but also dispersed. outcomes are inconclusive since some studies reveal female superiority (nyikos, 1990; scarcella & zimmerman, 1998), whilst others identify a male advantage (lin & wu, 2003; lynn, fergusson, & horwood, 2005). vocabulary can be classified into two types: receptive and productive. receptive vocabulary relates to the perception of a linguistic form and the understanding of its meaning in both listening and reading (meara, 1990). productive vocabulary, in its turn, concerns the production of words in speaking and writing to convey meaning (nation, 2001). two types of productive vocabulary can be distinguished: controlled and free types. controlled productive vocabulary refers to the production of words when they are triggered by a task. as laufer (1998, p. 257) puts it, it is just to complete the following sentence: “[t] he garden was full of fra—flowers” with the word “fragrant.” on the contrary, free productive vocabulary alludes to the use of words at one’s free will (laufer & nation, 1999). this research is dedicated to the study of controlled productive vocabulary, which is what the instrument productive vocabulary levels test (pvlt) (laufer & nation, 1995, 1999) measures, as it will be explained in the methodology. research on productive vocabulary is necessary to acknowledge the amount of words a learner knows in each educational level and context. its relationship with gender would allow us to explore gender-based divergences in the acquisition of vocabulary. therefore, part of this study will be devoted to this issue. little research has been conducted about productive vocabulary and gender (see table 3). scholars (harji et al., 2015; jiménez catalán & moreno espinosa, 2004; moyo, 2018; scheepers, 2014) agreed with females as being the ones who had a higher productive vocabulary. they differ in the sample of informants, background, and instruments employed. jiménez catalán and moreno espinosa (2004), scheepers (2014), and harji et al. (2015) focused on spanish, south african, and malaysian university students respectively, whilst moyo’s (2018) sample was composed of south african 6th graders. another divergence was the instrument employed because all of them made use of the pvlt, except jiménez catalán and moreno espinosa (2004) who used lex30. the studies conducted by moreno espinosa (2010), canga alonso and arribas garcía (2014), and fleckenstein (2018) came to the conclusion that there were no significant differences between males and females in productive vocabulary. both canga alonso and arribas garcía (2014) and fleckenstein (2018) dealt with spanish and icelandic 10th graders respectively and employed the pvlt to measure their productive vocabulary. however, moreno espinosa’s (2010) sample was constituted by spanish 4th, 5th, and 6th graders, and she used the lex30. on the contrary, castro garcía’s (2017) research gender-based differences in efl learners’ language learning strategies… 91 revealed that males outperformed females in productive vocabulary. in this case, she investigated 11th graders’ productive vocabulary in costa rica using the pvlt. table 3 studies on gender and productive vocabulary study instruments participants’ background findings jiménez catalán and moreno espinosa (2004) lex30 university students n 19 spain females moreno espinosa (2010) lex30 4th, 5th and 6th grade studentsn 225 (m: 124; f: 101) spain no significant difference canga alonso and arribas garcía (2014) pvlt 10th grade students n 38 (m: 26; f: 12) spain no significant difference scheepers (2014) pvlt university students n 298 (m: 123; f: 175) south africa females harji et al. (2015) pvlt university studentsn 120 (m: 60; f: 60) malaysia females castro garcía (2017) pvlt 11th grade studentsn 180 (m: 84; f: 96) costa rica males fleckenstein (2018) pvlt 10th grade studentsn 75 (m: 40; f: 35) iceland no significant difference moyo (2018) pvlt 6th grade studentsn 66 (m: 33; f: 33) south africa females in broad terms, the review of literature displayed on both language learning strategies and productive vocabulary has revealed gender-based divergences. as commented before, most investigations concluded that females outperformed males in the use of language learning strategies. similarly, studies conducted on productive vocabulary also acknowledged female superiority. there are several studies who have researched gender, vocabulary, and strategies in sla and fla (e.g., gu, 2002; lee, 2007). nonetheless, no research has been found that correlates language learning strategies with productive vocabulary in spanish efl learners. it could be interesting to explore whether the more language learning strategies informants employ, the larger their productive vocabulary will be, to determine whether the most frequent use of language learning strategies implies a better productive vocabulary knowledge. alejandra montero-saizaja92 research questions and hypotheses the present research investigates the relationship between gender, language learning strategies, and productive vocabulary in efl learners. language learning strategies were selected, instead of vocabulary learning strategies, because our purpose was to ascertain efl learners’ general approach to learning and if that general approach had an impact on their productive vocabulary. in fact, vocabulary learning strategies are a subgroup of language learning strategies. to our knowledge, there is a lack of investigations with regards to efl learners in the second year of spanish non-compulsory secondary education. they are students who are between the stages of older adolescence and early adulthood (mean age 17.43), and in the last year of education in the high school, some of them about to apply for university. with the instruments explained in the following section, we will be able to acknowledge the aspects in which the instruction of english as a foreign language could be improved and ascertain gender-based differences. as noted earlier, research revealed female advantage in both language learning strategies and productive vocabulary. therefore, based on previous findings, this study aims to investigate the reply to the following research questions: 1. do males and females employ the same amount of language learning strategies? 2. do males and females have the same amount of productive vocabulary? 3. is there a statistically significant relationship between language learning strategies and productive vocabulary? in respect of the aforementioned research questions, the following hypotheses were tested: h01: females make more use of language learning strategies than males. h02: females possess more productive vocabulary than their male counterparts. h03: there is a statistically significant relationship between language learning strategies and productive vocabulary. methodology the present study is a quantitative, cross-sectional, descriptive, and correlational research. gender-based differences in efl learners’ language learning strategies… 93 informants the sample was constituted by fifty-one efl learners. this group was composed of 20 boys and 31 girls, and their mean age was 17.43. they were enrolled in the last course of spanish post-secondary education (equivalent to the 12th grade) in a state school in la rioja (spain), a monolingual autonomous community. teachers reported that informants’ level of english was b1, which is the level assigned to the 12th grade by the educational board of la rioja. however, the sample differed in the kind of instruction they had received. 5.88% of students had taken content and language integrated learning (clil), 23.53% of learners had studied english with a program of the official school of languages, 27.45% had taken both clil and english with the official school of languages, and the remaining 43.14% had learnt english as a curricular subject. therefore, the number of hours of exposure to efl learning varied. both the english with the official school of languages and the english as a curricular subject groups had received 1,546 hours of instruction in efl, whereas the clil group had received 2,989 hours. these were the hours accumulated after six years of primary education, four years of compulsory secondary education and two years of non-compulsory secondary education. the difference is that official school of languages group focuses more on preparing students for their exams, but the hours of exposure to english are the same for the curricular subject and this group. although the clil group had received the same hours of english (1,546) as the other two groups, they had studied other subjects in english (e.g. social sciences, physical education, geography and history, music, mathematics, technology, philosophy), whilst their peers of the other groups had studied them in spanish. the headmaster of the participating school signed a written consent form so that the tests explained in the next section could be administered to students. in addition, students’ parents and tutors were also informed of this administration and its voluntary basis. instruments and data collection strategy inventory for language learning (sill). the strategy inventory for language learning (sill) questionnaire was designed by rebecca l. oxford (1990) and it was employed to identify the use of language learning strategies. it is made up of fifty items and it is aimed at learners of english as a sl or fl. this questionnaire makes use of the following five likert-scale factors: never or almost never true of me (1), usually not true of me (2), somewhat true of me (3), usually true of me (4), and always or almost always true of me (5). learners have to indicate their answer (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) in each statealejandra montero-saizaja94 ment. for instance, “i use rhymes to remember new english words” (oxford, 1990, p. 294). moreover, it is divided into six subscales: memory strategies (nine items), cognitive strategies (fourteen items), compensation strategies (six items), metacognitive strategies (nine items), affective strategies (six items), and social strategies (six items). productive vocabulary levels test (pvlt). another instrument used was the productive vocabulary levels test (pvlt) proposed by laufer and nation (1995, 1999) to measure the controlled productive vocabulary knowledge of the same informants. this tool is a quantitative measure which explores vocabulary growth by means of analyzing discrete, selective and context dependent vocabulary (moreno espinosa, 2010). the two-thousand-word parallel version (version a + version c) of this test was selected because the knowledge of the two thousand most frequent words is thought to enable learners to communicate both orally and in written form in a foreign language (nation & waring, 1997). in this version, informants have to complete the missing word that appears in thirty different sentence contexts. to do so, they are provided with the first letters of the target words. for example, in the sentence “he was riding a bic—,” they have to complete it with the word “bicycle.” procedure and analysis data were collected in one session during school time. students were presented with a background questionnaire, the sill and the pvlt tests. the background questionnaire was administered to get information about their age, sex, nationality, mother tongue, other languages spoken at home, their instruction in efl, and their previous experience with english. the time assigned to complete both tests, sill and pvlt, was twenty and ten minutes respectively. at the beginning of the tests, apart from written instructions in english, they were also given both orally and in written form in spanish to clarify what students were being asked to do. once data were collected, responses were coded and entered into an excel file. for scoring the sill, a five-point likert scale which ranged from “never or almost never true of me” (1) to “always or almost always true of me” (5) (oxford, 1990) was employed. afterwards, items were summed and the average of use of language learning strategies for each informant was calculated. all pvlt tests were corrected and marked: zero was the lowest score and 30 was the highest. to calculate the productive vocabulary size, nation’s formula was applied: the number of correct answers multiplied by the total number of words of the test (two thousand) and divided by the number of items (30) (nation, 1990, p. 78). we decided that a word was correct if it was well written both gender-based differences in efl learners’ language learning strategies… 95 grammatically and orthographically. the first letters and context are given as a clue, so it is easier to find out to which word it refers. the sample was also analyzed with spss 21 to perform descriptive and inferential statistics and explore whether statistically significant differences arose regarding language learning strategies, productive vocabulary and gender. spearman’s correlation was also implemented to determine whether the relationship between language learning strategies and productive vocabulary was statistically significant. results gender and language learning strategies table 4 shows the descriptive statistics for gender in the study of language learning strategies, revealing a higher means for females than for males. it can be stated that females use language learning strategies slightly more than males, although the difference in mean values between males and females is only 0.50. as depicted in table 4, both male and female respondents coincide with the most and least learning strategy used. social strategies appear to be the most employed, whereas affective strategies seem to be the least used by both groups. therefore, the most and least used learning strategies by male and female respondents are indirect strategies. table 4 descriptive statistics and classification for gender in language learning strategies males females learning strategies mean sd rank learning strategies mean sd rank memory 2.583 .657 4 memory 2.949 .624 5 cognitive 2.578 .432 5 cognitive 3.150 .413 4 compensation 3.03 .522 2 compensation 3.300 .560 3 metacognitive 2.95 .428 3 metacognitive 3.660 .523 2 affective 2.43 .763 6 affective 2.946 1.00 6 social 3.24 .213 1 social 3.780 .241 1 total 2.80 .319 total 3.300 .354 then, kolmogorov-smirnov test was implemented to ascertain if our sample met the normality assumption. as depicted in table 5, the male and female alejandra montero-saizaja96 groups did not meet normality. therefore, a non-parametric test for two independent samples was applied. table 5 normality test for gender-based differences kolmogorov-smirnov gender d p-value males .230 .007 females .163 .036 the u mann-whitney test was implemented to test whether there were inferential statistical differences between both groups. as shown in table 6, there are statistically significant gender divergences in the use of language learning strategies. table 6 inferential statistics for gender in language learning strategies u mann-whitney z p-value 114 –3.783 .0001612 gender and productive vocabulary table 7 displays a higher means and better maximum scores for females in productive vocabulary (27 vs. 25) out of 30 items. both males and females obtained the same minimum score (four points) in the pvlt. females are somewhat beyond the half of corrected words (fifteen) in the aforementioned test, whereas males are a little bit below it. table 7 descriptive statistics for gender in productive vocabulary gender n mean sd min. max. males 20 14.70 5.695 4 25 females 31 15.48 7.145 4 27 with reference to the number of known words out of the 2,000 most frequent ones, which was the object of study of this task, the data indicated that females have far more knowledge of these words than males, as can be observed in table 8. gender-based differences in efl learners’ language learning strategies… 97 table 8 word estimates for males and females in productive vocabulary gender n mean sd min. max. males 20 980 379.658 267 1667 females 31 1,032.258 476.366 267 1800 as for descriptive statistics, the boxplot in figure 1 reveals that the median value of females is higher than that of their male counterparts. regardless of the mean difference between males and females (52), it can be asserted that the overall productive vocabulary of this sample of efl learners is lower than 1,000 words in the case of males, and a little higher concerning female respondents. 1 female male 50 0 10 00 15 00 gender p ro du ct iv e vo ca bu la ry figure 1. boxplot of males’ and females’ productive vocabulary. afterwards, kolmogorov-smirnov test was applied to determine if our sample met the normality assumption. as can be seen in table 9, the sample met normality. therefore, an independent samples test of means comparison was implemented. table 9 normality test for gender-based differences kolmogorov-smirnov gender d p-value males .149 .291 females .133 .172 alejandra montero-saizaja98 the independent samples t-test was conducted to test whether significant statistical differences between males and females arose. as can be observed in table 10, the p-value does not reveal statistically significant gender-based divergences in productive vocabulary. table 10 independent samples t-test two sample t-test t df p-value .434 46.691 .667 language learning strategies and productive vocabulary table 11 illustrates the descriptive statistics for language learning strategies and productive vocabulary. table 11 descriptive statistics for language learning strategies and productive vocabulary mean sd min. max. language learning strategies 3.07 .523 1.60 4.06 productive vocabulary 15.18 6.566 4 27 kolmogorov-smirnov test was implemented. as shown in table 12, both language learning strategies and productive vocabulary met the normality assumption. therefore, spearman’s correlation coefficient was conducted because language learning strategies are measured on an ordinal scale. table 12 normality test for learning strategies and productive vocabulary kolmogorov-smirnov variables d p-value language learning strategies .105 .172 productive vocabulary .118 .073 results show a statistically significant positive correlation between learning strategies and productive vocabulary, being .370 the spearman’s correlation coefficient (see table 13). in this case, there is a moderate correlation between these variables, but it is a positive one. gender-based differences in efl learners’ language learning strategies… 99 table 13 spearman’s correlation of learning strategies and productive vocabulary spearman’s correlation s p-value rho 13914 .0075 .370 discussion concerning the first research question, our data showed that female efl learners in the second year of spanish non-compulsory secondary education used language learning strategies significantly more than males, being 0.50 the difference in mean values. therefore, our first hypothesis was confirmed. this finding concords with previous research conducted (aslan, 2009; garcía herrero & jiménez vivas, 2015; ghadessy, 1998; goh & foong, 1997; khan et al., 2018; lan & oxford, 2003; lópez aguado, 2011; oflaz, 2019; oxford & ehrman, 1995; oxford & nyikos, 1989; pawlak, 2013; salahshour et al., 2013; tamada, 1996; yilmaz, 2010) (see table 2). this does not mean that the difference between male and female learners in learning strategies depends on sex, but on other factors. these studies may agree with female learners using more learning strategies than males because they might be more willing to learn english by means of other techniques, such as watching television, reading or talking in english, rather than by traditional learning, which only concentrates on course books. research proved that female learners have more positive attitudes and higher motivation towards the learning of foreign languages than their male peers (burstall, 1975; dörnyei, csizér, & németh, 2006; griffiths, 2008). what this may imply is that men and women adopt different approaches when it comes to learning a language. on the other hand, this gender-related divergence might also be related to the cultural, social and educational context where the foreign language is acquired. with reference to the learning strategies used by male and female efl learners, social strategies are the most employed, whilst affective strategies are the least used (see table 4). however, it is not consistent with the findings of previous studies. pawlak’s (2013) investigation is the only one which reports that indirect strategies are the most and least employed, as in our study. in this case, metacognitive and affective strategies are the most and least used by male and female respondents. two more studies coincide with affective strategies as being the least employed by both groups (aslan, 2009; yilmaz, 2010). male and female learners perhaps use affective strategies with less frequency alejandra montero-saizaja100 because they are adolescents and they do not like talking about the feelings they have towards people or a language. nevertheless, social strategies might be the most employed in our study because both males and females have many opportunities in their efl class to talk with their classmates and teacher. there are speaking activities in their textbooks which encourage them to discuss issues related to daily life. regarding our second research question, results revealed that there were not statistically significant gender-based divergences in productive vocabulary, which refuted our second hypothesis. our findings coincide with the studies conducted by moreno espinosa (2010), canga alonso and arribas garcía (2014), and fleckenstein (2018) (see table 3). this result might derive from the students being in the same form are exposed to the learning of the same vocabulary throughout their efl courses. nevertheless, as in our study, results pointed out to a slightly higher productive vocabulary in females, except fleckenstein’s (2018), which favored males. this result corroborates the findings of agustín llach and terrazas gallego (2012) and jiménez catalán and terrazas gallego’s (2005–2008) studies, which revealed non-significant gender-related differences in the receptive vocabulary of spanish efl learners from the 4th to the 9th grade, and in the 4th grade, respectively. the average of known words out of the 2,000 most frequent ones differed in the investigations on productive vocabulary. canga alonso and arribas garcía’s research (2014) reported that female 10th graders’ average was 661 words, whereas their male respondents knew 636 words. in fleckenstein’s (2018) study, female learners’ average was 711 words, while male 10th graders had a knowledge of 744 words. however, our findings revealed that 12th grade females knew 1,032 words, whilst males’ mean was 980 words. in the light of our data, it could be stated that there may be differences in learners even if the cultural context is similar. in our view, the better results found in the present study might be due to the difference of two school years among our informants. twelfthth grade students have been more exposed to the english language, which in turn have made them acquire more vocabulary. in the third research question, spearman’s correlation coefficient showed a statistically significant, positive and direct relation between language learning strategies and productive vocabulary, which confirmed our third hypothesis. therefore, it can be inferred that language learning strategies and productive vocabulary are related. this means that the higher the use of learning strategies, the higher the score on productive vocabulary. however, the interpretation of this correlation ought to be taken with caution since it is significant but not strong. our result does not coincide with any of the studies met so far. in contrast, other research (gorevanova, 2000; gu, 2010) found no correlation between vocabulary learning strategies and/or their effect on vocabulary size or productive vocabulary. however, these studies differ from ours since our research examined language learning strategies and productive vocabulary. gender-based differences in efl learners’ language learning strategies… 101 as for limitations, the sample of informants (51) was not very numerous and research was only conducted in one school, so results cannot be taken as representative of either the population of 12th grade students or the autonomous community of la rioja. another constraint was that the sill questionnaire reported the learning strategies that students believed they employed when learning english, but they might not be the ones they actually use in the learning process. on the other hand, productive vocabulary was only measured with one instrument, so the type of task might have influenced the results. with regards to practical implications, the present study reveals the existence of language learning strategies and productive vocabulary in the efl classroom. it could be useful to train teachers in language learning strategies first so that they can become familiar with them. after this strategy training, teachers could instruct male and female foreign language learners in these strategies so that they know more techniques to deal with the learning of english. then, teachers could plan their classes and activities according to the learning strategies of their students. more instruction in vocabulary would also be needed because, as our results showed, male and female learners’ productive vocabulary is around 1,000 words. however, the knowledge of the 2,000–3,000 most frequent words is required to communicate both orally and in written form in a foreign language (nation & waring, 1997). in doing so, their language learning could be improved, and learners could become more autonomous towards the foreign language. conclusions this research has examined the language learning strategies and productive vocabulary of male and female efl learners in the second year of spanish non-compulsory secondary education in la rioja (spain). the data analyzed in the present study indicate three main results. first, female efl learners use language learning strategies significantly more than their male peers. second, there are no statistically significant gender-based differences in productive vocabulary. third, language learning strategies are significantly related to productive vocabulary. it should be considered that these gender-related divergences are not due to their sex, but due to the physical, social, and cultural context that surrounds foreign language learners. as an avenue for further research, longitudinal studies with male and female efl learners could be helpful to determine whether their use of language learning strategies and their productive vocabulary growth increases from primary education to the second year of non-compulsory secondary education. future alejandra montero-saizaja102 studies could also include observation and oral interviews to ascertain whether the learning strategies reported by the questionnaire match the strategies students actually use while learning english. as one of the reviewers suggested, further research could also measure free productive vocabulary, apart from controlled productive vocabulary, by means of speaking, writing, or both, to determine whether gender-related differences arise. in the light of research conducted on both language learning strategies and productive vocabulary, they are two 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(1996). japanese learners’ language learning strategies: the relationship between learners’ personal factors and their choices of language learning strategies (master dissertation). university of lancaster. tercanlioglu, l. (2004). exploring gender effect on adult foreign language learning strategies. issues in educational research, 14(2), 181–193. wenden, a. (1983). literature review: the process of intervention. language learning, 33, 573–597. wharton, g. (2000). language learning strategy use of bilingual foreign language learners in singapore. language learning, 50(2), 203–243. https://doi.org/10.1111/0023-8333.00117 yaacob, a., shapii, a., saad alobaisy, a., al-rahmi, w. m., al-dheleai, y. m., yahaya, n., & alamri, m. m. (2019). vocabulary learning strategies through secondary students at saudi school in malaysia. sage, 9(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244019835935 yilmaz, c. (2010). the relationship between language learning strategies, gender, proficiency and self-efficacy beliefs: a study of elt learners in turkey. procedia – social and behavioral sciences, 2(2), 682–687. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2010.03.084 https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244019844081 https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244019844081 https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijels.v.2n.3p.26 https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijels.v.2n.3p.26 gender-based differences in efl learners’ language learning strategies… 107 alejandra montero-saizaja geschlechtsspezifische unterschiede in den spracherwerbsstrategien und dem produktiven wortschatz von efl-lernern z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g in dem vorliegenden artikel wird der einf luss des geschlechts auf die spracherwerbsstrategien und den produktiven wortschatz von einundfünfzig efl-lernern im zweiten jahr der spanischen fakultativen sekundarstufe untersucht. aus den erzielten ergebnissen lässt sich schlussfolgern, dass weibliche efl-lerner häufiger spracherwerbsstrategien einsetzen als männliche. dennoch wurden keine statistisch signifikanten, geschlechtsspezifischen unterschiede in ihrem produktiven wortschatz festgestellt. die erhobenen daten zeigen, dass die spracherwerbsstrategien in hohem maße mit dem produktiven wortschatz zusammenhängen. das bestehen eines zusammenhangs zwischen spracherwerbsstrategien und dem produktiven wortschatz kann im efl-unterricht von vorteil sein, weil sowohl männliche als auch weibliche lerner unterschiedliche techniken zum erlernen von vokabeln in einer fremdsprache verwenden können. schlüsselwörter: geschlechtsspezifische unterschiede, spracherwerbsstrategien, produktiver wortschatz, efl-lerner, zweites jahr der spanischen fakultativen sekundarstufe theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 4 (1) 2018, pp. 49–67 joanna rokita-jaśkow pedagogical university of cracow social constraints of aspirations for second language achievement a b s t r a c t educational aspirations are defined as “educational goals students set for themselves” (trebbels, 2015, p. 37). they are widely studied in psychological and sociological research, in which it was found that, firstly, aspirations form in late adolescence and early adulthood, and secondly, their goal and level (i.e., high vs. low) are determined by the social environment they come from, that is, their family background, peer and school inf luence. the paper presents the results of the qualitative study, in which 56 students of english philology in one of the vocational schools in the south of poland expressed their aspirations in reference to their future foreign attainment and associated vocational goals. the results showed that in the majority of cases the aspirations are not so high and fully-formed, which, it is hypothesized, is rooted in the social background the students come from. keywords: foreign language, young adults, educational aspirations, social background introduction in the poststructuralist framework to the study of sla, it is emphasized that success in foreign language (fl) learning does not depend merely on the individual psychological traits of the learner, but on the social context in which learning takes place, such as the family, the school, the neighborhood, and even the socio-political situation of the country one lives in. each of these environments determines educational opportunities and limitations, and thus may indirectly impact the learners’ educational decisions. this impact has long been studied in educational psychology (e.g., marjoribanks, 2006; spera, wentzel, & mato, 2009). it has been generally found that educational success is to a large extent dependant on the family environment in the early years, and joanna rokita-jaśkow50 on peer and school influence in the adolescent years. this impact manifests in the arousal and directioning of educational aspirations, which, in turn, justify the effort undertaken towards the achievement of educational goals. while many of the studies focus on the educational aspirations of middleclass youth from big city environments, this one focuses on the aspirations of young people from a rather provincial and rural area. more precisely, it aims to investigate what goals and aspirations young adult learners of l2 english have towards their achievement, how they plan to utilize their l2 knowledge for vocational purposes, and if their aspirations are dependant on social variables. educational aspirations — defining the concept and their determinants educational aspirations are defined as “educational goals an individual sets for himself/herself” (fraser & garg, 2017, p. 807). they can be measured as high, low or medium. the level of aspirations an individual possesses is particularly relevant for educational achievement, as it has been found in research (cf. majoribanks, 2003; farmer, 1985; lewowicki, 1987) that individuals of high educational aspirations tend to achieve higher success in education, which in turn leads to better-paid occupational careers. if that causal relationship is true, one should be interested in boosting educational aspirations in adolescents and young adults, as it is at this age that individuals decide about their vocations. while possessing high/low educational aspirations can be related to a variety of personal characteristics (e.g., skorny, 1980) such as experience of success and failure, level of intelligence, personality, level of neurosis, and perception of self (cf. galas & lewowicki, 1991), more recent research focuses on the social/ environmental factors that contribute to the growth of aspirations, particularly to the role of family, and later in the adolescent years, of school, peers, and even wider educational policy. the influence of the family is seen as an interplay of proximal and distal characteristics. the former relate to socio-emotional and cognitive interactions among the family members. for example, it was found that children of parents presenting an authoritative parenting style characterized by support, emotional warmth, attention, and clear demands are more likely to achieve better results at school (baumrind, 1989). additionally, rosenzweig (1989) identified seven parental practices which contribute to high school attainment: parental educational aspirations and grade expectations, parental engagement, authoritative social constraints of aspirations for second language achievement 51 parenting, autonomy support, emotional support, providing resources and learning experiences, and parental participation in school. these factors stem from the general family orientations towards upbringing and education and are less dependent or dependent indirectly on distal characteristics. the distal characteristics of the family include: socio-economic status (ses), ethnicity, availability of material resources, parental level of education, age of the parents, child gender, family size, living standards, place of living. the most commonly studied of these variables is ses, although its impact on the level of aspirations is not direct. on the one hand, higher-ses families can provide their children with better access to material resources, and can pay for additional/ private tuition. higher-ses parents may also have a higher level of education and show better educational awareness, thus may hold higher educational aspirations. yet, due to performing more time-consuming jobs, they may be less involved, or have less time to engage directly, in their children’s education. as a result, these parents may delegate the role of supporter to teachers, often in private school and private tutoring. by contrast, lower-ses families, not having such capabilities, may aspire for their children’s high educational and occupational achievement more directly by providing such cognitive stimulation on their own. these dependencies show that parents’ own educational aspirations can further be transferred onto children and contribute to the growth of the children’s educational aspirations which normally manifest in late adolescence or early adulthood. it is unclear as to what is first in this cause-effect relationship between aspirations and achievement: is it high educational aspirations which boost higher achievement, or is it high achievement caused by parental educational aspirations which boost high school achievement, where the feeling of success contributes further to the growth of children’s own educational aspirations? a model of growth of educational aspirations has been proposed by garg et al. (2002), who take into account similar characteristics as above, that is, background, environmental and personal factors. the background factors would coincide with the distal factors as distinguished by majoribanks (2003). the environmental factors refer to parental involvement, including their support and communication with school. these could partly overlap with proximal factors. the last element distinguished by garg et al. (2002) is the personal factor, called academic self-schema, which is composed of self-perception of competence, school achievement, attitudes toward education and work, and extracurricular activities such as reading at home. according to the authors, students who have a positive self-schema lay more trust in their learning abilities and find learning more enjoyable. i believe this concept is related to what is known in motivational theories as self-efficacy beliefs. both of these concepts may be an outcome of inborn traits as well as parental support and prior learning joanna rokita-jaśkow52 experiences, thus there is a great role for schooling institutions to support and not discourage learning. finally, it has to be noted that research on educational aspirations is markedly boosted in liberal and democratic societies, where there is an opportunity to move up the social mobility ladder, and where education is considered to be one of the keys to it. high educational aspirations are less likely to arise in communities which have a fairly established social structure, and as a result, little chance to change social position. for this reason, research on educational aspirations has been particularly strong in australia (majoribanks, 2003, 2006), especially among groups of immigrants, and in the usa (spera, wentzel, & mato, 2009), predominatly in the 1970s and 1980s. research conducted in more recent years, that is, from 2000 onwards, has observed that in times of neoliberal economy, it is more difficult to guarantee mobility merely through education. as the number of university graduates has grown, the number of positions for which educated people are required has not. the competition for occupational positions has kept the salaries stable, or has even seen salaries lowered, thus it is hard to say that high educational achievement leads to higher vocational positions and social mobility. as devine (2004), working in the british context, noticed, it was much easier to achieve advancement in the 1960s when the post-war generation had grown-up as there were more places to be filled by educated labor than nowadays. yet, previous advancement occurred not so much due to removing the elite from the privileged positions, but due to a higher demand for skilled professionals and more space at the top. this shows that aspirations are more likely to arise in the times of sociological and historical change. for similar reasons, there is a well-established tradition for psychological and sociological research on aspirations in the polish setting. already in communist times of the 1970s and 1980s, individuals who were willing to complete a higher education usually obtained jobs of higher prestige, although not necessarily much better paid due to the official policy of equality (janowski, 1977; lewowicki, 1987; domański, 2007). another historical moment which precipitated the growth of aspirations, and particularly the need for foreign language competence, was the fall of communism. this was the time when the borders opened, thus giving ground for foreign investments. individuals who knew any fls made astonishing careers in foreign companies, even without formal qualifications for which they made up later on. the 1990s was the period when a variety of foreign languages was learnt and required in the job market. however, with the growth of popularity of english as a global language, this yearning for multilinguality diminished. english dominated the educational and job market, not least since poland joined the eu in 2004. a similar shift in fl motivation has been noticed in hungary, which passed through similar historical moments (cf. dörnyei, csizer, & nemeth, 2006). social constraints of aspirations for second language achievement 53 joining the eu has given many a chance for personal and professional mobility for which languages are necessary, both for communication and functioning in the job market. thus it seems young people should be willing and motivated to learn foreign languages, especially lingua franca english. thanks to it they have a chance to move upwards either in the social or occupational structure. aspirations and sla in sla theory, aspirations have received more attention in theories of language learning motivation, originating in psychology. one of the major theories within achievement motivation theory is attribution theory. attribution theory deals with individuals’ perceptions of their causality and their understanding of cause-effect relationships between various phenomena. it also identifies relationships between a person’s perceptions of causality and their behavioral tendency in the future, especially in reference to achievement motivation and the level of aspirations (weiner, 1972). so the attribution theory has utilized the concept of experience in formulating individuals’ aspirations. the theory claims that people of higher achievement motivation are more likely to attribute their success or failure to their own work and effort. what is more, past experience of a similar type positively influences a person’s orientation towards goals of similar type. by contrast, people of low achievement motivation ascribe their success or failure to pure luck and coincidence, or lack of ability (in the case of failure). this causative relationship can lie at the bottom of the formation of aspirations, as only persons who feel that they have influence over their success or failure in the future can formulate stronger aspirations. weiner (1972) introduced the term locus of control to describe an individual’s power to direct one’s behavior. the locus is the place where an individual places this power in the continuum from objectivity to subjectivity, and can be dependent on the person’s volition, intelligence, ability, or on external influences. aspirations are also regarded as an important component of ideal l2 self, that is, a motivational l2 self theory proposed by dörnyei (2009), as they set goals for learning. in further development of the theory dörnyei (2014, 2015), stated that what motivates learners for the learning activity are their visions of future achievement, which, to my belief, coincides with aspirations. thus imagination plays an important role in establishing the vision/goal. finally, it must be mentioned that no other studies have dealt with young people’s aspirations so far. some common ground can be found in the studies joanna rokita-jaśkow54 conducted by mystkowska-wiertelak and pawlak (2017) on willingness to communicate from the macro(i.e., as a general learner feature) and micro(i.e., as a class factor) perspective. the studies were conducted among students of english philology at the higher vocational school in konin with a view to verifying the factors that make some students more willing to communicate than others. having conducted a number of studies, the authors have proposed a model of interrelated factors influencing wtc. according to them, the variables are: communication confidence, ought-to self, classroom environment, international posture—openness to experience, unplanned in-class wtc, international posture—interest in international affairs, practice-seeking wtc, and planned in-class wtc. of these factors, wtc correlated the most with the two dimensions of international posture, which indicates that learners who are more willing to learn and use the language are those who see its utility in the wider world. this stance, i believe, is rooted in prior experience and social background, and these learners have been found to seek more practice in outof-class situations. the classroom environment was found to be conducive to wtc only if foreign-exchange students were present in class, which indicates that the classroom environment generates fewer communicative activities. this study, focusing only on wtc, has omitted social reasons due to which learners may be motivated towards learning a language and believe in achieving the final goal. while the aforementioned study focused on wtc, the following paper aims to verify the general motivation towards l2 achievement, which could be called the willingness to study. the common feature of both studies is the fact that a learner willing to obtain communicative competence in a fl must be motivated and willing to undertake the effort to study the language, and to actively seek opportunities to use it both in class and in the outside world. the study the following study aims to investigate what are the goals and aspirations for l2 achievement of young adults. it is assumed that in early adulthood aspirations of young people coincide with vocational aspirations, as young adults are at the threshold of making serious decisions regarding their future. their vocational goals determine their educational decisions. it is also assumed that the vision of their future attainment is what can motivate them to undertake a serious effort in pursuing the goal. more precisely, it is investigated why young adults choose to study english philology in a vocational school and how this relates to their vocational aspirations. social constraints of aspirations for second language achievement 55 the following research questions have been addressed: 1. what goals and aspirations do young adult learners of l2 english have towards their fl achievement? 2. how do they plan to utilize their l2 knowledge for vocational purposes? 3. are their aspirations dependant on social variables? if so, which ones? 4. what do they ascribe their fll success to, that is, to what situations, events, factors, people? the social variables taken into account are: socio-economic status (ses)measured as a self-perceived feature on a 7-point scale (1–poor, 7–excellent), parental level of education (1–primary, 5–doctorate level), family size, parental level of fl knowledge. in reference to the last variable, it is believed that those parents who have some fl knowledge can support their children in fl learning by either directly helping with the retention of class material, or by setting positive models and creating opportunities for l2 use. the instrument the instrument was a survey which consisted of seven open-ended questions inquiring about factors, situations and life events which influenced their current fl knowledge, beliefs about factors contributing to/inhibiting success, visions of self and their fl ability in five years’ time, a scale about self-efficacy beliefs, which was to provide information about their locus of control (in their ability of external factors). additionally, the demographic information about self-assessed l2 proficiency, length of learning, gender, age of the learner, as well as their parental level of education, occupation and level of fl knowledge was collected, and the size of family and self-perceived ses measured on the self-assessment scale (1–very bad, 7–very good). the study was qualitative in nature, yet the data will be presented in reference to the social variables. participants the participants of the study were 63 students in their 2nd year of english philology at the higher vocational school in nowy targ. there were: 15 males and 48 females. their mean age was: 20.6. there were 33 students in the teaching specialization group (coded as s1–s33), and 30 students who had chosen the translation specialization (codes s34–63). in the teacher specialization, there was only one male student. joanna rokita-jaśkow56 at this point, it should be mentioned that the region where the school is located differs from others in the sense that traditionally, it has been a place where families were quite big (had many children) and where it was common to emigrate to the usa. thus, there is a long-standing need and willingness to learn english for utilitarian purposes as this language enables communication and higher earnings abroad. also, what makes this study different is the fact that it is the students in big city institutions that are usually investigated/studied, who by getting a place at a prestigious university already show a certain degree of success and ability. the participants in this study come from lower ses families, a group which is quite underrepresented in research. results the following section presents the results of the study, first presenting the quantitative data for the synthesis of the findings, and then illustrating the key points with qualitative remarks. as regards their proficiency level, the students assessed their ability at either b2 (n = 34) or b1 level (n = 28), most probably referring to their results at the matura exam. only one person self-reported a c1 level. this level of fl knowledge allows communicative use, yet still requires further development. it is notable to say that the students have studied l2 english for a relatively long time (mean length of study: 11.2 years), which indicates they have mainly learnt the language throughout the schooling years, however, not always successfully, as the attainment of b1 level shows. surprisingly, more students at b1 level were in the teaching specialization group, while in the translation section there were more students at b2 level. table 1 below shows the types of aspirations as identified in the qualitative analysis together with the quantity of their appearance. in regard to the students’ aspirations referring to their fl attainment and vocational attainment, it can be seen that the learning goals are quite varied. nearly half of the students are language aficionados, as they either aim for achieving a native-like level of english (25%) or wish to learn other foreign languages (22%). thirteen students (21%) would like to be teachers and eight students (13%) would like to be translators, while ten students (16%) would like to emigrate. it seems that to a certain extent their vocational plans are connected with the choice of specialization. the desire to become teachers has been voiced by almost all students in that specialization (88%), whereas in the translation section, vocational plans seem to be more ambiguous. this is manifested in the vast array of responses showing plans which seem to remain in the sphere of social constraints of aspirations for second language achievement 57 dreams rather than being fully materialized plans (positions 8–20). apparently, the choice of this specialization was dictated by the lack of willingness to become a teacher on the one hand, and the desire to obtain additional time before making a final decision on the other. table 1 goals of studying english and future vocational/educational aspirations (n = 63) aspiration type count percentage score % 1. achieving native-like level 16 25 2. learning other languages (italian, russian, german, spanish) 14 22 3. work as a teacher 13 21 4. going/working abroad 10 16 5. work as a translator in a firm/sworn translator 8 13 6. working with languages 6 10 7. emigrate to an eu country/australia/theusa 5 8 8. interpersonal communication 6 10 9. open my own business (language school/kindergarten/tourist agency) 6 10 10. working in tourism (as a guide) 4 6 11. travelling 4 6 12. learning l2 culture 2 3 13. working in a corporation 1 2 14. giving private tution 1 2 15. study further and work 1 2 16. work as a journalist 1 2 17. combine language with studying another field 1 2 18. translating books 1 2 19. helping a family member to learn 1 2 20. working in a consulate 1 2 *the total number of aspirations exceeds the number of respondents as more than one aspiration was expressed. this tendency can be further endorsed by explicitly stated student aspirations. a student from the teaching specialization clearly knows what she would like to do in the future, saying, joanna rokita-jaśkow58 (s1, b2 level): i would like to teach young children so as to give them the best opportunities and make them speak fluently from the earliest years. i would like to speak the language fluently, just like in polish. from this statement, it can be seen that the student perceives a teaching profession as rewarding, and the student’s choice of this career is deliberate with high aspirations for her future learners’ achievement. whereas the students from the translation specialization group say, (s 46) foreign language learning is a pleasure for me; i would like to combine this (hobby) with my future profession. i hope that my language level in 5 years will be advanced. (s 59) i would like to master english to the degree that would enable me free conversation, however, i am trying not to look too much into the future, and so i have no plans. (s 45) it is difficult to say for the time being as i am not planning my future yet. however, i would like to work, maybe as a translator. in that situation i would use the language every day during my work. (s 56) i am going to continue learning l2 in my own way so that it is pleasant and motivating towards the goal. nothing enforced. these students supposedly enjoy learning english, but as they reported elsewhere in the questionnaire, they learnt it to a large extent effortlessly, often by playing online games or using the internet. it might be hypothesized that if students acquired language to a large extent implicitly, they are less familiarized with effective studying techniques, but may have willingness or interest to learn. those who acquired it through conscientious study might have taken liking to it, and consequently, would like to pass their interest and competence to others via the teaching profession. additionally, due to the fact that the students have unclearly specified vocational goals, the students may be less knowledgeable or aware of the ways which help to pursue them. table 2 shows a summary of the students’ beliefs as to what leads to success in a fl. as can be seen, about one third of the students (33%) believe that systematic learning/working hard is sufficient to realize their learning and vocational goals. what is more, nine students (14%) believe that graduation from english studies will help to attain these goals. another five students believe that the key to success is enrolling in additional fl courses. these choices were supported by 53% of the students, and indicated their belief in external factors aiding the process of a fl. the opinions relating to students’ autonomous learning were solitary, and denoted such aspects of learning as: going abroad temporarily (14%), looking for an opportunity to communicate (8%), social constraints of aspirations for second language achievement 59 reading in english (6%), and watching films (6%). furthermore, there were only singular innovative ideas about ways of improving their fl command, such as learning words and structures daily (3 persons) or even finding a job where english is required (2 persons) as a means of improving their command. clearly, these students felt that the best way to improve language skills is to use it frequently (e.g., as when abroad) and for communicative purposes (e.g., at work). it is quite surprising that the learning opportunities provided through various tools on the internet remained unnoticed. only one person pointed to the possibility of using various social networking sites as a means of using a fl. table 2 ways of pursuing the aspirations (n = 63) ways of pursuing the aspirations count percentage score % 1. systematic learning / working hard 21 33 2. graduate from english studies 9 14 3. going abroad for a while 9 14 4. looking for an opportunity to communicate 5 8 5. enroll on fl courses 5 8 6. reading in english 4 6 7. watching films 4 6 8. learning words and structures daily 3 5 9. study more on my own 2 3 10. find a job where english is required 2 3 11. revising l2 material 2 3 12. study more on my own 2 3 13. reward myself for achievements 1 2 14. increase l2 contact 1 2 15. pursue interests 1 2 most of the ways of pursuing aspirations relate to formal instruction which may also indicate the locus of control is placed outside the learner. this further indicates the learners feel less responsible for their own achievements, do not believe in their self-efficacy, and delegate the responsibility for achievement to their teachers. thus it may be speculated the learners are not autonomous and cannot pose clear goals themselves. consequently, learning a foreign language seems for them to be an infinite process. joanna rokita-jaśkow60 one could wonder what the reasons for this situation might be: the longlasting experience of authoritarian education which does not foster autonomy, or lack of out-of-class experiences for learning the language. indeed, in the times of the internet and availability of online resources, the lack of its use is surprising. one would expect greater autonomy and a clear pursuit of the goals by university-level students. the use of metacognitive or affective strategies which would indicate one’s autonomy is also scarce. single metacognitive and affective strategies are mentioned as indicated in statements number 9, 11, 12, 13; however, they were reported only by a few students. this finding may indicate that despite many years of school education, the students still do not know how to learn a language. additionally, it was observed that learners who have already achieved a higher level of l2 proficiency (b2) had more concrete visions of what they would like to achieve, and had more goals and more ideas of how to pursue these goals. similarly, respondents of the teacher specialization group had more accurate plans (students 1–33) than students of the translation group. it may be thus concluded that those who chose a teaching specialization had clearer language learning goals at the start of the study in a higher education institution while those who chose the translation specialization were looking to gain additional time before making a final vocational decision. this standpoint can be illustrated by statements of selected students of the translation group: (s 39) i am planning to complete ba and ma studies. if this does not teach me the language, nothing will, not even working abroad. (s 61) first i would like to learn english perfectly and then go abroad, so as to use it skillfully. from such statements it is evident that the learners have little knowledge of language learning processes and that they allocate teaching-learning effectiveness to educational institutions rather than holding it in their own hands. this finding is quite surprising, as it is already known from research in language pedagogy that what is most conducive to language learning success is going abroad and intensive communicative language use (muñoz, 2012), and not school instruction. the role of implicit language acquisition remains unnoticed. this may be due to the fact that contrary to the initial assumption, not many students in the cohort studied have the experience of living/travelling abroad (only one person was born in the us). as it was found from other responses, in this environment, the goal of many of those young people is to emigrate and stay abroad for good. therefore, language learning is for these social constraints of aspirations for second language achievement 61 young people a tool which will help them realize an important life goal. they learn the language in order to go abroad, and not use an opportunity to stay abroad to improve language skills. language learning has a purely instrumental function. it is also possible that the perception of available life choices is limited. the students may observe their own cognitive and social constraints which do not let them to either dedicate a sufficient amount of time to the study, or use extracurricular resources. as the following student says, (s 41) when i entered the university i thought i would become a worldfamous translator, but now when i understood how difficult it is, i decided to learn the language in order to go abroad. with fl knowledge, it will be easier for me to get a well-paid job, and not e.g. of a cleaner. a student from a low socio-economic background says: (s 37) i spend too much time helping my parents on a farm, and when i have time, i often do everything to put it off. i have poor concentration, i forget about motives that direct me towards fll. this finding leads us to answering the third research question, which aimed to identify social variables which might determine these rather low educational and vocational aspirations. in a vast number of sociological studies, ses is measured as an important social variable influencing l2 outcomes as it enables access to a better quality of education, learning materials, cultural resources, etc. in this study, however, the ses has not turned out to be a significant variable. the mean score was 5.6, which denotes a quite high level of satisfaction with one’s socio-economic status (on a 7-point scale) and indicates that none of them felt any financial inadequacies. for this reason, on the basis of this scale, it was difficult to single out higher or lower ses students. the reason for that might be that ses was measured as a self-assessed feature, and therefore the respondents may not have been willing to reveal their true ses as it is a delicate issue. secondly, it is possible that the students’ perception of their status is quite positive as there are no huge disparities in the level of income among the students, and the sense of well-being is always measured against others. therefore, ses defined as a self-perceived feature has not turned out to be a sufficient/objective descriptor of the ability. however, when we look at other distal variables, such as parental level of education and parental fl knowledge, they can tell us more about the ses of the learners. in the cohort studied, practically no parent knew a fl at a high level (b2). only in one case both parents were reported to speak english at an intermediate level (b1). in all other cases the parents were rejoanna rokita-jaśkow62 ported to have no knowledge or very little (only rudimentary) knowledge of a fl (mean: 0.8 for mothers and 0.4 for fathers). the same can be observed in reference to parental education (mean 2.7 on a 5 point scale). the majority of parents had a vocational or intermediate level of education. there were only a few parents, and these were usually mothers, who had a higher level of education. this data indicates that having taken into account the distal factors of the family environments from which the students came, the group studied was rather homogenous, that is, they came from low socio-economic families in which parents had a lower level of education and no, or only a rudimentary level of, fl knowledge. yet, it is known from other research in educational psychology that in postmodern society, it is particularly the parental level of education and the type of occupation that define the ses of the family. erikson, goldthorpe, and portocarero (1979) developed scales which describe social structure in postmodern society according to occupations. according to them, the occupations which guarantee the highest ses are: intelligentsia, top corporate management, and large-scale businessman, referred to as service class, while the occupations which denote lower ses are: skilled workers, unqualified manual workers, rural workers, and farm owners. taking this classification into account, it can be judged that the participants come from lower ses backgrounds. furthermore, parents of the students studied had little knowledge of a fl themselves, thus were unable to help their children in language learning at school, and/or inspire them for autonomous language development. it may be, therefore, concluded that the impact of low linguistic/cultural capital is evident in the fact that the majority of students ascribe their language success to the teacher and school, or to staying abroad, which, however, was undertaken for work, and not leisure purposes. this view is further illustrated by factors to which the students attributed their current fll level (table 3). as can be seen in table 3, approximately one third of the students ascribe their current fl success to visits/staying abroad. yet, as is known from previous analysis, this experience of living/working abroad has not turned out profitable to all of the students. despite this opportunity, many still believed that attending formal instruction is necessary (cf. table 1). the reason for this may be twofold: the amount of contact with a fl may have been varied and therefore not everyone profited with high proficiency. secondly, it may have been the case that some of the students first had a fl experience, and having realized their deficiencies, opted for more systematic formal instruction. as one of the students confessed, (s 21) in order to improve my language skills i enrolled to the language studies. in my opinion this has increased my liberty at using english. it’s a key element that has influenced my knowledge of english. social constraints of aspirations for second language achievement 63 table 3. student attributions to fl competence sources of language learning success count percent 1. visits abroad; opportunity to practice l2 18 29 2. watching cartoons/films/tv series 10 16 3. willingness to communicate with foreigners/foreign friends 6 10 4. choice of the subject of study/profile class 6 10 5. work (e.g., restaurants) with an opportunity to speak l2/work abroad 6 10 6. total time of learning spent at school 6 10 7. interest in the humanities/languages 5 8 8. school success (in comparison to other school subjects) 5 8 9. listening to l2 songs 4 6 10. playing computer games in l2 4 6 11. private tuition 4 6 12. reading in english 3 5 13. early start in a fl 3 5 14. the teacher (bringing additional materials) 3 5 15. willingness to get to know other cultures 3 5 16. communication in the internet 2 3 17. very good teachers in primary school (raising motivation) 2 3 18. extended program of fl at school (additional classes) 2 3 19. living in the english-speaking country 2 3 20. practice at speaking with foreigners 2 3 21. exchange programmes with schools from abroad 1 2 22. requirement to take a fl at school exams 1 2 23. participation in eu progams (free courses) 1 2 24. help of a family member 1 2 25. self-study 1 2 26. attending language courses 1 2 27. parents’ motivation 1 2 28. *lack of opportunity to speak l2 with foreigners 1 2 29. hard work in preparing for exams/tests 1 2 30. internship abroad 1 2 31. ambition to improve (due to poor school results) 1 2 joanna rokita-jaśkow64 another group of students are those who may not have had a chance of going abroad but found opportunities of learning the language in the home country, arousing their own interest in languages and looking for contacts with foreigners (points 2, 3, 5). however, such self-motivated students constitute only about 10% of the whole cohort. student 29 illustrates this type of experience best: (s 29) i have been always interested in the english language (mainly its melody). i began learning subconsciously with listening to english songs and printing out the lyrics so as to know precisely what they mean. the other factors that influenced my fll are the willingness to communicate with foreign friends; i have always admired people who could speak this language fluently (teachers, translators), and looked up to them. yet another group of students are those who were successful at language learning at school and therefore chose it as a subject of university study. they attended a special profile class with an extended program of english (position 4), or they ascribe it to their overall time spent at school and relative success in language learning as compared to learning other subjects. all other events took place sporadically as they were mentioned by individual students. discussion the above study showed that not all young adults, despite studying in a higher education institution and having chosen a prestigious subject to study (english philology), have high educational and vocational aspirations. only 25% point out to clear language learning goals, like achieving native-like competence or learning other fls (24%). as regards the choice of career, only about one third of the students are positive about their future occupational careers, such as the teaching (21%) or the translation profession (13%). these findings are quite surprising as in socio-pedagogical literature, young adults, when choosing higher educational institutions, have already well crystallized goals. yet, the above findings negate this fact and show rather low, or no, educational and vocational aspirations. this finds reflection in a rather relaxed approach to studying in general, and a lack of study skills. one reason for that fact may be that the students studied have low academic self-schema/self-efficacy beliefs due to low parental involvement at earlier stages of education, and often low language achievement (b1 level). this may denote also that they come from families of low cultural and linguistic social constraints of aspirations for second language achievement 65 capital. thus the fl level they have achieved so far can, to a large extent, be attributed to effortless acquisition rather than to a deliberate plan and investment or conscientious study. the reason they chose to study a fl was probably caused by the fact that they found it easy and enjoyable to learn the language in school times. another reason, which may overlap with the former, is the fact that in times of crisis of neoliberal economy, young people may be less positive about their future and hesitant about what profession to choose. there are few stable jobs available and a higher level of education no longer guarantees access to secure and better-paid jobs. consequently, young people additionally opt for ‘wait time.’ the availability of a free higher education institution in their neighborhood allows them to obtain a diploma, and possibly to gain some academic and/ or professional skills which may turn out useful in the job market. but first and foremost, it allows them to delay making decisions about their vocational future. this often results, in brzezińska’s words, “delayed adolescence” (brzezińska, ziółkowska, & appelt, 2016). young people have a chance to prolong their carefree years and postpone the time of making crucial life decisions, such as starting up a family or setting on a career path, while having a good excuse of study. it can be further speculated that had a higher education institution not been freely available in their environment, these young people would not have chosen to study and would have started to work earlier, possibly in some manual jobs. this provides the justification for the existence of such higher vocational schools in rural areas. the role of educational institutions is to make up for the deficiencies in cultural capital that a family has not been able to cater to, and provide learning opportunities for ambitious individuals. on the other hand, it is speculated that those young adults who have higher educational and vocational aspirations, if only they can afford it, decide to study in bigger cities, where more educational and vocational opportunities can be found. it is also possible that higher educational aspirations are characteristic of gifted learners who have internally placed locus of control and who thus feel more responsible for their learning, and set clearer goals. this issue, however, would require further investigation. conclusion the above study was carried out in a specific social environment, characterized by low socio-economic status, low level of parental education, including fl knowledge. these facts denote that learners can rely on the family environment for educational support to a lesser extent than learners joanna rokita-jaśkow66 from big city schools, where they receive more support from both parents and peers. ambitious adolescents coming from less favorable environments can always look up to their privileged friends, aspire for similar status and seek ways for its achievement. the homogeneity of the group studied is counterproductive as the young adults cannot learn about other career paths or ways to achieve them as they are all in the same boat. emigration seems to be the only available choice in improving one’s socio-economic status. for this reason, the role of school and teachers in awakening educational aspirations, as well as showing means of their realization is even more prominent in rural areas, in a considerable distance from larger educational centers. in a wider socio-political scale, there should be supportive education policies, for example via grants, which enable young people to pursue their aspirations. references baumrind, d. (1989). rearing competent children. in w. damon (ed.), child development today and tomorrow (pp. 349–378). san fransisco: jossey-bass. brzezińska, a., ziółkowska, b., & appelt, k. (2016). psychologia rozwoju człowieka. [psychology of human development]. gdańsk: gwp. devine, f. (2004). class practices. how parents help their children get good jobs. cambridge: cambridge university press. domański, h. (2007). struktura społeczna [social structure]. warszawa: scholar. domański, h., sawiński, z., & słomczyński k. (2007). nowa klasyfikacja i skale zawodów. socjologiczne wskaźniki pozycji społecznej w polsce [a new classification and scales of professions. sociological indicators of social position in poland]. warszawa: wydawnictwo instytutu filozofii i socjologii polskiej akademii nauk. dörnyei, z., & ryan, s. (2015). the psychology of the language learner revisited. new york: routledge. dörnyei, z. (2009). the l2 motivational self system. in z. dörnyei & e. ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identity and the l2 self (pp. 9–42). bristol: multilingual matters. dörnyei, z., & kubanyiova, m. (2014). motivating learners, motivating teachers: building vision in language education. cambridge: cambridge university press. dörnyei, z., csizér, k., & németh, n. (2006). motivation, language attitudes and globalisation: a hungarian perspective. clevedon, england: multilingual matters. farmer, h. s. (1985). model of career and achievement motivation for women and men. journal of counseling psychology, 32, 363–390. fraser, m., & garg, r. (2014). educational aspirations. in r. j. r. levesque (ed.), encyclopaedia of adolescence (pp. 807–812). new york: springer. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4419-1695-2_147 galas, b., & lewowicki, t. (1991). osobowość a aspiracje [personality and aspirations]. warszawa: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu warszawskiego. garg, r., kauppi, c., lewko, j., & urajnik, d. (2002). a structural model of educational aspirations. journal of career development, 29(2), 87–108. social constraints of aspirations for second language achievement 67 janowski, a. (1977). aspiracje młodzieży szkół średnich [aspirations of secondary school youth]. warszawa: pwn. lewowicki, t. (1987). aspiracje dzieci i młodzieży [aspirations of children and youth]. warszawa: pwn. marjoribanks, k. (2006). family environments and children’s outcomes. in k. wheldall (ed.), developments in educational psychology. how far have we come in 25 years? (pp. 75–85). london: routledge. marjoribanks, k. (2003). family background, individual and environmental inf luences, aspirations and young adult’s educational attainment: a follow–up study. educational studies, 29, 233–242. muñoz, c. (ed). intensive exposure experiences in second language learning. bristol: multilingual matters. mystkowska-wiertelak, a., & pawlak, m. (2017). willingness to communicate in instructed second language acquisition. combining a macroand microperspective. bristol: multilingual matters. rosenzweig, c. j. (2000). a meta-analysis of parenting and school success: the role of parents in promoting students’ academic performance. dissertation abstract international section a: humanities and social sciences, 61(4a), 1636. skorny, z. (ed.) (1980). mechanizmy funkcjonowania aspiracji [mechanisms of aspirations]. wrocław: ossolineum. spera, ch., wentzel, k. r., & matto, h. c. (2009). parental aspirations for their children’s educational attainment: relations to ethnicity, parental education, children’s academic performance, and parental perceptions of school climate. journal of youth adolescence, 38, 1140–1152. weiner, b. (1972). attribution theory, achievement motivation and the educational process. review of educational research, 42, 2-3-215. joanna rokita-jaśkow soziale begrenzungen der bildungsaspirationen beim zweitspracherwerb z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die bildungsaspirationen werden meistens definiert als „bildungsziele, die sich der lernende setzt“ (trebbels, 2015:37). diese werden häufig zum gegenstand der psychologischen und soziologischen forschungen, in folge deren es u.a. festgestellt wurde, dass aspirationen auf bildung in späten jugendjahren und /oder im frühen erwachsenenalter entstehen und deren ausrichtung und niveau (hohes oder niedriges) durch soziale umgebung des lernenden (d.i. seine familie, altersgenossen u. schule) gestaltet werden. der vorliegende beitrag präsentiert die ergebnisse der qualitätsforschung, die unter 56 anglistikstudenten einer der berufsfachschulen in südpolen durchgeführt wurde. sie bezweckte, die bildungsaspirationen der studenten auf englischerwerbung und die damit verbundenen berufsaspirationen zu untersuchen. die ergebnisse zeugen davon, dass diese aspirationen in den meisten fällen nicht zu hoch sind, was mit sozialer herkunft der studenten begründet werden kann. schlüsselwörter: fremdsprache, jugend, bildungsaspirationen, soziale herkunft theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 8 (1), 2022, pp. 157–176 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.9152 tan arda gedik https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1429-9675 friedrich-alexander universität erlangen-nürnberg, germany yağmur su kolsal https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2659-4447 middle east technical university, turkey a corpus-based analysis of high school english textbooks and english university entrance exams in turkey a b s t r a c t this study explores the disconnect between the english textbooks studied in high schools (9th–12th grades) and the english tested on turkish university entrance exams (2010–2019). using corpus linguistics tools such as antwordprofiler, taaled, and the l2 syntactic complexity analyzer (l2sca), this paper analyzes the lexical diversity and syntactic complexity indices in the sample material. a comparison of official textbooks and complementary materials obtained from the ministry of national education against the official university entrance exams demonstrates that: (i) differences in lexical sophistication level can be observed between the two corpora, the lexical sophistication level of the exam corpus was higher than that of the textbook corpus, (ii) there is a statistically significant difference between the two corpora in terms of lexical diversity, the exam corpus has a significantly higher level of lexical diversity than the textbook corpus, (iii) statistically significant differences also existed between the two corpora regarding the syntactic complexity indices. the syntactic complexity level of the exam corpus was higher than that of the textbook corpus. these findings suggest that turkish high school student taught english with official textbooks have to tackle low-frequency and more sophisticated words at a higher level of syntactic complexity when they take the nationwide exam. this, in turn, creates a negative backwash effect, distorting their approach to l2, and raising other concerns about the misalignment between the official language education materials and nationwide exams. keywords: corpus linguistics, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.9152 tan arda gedik, yağmur su kolsal158 textbooks and exams english language teaching in turkey has been a topic for long hours of debate in many layers of the society. with this in mind, the english curriculum in turkey has witnessed many changes over the years (hatipoğlu, 2016). the most drastic change in the recent years has been the lowering of the grade in which students learn english, the first foreign language to be taught at schools, from 4th to 2nd. in addition, the change in educational model which experienced a shift from a eight years of elementary school and four years of high school type of division of grades to four years of primary, four years of middle and four years of high school. this has required many to adopt a different approach to language learning. the national curriculum claims that the new model accommodates these changes, and the textbooks used in turkish english as a foreign language (efl) setting have also been tweaked and enhanced over the years. the national curriculum for english language for the term of 2018–2019 by ministry of education also states that the new curricular model puts emphasis on the use of authentic language in an authentic context, a consideration, the importance of which common european framework of reference for languages: learning, teaching, assessment (cefr) emphasizes. the main goal of the new english curriculum for secondary schools is engaging learners of english in stimulating, motivating, and enjoyable learning environments to render them independent, fluent, and effective users of the language (milli eğitim bakanlığı, 2018). rather than adopting a singular teaching methodology, the curriculum sets recurring teaching and language principles which are based on the acknowledgment of the international status of english, the components of communicative competence and the integration of four main language skills. these claims of an enhanced educational model for the textbooks is very important in an efl context, since textbooks are among the most widely used efl teaching materials (allen, 2008). the marked presence of textbooks in efl classrooms signifies the need for analyzing the content and problems associated with the success of the efl programs (choi, 2008). textbooks can be considered a route map for any english language teaching (elt) program: not only sources of information but also a factor influencing the program’s structure and destination. a wrong selection can later be a source of regret. that holds true for government-imposed books, which give little opportunity for modification (sheldon, 1998). in a wide variety of occasions in many countries, textbooks are designed with the aim of preparing the students for standardized tests, and while this widespread tendency in efl can be a source of criticism, textbooks need to fulfill that aim. in turkey, textbooks are mainly a corpus-based analysis of high school english textbooks… 159 used to prepare students who are to take high stakes exams. these exams are also referred to as nationwide university entrance exams. the textbooks are provided across turkey at the beginning of each semester, free of charge, to establish equality (gençoğlu, 2017). some scholars have analyzed the discrepancies and a lack of correspondence between english textbooks and high stakes university entrance exams for english in various other contexts (underwood, 2010; tai & chen, 2015; nur & islam, 2018). although the english textbooks used at turkish high schools are not directly aimed at addressing the english university entrance exam, the textbooks are handed out as an aid to improve students’ overall proficiency. the exam, on the other hand, is a multiple-choice proficiency exam without subsections that test productive skills such as speaking and writing. in the light of these, to achieve academic success in turkey, students are obligated to succeed in the nationwide exam, but are the textbooks adequately preparing the students to cope with the exams? to the best of the researchers’ knowledge, no study has scrutinized the lexical and syntactic complexity of high school english textbooks and the university entrance exams from a statistical standpoint so far within the turkish context. hence, this study aims to analyze english high school textbooks and the complementary materials that are currently in use throughout the country and english university entrance exams that were administered in the past ten years in terms of lexical sophistication, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity using corpus linguistics analysis tools. in sum, the current study aims to serve as (i) a non-biased source of findings while bridging the research gap, (ii) a gateway between the exam preparation committee and the textbook writers, (iii) the voice of students who struggle with vocabulary item and syntactic differences between the textbooks and exams. literature review english language teaching and testing situation in turkey the situation of efl teaching in turkey is a troubled area. kırkgöz (2007) mentions that with turkey’s negotiations with the eu, english saw a rise of importance (e.g., to comply with the eu regulations like cefr leveled textbooks). attempts at accommodating for the rising importance of english competencies include international collaborations with schools in the eu in addition to modification of textbooks according to the new model. these factors have been the primary influences on the efl teaching situtan arda gedik, yağmur su kolsal160 ation in turkey. kırkgöz (2007) also mentions two phases: 1863–1997, 1997 and onwards. 1863 marks the beginning of elt in what was back then the ottoman empire. the year 1997, on the other hand, was of great importance as the compulsory grade in which english was taught was lowered from 6th to 4th grade. in other words, the content of many textbooks had to be re-evaluated, and this was another significant change to the efl teaching situation in the near past. this could be associated with the never-ending change of elt policies which attempt to make foreign language education better and increase the level of proficiency among school-age children, and as a result, the general demographic in turkey. as previously mentioned, hatipoğlu (2016) mentions that turkey has “one important high-stakes exam, which determines whether students gain entry to prestigious colleges or tertiary institutions” (p. 2). the study done by hatipoğlu (2016) also reveals that a big number of pre-service teachers believe that high stakes exams play a dramatically life-changing role in one’s future. furthermore, it is revealed that due to the detrimental consequences of the negative backwash effect of unplanned high stakes exams and changes to the curriculum, many students regard english as a sum of the parts they separately learn. hatipoğlu (2016) claims the following for the efl teaching situation in turkey: the short historical overview presented in the first part of the paper reveals an unsettled and frequently changing system where, in majority of the situations, changes were not based on empirical research, educational theories, or assessment models but rather on political and practical reasons. this reveals an inadequate understanding and skewed interpretation of testing and assessment. (p. 142) comparing english language testing and teaching materials in other contexts english language testing is a topic that cannot be overlooked. using multiple-choice based exams has been widely accepted as a way of testing many subjects, and english is not an exception. many countries conduct various university entrance exams that utilize multiple-choice questions. moreover, the lack of correspondence between textbooks and university entrance exams seems to be a recurring theme among other countries. in a study done by nur and islam (2015) in bangladesh, the findings highlighted a clear disconnect between the intended english assessment policy directions and the practiced pattern. the analysis of data also indicated that a backwash of such “disconnect between policy and practice substantially intercedes the overall quality of secondary english education” (p. 100). a corpus-based analysis of high school english textbooks… 161 underwood (2010) conducted a similar study to the present one in japan, comparing english textbooks and the japanese university entrance exam for english. underwood (2010) states that over the years, there has been a greater alignment between the textbooks and exams in terms of readability and lexical sophistication. nevertheless, underwood (2010) notes that there is still more improvement required in terms of lexical overlap between the analyzed materials. another different approach to the same topic was carried out by tai and chen (2015) in taiwan. their study compared english textbooks in high schools to the national university entrance exam, and the frequency of marked structures, namely relative, adverbial, and passive clauses, was attained by utilizing antconc and readability test tool. in other words, their study scrutinized the two corpora from a syntactic analysis point-of-view. they reported statistically significant results between the corpora. although there have been many studies analyzing the relationship between syntactic complexity and l2 writing (lu & ai, 2015, kyle, 2016; kyle & crossley, 2018), studies that scrutinize syntactic complexity levels to compare exams to textbooks have been very few (mirshojaee & sahragard, 2015). nevertheless, these findings, where textbooks and exams are compared, demonstrate a lack of correlation between the abovementioned corpora and affirm the fact that “skewed interpretation of testing and assessment” (hatipoğlu, 2016, p. 142) is a recurring theme in other parts of the world. lexical sophistication, diversity read (2000) determines four different ways of identifying lexical richness: lexical density, lexical diversity, lexical sophistication, and proportion of errors. lexical sophistication and lexical diversity are two essential terms out of those four for the present investigation as lexical density and proportion of errors are more often researched in corpora that are produced by learners. to measure lexical sophistication, researchers have calculated the total number of advanced or sophisticated words in a text (laufer & nation, 1995). nevertheless, there has not been a consensus on what a sophisticated/advanced word is. yet, overall, many seem to agree that the use of word frequency as a tool to identify whether a word is advanced or not has been the widely accepted way of approaching this issue (bardel et al., 2012). namely, low-frequency words and how many times those appear in a text appear to stand out as the most reliable way of approaching sophisticated words (hyltenstam, 1988; laufer & nation, 1995; read, 2000; vermeer, 2004). bardel et al. (2012) approach lexical sophistication as the percentage of sophisticated or advanced words in a text, including the first one thousand tan arda gedik, yağmur su kolsal162 (k1), the first two thousand (k2), the first three thousand (k3), and academic word list (awl) words in the corpora. the researchers argue that the lexical sophistication level(s) of non-native speakers (nns) of a language can prove to be a source of knowledge when it comes to testing l2 knowledge. in other words, lexical sophistication can be employed as a way of determining whether a nns has reached native-like proficiency in terms of vocabulary size. their argument also extends to the vocabulary size of the teaching material employed to teach l2 since the more low-frequency words the learners are exposed to, the higher native-like proficiency they are likely to have. to measure the lexical sophistication level of a text or corpus, a procedure called lexical frequency profiling first carried out by laufer and nation (1995), corpus linguistics tools such as antwordprofiler (anthony, 2012) are utilized. antwordprofiler enables finding the coverage of aforementioned word lists in a corpus. in recently conducted studies of kwary et al. (2018), du (2019), beauchamp and constantinou (2020), antwordprofiler was used to analyze lexical frequency profiles. lexical diversity, on the other hand, refers to “the range of different words used in a text, with a greater range indicating a higher diversity” (mccarthy & jarvis, 2010, p. 381). the researchers also argue that lexical diversity can be used to determine the “writing quality of a text, vocabulary knowledge, speaker competence, alzheimer’s onset, hearing variation as well as socioeconomic status” (p. 381) of interlocutors in a conversation. lexical diversity introduces two different sub-terms: type-token ratio (ttr; rootttr and logttr), and the measure of textual lexical diversity (mtld). while rootttr and logttr are basically calculation of the ttr level of a text using a root and a log formula, in the case of mtld, the text is divided into segments based on the ttr value of each segment. each segment finishes when the ttr level reaches .72 (toruella & capsada, 2013) and the calculation of mtld is done by dividing the length of the text in number of words by segments. these two other terms are introduced because determining the lexical diversity level of a text has been problematic as lexical diversity indices may display sensitivity to the length of a text (mccarthy & jarvis, 2010). researchers like biber (1989) have produced reliable analyses of corpora as they seem to have been aware of this sensitivity, however, researchers such as ertmer et al. (2002) and miller (1981) who have not demonstrated their awareness of this issue may have produced misleading analyses of corpora. mccarthy and jarvis (2010), however, believe that mtld, rootttr, and logttr results are of a validating nature for analyzing a text and have corrective features and factors that help researchers yield a more reliable analysis. in this study, taaled version 1.3.1. was used to this end. taaled (the tool for the academic analysis of lexical diversity) is used in calculating the lexical density of a corpus for types and tokens and eight indices of lexical diversity (kyle, 2018). studies of a corpus-based analysis of high school english textbooks… 163 bulté and roothooft (2020) and skalicky et al. (2020) are recent examples of the use of taaled for lexical diversity analysis. with all of this mentioned, crossley et al. (2011) draw on the importance of lexical proficiency explaining parts of lexical proficiency, as a cognitive construct, as exposure to lexically diverse corpora, lexical-semantic relations, and coherence of core lexical items. thus, lexical proficiency is also a very salient indication of academic success in l2 (daller, van hout, & treffers-daller, 2003) that is interconnected with the focus of this paper. given the context of the efl teaching situation not only in turkey but also in other countries, the following question arises: do english textbooks used in high schools and english university entrance exams correspond to each other in terms of lexical complexity? what is more important is that no matter what kind of approach the institutions follow, if the textbooks and exams do not match in terms of lexical richness (lexical sophistication and diversity in this paper’s case), the students are left in a position of disadvantage where what they learn does not prepare them for the examinations. as mentioned, and demonstrated by many scholars (mccarthy & jarvis, 2010; crossley et al., 2011; bardel et al., 2012), lexical richness goes hand in hand with the number of low-frequency words introduced in l2 textbooks and materials. it would be unimaginable to ignore this fact and create textbooks and exams disconnected from each other. this, in turn, would raise another important question in many readers’ minds: do we test what we teach? when this is not the case, when what is not taught is being tested or vice versa, many students suffer from what is called a negative backwash effect. this, in turn, demotivates them and distorts their perception of and approach to l2, forcibly changing their notion of language from a tool of communication with which they can create and share to a distorted one on which they must (or are expected to) perform various assigned tasks to be considered proficient. syntactic complexity syntactic complexity is one of the crucial elements in language testing and evaluation of l2 learners (wang & slater, 2016). to assess the syntactic complexity of a text, sentence level and word level measures have been proposed such as ratio of t-units to clauses and syntactic variety of tenses (ellis & yuan, 2004; larsen-freeman, 2006; nelson & van meter, 2007; norrby & håkansson, 2007). this is because syntactic complexity seems to have become a vital indicator of a text’s complexity and comprehensibility (wang, 1970). many scholars report that this complexity goes higher in more proficient l2 users (lu, 2011; mcnamara et al., 2010; ortega, 2003). these l2 users, in correlation with their proficiency, produce syntactically lengthier pieces of texts tan arda gedik, yağmur su kolsal164 compared to less-proficient l2 users (frase et al., 1999; grant & ginther, 2000; ortega, 2003). a heightened use of subordination was also reported (grant & ginther, 2000). therefore, it is fair to explain syntactic complexity in the lines of “measures such as length of production unit, amount of subordination or coordination, [and] range of syntactic structures” (kim, 2014, p. 32). park (2012) suggests that the mean length of clause and sentence as well as the number of complex nominals in clauses and t-units are of salient indicators for l2 proficiency. t-unit is one of the tiniest but most important indexes in evaluating syntactic complexity (hunt, 1965). wolfe-quintero et al. (1998) in their study revealed that mean length of t-unit, dependent clauses, mean number of clauses per t-unit, and mean length of clause were the best indicators of syntactic complexity. mean length of clause (mlc) is the average number of words per clause. it can be referred to as a global measure of syntactic complexity. many studies also point to a salient correspondence between mlc and proficiency levels (cumming et al., 2005; ortega, 2003; wolfe-quintero et al., 1998). in contrast to mlc, the mean length of t-unit (mlt) builds another layer of specific examination of the complexity. that is, dependent clauses might be indistinguishable in mlc, but mlt, due to its t-unit nature, specifies them. ortega (2003) and wolfe-quintero et al. (1998) demonstrated that just like mlc, mlt also shows great correlation with high proficiency levels. t-units may not always be enough on their own, and another index may be required. a complex t-unit per t-unit (ct/t) is the proposed index by casanave (1994) and lu (2011). what makes this a complex t-unit is, this time the t-unit is expected to host an independent and a dependent clause at the same time. however, ct/t is not proven to be statistically significant in relation to language development; in other words, learners’ proficiency is not reflected through this index. nevertheless, the studies (casanave, 1994; lu, 2011) done on ct/t only compared the production of l2 learners and thus their proficiency. ct/t has not been examined from the point of language testing and evaluation. this study attempts to see whether there is a contrast between the two corpora. complex nominals per t-unit (cn/t) is a syntactic construction that has nominal clauses, nouns with adjectives, possessives, prepositional phrases, and/ or infinitives/gerunds. despite studies not reporting a significant relationship between proficiency and cn/t numbers (wolfe-quiero et al., 1998; lu, 2010), dean (2017) demonstrates a significant connection between l2 proficiency and cn/t. table 1 illustrates the definitions of the syntactic indices used in this study based on lu’s (2010) article. a corpus-based analysis of high school english textbooks… 165 table 1 syntactic indices explanation mlc mean length of clauses mlt mean length of t-units ct/t # of complex t-units per t-unit cn/t # of complex nominals per t-unit lu (2010) reported five categories of syntactic complexity measures. these were: length of production unit, amount of subordination, amount of coordination, level of phrasal complexity, and overall sentence complexity. the l2 syntactic complexity analyzer (l2sca) uses 14 indices based on lu’s (2010) categories. during this study, the following four indices were employed to examine the syntactic complexity levels: mlc and mlt identify the length of the production unit. ct/t identifies the amount of subordination and cn/t examines the degree of phrasal complexity. all these indices have been investigated to seek relations between proficiency and production. however, the current study assumes that textbooks should prepare students on all four indices and that exams should correspond to them. if the textbooks fall behind the exams in terms of syntactic complexity, this will ensure that proficiency levels of the students are not tested on the same level as the textbooks prepare them to be. furthermore, the three categories addressed in the present study (lexical sophistication, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity) would affect the comprehension of a text the most, especially in dealing with standardized tests. quite clearly, comprehension and proficiency are cognitive heavy processes (kalyuga, 2006). thus, these indices, because they indicate complexity which affect comprehension and proficiency, may possibly indicate the relation between sentence complexity and syntactic processing of the sentences. both corpora could be examined in relation to other ten indices as well, but to keep uniformity across the two corpora, the same set of indices were utilized, namely mlt, mlc, ct/t and cn/t. hence, the present study aims to examine the following research questions: (i) are there statistically significant differences in terms of lexical sophistication and lexical diversity between the textbook and exam corpus? (ii) are there statistically significant differences in terms of syntactic complexity between the textbook and exam corpus? tan arda gedik, yağmur su kolsal166 methodology to answer the questions above, all data were gathered online either from eba.gov.tr (for english textbooks) or from ösym.gov.tr (for english university entrance exams), ösym being the measurement, selection and placement center, the sole body responsible for preparing and administering the nationwide entrance exams and the placement of students, while eba is the online platform where students and teachers alike can access educational content, among which are textbooks. english textbooks and other complementary materials (i.e., corresponding workbooks and listening transcripts) that are currently in use from 9th through 12th grade were identified and downloaded in .pdf format. meanwhile, english university entrance exams between the years 2010–2019 were identified and downloaded in .pdf format. in total, there were eight textbooks and ten exams. the textbooks covered each grade in high schools (9th–12th grade) and were published by the following publishing houses; (meb) relearn, teenwise, progress for 9th; count me in, gizem for 10th; sunshine, silverlining for 11th; and count me in for 12th grades with their accompanying workbooks. regardless of the publishing house of the books, the respective cefr level for grades were as follows: a1–a2 for 9th grade, a2+– b1 for 10th grade, b1+–b2 for 11th grade and b2+ for 12th grade. the total number of tokens in the textbook corpus was 301.255. the ten exams were all prepared and released by ösym between the years of 2010–2019 with a total token number of 66.913. while these books are produced by different publishing houses, they all have to follow the same regulations put forward by meb, and their products (textbooks) have to go through a series of assessments and evaluation by a committee allocated by meb itself. once the data collection was over, the followings were executed in a progressive order: (a) convert all the .pdf files into .docx files using an online document converter; (b) clean both corpora of any mistakes, typos and unnecessary signs or images which may have been caused by the conversion and may interfere with the results; (c) convert the clean .docx files into compatible .txt files for the analysis tools; (d) run both antwordprofiler, taaled and the l2 syntactic complexity analyzer (l2sca) on all the documents and save the results in .csv files; (e) run the .csv files’ output through spss for statistical analysis, including descriptive analysis and a series of independent samples t-tests); (f) interpret the results. while for lexical sophistication, antwordprofiler (anthony, 2012) was used to examine both corpora, for lexical diversity, kristopher kyle’s taaled version 1.3.1. was employed. ttr, rootttr, logttr, and mtld were selected as the indices to conduct the comparison between the two corpora. as mentioned in the literature review, because these indices have corrective a corpus-based analysis of high school english textbooks… 167 features that are required when working with longer texts, they were chosen reliable indices. as for syntactic complexity, the l2sca (lu, 2010) was employed to analyze mlt, mlc, ct/t and cn/t because of the following two reasons: (i) the researchers specifically wanted to focus on whether sentence and clause lengths were statistically different across corpora even though the token numbers are vastly different (thus mlt and mlc were selected), (ii) the amount of subordination, as mentioned in the literature review, would affect one’s comprehension (hence, ct/t and cn/t were selected). finding out the differences between the two would then show the researchers whether students are trained well enough for a timed examination regarding decoding syntactically heavily subordinated clauses. another reason is that the scope of this study would need to be broader to examine all the syntactic indices at once. results lexical sophistication and lexical diversity the mean difference between the two corpora regarding the percentage of k1, k2, and awl words were conducted with the spss software. for the following results, assumptions of equal variance and normality were met. although the descriptive means results or k1 and k1 between the two corpora demonstrated means resembling each other, the means for awl displayed a mismatch. as illustrated in figure 1, the textbook corpus scored a higher mean in its use of k1 and k2 words (mk1: 79.96%, sdk1: 1.93501; mk2: 6.64%, sdk2: .76213) than the exam corpus (mk1: 79.52%, sdk1: 1.65094; mk2: 6.15%, sdk2: .46871). on the other hand, the exam corpus had a significantly higher coverage of academic words (mawl: 5.65%, sdawl: 1.16101) than the textbook corpus (mawl: 2.71%, sdawl: 1.12163). this finding was further proven with the following results. independent t-tests results indicated that the corpora did have a drastically salient significance level for awl. while k1 and k2 displayed insignificant statistical results (k1: .556; k2; p = .87, p > 0.5), awl displayed a statistically significant result (awl: p= .000 < 0.5). descriptive statistics suggest that, on average, the exam corpus contained more low-frequency words than the textbook corpus as the textbook corpus demonstrated a higher usage of higher frequency words in mean (k1 and k2) and that the use of academic words was significantly low in the textbook corpus than in the exam corpus. tan arda gedik, yağmur su kolsal168 figure 1. lexical sophistication overlap unlike lexical sophistication findings, lexical diversity findings displayed greater differences in the mean between the two corpora in ttr, logttr, and mtld. the assumptions of equal variance and normality were met. it is evident that, regardless of ttr type, the exam corpus always scored a higher mean value (mttr: .2335, sdttr: .016959; mrootttr: 18.096, sdrootttr: 1.50964; mlogttr: .8372, sdlogttr: .010753; mmtld: 59.8613, sdmtld: 4.90247) than the textbook corpus (mttr: .1212, sdttr: .006937; mrootttr: 17.1479, sdrootttr: .793944; mlogttr: .7864, sdlogttr: .002871; mmtld: 55.2500, sdmtld: 3.97819). these numbers indicate that the exam corpus was lexically more diverse than the textbook corpus on average. the mismatch of lexical diversity was proven by independent t-tests results ( p < .05). these results were statistically significant except for root ttr (ttr: .000; rootttr: .105; logttr: .000; mtld: .042, p < .05) and supported the claim that the exam corpus was lexically more diverse than the textbook corpus. except root ttr ( p = .105 > .05), all other variables prove a notable variation for the corpora. using cohen’s d (cohen, 2013), the effect size of the differences between the two corpora regarding lexical diversity can be further explained. the effect sizes for the lexical diversity indices that were found are as follows; ttr: 8.6%, rootttr: 0.78%, logttr: 6.45%, and mtld: 1.03%. in other words, the previously mentioned percentage indicates the amplitude of the gap of lexical diversity between the two corpora. figure 2 shows the lexical diversity overlap. a corpus-based analysis of high school english textbooks… 169 figure 2. lexical diversity overlap syntactic complexity corresponding to the previous findings in the lexical section, syntactic complexity indices indicate significant differences regarding mlt, mlc, ct/t, and cn/t. the means of exams were higher (mmlt: 15.47, sdmlt: 3.39884; mmlc: 9.80, sdmlc: 1.79345; mct/t: .4631, sdct/t: .12678; mcn/t: 1.84, sdcn/t: .61127) than the textbooks means (mmlt: 10.40, sdmlt: 2.67762; mmlc: 7.97, sdmlc: 1.26800; mct/t: .2609, sdct/t: .13291; mcn/t 1.01, sdcn/t: .43015). (see figure 3 for the differences). on the surface, it seems as if the exams were syntactically more complex than the textbook corpus. the results of the independent t-test further proved this point by displaying a significance level of ( p = .000 < 0.5). departing from our lexical findings, results for all four indices examined in this study performed a significance level ( p = .000 < 0.5). these numbers suggest that the exam corpus was notably more complex than the textbook corpus regarding syntactic complexity. the implications of this finding are discussed in the next section. tan arda gedik, yağmur su kolsal170 figure 3. syntactic complexity overlap discussion and conclusion the present research paper explored the lexical sophistication, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity differences between the english high school textbooks and the english university entrance exams in turkey. descriptive statistics suggest that lexical sophistication levels (for awl) between the corpora demonstrate a considerable variation. although the coverage of k1 and k2 were not significantly different between the two corpora, the coverage of the awl was found to be significantly different. this indicates that the exam corpus contains more academic words than the textbook a corpus-based analysis of high school english textbooks… 171 corpus. furthermore, because lexical sophistication level in awl is lower for the textbook corpus, the learners who conduct english lessons with these textbooks are less likely to encounter low-frequency words awl words than the awl lexical items available in the exam corpus. this would indicate that these students would be less likely to encounter words that render them near-native-like. the exam corpus, on the other hand, proves to be lexically more sophisticated regarding awl and contain less high-frequency awl words in its inventory. although k1 and k2 levels showed similar results, one should still note the slight variation between the corpora, especially when there needs to be a one-to-one correspondence between the exam and textbook materials. frequency words also indicate that the decrease in the overlap correlates with the increase in the gap between the two corpora in terms of lexical alignment. results for the lexical diversity levels of the corpora tell a similar story. the differences in ttr, rootttr, logttr, and mtld among the corpora suggest that a statistically significant mismatch is present between the two corpora. more practical interpretation is averagely speaking, in every 100 words, the textbook corpus introduces ten new (different) words. this increases the lexical diversity gap between the two corpora, leading to poor input in the textbook corpus compared to the exam corpus. the statistical findings for lexical sophistication and diversity levels give the stakeholders (e.g., students, test and textbook-writers, english language teachers) a better insight and reinforce the recurring claim that the textbooks do not prepare students for the upcoming high stakes exams in terms of lexis. the findings in lexical sophistication and diversity match with the findings of yu’s study (2018). yu suggests that turkish learners of english, in their academic writings, have the highest “coverage of the high-frequency words, namely the first and second 1,000 words” (yu, 2018, p. 167). furthermore, yu’s study, comparing turkish speakers’ written output to five other nns groups, proves that turkish learners of english demonstrate very poor lexical sophistication and diversity performances. these findings correspond to the current findings in this study, suggesting a cause-and-effect relationship of the materials used and tested. that is, if the materials used in classroom are more compelling regarding lexical sophistication and diversity, when they are tested in nationwide english exams, they are more likely to be acquired (see positive backwash effect, heaton, 1989). therefore, to improve the performance of turkish learners of english, “vocabulary lists of academic, substitutional, and discipline-based words should be provided” (yu, 2018, p. 168) in textbook materials. syntactic complexity findings are, perhaps, the most dramatic results in this study. descriptive statistics results for syntactic complexity indices (mlc, mlt, ct/t and cn/t) always demonstrate a higher mean in the exam corpus. this means that on average, exam takers are likely to spend more time reading the tan arda gedik, yağmur su kolsal172 sentences (mlc). due to higher means of mlt (and t-unit’s nature which is “one main clause with all subordinate clauses attached to it” (hunt 1965, p. 20) in the exam corpus, exam takers are more likely to be under a cognitive load to process the syntactic packaging compared to the textbook corpus. as with mlt, ct/t also significantly affects the exam takers processing times significantly as ct/ts pack more complex t-units. complementarily, higher means of cn/t indicates a heavier syntactic load for the exam takers, to decode the complex nominals. the difference between the two corpora was statistically significant for all indices. namely, if students are to prepare for the high stakes exams using the government imposed books, then the chances of students’ success (unless they have access to external educational materials and teachers who are aware of this mismatch, or this mismatch has been addressed by the exam and textbook preparation teams) is very low because of the mismatch between mlc, mlt, ct/t, and cn/t levels. the pedagogical implications of this study are as follows: because there is a remarkable differentiation of lexical sophistication, lexical diversity and syntactic complexity levels, the students who have used these textbooks and taken these exams may have been forced to develop a more distorted idea of l2 (in this case, english). this distorted idea (also known as negative backwash effect) reinforces that languages can be split into smaller units and that no matter how hard they study for the english university entrance exam using government-based textbooks, they run the risk of not being able to succeed in the high-stakes english university exams. another important point to explain is that students who use these textbooks are likely to struggle with exam fatigue due to heavy syntactic processing even from the very beginning of the exam. moreover, this study can be beneficial for the major stakeholders of english language teaching in turkey, namely, the textbook and exam-writers, the english language teachers, and the students. these stakeholders, with the findings at hand, can communicate and reconcile this apparent gap of lexical knowledge expected from students in the high stakes exams. the textbook and exam writers also need to work collaboratively to account for these to provide a more reliable exam experience for everyone, on equal grounds. the discussion of equal grounds can also be expanded to include the inequalities across socio-economically advantaged and disadvantaged students. most students who come from a disadvantaged background may not have access to lexically and syntactically more compelling textbooks and may be more likely to fail in the university entrance exam while the advantaged students are ever so subtly favored and made to succeed as they already have access to more compelling language learning materials. this may not be the case for everyone in turkey, but it might disclose an important—mostly overlooked—inequality that affects the lives of many young students who just wish to be successful but cannot figure out why they keep failing. a corpus-based analysis of high school english textbooks… 173 although this study attempts to bridge the gap in the literature of turkish corpus linguistics, it has several limitations. first, the study has relatively small corpora and only discovers the current situation of the corpora that are in use; second, the study includes only 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(2018). analyses and comparisons of three lexical features in native and nonnative academic english writing [university of central florida]. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd/6061 http://dx.doi.org/10.14705/rpnet.2015.000386 http://dx.doi.org/10.14705/rpnet.2015.000386 tan arda gedik, yağmur su kolsal176 tan arda gedik, yağmur su kolsal eine korpusbasierte analyse englischer lehrbücher für die oberschule und englischer hochschulaufnahmeprüfungen in der türkei z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die vorliegende studie untersucht die diskrepanz zwischen dem inhalt von englischen lehrbüchern, die man in den oberschulen (9. bis 12. klasse) verwendet, und englischkenntnissen, die während aufnahmeprüfungen an türkischen universitäten (2010–2019) geprüft werden. unter verwendung von korpuslinguistischen werkzeugen wie antwordprofiler, taaled bzw. l2 syntactic complexity analyzer (l2sca) werden anhand des untersuchungsmaterials die lexikalische vielfalt und syntaktische komplexität analysiert. aus dem vergleich der offiziellen lehrbücher und zusätzlichen materialien des ministeriums für nationale bildung mit den offiziellen hochschulaufnahmeprüfungen lässt sich schließen, dass: (i) es treten unterschiede im lexikalischen niveau zwischen den beiden korpora auf – das lexikalische niveau des prüfungskorpus war höher als das des lehrbuchkorpus, (ii) zwischen den beiden korpora besteht ein statistisch signifikanter unterschied in bezug auf die lexikalische vielfalt – das prüfungskorpus hat ein wesentlich höheres niveau der lexikalischen vielfalt als das lehrbuchkorpus, (iii) es gibt statistisch signifikante unterschiede zwischen den beiden korpora hinsichtlich der syntaktischen komplexität – das niveau der syntaktischen komplexität im prüfungskorpus war höher als das im lehrbuchkorpus. die angeführten schlussfolgerungen deuten darauf hin, dass türkische oberschüler, die aus offiziellen lehrbüchern englisch lernen, bei landesweiten prüfungen mit dem seltener gebrauchten und anspruchsvolleren wortschatz auf höherem niveau der syntaktischen komplexität umgehen müssen. dies wiederum führt zu einem negativen backwash-effekt, der ihre einstellung zur fremdsprache verzerrt und weitere bedenken hinsichtlich abweichungen zwischen den offiziellen sprachlehrmaterialien und landesweiten prüfungen auf kommen lässt. schlüsselwörter: korpuslinguistik, lexikalische vielfalt, syntaktische komplexität theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 7 (2), 2021, pp. 37–59 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.9098 adrian leis https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4964-1293 miyagi university of education, sendai, miyagi, japan praise in the efl classroom: a growth mindset perspective a b s t r a c t this study investigates how praising students’ success in tasks affects the performance of other students who were not successful. possible and impossible crossword puzzles were used as an experiment to engender fixed mindsets in half of the sample. the average time to complete a crossword puzzle at the pre-test was compared to the average time to complete the same puzzle at the post-test. the results showed that students given possible crossword puzzles were able to make significant improvements in the speed with which they could complete the puzzle at the post-test stage. however, such improvements in performance were not seen among the students who had been temporarily primed into a fixed mindset during the experiment through the use of the impossible crossword puzzles. reasons behind these results as well as pedagogical implications related to effective ways of giving praise and other feedback will be discussed. keywords: growth mindset, failure, feedback, university students, praise in recent years, there has been an increasing number of studies in the field of psychology looking at mindsets, especially those investigating the benefits of having a growth mindset and the ramifications of possessing a fixed mindset (e.g., dweck & yeager, 2019; gunderson, sorhagen, gripshover, dweck, goldin-meadow, & levine, 2018). the concept of mindsets has evolved over time and can be described as the beliefs individuals hold regarding (1) the malleability of their ability in a particular field; (2) the control they feel they have to improve their ability in a field; and (3) how they deal with failure (dweck, 1999). in this study, i focus on the second of these facets of mindsets. investigating mindsets and the reasons why students may have growth or fixed mindsets may be especially relevant in english as a foreign language https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.9098 adrian leis38 (efl) environments. as suggested through krashen’s (1982, 1985) input hypothesis, students learn most efficiently when challenged to take calculated risks with language at a level slightly above their current ability is essential for making solid progress in their proficiency (i.e., i + 1). such a willingness to make mistakes at a level just above one’s current ability is closely linked to the concepts related to a growth mindset. in other words, to improve in a foreign language, a learner inevitably has to be willing to take a certain degree of risk in using the language with the possibility of making mistakes or encountering difficulties. having a growth mindset is known to make learners more willing to take calculated risks and persevere on tasks (dweck, 2009; mercer, 2012). yet, despite the strong positive relationship between moderate risk-taking and improvements in language proficiency (arnold, 1999; dewaele, 2012), the amount of research related to the mindsets of students studying in efl environments is still rather limited. in this paper, i focus on the second facet of mindsets centering on the sense of control one feels over one’s ability to improve in a language. i discuss how praising certain students’ ability in a university efl classroom may lead other students in the classroom to feel that their efforts will not lead to higher proficiency: a characteristic of a fixed mindset. literature review response to failure the ways humans react to challenging tasks which involve a perceived risk of failure have been investigated by various researchers in the field of psychology. perhaps the seminal work in this field began with the study by seligman, maier, and geer (1968) who conducted an intervention of electric shocks that the subjects (i.e., dogs) had no control over. in the post-test, the dogs did not even attempt tasks that they had previously been able to complete successfully in the pre-test. the phenomenon of becoming unable to complete a task successfully that one could do beforehand was coined learned helplessness. seligman et al. (1968) suggested that all animals, including humans, tend to give up when faced with tasks with which they feel they have no control over the outcomes. a few years later, an investigation conducted by dweck and reppucci (1973) attempted to link the phenomenon of learned helplessness and the attributions children give for their successes or failures to complete tasks. in the study, elementary-school-aged children were given colored blocks and asked to replicate patterns that had been shown to them. some children were given praise in the efl classroom… 39 problems that were relatively easy to solve, whereas others were given tasks that were impossible to solve. the findings of dweck and reppucci’s (1973) study suggested that when given challenging puzzles some children simply gave up, even though they had initially had sufficient motivation and the ability to complete the puzzles. others, however, thrived on the challenges and saw them as opportunities to learn. these children had positive reactions toward situations in which others simply fell into a state of learned helplessness. dweck (1975) has also argued that children can be alleviated from the state of learned helplessness if they can be trained to attribute their failures to a lack of effort rather than low aptitude for their chosen field. a large number of studies related to humans’ approaches to highly challenging tasks continued to be published over the next few decades. for example, in self-worth theory, covington (1992) suggested that some children purposefully make little or no effort in their studies when they are faced with circumstances in which they feel they may fail. this is especially salient in the classroom, where children’s egos and self-confidence are developed. covington (1992) suggests that some children use self-handicapping strategies. they purposefully make little effort because if they try hard to overcome challenges and still fail, this can damage their egos. they feel that peers and family members view their failures as indications of not being smart enough, so it would be more beneficial for their self-confidence if they made little effort and were seen as lazy. more recent studies have had similar findings (e.g., johnson, gooding, wood, taylor, & tarrier, 2011; johnson, panagioti, bass, ramsey, & harrison, 2017). based on decades of research on learned helplessness (seligman et al., 1968), attribution theory (weiner, 1986), and self-worth theory (covington, 1992), carol dweck and her colleagues proposed the implicit theories framework (dweck, chiu, & hong, 1995; dweck & leggett, 1988) as an explanation for understanding the differences between humans who are willing to risk failure in difficult situations and those who avoid the risks and choose easier, yet less beneficial pathways. implicit theories implicit theories offer an understanding of the reasons for humans’ reactions when faced with situations in which they feel they may fail (dweck, 1999; dweck, chiu, & hong, 1995; dweck & leggett, 1988). according to implicit theories, the way one reacts when faced with challenging situations can be divided into two theories: an entity theory and an incremental theory. the entity theory refers to the belief that ability is innate and that regardless of the efforts one may exert, the level of proficiency will not change. therefore, it is better to avoid challenging tasks—which such individuals believe will most likely result adrian leis40 in failure—because failure is seen as a sign of being unintelligent: a state also known as fixed mindset. in contrast, those with an incremental theory have strong beliefs that ability is malleable, and with hard work, anyone is capable of reaching high levels of proficiency and performance in their chosen fields. even if one experiences failure, those with an incremental theory believe that that failure brings about opportunities to learn and build one’s capabilities: a state known as a growth mindset. dweck (1999) explains, however, that the distinction between the entity theory and incremental theory is not clear-cut. it is possible, and in fact more likely than not, that one will hold an entity theory for one field and the incremental theory in another. therefore, it may be possible, for example, that students have an entity theory for mathematics; they believe that their efforts to study mathematics are meaningless. however, the same students may possess the incremental theory in athletics, holding the belief that if they practice hard enough, they can become more skilled at the sport they choose to play. through the results of a large number of studies, implicit theories have proved to be an accurate way of describing humans’ beliefs regarding the innateness of ability in various fields (e.g., knee, 1998; ommundsen, 2001). in order to share the benefits of having an incremental theory with a wider audience, dweck (2006) employed a more accessible terminology for implicit theories: mindsets. as such, outside of the field of psychology, the entity theory has since been more commonly referred to as the fixed mindset, and the incremental theory as the growth mindset. in order to connect with the large body of work in education and practitioner perspectives, in this paper, i shall use the mindset terminology. mindsets although the notion of growth mindsets has received much attention and support in the fields of psychology and education, it is not without its critics. orosz, péter-szarka, bőthe, tóth-király, and berger (2017), for example, criticized studies that appeared to give support for the growth mindset, suggesting that the effects were only temporary: students who had previously had fixed mindsets and were changed to growth mindsets through various interventions returned to display traits of the fixed mindset once they went back to regular routines and learning. sisk, burgoyne, sun, and macnamara (2018) followed this up by arguing that having a growth mindset does not necessarily result in higher academic achievement. dweck (2018) addressed these issues by arguing that the criticisms were based on the results of performances in quizzes, not on real grades or standardized test scores. a few years earlier, dweck (2015) had expressed concerns that the growth mindset had been misunderstood, and that praise in the efl classroom… 41 many believed simply praising effort alone and telling children, “you can do anything!” would lead to success in their chosen fields. however, dweck (2015) warned that giving such praise may lead to a false growth mindset: the belief that it is effort and effort alone that will lead to one’s success. yet, the growth mindset is not just about expending effort. the growth mindset is not “practice makes perfect.” the growth mindset asserts the idea that perfect practice makes perfect—it involves the use of strategies, persistency in meaningful work, calling upon metacognitive skills, and receiving honest and helpful feedback and praise from mentors. in this study, i investigate the effects of a particular form of feedback, namely, praise. praise the detrimental effects of praising for children’s abilities have been well documented in the field of psychology. mueller and dweck (1998), for example, suggested that students who were praised for their ability (e.g., “you are really smart!”) were less likely to take on future challenging tasks. it was argued that because children like to be praised and want to be praised, they tend to avoid situations in which they may not be praised. so, for example, if children have been praised for their ability to successfully complete tasks in the past, they are more likely to choose easy tasks that they feel they will complete successfully rather than slightly challenging tasks, in order to be assured of the praise. in contrast, although they may learn something through the challenging tasks, they could also possibly fail, and as a result would not receive any praise. as dweck states, “praising students’ intelligence gives them a short burst of pride, followed by a long string of negative consequences” (dweck, 2007, p. 36). in another study, kamins and dweck (1999) discussed the negative effects of praising and criticizing the person rather than the process when carrying out a task. in the study, when children themselves were criticized after making mistakes (e.g., “i am very disappointed in you”), it led to students not feeling good about the tasks, losing self-confidence, blaming themselves for not being able to complete the tasks, and showing signs of helplessness in their responses: all traits of the fixed mindset. on the other hand, when feedback for being unable to complete a task successfully was based on the process (e.g., “maybe you could think of another way to do it”), children were able to come up with strategies and solutions to amend the problems. it has also been reported that praising for ability can lead to cheating (leis, 2014; zhao, heyman, chen, & lee, 2017). for example, zhao et al. (2017) conducted an experiment with 300 preschool children in china and showed that children who were praised for being smart tended to cheat in the final task of a game in order to receive a prize. in other words, it was so important to look adrian leis42 good and receive the praise that the learners were more likely to cheat to ensure that kind of perceived favorable outcome. leis (2014) used an experiment with junior high school students (i.e., 14–15 years old). in the study, students who had been primed into a fixed mindset were observed cheating by misspelling simple words on purpose and making changes to the test papers in order to produce correct answers. by cheating, these students were able to show others that they had been successful, whereas in fact they had not. mindsets in sla the literature on mindsets in the field of second language acquisition (sla) is still relatively limited. one of these first contributions was made by mercer and ryan (2009) who conducted comparisons of the mindsets of japanese and austrian students studying english at the university level. in the study, semi-structured, in-depth interviews were carried out with five austrian and four japanese efl university students. mercer and ryan (2009) suggested that japanese students were inclined to have a more uniformed growth mindset for language learning, displaying stronger beliefs in the benefits of persistence and effort, in comparison with the austrian students, whose responses showed a more variable tendency. some other studies have looked at the benefits of having the growth mindset for learners in english as a second language (esl) environments. waller and papi (2017), for example, investigated the differences between having a fixed mindset and a growth mindset on the reactions to written corrective feedback of 147 foreign university students studying in the united states. the results suggested that those with a growth mindset accepted the feedback more willingly, as it was viewed as beneficial for improving their writing ability. those showing a tendency toward a fixed mindset, however, viewed written corrective feedback negatively, as it was “an invalidation of the positive image they [had] been trying to project” (waller & papi, 2017, p. 62). in another study conducted in an esl environment, lou and noels (2016) investigated the effect one’s mindset has on one’s language learning goals and how those students reacted to failure. the 150 students who took part in the study were from various cultural backgrounds, and it was suggested that students with growth mindsets, regardless of their linguistic self-confidence, saw failure in a positive manner, using it as a driving force to achieve success in future endeavors. in their study, lou and noels (2016) used mock research articles that encouraged either the growth mindset or the fixed mindset. students who had read the article encouraging a fixed mindset showed tendencies toward a helpless state, especially those who had high self-perceived linguistic proficiency. in the study, the students with the fixed mindset tended to give praise in the efl classroom… 43 up striving for their goals, because they surmised that “language aptitude is fixed and it determines their language success” (lou & noels, 2016, p. 29). lou and noels (2016) also suggested various strategies for teachers to promote the growth mindset in their classrooms, such as: (1) giving lectures explicitly explaining the benefits of possessing a growth mindset over a fixed mindset; (2) advocating the importance of failure as a part of the learning process; and (3) interactions with the teacher. in the present study, i especially considered the interactions that students have with their teacher in a classroom environment. i chose to focus on interactions regarding praise and feedback from teachers based on students’ successful or unsuccessful performances in tasks carried out in the language classroom. i was interested whether praising students for success would have a detrimental effect on those students who were unable to complete the tasks given to them, which were deliberately impossible. the study research question in the present study, i aim to answer the following research question: does praising students for success result in other students in the classroom who have been unsuccessful showing characteristics of a fixed mindset? based on the results of an earlier study of the same design (leis, 2014) with younger learners, it was hypothesized that students experiencing failure would tend to give up more readily—one trait of the fixed mindset. participants a total of 81 japanese university students participated in the study. based on their scores in the toeic1 (i.e., 314), participants’ proficiency could be described as ranging between levels a1 and a2 on the cefr scale. the mean age was 19.18 (sd = .95) and there were 47 females and 34 males. the students were divided into a control group and an experiment group at random. the control group had 23 female and 17 male participants, while the experiment group had 24 female and 17 male subjects. there was no significant difference in the mean age of the participants in the two groups ( p = .62). the experiment was conducted as part of a regular weekly english communication course conducted by the researcher. the students were told that the puzzles being solved in class were simply some fun activities to learn english adrian leis44 and would not affect their regular grades. although the students were required to write their student numbers on the puzzle booklets, these were used only for demographics. at the end of the experiment, informal consent was received from the students, and they were ensured of anonymity in any published works. methodology this study was inspired by the experiments conducted by dweck and reppucci (1973) and mueller and dweck (1998), but with a second-language acquisition aspect added. also, whereas dweck and reppucci (1973) and mueller and dweck (1998) had used blocks and asked participants to recreate patterns using the blocks, in the present study, i had participants complete crossword puzzles in english with simple vocabulary items. furthermore, the studies by dweck and reppucci (1973) and mueller and dweck (1998) were conducted one-on-one with the subjects, which does not reflect an authentic classroom setting. in the present study, i aimed to create an authentic learning environment by having all 81 participants do the crossword puzzles in the same classroom at the same time. therefore, as is often seen in regular classes, some participants were experiencing failure, even though their peers were being successful, and vice-versa. the experiment followed a pretest–experiment–post-test design, with comparisons being made between the speed with which subjects could complete the crossword at the pretest stage and the speed at the post-test stage. pretest. first, participants were given booklets containing the crossword puzzles and told not to open or turn pages in the booklets until instructed to do so. participants were also told that they must not look at other students’ booklets. the front covers of the booklets were identical. however, the numbers of the puzzles inside the booklets were colored coded (i.e., puzzle numbers printed in black for the experiment group and puzzle numbers printed in red for the control group) so the students could be divided into the control group and experiment group at random. neither the researcher nor the students were aware of who was in the control group and who was in the experiment group when distributing the booklets. this reflected an authentic classroom in which some students would be successful in completing a task and others would not. after answering simple questions related to age and gender, the participants were asked to turn to crossword 1 (i.e., the pre-test), and a timer displayed on a screen at the front of the room was started. in the pre-test, participants had to complete the crossword by entering the words egg, cake, cook, and clock, with pictures used as hints. students were instructed to raise their hands and say “finished!” when they had completed the crossword. then, they wrote the number of seconds it took them to complete the puzzle in their puzzle bookpraise in the efl classroom… 45 lets. as in the study conducted by dweck and reppucci (1973), it was thought a faster time to complete the puzzles at the post-test stage would be an accurate indication of improved performance and perseverance. both the control group and experiment group had the same puzzle for the pre-test. if the students had not finished after one minute had passed, the participants were told to stop and write “60 seconds” as their times. the correct answers were not given to the students until the end of the experiment. appendix a shows the puzzle used in the pre-test of this study. experiment. the experiment was made up of crossword 2 to crossword 5 (i.e., a total of four crosswords). all of the crossword puzzles given to the participants in the control group were relatively straightforward and easy to complete (see appendix b). the process for the experiment was the same as the pre-test, with a timer displayed on a screen at the front of the room, and students saying “finished!” after completing the crosswords, before recording the number of seconds it took to complete each puzzle in their booklets. the participants in the experiment group were given puzzles with the same words as those in the control group, but the designs of the crosswords were slightly altered (i.e., extra cells were added to the crosswords or their designs were slightly different) in order to make the puzzles impossible to complete (see appendix c). this was done with a view to temporarily create an experience of failure among those in the experiment group and the feeling that the participants were not in control of the outcome, thus leading them to give up on the task (i.e., one characteristic of the fixed mindset). furthermore, when participants who completed the puzzles said, “finished!” i praised them in ways such as, “excellent!” “wow, you are really good at this!” and “that was so fast!” this praise for students’ ability to complete the tasks successfully was given in order to generate a fixed mindset among the students of both groups (mueller & dweck, 1998). all students who completed the puzzles were praised in these ways. however, the possible puzzles were given only to the students in the control group. thus, only these students were praised, unless students in the experiment group cheated to complete the puzzles (e.g., adding extra cells or misspelling words). the students who were unable to complete the puzzles successfully were told, “don’t worry. some people can do these kinds of puzzles and some cannot.” this kind of feedback was given in an attempt to prime a fixed mindset among students in the experiment group. although our mindsets are deeply ingrained within ourselves, they can be changed (dweck, 2006). in this study, it was thought that the simple method described above could be used to prime a temporary fixed mindset in the students in a similar way to the mock articles used in the study by lou and noels (2016). throughout the entire experiment, once the time limit (i.e., 60 seconds) had passed for each stage, i said to the students who had been unable to comadrian leis46 plete the puzzles, “don’t worry, it is okay. some people can do these kinds of puzzles, and some people cannot” in both english and the students’ mother tongue (i.e., japanese). this feedback was intended to create comparisons between the students who could complete the tasks and those who could not. when students with fixed mindsets are compared to others by, for example, teachers, sports coaches, parents, and peers, they tend to find excuses for not being as good as the other students (dweck, 2006), give up and make no effort on purpose (covington, 1992). some may even turn to cheating in order to show others that they can actually do it (leis, 2014; zhao, heyman, chen, & lee, 2017). post-test. the sixth crossword in the booklets acted as an immediate post-test. this crossword puzzle used exactly the same words as those used in the pretest (i.e., egg, cake, cook, and clock), but with different pictures and crossword design (see appendix a). due to the effect of prior experience, it can be expected that when one does the same task a second time, performance should improve (whalley, cutting, & beck, 2017). at the end of the experiment, the booklets were collected, and participants were told that some puzzles had been made impossible on purpose so they could not be completed. this was done in order to assure the students that it was not their lack of ability or effort, but the design of the study that prevented them from completing the tasks. ethical issues there are some questions surrounding ethical issues of early studies of implicit theories and the negative effects of purposefully giving feedback to students that may be harmful. i was concerned with similar ethical questions about the method of feedback given in this study. this feedback was given in an attempt to reflect the kind of praise suggested by various teaching handbooks (see the section on teachers’ praise for students’ ability below). in the hope of overcoming any possible ethical issues resulting from the feedback given in this experiment, at the conclusion of the study, i gave the students a short and simple explanation of mindsets, the reasoning behind conducting the experiment, as well as recieved informal consent to use the results of the experiment for research purposes. in addition, i also gave a 30-minute workshop on the benefits of having a growth mindset in one’s language studies to counter any possible temporary fixed mindsets that may have been primed within the experiment. praise in the efl classroom… 47 data analysis the times indicated on participants’ pre-test and post-test puzzles were entered into spss version 23 for analyses. paired samples t-tests were conducted to measure the differences in times within each group to complete the pre-test and post-test puzzles for each group. then, a mixed-design analysis of variance (anova) was conducted to measure differences between the groups in the improvements in time to complete the puzzles at the post-test stage. that is, i conducted the mixed-design anova to find out whether the students in the experiment group would improve their times as much as the students in the control group. table 1. results of the pre-test and post-test for the control and experiment group group test time (sd) 95% ci control pre 32.01  (14.93) 27.23,  36.78 post 22.15  (10.67)* 18.73, 25.56 experiment pre 28.07 (14.09) 23.39, 32.50 post 26.90 (13.86) 22.68, 31.61 notes: times are displayed in seconds; * p < .001. table 1 shows a summary of the results of this study. the results of the paired samples t-tests indicated that, as had been expected, the performance of those in the control group improved significantly with large effect sizes: t(40) = 4.06, p < .001, d = .76. the 95% confidence intervals (95% ci) had no overlap between the pre-test and post-test, confirming the significantly faster speed with which students could complete the puzzles at the post-test. the large effect sizes and lack of overlap in 95% ci suggest that substantial improvements were indeed observed, despite the relatively small sample size, and that similar results would be expected if the experiment were to be conducted again. on the other hand, the experiment group, as had been hypothesized, did not see any notable improvement in the speed with which the participants were able to complete the puzzles: t(41) = .36, p = .76. significant overlaps in 95% ci between the pre-test and post-test for the experiment group confirmed the lack of improvement in speed the second time the students did the crossword puzzle. to follow up the t-tests measuring the differences in times within the two groups, the improvements in times between the two groups were also measured through a mixed-design anova. this was done to confirm whether the experiment group did indeed make significantly less improvement than the adrian leis48 control group. the analysis showed that the differences were significant with medium effect sizes: f (1, 79) = 4.58, p = .04, ηp 2 = .06. these analyses support the hypothesis given earlier in this paper that the performance of students experiencing failure in an environment in which others were experiencing success, and were being praised for that success, would be affected in a negative way. reasons for this lack of improvement will be discussed in the next section. discussion and pedagogical implications the results of the present study suggest that when students are in a state in which they feel they have no control over the outcome, one of the characteristics of the fixed mindset, it results in lower persistence. as holding a growth mindset is known to be beneficial for a number of academic outcomes (dweck, 2018) and given that persistence in academic studies tends to lead to higher achievement (duckworth, peterson, matthews, & kelly, 2009), these results may provide pedagogical insights for researchers and language instructors. recent studies suggest many teachers appear to be investing little time in developing the growth mindsets of their students, even if they themselves have growth mindsets (haimovitz & dweck, 2017). therefore, it behooves teachers to reflect on concrete ideas for teachers to incorporate into their classrooms that develop strong growth mindsets among their students. this is especially important for language teachers to keep in mind as they encourage their students to take calculated risks in their learning and endeavor to study at a difficulty slightly higher than their current skill. comparisons with other students students learn in ways which are unique to each individual. therefore, it is helpful when teachers provide personalized coaching to each student in their classrooms so that a student feels that the teacher is not comparing one individual’s level of performance to another but rather, “emphasis is placed on the uniqueness of the individual student, the tenets of self-direction, and the need for student responsibility” (keefe, 2007, p. 221). although providing individual instruction may not be easily feasible in overpopulated classrooms, attending to learner uniqueness can help learners feel cared for by their teacher. giving effective praise to students in the classroom may be one approach to increasing their feelings of being attended to at an individual level. praise in the efl classroom… 49 in the classroom, words of praise for students that do not encourage comparisons with other students can develop the feeling of individualized instruction. rather than the feedback that was given in this experiment, encouragement such as, “don’t worry, i am sure you will get the next one!” or “you were so close! think about a strategy you could use to do better next time” may help students to focus on the process and imagine pathways to success as well as reinforce the sense that the teacher is looking at each student as an individual. the key is to consider other techniques for teachers to use that can help students focus on their individual progress as opposed to comparing their learning outcomes with their peers, for example, the approach to feedback suggested in the power of yet (dweck, 2014). the discouragement of competition with other students can also be developed through test feedback. leis and wilson (2017) argued that language teachers could consider refraining from telling the mean score of the class when returning tests to students, which is a common habit among teachers, especially in japan. leis and wilson (2017) suggested that giving the class average encourages students to compare their own scores with those of other students. as an alternative to giving class averages, leis and wilson (2017) recommended the use of an idio-comparative marking method, an approach to marking that gives individual students positive and negative comparisons to their previous test scores to show their personal progress. see leis and wilson (2017) for more on the idio-comparative marking method. teachers’ praise for students’ ability during the experiment conducted in this study, i made it a point to clearly praise students who were able to successfully complete the crossword puzzles. i did this to intentionally engender a temporary fixed mindset among the students experiencing failure by praising successful students in ways such as, “wow, you are so smart!” and “you are great students!” these kinds of comments were chosen to reflect the types of praise for proficiency (e.g., mueller & dweck, 1998) and praise for person not process (e.g., hattie & timperley, 2007; kamins & dweck, 1999) that often appear in teaching handbooks focusing on language to use in the classroom. for example, some teaching materials concentrate only on the correct answer without encouraging self-correction when giving feedback to a student who gives an incorrect answer: “no— that’s not right. will someone else try?” (gardner & gardner, 2005, p. 47). other textbooks simply praise students for giving the correct answer, without any focus on the process the student used to get to that answer: “good job!” (e.g., aiba, fujiwara, byrd, & barrows, 2016, p. 40; matsuzaki carreira, 2009, p. 11). adrian leis50 by regularly using feedback that consistently focuses on the process rather than the person, especially when praising or criticizing students, teachers of foreign languages create feelings that the students are in control of how they approach tasks and the success they experience with those tasks. kamins and dweck (1999) give examples of praise for person as, “you’re a good boy”; “i’m proud of you”; and “you’re really good at this” (kamins & dweck, 1999, p. 842). such feedback is unproductive, as it results in children developing “a sense of contingent self-worth—that they are only able, good, and worthy when they are successful” (johnston, 2012, p. 39). alternatively, teachers who praise students for their efforts and thought processes, encourage students to adopt an approach to learning that suggests ability is malleable and see that change is the result of the hard work one expends (i.e., one aspect of the growth mindset) (johnston, 2012). examples of praise focusing on process include, “you must have tried really hard”; and “you found a good way to do it, can you think of other ways that may also work?” (kamins & dweck, 1999, p. 842). precision of praise in this study, students were praised for their performances after they had indicated that they had been able to complete the puzzles successfully. similar praise might be given in regular classrooms after students have given the correct answer or completed a task successfully. for example, in a model classroom interaction during a task to facilitate speaking, ong and murugesan (2007) recommend teachers praise students at the end of an activity: “after several minutes, mr. martinez collects the cards and praises the students” (p. 37). furthermore, the praise given in the above interaction, “that was great” (ong & murugesan, 2007, p. 34), does not give students any indication to what “that” is referring—their efforts, the accuracy of their responses, their returning the cards quickly, or various other possibilities. for praise to be effective, it must also be precise and constructive. further, in order for praise given to students to be taken in an intended manner, it is vital that teachers carefully consider the timing of feedback. various studies have suggested that optimal benefits for students can be achieved when praise and other kinds of feedback is provided immediately after the behavior for which that praise is being offered has occurred (arbel, hong, baker, & holroyd, 2017; opitz, ferdinand, & mecklinger, 2011). in the present study, students were praised after answering correctly, meaning the praise was precisely targeted at that correct answer. this, then, affected the attitudes of students who were unable to come up with the correct answers, as they were ineligible for praise. in efl classes, when teachers give praise such as “great” or “thank you” after students have raised their hands, but before giving their answers, praise in the efl classroom… 51 the praise focuses on the effort the student has made to contribute to the class. praising students’ efforts can strengthen the growth mindset of both the students being praised and those around them. “immediately providing students with praise for desired behaviour highlights for the student the connection between the desired behaviour and the praise, and prevents inadvertently reinforcing an intervening, less desirable, behaviour” (alberto & troutman, 1999, cited in sutherland, copeland, & wehby, 2001, p. 47). thus, in order for teachers to encourage students to move away from the belief that they do not have control over the level of their performances (i.e., one aspect of the fixed mindset) and strengthen the attitude that their efforts and willingness to take calculated risks in challenging situations will lead to greater success (i.e., one aspect of the growth mindset), it is vital for language teachers to consider: (1) focusing praise and feedback at an individual level; (2) giving praise for the processes students go through rather the students as persons; and (3) the precision in how the praise is expressed. consideration of these three principles may be less likely to contribute to a fixed mindset among students, thus improving their performances in regular classes. conclusions in the present study, i have focused on only one aspect of mindsets: the sense of control one has over an outcome. this feeling of control can be exhibited through one’s effort and persistence. in the experiment, i investigated the effects of praise for ability aimed at successful students on those students experiencing failure. the results showed a tendency for these students to give up, with retrograded performance being observed in a post-test in which students would normally be expected to perform well. it could be argued, therefore, that although mindsets are firmly based within our beliefs, they may be changed depending on some negative experience: “[e]ven a single experience of failure can heighten anxiety and depression” (johnson et al., 2017, p. 19). building students’ motivation to be persistent through difficult periods of study takes time–destroying it may only take one simple negative experience. based on the results, i have suggested several implications for language teachers: carefully giving praise and test feedback based on individual bases, rather than performing comparisons with other students; and giving praise to students before they answer, in order to target the feedback on their willingness to contribute to class, not the accuracy of their responses. as with all research, this study has its limitations. first, interviews with some participants in both the control group and experiment group may have adrian leis52 given clearer insights to students’ reactions to the crossword puzzles, their feelings about the praise being given by the teacher, and thoughts about the success or lack thereof of other students in the classroom. in similar studies in the future, it would be advisable to add a qualitative component to the investigation, to obtain a more accurate portrayal of the students’ perceptions of the praise being given by the instructor. second, if interviews had been conducted, i could also have gained an insight as to whether the depleted performance of the students in the experiment group were in fact due to the type of praise being given or simply because they had been expecting another puzzle that they could not solve. there is a possibility that some students had worked out that the puzzles were indeed impossible to complete, which may have served as the impetus for their giving up. this, rather than cheating, could have been the reason why some students added extra cells to the crossword puzzles or purposefully misspelled words to complete the puzzles. the results of the present study are similar to those of dweck and repucci (1973) and mueller and dweck (1998), in that the students who had received impossible puzzles appear to temporarily have changed their attitudes towards learning in a negative way. like mueller and dweck (1998), in this study, i have focused these results on the praise given to students. in future studies, it may be advantageous to avoid priming a feeling of helplessness through impossible and possible puzzles, instead focusing on two different kinds of praise (i.e., praise for person and praise for process) in similar environments while mindful of ethical concerns. this may give strength to the argument that teachers need to be purposeful in the type of praise they give students in order to develop their growth mindsets. third, without the use of a questionnaire or other method to investigate students’ mindsets before, during, and after the study, it is difficult to conclude that the experience of failure and peers being praised for success did indeed result in the students in the experiment group having fixed mindsets. in future studies, it may be beneficial to consider adding short items related to, for example, confidence or expectancy of success, before doing each puzzle in the experiment (see leis, 2014). doing so may give a clearer indication of the dynamics of students’ mindsets throughout the study. these limitations, however, do not necessarily diminish the results of this study, rather they give directions for future investigations in this important area of language education. by considering the suggestions for ways of praising and offering feedback, as presented in this paper, teachers may be able to help students see the benefits of effort and risk-taking in their language learning. moreover, students may recognize that they do not need to compete with their peers in the classroom; they should focus more on competing with their own previous performances and seeking to improve. when a student approaches learning with a growth mindset and a feeling of “my only rival is the me of praise in the efl classroom… 53 yesterday,” the potential for learning, improved performance, and increased linguistic self-confidence is likely to follow. notes the test of english for international communication (toeic) is a common test used in japan to evaluate students’ english proficiency. the maximum score is 990 and minimum score is 10. acknowledgements this study was supported in part by grant-in-aid for scientific research (c) project number 17k04523. i would like to thank the reviewers for their insightful comments. much appreciation goes to kohei kidachi for drawing the pictures used in the experiment and rintaro sato and ashley leis for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. all remaining errors are the responsibility of the author. references aiba, c., fujiwara, m., byrd, b., & barrows, j. 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(2017). praising young children for being smart promotes cheating. psychological science, 28(12), 1868–1870. https://doi. org/10.1177/0956797617721529 a p p e n d i x a pretest and posttest puzzles appendix a shows the puzzles used by both the control group and the experiment group for the pre-test and post-test. the designs of the puzzles slightly differ in the pre-test and post-test but required participants in both groups to write the same words: cake, clock, cook, egg. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.03.009 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.03.009 https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617721529 https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617721529 praise in the efl classroom… 57 a p p e n d i x b control group experiment puzzles appendix b shows the puzzles given to the control group during the experiment of this study. the participants were required to enter the words (from top puzzle): can, ear, moon, mouse; frog, pig, spring, tree; dress; shoe, nose, sun; apple, snow, tea, water. adrian leis58 a p p e n d i x c experiment group experiment puzzles appendix c shows the puzzles given to the experiment group during the experiment of this study. the puzzles were designed to be impossible to complete in order to prime a feeling of helplessness and a fixed mindset. praise in the efl classroom… 59 adrian leis das lob im efl-unterricht: eine growth mindset-perspektive z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g in der vorliegenden studie wird untersucht, wie sich das loben von studenten, die bei der ausführung von aufgaben erfolgreich waren, auf die leistung sonstiger, erfolgloser studenten auswirkt. als experiment wurden lösbare und unlösbare kreuzworträtsel verwendet, um bei der hälfte der probanden fixed mindsets zu erzeugen. die durchschnittliche zeit für die lösung eines kreuzworträtsels im vortest wurde mit der durchschnittlichen zeit für die lösung desselben rätsels im nachtest verglichen. die ergebnisse zeigten, dass die studenten, denen lösbare kreuzworträtsel aufgegeben wurden, imstande waren, die geschwindigkeit, mit der sie das rätsel in der nachtest-phase lösen konnten, wesentlich zu verbessern. solche leistungsverbesserungen wurden allerdings nicht bei den studenten beobachtet, bei denen während des experiments durch die verwendung unmöglicher kreuzworträtsel fixed mindsets erzeugt worden waren. im artikel werden die gründe der erzielten ergebnisse sowie pädagogische implikationen in bezug auf effektives lob und andere feedback-methoden erörtert. schlüsselwörter: growth mindset, misserfolg, feedback, studenten, lob theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 7 (2), 2021, pp. 11–35 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.8431 tammy gregersen https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0744-9655 american university of sharjah, uae peter d. macintyre https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1085-6692 cape breton university, canada rachel buck https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7257-5506 american university of sharjah, uae using character strengths to address english writing anxiety a b s t r a c t positive psychology has been introduced to the applied linguistics literature with the broad goal of improving the experience of language learners and teachers through a variety of interventions (macintyre & mercer, 2014; gabryś-barker & gałajda, 2016). “the aim of positive psychology is to catalyze a change in psychology from preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building the best qualities in life” (seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000, p. 5). one significant contribution of this young field has been a series of empirically-tested positive psychology interventions (ppis) that have been shown to increase positive emotion, reduce distress, and/or improve well-being (seligman, steen, park, & peterson, 2005; sin & lyubormirsky, 2009). in the present research, we examine one application of a ppi involving a focus on using character strengths as a way to address language anxiety. through a case study analysis, we demonstrate the ways that this intervention was beneficial for the student. keywords: foreign language anxiety, positive psychology interventions (ppis), via strengths inventory the literature on positive psychology has proposed a number of exercises or interventions that have been empirically shown to increase well-being. however, one of the early important lessons emerging in studies of positive psychology interventions (ppis) in language acquisition is that the efficacy of the interventions appears to be quite variable, depending to a large degree on the individual and their context. for example, ppis have been used to encourage emotional intelhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.8431 tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, rachel buck12 ligence traits, such as gratitude, savoring, and optimism (gregersen, macintyre, finegan, talbot, & claman, 2014); empathy and emotional labor (gregersen, macintyre, & macmillan, 2020); gratitude, altruism, music, exercise, pets, and laughter (gregersen, macintyre, & meza, 2016). these characteristics are especially important in the foreign language classroom. there are positive benefits to connecting emotional intelligence and foreign language enjoyment (aki, 2006) and can have a predictive effect on language performance (valizadeh & alavinia, 2012; zarafshan & ardeshiri, 2012). although language anxiety has been studied extensively and potential interventions have been proposed, there are still few empirically tested examples. in the present research, we take an n-of-1 experimental approach to examine the effectiveness of a ppi by using character strengths in a new way as a factor in reducing anxiety. we focus specifically on the skill of writing and examine whether the learner’s novel engagement of self-selected character strengths might reduce language anxiety and help improve performance in a second language writing class. positive psychology and ppis succinctly, positive psychology can be defined as “the scientific study of what goes right in life” (peterson, 2006, p. 4). whereas much of psychology is concerned with negative experiences such as depression, trauma, and anxiety, positive psychology encourages a balance among research topics that directs research effort toward the breadth of the human experience—good and bad— acknowledging that good health means much more than the mere absence of illness (seligman & csikzentmihalyi, 2000, p. 5). the obvious parallel in sla is the notion that language learners are not deficient native-language (l1) speakers, but, rather, are developing unique linguistic and communicative capabilities (byrnes, 2018). at the same time, positive psychology advocates applying the rigor of the scientific method that psychology has long employed—which demands testing theories against evidence. accordingly, positive psychology is not to be mistaken for untested pop psychology, groundless assertions, or simplistic promotion of the power of positive thinking. rather, it requires an empirical process that demands scientific methods, falsifiability, and attention to methods, whether quantitative or qualitative (hefferon, ashfield, waters, & synard, 2017). in particular, the literature on positive psychology can benefit from engaging a combination of experimental and qualitative designs to produce a process-oriented account of how and why a specific ppi might work for a specific person. using character strengths to address english writing anxiety 13 the development of positive psychology interventions (ppis) includes exercises, training, and therapies principally focused on increasing positive feelings, positive cognitions, or positive behavior, in contrast to interventions that target a reduction of unpleasant symptoms. the typical approach of a ppi is to encourage further development and new applications of processes that already produce positive effects for a person. available, systematic evidence shows that ppis can be effective (seligman et al., 2006; sin & lyubomirsky, 2009). seligman et al. (2005) identified five specific exercises emphasizing positivity that also resulted in reducing depression and/or increasing well-being over short term and long term follow-up has been supported by random placebo-controlled trials. the five exercises asked participants, every day for a week, to (1) name three good things every day; (2) express gratitude more often; (3) describe ‘you’ at your best; (4) identify personal character strengths, and (5) use their strengths in new ways. the fifth exercise, using strengths in new ways, produced a pronounced reduction in depressive symptoms and an increase in self-reported happiness after a week, one month, three months and at the six-month follow-up. as part of the follow-up process, the researchers asked the study participants whether they continued to use the ppi even after the one-week intervention portion of study was complete. those who continued to use the exercise on their own experienced the most pronounced positive effects over time, emphasizing the need for a ‘fit’ between the person and the intervention activity (lyubormirsky & layous, 2013). the present study tests this intervention’s effects on second language writers, with particular emphasis on one person who was most successful in engaging with the ppi. the methodological toolbox that can be used to evaluate ppis is diverse. one under-utilized approach is single-subject or n-of-1 designs that test one individual intensively, over time. n-of-1 designs are especially valuable in testing ppis because results at the group level may or may not apply to specific individuals and vice versa. further, analyzing individual-level data can reveal details of the process of using ppis that cannot be examined at the group level. in general, most ppis, including the novel use of signature strengths employed here, usually are framed as an outline of activity and processes that must be tailored to individuals. woodworth et al. (2015) provide an example of testing ppis in n-of-1 designs. they argue that studying individuals, rather than drawing conclusions from group averages, is advantageous for at least three reasons: (1) relevant changes in psychological states can be identified that might be missed when averaged over a group; (2) interventions often are adapted to be tailored to an individual’s context; and (3) n-of-1 actually is a preferred design when an intervention is used repeatedly over time, providing a more rigorous test of the effect of the intervention. the study by woodworth et al. provided evidence that using signature strengths is one of the more effective interventammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, rachel buck14 tions but that there is considerable variability in the effect of ppis for individuals. in general, woodworth et al. conclude that ppis are likely most effective when there is a good fit between the person and the activity, but, at the same time, the authors show that such a result is problematic because the effectiveness of ppis “[…] should not rely on the self-selection of participants” (2015, p. 28). we disagree. perhaps the more appropriate lesson from woodworth et al. is not about the decontextualized efficacy of any given ppi in general but, rather, the need to assess how the process of using a ppi reveals its fit with the person using it and the context in which they live. in the case of the ppi under study here, the specific signature strength, or, more broadly, the pattern of interconnected strengths, will be unique to each person, and using strengths in a novel way is a creative process that would not be instantiated in the same way in another person. signature strengths character strengths are often defined in ways similar to personality traits, specifically as the capacity for thoughts, feelings, and actions that allow for optimal functioning in ways that are valued, either because of goal orientations or morally-valued virtues (biswas-diener, kashdan, & minhas, 2011; linley, maltby, wood, joseph, harrington, peterson, & seligman, 2007). consistent with modern personality trait theory, strengths can be viewed as “stable and general but also shaped by the individual’s setting and thus capable of change” (peterson & seligman, 2004, p. 10). one of the most widely used ways of measuring strengths is the online via inventory (peterson & seligman, 2004). seligman (2002) defines the qualities of a character strength as the ability to: (1) contribute to individual fulfillment, satisfaction, and happiness; (2) be advocated by institutions (e.g., schools, religions); (3) be associated with respected persons; and (4) be morally valued in its own right and not for tangible outcomes it may produce. further, from a research perspective, strengths are defined as trait-like, measurable, and nonredundant with other character strengths. theoretically, a taxonomy of potential strengths that are ubiquitous across cultures identified 24 character strengths divided into six broader categories called virtues (peterson & seligman, 2004). the six virtues and the character strengths that fall within each are: 1. wisdom/knowledge: creativity, curiosity, judgment, love of learning, and perspective; 2. courage: bravery, perseverance, honesty, and zest; 3. humanity: love, kindness, and social intelligence; using character strengths to address english writing anxiety 15 4. justice: fairness, leadership, and teamwork; 5. temperance: forgiveness, humility, prudence, and self-regulation; 6. transcendence: appreciation of beauty/excellence, gratitude, hope, humor and spirituality. research that has tested the reliability and validity of the via inventory has suggested that the individual scales show acceptability, reliability, and validity (mcgrath, 2016; peterson, park, & seligman, 2006).1 to emphasize that some strengths are more influential than others in a person’s life, seligman (2002) coined the term signature strengths to identify those that best characterize a person. seligman (2002) describes signature strengths as those meeting the following criteria: – a sense of ownership and authenticity surrounding the strength; – a feeling of excitement (particularly at first) while displaying it; – create a rapid learning curve when undertaking new tasks; – intrinsic motivation to use the strength; – a sense of yearning to act in accordance with it; – the creation and pursuit of fundamental projects that revolve around the strength; – continuous learning of new ways to use the strength; – invigoration rather than exhaustion when using the strength; – the discovery of the strength as owned in an epiphany; – a feeling of inevitability in using the strength (i.e., “try and stop me”). the above attributes, including intrinsic motivation, excitement, and rapid learning, would likely be welcomed in almost any pedagogical context by teachers and learners alike. in considering how strengths are employed in situ, biswas-diener et al. (2011) emphasize the need to take a dynamic view of strengths. instead of focusing on strengths as internal capacities that exist across time and situations (contemporary trait approach), we adopt a dynamic, withinperson approach to personality. instead of searching for behaviors that elicit strong performance and vitality across time and situations, we can search for interactions between people and their environment. such behaviors can be defined as a strength-based structure within someone’s personality. (p. 110) the specific intervention employed in the present study shows promise in aligning the specific strengths of an individual with difficulties they might be having, specifically anxiety-arousal. the intervention has two parts. first, each participant identifies his or her own personal strengths, using a standardized 1 empirical research is showing that these can be organized differently (mcgrath, 2015) and there are now several variations on the via inventory available (www.viacharacter.org). tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, rachel buck16 survey published online called the via inventory (peterson & seligman, 2004). second, the person is tasked with creating new ways to optimize personal well-being by finding new ways to apply the strength in areas where it has not been applied in the past. language anxiety anxiety is often a disruptive and an unwelcome part of the languagelearning process. defined as “a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors related to classroom language learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process” (horwitz et al., 1986, p. 128), this anxiety can often hinder the learner’s progress. numerous studies have raised concerns about the negative effects of anxiety arousal (for reviews see: horwitz, 2017; macintyre, 1999; 2017; teimouri, et al., 2019), including studies highlighting negative effects of anxiety on the writing process (cheng, horwitz, & schallert, 1999; cheng, 2002; lee & krashen, 1997). in broad terms, we can identify two possible routes by which to reduce anxiety: (1) directly address the symptoms of anxiety, for example, through relaxation training or eliminating anxiety triggers (see gregersen & macintyre, 2014 for several suggestions), or (2) intervene in a way that affects anxiety as a byproduct of focus on other attributes, for example, through building strengths and self-confidence (see dewaele & dewaele, 2017). if we choose to leave anxiety to one side and work on interventions that psychologically build up the learner, a collection of empirically tested ppis is available, though none has been tested as a way to reduce the negative effects of language anxiety (seligman, steen, park, & peterson, 2005; sin & lyubormirski, 2009; helgesen, 2018). however, at the outset of this research, we take note that studies exploring the efficacy of positive psychology interventions (ppis) in second language acquisition (sla) suggest that their success is quite variable across individuals (gregersen, macintyre, finegan, talbot, & claman, 2014; gregersen, macintyre, & macmillan, 2020; gregersen, macintyre, & meza, 2016). there are myriad reasons for anxiety arousal, and this is important to recognize because the reason for anxiety may influence the configuration of individuals’ abilities or aptitudes that are relevant to the success of any specific intervention (gregersen & macintyre, 2014). in the present study, we take a process-oriented, n-of-1 approach to an experimental procedure wherein english language learners were tasked with identifying their signature strengths using the via online survey (peterson & seligman, 2004) and explore whether using them helped to reduce anxiety in using character strengths to address english writing anxiety 17 a writing course. because anxiety is personal, students were told they would be using these strengths to overcome their individual senses of anxiety. over a three-week period, learners self-generated ways of using their own strengths in new ways as they approached writing tasks in their language course. participants used three specially created narrative frames (burkhuizen & wette, 2008) before, during, and after the intervention to capture their thoughts about their past, present, and future use of their signature strengths (see appendix a). although we will test differences in anxiety based on the second language writing anxiety inventory (slwai) results (cheng, 2004), our concern with a process-oriented account suggests that the intervention be examined as a case study. in particular, we focus on how the learner who was most successful in reducing writing anxiety used their signature strengths. a close examination of the case study participant’s narrative frames and four individual written assignments before and during the intervention offers insight into whether the intervention influenced that individual’s writing. in short, our research questions are as follows: rq1: how did learners react in general to the ppi which required using signature strengths in new ways; what did students say about the activity in their narrative frames? rq2: what can a close examination of one particular case study participant, who experienced success with using signature strengths in new ways, reveal about the potential found in the intervention to mitigate the effects of negative emotion? methodology participants a total of 45 participants (24 females, 21 males) were recruited for this study. all were firstand second-year university students from a variety of majors (several different kinds of engineering, biology, architecture, design, finance, business, marketing, mass communications, international studies) enrolled in three different sections of an obligatory english for academic writing class. the class is the first of three writing courses that they must take at a university in the united arab emirates (uae). two of the three intact course sections became experimental groups (31 participants), while the third acted as a control (14 participants). although the language of instruction for tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, rachel buck18 all of the classes and the university was english, the l1 of the majority was arabic (38), followed by urdu (3), malayalam (2), tajik (1), and gujarati (1). the uae has an unusual sociolinguistic context in that it has welcomed globalization by adopting english through the implementation of a strategy of linguistic dualism in which english is linked with commercial, modern, and international facets of society, while arabic is used in religious, traditional, and local aspects (findlow, 2006). instruments the via inventory of strengths. to assess participants’ character strengths we used the english version of seligman and peterson’s (2004) standardized web-based via inventory of strengths, that according to the survey’s website, has been taken by over seven million people (https://www.viacharacter. org/www/). the via is a self-report survey in which participants rank their responses to items on a five-point scale (1 = “not at all like me,” 5 = “very much like me”). with a total of 198 items (five to nine statements per strength), respondents report their degree of support for each statement and then receive a report, free of charge, which lists all 24 character strengths in order from the individual’s strongest to weakest. the l2 writing anxiety inventory (cheng, 2004). to assess participants’ l2 writing anxiety, we used cheng’s (2004) second language writing anxiety inventory whose total scale and subscales were assessed by means of correlation and factor analysis. it was discovered that both the total scale and the individual subscales of the slwai have good reliability and adequate validity. consisting of 22 likert-type items ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), the inventory was created for the purpose of developing and evaluating a self-report assessment that reflects a three-dimensional conceptualization of anxiety. the three components assessed by the items are: (a) cognitive, reflecting the mental aspect of the anxiety experience, including negative expectations, preoccupation with performance and concern about others’ perceptions; (b) somatic, including one’s awareness of the physiological effects of the anxiety experience, as reflected in increased arousal of unpleasant feelings, such as nervousness and tension; and (c) avoidance behavior, which is the behavioral aspect of avoiding writing. narrative frames. our third set of instruments, three different narrative frames (see appendix a), was used to document participants’ feelings before applying their strengths, how they felt during the exercise, and their resulting feelings upon completion. the preand post-intervention narrative frames were each filled out once, while the “during-the-intervention” one was completed nine times, corresponding to the three times a week class was held for using character strengths to address english writing anxiety 19 the experimental period of three weeks. the narrative frames were meant to provide guidance and support in terms of both the structure and connection for their written narratives (barkhuizen & wette, 2008). narrative frames as a research method deliver a snapshot of participants’ experiences in the form of a story, written mostly by the participants within a framework provided by the researcher. for the purposes of this study, the three frames acted as starters, connectives, and sentence modifiers, giving participants a template within which they could focus on communicating what they sought to convey while, at the same time, scaffolding them with a specific generic form. coded writing assignments. our fourth data set consisted of four formal written assignments that were submitted throughout the semester, although the intervention began during week 10 of the semester. table 1 shows the study intervention process within the semester timeline. table 1. data collected from students in experimental group study week # intervention data collected semester week # syllabus assignment data collected pre-intervention: students had already completed a disciplinary writing analysis and had begun research about their chosen research topic. 1 via character strengths test, the pre-intervention slwai; and the pre-intervention narrative frame. 10 students had completed an annotated bibliography assignment for an introductory research paper (syllabus assignment #2); they began drafting an introduction for this paper. 2 during-intervention narrative frame with responses for 3 days of the week. 11 students began an outline and draft for their research papers. 3 during-intervention narrative frame with responses for 3 days of the week. 12 students submitted their research papers and began the introductory argument assignment (syllabus assignment #3). this assignment was a “letter to the editor” based on the research they had completed for assignment #2. 4 during-intervention narrative frame with responses for 3 days of the week. 13 students submitted argument assignment (syllabus assignment #3). 5 post-intervention slwai. 14 students began working on the final reflection (syllabus assignment #4). 6 students were shown the preand post-slwai scores and submitted a short reflection commenting on the change or lack of change. 15 students submitted the final reflection assignment (syllabus assignment #4). tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, rachel buck20 the written formal assignments were the following: assignment 1. rhetorical analysis paper. purpose: to analyze the rhetorical situation and particular rhetorical strategies of a genre from the student’s discipline, such as an engineering proposal. assignment 2. introductory research paper. purpose: to research a chosen topic and present many aspects of the issue. students included a cover letter with their paper to encourage meta-cognitive awareness. assignment 3. letter to the editor. purpose: students chose a newspaper or magazine and wrote an opinion piece using research from their previous class assignments. assignment 4. course reflection. purpose: to retroactively review their assignments and demonstrate that they learned valuable skills which they will transfer to future contexts. post-study reflection/member check. at the end of the intervention period and upon being informed of their preand post-intervention slwai scores, the participants were asked to reflect upon their results and reveal any insight they may have as to why the differences occurred. table 2 shows the data collected from the control group students and procedures are explained further in the next section. table 2. data collected from students in control group study week # intervention data collected from students in control group semester week # syllabus assignment data collected from students in control group 1 students completed pre-intervention slwai. 10 students completed the same assignments as the experimental group, but these were not collected. 5 students completed the postintervention slwai. 14 6 students were shown the preand post-slwai scores and submitted a short reflection commenting on the change or lack of change. 15 procedures data collection for the experimental and control groups took place over the course of six weeks after students consented to participate in the study. after this, participants across the three groups responded to the pretest slwai. subsequently, only the experimental group participated in the intervention while participants in the control group continued with class as usual without using their signature strengths in new ways. using character strengths to address english writing anxiety 21 the first activity completed by the experimental group, outside class time, was the online via character strengths survey with the purpose of revealing their personal strengths used most often. upon receiving their personalized strengths report from the via website, experimental participants filled out the first (“pre-intervention”) narrative frame called “my strengths story.” after submitting the first narrative frame during the next class, participants were asked to think of creative ways to use their strengths throughout the next three weeks, at which point they were given three identical (“duringintervention”) narrative frames into which they documented their experiences. this helped participants keep track of how they applied their strengths on a daily basis and how this affected their performance and feelings. the frames prompted participants to write their top five strengths, and then each week to choose one strength and think of novel ways to use it in writing class or while they wrote their assignments outside of class. in this way, each individual participant was able to individualize the intervention to fit their own context. after completing the during-intervention narrative for three consecutive weeks, students were given their final (“post-intervention”) narrative frame which was similar to, but not exactly the same, as the first. this one asked them to reflect on the similarities and differences in their feelings before and after the intervention by describing how they felt while writing in their l2. they reported on levels of confidence, continuing struggles, and ways they might conquer these struggles by using their signature strengths in the future. they completed the post-intervention narrative frame in class and then took the post-test slwai. control group participants also took the post-slwai. the scores of both the control and experimental groups’ slwai were then calculated for each participant to identify individuals showing the most anxiety reduction. in week 6 of the study, students from the experimental group were informed about the difference between their preand postslwai scores and were asked to write a short reflection about changes in their personal anxiety scores. to focus on the n-of-1 analysis, we selected the participant who showed the greatest change in slwai scores in order to assess the specific ways in which she used the ppi to reduce anxiety. the analysis examined her four formal writing assignments that had been submitted during the semester in the context of the writing class. using an iterative coding process, two coders were given copies of the case study participant’s three sets of narrative frames as well as her four written papers and were instructed to identify evidence supporting the participant’s strength being incorporated into her writing. using five different-colored highlighters for the participant’s five character strengths, readers coded the presence of the strength in the participant’s manuscripts. for example, if the participant stated in her narrative frame that she would use her “zest” to “create an anecdote in her introduction,” readers coded the strength of  “zest” in pink and then highlighted the anecdote in the corresponding written tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, rachel buck22 assignment also in pink. only those narratives that had sections coded by both readers in the same color are used as data in this study. results and discussion to answer rq1 concerning learners’ reaction to using their signature strengths in new ways, we begin with the narrative frames. the participants in the intervention group were asked to complete three narrative frames that corresponded to their feelings concerning writing in their l2 (english) before, during and after the intervention (using signature strengths in a new way). examination of the respondents’ word choice within the narrative frames suggests positive experiences. there were no negative descriptors used in any of the post-intervention narrative frames. all reported feeling positive about engaging their strengths, using adjectives such as powerful, successful, comfortable, confident, amazed, happy, satisfied, humorous, productive, curious, involved, prepared, positive, relieved, dedicated, comfortable, and creative. the words used in narrative frames generally indicate a positive collective response to the exercise even though it did not result in statistically significant differences between the groups on the writing anxiety measure.2 previous research in positive psychology suggests that a group-level examination can obscure the variability among individual reactions to specific interventions and complicate the identification of the variables that drive change (or lack thereof) within individuals (gregersen, macintyre, & macmillan, 2020). because grouplevel results seldom reflect the experience of individuals, or can be assumed to do so only under restrictive conditions (molenaar & campbell, 2009), we focus on an n-of-1 case study for an individual (eid & diener, 1999; lazarus, 2003) to show an example of the process of the intervention being used. we selected the participant who showed the single largest decline in writing anxiety among the study participants; we shall call her noor. 2 the small sample size suggests that the analysis was under-powered, but we present the anova results here for completeness. to assess the group-level effects of the ppi, a 2×2 split plot (mixed model) anova was conducted. the between-subjects factor was group (intervention vs control) and the repeated-measures factor was time (pre-test vs. post-test). the dependent variable was the slwai total score. levene’s test was non-significant for both the preand post-test data, allowing us to assume homogeneity of variance at each testing time. results showed no significant main effects or interactions. the main effect for group, f (1, 39) = .41, p = .527, the main effect of time, f (1, 39) = 2.70, p = .109, and the group × time interaction, f (1, 39) = .51, p = .481, all were non-significant. although both groups showed a slight but non-significant decline in mean anxiety scores (overall mpre = 61.7; mpost = 59.1), the intervention and control groups on average showed approximately the same degree of change over time. using character strengths to address english writing anxiety 23 in response to rq2 that asks what a close examination of one particular participant might reveal about the potential of the intervention, we turn to the individual chosen as the focus of our in-depth case study, noor. she was selected based upon the unusual effectiveness of the intervention to mitigate her l2 writing anxiety. noor had a post-test anxiety score 21 points less than at pretest. this was the largest success of anyone in the study suggesting that she found a fit between her specific context and the way in which she used the signature strengths ppi. noor, a design major, speaks arabic as her l1 and began acquiring english at the age of three as an l2. on a scale of one (low proficient) to ten (high proficient), she self-assessed her english proficiency a bit above average with a 7.5. according to the results of the via inventory, her top five strengths (in descending order) were spirituality, creativity, humility, honesty, and zest. specifically, the strengths are defined as follows: – a spiritual person is guided by his or her solid, consistent beliefs about the universe’s higher purpose and meaning and receives comfort from such beliefs as they evidence where the individual fits into a much bigger picture. – a creative person constantly imagines novel ways to do things and are seldom satisfied by getting things done via traditional means. – a humble person is acknowledged and valued for his or her modesty and avoidance of the spotlight. – an honest person lives authentically, straightforwardly, genuinely, and without pretense. – a person with zest exudes excitement and energy, living life wholeheartedly and as an adventure (via institute on character, 2019). before the strengths intervention the pre-intervention narrative frame shows noor’s thinking before the study began. her words are italicized below; the un-italicized words are part of the narrative frame: in my writing class, i have a difficult time trying to find my inner voice. the main reason for this is that i cannot find the right vocab palette to express myself the way i express myself in arabic. however, i feel i excel in simplifying complex ideas and make them better suited for a wide range of audience. one of my personal strengths is spirituality. i have used it in the past to overcome the losses and disappointments i have faced. this week, i will use my strength to help me in my writing and my writing class by re-reading what i wrote in my introduction and altering it so it matches who i am. each of the remaining three weeks i will try to use my personal tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, rachel buck24 strength in a new way by: 1) listening to podcasts to improve it and learn how to efficiently incorporate it in my daily life; 2) finding inspiration from my environment; and 3) reading my audience and friends. [i.e. interpreting friends’ reactions to events] before beginning the intervention, noor felt she exceled at simplifying complex ideas but also lamented not having the vocabulary in english that she commands in her l1 (arabic), which she believes limits her authenticity in english. her concern over authenticity may be highly salient for her, given that a top strength is being “honest,” which by definition means living authentically (via institute on character, 2019). furthermore, she seems to recognize that gaps in her command of english do not allow her to express herself in creative ways, frustrating another of her strengths. further in the narrative frame, noor juxtaposes her limited lexicon with notions that are a bit esoteric—she recognizes one of her strengths as spirituality, yet begrudges her difficulties in finding her “inner voice” in her l2 writing, which implicates her strengths of honesty, integrity, and authenticity. noor uses this disparity to revise her writing in order to align it more with her authentic self. paired with the strength of spirituality, we might infer that the podcasts to which she plans to listen (as cited in her goal list for the following three weeks) will invoke spiritual messages and that the “inspiration” she seeks from her environment will also provide a spiritual uplift. noor’s pre-intervention narrative reveals an alignment among the difficulties she perceives in her own authentic writing and strengths she can use during the three-week intervention phase of the study. during the strengths intervention as part of the intervention, noor completed nine additional narrative frames, one in each of three classes per week for three weeks. each narrative frame consisted of three sentences in which the first part of the sentence was provided and she completed the rest. the first narrative frame noor completed in week 1 is shown here, followed by table 1, which summarizes verbatim her responses to the same narrative prompts in weeks 2 and 3. week 1. class 1: the strength i used was creativity. i used this strength in my writing by finding new ways to draw the reader. after doing this, i felt that it is easier to continue my introduction since i have a strong base. using character strengths to address english writing anxiety 25 class 2: the strength i used was zest. i used this strength in my writing by i finished my introduction wholeheartedly. after doing this, i felt satisfied, since i am a perfectionist. class 3: the strength i used was spirituality. i used this strength in my writing by listening to my inner voice, to help organize my ideas, and how my essay will flow. after doing this, i felt blank, since all my thoughts are reflected in my paper. table 3. case study #1 (noor’s) during-intervention narrative frame response the strength i used was... i used this strength in my writing by… after doing this, i felt… week 2 class 1 creativity finding smart arguments critical thinker class 2 honesty stating 100% accurate facts knowledgeable class 3 zest anecdotal introduction optimistic week 3 class 1 spirituality finding an accurate tone to address my audience like i sent the message accurately class 2 creativity making an anecdote like i killed the idea since its already created, no room for improvement class 3 honesty finding accurate data unbias during the intervention, noor found new ways to exercise four of her top five strengths while writing. according to the information in the narrative frames, throughout the three weeks she employed her creativity three times: to draw in her readers, to formulate “smart” arguments, and to compose an anecdote. this strength application resulted in her feeling that the writing process was easier, that she improved her critical thinking, and that she did such a good job there was “no room for improvement.” she used honesty to state facts she believed to be 100% correct and to find accurate data which made her feel “knowledgeable” and “unbiased.” exercising her strength for zest, noor “wholeheartedly” finished writing an anecdotal introduction, sparking feelings of satisfaction and optimism. finally, noor re-visited her spirituality strength by using her inner voice to guide organization of her writing and strike an appropriate tone for her audience. there are connections between the strengths identified prior to the intervention and the new ways noor created to use them. noor experienced positive language results after using her signature strengths in new ways: she liked her writing, feeling optimistic, knowledgeable, and satisfied. these are positive psychological processes that teachers typically encourage in a writing course. in her first (pre-intervention) writing assignment, noor communicated anxiety tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, rachel buck26 concerning expressing herself in her english writing. she attributed her apprehension to past educational experiences in which teachers “just taught us to stick to the five paragraph essays where every sentence is calculated, there is little to no space for self-expression, and creative writing.” she found the old approach too restrictive; the present approach seemed a better fit to her particular strengths. as a design major, noor felt the tension between her desire to be creative in her writing and following formulaic, prescribed rules. she stated in her assignment that when she started college, she found it “challenging in adjusting my writing and drawing a line between my design proposal, my wri 101 essays, and my history classes biography writing” (assignment 1). she echoes the sentiments again in her final research paper reflection letter. within the context of applying strengths such as creativity, she commented, “i learned that there are rules and policies one must abide to when writing a research paper.” in essence, noor suggested that her writing anxiety stems in part from the notion that her past writing experiences did not provide enough room for her to exercise the signature strength of creativity. during the intervention, her narrative frame responses described how she invoked creativity more than any other strength (three times). further, she suggested that creativity could manifest in different, non-traditional ways. she was able to exercise her strengths within the broader confines of the l2 writing systems she was being taught. at the outset of the intervention, noor was in the process of gathering research and drafting a paper on the topic of closed and open adoptions.3 in her narrative frame for week 1 of the intervention, noor cites work on her introduction and her goal to use her creativity strength to find “new ways to draw in the reader.” through the process of trying multiple ways to begin the essay, she found that the most effective strategy for her was to provide background information on, and definitions of, closed and open adoptions. noor discovered that she can still exercise her strength of creativity within a genre that she perceived as being confining and restrictive, that is, she used her strength in a new way. in both her narrative frame for week 1 and assignment 1, another writing challenge that noor describes was finding her “inner voice”: it is also challenging to translate certain ideas and sentences in my head to english since the language structure is different from that in arabic. it is a long systematic process from developing the idea in my head in arabic, translating it to english, and then adjusting it to a certain style of writing. 3 a closed adoption means there is no contact between the birth parents and the adoptive parents, while in open adoptions, birth parents and adoptive parents choose to include both parties in the adopted child’s life. using character strengths to address english writing anxiety 27 this challenge is exacerbated with writing her research paper when she laments in assignment 4, her reflective journal: i find it challenging to brain storm my ideas and finding the order and hierarchy in my research since i am overwhelmed by the things i read about the topic and want to include them. thus, making it difficult for me to find what my argument is and what is the best method to convince my reader. however, noor used her spirituality strength as a way to organize ideas. for noor, finding her “inner voice” is a complicated process. when reflecting on the first draft of the research essay in assignment 4, noor states, “the overuse, and abuse of voicing my opinion rather than supporting my argument with peer-reviewed articles, data, and experts’ opinion weakened the claims i made.” noor’s use of the pronoun “i” undergoes a transformation during the course of the semester. in her first assignment, noor used “i” frequently throughout to discuss her experiences. in her research essay (assignment 2), she removed the “i” when stating her opinion. for example, in her conclusion, she states, whether the vessel chosen is open or closed adoption a child has the right to learn the truth about his identity since day one. manipulating the story and waiting until the child turns the legal age would only create self-acceptance and identity issues which might later lead to various mental disorders and cause depression. she seems to feel more confident in stating her opinion after she has stated research supporting many sides of the issue of adoption, but finding an inner voice did not necessarily mean using “i” in her papers. during week 3, noor was asked to use her research to write a letter to the editor of a newspaper or magazine of her choosing. in her narrative frame, noor explained that she used her strengths to find “smart” arguments and “accurate facts.” in her letter, she responded to a previous article about an experiment conducted on triplets separated at birth. in her reflection about the letter (assignment 4), she specifically mentions that she had read multiple articles about adoption and felt knowledgeable about the subject. she worked on the final draft in order to find an “accurate tone” and, in doing so, decided that her letter should be directed to “adoptive parents, and for that [she] kept the language simple and did not mention scientific terms used in the study like polygenic, eugenics, etc.” because she knew that adoption was a sensitive topic, noor chose to include a quote in her letter from one of the actual triplets who was targeted in the study. she also decided an anecdote would be appropriate for the content, and she interpreted this as being “honest” about her description of the study in the letter. while noor’s purpose for writing was somewhat vague tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, rachel buck28 (“inform the public and alarm parents to wake up”), she found some freedom and strength in writing about something with which she is deeply concerned. over the three-week intervention period, by actively thinking about her signature strengths, noor altered some of her beliefs about writing. instead of thinking about her writing in terms of rules and policies, she came to see it as more nuanced and complex. she understood that “writing in the field of design can look and feel very different like that of magazines, and design journals” (assignment 4), but that there are choices within each genre of writing. noor found room for creativity within the assignments, but the ways she drew on her creativity took on different forms in each context. after the strengths intervention the post-intervention narrative frame asked participants to reflect upon the experience of using signature strengths and to project forward as to how they might use them in the future. noor’s final post-intervention narrative frame was as follows: this past month, i used my personal strength in new ways by introducing it to my life in new ways like my art. from this experience, i felt powerful. this is because i was able to use my strength efficiently. in my writing class, i felt more productive. however, i still struggle with organizing my ideas since it does get overwhelming sometimes. yet, from this experience, i have learned to get my mind off things and start after a short break. still there are still so many ways for me to use my strengths! among them are communicating with people in any form (art, conversations, writing). a striking element of noor’s final narrative is her revelation that she was able to extend the use of her signature strengths to other areas of her life, such as her art, and that this extension resulted in positive outcomes, making her feel more powerful and productive. as a design major, art is central not only to her identity, but also to her profession. she admits to feeling overwhelmed at times but knowing how to use her strengths has taught her to reenergize by taking a break to re-center herself. at the end of the study, we informed the participants of their anxiety scores from the preand post-intervention slwai and asked them to reflect on the differences between the pre-test and the post-test, if any. our purpose in doing so was a form of member check (maxwell, 2013) wherein the research participant reacts to the information obtained in the study. noor’s response to her reduction in anxiety scores on the slwai was as follows: using character strengths to address english writing anxiety 29 towards the beginning of the semester, i was uncertain of my english language skills. this was because i was not confident in my own voice. i tried to mask my opinion by using the passive voice. however, that made me realize that i was anxious to express my inner voice. after participating in the study […], i had to face my anxiety and accept it so i can move on. i started using the active voice in my writing, which decreased the grade of my essay because i did not master the style well. however, after some practice, my grades became better and i was more confident in expressing my thoughts and my values to communicate to people my standard rather than shying away. and i feel like i have accomplished that since i went from a 72 to a [score of 51, a change of] –21. rather than working on compensating for her deficiencies in her writing, noor capitalized on signature strengths she already possessed to make the writing process easier, more enjoyable, and to gain confidence. her teacher uses a very friendly teaching style, beginning class with a question used to create an open environment, group work activities, and thus students were encouraged to offer multiple viewpoints in class discussions. noor said that the effect extended to the rest of her life and art, leading her to feel more powerful, productive, and energized. noor’s specific approach to implementing the signature strengths ppi supports the need to assess the person-activity fit. lyubomirsky and layous (2013) presented the factors that mediate the effectiveness of ppis, including (1) the details of the specific ppi; (2) the characteristics of the person using it; (3) the degree of ‘fit’ between the person and the activity; and (4) a consideration of the specific processes that are engaged. the present results support the idea that assessing the efficacy of the ppi can be done at the individual level, in a detailed analysis of the process used to implement the ppi and tailor it to the individual. noor’s quantitative data showed that the ppi was unusually effective for her, she showed a remarkable reduction in writing anxiety, and the above analysis suggests that it fit her needs remarkably well. conclusion perhaps the most appropriate conclusion of this study is that the ppi intervention can reduce writing anxiety for some learners but not others. for at least one individual, this occurred in a dramatic fashion. that is not to say the ppi will work for everyone. one of the lessons emerging from this study is the need to examine in detail the fit between the individual and the ppi tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, rachel buck30 activity and to document the process by which it exerts its effect. in fact, one of the most significant pedagogical implications emerging from this study is that interventions, such as learning tasks, assessment tools, feedback, and other teaching/learning mechanisms, are most effective when personalized to meet the individual needs of the learner. the present results reinforced the benefits of an individual-level experimental approach to analyzing the efficacy of interventions. we know from previous investigations that even the most successful inventions will not affect all persons in the same way, and some persons might not engage with the ppi at all. csikszentmihalyi (1991, p. xi) poetically suggests, “[…] a joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.” in more practical research terms, molenaar and campbell (2009) argue forcefully what virtually every methodologist knows—because of intra-group variability and aggregation of data across persons, 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(2012). the relationship between emotional intelligence, language learning strategies and english proficiency among iranian efl university students. the journal of educational and instructional studies in the world, 2(3), 105–114. a p p e n d i x a narrative frames 1. pre-intervention narrative frame: my strengths story in my writing class, i have a difficult time trying to . the main reason for this is . however, i feel i excel in . one of my personal strengths is . i have used it in the past to . this week i will use my strength to help me in my writing and in my writing class by . for each of the remaining three weeks i will try to use my personal strength in a new way by: 1) 2) 3) 2. post-intervention narrative frame this past month, i used my personal strength in new ways by . from this experience, i felt . this is because . in my writing class, i felt more . tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, rachel buck34 however, i still struggle with . yet, from this experience, i have learned . still, there are still so many ways for me to use my strengths!! among them are . 3. “during intervention” narrative frame my top five personal strengths are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. weekly strength report: sunday the strength i used was . i used this strength in my writing by . after doing this, i felt monday the strength i used was . i used this strength in my writing by . after doing this, i felt tuesday the strength i used was . i used this strength in my writing by . after doing this, i felt wednesday the strength i used was . i used this strength in my writing by . after doing this, i felt thursday the strength i used was . i used this strength in my writing by . after doing this, i felt . using character strengths to address english writing anxiety 35 tammy gregersen, peter d. macintyre, rachel buck die verwendung von charakterstärken zur bekämpfung von schreibangst in englisch z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die positive psychologie wurde in die literatur der angewandten linguistik mit dem allgemeinen ziel eingeführt, die erfahrungen von sprachlernern und -lehrern durch eine vielzahl von interventionen zu verbessern (macintyre & mercer, 2014; gabryś-barker & gałajda, 2016). „das ziel der positiven psychologie ist es, einen wandel in der psychologie zu katalysieren, der sich nicht mehr nur damit beschäftigt, die schlechtesten dinge im leben zu reparieren, sondern auch die besten qualitäten im leben aufzubauen“ (seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000, s. 5). ein wichtiger beitrag dieses jungen gebiets ist eine reihe von empirisch getesteten, positiv-psychologischen interventionen (ppi), die nachweislich positive emotionen verstärken, disstress reduzieren und/oder das wohlbefinden verbessern (seligman, steen, park, & peterson, 2005; sin & lyubormirsky, 2009). in der vorliegenden studie wird eine anwendung von ppi untersucht, deren schwerpunkt in der nutzung von charakterstärken als einer möglichkeit, die sprachangst zu behandeln, liegt. anhand einer fallstudie wird aufgezeigt, wie diese intervention für die studierenden von vorteil war. schlüsselwörter: fremdsprachenangst, positiv-psychologische interventionen (ppi), via strengths inventory katarzyna papaja university of silesia in katowice, poland marzena wysocka-narewska university of silesia in katowice, poland investigating code-switching in a content and language integrated learning (clil) classroom a b s t r a c t the aim of this article is to provide an outline of the research on code-switching in clil, including the use of mother tongue vs. target language by clil teachers, as well as teacher perception of clil learners’ language use and language problems, attention being given to spoken and written discourse difficulties and ways of overcoming them. the study was conducted among 29 secondary school clil teachers teaching geography, biology, mathematics, chemistry, physics, or history in english, and was based on a questionnaire especially prepared for this study. the main aim of the study was to investigate the situations of switching the codes and reasons for particular linguistic behaviours in clil classrooms, especially through the prism of teacher and learner code-switching functions, and find out both positive and negative aspects of this phenomenon. keywords: code-switching, clil, clil teachers, clil learners switching between languages (the target language) and the native language in the fl learning classroom is a common practice when the learners’ proficiency in a given fl is incomplete, and the teacher feels it necessary to use the first language in order to make his or her learners understand certain concepts. even though the term content and language integrated learning (clil) may create an image that all instructions in a given course should take place in the target language, it is not true as clil learners often face many challenges with acquiring content-specific terminology and there is a need to translate certain concepts into their native language. theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 6 (1), 2020, pp. 51–63 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.7808 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2808-443x https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2787-8676 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en katarzyna papaja, marzena wysocka-narewska52 code-switching: definitions and types classroom code-switching most often refers to the alternating use of more than one linguistic codes by any of the classroom participants for many different reasons and purposes. according to grosjean (2010, p. 51), code-switching is “the alternate use of two languages, that is, the speaker makes a complete shift to another language for a word, phrase, sentence and then reverts back to the base language.” poplack (1980) distinguishes three types of code-switching: • inter-sentential switching (a whole sentence, or more than one sentence, is produced in one language before there is a switch to another one. it is usually done at sentence boundaries). • intra-sentential switching (consists of a switch within the same sentence or sentence fragment. the shift is done in the middle of a sentence, with no interruptions, hesitations, or pauses to indicate a shift. different types of switches occur within the clause level and the word level. the speaker is usually unaware of switching). • extra-sentential or tag-switching (the switching of either a single word or a tag phrase (or both) from one language to another. this type is common in intra-sentential switches. it involves the insertion of a tag from one language into an utterance in another language). the very forms of switches vary, still, each of them reflects a “verbal skill requiring a large degree of linguistic competence in more than one language, rather than a defect arising from insufficient knowledge of one or the other” (poplack, 1980, p. 240). language deficits, on the other hand, give rise to the unintentional switching, stemming from communicative pressures and/or temporary inaccessibility of elements of the currently used language, and may be regarded as a manifestation of interference. unintentional code-switching, according to poulisse (1999), is common with less fluent and less balanced bilinguals (including language learners in particular). however, even balanced bilinguals may be unfamiliar or less familiar with the vocabulary of certain specific registers, exceptions in grammar and/or phonology in general in either of their languages. investigating code-switching in a content and language integrated learning… 53 functions of code-switching language switching processing serves a few functions, which may be beneficial in language learning environments from teachers’ and learners’ perspective. teacher functions according to mattsson and burenhult-mattsson (1999, p. 61), the teacher functions involve: • topic switch, • affective functions, • repetitive functions. in topic switch cases, teachers alter their language according to the topic that is under discussion. this type of switching is mostly observed in grammar instruction, namely, when teachers shift language to students’ mother tongue in dealing with particular grammar points taught at that moment. the students’ attention is directed to the new knowledge by making use of code-switching and, accordingly, making use of the native tongue. in such a situation, by code-switching, teachers construct a bridge from the known (native language) to the unknown (new foreign language content) in order to transfer the new content and meaning (sert, 2005). in other words, this is just exploiting students’ previous l1 learning experience to increase their understanding of l2. affective functions serve the purpose of expressing emotions. for example, code-switching is used by the teacher to build solidarity and intimate relations with the students or to create a supportive language environment in the classroom. modupeola (2013) claims that code-switching helps learners to enjoy their learning due to their ability to comprehend the teachers’ input. understanding what is being said constitutes psychological support for the learners, allows them to feel less stressful and anxious, and makes tl more comfortable for them. at that state, learners can focus and take part in classroom activities in a more successful way. finally, a repetitive function of code-switching allows the teacher to use code-switching in order to transfer the necessary knowledge in further clarity. following the instruction in the target language, the teacher code switches to the native language, clarifying meaning for efficient comprehension. katarzyna papaja, marzena wysocka-narewska54 learner functions when it comes to students and functions of their language shift, eldridge (1996, pp. 305–307) enumerates: • equivalence, • floor-holding, • reiteration, • conflict control. as far as the function of equivalence is concerned, the student makes use of the native equivalent of a particular lexical item in the target language, and code switches to the native tongue. in other words, the student uses the native lexical item when he or she does not have the competence for using the target language equivalent for a particular lexical item. therefore, equivalence functions as a defensive mechanism for students as it gives them the opportunity to continue communication by bridging the gaps resulting from foreign language incompetence. floor-holding consists of conducting a conversation in the target language and filling in the gaps with the native language use, as a mechanism to avoid deficiency in communication. code-switching deriving from the need to hold the floor indicates the lack of fluency in the target language or inability to recall the appropriate target language structure or lexicon. reiteration is a situation where “messages are reinforced, emphasized, or clarified where the message has already been transmitted in one code, but not understood” (eldridge, 1996, p. 306). in this case, the student repeats the message in the native tongue, either because he or she may not have transferred the meaning exactly in the target language or because simply it is more appropriate to code switch in order to indicate the teacher that the content is clearly understood. the last function, namely conflict control, involves using code-switching in order to avoid misunderstanding. it is a strategy to transfer the intended meaning whenever there is a lack of some culturally equivalent lexis among the native language and the target language. content and language integrated learning content and language integrated learning (clil) is a common term for a number of similar approaches in europe to teach content subjects through a foreign language. other terms used are bilingual content teaching, bilingual subject teaching, or content-based language teaching (wolff, 2003, p. 211). investigating code-switching in a content and language integrated learning… 55 the term clil is now the most commonly used and “it is based on the assumption that foreign languages are best learnt by focusing in the classroom not so much on language but on the content which is transmitted through language. the novelty of this approach is that classroom “content is not so much taken from everyday life but rather from content subjects e.g. mathematics, biology, geography, etc.” (wolff, 2003, pp. 211–222). the term clil may create an image that all instruction in a given course should take place in the target language. a key development issue relates to how the use of different languages can be manipulated within the classroom. according to wolff (2005, p. 18), “clil lessons should not be monolingual. the use of l1 during the clil lessons may help clil learners in widening their content knowledge.” the l2 should not become a linguistic burden for the learner. if the situation demands that a switch from the l2 to the l1 is required, then it should be done. if learners are forced to use the l2 only, especially in cases in which they need to use their mother tongue, problems may occur (marsh & marsland, 1999). in fact, clil offers choice, two languages may be used, and as a result, the clil classroom may be natural and positive. the extent to which l2 and l1 are used depends on the aims and clil approach adopted. “it is useful to consider the l1/l2 ratio of 75%/25% as a minimum starting point for clil. this is very low in terms of l2 usage, but it allows for teachers to see clil as a means of enriching rather than constraining the learning context” (marsh & marsland, 1999, p. 51). in other words, the clil teachers need to gradually reduce the use of l1 during the clil lessons but should not abandon it completely as it may be a very useful tool. the current study the current study aims to investigate the situations in which clil teachers and learners switch codes. based on the literature review and our observations of clil lessons, we assumed that both clil teachers and learners changed codes. therefore, the research questions were the following: 1. when do the teachers use polish during the clil lessons? 2. when do the learners use and overuse polish during clil lessons? 3. 3. what are the language difficulties in spoken and written language that the learners face during the clil lessons? 4. what are the ways of overcoming the learners’ language problems during the clil lessons? katarzyna papaja, marzena wysocka-narewska56 participants and procedure a total of 29 clil teachers participated in the study; 25 females and four males. the data concerning teaching experience in clil education is presented in figure 1. figure 1. work experience in clil as it is demonstrated in figure 1, most teachers do not have much experience in clil. 65.5% of the research participants have between zero and five years of teaching experience in clil. 13.8% have between six and ten years of experience in clil, and the same percentage of the research participants have between 15 and 20 years of experience in clil. only 3.4% of the teachers have between 11 and 15 years of experience in clil, and the same percentage of the clil teachers has been working in clil education for more than 20 years. one of the reasons why most of the research participants do not have a lot of experience in clil is that clil is still treated as an innovative approach, and schools have been gradually introducing it within the last 15–20 years. all the research participants were working in secondary schools teaching geography, biology, mathematics, chemistry, physics or history in english. investigating code-switching in a content and language integrated learning… 57 data collection instrument the teacher questionnaire has been especially designed for the purpose of the current study. the questionnaire consisted of 14 questions in the main section. eight questions were closed-ended, and six questions were open-ended ones. additionally, the clil teachers were asked to indicate their sex, age, teaching experience in clil, and the subject they teach. the questionnaire was in english. the research was conducted in spring 2019 during the clil teacher training. after having been given clear explanations and instructions, the clil teachers were kindly asked to fill in the questionnaire via the internet. study results in the following part, the results of the study will be discussed, and the graphic representation of the obtained data will be presented in cases when it is necessary. the first two questions that the participants were asked concerned the usage of polish during clil lessons. most of the clil teachers (89.7%) stated that they were using polish during clil lessons and enumerated the following situations: – “to explain grammar rules”; – “while explaining difficult vocabulary in biology—terminology”; – “only at the beginning of clil education—the students look terrified”; – “when i give them back their tests i switch into polish”; – “when we do some experiments”; – “when i explain safety rules before doing experiments in physics”; – “when i have problems with discipline—students don’t react to english”; – “when i don’t have time and need to explain complicated terminology in chemistry”; – “when we do difficult equations”; – “when talking about polish history.” in the case of the learners, most of the clil teachers (82.8%) stated that the learners were also using polish during clil lessons in the following situations: – “when asking questions”; – “when they don’t understand difficult terminology in chemistry”; – “when they work in pairs or in groups they switch into polish”; – “when they discuss difficult, very specialised topics”; – “in the situation when they can’t find english equivalent”; katarzyna papaja, marzena wysocka-narewska58 – “when doing experiments and asking for necessary tools”; – “when they talk about things which are not related to the topic of the lesson”; – “when they do matura tasks”; – “when they ask about grades”; – “when they ask about homework.” as can be noticed from the answers provided by the clil teachers, polish is usually used in some difficult situations, for example when explaining complicated terminology or when the learners lack some content knowledge. in fact, it is not forbidden to use l1 in clil education. as marsh and marsland (1999) state, both mother tongue and target language should be used interchangeably, especially when new concepts are introduced. the research participants were also asked if learners were overusing polish during clil lessons. most of the respondents (65.5%) provided a negative answer, however, 34.5% stated that their learners were overusing polish in the following situations: – “sometimes they ask too many questions in polish. i’m sure they can ask the same questions in english”; – “when they work in pairs or groups they definitely overuse polish”; – “when talking about something private”; – “when they are stressed e.g. before the test”; – “at the beginning of their clil education”; – “when they are lazy and don’t want to put too much effort into explaining some terminology in biology.” the circumstances in which clil learners overuse polish are usually connected with the clil learners feeling of insecurity or laziness. additionally, wong-fillmore (1991) points out that the overuse of mother tongue in bilingual education might be due to the teachers’ inconsequentiality as it is the teachers’ role to show the learners the functions of the mother tongue and control the use of it during the lessons. as for the other languages, which might be used during the clil lessons, most of the clil teachers (93.1%) answered that their learners were not using other languages. only two clil teachers indicated russian and ukrainian to be used by their learners. next, the research participants were asked to indicate how much percentage of polish should be used during clil lessons. as can be seen in figure 2, 24.1% of the clil teachers chose 5%, 20.7% chose 10%, and the same percentage of the clil teachers chose 20%. 17.2% of the respondents chose 30%, and 6.9% chose 40%. as the data indicates, the clil teachers are fully aware of the fact that only a small percentage of the mother tongue should be used during clil lessons. however, the research conducted in polish schools shows that the reality is different, and still, many teachers overuse the mother tongue during clil lessons (muszyńska & papaja, 2019). investigating code-switching in a content and language integrated learning… 59 5% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 5% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% figure 2. the percentage of polish that should be used during clil lessons the clil teachers were also asked to specify when, in their opinion, polish should be used during clil lessons. the answers varied. as many as 82% of the respondents think that polish should be used when explaining complex grammar, 55%—to help define new vocabulary items (e.g., some abstract words), 41%—to explain concepts or ideas, 31%—to practice the use of some phrases and expressions, 13%—to give instructions, and 10%—to give suggestions on how to learn more effectively. nobody suggested any other answers. it is quite surprising that such a significant percentage of the research participants think that polish should be used when explaining grammar. the main aim of clil is to provide the learners with content-specific knowledge not to teach them grammar. clil classes are usually accompanied with additional language classes during which grammar should be explained. during clil classes, certain grammatical structures can be practiced with the use of content-specific vocabulary (wolff, 2007). this high percentage suggests that there are still clil teachers who do not know what the main goals of clil are. when being asked why, in their opinion, the use of polish was necessary in the clil classroom, most of the respondents (82%) indicated the first answer, namely “it helps learners to understand difficult concepts better.” the next answer chosen by the research participants was that it did not make them feel lost (58%). 41% of the clil teachers chose answer c—“it makes learners feel less stressed” and 34% of the respondents claimed that it helped learners to understand new vocabulary items. all the reasons chosen by the research participants are mentioned when discussing the use of the mother tongue during clil lessons (dalton-puffer, 2006; iluk, 2000; marsh, 2001) and the first answer which seems to be the most popular among the research participants is often quoted as a solid argument for using the mother tongue during clil lessons. katarzyna papaja, marzena wysocka-narewska60 the clil teachers were also asked to enumerate language difficulties in spoken and written language that clil learners need to face in clil educations. the answers were the following (table 1): table 1. spoken and written language difficulties spoken language difficulties written language difficulties “they keep translating the concepts from english into polish and vice versa” “using proper tenses when writing” they have problems with pronunciation of some difficult terminology in physics” “spelling of specialised terminology in chemistry” “language barrier at the beginning of their clil education— they are not used to using english all the time” “handwriting – oh, my god!” “false friends” “lack of specialised vocabulary in physics” “they are scared and shy, when i ask a question there is silence” “spelling mistakes—they sometimes write the words the way they pronounce them” “they think that in a clil class their english has to be perfect so they are afraid of making mistakes” “wrong structure of the sentences—they translate literally from english into polish and vice versa” “lack of specialised vocabulary in geography—they get stuck” “wrong word order e.g. adverbs of frequency” “they mix the tenses when they talk, they don’t pay attention to grammar” “problems with forming proper english sentences–they use too many contractions, slang words and internet vocabulary” “they have problems with asking questions in general” “they don’t pay attention to the stages of writing. they think that in clil it is not important. they are wrong” “problems with fluency in english” most of the clil learners tend to have problems with specialized vocabulary both in spoken and written language. when they lack content-specific vocabulary, they often get stuck and lose fluency. some of them still tend to have problems with grammar, namely, the tenses or the structure of the sentences. after having enumerated the language difficulties, the clil teachers were also asked to suggest the ways in which they could help the clil learners overcome these difficulties. the answers were the following: – “by being patient”; – “i try to explain difficult concepts over and over again”; – “i give them a lot of additional exercises”; – “practice makes perfect”; – “i prepare a lot of additional language exercises e.g. fill in the blanks, transformations, language debates, etc.”; investigating code-switching in a content and language integrated learning… 61 – “i give them more pair or group work so they don’t feel that shy”; – “i always talk about their language difficulties and try to come up with suitable exercises”; – “i try to motivate them and tell them that making mistakes is something natural even in a clil class”; – “i switch into polish when some concepts are too difficult to my students”; – “we talk about learning styles and some strategies they should use when studying difficult vocabulary in biology.” as can be noticed from the answers provided above, the clil teachers try to help the learners overcome language difficulties by providing them with additional exercises, designing pair or group work activities and making them aware of various learning strategies. one of the ways to help learners overcome language difficulties is to support them, motivate, and give them autonomy at each stage of their clil education (dale, van der es & tanner, 2011). limitations of the study the interpretation of the above-presented findings is limited by certain methodological constraints connected with the selection and use of research instruments. the study was mainly based on a questionnaire, which did not contribute to its reliability. a recommendable direction for future studies could be the adoption of a mixed-methods approach enabling a combination of quantitative and qualitative tools that would lead to a cross-verification of the obtained results, thus allowing potential researchers to look at code-switching from a wider perspective. finally, it has to be underlined that the limitation of the present study is also a small number of clil teachers under investigation. it would be a good idea to investigate both clil teachers and clil learners so as to receive more data, which could be compared. conclusions basing on the current study and its findings, it is clear that almost 90% of the teachers code switch during clil lessons; in the form of the topic switch (to explain grammar, terminology or polish history), affective functions (when the students “look terrified,” misbehave or to explain safety rules before exkatarzyna papaja, marzena wysocka-narewska62 periments, as well as repetitive functions (in complicated equations). teachers switch into polish because it helps learners to understand difficult and new concepts better, overcome fear, and the feeling of being lost. almost 83% of the teachers claim that their students use polish during clil lessons, most often making use of the reiteration function (asking for clarification and explanation), and equivalence (looking for english equivalents). almost 33% of them report on their learners’ overuse of code-switching while “talking about something private,” at the beginning of their clil education or during group as well as pair work. in trying to find the reason for the very situation, the teachers provide examples of language difficulties the learners face during clil lessons. their switches resemble a careful strategy, which has positive and facilitating functions, such as explaining notions, reducing learners’ stress, and establishing a pleasant atmosphere. in spoken language, these are manifested by means of problems with pronunciation, lack of specialised vocabulary, relying on false friends, translating concepts from one language to another over and over again, and being silent/ getting stuck. when it comes to writing, the learners have problems with sentence structure and spelling, mixing both, keep translating literally from english into polish and vice versa, use too many contractions, slang, and internet vocabulary. as a result, learners’ code-switching is more often than not the evidence of poor competence lacking appropriate forms and features, a compensation strategy and/or a certain defensive mechanism thanks to which the learners follow the content of the course successively, though infrequently at the expense of language advancement. references dale, l., & tanner, r. (2012) clil activities. a resource for subject and language teachers. cambridge: cambridge university press. dalton-puffer, c. (2006). questions in clil classrooms: strategic questioning to encourage speaking. in: a. martinez flor & e. usó (eds.), current trends in the development and teaching of the four language skills. (studies in language acquisition 29), (pp. 187–213). berlin: mouton de gruyter. eldridge, j. (1996). code-switching in a turkish secondary school. elt journal, 50(4), 303– 311. grosjean, f. (2010). bilingual: life and reality. cambridge: harvard university press. iluk, j. (2000). nauczanie bilingwalne. modele, koncepcje, założenia metodyczne. katowice: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego. marsh, d., & marsland, b. (eds.). (1999). learning with languages. a professional development programme for introducing content and language integrated learning. finland: university of jyväskylä. investigating code-switching in a content and language integrated learning… 63 marsh, d. (ed.). (2001). clil/emile the european dimension: actions, trends and foresight potential. public services contract dg eac: european commission. mattson, a., & burenhult-mattson, n. (1999). code-switching in second language teaching of french. working papers, 47, 59–72. modupeola, o. r. (2013). code-switching as a teaching strategy: implication for english language teaching and learning in a multilingual society. iosr journal of humanities and social science, 14, 92–94. muszyńska, b., & papaja, k. (2019). zintegrowane kształcenie przedmiotowo-językowe (clil) – wprowadzenie. warszawa: pwn. poplack, s. (1980). sometimes i’ll start a sentence in spanish y termino en espanol: toward a typology of code-switching. linguistics, 18, 581–618. poulisse, n. (1999). slips of the tongue: speech errors in first and second language production (studies in bilingualism 20) amsterdam–philadelphia: john benjamins publishing company. sert, o. (2005). the functions of code switching in elt classroom. the internet tesl journal, xi(8). retrieved from: http://iteslj.org/articles/sert-codeswitching.html wolff, d. (2003). content and language integrated learning: a framework for the development of learner autonomy. in d. little, j. ridley, & e. ushioda (eds.), learner autonomy in the foreign language classroom: teacher, learner, curriculum and assessment (pp. 211–222). dublin: authentik. wolff, d. (2005). content and language integrated learning. handbook of applied linguistics. vol. 5, chap. 21, 1–22. wolff, d. (2007). clil: bringing the gap between school and working life. in d. marsh & d. wolff (eds.), diverse contexts – converging goals. clil in europe (pp. 15–26). frankfurt am main: peter lang gmbh. wong-fillmore, l. (1991). when learning a second language means losing the first. early childhood research quarterly, 6(3), 323–346. katarzyna papaja, marzena wysocka-narewska diagnostizierung des sprachcodewechsels im integrierten fachund sprachunterricht z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g der artikel befasst sich mit der problematik des sprachcodewechsels im integrierten fachund sprachunterricht. die studie wurde unter 29 oberschullehrenden durchgeführt, die geographie, biologie, mathematik, chemie, physik und geschichte auf englisch unterrichten. mit hilfe eines fragebogens ließen sich solche situationen diagnostizieren, in denen sich die verwendung des polnischen im unterricht als hilfreich und/oder notwendig erweist – nicht nur von lehrenden, sondern auch von lernenden. untersucht wurden auch die funktionen und die ursachen für den codewechsel im klassenzimmer. schlüsselwörter: sprachcodewechsel, clil, clil-lehrende, clil-lernenden theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 7 (1), 2021, pp. 51–74 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.8667 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4634-8585çağrı tuğrul mart department of english language teaching, ishik university, iraq integrating form and content within classroom discussions of literature: a discernible advantage in language learning a b s t r a c t as both form-focused (ffi) and content-based (cbi) instructions have advantages and disadvantages in language teaching, the integration of ffi and cbi into literature-based classrooms provides an ideal context to attend to form and meaning and some of the strongest rationales for language acquisition as the disadvantages of one approach will be compensated by the advantages of the other. when ffi and cbi are integrated in conjunction with literaturebased approach, learners easily perceive language patterns in the meaningful context, foster content learning and initiate production of the meaningful discourse. simply put, the advancement of grammatical accuracy and content unveils improvements in language proficiency. the present study aimed to create a favorable condition for language learning through employing ffi and cbi incorporated in a literature-based program. quasi-experimental approach was adopted and the participants were 60 students majoring in english language teaching at a university. it was found that this integrative pedagogy can be used as a springboard for language proficiency development because learners exhibited notable progress in enhancing their grammar and vocabulary knowledge. keywords: form-focused instruction, content-based instruction, integration, language development, accuracy introduction the principle of integrating language and content learning is a favorable condition for language learning for its advantages to offer a substantial amount of language input, engage learners into more interaction and provide çağrı tuğrul mart52 output in meaningful communicative contexts (lo, 2014). the process of interaction brings about receiving modified input while learners process negotiation of meaning (mackey & oliver, 2002), taking cognizance of target language features through noticing (gass & mackey, 2007), and pushing learners for more language output (swain, 1995) that results in language development. the acquisition of linguistic forms through instructional interventions enables learners to use the language with greater fluency and accuracy (spada & lightbown, 2008). it should be noted that in the failure of form and meaning balance language learning does not spawn successful outcomes. the inclusion of form-focused instruction in a content-enriched language instruction through using literary works offers learners discernible advantages. literature gives a basis for group discussions; thus, it has communicative value (mart, 2018; mart, 2019a; shanahan, 1997). moreover, literature discussions have the potential to help learners notice language forms and integrate the knowledge into communicative activities (mart, 2019b; nystrand, 2006). this study has been designed to draw learners’ attention to form and meaning simultaneously through integrating form-focused and content-based approaches by means of literature discussions to make real gains in grammar and vocabulary learning. literature review form-focused instruction empirical support for form-focused instruction (ffi) comes from several studies investigating its role in communicative use of language (larsen-freeman & long, 1991; ellis, 2008; ranta & lyster, 2018). spada (1997) bestows promising evidence for the potency of ffi and defined the approach as “any pedagogical effort which is used to draw the learners’ attention to form either implicitly or explicitly […] within meaning-based approaches to l2 instruction in which a focus on language is provided in either spontaneous or predetermined ways” (p. 73). ellis (2001), on the other hand, defined ffi as “any planned or incidental instructional activity that is intended to induce language learners to pay attention to linguistic form” (pp. 1–2) that embodies not only traditional but also communicative approaches. for ellis, basturkmen, and loewen (2001; 2002), the form includes grammar, vocabulary, discourse, and phonology. following long (1991), ffi is comprised of two types: focus-on-forms and focus-on-form. the former involves intensive treatment of pre-selected specific features based on a linguistic syllabus. the primary focus of attention integrating form and content within classroom discussions of literature… 53 in focus-on-forms instruction is on the targeted form (ellis, basturkmen, & loewen, 2002). it refers to teaching different points of grammar in separate classes (sheen, 2002), and preselected forms are attended intensively (ellis, 2001). it is assumed that focus-on-forms is equated with skill learning and arises from cognitive processes (sheen, 2002). conversely, in focus-on-form the central focus of attention is on meaning which brings learners’ attention to “linguistic elements as they arise incidentally in lessons whose overriding focus is on meaning or communication” (long, 1991, pp. 45–46). long (1991) defined focus-on-form as instructional approaches where the emphasis remains on specific linguistic forms during communicative activities. his definition is restricted to pedagogical events that root in meaning-based activities in which certain linguistic forms are not practiced in predetermined ways. the underlying assumption of focus-on-form is that it derives from comprehensible input ensues from natural interaction. norris and ortega (2000) argue that both focus-on-form and focus-on-forms are equally effective. focus-on-form is an exponent of grammar-problemsolving tasks rather than explicit instruction (sheen, 2003), because grammar is treated to meet communicative needs of learners. likewise, focus-on-forms shares the same assumption with focus-on-form that the priority of communication receives a surge of attention. teaching grammar is compatible with the development of communication skills in the theory of language acquisition. for this reason, it is recommended that grammar should be the object of some sort of intervention when communication breakdown occurs (doughty & varela, 1998). ffi has been operationalized as proactive or reactive (lyster, 2015). while proactive ffi refers to pre-planned instruction to render it possible for the learners to use features of target language which are considered difficult to learn with the aid of exposure to input, reactive ffi bears on language production of learners during teacher-student interaction to bring their attention to the target language (lyster, 2015). reactive ffi involves “corrective recasting” (ellis et al., 2002, p. 422), and spontaneous and unplanned attempts (lyster, 2007) in which corrective feedback for the treatment of learner errors is provided if learner’s self-correction does not occur though the error is highlighted by the teacher. corrective feedback, a type of ffi, has been considered conducive to language learning as learners have the opportunity to correct their errors. a substantial number of studies have showed the beneficial effects of corrective feedback; thus considered effective in fostering noticing (sheen, 2007; yang & lyster, 2010). cognitive psychologists are concerned that the provision of corrective feedback interrupts the flow of communication (e.g., chaudron, 1988); however, this idea has been viewed as a paradox by lyster (2007) who attests that corrective feedback should be elicited “in the heat of the moment” (p. 137); simply put, when “the error is still active in memory” (dekeyser, 2007, p. 5). çağrı tuğrul mart54 second language instruction involves two different types that differ regarding the timing of attention to form; while in isolated ffi attention to form is separated from communicative instruction, in integrated ffi attention to form is embedded within communicative teaching (spada et al., 2014). however, isolated ffi is different from focus-on-forms which involves exclusive focus on language structures. isolated ffi refers to a focus-on-form that is presented separately but it supports communicative practice. isolated ffi does not refer to meaningless repetition of grammar rules, thus it does not exclude communicatively-based practice. both isolated and integrated instructions have different roles in promoting language acquisition. second language acquisition (sla) research has explored the effectiveness of instruction whether it involves attention to both form and meaning. spada et al. (2009) state that theoretical support for integrated ffi is expressed in long’s (1996) “revised interaction hypothesis,” swain and lapkin’s (2002) “meta-talk,” and lyster’s (1998) “negotiation of form” constructs in sla. these three constructs hinge upon the assumption that if learners attend to form within communicative practice, they obtain information concerning language form by virtue of form-meaning connection and use it for expressing messages. empirical support for integrated ffi can be found in the works of ellis, basturkmen, and loewen (2001); williams (2005), and valeo and spada (2015) in which learners attend to form in communicative classrooms. conversely, theoretical support for isolated ffi comes from dekeyser (1998) who argues that grammar instruction should be performed explicitly “to achieve a maximum of understanding, and then should be followed by some exercises to anchor it solidly in the students’ consciousness, in declarative form so that it is easy to keep in mind during communicative exercises” (p. 58). norris and ortega (2000) pointed to the necessity of teaching language properties directly and concluded that explicit types of ffi are more effective to help learners notice language forms. isolated ffi occurs when focus on language form is separated from meaning-based activities in language classes. this approach is mainly concerned with preparing learners for a communicative activity (spada et al., 2009). stern (1992) argued that “there is a still a place for a separate analytic language syllabus” (p. 180), although communicative activities have a central role in language teaching methodology. ellis (2002) asserted that grammar should be taught separately “making no attempt to integrate it with the task-based component” (p. 32). nevertheless, isolated ffi does not refer to practicing target forms in mechanical drills which are separate from the communicative activities. rather, it engages learners in communicative practice through drawing their attention to target forms that arise during interaction activities (spada et al., 2014). isolated ffi is useful to elucidate misleading similarities between the l1 and l2 and it helps ensure that learners see simple language features that occur frequently integrating form and content within classroom discussions of literature… 55 but are not salient in oral and written language (spada & lightbown, 2008). isolated ffi includes the assumption that learners need to discover certain target features during communicative activities. van patten (1990) suggested that beginner learners cannot concentrate on some aspects of target forms while perceiving the meaning of a text. information processing theory argues that learners have difficulty in focusing form and meaning simultaneously due to the restricted processing capacity of the human mind (ellis, 1997). integrated ffi is an appropriate approach for complex language features. studies by dekeyser (1995) and robinson (1996) show that compared with easy rules; hard rules, which are difficult to describe, cannot be successfully taught in isolated instruction. thus, learners learn complex rules better by means of integrated ffi. the potential effectiveness of integrated ffi to instruction for language features in which errors prompt communication breakdowns has been widely addressed; furthermore, learners need isolated ffi to make formmeaning relationships for low salient and low frequent language features which do not have high communicative value, and once learners make form-meaning connections more fluent and accurate use of the language features may be encouraged through integrated ffi (spada & lightbown, 2008). in general, adult learners benefit from instruction and isolated grammatical instruction is more favorable for them (barkhuizen, 1998). young learners acquire proficiency in language with little ffi (spada & lightbown, 2008). content-based approach cbi is an umbrella term that refers to a wide array of teaching models which take language teaching as a basis (valeo, 2013). cbi is defined as the simultaneous study of language and subject matter with the focus on form and sequence of language items imposed by content material (martel, 2016; waller, 2018). stoller (2008) defines cbi as an instructional approach that dedicates itself to language and content-learning objectives. cbi is conceived as “two for one” (wesche & skehan, 2002, p. 221); that is, it rests on the principle that language learning arises with the dual focus of language and content (netten, 1991). cbi represents the integration of language learning and cognitive development (lyster, 2011) to create “the requisite motivational basis for communication” (lyster, 2007, p. 2). as an instructional framework, cbi has been considered an effective pedagogy for reinforcing language teaching through the use of authentic materials. the utility of authentic content material in language learning has unveiled fulfillment of the study and a sense of accomplishment for learners (gaffieldville, 1996). a great deal of research has revealed favorable responses toward cbi with regard to its benefits in promoting language learning (leaver, 1997), çağrı tuğrul mart56 increasing learner satisfaction (rodgers, 2006), enhancing content knowledge (stryker & leaver, 1997), facilitating skill learning (pica, 2002), improving academic achievement (smit, 2008), and developing motivation and self-confidence (stryker, 1997). a major source of support for cbi classes comes from the natural approach, which disregarded grammar teaching. in content-based language teaching, language proficiency is gained by learning of subject matter rather than grammar rules or vocabulary lists. cbi is an instructional approach that shifts the focus of the course from language learning to subject matter learning (leaver & stryker, 1989). in other respects, cbi can contextualize language instruction; thus, plunge learners into a rich exposure to form-meaning relationships and render it possible to learn grammar and vocabulary in clusters pertaining the given topics (wesche & skehan, 2002). a high level of persuasive support for cbi comes from educational and cognitive psychology. cognitive learning theory, discourse comprehension processing research, depth-of-processing research, expertise research, and motivation attribution and interest research are five research areas that contribute to cbi (grabe & stoller, 1997). cognitive learning theory is a strong potential rationale that integrates attention to language and content and is based on a learning theory proposed by anderson (1990) which combines language knowledge development, language usage practice and strategy training to reinforce independent learning. grabe and stoller (1997) assert that discourse comprehension processing research has demonstrated that the relatedness and coherence of the information pave the way for improved learning and recall. additionally, they attest that depth-of-processing research is consistent with cbi because it provides a basis for coherent and meaningful information that makes way for deeper processing and better learning. expertise research refers to learning that allows learners to reinvest their knowledge in sophisticated problem-solving activities and gain from the challenges that will occur (bereiter & scardamalia, 1993). interest of learners in the content triggers their motivation and brings about better learning. research claims that highly motivated learners tend to make more sophisticated elaborations on the materials through seeking connections among sets of information which will ease their recall of information (tobias, 1994). cummins (2000) is particularly interested in the degree of cognitive demand and contextual support rooted in the tasks while language and content integration; in this framework, learners are apt to access the content with less cognitive demand through tasks with a great degree of context while less context is associated with experiencing difficulties in terms of linguistic knowledge. it has been well documented that cbi classes are effective in the development of content knowledge and interpretive skills (rodgers, 2006). however, one aspect of cbi that is open to discussion is whether it can promote the formintegrating form and content within classroom discussions of literature… 57 meaning connections learners need for the development of expressive abilities. more precisely, in cbi contexts the connection between content knowledge and functional linguistic abilities of learners remains controversial. seeking explanations, williams (2001) posited that learners, particularly at lower proficiency levels, concentrate more on understanding the input than the linguistic form in the context. likewise, vanpatten (1996) supporting this view hypothesized that in the course of input processing, learners attach priority to meaning rather than form. in essence, it appears that semantic processing of input takes precedence over syntactic processing (swain, 1985). zeungler and brinton (1997) in their attempts to show the connection between linguistic form and pragmatic function held that form and function are inextricably linked, thus content learning and language development cannot be distinguished. it appears to be the fact that form and function development of learners occur jointly which is considered as an optimal path to communicate the acquired concepts of the content (rodgers, 2006). a number of studies validated the use of cbi in foreign language acquisition and development and reported that cbi is a viable approach for the development of content knowledge and expressive skills (rodgers, 2006). a substantial amount of literature clearly points the significance of content-based instruction due to its potential benefits for academic growth and language proficiency development (stoller, 2004; pessoa et al., 2007). regular curriculum concepts are enriched with academic content to provide a context for language learning (curtain & pesola, 1994). stoller (2002) states that in content-based instruction language is viewed as a medium for learning content and content is considered as a resource for the mastery of language. in the pedagogical literature, incorporating form focus into communicative activities has been considerably supported. for instance, celce-murcia (1991) advocates combination of language features within communicative activities and argues that “grammar should never be taught as an end in itself but always with reference to meaning, social factors or discourse or a combination of these factors” (pp. 466–467). correlatively, brumfit (1984) asserts that learners should not be prevented from combining language forms with language use since feedback that is provided during communicative interaction influences on formal accuracy. the integration of focus on language form into communicative interaction provides an ideal context for learners to attend to language form. the comprehensible input in meaningful interaction is an effective factor for language acquisition (long, 1996). language learning through the use of subject matter makes room for language proficiency and academic skill development across a wide range of learners (pica, 2002). the integration of subject matter knowledge and language forms not only improves learners’ content knowledge but also language skills concurrently (wesche & skehan, 2002) which largely contributes to augmenting communication of content (swain, 1985). çağrı tuğrul mart58 the current study study purpose and research questions in this study, all three groups underwent different treatments (form-focused, content-based and mixed approaches) to investigate the role of combining attention to form and meaning. the aim of the current study was to reveal which of the treatment types the study used has the potential to raise the students’ ability to master grammar and vocabulary for meaningful communication. it is hypothesized that integrating language and content is an effective inviting way for students to discover language forms during communicative interactions. the study addressed the following research questions: 1) is teaching form and content in tandem a favorable condition for language learning? 2) does the integration of form-focused and content-based approaches within classroom discussions of literature provide advantages to enhance grammar and vocabulary learning? participants the participants in this study were 60 first-year students majoring in english language teaching (elt) at a university in iraq. their ages ranged from 19 to 25 years. the students, with a native language other than english, met three hours a week for two months. they were divided into three different classes randomly (each class had 20 students). based on the proficiency test they had after enrollment, they were placed in the intermediate level of the program. a situation was constructed for the students to engage them in a process of discovery in which they were afforded the opportunity to promote grammatical accuracy development and enhance their vocabulary knowledge. in this study classroom discussions of literature served as an avenue for the students to perceive the features of target structures in contexts and decipher the meanings of unfamiliar words. while articulating their opinions during classroom discussions, the participants underwent different treatment types. the first control group (group 1) received formfocused instruction. the second control group (group 2) received contentbased instruction and finally, the experimental group (group 3) received the instruction that included form-focused and content-based components (see table 1). integrating form and content within classroom discussions of literature… 59 research materials and procedures the reading materials included the great gatsby (1990) by scott fitzgerald and lord of the flies (2003) by william golding. while the former centers on the differences between social classes and the decline of american dream, the latter delves into civilization and savagery. these two novels were chosen for their appropriate length, accessible language and universal themes. pre-and post-assessments were viable methods to assess the extent which an educational intervention influence learning. these tools in this study were used to measure students’ vocabulary and grammar knowledge. comparing the amount of pre-existing knowledge on the topic with the learning as a result of the course experience indicated whether the training courses were successful in increasing their knowledge of the training content. table 1 treatment activities groups methods employed treatment activities focus on form/meaning group 1 form-focused instruction + literature-based instruction metalinguistic explanation + explicit and implicit corrective feedback form group 2 content-based instruction + literature-based instruction recasts and prompts as as feedback on meaning meaning group 3 form-focused instruction + content-based instruction + literature-based instruction metalinguistic explanation + explicit and implicit corrective feedback form + meaning procedure in group 1 explanations, dialogues, key sentences, and teacher action are components of conventional presentation techniques (johnson, 1996). in this study, group 1 received treatment that included grammatical explanations and utterances of students in dialogues. explicit and implicit corrective feedback helped students with the acquisition of grammar. the researcher used recasts and prompts to draw students’ attention to the target forms. metalinguistic explanations were provided during the treatment instruction. all classroom discussions were on the course content and based on the mastery of language forms but the instruction to group 1 also included instructions that engage learners in communicative practice. çağrı tuğrul mart60 the implementation of both explicit and implicit corrective feedback, as displayed in table 2, during treatment instruction in group 1 was conducive to the acquisition of grammatical features. the instructor provided implicit feedback in the following example by responding to the learner’s error in group 1. in response to the learner’s statement “has became,” the instructor replied “has become.” or to put this another way, ill-formed utterance was reformulated by the instructor to encourage the student to use the target forms more accurately. the provision of on-the-spot reformulations by an external source created conditions for learners to elicit self-repair and promoted the level of accuracy in language acquisition. an example of explicit feedback was the instructor’s response to the student’s error by saying “use present tense consistently.” it is important to stress that corrective feedback displayed a significant advantage to repair the errors and produce a modified output. student: the beast has became one of the most important goals in the novel. teacher: oh, the beast has become one of the most important symbols in the novel. can you give an example? student: yes, it has become an important symbol for instance; it has become jack’s source of power. teacher: how does jack use the beast to his advantage? student: he used the beast to frighten the other boys. teacher: use present tense consistently student: jack uses the beast to frighten the other boys. student: and, he uses the beast for power. (classroom conversation) procedure in group 2 the instruction in group 2 did not include references to grammar or metalinguistic explanations. all classroom discussions focused entirely on content because students talk about literature came to the fore in cbi classes and corrective feedback on form was limited to recasts. recasts were effective to edit the discourse and repair the conversational breakdowns. lyster and ranta (1997) argue that learners in cbi classes may perceive recasts as feedback on meaning. in the following example, discussion is used to construct and negotiate knowledge by the discourse contexts of interaction. the instructor provided recasts to stimulate the student to express the meaning precisely in order to seek constructive ways and to express the meaning precisely. teacher: how can you explain gatsby’s greedy pursuit of wealth? student: he influences daisy. teacher: he wants to impress daisy. integrating form and content within classroom discussions of literature… 61 student: yes, he wants to impress daisy. teacher: why do you think he wants to impress daisy? student: he wants to impress daisy. in fact, he wants to get happiness. he has dream of happiness with daisy. teacher: good point! he is in pursuit of happiness. let’s consider this point a bit further. (classroom conversation) procedure in group 3 the instruction in group 3 included metalinguistic explanations and references to grammar in meaningful comprehensible input to promote grammatical accuracy development. both explicit and implicit corrective feedback was used to maximize language development. literature discussions are strong potential foundations for grammatically richer intake and meaningful communication establishment. drawing attention to errors and giving corrective feedback in group 3, as shown in the following example, provided some of the strongest rationales for students to attend to accuracy in communicative activities. students in group 3 made appropriate use of form-meaning connections in literature discussions and had a number of distinct advantages to develop accuracy and fluency. teacher: what is the climax in lord of the flies? student: simon understood that the beast doesn’t exist. teacher: he realized that the beast … student: he realized that the beast didn’t exist. teacher: good point! teacher: then what happened to him? student: the other boys killed him with savage. teacher: they killed him savagely. student: yes, they killed him savagely and problems started on the island. teacher: what problems started on the island? student: the boys started doing evil things. teacher: savagery prevails on the island. student: yes, after the death of simon we see big changes and serious problems. teacher: good! can you explain that a bit more? student: the boys were not civilized, they became savage. although everything started well at the beginning, the control was lost soon. it is like the power of violence charmed the boys. teacher: yes, the lure from civility and the allure of violence (classroom conversation) çağrı tuğrul mart62 table 2 corrective feedback options options description implicit feedback the teacher responds to students’ ill-formed utterances without directly indicating that an error has been made through prompts or recasts. explicit feedback the teacher responds to students’ ill-formed utterances by directly indicating that an error has been made through drawing their attention to them or metalinguistic explanation. table 2 defines the correction feedback options that were used in the study. both types of feedback options were used in all groups in the classroom discussions of literature. implicit feedback included responding to the ill-formed utterances of the students indirectly to give them a chance to reformulate their utterances. explicit feedback included responding to the incorrect utterances by directly indicating that the error should be corrected. data collection and analysis in this study, a pre-test, a post-test and a delayed post-test were conducted to measure language progress of students. each test consisted of two parts: grammar and vocabulary, and each part included 25 questions. the students were allowed 45 minutes to complete 50 questions in each test and the scores were given out of 100. each group had the same tests that included multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions. the students were exposed to all sorts of grammar rules and a wide variety of words in the novels. the assessment tests were prepared by the researcher based on the novels the participants read in the classes throughout the study. in other words, the vocabulary and the grammatical constructions derived from the novels were included. the tests did not differ from each other in terms of scope and format. to ensure that the tests were of similar level of difficulty, the researcher asked two of his colleagues, who work at the same department, to work closely with him. the students were not penalized for wrong answers; therefore, they did not leave any questions unanswered. the test outcomes were compared to measure student performance in relation to their vocabulary and grammar development under different treatment conditions. integrating form and content within classroom discussions of literature… 63 table 3 timeline for preand post-assessments weeks groups data sources 1 all groups pre-test 8 all groups post-test three months after the study all groups delayed post-test the pre-test was conducted in the first week before the treatment sessions started. in the eighth week, after the treatment sessions were over, the students had the post-test. finally, delayed post-test was conducted three months after the experiment to determine which treatment measures aided recall. findings spss 20 was used to conduct reliability analysis in the study. kurtosis and skewness statistics were used to examine the normality of variables. the acceptable range for kurtosis and skewness is between –2 and +2. the kurtosis and skewness of each variable fell within acceptable limits in the study in all groups. cronbach’s alpha was used to assess the reliability and internal consistency. for a classroom exam, a reliability coefficient of .70 or higher is an acceptable value for cronbach’s alpha. the alpha coefficient for all items in all groups is higher than .94, suggesting that the items have relatively high internal consistency. table 4 illustrates the descriptive statistics (minimum, maximum, mean, and standard deviation) for tests for all groups. the results show that students in group 1 increased their scores on all tests. the means showed high improvement for post-test grammar and delayed-test grammar and increased from 64.0 to 74, 8, and 77 respectively. with regard to vocabulary tests, the means showed slight improvement and increased from 60.4 to 64.8 in the post-test grammar, and 66.4 in the delayed-test grammar. the results indicate that students in group 2 increased their scores on all tests. the means showed high improvement for post-test vocabulary and delayed-test vocabulary and increased from 58.9 to 69.9, and 72.9 respectively. with regard to grammar tests, the means showed slight improvement and increased from 66.1 to 69.3 in the post-test grammar, and 70.8 in the delayed test grammar. group 3 increased their scores on all tests. the means showed high improvement for all tests. the means for grammar tests increased from 63.8 to 78.1 in the post-test grammar, and 80.8 in the delayed-test grammar. with regard to vocabulary tests, the means showed improvement and increased from 61.8 to 75.4 in the post-test vocabulary, and 78.8 in the delayed-test vocabulary. çağrı tuğrul mart64 table 4 descriptive statistics for pre-test, post-test and delayed-test for group 1 types of tests n minimum maximum mean st. deviation pre-test grammar 1 20 42.0 88.0 64.0 13.50 pre-test grammar 2 20 44.0 86.0 66.1 10.84 pre-test grammar 3 20 40.0 78.0 63.8 10.38 post-test grammar 1 20 52.0 92.0 74.2 11.74 post-test grammar 2 20 52.0 88.0 69.3 9.86 post-test grammar 3 20 50.0 94.0 79.7 12.02 delayed-test grammar 1 20 52.0 94.0 77.0 12.50 delayed-test grammar 2 20 52.0 90.0 70.8 9.78 delayed-test grammar 3 20 48.0 96.0 82.6 14.25 pre-test vocabulary 1 20 40.0 80.0 60.4 11.67 pre-test vocabulary 2 20 40.0 76.0 58.9 10.73 pre-test vocabulary 3 20 40.0 78.0 61.8 10.25 post-test vocabulary 1 20 46.0 84.0 64.8 10.92 post-test vocabulary 2 20 48.0 90.0 69.9 12.30 post-test vocabulary 3 20 46.0 92.0 75.4 11.80 delayed-test vocabulary 1 20 48.0 86.0 66.4 10.92 delayed-test vocabulary 2 20 52.0 92.0 72.9 13.01 delayed-test vocabulary 3 20 46.0 94.0 78.8 13.16 64 74.2 77 60.4 64.8 66.4 66.1 69.3 70.8 58.9 69.9 72.9 63.8 79.7 82.6 61.8 75.4 78.8 0 50 100 150 200 250 pre-test grammar post-test grammar delaed-test grammar pre-test vocabulary post-test vocabulary delayed-test vocabulary group 1 group 2 group 3 figure 1. means of pre-test, post-test, and delayed-test grammar and vocabulary for all groups integrating form and content within classroom discussions of literature… 65 figure 1 displays comparison of means for grammar and vocabulary tests which reveal that students in group 3 showed better improvement than the other two groups and demonstrated significant gains in scores from pre-test to posttest and maintained this improvement in delayed post-test. similarly, group 1 outperformed group 2 and made significant gains over time in grammar. group 2 could not make significant gains in grammar tests. comparison of means for vocabulary tests reveals that students in group 3 showed better impro-vement than the other two groups and made significant gains between pre-test and post-test. likewise, group 2 outperformed group 1 and made significant gains over time. group 1 could not make significant gains in vocabulary tests. a one-way anova revealed statistically significant difference between groups in pre-test and post-test grammar results (f(2,57) = 6,42, p = .003). also, there was a statistically significant difference between groups in pre-test and post-test vocabulary results (f(2,57) = 6,76, p = .002). bonferroni corrected post hoc tests were run to determine whether the pairwise comparisons were significant. bonferroni corrected post hoc tests showed that group 3 demonstrated significantly high difference (p = .000) compared to group 1 (.002) and group 2 (.003). one-way anova was conducted again to compare the means between delayed-test grammar and delayed-test vocabulary and it was found that there was a statistically significant difference between groups in delayedtest grammar (f(2,57) = 6,82, p = .001), and delayed-test vocabulary (f(2,57) = 6,96, p = .000). specifically, these results suggest that treatment received by group 3 (mixed approach) has an effect on the achievement of the participants. table 5 grammar and vocabulary tests group comparison group 1 group 2 group 3 pairs tests t df p-value t df p-value t df p-value pair 1 grammar pre-test 1 –14.769 19.000* –8.718 19.000* –24.430 19.000* grammar post-test 1 grammar post-test 1 –4.222 19.000* –2.517 19.021* –3.500 19.002* pair 2 grammar delayed post-test 1 pair 1 vocabulary pre-test 1 –12.815 19.000* –15.983 19.000* –20.168 19.000* vocabulary post-test 1 vocabulary post-test 1 –3.238 19.000* –5.090 19.000* –6.240 19.000* pair 2 vocabulary delayed post-test 1 *significant at p < .05 çağrı tuğrul mart66 a paired samples t-test revealed a statistically significant difference between pre-test and post-test grammar results in group 1: t (19) = –14.8, p < .001; group 2: t (19) = –8.8, p < .001; and group 3: t (19) = –24.430, p < .001. similarly, the test revealed a statistically significant difference between post-test and delayed post-test grammar results in group 1: t (19) = –4.222, p < .001; group 2: t (19) = –2.517, p < .05; and group 3: t (19) = –3.500, p < .005. also a paired samples t-test indicated that there was a statistically significant difference between pre-test and post-test vocabulary results in group 1: t (19) = –12.815, p < .001; group 2: t (19) = –15.983, p < .001; and group 3: t (19) = –20.168, p < .001. similarly, the test revealed a statistically significant difference between post-test and delayed post-test vocabulary results in group 1: t (19) = –3.238, p < .005; group 2: t (19) = –5.090, p < .001; and group 3: t (19) = –6.240, p < .001. discussion preand post-assessments were conducted to measure students’ progress under different treatments. the results of the tests showed that the experimental group (group 3) which was exposed to mixed-approach made noticeable gains in terms of grammatical and lexical forms compared with the other two groups. the debate whether grammar instruction in the communicative classroom should be provided or not have posed two extremes: while some advocate minimal attention to grammar, some advocate ample attention and integrate the knowledge into communicative activities (sheen, 2002). in the realm of the language classroom, some linguistic features are acquired without guided attention; conversely, it is evident that some linguistic features do not develop in the absence of intentional effort (spada & lightbown, 2008). the study shows that ffi treatment in group 2 outperformed cbi treatment in group 3 on the grammar component. it has been suggested by linguists and practitioners alike that some form of grammatical instruction should be included in language programs because a lack of grammatical accuracy is an obstacle for not developing native-like abilities in written or oral language proficiency (millard, 2000). production of correct and advanced language and appropriate use of language units help language learners keep interactions going; therefore, promotes their access to language input (krashen, 1982). there is a growing consensus that some language features do not appear in learners’ use of language without ffi (spada & lighbown, 2008). when criteria by long (1991) and norris and ortega (2000) are followed, it is feasible that they emphasize on both the need for communication and form-oriented instruction. integrating form and content within classroom discussions of literature… 67 another issue to point out is that cbi treatment in the study is more effective than ffi treatment on the vocabulary component. nation and webb (2011) argue that cbi provides clear advantages for vocabulary learning. the core premise of communicative language teaching is that learners need a reason to talk, in other words learners should be provided a genuine purpose in which the emphasis is on information exchange and meaning negotiation by utilizing meaningful contexts (millard, 2000). further, as brown (1994) stresses, language is spoken at the discourse level rather than sentence level because meanings are not acquired from isolated individual sentences but from “referents in both previous sentences and following sentences” (p. 235). however, it is uncommon for language learners to arrive at high levels of linguistic competence from engaging in entirely meaning-focused instruction. when grammar scores of cbi treatment are examined, it is noticed that they seemed to lack language accuracy. swain (1993) discovered that without exposure to language forms, simply learning in context does not lead to real gains in achieving the desired outcomes in proficiency level. in a meaning-based classroom “learners are usually not specifically taught the strategies, maxims and organizational principles that govern communicative language use but are expected to work these out for themselves through extensive task engagement” (celce-murcia, dörnyei, & thurrell, 1997, p. 141) because meaning-based instruction aims to enhance ability of learners to communicate in real-life settings. this engagement provides learners with an ample amount of target language samples that may develop their sociolinguistic, discourse, strategic and linguistic competence (barrot, 2014). however, the sufficiency of meaning-focused instruction has been questioned (long, 1996; larsen-freeman & long, 1991). for instance, swain (1995) proposes that learners not only involve in communicative language use but also attend to form to master the language. in doughty’s (2001) view, “the factor that distinguishes focus-on-form from other pedagogical approaches is the requirement that focus on form involves learners’ briefly and perhaps simultaneously attending to form, meaning and use during one cognitive event” (p. 211) as ffi helps learners make more efficient use of linguistic forms in meaningfocused language use. the acquisition of linguistic forms through exposure to instructional intervention enables learners to use the language with greater fluency and accuracy (spada & lightbown, 2008). treatment 3 was shown to be effective in that the learners made measurable gains on both grammar and vocabulary components. the inability of communicative esl teaching alone has led to providing implicit focus on grammar during communicative language teaching without revival of traditional grammar-based language instruction in the efl situation (fotos, 1998; fotos & hinkel, 2007). efl syllabus design, in which the entire lesson content comprises grammar points, is ineffective. long (1988) notes that teaching grammatical forms in çağrı tuğrul mart68 isolation, fails to advance learners’ ability to utilize forms for communicative language use. correspondingly, he suggests that communicative syllabus which neglects grammar instruction is inadequate in efl pedagogy. thus, combining communicative language use with grammar instruction provides for learners clear advantages to perceive the characteristics of target structures in context and improve their accuracy (fotos, 1998; baecher, farnsworth, & ediger, 2014; zarobea & cenoz, 2015). also, it was seen that the students were able to retain newly acquired knowledge for a long time when form and content was integrated in the language classroom. conclusion the present study has highlighted the premise that the integration of ffi and cbi within classroom discussions of literature is a powerful approach to help learners make form–meaning connections and measurable gains in language learning outcomes. ffi draws attention of learners to target features to reach high levels of linguistic competence. the acquisition of linguistic forms provides clear advantages for language learners to perceive the characteristics of target structures in context and use the language with greater accuracy. cbi is the simultaneous study of language and content. cbi provides optimal conditions for language learning in which learners use the target language as a medium of communication rather than a means of instruction for analysis. content-based classrooms provide language learners occasions to negotiate form and meaning and promote their knowledge. language learners construct knowledge and negotiate through the discourse contexts of interaction. cbi situates the comprehensible input at the core of language acquisition. any content material that addresses to the cognitive needs of learners and with the language input can be used to develop their language skills and, at the same time, help them become knowledgepowered individuals. the impetus of cbi to impact verbal interaction of language learners motivates them for successful outcomes. an integrated approach which focuses on both form and content led to real gains in language learning. the study revealed that collaborating ffi and cbi within classroom discussions of literature is an optimal path for language learners to attend to language forms within communicative practice and creates them occasions to negotiate form and meaning. the provision of language forms in meaning-based tasks is an optimal path for language learners to achieve the desired outcomes for language proficiency development through building grammar and vocabulary knowledge. integrating form and content within classroom discussions of literature… 69 limitations of the study the number of participants and materials in the study is limited. a large sample size would reveal more accurate information; thereby, the study calls for 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(2015). way forward in the twenty-first century in content-based instruction: moving towards integration. language, culture and curriculum, 28(1), 90–96. zeungler, j., & brinton, d. m. (1997). linguistic form, pragmatic function: relevant research from content-based instruction. in m. a. snow & d. m. brinton (eds.), the content-based classroom: perspectives on integrating language and content (pp. 263–273). white plains, ny: longman. çağrı tuğrul mart die integration von form und inhalt in den diskussionen über die literatur in einer klasse mit erweitertem fremdsprachenunterricht z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g in anbetracht dessen, dass sowohl das unterrichten von formalen aspekten (engl. form-focused instruction), als auch das inhaltsorientierte unterrichten einer fremdsprache (engl. content-focused instruction) bestimmte vorund nachteile aufweisen, gewährleistet die integration der beiden unterrichtskonzepte und deren einbeziehung in einen auf literarischen texten basierten fremdsprachenunterricht aufgrund ihrer gegenseitigen komplementarität çağrı tuğrul mart74 einen idealen kontext. solche methode ermöglicht den schülern, sprachmuster in einem kontext zu erkennen und einen sinnvollen diskurs auszulösen. darüber hinaus hat sie einen positiven einf luss auf den fachunterricht. das ziel der dargestellten untersuchung war es, eine diagnose zu stellen, wie effektiv das fremdsprachenlernen durch die integration von formalen aspekten und der inhaltsorientierung im fremdsprachenunterricht im falle eines literaturbasierten lehrprogramms sein kann. an dieser quasi-experimentellen untersuchung nahmen 60 studierende eines lehrerstudiums teil (englisch als fremdsprache). es wurde festgestellt, dass die integrative methode als werkzeug für die entwicklung von sprachkompetenzen dienen kann, weil die schüler wesentliche fortschritte in bezug auf die erweiterung ihrer grammatischen und lexikalischen kenntnisse aufweisen. schlüsselwörter: unterrichten von formalen aspekten einer fremdsprache, das inhaltsorientiere unterrichten, integration, sprachentwicklung, korrektheit theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 7 (2), 2021, pp. 133–153 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.9993 amare tesfie birhan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8764-8592 bahir dar institute of technology, bahir dar university, ethiopia mulugeta teka https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9786-8871 humanities faculty, bahir dar university, ethiopia nibret asrade https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6874-7299 humanities faculty, bahir dar university, ethiopia effects of using corpus-based instructional mediation on efl students’ academic writing skills improvement a b s t r a c t this study aimed at examining the effects of corpus-based instructional mediation on efl learners’ academic writing skills improvement. to conduct the research, a quasi-experimental research design was employed. a total of 72 efl mechanical engineering students participated in the study, and they were selected through a simple random sampling technique. among them, 25 students were assigned to the experimental group and 47 students to the control group. the data were gathered by means of preand post-tests. multivariate analysis of variance (manova) was used to observe the statistical differences between the control and the experimental groups in their academic writing skills. the results showed that the students who were instructed through corpus-based instructional mediation outperformed than the students who were instructed in the conventional instructional approach. particularly, the students who participated in the experimental group improved their content, communicative achievement, organization, grammar, and vocabulary usage than the students who participated in the control group. therefore, this research calls for inclusion of corpus-based authentic linguistic elements in their teaching material when teaching academic writing courses in the efl context. keywords: academic writing, corpus linguistics, mediation, usage-based https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.???? amare tesfie birhan, mulugeta teka, nibret asrade134 introduction information technology has played a significant role in language teaching, learning, and student engagement (pareja-lora, rodriguez-arancon, & calle-martinez, 2016). technology facilitates students’ autonomous and collaborative language learning. learners acquire authentic linguistic elements via computer technology: they can read different materials on the computer, get a huge amount of data, revise grammatical and spelling mistakes, compute and compare the frequency of words and translate written texts (birhan, 2019; hyland, 2003; lee, warschauer, & lee, 2017). hence technology facilitates all phases of academic writing process: planning, drafting, and revising. these factors help learners solve lexical or grammatical problems and generate ideas for writing (luo, 2016). the introduction of corpus linguistics, which is the collection of written or spoken texts usually stored in a computer database, is also considered the other contribution of technology (fuster & clavel, 2010). students, language teachers, and researchers use authentic language data (braun, 2005) through user-friendly software such as antconc, wmatrix, wordsmith tools, and online corpora searching engines like corpus.byu.edu, cqp web, etc. vyatkina and boulton (2017) confirmed that the corpus started its influence in language teaching and learning as soon as it emerged in the modern form in the 1960s. the corpus data have been used in language classrooms to facilitate the students’ second and foreign language acquisition. since then, the corpus has brought fundamental changes in the second language approach, materials development, curriculum design, and teaching methodology (cotos, 2014). therefore, the use of corpus linguistics as a mediation tool has been realized and discussed by various researchers (e.g., belz & vyatkina, 2008; meunier, 2011; perez-paredes, 2010; yoon, 2008). the researchers confirmed that corpus linguistics is a viable meditation tool to enhance the students’ vocabulary (szudarski, 2018); writing (donesch-jezo, 2010), grammar (conrad, 2000), and speaking skills (carter & mccarthy, 1995; hilliard, 2014). language teachers integrate the language teaching with authentic, reliable, and pedagogically relevant contents to satisfy the language learning needs and to fill their learners’ language gap. according to vygotsky’s socio-cultural learning theory, the students’ learning can be mediated by their peers, by teachers, and by instructional material or technology (nieto, 2007). likewise, corpus informed instruction mediates the students’ language learning in two ways: directly and indirectly (braun, 2005; o’keeffe, mccarthy & carter, 2007). in a direct approach, teachers/researchers can design learners’ corpora or use the existing corpora directly while the students construct academic text effects of using corpus-based instructional mediation… 135 through an online concordancing program. the direct approach assists learners in identifying the pragmatic function and meaning of words in context (thurstun & candlin, 1998). vyatkina (2013) suggests that the teacher should support the learners before they start to use the corpus data because it might be difficult to utilize. brown (2007, p. 308) also mentioned that “many of the widely accessible corpora were created as tools for linguistic research and not with pedagogical goals in mind.” therefore, if the teacher uses the existing corpus data, he/she should guide and direct the students learning. a second approach is an indirect approach, in which, according to vyatkina (2013), the teacher prepares corpus-based teaching materials, activities, worksheets for instruction purposes. this approach is one of the favored approaches especially when there are constraints such as the level and experience of learners, time constraints, curricular requirements, knowledge, and skills required for corpus analysis and pedagogical mediation (mcenery & xiao, 2011). this approach offers different language samples that increase students’ language exposure (flowerdew, 2009; szudarski, 2018). recently, there are various well-designed corpus-based dictionaries, teaching materials (e.g., touchstone by mccarthy, mccarten & sandiford, 2014), activities, and worksheets that mediate the learners’ language skills including writing. hence, these activities mediate students’ language learning in general and academic writing in particular by offering authentic linguistic contents that are frequently used in students’ communicative situations. these corpus informed materials indicate the pragmatic function of lexes and guide students while they compose different academic texts. corpus-based instruction mediates learners to become more aware of text production in a context of use. academic writing and corpus-based instructional mediation academic writing is a demanded skill for higher education students. the students’ achievement depends on the quality of project reports, proposals, and assignments they produce. hence, to produce effective academic writing in fruitful way, the students need to have adequate knowledge of linguistic used by certain academic communities (coxhead & demecheleer, 2018; ward, 2009). in academic literacy, researchers (e.g., chen, 2017; hardy & romer, 2013) stated that there are rhetorical and linguistic element differences among disciplines as well as academic writing genres. thus, in order to communicate effectively, writers need to know the rhetorical and linguistic structures commonly used in their communicative context. in academic writing, literacy is viewed as beyond copying words and sentences structures; it investigates understanding disciplinary conventions and enables learners to develop a critical view of the amare tesfie birhan, mulugeta teka, nibret asrade136 context of the conventions used (wingate, 2012). the writers show their positions, arguments, and stances. while learners have real language skills, they can have effective academic writing communication in their discipline (maher & milligan, 2019). the students need to know the academic writing conventions that are used in their disciplines. academic writing encompasses various skills. according to jordan (1997), academic writing involves skills such as organizing ideas appropriately, using cohesive devices, describing, defining, comparing, logical thinking, constructing arguments, finding and analyzing evidence, using data appropriately, etc. accordingly, to make use of these academic writing skills, the writers’ genuine lexical knowledge is crucial. the students’ lexical knowledge is fundamental to language production (allan, 2016). particularly, knowledge of lexical bundles and metadiscourses are considered crucial for academic writing improvement and a significant indicator for academic writing ability. metadiscourse and lexical bundles facilitate communication (schmitt & carter, 2004), social interaction (jalali & moini, 2014), communicative competence (hyland, 2012), and second language academic literacy acquisition (shin, cortes, & yoo, 2018). thus, corpus analysis helps to indicate the genuine metadiscourse and lexical bundles that are frequently used in students’ academic and social-communicative context. currently, various researchers use corpus linguistics mediation to address the students’ language skills gap; the corpus creates an opportunity to overcome the students’ academic writing skills challenge. for instance, reynolds (2015) mediated the efl students’ academic writing gap through the corpus tool and reported that the corpus tool “string net navigator” assists students in correcting their academic writing errors. yoon (2008) also reported corpus mediation to enhance the learners’ academic writing confidence. o’sullivan (2010) also confirmed that corpus consultation enhances students’ citations in academic writing. corpus is vital to present a more genuine and achievable targeted linguistic elements for students’ academic writing (nesi, 2014). it also offers a real-life language use that enables learners to apply authentic language in their communicative situation (klimova, 2014). in this way, through corpus analysis, researchers and teachers analyze genuine linguistic elements that satisfy the students’ academic writing needs. according to usage-based learning theory, the linguistic structure and meaning are shaped by a specific communicative context (tyler, 2010). however, researchers observed that efl/esl students encounter challenges due to a lack of authentic lexical knowledge that is crucial to develop effective academic text production. paquot (2010) observed that 50% of the students encountered difficulties in using appropriate academic style, expressing ideas in correct english, and linking sentences smoothly. learners are unable to convey what they want to say properly (luo, 2016). the students face an enormous effects of using corpus-based instructional mediation… 137 challenge in using academic writing skills in different contexts (chang & kuo, 2011; o’sullivan, 2010). these researchers added that students often find it diffi cult to grasp concepts like argument, thesis statement, and topic sentence and lose their stances which are essential for producing a good academic text and participating actively in the international academic discourse community. these might be because of the lack of formal training in academic writing or the existing practice of teaching writing (cortes, 2011). studies explored that efl students rarely utilize lexical bundles and metadiscourse linguistic elements that help them compose coherent paragraphs and essays. according to researchers (e.g., jalali & moini, 2014; wright, 2019), non-native writers rarely used lexical bundles in their academic writing. they are not familiar with the repeated sequence of words (kazemi, katiraei, & rasekh, 2014). grabowski (2015) also reported that little attention is paid to lexis in classroom instruction. according to qiong (2017), one of the features of communicative language teaching is the indebted to the use of authentic texts. in contrast, the lack of pragmatic authenticity of teaching material has been a major problem in the english language classroom (zahra & abbas, 2018) researchers explicated that lexical grammar or lexical accuracy is a major challenge for efl/esl students (see ferris & hedgcock, 1998). according to maher and milligan (2019), engineering students do not pay due attention to improving the linguistic knowledge which could help them to produce effective academic writing. similarly, ward (2009) indicated that engineering students have little lexical knowledge. this might be partly due to the fact that students do not have sufficient exposure to authentic lexes in their secondary school learning. likewise, birhan, belaye, and alemahyehu (2020) revealed that at bahir dar institute of technology, mechanical engineering students use course material that does not include adequate lexical bundles and metadiscourse. though researchers like hyland (2000) reported there are disciplinary cultures that indicate how the rhetorical structure is used in certain disciplines, the way students use lexical bundles and metadiscourse differs from that in use by experts (cortes, 2004; hyland, 2008; kawase, 2015). therefore, this research was aimed at examining the effects of corpus-based instructional mediation on students’ academic writing skills. recently, numerous researchers (e.g., chen & flowerdew, 2018; jalilifar, mehrabi, & mousavinia, 2014; poole, 2016; yoon, 2008) studied the impact of corpus instruction on students’ language learning. however, these researchers focused on the direct application of corpus linguistics, and their studies are limited in terms of scope and data collection methods. besides, various researchers recommended further research to examine the effects of corpus-based instruction in the efl context. for instance, mukherjee (2006) asserted that there is a gap between what corpus linguistic offers and what teachers can do (do not do) with corpora in classroom practice. poole amare tesfie birhan, mulugeta teka, nibret asrade138 (2016) and yoon and hirvela, (2004) also recommended further research to provide evidence on the application of corpus work in academic writing skills classes. hence, this research was conducted considering the recommendation of the above studies to examine the effects of corpus-based mediation on improving efl students’ academic writing skills. this research hypothesized that students having learnt linguistic, discursive, and pragmatic features on technical report writing through corpus-based instructional mediation would improve their academic writing skills better than students taught the same course in a traditional way. this research was intended to answer the following research questions. does corpus-based instructional mediation improve the students’ academic writing skills significantly better than the conventional instruction does? if so, in which component(s) of the students’ academic writing is a significant improvement observed? method research design the purpose of this research was to examine the effects of corpus-based instructional mediation on improving efl students’ academic writing skills. to observe the effect of the instructional mediation, this research followed a quasiexperimental research design. the research adopted a nonequivalent preand post-test control group design. participants the participants of the study were 72 mechanical engineering students of bahir dar institute of technology, at bahir dar university (ethiopia). in the 2019/2020 academic year, in the mechanical engineering department, there were five sections of year iv. among these, two sections were randomly selected for this study; one of which was assigned as a control group (47 students), and another (25 students) was assigned in an experimental group. in ethiopia, the english language is taught to students starting from grade 1 and it is used as a medium of instruction in secondary and tertiary levels. engineering students take three different english language courses: communicative english, basic writing, and technical report writing and research method. effects of using corpus-based instructional mediation… 139 being fourth year students, the study participants were taking the course technical report writing and research method. the objective of the course is to help engineering and technology students learn the principles of technical writing such as formats, contents grammatical techniques, general procedures of report writing. it is also aimed to improve the essential knowledge of vocabularies and terminologies in science and engineering. data gathering tools the data was gathered via an academic writing test. the academic writing test is one of the common instruments which are used by researchers (e.g rashtchi & ali mohammadi, 2017; crossley, roscoe, & mcnamara, 2014) to assess and observe the students’ academic writing improvement as a result of pedagogical intervention. hence, the students’ academic writing tests included gap filling, text revision, data interpretation, and an argumentative text. the tests covered the major research genres such as abstract, introduction, result, and discussion genres. thus, except for the gap-filling test, text revision, data interpretation, and the argumentative essay were marked through rubrics/traits by two english language teaching instructors drawing on the common european framework of reference for language-b2 level academic writing assessment scale. the scale contains four components each accompanied by five-point scale descriptors. these components helped to assess the content, meaning, and linguistics (lexical bundles and metadiscourse) of the students’ texts. the scale yielded aggregate scores on each component of academic writing skills: content, communicative achievement, organization, and grammar and vocabulary control (council of europe, 2001). the validity of the tests was reviewed by two phd instructors who have been teaching english language courses for more than 20 years. to check the agreement between the two instructors who marked the argumentative essay, pearson’s correlations (pearson’s r) was applied to estimate the interrater reliability and the obtained coefficient (r = .80) confirmed that it was reliable. corpus design and intervention there are various corpus informed teaching materials. among these, the touchstone series by mccarthy, mccarten, and sandford (2014) and the cambridge grammar of english by carter and mccarthy (2016) are the well-known corpus informed materials. however, they did not address the specific academic writing needs of mechanical engineering students. as braun (2005, p. 51) contends, “the genuine materials in corpora which have been collected in accordance with pedagogical considerations do seem to create some problems of authentication.” amare tesfie birhan, mulugeta teka, nibret asrade140 therefore, in this study, the researchers considered self-designed small corpora for classroom intervention. corpus informed studies confirmed that small corpora are more appropriate than general corpora for classroom instruction and specific genre language analysis (szudarski, 2018). besides, researchers such as flowerdew (2009) and tribble (2001) proved that using small corpora is effective for classroom instruction. nelson (2010) also asserts “small corpora can offer a balanced and representative picture of a specific area of the language” (p. 55). small corpora are appropriate for classroom instruction to address the student’s specific english language needs. hence, the authors of this paper have designed small size corpora from articles published in journals with high impact factor and indexed in thomson reuters and scopus. considering the journals scope, content coverage, publication language and representativeness to the field, the authors have selected the following eight journals: advances in mechanical engineering, mechanism and machine theory, mechanical systems and signal processing, international journal of mechanical sciences, archive of mechanical engineering, journal of mechanical engineering, periodica polytechnica mechanical engineering, and chinese journal of mechanical engineering. from these journals, 120 (15 articles in each journal) articles were selected. the number of words in each sub-corpus seems to be the following. table 1. a list of articles and number of tokens no. journals word tokens word types 1 advances in mechanical engineering 118,387 5,259 2 mechanism and machine theory 46,455 4,706 3 mechanical systems and signal processing 92,218 5,955 4 international journal of mechanical sciences 96,649 6,128 5 archive of mechanical engineering 53,015 4,523 6 journal of mechanical engineering 54,793 5,423 7 periodica polytechnica mechanical engineering 47,683 5,114 8 chinese journal of mechanical engineering 54,412 4,022 total 563,612 41,130 while the articles were selected, the researchers used information in the journal’s website such as most downloaded, read, and cited articles. antconc corpus analysis software was also employed to clean and analyze the frequency of metadiscourse and lexical bundles in the selected articles. manual analysis was also employed to specify the specific function of the selected linguistic element. the metadiscourse and lexical bundles were selected based on the taxonomies of hyland (2005), biber et al. (1999, 2003, 2004). effects of using corpus-based instructional mediation… 141 in this research, the corpus-based instruction was approached through a hands-on activities approach (boulton, 2010; reppen, 2010). the researchers have designed a series of lessons to teach the sorted pedagogically relevant metadiscourse items and lexical bundles in a communicative language teaching approach. the experimental group was taught the functions of lexical elements and metadiscourse items explicitly in contexts. additionally, the students were engaged in text revision, data interpretation, and argumentative writing activities both individually and in group. the students were also committed to revising sample paragraphs and essays which were written by former students. in this way, the experimental group practiced metadiscourse and lexical bundles through writing argumentative essays, data interpretation, and gapfilling activities. the instruction incorporated the conceptual and theoretical aspects of research and project writing reports. researchers moderate the instruction by guiding students how to use the selected lexical bundles and metadiscourse devices contextually, facilitating their group discussions and giving gap lectures throughout the intervention. feedbacks were also given in the students’ activities and assignments. however, the control group was taught through the conventional approach in which the theoretical aspects of report and research writing and accompanying activities included in the course material were treated. this group did not have the exposure to the activities based on the selected metadiscourse and lexical bundles. both groups attended the course for a four-month-long semester. data analysis procedure in this study, the data collected through the tests were analyzed using oneway multivariate analysis of variance (one-way manova) on the statistical package for the social sciences (spss) for windows, version 24.0. as opposed to using a number of separate t-tests that could result in type ii errors and ignore correlations among the components of the dependent variable, the researchers in this study preferred one-way manova to detect both combined and separate differences by making both multivariate and univariate comparisons between the control group and the experimental group in terms of their means on the four components of the dependent variable: content, communicative achievement, organization, and grammar and vocabulary. before running this test, the researchers conducted exploratory data analysis to check that all the necessary assumptions were met and determine the possibility of applying the inferential statistics, manova. accordingly, the exploratory data analysis proved that the data did not have any problem of normal distribution, multicollinearity, outliers, and homogeneity variance-covariance matrices. amare tesfie birhan, mulugeta teka, nibret asrade142 results the results obtained by analyzing the data gathered through writing tests are presented below. comparison of students’ academic writing performance before and after the intervention is presented. students’ academic writing the first step was to perform the one-way manova to make a quantitative comparison between the control group and experimental one regarding students’ academic writing skills and the four components of this dependent variable: content, communicative achievement, organization, and grammar and vocabulary before the intervention. the main objective of running the manova test on the students’ pre-intervention writing performance was to make sure that the two randomly selected intact classes were homogeneous (without significant multivariate and univariate differences) in terms of their academic writing skills before they received respective treatments in the experimental group and in the control one. thus, table 2 presents descriptive statistics (the means and the standard deviations for each group of participants on the four sub-scales of academic writing skills) and the multivariate analysis of variance (manova) results. table 2. pre-intervention comparison of the two groups and multivariate analysis result variable group n mean s.d. df f sig. wilks’ lambda ʌ partial η2 content control 47 2.10 .844 4,67 .551 .699 .968 .032 experimental 25 2.06 .506 communication achievement control 47 2.46 .475 experimental 25 2.52 .420 organization control 47 2.46 .508 experimental 25 2.54 .454 language and grammar control 47 2.19 .655 experimental 25 2.06 .506 as shown in table 2, the study entails the pre-intervention comparison between control and experiment on the four components of students’ academic writing skills: content, communicative achievement, organization, and grammar effects of using corpus-based instructional mediation… 143 and vocabulary. the descriptive statistics results indicated that the two sections registered comparable scores on the content of the writings with a mean score of 2.10 in the control group and 2.06 in the experimental one. the standard deviations are .844 and .506, respectively. concerning their communicative achievement, the control group scored a relatively lower mean (m = 2.46; sd = .475) than that of the experimental one (m = 2.52, sd = .506). similarly, the difference in their scores on the organization of their writing was marginally small (i.e., with a mean score of 2.46 in control group and 2.54 in experimental). the standard deviations are .508 and .454 respectively. moreover, the control group was associated with a numerically higher mean score (m = 2.19; sd = .655) of grammar and vocabulary than the experimental (m = 2.06; sd = .506). this indicated that there were slight mathematical differences between the two groups in their pre-intervention academic writing performance. based on these results of the descriptive statistics, multivariate tests were checked to examine if statistically significant multivariate differences could occur between the two groups before they were assigned as experimental and control groups. the results of multivariate tests in the above table revealed a non-significant multivariate difference between the two sections, wilks’s λ = 0.968, f (4, 67) = .559, p = .699, η 2 = .032. these results indicated that there were no significant differences between the control and the experimental groups in their academic writing skills on a linear combination of content, communicative achievement, organization, and grammar and vocabulary. as a rule, there is no need to run further tests of univariate analyses of variance (anovas) after the manova result shows a nonsignificant multivariate effect. however, following the above omnibus test, univariate tests were applied just to show clearly that the two sections recorded nonsignificant differences across each component of the dependent variable. the results of the univariate tests are presented in the table below. table 3. pre-intervention univariate tests results variable group n mean s.d. df f sig. partial η2 content control 47 2.10 .844 1,70 .037 .847 .001 experimental 25 2.06 .506 communication achievement control 47 2.46 .475 1,70 .305 .583 .004 experimental 25 2.52 .420 organization control 47 2.46 .508 1,70 .461 .499 .007 experimental 25 2.54 .454 language and grammar control 47 2.19 .655 1,70 .762 .386 .011 experimental 25 2.06 .506 amare tesfie birhan, mulugeta teka, nibret asrade144 as can be seen in table 3, none of the results of the univariate analysis of variance confirmed significant difference. hence, the observed slight mathematical differences between the two groups were not found statistically significant for all the four components of academic writing skills (i.e., content (f (1, 95) = 0.713, p < 0.400, η 2 = 0.007), communicative achievement, (f (1, 95) = 2.367, p < 0.127, η2 = 0.024), organization (f (1, 95) = 2.367, p < 0.127, η2 = 0.024), and grammar and vocabulary (f (1, 95) = 0.352, p < 0.554, η2 = 0.004). thus, the hypothesis that the two groups were homogeneous before the intervention in terms of content, communicative achievement, organization in their writings was retained. post-intervention multivariate comparisons considering the results of the assumptions made so far, the experimental group and the control group were compared in their post-intervention writing test performance by running the same statistical test, one-way manova. the researchers compared first the multivariate effect of corpus-based writing instruction on the two groups students’ academic writing skills (the combined effect) and then its univariate effects on the four components of the academic writing skills: content, communicative achievement, organization, and grammar and vocabulary. accordingly, the post-intervention comparison between the experimental group (n = 25) and the control group (n = 47) as displayed in table 4 indicates that the former group registered mathematically better results than the latter in all of the four components of academic writing: content, communicative achievement, organization, and grammar and vocabulary. table 4. post-intervention comparison of the two groups and multivariate analysis result variable group n mean sd df f sig. wilks’ lambda ʌ partial η2 content control 47 2.21 .519 4, 67 49.8 .000 .251 .749 experimental 25 3.02 .567 communication achievement control 47 2.47 .488 experimental 25 3.88 .415 organization control 47 2.57 .389 experimental 25 3.22 .434 language and grammar control 47 2.25 .641 experimental 25 3.10 .540 effects of using corpus-based instructional mediation… 145 according to the results, the post-intervention content was associated with a mean score of 3.02 (sd = .567) in the experimental group and 2.21 (sd = .519) in the control group. in terms of the post-intervention communicative achievement results, the experimental group (m = 3.88, sd = 247) was again relatively better than the control group (m = 2.47, sd = .488). furthermore, concerning the post-intervention organization, the experimental group m = 3.22, sd = .434) scored rather higher result as compared to the mean score related to the control group (m = 2.57, sd =.389). in order to check whether these mathematical disparities of scores between the two groups differed significantly, multivariate and univariate tests were examined by performing one-way manova. table 4 also presents the multivariate test result. as can be seen in table 4, the multivariate differences between the experimental and the control groups were found to be significant with wilks’s λ = .251, f (4, 67) = 4, 98, p = .000, η2 = .749. these results showed that corpus-based mediation instruction brought about a significant multivariate difference between the experimental group and the control group on students’ content, communicative achievement, organization, and grammar and vocabulary when these four components of the variable are considered collectively. since the result of the omnibus test (manova) in table 4 does not show how much each component of the dependent variable was impacted by the independent variable, this omnibus test had to be followed by univariate analyses of variance (tests of between-subjects effects). the univariate differences across each component of the dependent variable are presented below. table 5. post-intervention univariate tests results variable group n mean sd df f sig. partial η2 content control 47 2.21 .518 1,70 37.012 .000 .346 experimental 25 3.02 .567 communication achievement control 47 2.47 .488 1,70 148.3 .000 .679 experimental 25 3.88 .415 organization control 47 2.57 .389 1,70 41.28 .000 .371 experimental 25 3.22 .434 language and grammar control 47 2.25 .641 1,70 31.42 .000 .310 experimental 25 3.10 .540 the results of univariate analyses of variance revealed a significant effect of corpus-based writing instruction on each component of academic writing (the dependent variable). the results, as shown in table 5, indicate that the use of amare tesfie birhan, mulugeta teka, nibret asrade146 corpus-based writing instruction brought about a multivariate significant difference between the two groups academic writing performance in terms of content, communicative achievement, organization, and grammar and vocabulary, all in all, favoring the experimental group. the impacts of corpus-based writing instruction on each component of academic writing (content, communicative achievement, organization, and grammar and vocabulary in their academic writing) were found to be dissimilar as can be understood from the above table. with regards to the content of students’ academic writing, the univariate difference between the two groups was found to be significant, f (1. 70) = 37,012, p = .000, η2 = .346. similarly, the univariate difference between the two groups in terms of communication achievement was found significant, f (1. 70) = 143,3, p = .000, η2 = .679. when comparing the effects of corpus-based writing instruction on each component of academic writing, the difference brought to the two groups by students’ communicative achievement (67.9%) was the highest compared to the other three components: organization (η2 = .371), grammar and vocabulary (η2 = .310) and content (η2 = .346). the effect of corpus-based instructional mediation on students’ communicative achievement seemed to take the highest share in the multivariate tests, while the effects on the remaining three components ranged between 31% and 37.1%. additionally, the students employed lexical bundles and metadiscourse device effectively in their argumentative and data interpretation texts, which was not observed before the intervention. the following excerpts are taken from the students’ writing. s1: apart from this it increases employment opportunities… s2: according to the table the energy of households…. s3: in contrast, in primary and secondary educations, the tables shows that s4: in my view, globalization contributes a lot by introducing new technologies. … to start with the first reason, … accordingly, the research findings confirmed that the students who participated in corpus-based mediation performed better in the four major components of academic writing than those who learned academic writing via the conventional approach. discussion the purpose of this research was to investigate the effects of corpus-based instruction on efl students’ academic writing skills. hence this study confirmed that corpus-based instructional mediation helped students to improve their language skills. particularly, the findings indicated that the students who effects of using corpus-based instructional mediation… 147 participated in the experimental group improved their academic writing skills better than those who were taught their academic writing skills by means of the conventional approach. moreover, the experimental group showed a significantly better improvement in the content, organization, communicative achievement, and grammar and vocabulary usage in their academic writing skills than the control group. the findings of this study have been aligned with previous study findings. to mention but a few, luo and zhou (2017) proved corpus consultation is crucial to enhance students’ certain lexical problems. similarly, chitez, rapp, and kruse (2015) and ward (2009) found that corpus linguistics instructional mediation helped to improve the students’ academic writing skills. likewise, belz and vytakina (2008) came up to a similar finding that corpus linguistics mediation affects students’ language use. huang (2012) also reported that students who received a corpus-based instruction improved their’ knowledge of periphrastic causatives. researchers such as kogan, yaroshevich, and ni (2018) also reported that a corpus-based instruction improved academic writing skills. authentic and genuine linguistic elements helped efl learners to construct effective academic writing. students’ lexical knowledge is crucial to choose appropriate content, to organize their ideas smoothly, to control their use of vocabulary and grammar, and to achieve their communicative goals in their academic writing. more specifically, the finding of this study is consistent with abdelwahab’s (2020) findings in terms of the improved components of students’ academic writing skills (content, organization, vocabulary, and language use) and with asadi’s (2018) work in terms of the effect of using metadiscourse devices on students’ academic writing skills. likewise, this research indicated that mechanical engineering students who were instructed through corpus-based instructional mediation improved their awareness regarding the utilization of lexical bundles and metadiscourse which occurred frequently in their field of studies. according to a usage-based theory, language is confined to a specific context in which it is used, and the user shapes language features (meaning and structure) according to the context. likewise, the meaning and the structure of a language are determined by identity of the users (baker, 2006). thus, the lexical bundles and metadisocurse function vary according to the contexts in which it is used and according to the people who use them. in academic writing, corpus mediates students’ language learning by showing the pragmatic functions of a specific linguistic elements which occur frequently in their field of studies. baybee and beckner (2010) and ibbotson (2013) also mention that language is developed with social interaction. therefore, teachers can use corpus data to design authentic academic writing teaching materials. asik (2017) asserts that corpus-informed materials adamare tesfie birhan, mulugeta teka, nibret asrade148 dress the students’ language learning needs. when teachers prepare teaching materials, they should consider pedagogically relevant contents and motivate students to use them in their communicative situations. conclusions corpus-based instructional mediation assists students how to use genuine linguistic elements that occur frequently in their discipline while they construct academic writing texts. this study proved that corpus-based instructional mediation was a viable instructional tool to enhance students’ academic writing skills. the research found that students who participated in the experimental group improved their lexical knowledge better than students who learned their academic writing skills through holistic approach. the experimental group improved their content, organization, communicative achievement, and grammar and vocabulary usage skills better than students who were taught through the traditional teaching material and method. the students also employed metadiscourse and lexical bundles effectively and properly in their argumentative essay and data interpretation texts. the findings of this research have various implications. first, the findings implied that computer technology plays an indispensable role to discover lexical bundles and metadiscourse elements that can be used in students’ social context. second, the finding implied that english language teachers should consider empirical language data to prepare academic writing teaching material, to address students’ academic writing needs than relying on teacher made examples and language contents; teachers should depend on authentic examples and linguistic contents. moreover, the finding implied that teachers can select specific linguistic elements (for instance lexical bundles and metadiscourse) to enhance their learners’ lexical knowledge. corpus-based instructional mediation could meet the academic writing communicative needs of students. the corpus-based instructional mediation raises the students’ awareness on how to use lexical bundles and metadiscourse in different academic genres. effects of using corpus-based instructional mediation… 149 references abdelwahab, a. 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(2004). esl student attitudes toward corpus use in l2 writing. journal of second language writing, 13, 257–283. zahra, t., & abbas, a. (2018). pedagogical implications of corpus-based approaches to elt in pakistan. journal of education and educational development, 5(2), 259–275. amare tesfie birhan, mulugeta teka, nibret asrade der einfluss von korpusbasierter unterrichtlicher vermittlung auf die verbesserung der akademischen schreibkompetenzen von efl-studierenden z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g das ziel der vorliegenden studie ist es, den einf luss von korpusbasierter unterrichtlicher vermittlung auf die verbesserung der akademischen schreibkompetenzen von eflstudierenden zu untersuchen. zur durchführung der untersuchung wurde ein quasi-experimentelles forschungsmodell verwendet. insgesamt nahmen 72 efl-maschinenbaustudierenden daran teil, die durch eine einfache zufallsstichprobe ausgewählt wurden. 25 studierende wurden der experimentalgruppe und 47 studierende der kontrollgruppe zugeordnet. die daten wurden mit hilfe von vorund nachtests erhoben. dabei wurde die multivariate varianzanalyse (manova) verwendet, um die statistischen unterschiede zwischen der kontrollund experimentalgruppe in bezug auf ihre akademischen schreibkompetenzen zu untersuchen. die ergebnisse zeigten, dass die studierenden, die durch korpusbasierte unterrichtliche vermittlung unterrichtet wurden, bessere leistungen erbrachten als die studierenden, die man mit dem konventionellen unterrichtlichen ansatz unterrichtete. im vergleich zu den teilnehmern der kontrollgruppe verbesserten die teilnehmer der experimentalgruppe insbesondere den inhalt, kommunikative leistungen, die organisation, grammatik und den wortschatzgebrauch. daher postuliert die studie die einbeziehung von korpusbasierten, authentischen sprachlichen elementen in das lehrmaterial der akademischen schreibkurse im efl-kontext. schlüsselwörter: akademisches schreiben, korpuslinguistik, vermittlung, gebrauchsbasiert theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 7 (1), 2021, pp. 11–31 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.8229 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5631-3706maria villalobos-buehner languages literatures and cultures, rider university a habermasian approach to the examination of language teachers’ cognitive interests a b s t r a c t language teacher educators train pre-service teachers in numerous theories and pedagogical practices of language learning and language teaching. they expect that their student teachers will translate this conceptual and practical knowledge into action during their practicum. however, in the process of determining pre-service teachers’ readiness for the field experience and the profession in general, methods classes measure only their conceptual knowledge and omit looking at their student teachers’ belief system about language teaching and learning. this belief system is a strong indicator of how the students organize their knowledge for application (borg, 2003) and may help teacher educators gauge students’ read ness in the use of new pedagogies that these pre-service teachers may not have experienced before. using two ref lective essays and a piece of authentic assessment as instruments to gather data, as well as jürgen habermas’s theory on cognitive interests as a framework to explore the espoused beliefs of nine pre-service language teachers at the end of a methods course, this qualitative study addressed the following questions: what levels of cognitive interests do the nine pre-service world language and esl teachers exhibit prior to student teaching? to what extent do the students’ levels of cognitive interests change during the methods course called teaching a second language? what are the most common cognitive interests regarding such areas of teaching performance, such as methodology and assessment among the participants? the results show that the nine pre-service teachers held mostly technical and some practical cognitive interests at the beginning of the semester. in the end, most of the participants held practical interests, and three out of the nine pre-service teachers held elementary emancipatory beliefs. one pedagogical recommendation is to include experiences in the training of pre-service teachers that promote emancipatory beliefs that could support teachers in their pursuit of transforming challenging social conditions while examining and adopting new pedagogies. keywords: pre-service language teachers, cognitive interests, technical interests, practical interests, emancipatory interests, habermas maria villalobos-buehner12 introduction methods courses play a pivotal role in the development of a teacher. they provide the foundational work that would assist the students in applying the theory to real academic contexts. most of these methods courses use case studies, lesson plans, micro-teaching sessions, and formal paper-and-pencil exams to gain a perspective about their pre-service teachers’ level of preparedness for their field experience and the profession in general. even though these evaluations could help determine their level of understanding of concepts, teacher educators soon find that once in the field, pre-service teachers have a hard time using this theoretical knowledge to act on either a typical or challenging practice situation. therefore, it is imperative that teacher educators examine not only pre-service language teachers’ conceptual and practical knowledge but also their beliefs in order to help determine their level of preparedness prior to student teaching. as varghese et al. (2005) said, in order to understand language teaching and learning we need to understand teachers; and in order to understand teachers, we need to have a clearer sense of who they are; the professional, cultural, political, and individual identities, which they claim or which are assigned to them. (p. 22) the main goal of this study was to determine the cognitive interests, conceptual knowledge, and espoused beliefs about language teaching and learning of nine pre-service teachers in order to gain knowledge about their different levels of pedagogical preparation and beliefs prior to their student teaching experience. this study applied the theoretical framework of habermas’s cognitive interests to three sources of data (two reflective papers and a piece of authentic assessment) to answer the following questions: 1. what levels of cognitive interests do the nine world-language and esl preservice teachers exhibit prior to student teaching? 2. which cognitive interests regarding such areas of teaching performance, such as methodology and assessment, are most common among the participants? 3. to what extent do the students’ levels of cognitive interests change, if at all, during the methods course called teaching a second language? a habermasian approach to the examination of language teachers’… 13 literature review language teacher cognitions the meaning of the term teacher cognition in this paper relates to the teacher’s knowledge of theory and pedagogy and their personal theories and beliefs about teaching (borg, 2003). in the last two decades, various authors have published several reviews and studies about experienced and novice language teachers’ cognition (basturkmen, 2012; borg, 2003; burns, edwards, & freeman, 2015; gabryś-barker, 2012; golombek & johnson, 2017; mann, 2005; wright, 2010). one of the three themes addressed in borg’s review of the studies done from 1989 to 2000 was cognition and teacher education. he found out that, according to the mainstream research, student teachers develop in diverse ways. therefore, in order to comprehend the scope of the impact of teacher training programs on student teachers, one should focus on individual cases. another key theme in his review was that a change in behavior as a result of teacher education does not imply a change in cognition and vice versa. borg also discovered that future language teachers at the beginning of their studies show distorted or immature understandings of teaching and learning (brookhart & freeman, 1992; brown & mcgannon, 1998; cumming, 1989). according to borg’s review, brookhart and freeman (1992) found two recurrent future teachers’ misunderstandings in their study: that languages were learned by imitation and that errors were caused by l1 interference. a recent study on pre-service teachers’ beliefs (debreli, 2016) reported that the majority of the 16 pre-service teachers from cyprus trusted the methods presented as effective in a teacher education program. these methods were also the main influential factors in shaping their beliefs. basturkumen’s (2012) review showed that most of the studies reported a “limited correspondence” between experienced teachers’ espoused beliefs and their classroom practices. those studies also supported the influence of the context and teachers’ years of experience in terms of facilitating or restricting the execution of teachers’ beliefs. these groups of studies determined that the beliefs of experienced teachers were more evident in their pedagogical choices and behaviors than those beliefs from novice teachers. only two dissertation studies from basturkurmen’s review reported results related to pre-service teacher beliefs. sinprajakpol’s (2004) research found limited correspondence between pre-service teachers’ beliefs about language teaching and learning approaches and their classroom practices; vibulpol’s (2004), on the other hand, found correspondence between the teachers’ beliefs about their own language skills and the importance of grammar in their choice of approaches in the classroom. despite the disagreement between sinprajakpol’s (2004) and vibulpol’s (2004) results, it is clear that pre-service language teachers’ beliefs are mostly maria villalobos-buehner14 influenced by their experiences as students and by emergent understandings of what are considered good practices in the field. gabryś-barker’s (2012) qualitative study about the beliefs of a group of pre-service teachers about language teaching shows that teachers’ earlier experiences as language students play a pivotal role in the shaping of their beliefs about teaching. these trainees, as the study describes them, perceive teachers as experts, sharers of knowledge, and ones with a clear mission. the participants’ perceptions of their future roles as teachers “implies the need for a teacher’s active involvement: both professional and personal, creativity and responsibility and also the courage to be different and the need to go on trying, irrespective of failures and obstacles” (48). burns, edwards, and freeman (2015) summarized the main ontological approaches used from 1990 to 2014 by a group of studies (crookes, 2010; freeman & johnson, 1996; kubanyiova, 2012) and their goal to understand the mind of the language teacher. the bulk of this research highlights the importance of understanding the pre-service teachers’ values, beliefs, and histories as learners if teacher programs want to be effective in their goal to not only shape but also to transform teachers’ practices. hennisen, beckers, and moerkerke (2017) studied the effectiveness of a curriculum in helping 136 pre-service teachers link theory with practice. the results showed growth in their knowledge and new schema formations after the pre-service teachers participated in a curriculum designed using an inductive approach that includes in-the-field experiences, post-experience reflections, and pre-service teachers’ concerns. most of the studies above have used teachers’ narrative inquiry in their study design as a “systematic exploration that is conducted by teachers and for teachers through their own stories and language” (johnson & golombek, 2002, p. 6). this study will contribute to this body of research by expanding the field’s understanding of pre-service cognitive interests by offering a theoretical framework to help shape our understanding of pre-service language teachers. a habermasian lens helps to capture the complexity and dynamic nature of cognitive beliefs by being able to explore emancipatory ways of thinking about language-learning practices. cognitive interest framework jürgen habermas’s (1971) theory of cognitive interests offers a framework for looking at diverse knowledge, beliefs, and dispositions in order to gain a wider perspective on pre-service teachers’ cognitive interests. this framework not only explores specific orientations in conceptual knowledge, but it also looks at people’s interests in connecting with a community and explores issues of power. the two latter foci allow a framing of our understanding of student teachers’ belief systems from a socio-critical perspective much needed a habermasian approach to the examination of language teachers’… 15 during these times, when language classes are being cut and second language requirements are either being substituted with other content areas, such as coding, or simply eliminated. therefore, teachers need to develop a critical lens to understand their own precepts and those of the community in order to become strong advocates for the profession. furthermore, this theory of cognitive interests helps to capture the complexity and dynamic nature of pre-service language teachers’ tenets. habermas (1971) stated that people function in a combination of domains based on specific orientations in their beliefs. these domains of human activity are classified into three cognitive interest domains: 1 figure 1. domains of human interests (habermas, 1971) teachers functioning at a technical-interest level focus on the desire to control their professional environment by following pre-established precepts (scott, 1997) to meet specific academic needs. the focus is “on efficiency and effectiveness” (geelan, 2001, p. 7). language educators performing at this level might focus on translations, the memorization of vocabulary lists, and grammar lessons that emphasize repetition and error correction. teachers aim at controlling discrete chunks of information (edgar, 2006). teachers functioning at a practical-interest level emphasize the importance of understanding the environment and the society around them. they work on developing “interpersonal rapports, understanding, and consensus that facilitate maria villalobos-buehner16 positive change for their students” (kondrat, 1995, p. 409). these teachers look for an understanding of the other and the self (kondrat, 1995). language teachers functioning at this level would plan around the students’ interests. the goals of communication and cultural understanding would be at the center of their pedagogical decisions (edgar, 2006). finally, teachers operating at an emancipatory level identify issues of power in the classroom and school contexts. they focus on a pedagogy that emphasizes compassion and underscores equity and empowerment for their students and the school community. language teachers would foster a caring classroom culture where all the participants’ voices would have a fair chance to be heard (edgar, 2006). these teachers would engage in self-reflection (scott, 1997) and in advocacy efforts for the profession. they would also design lesson plans based on principles of social justice and that would benefit the community (kondrat, 1995). it is important to highlight that these domains are neither linear nor in hierarchical order. it is advisable that teachers operate in all the domains (ring, 2014), with one or two domains being more prominent than others. the profession of social work encourages the inclusion of habermas’s framework to redesign curricula that would address current challenges in the field. for instance, kondrat (1995) affirmed that incorporating habermas’s domains in the training of social workers would help determine trainees’ particular orientations for actions and possible sources of practitioner errors. ring (2014) argued that a curriculum based on habermas’s domains of cognitive interests would better train social workers in england to deal with an aging population and difficult financial times for social welfare systems. this framework offers an empowerment perspective that is needed in the profession to aid esl, bilingual, and world-language teachers in their pursuit to transform challenging social conditions “to be more inclusive of diverse and less powerful voices” (kondrat, 1995, p. 420). language-teacher education should not only focus on the development of pedagogical skills but also on the development of an educator who could question and transform the implementation of policies that could compromise the future of language learning. in the process of reviewing the literature, the researcher found studies related to cognitive interests in the field of education. butler’s (1997) thesis looked at the differences in habermas’s cognitive interests between students and their teacher and the impact of these differences on students’ performance in three different courses for the adult community. butler found that students with cognitive interests matching their teacher’s performed better than those with different cognitive interests. scott (1997) examined the beliefs of three college teacher assistants about the teaching and learning of educational technology. his study found that even though the assistants espoused interests in the practical domain, their actions in the actual classroom reflected their interests in the technical domain. this finding correlates with basturkumen’s (2012) review. a habermasian approach to the examination of language teachers’… 17 this research will be the first qualitative study in the area of language-learning education that has used habermas’s domains as a framework to understand pre-service language teachers’ cognitive interests. this study aims to expand this area of research by offering a theoretical framework that helps frame our understanding of language teachers’ cognitive development beyond the descriptive accounts of teachers’ beliefs so needed in our field (kubanyova, 2012). methods participants a convenience sample of nine pre-service teachers agreed to take part in this study. they were all women between the ages of 20 and 40 who were taking a methods course in language teaching during the data collection stage of this study. three of these participants were pursuing initial certification in esl; six were pursuing initial certification in world-language education. five were undergraduate students, and four were in the post-baccalaureate education program. the following table 1 provides a complete list of the participants. table 1 participants name age certification u p l1 l2 professional experience gab 20 esl x english italian n/a kit 20 esl x english and spanish french n/a sam 20 spanish/esl x english spanish n/a vic 20 spanish/esl x english spanish and german n/a mer 36 spanish x spanish english worked in banking ele 25 esl x english greek worked from home— family business kel 25 spanish x english spanish n/a jan 40 french x english french homemaker adi 35 french x french english and german homemaker notes: u = undergrad p = post-baccalaureate maria villalobos-buehner18 procedures and data analysis the researcher collected the data at three different points during the semester while the participants took a methods course called teaching a second language. table 2 shows the data collection timeline. table 2 data collection data collection point data collection tool data collection focus first week of classes reflective paper (appendix a) participants were asked to consider past language-learning experiences to gain a perspective on their beliefs about language learning prior to starting the methods course. ninth week of classes philosophy of teaching paper (appendix b) participants were asked to reflect on their beliefs about effective language-teaching practices. thirteenth week of classes authentic assessment—mock job interview (appendix c) participants were asked to discuss their beliefs about language learning environments, students’ learning styles, teachers’ classroom management skills, and teachers’ advocacy efforts. the first collection point took place during the first week of classes, and the instrument was a three-page reflective essay about their experiences as language students in high school. the participants wrote about their teachers’ pedagogical choices in relation to class activities, class content, what made teachers “good,” and the characteristics associated with poor teachers. the second data-collection point took place during the ninth week of classes. the instrument was a three-page teaching-philosophy essay. the participants wrote about their beliefs regarding effective practices in foreign language instruction in the areas of classroom environments, teachers’ methods, learners’ learning experiences, and the role of assessment in the language classroom. the third data-collection point took place at the end of a 13-week course. the instrument used was a type of authentic assessment that helped students demonstrate what it means to be an effective language teacher in a real-life situation that would bring theory and practice together. this assessment combined three elements of angelo and cross’s (1993) classroom assessment techniques (cat): an annotated portfolio, invented dialogues, and exam evaluations. this authentic assessment asked the students to prepare for a final oral exam in the form of a job interview. students received an authentic job ad according to their educaa habermasian approach to the examination of language teachers’… 19 tion major (esl, french, or spanish). afterwards, they had to prepare for this interview by putting together a teaching portfolio with material developed during the course by visiting the school’s job-listings website and preparing a list of possible questions. they were asked five more questions that were not part of the list. the answers to these questions were used as data for this study. each student received a time slot of 20 minutes to complete this interview. the interviews were videotaped, and the answers to the five undisclosed questions were transcribed. each answer during the job interview and the two essays was iteratively, inductively, and deductively coded according to themes that revealed conceptual knowledge and espoused beliefs in the areas of classroom management, planning, assessment, and students’ and teachers’ roles. following bernard and ryan’s (2010) transcription protocol during the inductive coding process, the raw data were read and reread in order to familiarize the researchers with the participants’ answers and to facilitate the creation of the categories listed above. those cognitive orientations were then deductively coded, since the researcher brought a conceptual lens a priori to the analysis of the data. a matrix of analyses was created according to habermas’s three types of cognitive interests—technical, practical, and emancipatory—in combination with the five pedagogical areas listed above. next, the researcher and an aide compared each of the students’ answers and classified them according to the definitions of the three cognitive interests and five pedagogical areas in this matrix. finally, the researcher and second reader used this matrix to find out the frequency or different levels of saliency in which each of the cognitive levels stood out in the students’ narrative. results this research looked at the participants’ most common cognitive interests and classified them into five areas of teaching performance: classroom management, planning, assessment, and students’ and teachers’ roles. this study also focused on finding the levels of cognitive interests in which nine pre-service world-language and esl students operate prior to student teaching, and whether these interest levels change during the methods course called teaching a second language. maria villalobos-buehner20 cognitive interest domains and areas of teaching performance this study organized the data into five teaching performance indicators to find out what the participants’ most common beliefs were in each area of teaching performance according to habermas’s levels of cognitive interests. the areas were classroom management, student role, teacher role, pedagogical method, and assessment. technical cognitive interest domain. the study participants believed that having an organized plan, clear rules, a reward system, and good time management were indicators of having good classroom management skills. during the job interview, adi highlighted the need to provide structure to teenage students in order to enhance their learning experience: teenagers—they need some structure. so they need to know, that when they come to my class, there’s a certain structure to the lesson. so uh, [in] each class there will be three parts: the introduction, the procedures part with the main activity or activities, and the closure part. (adi) the participants who held beliefs at the technical level described student and teacher roles in simplistic ways that painted a fixed idea of both roles. one of the most commonly held beliefs was that teachers were always in charge and that one important task was to motivate their students and attend to their needs. these participants used the pronouns i, my, and they when describing language teachers’ and students’ roles in the classroom, which indicates a hardline division of roles: for my middle school classes, i wish to instill the values that i find more important and valuable in life. (sam) the role of instruction is to break down the material in a fashion where they will comprehend it easily and be able to have it and use it in their lives. also, this role is something that should be taken seriously; if the instructor is not willing to help the students and break down the material to help them understand, then there is no simple way for the students to comprehend and learn this language. (gab) the most commonly held beliefs in the area of methodology emphasized the memorization of vocabulary, the importance of teaching grammar, and following the main textbook: a habermasian approach to the examination of language teachers’… 21 it is imperative that students receive extensive practice with the language basics. they will master letters, numbers, greetings, adjectives, simple verbs and conjugations, phrases and sentences. (kel) beliefs about assessment at this technical level emphasized it as a way to monitor and control students’ learning as well as their role in reviewing material. those beliefs also expressed the role of accountability for the student: i plan to teach my students “standardized testing” for reading and writing as a genre, just like i would teach poetry as a genre. when you think about it, there is a specific way you analyze and answer questions about standardized texts, just like there is a specific way to read and evaluate poetry. summative assessments leave little room for error, but they help me as a teacher evaluate class understanding, and they help my students evaluate their own learning. (sam) practical cognitive interest domain. the most commonly held beliefs about language classroom management, at the practical level, were the need to offer language immersion experiences and the use of teams or groups to help develop communicative language skills and the necessary student support. the role of the student and teacher was mainly that of negotiators of meaning. students are perceived as unique, autonomous, and having a diverse set of needs. the teacher is passionate, open to new ideas, creative, and offers students support at all times. the main pedagogical method supports the exchange of meaning, uses authentic texts, and provides students with rich input. there is an emphasis on experiencing the language at a personal and intimate level: i believe that students will remember what they learn better if they are able to make sense of the information themselves, often in working with teammates. (adi) so i would be very interested to see if there [were] certain things that we could look at in terms of the cultural unit that we could teach through the medium of french. so, when we’re talking about french culture, rather than talk about it in english, let’s talk about it in french. (jan) assessment, at this cognitive level, would help the teachers modify and adjust their pedagogies and motivate students’ growth in their language skills. mistakes are considered necessary for learning: i want my students to understand that we are all in this learning process together. formative assessments will help me build up my understanding maria villalobos-buehner22 of how students are learning and assimilating the language. they will help me adapt my instruction to better suit the needs of my students and to maximize their learning potential. (jan) emancipatory cognitive interest domain. the participants’ beliefs at this level emphasized the importance of fostering an inclusive and welcoming classroom that respected differences, and providing a safe space free of fear tactics that would support students’ growth and curiosity and respect their unique identities. the role of the teacher is to be passionate, positive, and fully committed to their students’ success: the student-centered approach allows for many teachable moments as students become highly engaged with the content. once they make relevant connections to their own lives, the students then take ownership of their education. (vic) i will discover their cultures by allowing the students to feel comfortable enough to share their cultures in class, and then creating projects and assignments based on their cultures to create inclusivity and understanding of other cultures. . . . all i wish to do with my students is to teach them to be ready for the world while learning to be better people in a comfortable, fun environment we create together. (kim) there were no clear beliefs in the areas of methods and assessment at this level. operational cognitive domains the data showed that the nine pre-service teachers functioned mainly at the technical and practical domains during the semester (see table 2). they also operated at different levels of cognitive interests with different levels of saliency, which supports what borg (2003) stated about teachers developing in unique ways. one cognitive level was more salient than the other at different points in the semester. those students who started the semester functioning at a technical domain started functioning at a technical and practical level at mid-semester and at the end of the semester. those students who started functioning at a practical domain did not experience any change, and very few started to function at the emancipatory domain toward the end. a habermasian approach to the examination of language teachers’… 23 table 3 students’ cognitiv interest domains time beginning of the semester middle of the semester end of the semester name t p e t p e t p e adi ele gab kel kit vic jan mer sam notes: t = technical; p = practical; e = emancipatory. salient somewhat salient not salient the saliency of cognitive interests. the study participants held cognitive beliefs that exemplified mostly the technical and practical levels. most of those operating at the technical level emphasized the need for efficiency, effectiveness, and the teacher’s control of the classroom. sam, for instance, believed that the use of multicultural posters would make her classroom more diverse and student-friendly. she also considered grammar essential in developing the literacy process of her students: to develop cultural sensitivity in my classroom, i will fill my classroom walls with multicultural posters. this will not only expose my students to these different cultures, but it will also allow my students who experience these cultures feel more comfortable with their surroundings. i will utilize grammar activities when [they correlate] with my lessons as well as when my students are having difficulty with it. it is important to provide my students with an academic level of literacy rather than simply a conversational level. (sam) maria villalobos-buehner24 those operating at a practical level highlighted the importance of providing immersion opportunities for their students so they could develop strong communicative skills in the target language: a teacher should make it a priority to speak in the target language as much as possible in the classroom, not only during communicative activities but also during explanations, as students can learn from these exchanges too. in doing so, students can realize that the target language is more than the object of study, it is a vehicle for communication. (adi) gab was the only participant who held some emancipatory beliefs at the beginning of the semester, and these beliefs became more salient later in the semester, during the final interview. gab said, “the concept of teaching a foreign language is something that has to be done with compassion. this compassion will help the students be unafraid of not knowing the language and have the will to further their knowledge with the language.” the subjects also exhibited different levels of saliency in their beliefs. however, one level was constantly more salient than the other two. for instance, ele stated that she wanted her students to accomplish growth in the technical aspects of the languages and also have the drive to continue learning english on their own. even though ele was interested in how students feel in the languagelearning process, which is an example of someone working at a practical level, she believed that the way students feel is her responsibility. she also focused on the importance of developing students’ linguistic knowledge. her statement is an example of someone working mostly at a technical level of cognitive interest: the skills my students will master will include: to be brave and confident when speaking english or trying to learn, various ways to use their vocabulary to create sentences and then eventually form paragraphs, and to constantly learn and improve their english language proficiency. i want my students to have a drive to continue learning english on their own outside of the classroom. (ele) jan’s position about the use of authentic material in the classroom is an example of someone operating at a practical level of cognitive interest. she not only highlights the importance of developing multi-literate skills for the students by using different sources, but she also points out that relying only on textbook material is not desirable: students need to be exposed to the target language in a real setting through a variety of texts—not just the standard textbook but also newspaper and a habermasian approach to the examination of language teachers’… 25 magazine articles, blogs, websites, radio, tv, films, and advertisements. we live in a multi-literate world and we need to ensure that our students are able to communicate effectively in the same way. (jan) changes in the saliency of the students’ cognitive belief system. the group experienced two common saliency changes from a technical interest level to a practical level, and more than half started exhibiting some type of saliency in emancipatory interests either by mid-semester or toward the end of the semester. for instance, besides holding beliefs at the technical and practical levels, vic started to operate at an emancipatory level mid-semester and toward the end of the semester. vic’s teaching philosophy emphasized the importance of students becoming the owners of their own learning process and feeling empowered: the student-centered approach allows for many teachable moments as students become highly engaged with the content. once they make relevant connections to their own lives, the students then take ownership of their education. my classroom approach is definitely student-centered, with guidance when necessary. this approach fosters students’ critical thinking skills through the use of daily informal assessment in order for them to become self-sufficient learners. (vic) six participants experienced different saliency levels of cognitive interests in their belief system during the semester, and three of the participants’ belief system remained constant. gab, ele, kel, and adi held strong technical beliefs about language teaching at the beginning of the semester. their belief system started to function at the practical level mid-semester, and at the end of the semester, gab and kel showed some emancipatory beliefs during the final interview. discussion the results of this study indicated that habermas’s framework of cognitive interests describes and aligns with fundamental tenets and principles of language teaching, which allows language—teacher educator programs to look at their students’ progress with a broader lens, one that shows not only the development of the students’ conceptual knowledge but also their development of espoused beliefs. as borg (2011) stated, those espoused beliefs “structure the ways in which knowledge is organized for application and for disseminamaria villalobos-buehner26 tion in the professions” (p. 371). a student teacher functioning in a technical domain considers skill-building activities such as fill-in-the-blank sheets, short read-aloud exercises, grammar lessons, and vocabulary lists essential, since these lessons can be predictable and easier to control. these activities also offer a systematic way of organizing content, which makes this content more manageable. when ele explained how a typical day in her classroom would be during the interview, she emphasized the need for her students to learn new vocabulary words. she said, “they should be able to identify a new type of word at the end of the lesson.” gab described her day as having her students do the following: read and speak, and having the kids speak, and read is very important because all students learn in different types of ways. some learn better by hearing, some by speaking and some by physically reading. so by those three main things they are able to grasp the concept better and definitely learn from it in a positive way. (gab) these students also believed that they are in charge of every aspect of the class and even their students’ motivation for learning. student teachers with a salient practical cognitive interest would consider the goal of communication as the one that would guide their pedagogical decisions. these students would plan around the students’ communicative interests. these teachers would exhibit interest in using teams and community-building exercises. connecting with peers and others would be central in their planning for language learning. during the job interview, jen was asked to describe what a typical activity would be when she started teaching. she said the following: they look at the foods they would offer in france, and then they can work together, all in french. they can work out what items they want to, you know, have on their menu and what items they want to prepare. and then we can invite their families into the classroom, so, bring the community into the classroom to sample their foods—we can have people serving them, you know what i mean? it would be a really great experience of learning about france and its great food heritage, and also, um, showing [what] we can do, what we can communicate in the language, what we can prepare from the country, and showing it to the rest of the school community. (jen) jen highlighted the importance of working together and sharing a cultural experience as a community. a habermasian approach to the examination of language teachers’… 27 one noteworthy finding was that this group of student teachers did not exhibit a salient or well-defined emancipatory belief system at the beginning of the semester, and only two, kit and vic, exhibited salient emancipatory interests toward the end of the semester. most of their espoused beliefs at this level were about creating an inclusive classroom culture, free of fear, and being respectful of students’ differences. during the job interview, kit highlighted the “power of we” when asked about what she liked about the school she wanted to work for. she said: i checked the school’s website, their curriculum, and i noticed that the school’s main slogan was “the power of we,” and i thought that was amazing because it brings everybody together, the community and the stakeholders. and it is a powerful word to use, and i would love to be part of a community that brings everyone together and makes an effort to show everyone in the community—teachers, students, parents, staff—that everybody is important and vital in the learning experience. (kit) kit emphasized the message of inclusiveness, which showcases beliefs at the level of emancipatory domain. having a belief system at the emancipatory level could allow student teachers to become advocates of their own field, because it helps them to identify important forces in the decision-making process at a time when resources in the language field are scarce and threatened with elimination. emancipatory beliefs also allow student teachers to look at their own practices from a critical-theory framework, with the goal of becoming transformative agents of their own pedagogy. hopefully, this type of transformation could lead to changes in old practices—for instance, moving from a grammar-based classroom to a more communicative approach. freeman and johnson (1998) affirmed that an effective teacher education program should approach educational settings not as unbiased and neutral spaces where “educational practices are implemented” (p. 14), but as “dynamic environments” where student teachers need to learn how to negotiate issues of power and access. limitations and future research one of the most evident limitations of this study is the possibility that habermas’s classification would have limited the process of theme recognition to the three main levels of cognitive beliefs. a second limitation is the possibility of students’ biases in the answers given during the job interview, because this interview was part of the final oral exam, and the students might have included narratives that are only part of what was discussed in class. the third limitation is the data collection time. more definite changes in their belief maria villalobos-buehner28 systems could have been observed if the study’s timeframe had been longer and continued during student teaching. future studies could use habermas’s framework to explore language teacher development further during student teaching and the first year of teaching. these studies could explore the role of the cooperating teacher’s belief system in the development of student teachers’ belief systems. other studies could use quantitative measures that would allow for more generalizable results. in addition, other studies could look into levels of saliency at different points in the language educator’s career. conclusion the development of the belief system of future language teachers is key in determining the process of decision-making during their teaching years in the school system. habermas offers a framework that captures the complexity of this belief system and will allow teacher educators to plan experiences that will help teachers develop beliefs not only at the technical and practical levels but also at the emancipatory level. educators who are critical thinkers of their practices and the educational system as a whole are needed to promote change. schools need teachers who are willing to transform and consider new ways of teaching, so their institutions develop more efficient ways to learn languages. this study shows that habermas’s framework could help teacher educators to facilitate the development of a more holistic teacher, one who not only understands the whats and hows of the field but also the forces that shape their practices. references angelo, t. a., & cross, k. p. 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(2005). theorising language teacher identities: three perspectives and beyond. journal of language, identity and education, 4, 21–44. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327701jlie0401_2 vibulpol, j. (2004). beliefs about language learning and teaching approaches of pre-service efl teachers in thailand (unpublished doctoral dissertation). oklahoma state university, stillwater. wright, t. (2010). second language teacher education: review of recent research on practice. language teaching, 43(3), 259–296. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261444810000030 a p p e n d i x a language learning autobiography this essay provides the reader with a snapshot of your experiences and an introduction to your views regarding the teaching of a foreign language. carefully consider your experiences as a student in your foreign language classes and describe your reaction to these classes in elementary, middle, and/or high school. you need not list a chronology of every school year. well-written essays will answer some but not all of the following questions: • what were the purposes of the teacher? • what content was taught? • what do you remember? • what did students do in class? • what did the teacher do? • what made teachers good and what characteristics did you associate with poor teachers? please limit your essays to no more than two, maximum three pages of double-spaced typing with 1” margins and a 12-point font such as times new roman. a p p e n d i x b philosophy of teaching develop a ref lective essay that explores your beliefs regarding the purposes, methods, and content of foreign language teaching. consider this essay as a written interview that you are having with a panel of middle or high school foreign language teachers. please consider the following topics as you explain your rationale and teaching practices. address these issues, but organize your answer according to your beliefs regarding effective practices in foreign language instruction. • what is your rationale for teaching language in the middle or high school? this includes the knowledge you believe is most important, the values you will teach, and the skills that students will master in your classes. • what approach will you take in teaching language to your students? • how do you believe that students best learn a foreign language? what is the role of instruction about grammar? a habermasian approach to the examination of language teachers’… 31 • ref lect on ways you will develop cultural sensitivity in your students. • what are your career goals? and what are your plans to achieve those goals? • what are your beliefs about summative and formative assessment in a language class? a p p e n d i x c mock job interview you will demonstrate an understanding of the central concepts discussed in class, such as the teaching and learning process in world language and esl education and the national standards. in the form of a mock job interview, you will describe the importance of language study while placing it within a cultural, social, educational, and professional context. these interviews will take place during the last week and the week of finals. you will be given in advance the job description for a fictitious k–12 world language/esl teaching position. you are expected to dress professionally, and interviewers will consist of your course instructor and one or more practicing teachers/administrators with whom you are not familiar. on the night of the final exam, you must bring your portfolio, nicely organized. each interview will last approximately 15 minutes. the study used the participants’ answers to the following questions: • what should be the goal of the esl/world language classroom? • how would you assess your students? • describe a typical day in your classroom. • how do you accommodate the various learning styles of students within a class? • how would you help advocate for the profession?/ esl: how could you help make the esl classroom part of the school community? maria villalobos-buehner habermas‘sche theorie in der forschung zu kognitiven interessen von fremdsprachenlehrern z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g die ausbildung zum fremdsprachenlehrer umfasst sowohl theoretische und praktische kurse, als auch pädagogische praktika in der schule (engl. practicum). es wird erwartet, dass künftige lehrer bei der lehrtätigkeit während praktikumszeit ihr konzeptionelles und praktisches wissen einsetzen. allerdings bei der beurteilung ihrer bereitschaft zur lehrerarbeit wird lediglich das konzeptionelle wissen in betracht gezogen, während ihr vorstellungssystem bezüglich fremdsprachenlernen und -lehren ganz unberücksichtigt bleibt. das erwähnte vorstellungssystem bietet nicht nur einen wichtigen einblick darin, wie sie ihr unterrichtsbezogenes wissen organisieren, sondern weist auch auf ihre offenheit für neue pädagogische methoden hin. im vorliegenden artikel wird eine auf grundlage der theorie von jürgen habermas zu kognitiven interessen konzipierte untersuchung dargestellt, die sich auf die analyse der vorstellungen von neun künftigen fremdsprachenlehrern zum abschluss ihres methodischen kurses bezieht. die analyse basiert auf ref lexionsessays betreffend unmaria villalobos-buehner32 ter anderem kognitive interessen der künftigen lehrer sowie die unterrichtsmethoden und leistungsbeurteilung im fremdsprachenlehren. aus der analyse ergibt sich, dass man bei der bildung künftiger lehrer die vorstellungsfördernden und auf den verselbstständigungsprozess bezogenen erfahrungen berücksichtigen sollte. dies könnte die künftigen lehrer bei den bestrebungen unterstützen, ihre autonomie im bereich der bewältigung von schweren umweltbedingungen zu entwickeln oder die neuen pädagogischen methoden umzusetzen. schlüsselwörter: künftige lehrer, vorstellungssystem, jürgen habermas, kognitive interessen cover photo: “big_blue” by max iter (retrieved from www.f lickr.com) copy editing: gabriela marszołek proofreading: joanna zwierzyńska typesetting: marek zagniński electronic version is the original one. the journal was previously published in printed form with the issn 2450-5455 the journal is distributed free of charge issn 2451-2125 published by wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego ul. bankowa 12b, 40-007 katowice www.wydawnictwo.us.edu.pl e-mail: wydawus@us.edu.pl first impression. printed sheets: 13.0. publishing sheets: 14.5. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 7 (2), 2021, pp. 109–132 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.9285 carla ferrerós pagès https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6048-3604 universitat de girona, spain conceptual and linguistic transfer from l2 (catalan) to l1 (amazigh) within the context of migration a b s t r a c t this paper focuses on the analysis of the lexical and semantic inf luences of l2 (catalan) on the l1 (amazigh) in a basic semantic field: parts of the body. based on the observation that our participants show differences in their l1 usage related to the amount of time they have been in contact with catalan, our goal is to analyze and describe these differences to see if they are the consequence of a transfer from the l2 conceptual system. this paper is a qualitative study with a sample size of 14 participants whose l1 is amazigh and who live in catalonia. the results show that there are cases of semantic and conceptual inf luence, although to a lesser degree than in other studies that do not analyze data from basic semantic fields. we will also show that there are extralinguistic factors that inf luence these transfers (the status of the languages involved and certain characteristics of the speakers). keywords: semantic categorization, crosslinguistic transfer, conceptual transfer, catalan, amazigh, bilingualism, multilingualism the relationship between language and thought has been studied from various perspectives in research on bilingualism, beginning with linguistic relativity, which was developed by whorf (1956) and has been adapted over the years (slobin, 1996; lucy, 2016). linguistic relativity studies the effects of language on thought. however, other research focuses on the influence of thought on language. crosslinguistic influence is another point of view from which this relationship has been studied, especially as regards conceptual transfer (jarvis & pavlenko, 2008). these studies research how the ideas of conceptualization that have been acquired through a language affect the use of another language and how the transfer can be bidirectional, between the two languages involved (cadierno & ruiz, 2006; jarvis, 2016). other recent studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en http:// https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.9285 carla ferrerós pagès110 (aveledo & athanasopoulos, 2016; park, 2019) use a theoretical framework that combines both abovementioned perspectives. this paper falls under the research field of crosslinguistic influence and focuses on lexical conceptual transfer issues. it will analyze the influence that l2 has on l1 for catalan speakers of amazigh origin regarding the categorization and conceptualization of a basic semantic area: parts of the body. this research on crosslinguistic influence is based on results obtained through a sample of bilingual or multilingual speakers who speak at least amazigh and catalan.1 when referring to bilingualism or bilingual speakers, one must distinguish between speakers who have grown up learning both languages simultaneously and those who have learned their l2 later (cook, 2003). we will refer to the latter case for this study: all participants have learned catalan after amazigh and, furthermore, they all speak at least one other language. this will be described in detail later. the data analyzed have been obtained from speakers who live in a migratory context in which many languages are involved. these data differ from those in many studies that have been produced regarding bilingualism, crosslinguistic influence, and conceptual transfer. such research usually focuses on speakers who know two languages, with the l2 usually being english. the status of the two languages addressed in this work, both minoritized languages yet with different sociolinguistic situations, is therefore quite different from the status of languages that are often studied in research on bilingualism. the lexical and semantic data will be approached from the point of view of cognitive semantics, which is the theoretical framework that encompasses the conceptual transfer hypothesis. this hypothesis assumes that each language shows how speakers categorize and conceptualize reality, and that the differences that languages reflect will be transferred, potentially, from one language to another with bilingual or multilingual speakers (bylund & jarvis, 2011). this study builds upon other studies comparing how body parts are categorized in catalan and amazigh (ferrerós, 2015; múrcia & zenia, 2015). these studies are essential in knowing if there has been a conceptual transfer in the results obtained in producing l2, as to determine whether such transfer has occurred or not it is necessary to previously and separately study each of the languages involved. this previous study is important when taking into account that categories are not always labelled in the languages. it is possible for two 1 the amazigh language, of the afro-asiatic family, is the proper language of north africa, most commonly spoken in morocco and algeria but also in libya, nigeria, burkina faso, niger, mali, mauritania, tunisia, and egypt. it is the l1 of almost half the population of morocco. this study focuses on the riffian (north morocco) amazigh variety. the biggest migrant community in catalonia is of amazigh origin. hence the relevance of interlinguistic studies such as this one, as these languages come into contact with each other oftentimes in the migration context (barrieras, 2013). conceptual and linguistic transfer from l2 (catalan) to l1 (amazigh)… 111 languages to similarly categorize a reality segment, but one not labelling said category. therefore, a crosslinguistic difference does not necessarily show a difference in categorization. that is to say, the fact that one language does not label a reference that another language does label does not imply that speakers of the former do not categorize a given part of the body. if the categorizations were the same, one could not speak of conceptual transfer even if we observed a crosslinguistic influence. this is why it is essential to have previously analyzed the two languages in order to produce research as found herein. literature review semantic categorization one of the cognitive activities that human beings do is related to classifying and organizing reality in order to give it meaning. we create categories that usually take the form of words or morphemes in language. each language shows different categorizations of reality, although there are certain limits regarding diversity. from the point of view of cognitive studies, the ability to categorize is a vital cognitive ability for the survival of living beings, which consists of grouping the world’s objects and events according to the similarities they present. cognitive semantics draw from the prototype theory formulated in the seventies by rosch (1973, 1878). the categories that are created are gradual, and there are elements that occupy central positions and share more information among themselves than with other elements that occupy less central positions. the more central an element is in a category, the more features it shares with the prototype, which is the most characteristic element (rosch, 1978). the effects of the prototype are not only produced in individual meanings, but also between the different meanings of the same polysemous word. polysemy is the phenomenon by which the various meanings of a word are related to each other, if there is an embodied reason, that is, if the categorization is related to how humans experience the world. the phenomena that operate at the foundation of semantic extensions are metaphorical or metonymic (lakoff, 1987; ibarretxe-antuñano, 1999). the terms for parts of the body refer to a reality that is the same for everyone, enabling us to study how humans experience this reality as an integral part of ourselves and how this influences our cognition. crosslinguistic differences also help us see if there are cultural factors that condition categorization. the categorization of the human body has been studied from various, carla ferrerós pagès112 non-exclusive points of view: lexical typology (for example, andersen, 1978; brown, 1976; enfield, majid, & van staden, 2006; wierzbicka, 2007) and cognitive semantics, especially in matters related to the notion of polysemy (ibarretxe-antuñano, 1999, 2010). the transfer of l2 to l1 with bilingual or multilingual speakers one of the most frequently discussed issues in bilingualism and second language acquisition is the mutual interference of the languages involved in these processes. jarvis (2011, p. 1) claims that crosslinguistic influences occur not only in grammatical phenomena but also in the choice of words and discursive structures. these differences often reflect ways to convey specific meanings in a given language. jarvis (2016, p. 609) explains that crosslinguistic influences can be related to (1) the constraints of good linguistic formation; (2) the relationship between form and meaning; and (3) the specific ways how meanings are represented in the minds of the speakers. he calls influences of the first kind linguistic, those of the second semantic, and those of the third conceptual. this use of terminology seems inadequate as we view conceptual aspects as also being linguistic and semantic. if we take into account contributions framed within lexical typology and cognitive semantics that have focused on the study of the lexicon and the conceptualization of meanings (see, for example, koch, 2005), we see that the conceptual aspects correspond to paradigmatic distinctions (considering lexical and morphological pieces as elements of an inventory), while other issues depend on syntagmatic organization (if the lexical and morphological elements are considered part of a sequence). the paradigmatic lexical distinctions can be studied from a semasiological or onomasiological point of view (koch, 2005, p. 12). the latter aims to explain how conceptual material is organized in relation to lexemes and how the concepts expressed are organized, and it is one of the points of view used in this papebylund and athanasopoulos (2014) and pavlenko (2014) claim that learning a language and the changing circumstances of people’s language experience can be accompanied by cognitive changes. jarvis (2016) explains that investigating the relationship between multilingual people’s language and cognition also facilitates understanding which phenomena are related to crosslinguistic influence and that reflect cognitive and conceptual tendencies conditioned by the languages spoken. adding to jarvis’s assertions, the differences in conceptualization can also be the result of other nonlinguistic factors, which can be related to culture, the individual’s education, the methodology used to obtain the speakers’ speech, and more. although this paper focuses on linguistic issues related to the semantic categorization shown conceptual and linguistic transfer from l2 (catalan) to l1 (amazigh)… 113 in the lexicon, we will also consider these other phenomena in the analysis of the results. studies on conceptual transfer are based on the hypothesis that some cases of crosslinguistic influence on language use are due to the concepts and mental patterns of conceptualization that a person has acquired as a speaker of another language (bylund & jarvis, 2011). according to jarvis (2016), issues related to conceptual transfer can be researched from points of view closer to linguistic relativity (using non-verbal data to research conceptualization) or traditional research on crosslinguistic influences (making use of verbal data to observe what linguistic influences occur between the languages involved). there are also intermediate points of view that take into account linguistic data to study crosslinguistic influences related to conceptualization. in this study, we will primarily use linguistic data, as we will explain in section methodology. issues related to conceptual transfer will be analyzed through the description, analysis, and interpretation of the language used by the bilingual speakers interviewed for this study. the analysis of the results will be conducted based on the framework proposed by pavlenko (2000) regarding the study of transfers, which can be applied to the analysis of any type of transfer or influence processes between two languages: the adoption of borrowing from one language to another, crosslinguistic convergence, the displacement of structures or values from one language to a speaker’s own language, language restructuring, and the erosion of one of the two languages. furthermore, we will make a distinction, which we find particularly relevant for the study of conceptual transfer, between cases of crosslinguistic lexical influence that involve recategorization and those that simply introduce or redistribute labels for concepts that are categorized but not necessarily labelled (wierzbicka, 2007). methodology sample size this is a qualitative study: the sample size is composed of 14 participants and the selection of participants did not end until there was no further new data, that is, until saturation was reached. the general criterion for inclusion of the participants in the sample was that their l1 was riffian amazigh and their l2 was catalan. in addition, their contact time with catalan was taken into account, leading us to create three groups: (1) participants who have spent more time in catalonia than in morocco (5 participants); (2) participants who carla ferrerós pagès114 have spent approximately the same time in catalonia and morocco (4 participants); (3) participants who have lived in catalonia for less than five years at the time of the interview (5 participants). within each group, participants with different ages and educational levels were included as we deemed that these variables could influence responses. although studies on the influences between l1 and l2 that we have referred to almost all use a sample of adult participants who are bilingual, participants in our study were multilingual: berber, catalan, spanish, moroccan arabic, standard arabic, french, and so on. in addition, our participants showed remarkable differences between one another: the linguistic profiles of amazigh speakers who were educated in catalonia, that is, the participants in the first group, are quite different from amazigh speakers who were not (they speak neither moroccan arabic nor standard arabic). the latter group also shows differences depending on whether they were educated or not. we will make references to these variables as appropriate. the fact that the speakers in the sample are multilingual is related to the idea of mixed linguistic identities. rampton (2017, p. 338) points out that “the idea that people really only have one native language, that really monolingualism is the fundamental linguistic condition, also underlies a widespread failure to recognize new and mixed linguistic identities.” related to this, authors such as cook (1999) and grosjean (1998) have proposed the theory of multi-competence by which a multilingual person has a compound mental state that is not equivalent to two monolingual states. besides the group of participants indicated, three participants living in morocco with knowledge of linguistics who know neither catalan nor spanish contributed to deepening and expanding the information taken from riffian amazigh lexicographical sources. procedures the data in the study comes, first, from a thorough review of the following dictionaries: serhoual (2002), sarrionandía and ibáñez robledo, (2007 [1944, 1949]), naït-zerrad (1997; 1999; 2002), and múrcia and zenia (2015). the first two cover riffian amazigh. the other two are pan-amazigh. as we have noted in the introduction (the transfer of l2 to l1 with bilingual or multilingual speakers), jarvis (2016) mentions the use of verbal data in understanding the conceptualization that a given language shows. jarvis affirms that this question is usually answered through the analysis of verbal responses in perception, categorization, and memory tasks such as those used in the field of psychology. in addition, he also adds data from narrative tasks or tasks with more open references. that is why we have used a combined conceptual and linguistic transfer from l2 (catalan) to l1 (amazigh)… 115 methodology for this research, with psycholinguistic tasks followed by a more open task. the first task was to make a list of words for body parts in their l1, with the objective of understanding which ones were most commonly used by participants, and thus, which are perceptively more relevant. next, participants did the body coloring task (van staden & majid, 2006), the objective of which was to understand the extent of the references of the words for body parts with imprecise boundaries.2 the third task was based on extralinguistic stimuli consisting of images that the speakers had to name and describe. finally, they participated in a semi-structured interview (about 90 minutes in length) in which they were asked about words and meanings (literal and non-literal) for body parts. an in-depth reading was the first step in order to analyze the responses obtained in the interview. then, the most relevant units of meaning were taken, which were grouped into categories based on common characteristics. finally, the contents were interpreted. the results set out in the next section are organized into sub-sections taking into account the established categories. results in order to obtain and analyze the results, we began with categorization and labelling differences seen in catalan and amazigh (ferrerós, 2015; múrcia & zenia, 2015). these differences, which can result in cases of transfer and influence from l2 to l1, allowed us to create the categories under which we have divided this section. regarding the study on the use of non-literal meanings, we will describe the words that present vagueness or polysemy and whose uses are related to anatomical references. next, we will describe the cases that present differences with respect to the use of non-literal meanings for a polysemic word in both languages (cor, ul, ‘heart’). finally, we will describe data related to differences in knowledge and the use of words for body parts. each section will be headed by a list of the words employed on each part. these words are primarily obtained from lexicographical sources. it is important to note that the selection and classification is sourced from 2 the words analyzed in this task were the following: aɛddis ‘belly,’ taɣrudt ‘shoulders,’ afus ‘hand/arm,’ idmarn ‘chest,’ iɣzdisa ‘side,’ iri ‘neck,’ aɣil ‘arm/shoulder,’ aḍar ‘leg/foot,’ taɛddist tamẓẓiant ‘lower abdomen,’ aɛrur ‘back,’ taḥbut ijiman ‘nape hollow,’ amggiz ‘cheek,’ anzarn ‘nose,’ aɣnbub ‘face,’ udm ‘face,’ tawarna ‘forehead,’ tamart ‘beard/chin,’ takmmart ‘lower side of the face.’ carla ferrerós pagès116 the semantic information obtained through the interviews: the hereby analyzed cases are the ones showing differences from catalan (so they might generate transfers). these differences will be subsequently described in the following sections. differences in categorization and labelling terms in amazigh without an equivalent in catalan. amazigh has names for certain body parts which are not named in catalan. the words presented here refer to perceptively not very relevant body parts: they never appear in the list task, which is the first participants are asked to complete. table 1 terms in amazigh without an equivalent in catalan addiɣ n taddaxt ‘jugular notch’ akmmar ‘lower part of the face’ arbub n tiɣmas ‘tooth growing close to another tooth’ in amazigh, the jugular notch is labelled with the nominal expression addiɣ n taddaxt (literally, ‘shoulder hole’). use of this term is highly specialized: it is employed when talking about a woman’s beauty. most of the younger speakers, under 25 years of age, do not recognize the term. only one of the younger speakers recognized the term, stating that his mother uses it but not him. the word akmmar is only used by the two oldest speakers who are the participants that have spent a longer period in morocco than in catalonia. both the body coloring task and the semistructured interview show that this word refers to the lower part of the face (from the nose to the chin) and the speakers explain that it is usually used to refer to the appearance of this part of the face when a certain facial expression is made. the oldest participant said that akmmar “means, for example, that somebody was unhappy, someone came and they made a bad takmmart.”3 the final term, arbub n tiɣmas, refers to a tooth growing too closely to another one, causing dental health problems. the first component, arbub, is related to the verb arbu ‘to carry a load’ (serhoual, 2002: rb). only four participants use this expression, although they do not associate arbub with the verb arbu. three of these four speakers were over 40 years of age when the interview was conducted, and the two oldest ones had lived in morocco 3 this participant inf lects the word in feminine (t...t). in amazigh, gender inf lection can convey certain semantic contents. in this case, it conveys the idea of the diminutive. conceptual and linguistic transfer from l2 (catalan) to l1 (amazigh)… 117 longer than in catalonia. none had completed education beyond grade school. the fourth participant who already knew and used the expression was 35 years old when the interview was conducted, was educated in catalonia, and has completed higher education. he points out, however, that the expression is something he has heard at home and that his mother uses it more than he does. none of the other participants use this expression, let alone recognize it. the fact that these expressions do not have an equivalent in catalan does not necessarily mean that they are not categorized by catalan speakers. arbub n tiɣmas and addiɣ n taddaxt label references possibly categorized by catalan speakers (ferrerós, 2015). however, akmmar refers to a segment clearly not categorized by catalan speakers (ferrerós, 2015, p. 399). terms in catalan without an equivalent in amazigh. the referents selected here have the peculiarity of not being labelled in amazigh: hence the informants do not mention them before the semistructured interview, and evidently do not appear in any of the previous psycholinguistic tasks. table 2 terms in catalan without an equivalent in amazigh parpella (cat.) aɛddis n tiḍt (?) (am.) lit. ‘belly of the eye’ ‘eyelid’ paladar (cat.) aɛrur uqmmum (?) (am.) lit. ‘back of the mouth’ ‘palate’ the words parpella ‘eyelid’ and paladar ‘palate’ in catalan have no equivalent in amazigh. this does not mean, like in some of the cases set out in the section terms in amazigh without an equivalent in catalan, that they are not categorized in amazigh. in a situation of metalinguistic reflection, the speakers immediately understand which body parts are being referred to. sarrionandía and ibáñez (2007 [1949]), in their spanish-amazigh dictionary, suggest the nominal expressions that appear in the table as translations of spanish words párpado ‘eyelid’ and paladar ‘palate,’ probably to match the categorical segments of spanish with those in amazigh. the speakers interviewed analyze and understand these expressions, but explain that they do not use them or see them as fixed expressions in their l1. some of the younger participants say they sometimes use the word in catalan or spanish when they speak amazigh. in other cases, they label ‘eyelid’ with the word abliwn ‘eyelashes.’ regarding aɛrur uqmmum, one of the younger speakers affirmed that he believes that it is an expression used by the elderly, although no elderly participants in the sample recognized it. carla ferrerós pagès118 issues of polysemy or vagueness with anatomical references vague or polysemic amazigh words. the following shows cases in which there are more words in catalan than amazigh to refer to a given part of the body: table 3 vague or polysemic amazigh words amazigh meaning catalan meaning tagarjumt ‘tube that goes through the throat’ esòfag ‘oesophagus’ faringe ‘pharynx’ laringe ‘larynx’ afus ‘hand’ ‘arm’ mà ‘hand’ braç ‘arm’ aḍar ‘leg’ ‘foot’ peu ‘foot’ cama ‘leg’ the word tagarjumt ‘tube that goes through the neck’ is known to all amazigh speakers interviewed to also refer to ‘throat’ and ‘pharynx, larynx, and oesophagus.’ they do not mention specific words for each of these references and, when they have to distinguish them, they refer to what is used to breathe and what is used to eat. in catalan, despite the fact that there are three terms to refer to it, speakers often confuse their use because they are recently introduced and rather specific terms. the usual term in catalan to refer to these internal body parts is coll, which is also used to refer to the corresponding external part of the neck. unlike the referents until this point, the words afus ‘hand/arm’ and aḍar ‘leg/foot’ do appear in the psycholinguistic tasks previous to the semistructured interview. in the list task afus appears in all 14 cases, whereas aḍar appears in 12 of them. thus, these are body parts considered relevant to the interviewed informants. furthermore, these are body parts included in the body coloring task. in the case of afus, in six cases the informants paint only the hand: all the participants of the group that lived longer in catalonia than in morocco and one respondent of the last group. the other participants color the whole upper limb, including the hand. regard aḍar, all respondents color the leg segment between knee and foot, except two participants of the first group, who only color the foot. the word afus in amazigh refers to ‘hand’ and ‘arm.’ as previously explained, this is the segment colored by most participants in the two last groups in the body coloring task. but amazigh speakers of the first group, who spent longer in catalonia than in morocco, in a situation of metalinguistic reflection, conceptual and linguistic transfer from l2 (catalan) to l1 (amazigh)… 119 tend to categorize and label these body parts in the same way as in catalan, as seen in the results of the coloring task. in the interview, when asked, they say that ‘arm’ is called aγil (a word that never appears in the list task) and ‘hand’ afus. however, in more spontaneous situations, they never mention aγil, they always talk about afus to refer to both ‘arm’ and ‘hand.’ the informants that spent longer in morocco than in catalonia, on the other hand, only mention the word afus for these two body parts (‘hand’ and ‘arm’), just like the participants living in morocco. the latter group explains that aγil has a meaning close to ‘shoulder.’ the situation is not similar for the lower limbs: amazigh speakers only mention the word aḍar to refer to the words for leg and foot in catalan. it is also noted that in the body coloring task it is more often considered the name of a referent including the foot too. vague or polysemic catalan words. the following shows examples contrary those above: table 4 vague or polysemic catalan words amazigh meaning catalan meaning izaggwn ‘armpit and pubic hair’ pèl ‘body hair’ izuṭṭn / acaεr ‘body hair, except armpit and pubic hair’ ijiman ‘sides of the neck’ clatell / nuca ‘nape’ taḥbut n ijiman ‘nape cavity’ stumagu ‘stomach’ estómac ‘stomach’ taramant ‘internal stomach’ in amazigh, different words are used to label ‘body hair’ and ‘armpit and pubic hair.’ although armpit and pubic hair are not categorized together in catalan, they are considered different from leg or arm hair by catalan speakers. therefore, the categorical segmentation is not as different as the lexicon suggests (ferrerós, 2015, p. 399). the words clatell and nuca in catalan refer to a segment that, for the amazighs of the latter group, older people, are two different categories called ijiman ‘sides of the neck’ and taḥbut n ijiman ‘nape cavity.’ in catalan, the word stomach does not make any distinction between the internal and external part of this organ, but refers to the whole organ in itself. in riffian amazigh, there is a word referring to the outside, stumagu, which is a loan word from spanish, as well as a specific word referring to the internal part, taramant. the amazigh words here presented never appear in the list task: they are perceptively not very relevant body parts. only the ones referring to the nape carla ferrerós pagès120 (ijiman and taḥbut n ijiman) appear in the coloring task: the informants of the first group, except two of them, do not recognize these words and do not paint their referents. the three cases we have presented are similar: the participants’ responses suggest that the distinctions shown in the amazigh words are maintained by the speakers of the last group: the ones that spent longer in morocco than in catalonia. regarding the other participants, we have observed the following: first, they extend the use of the word izuṭṭn or acaεr to refer to all body hair. second, apart from two participants, and as aforementioned in the previous paragraph, they do not recognize the word taḥbut n ijiman. in the last case, we have observed that the word taramant is only recognized by the two oldest participants, belonging to the last group. moreover, the speakers who still reside in morocco do not recognize this word either. we have also found cases in which there are words in the two languages that are used to label more than one reference, but whose meanings do not coincide: table 5 amazigh and catalan vague or polysemic words amazigh meaning catalan meaning arrimt ‘skin’ ‘body’ cos ‘body’ ‘trunk’ in amazigh, the first partonomic level is called arrimt ‘body,’ but the meaning first mentioned by the participants of the last group, who are older people, is ‘skin of the entire human body.’ three of the amazigh speakers who have had greater contact with catalan and two participants who have spent the same time in catalonia as morocco at the time of being interviewed spontaneously state that arrimt can refer to both ‘skin’ and ‘body,’ but then they correct themselves and give different labels to each category. they often use arrimt for ‘skin of the entire body’ and borrow from arabic to designate ‘body’: ljsdt or ddat. in catalan, the prototypical meaning of cos is ‘body,’ and an associated meaning is ‘trunk.’ none of the amazigh participants use arrimt to refer to ‘trunk,’ as in catalan with the word cos. differences in the use of non-literal meanings of polysemic words for body parts: the example of ‘heart’ both in catalan and in amazigh, the word for ‘heart’ has many associated meanings. the theory of conceptual metaphor and metonymy (lakoff & johnson, 1999; 2008) focuses on the study of non-literal expressions in language, that is, the study of the non-prototypical meanings of words. metaphor is a cognitive process that correlates two different domains. conceptual metaconceptual and linguistic transfer from l2 (catalan) to l1 (amazigh)… 121 phors are expressed in language with metaphorical expressions in which the vocabulary of a source domain is used, but the meaning is found in a different domain, the meta domain. metonymy is a similar cognitive process but it correlates elements within the same conceptual domain. according to barcelona (2002, pp. 14–15), metonymy responds to a general pattern, which refers to relationships such as whole for part, part for whole, etc. regarding the word for ‘heart’ in both languages, most non-literal meanings coincide and we will not list them here (heart for the adjacent area, heart for sincerity, heart for emotions and feelings, etc.). we have only listed one that coincides (heart is something loved) because it presents certain differences between the two languages. all information obtained for this section is sourced from the semi-structured interview: it did not appear in the psycholinguistic tasks, which were exclusively focused on obtaining results about literal meanings. table 6 metaphoric and metonymic linguistic expressions with ul and cor ‘heart’ catalan amazigh semantic relationship bravery fer el cor fort ‘make the heart strong (lit.), give it all your heart’ metonymy: part for functiona memory aprendre de cor ‘learn of heart (lit), learn by heart’ metonymy: part for function object that looks like it cor de bou (mol·lusc) ‘ox heart (lit.), bivalve mollusc’ metaphor: heart is object carta de cors ‘heart card’ metonymy (derived from heart is object) individual nniγ-as dg wul-inu ‘i told my heart (lit.), i said to myself’ metonymy: part for whole enthusiasm, desire, drive s wul ‘with heart (lit.), with enthusiasm’ metonymy: part for function something loved el cor d’una mare ‘the heart of a mother (lit.), a mother’s love’ something loved ul inu ‘my heart (lit.), my love, dear’ metaphor: heart is something loved (derived from part for function) a for historical reasons, because emotions and personality traits in the past would have been to the heart in a literal manner, some metaphorical expressions have been classified as metonymic (part for function). it should be noted that the fact that the meanings associated with ‘heart’ in both languages are related to emotions, feelings, and personality traits is due not only to cultural factors but also to the phenomenon of embodiment: one’s heartbeat can vary in terms of the emotion they are experiencing, and this can inf luence the existence of metaphors and conceptual metonyms. carla ferrerós pagès122 as seen in table 6, some examples of metonymy have been found only in amazigh or only in catalan. in their language, amazigh speakers do not use linguistic expressions that specify the metonymy heart for bravery and heart for memory as with catalan. in fact, they do not know them in catalan either, except for two participants between 30 and 45 years of age, one of whom has spent more time in catalonia than morocco and the other who has spent the same amount of time in both places. however, they do know and use the expressions that determine the metonymy heart for individual and heart for enthusiasm, both typical in amazigh. regarding the metaphor in catalan heart is object (which is similar in form), which does not exist in amazigh, it is worth noting that the younger amazigh speakers who have been educated in catalonia use this expression in their l1, in some cases using the words cor or corazón and inserting them into amazigh speech instead of using ul. conversely, older amazigh speakers who have spent more time in morocco do not recognize it and do not recognize the conventionalized image the heart represents. this image would not be called ul by younger amazigh speakers, but rather cor or corazón (‘heart,’ in catalan and spanish) even when speaking amazigh. there is a shared meaning that presents certain differences: the metaphor heart is something loved. in amazigh, the word ul ‘heart’ is used by people who love each other, but if that feeling is very intense, especially from parents towards their children, the word for ‘liver’ is used: tasa. in catalan, on the other hand, fetge, the word for liver, does not have this meaning, although expressions exist that are related to emotions and personality traits using the word liver. thus, the words for ‘heart’ refer to ‘feelings’ in both languages, but the distribution of feelings between heart and the liver is different. the amazigh speakers who have spent the most time living in catalonia and who have been educated there use the word ul ‘heart’ with the same meanings as the equivalent word in catalan regarding feelings and emotions. they state that they would use ul-inu ‘my heart’ for their children rather than tasa-inu ‘my liver,’ which is the expression that would be used by the other speakers in the sample. cases with differences related to the use and knowledge of words the younger amazigh speakers who have been educated in catalonia and who have spent more time there have difficulty understanding certain words. in general, these speakers easily recall the words for ‘eyes,’ ‘mouth,’ ‘head,’ ‘face,’ ‘belly,’ ‘back,’ ‘hand/arm,’ ‘leg/foot,’ ‘heart,’ and ‘liver,’ but have a hard time remembering words that refer, for example, to ‘elbow,’ ‘knee,’ ‘spleen,’ and so on. actually, the words labelling these references never appear on the list conceptual and linguistic transfer from l2 (catalan) to l1 (amazigh)… 123 task. however, such words are recognized when they are spoken, except by the two youngest amazigh speakers. the same applies for synonyms of the most common words that designate the body parts that we have mentioned. thus, for example, although the participants regularly use aymbub for ‘face,’ they did not remember, and in some cases they did not recognize, the synonym udm. the speakers of the last group have more difficulty recalling these synonyms and using them, but they understand them when they are mentioned. discussion the various effects of the influence of l2 on l1 pavlenko (2000) points out that research on the influence and transfer between l1 and l2 has focused on this sense of interference and the description of these phenomena, taking into account the different components of grammar, lexicon, semantics, pragmatics, and rhetoric. the author proposes a unitary framework for the study of transfers that can be applied to the study of any type of transfer or influence between two languages, and distinguishes some phenomena that must be taken into account (see the end of section the transfer of l2 to l1 with bilingual or multilingual speakers).4 the first one refers to the use of borrowing, that is to say, the addition of elements from l2 to l1. in our study we found two types of loan words: some old ones, borrowed from romance languages that entered the language in colonial times. we will not take them into account here, as they are also part of the language spoken in the territory of origin. we will take into account borrowing in terms of loan words that have been produced through contact with catalan in the context of migration. we have seen situations in which the l2 labels more references than the l1, such as ‘eyelid’ or ‘palate,’, which are not named in amazigh. the youngest speakers and those who have been educated in catalonia, in these cases, often use the catalan or spanish word ( parpella, párpado) when speaking in amazigh to refer to this part of the body. although these two body parts are not labelled in amazigh, it seems that they are categorized. this leads participants, on the one hand, to use loan words 4 here it must be remembered that all the participants in the sample are plurilingual (they can speak in arabic, french, or spanish, too). it must be noted that in morocco it is difficult to find monolingual amazighs and in catalonia there are no monolingual catalans. being both languages subordinated to a dominant language, it was not possible to find participants speaking amazigh and catalan exclusively. deeper studies should be focused on distinguishing, as thoroughly as possible, the inf luences of the different spoken by each participant. carla ferrerós pagès124 to refer to them (especially when they have had more contact with the l2) and, on the other hand, to recognize the expressions given by certain bilingual dictionaries that older amazigh speakers have never used, like the syntagmatic compound that literally means ‘belly of the eye.’ the participant’s recognition of compounds owes to the fact the body part is categorized in amazigh, but also because it is named in catalan. the speakers interviewed who have not left morocco and who do not speak languages other than amazigh and moroccan arabic in their daily lives do not interpret this expression so readily.5 this involves a case of crosslinguistic influence, but categorization is similar in both languages. furthermore, we have observed that, when referring to the metaphorical meaning of heart is object in amazigh, borrowing from catalan or spanish is sometimes used to refer to it. cor or corazón is used to label the typical drawing of a heart shape. the participants state that they would never use ul to refer to it, as there are no linguistic expressions in amazigh derived from the metaphor heart is object. therefore, in this case, apart from the crosslinguistic influence that we have described, there would be a transfer related to the processes of categorization and conceptualization shown by the languages involved. the second phenomenon mentioned by pavlenko (2000) is restructuring, that is, the incorporation of elements from l2 to l1 that result in changes, substitutions, or partial displacements. these partial displacements may result in a change of categorical prototypes or a change of boundaries between categories. if we take an example from the results we have shown, we see that there is a word for ‘hand’ and a word for ‘arm’ in catalan yet, in amazigh, the word afus is polysemic and refers to both categories. although in a spontaneous situation all the speakers use afus to refer to the upper limb, when doing a metalinguistic reflection or in psycholinguistic tests such as the body coloring task, the speakers of the first group correct themselves and state that afus labels ‘hand’ and that the word aɣil (which in some varieties of riffian amazigh means ‘forearm’ or ‘arm’ and even ‘shoulder’ in rarely used cases) refers to ‘arm.’ the fact that it has been demonstrated that, in languages in which the same word is used for ‘hand’ and for ‘arm,’ the word is polysemic (see, for example, brown, 2013; wierzbicka, 2007) leads us to the assertion that it does not involve a case of categorical transfer but rather of crosslinguistic influence. let us now look at the apparent similarity between the word afus ‘hand, arm’ and the word aḍar ‘foot, leg.’ using analogous examples in polish, wierzbicka (2007, p. 30) shows that the word referring to ‘hand’ and ‘arm’ is polysemic, whereas the word referring to lower limbs is not. furthermore, we can see that, with respect to the lower limbs, no speaker specifically uses the word 5 in moroccan arabic, the word šfaṛ means ‘eyelash’ and ‘eyelid.’ on the other hand, moscoso (2005) lists the syntagmatic compound la-ġṭa d el-ʕaynīn, lit. ‘the lid of the eye,’ as a translation for ‘eyelid.’ conceptual and linguistic transfer from l2 (catalan) to l1 (amazigh)… 125 aḍar for ‘foot’ and looks for another one for ‘leg’ like they did with the upper limbs. this suggests that linguistic transfer studies of bilingual speakers give clues to the discussion on polysemy and vagueness (see, for example, enfield, majid, & van staden, 2006; koptjevskaja-tamm, rakhilina, & vanhove, 2016; wierzbicka, 2007): there is more linguistic transfer when the word is polysemic and less when it is vague, because that would imply a recategorization. the word for ‘body’ involves another case of restructuring. in catalan, the word cos refers to ‘body’ and ‘trunk,’ while in amazigh, arrimt means ‘skin of the entire body’ and ‘body.’ amazigh speakers who have spent the most time in catalonia, despite knowing the word arrimt has these two meanings, state that they use it for ‘skin’ and they use a borrowing from arabic (ljsdt or ddat) for ‘body.’ the fact that they use an arabic loan word shows that interference does not likely come from catalan. in any case, the restructuring of the semantic paradigm is a conceptual transfer. it is worth noting that the case of ‘body’ relates to important issues in semantic and lexicon studies of anatomy: there is a discussion among researchers about whether this partonomic level 0 can be designated with a loan word or not (see enfield, majid & van staden, 2006; wierzbicka, 2007). we see that, at least as regards cases with bilingual speakers, and due to linguistic restructuring, it is named with a loan word from arabic, the dominant language. pavlenko (2000) also mentions the phenomenon of convergence, through which the structures of the two languages converge into an intermediate structure, different from each individual language. we have found a case of convergence with two concepts in one, different from the two concepts of each linguistic community involved. we have seen that amazigh speakers who specifically use the word afus for ‘hand’ use the word aγil for ‘arm.’ however, they affirm that this word, used in this way, has nuanced semantics focusing on the upper part of the upper limb. that is to say, aγil, as they use the word when saying afus specifically for ‘hand,’ coincides neither with the actual amazigh meaning (‘shoulder’) nor with the meaning of the catalan word for arm. this phenomenon of convergence shows that there has been a restructuring of the conceptual system of the l1. the results of our study also show cases of displacement, another of the phenomena mentioned by pavlenko (2000), that is, changes in certain l1 structures that approximate l2 structures. in our case, we have observed semantic displacements for which the lexical pieces of the l1 get meaning added to them with partially equivalent polysemic words from the l2. the words for ‘heart’ in both languages are highly polysemic. we have observed two remarkable phenomena, both from the speakers of the first group who have been educated in catalonia: on the one hand, the metaphor heart is object is displaced to amazigh and, as we have seen, in these cases the catalan or spanish word is inserted into amazigh speech. on the other hand, we have also seen that one carla ferrerós pagès126 of the meanings of the word heart in catalan is ‘something loved.’ in amazigh, ul also has this meaning, except when children are the ‘something loved,’ in which case tasa ‘liver’ is used. some of the younger speakers, however, also attribute it to ‘heart’ in their language as occurs in catalan. these cases of displacement show that there have been influences of the categorization system from l2 to l1, in this case related to the non-literal meanings of a word. the last phenomenon mentioned by pavlenko (2000) refers to the erosion of the l1, that is to say, the loss or inability to produce some elements of the l1 due to the influence of the l2. when there are terms in amazigh that do not have an equivalent in catalan, we have observed that they are often only used by older amazigh speakers, the participants of the last group. some younger speakers recognize such terms, but state that this is because they have heard elderly people use them. the participants who have lived in catalonia longest (ferrerós, 2015), do seem to categorize, for example, ‘tooth growing too close to another tooth’ even though they do not have a word to label it. there would be no recategorization in this case. however, there would be cases in which they do not categorize an entity labelled in amazigh, such as akmmar ‘lower part of the face.’ these younger participants are aware that they do not speak the same language as their older relatives. that is why, for example, when asked about expressions that are not typical of the l1 but which some dictionaries list, such as what literally means ‘back of the mouth’ (‘palate’), some claim to believe that these expressions are used by the elderly, although they have never been heard at home because they are not native to amazigh. in the same way, the two youngest speakers, who belong to the first group, say they have never heard the word arrimt ‘body’ even though it is a word that belongs to their language. they have also lost some distinctions that amazigh words convey which do not have equivalents in catalan, and there has been a deviation of categorial boundaries. for example, in the case of izaggwn ‘armpit and pubic hair’ and izuṭṭn ‘body hair except armpit and pubic hair,’ they extend the use of izuṭṭn, which ends up equivalent to the word hair in catalan, and they have lost the use of the word izaggwn. they have also lost the word taramant ‘inner stomach’ and only use stumagu ‘stomach.’ in the latter case, however, it is possible that this is also due to the fact that they live in an urban environment: the three amazigh speakers living in morocco, in the city of lḥusima, do not use the word taramant either. therefore, it is important to take into account that there are several factors that can cause these linguistic changes aside from the attrition of the l1 within the context of migration. at this point it is worth highlighting that there is a difference related to the participants’ age and length of time spent in catalonia: when the speakers are younger and have spent more time in catalonia than morocco, and speak a different sort of amazigh than what is spoken in their territory of origin, it is conceptual and linguistic transfer from l2 (catalan) to l1 (amazigh)… 127 possible that their particular language systems have not suffered attrition or that there has not been a transfer in their particular conceptual systems. however, we have found cases of particular language systems that have clearly been eroded by contact with the l2. some older amazigh speakers who have lived approximately the same time in morocco as catalonia claim that it is hard for them to remember certain words for labelling less relevant body parts (taking into account the data obtained through the listing task). nor do they remember less frequently used synonyms of words that refer to more relevant body parts (for example udm, which is used less frequently than aɣmbub for ‘face’). in fact, an important aspect in lexicon and semantics studies within the context of bilingualism or multilingualism is the aspect regarding the difficulty of lexical recovery. authors who have researched this issue include de bot and stoessel (2000), latomaa (1998), and oshtain and barzilay (1991). these studies show that not only do such late bilinguals speak with more gestures, but they also have difficulty finding words from their l1. when speakers have spent more time in contact with the l2, we observe greater attrition of the l1. jessner (2003, p. 238) explains, in fact, that linguistic erosion is “a gradual process of information decay that is dependent on time.” one of the questions posed in bilingualism studies is whether such speakers have two systems of conceptual representation (one for each language) or a single underlying system for both languages. otheguy and garcia (1993) affirm that late bilinguals have systems of coexisting conceptual representation underlying the use of both languages. conversely, other studies show evidence of conceptual changes. based on the results of our research, it appears that the youngest speakers, who spent longer in catalonia than in morocco, have two very convergent underlying conceptual systems, which is why we have pointed out that phenomena such as linguistic attrition do not occur in the particular language of these specific speakers. rather, we can only speak of erosion if we compare their language use with that of other speakers. in contrast, speakers who have been exposed to the l2 at an older age seem to have two underlying conceptual, coexisting, and less convergent representation systems, although with mutual influences. some available studies on conceptual transfer show that conceptual representations are subject to changes in adulthood (jarvis, 2011; pavlenko, 1999, 2000; pavlenko & jarvis, 2000). extralinguistic factors that affect the influence of the l2 on the l1 one extralinguistic factor that affects the influence of the l2 on the l1 is the prestige that speakers attribute to one of the two languages (pavlenko, 2000; weinreich, 1953). weinreich (1953), for example, shows that more loan words from the l2 are used if they seem to have greater prestige, to make carla ferrerós pagès128 the speaker’s familiarity with the language deemed more prestigious evident. in this paper, we have shown that prestige not only results in borrowing, but also other cases of linguistic transfer, including conceptual transfer. within the context of migration, the language of the receiving country is considered more prestigious. in this case, both languages are minoritized languages, but catalan has a much greater public presence than amazigh. thus, when catalan labels more parts of a given reference, or when it presents more categories, the speakers of the first group, at least in a situation of metalinguistic reflection, make the l1 categorization and labelling coincide with those of the l2. this, however, is also related to the fact that, being accustomed to speaking catalan or spanish, they feel the need to designate a reference in their native language for which the latter has no label or category. another important aspect to take into account is the age of the participants and the level and type of contact which late bilinguals may have with l2 speakers. through the analysis of the results, we have shown that almost all the crosslinguistic transfers and influences observed and most cases of transfers related to categorization and conceptualization occur with the speakers of the first group: younger speakers who have been educated in catalonia. one more extralinguistic factor we think should be taken into account is related to the choice of methodology used (ferrerós, 2016). throughout the presentation of the results from this study, we have already observed how participants might give different answers depending on whether they are in a situation of spontaneous conversation or metalinguistic reflection. but there are other phenomena that must be taken into account, such as the semantic domains analyzed in any given research. many studies have described crosslinguistic transfers taking into account semantic fields related to culture and environmental factors, which is why numerous cases of linguistic transfer, including conceptual, have been noted. in contrast, this paper is based on data from a basic semantic domain: that of body parts. there are certain words and meanings related to a reference that are the same for everyone in every location, but which are categorized and named in different ways. conclusions with the analysis of the results from this study, we have determined the cases in which there have been crosslinguistic influences and influences between different ways of categorizing and conceptualizing reality. thus, when loan words from the l2 are used, we have determined that there is recategorization if a borrowing serves to label a body part not categorized in l1, which conceptual and linguistic transfer from l2 (catalan) to l1 (amazigh)… 129 can also be used to label a categorized yet unnamed body part thus becoming adopted more easily. the cases of displacement and restructuring also show diverse results: in the case of the polysemic words in the l1 that are equivalent to two different words in the l2, if there has been crosslinguistic influence that has caused the polysemic word from the l1 to become specified for just one of its meanings, there is no recategorization. however, if the l1 word was vague and the l2 influence led to specifying when using a meaning from the equivalent l2 word, there is recategorization. we have not found any cases of this second type. thus, we have shown how bilingual studies can provide new data to the debate on the distinction between phenomena of polysemy and semantic vagueness. we have also found data that respond to the 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(1953). languages in contact, findings and problems. new york: linguistic circle of new york. whorf, b. l. (1956). language, thought and reality. selected writings of benjamin lee whorf. cambridge: technology press of massachusetts institute of technology. wierzbicka, a. (2007). bodies and their parts: a nsm approach to semantic typology, language sciences, 29, 14–65. http://www.juntadeandalucia.es/export/drupaljda/diccionario_espanol-arabe_marroqui.pdf http://www.juntadeandalucia.es/export/drupaljda/diccionario_espanol-arabe_marroqui.pdf carla ferrerós pagès132 carla ferrerós pagès konzeptueller und sprachlicher transfer von l2 (katalanisch) zu l1 (amazigh) im kontext der migration z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g der vorliegende beitrag konzentriert sich auf die analyse der lexikalischen und semantischen einf lüsse von l2 (katalanisch) auf l1 (amazigh) in einem elementaren semantischen feld: körperteile. ausgehend von der beobachtung, dass die probanden unterschiede in l1gebrauch aufweisen, die mit der dauer ihres kontakts mit dem katalanischen zusammenhängen, wird analysiert und erörtert, ob die genannten unterschiede die folge eines transfers aus dem konzeptuellen system von l2 sind. es ist eine qualitative studie mit einer stichprobe von 14 probanden, deren l1 amazigh ist und die in katalonien leben. die ergebnisse zeigen, dass es fälle von semantischem und konzeptuellem einf luss gibt, wenn auch in geringerem maße als in anderen studien, die keine daten aus elementaren semantischen feldern analysieren. darüber hinaus wird darauf hingewiesen, dass es außersprachliche faktoren gibt, die diese transfers beeinf lussen (status der betreffenden sprachen und bestimmte eigenschaften der sprecher). schlüsselwörter: semantische kategorisierung, sprachtransfer, konzeptueller transfer, katalanisch, amazigh, zweisprachigkeit, mehrsprachigkei theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 7 (1), 2021, pp. 33–50 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.7928 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9395-2734hanna komorowska swps university of social sciences and humanities the role of attention in teacher education: a factor in the quality of european schooling a b s t r a c t the text is an article of ref lection aiming to examine causes of disproportions between the amount of effort undertaken by leading international institutions in the field of education and the quality of european school systems measured by the attainment of curricular goals. as worrying trends have been observed mainly at the classroom level, psychological rather than organizational factors need to be examined. it is hypothesized that current didactic problems should be explained by attention rather than motivation deficits. the paper, therefore, analyzes various types and aspects of attention, tendencies to misdirect it as well as ways of building and maintaining attention in order to counteract distraction, boredom and overstimulation of both teachers and learners. suggestions are also formulated for preand in-service teacher education programs which are postulated to give more emphasis to the role of attention as well as to provide a toolkit of verbal and non-verbal strategies which may help language teachers to elicit and sustain learners’ attention without departing from the lesson scenario. keywords: quality, language learning, attention, distraction, coping strategies, teacher education introduction for a long time the quality of education in europe has been considered the responsibility of schools and teachers. until the end of the 20th century governments took interest in education only in times of the implementation of major school reforms, while major international organizations such as the council of europe, the european union, oecd and unesco focused on human rights, democratic citizenship, peaceful coexistence and intergovernmental hanna komorowska34 collaboration, remaining firmly convinced that education lies beyond the scope of their interest. yet, due to the growing awareness of its impact on economic growth, education kept slowly and systematically moving to become a sector of peripheral interest and then to take a prominent place on the european scene. for more than two decades now education in general and language education in particular, has been perceived as a sine qua non condition for successful economic development, thus becoming central to the concerns of all the international institutions. yet, in spite of all the budgetary and organizational efforts quality of education remained unsatisfactory. educational activity, therefore, turned first to promoting learner autonomy and then focused on motivation. the key, however, seems to lie in another factor, namely attention. dissatisfaction with education—in search of possible causes the turn of the 20th and the 21st centuries marked a breakthrough for research conducted within the frames of the most important international institutions which turned to the analysis of school systems and their effectiveness. the organization for economic co-operation and development implemented two cyclic studies: pisa–program for international student assessment (pisa) conducted every three years since 2000 and talis–teaching and learning international survey conducted every five years since 2008, while the united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization and its international association for evaluation of educational achievement developed pirls– progress in international reading literacy study conducted every five years since 2001. the european union completed an analysis of language education through surveylang–the first european survey on language competences. results, although optimistic for some countries, in most cases prove far from satisfactory (european commission, 2012; oecd, 2018a; oecd, 2018b; mullis et al., 2017). at the same time all the organizations focused on designing strategies to support teaching and learning. the council of europe constructed and extended the common framework of reference for languages—teaching, learning and assessment (council of europe, 2001; council of europe, 2018). oecd initiated an overall diagnosis of education in member countries on the basis of which the concept of key qualifications was born. the study led to the selection of eight competencies adopted by the european union and widely promoted via numerous eu activities and projects (european commission, 2019). the european union focused on the organization of language education which gained a high status as a result of the lisbon the role of attention in teacher education… 35 strategy with its “mother tongue plus 2 other languages” formula (european commission, 2002; european commission, 2005). the european centre for modern languages in graz launched projects aimed at raising the quality of language education and tackling issues caused by mobility and the resulting differences between learners’ first languages and languages of schooling (www.ecml.at). in parallel all the governments of the eu member states have intensified efforts to provide proper infrastructure for schools and to control class sizes for language education offered therein (baidak et al., 2017). despite the concerted international intellectual and financial investment, numerous problems remain unresolved, while educational systems meet with more and more criticism. dissatisfaction has been voiced not only by researchers, but also by all the actors of the educational scene. research launched by the oecd in 2005 and 2015 demonstrated that upper secondary school students tend to be more critical about schooling than the lower secondary ones, while both groups tend to be much more critical than primary school learners. enjoyment and motivation have been demonstrated to gradually decrease with age and school level. the reason for the younger students’ satisfaction with the school’s offerings lies most probably in two areas: lack of formal evaluation eliminates pressure to get good marks, but also, as researchers put it, education in primary schools tends to be more play-oriented and, therefore, offers more opportunities for pupils “to follow their natural curiosity and be engaged in their own learning” (oecd, 2005, p. 79; oecd, 2015). decreased enjoyment in older learners may also spring from the fact that—as the research demonstrated—“students do not have a one-dimensional understanding of what schooling is about. schools represent many different things: places to learn, places to meet friends, and places to get the credentials to get ahead in life” (oecd, 2005, p. 88)—a phenomenon also identified ten years later in a series of case studies (oecd, 2015). dissatisfaction can be heard from parents, mainly the educated ones living in urban areas, who stress the need for personality development and problem-solving skills. parental attitudes are extremely important in the oecd analysis, as family background proved to be the best predictor of educational achievement. strong criticism directed at the lack of soft skills development comes also from business communities. at the same time, data collected in the teaching and learning international survey have in the last decade been showing worrying degrees of teachers’ dissatisfaction in 34 countries as more than 80 per cent of those questioned felt undervalued and cited a lack of influence on administrative and budgetary decisions. they also noted that the only sphere on which they could have an impact was the classroom, although even there they were far too rarely listened to (oecd, 2013). data collected in the last talis survey reveal increasing problems with classroom discipline, especially in primary and lower secondary schools of 48 countries under research, hanna komorowska36 a phenomenon adversely affecting not only learning outcomes but also teachers’ self-confidence (oecd, 2018a, p. 108). organizational problems connected with infrastructure and teacher provision seemed under control in the eu member states, as the last international comparisons lead us to conclude (baidak et al., 2017: oecd, 2018b), yet attempts to raise the quality of language education in particular during the first decade of the 21st century have not brought satisfactory results (heyworth, 2013) and no improvement in overall learning outcomes has been noted over the last decade (oecd, 2018b). the discrepancy was usually attributed to insufficient teacher awareness of individual learner variables—anxiety, willingness to communicate and motivation. one learner factor, however, was overlooked and has never been properly addressed, namely that of attention—the phenomenon to which we now move. the concept of attention attention as the flexible control of limited computational resources (lindsay, 2020) is defined as a cognitive process enabling the individual to select a stimulus from a multitude of stimuli coming from the environment and process information it carries (zanto & gazzaley, 2009). attention presupposes a certain speed of individual reactions, a degree of alertness which makes it possible to select a salient stimulus out of a vast number of competing ones. selection takes place through subconscious prioritization of stimuli and facilitates goal-directed behavior manifested in maintaining concentration on the stimulus considered relevant in a given context. the selection process is possible due to the inhibition of stimuli considered irrelevant in order to prevent distractibility and concentration loss, often referred to as mind wandering, although intentional and unintentional mind wandering should be distinguished (seli, risko, & smilek, 2016). suppression of irrelevant stimuli should be long enough to enable task completion, which presupposes the ability of an individual to self-regulate behavior (humphreys & sui, 2016; foster & levie, 2016). difficulties in any of the stages listed above result in attention deficit, a phenomenon best examined in learners suffering from adhd (merell, sayal, tymms, & kasim, 2016). attention has a shifting nature, and any battle won is not won for long. several types of attention have been distinguished; immediate attention attracted via a sudden emotion; voluntary attention focused on the initiative of the learner; non-voluntary attention attracted by a sudden, unexpected stimulus while performing another activity and involuntary attention when a task has been imposed and cannot be ignored for fear of consequences. attention is linked to the role of attention in teacher education… 37 working memory in which the component of wm referred to as central executive and situated in the frontal lobes (baddeley, 2003; scolari, seidl-rathkopf, & kastner, 2015) is responsible for executive attention and considered “principal in determining individual differences in wm span” (biedroń, 2012, p. 82). it follows that in pedagogical contexts what teachers colloquially refer to as “the lack of learner’s attention” is an expression running counter to all the psychological definitions available, according to which attention is considered to be a preferential response based on a learner’s decision to focus on one of the competing stimuli. as a large number of stimuli attack the human organism simultaneously, the result is not only the unavoidable failure of almost all of them to win in this contest, but also a shorter attention span for the victorious ones. as learners tend to select more than one stimulus, their decision results in a continuous partial attention leading to distraction or multitasking, a timesaving phenomenon taking place at the cost of quality (barnes & dougherty, 2007; sana, weston, & cepeda, 2013). school learners addicted to social media and background music usually engage in multiple activities, therefore, trying to reverse this trend is difficult, if not straightforwardly impossible. optimistic approaches point to the fact that—as research demonstrates—“people may compensate for divided-attention costs by selectively attending to the most valuable items and that factors that worsen memory do not necessarily impair the ability to selectively remember important information” (middlebrooks, kerr, & castell, 2017, p. 1103). such compensation is, however, possible only when students are able to decide what is valuable and have some practice in prioritizing information, a skill that needs to be developed in class. all this means that learners are always attentive and the problem lies in the fact that they do not attend to what the teacher planned to function as learners’ attention focus. teachers’ battle for learners’ attention and a tendency to minimize distraction tend to be treated globally ignoring the learners’ age as a mediating factor. although young learners acquire a language subconsciously and informally from input, adolescent and adult students need consciousness to ensure effective learning. consciousness makes it possible to notice stimuli which then enter the working memory. noticing and processing are a sine qua non condition for learning to take place (schmidt, 1990), neither of the two being possible without attention, now more commonly analyzed as part of short-term and working memory. attempts at winning the race for attention call for the identification of factors stimulating it. these are: novelty, expectancy, contrast and high intensity together with interest determining motivation, a factor crucial to both attention and learning. the role of emotions cannot be underestimated. teachers’ difficulty with preventing their learners’ mind wandering increases when group interaction produces strong emotions. as emotions elicit immediate attention, the teacher’s battle for attention becomes a battle of and for emotions. positive hanna komorowska38 emotions correlate with higher selectivity and lower distractibility levels, while negative emotions adversely influence the process (kilingsworth & gilbert, 2010; pacheco-unguetti & parmentier, 2014), hence the value of good teacherstudent and student-student rapport, a suggestion omnipresent in all teacher education programs. emotions immediately bring about attention and as friendly classroom atmosphere correlates with achievement, positive psychology promotes praise. yet, although successful teachers praise twice as often than others, the amount of their critical remarks is not reduced. positive feelings are not always desirable; research on optimists demonstrates that they are characterized by quick judgement, superficial information processing, less systematic thinking, unrealistic decision-making and less careful observation which makes them less valuable witnesses (forgas, 2007; forgas, vargas, & laham, 2005). addiction to praise can also reduce levels of motivation and autonomy. what is more, suppressing negative emotions leads to their greater accessibility, which might be counterproductive if self-regulation fails. (weiner, 2006). attention, therefore, benefits from positive emotions, although not at the cost of suppressing critical remarks useful as constructive feedback or expressions of negative feelings surfacing in class life. when students are considered inattentive, teachers tend to attribute it to laziness. the issue is, however, more complicated. mediating factors such as family situation, transport, lack of sleep and overburdening with extracurricular activities are often responsible for mind wandering. the reason for mind wandering can lie in difficulty to give attention to one object, activity or task. it can also lie in the lack of ability to maintain the same level of concentration for a longer time. sometimes the problem can be attributed to a variety of learning difficulties the most important of which is attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (adhd). sometimes the reason lies in monotony which occurs when a stimulus is repetitive and attention previously elicited has been lost, but also when stimuli are too similar adversely affecting concentration. it can also lie in under-stimulation producing boredom when, out of numerous stimuli, none is deemed interesting enough to focus a learner’s attention (pawlak et al., 2020). attention is strongly connected with motivation. permanent lack of stimulating factors may result in amotivation, while in most cases unpleasant events experienced in the past produce demotivation. remotivation is, however, always possible. very high levels of motivation strengthen both attention and concentration leading to the so-called directed motivational current (dörnyei, 2005; dörnyei, henry, & muir, 2016) or even to the flow phenomenon when work and pleasure start merging (csikszentmichalyi, 2008). conversely, motivation disappears, attention is lost and boredom creeps in when the task is imposed on the learner, but also when payoff is deemed not worth the effort. the learner the role of attention in teacher education… 39 withdraws which can also happen when the material is either too easy, hence not stimulating enough, or too difficult, hence not likely to guarantee payoff. the student’s verbal and/or non-verbal message is, therefore, one of the following: not much is going on/enough, but it is not what i want/not my choice, i simply had to do it/it is not worth my effort/i simply can’t concentrate/i am full of negative emotions anyway. the learner then passes through several stages moving from indifference to displeasure and then to the search for new, stimulating factors. if none are found or if those found elicit teacher’s criticism—the situation breeds either learner’s apathy which is a challenge for the teacher or aggression which is a challenge for the whole school community (goetz et al., 2013; kruk, zawodniak & chumas, 2017). the teacher has an outstanding role to play as didactic procedures have been found to be more important than learner’s self-reported motivation (guilloteaux & dörnyei, 2008). war on attention does not only mean a series of battles against competing classroom stimuli coming from peers. it also means dealing with lifestyles and coping with the speed of the modern world with its plenitude of institutions engaged in what is often referred to as the corporate arms race for attention and the plenitude of stimuli produced by the media. the following question, therefore, arises: what can teachers do to win this race for education and the learners’ personal development and what can teacher educators do to help them? postulates for teacher education programs as attention is crucial for learning, we need to understand its functioning to efficiently manage the language class and effectively achieve lesson objectives. pre-service teacher education programs, however, mainly concentrate on theories and global teaching methods, lesson structure and test-based assessment, while in-service workshops understandably focus on age groups and types of educational institutions served by course participants. individual variables tend to be dealt with in the course of reflective practice which has gained a high status in teacher education of all levels (gabryś-barker, 2012; krajka, 2012; werbińska, 2017). what seems important, though often neglected, is the need for a didactic toolkit designed for trainees in order to provide them with certain strategies, but also with food for thought and reflection. focus on valuable techniques which can help them in their battle for learners’ attention would be most helpful in preand in-service teacher education courses. issues worth including could encompass verbal and nonverbal techniques on the one hand and those useful in the teaching and in hanna komorowska40 assessment processes on the other. their didactic value can only be determined for a particular group of students and sometimes even for a particular lesson, generalizations are, therefore, not well justified. initial steps in professional induction need to first address negative aspects of modelling behavior remembered from trainees’ own school days. not infrequently did their teachers use certain attention-attracting techniques to stimulate passive students and/or to redirect attention of those who respond to competing stimuli other than the didactic ones offered during the lesson. unfortunately, a large group of these techniques were—in the spirit of those school times—based on criticism and blame typical of autocratic teaching styles and domination strategies which blur the distinction between achievement and effort by using the grading system to punish undesired behavior. in face to face classroom contact, power strategies ruin constructive interaction by negative, personal remarks breeding aggression or by delegating the problem to other individuals such as school principals or parents, which reveals the teacher’s helplessness. all of them attract learners’ attention, though not in the way desired as emphasis is given to the teacher-student conflict rather than to the learning task. what is often deeply ingrained in many trainees’ memories is their school teachers’ ways of attracting attention by eliciting negative emotions such as shame, irritation or anger elicited through critical remarks connected with certain types of feedback given to learners in connection with their classroom behavior or with their educational attainment. comments breeding aggression usually take the form of personal ‘you-messages’ of the you always… kind. here a constructive element of teacher education can be introduced: according to the congruent communication theory, feedback in this form tends to be rejected and as such is didactically useless and, what is more, ruins teacher-student rapport, destroying chances for fruitful interaction (ginott, 1972; spitzberg & cupach, 2007). for classroom management purposes expressive ‘i-messages’ describing the teacher’s feelings about the situation are more effective as they are either accepted or ignored with no negative emotions to follow. ‘it-messages’ which point out the problem, describe it and suggest constructive solution are the most valuable and tend to be fully accepted by the addressee. another aspect seems worth pointing out here. constructive feedback manifested in the appropriate choice of message format shows the learner ways of evaluation which do not base on power and authority, but on a precise diagnosis springing from observation and expertise. this means that—as the elaboration likelihood theory puts it—central rather than peripheral processing is taking place in the mind (petty & wegener, 1999). it is, therefore, important for the teacher to be aware of impulsive tendencies and, in consequence, to be able to block reactions to be avoided and choose feedback formats conducive to learning. it is also indispensable for the teacher to have at least some knowledge of the role of attention in teacher education… 41 the learner’s reactions as today we know that students with high ego-protection do not easily take critical remarks, remember negative feedback for a long time, but at the same time may be distrustful of praise, doubting the authority of the person who praises them, while students with tendencies to enhance their ego tend to actively seek praise, remember praise for a long time and respect the person praising them (sedikides & skowronski, 2009). elimination of subconscious modelling and replacing it with constructive patterns paves the way for the introduction of useful didactic techniques. the most popular of the verbal ones draw on attractiveness of the teaching content, selecting topics of interest and enjoyable activities. trainees should, however, reflect on the fact that this seemingly effective path is often less effective than planned as teachers tend to select what they presume would be interesting and enjoyable for students, a type of content not always perceived by the learners as such. on the other hand, students’ needs may prove so diverse that it is extremely difficult for the teacher to satisfy them given curricular constraints; teacher-student consultations are, therefore, needed. the race for attention may be won, but the attention gained does not go to learning; it is given to negotiation often used to gain time, especially if prolonged negotiations are conducted in the mother tongue. if the problem does not arise, yet learners attention is misdirected—an unexpected code-switch from l2 into the mother tongue may serve the purpose, though it works only for teachers who conduct their lessons in the target language as otherwise the surprise factor of such a brief intervention is lost. simple and effective, but not so frequently used classroom techniques to be recommended are, for example, the feed-back technique, whereby learners are not informed of teaching aims at the beginning of the lesson, but engage in their inductive discovery at the end of the session or the traffic light technique based on end-of-lesson color cards where a red card signals lack of skill, a yellow one shows that a skill has been developed only partially and a green one informs of learner’s difficulties. attention attractors can also be found among selfassessment techniques based on the expectancy factor such as self-assessment prediction where students try to determine the grade they expect, compare the grade received with their expectations and check their own work one more time against the grading criteria; or a peer assessment procedure according to a two stars and a wish formula with two aspects to praise and one to be considered for the future. what is also effective, is guessing the upcoming test technique whereby students are encouraged to prepare their own test items of the type they expect to appear on a test. resources can also be found in non-verbal communication. silence is the simplest, though often forgotten option which proves powerful on two conditions: first, when it is unexpected and, second, when it is combined with intense gaze. its psychological function is based on the surprise factor, which hanna komorowska42 makes it useful for teachers whose conversational style tends to be one usually referred to as the high involvement style characterized by fast speech, expressive intonation, short hesitation pauses and immediate starts when others finish their turn. silence as attention attractor is not effective for those whose way of speaking is described as the high considerateness style marked by slow speech, long hesitation pauses, intonation and delayed start when others finish talking and less expressive pitch (tannen, 2005; tannen, 2012). silence as a classroom management technique used for disciplinary purposes enables the teacher not to depart from the original lesson scenario, an additional benefit impossible if verbal strategies are used (witosz, 2006). gesture is another obvious choice, considering it does not take time needed for language teaching and can even support contact and comprehension at the same time playing a management function. so far teachers have been interested in the conscious use of gesture for two reasons: signaling approval / disapproval and error correction. today explicit instruction in the use of gestures which should be part of teacher education takes place solely in courses of business english or english for public speaking where persuasive and manipulation skills are being developed. what seems to be relatively well popularized in language teaching methodology is a specific use of gestures to signal grammatical errors, but these are beyond the scope of our reflection here as they relate to the learner’s utterance, that is, a situation in which the learner’s attention is already in harmony with the teaching focus. gestures attempting to hold attention for a longer time or to attract attention lost can take several forms depending on the speaker’s intention (komorowska, 2018). attention is more likely to be attracted when gestures bridge an information gap needed to complete a task. for that purpose teachers can use deictic gestures which point to an object, thus supporting comprehension of a difficult or unknown word or replacing missing nouns, but also iconic gestures which present the shape of objects spoken about. in order to elicit speech the teacher may use metaphoric gestures which carry a specific meaning, such as a hand placed on the heart, with a subset of emblems, that is, gestures carrying one meaning evident to every member of a given speech community. to hold learners’ attention teachers can use beats which signal the rhythm of their speech, and provide implicit non-verbal instruction in suprasegmentals. if teachers decide to explicitly concentrate learners’ attention on the use of gesture and raise awareness of its individual use, pair work or group work rather than the desk-to-desk format is recommended during which one student gives a brief oral presentation and the other one gives feedback describing body posture, facial expression and gestures which have been used, their intention and the listener’s perception of their function, value, and quality. reaction of the observed and possible comments by the other members of the group end the activity which is usually considered attractive in the classroom. the the role of attention in teacher education… 43 teacher’s role is to create relaxed learning environments, offer model sentences to prevent undesired forms of criticism which would block further communication and harm interpersonal relations in the classroom, and give tips on verbal and non-verbal signals of attentive and respectful listening. encouraging learners’ gesticulation in the classroom is not likely to reduce student speaking time as no more than 7 per cent of interlocutor’s responses have been found to consist of gestures only (puppel, 2013). what is more, verbal signals attract attention, bodily engagement enhances motivation on task, and conversations accompanied by gestures are perceived as more smooth and natural (sidnell & stivers, 2012). controversial issues arguably the most important controversy concerns the value of new technologies which are believed to motivate students and are today part of their everyday life. their role in unexpected situations, such as pandemics, is not at all questionable; there is, however, uncertainty about the value of for example, the use of mobile phones during face-to-face lessons or of various applications used during the preparation of homework assignments. controversy started when the european union’s international comparative analysis of educational attainment in languages surveying 50 thousand 15-year-olds in 15 countries with 18 school systems proved completely unexpected in the section devoted to new technologies. in the times of enthusiasm for promising solutions, factors which do not correlate with fl test scores were identified as: teacher’s use of ict outside lessons for teaching, teacher’s use of ict devices when teaching and teacher’s use of web content for teaching. what is more, strong negative effect of ict use at home was found, with some positive effect only on listening comprehension. similarly negative effects were noted of time spent on preparing students for tests as well as of time spent on homework. general report stated “no positive effect on average scores on the language tests for any of the skills” (european commission, 2012, p. 83). the explanation of the data quoted above, which have every right to be perceived as counter-intuitive, most probably lies in the selection of stimuli and the subsequent direction of attention which tends to orient itself towards hardware rather content. it may also lie in the low value of didactic content and misuse of new technologies which more and more often lead to treating life as a competition during which the goal of people and institutions is to attract our attention. the phenomenon is extensively discussed by tristan harris, a design ethicist formerly working at apple and google who analyzes ways in which hanna komorowska44 creators of big international corporations with authors of advertising campaigns ‘hijack our attention’ and warns against losing control over our time and life. today he heads the centre for humane technology (www.humanetech.com) whose activity is not directed against new technologies, but consists in planning strategies to help users identify their own needs rather than let technological giants create artificial needs for commercial purposes. another controversial issue is the phenomenon of teachers’ attention, a phenomenon rarely discussed by educators understandably concentrating on learners. whether their attention is evaluated positively or considered misdirected is very often a matter of opinion. in didactic contexts, for example, teachers’ attention often goes to grammatical errors. these are usually noticed not only as a consequence of long educational tradition, but also because mistakes in this field are often perceived as indices of the learner’s attitude to language learning and symptoms of disrespect to schools and teachers. they are also noticed, because—alongside spelling—grammar is an aspect of a foreign language where objective assessment is possible. it also goes to grammar because teachers treat the type and number of mistakes as an important piece of pedagogical information on how diligently the learner works in class and completes assigned homework. yet, goal-directed corrective behavior by the teacher is often much better justified in tasks designed to develop speaking skills, when attention targets content, rhythm, intonation and fluency. balancing objectivity of assessment and the communicative value of the message in teacher’s attention management is a difficult decision, not infrequently mediated by internal regulations of the employing institution. on a more general plane, teachers often feel insecure when it comes to making decisions on how to manage their attention when offering corrective feedback and—considering the multitude of conflicting opinions in the literature on the subject—they have every right to be confused. academic sources are abundant in books and articles on englishes of the world and the role of english as a global language functioning as the lingua franca of the modern times (jenkins, 2014). most of these texts undermine the status of the nativespeaker as a criterion of linguistic standards, and thus legitimize elf users of the international language. on the other hand, characteristics of speech samples produced by speakers of elf are similar to those produced by b1/b2 speakers of english as a foreign language. it is, therefore, understandable that teachers may start hesitating when it comes to correcting mistakes made by intermediate, upper-intermediate or advanced students, especially the relatively fluent ones. yet in school language learning future needs of our students are unknown and, in the era of mobility, it would be dangerous to assume that they will never live in english-speaking countries and are likely to communicate with other elf speakers only. yet, as alan davies (2015) states in his interview for laq, we have no other criterion than the native-speaker who the role of attention in teacher education… 45 will remain a model, which does not mean that this model must be identical with the educational goals selected for a given program. for the time being, developing proficient speaking skills results in fact in less rigor in the teaching of grammar and pronunciation where criteria have been shifted from accuracy to acceptability. redirecting teacher’s attention from what learners consider to be the focal point is also subject to controversy. teachers are often encouraged to take learners’ communication anxiety into consideration and refrain from intervention or use delayed correction in the hope that this procedure will attract learner’s attention without ruining their self-esteem and blocking fluency. students, however, consider immediate error correction part of the teacher’s job and tend to suspect teachers who tend to ignore mistakes of neglect or incompetence. the lack of immediate correction is at the same time taken by other students to mean approval of what is being produced which may lead to promoting mistakes in the classroom. recast presented in a voice soft enough not to stop a learner’s utterance, but clear enough to inform everybody of the correct form seems to be a better option, yet opinions here remain divided. a similar redirecting process takes place when teacher’s attention goes to learners’ classroom behavior taken as an index of their attitude towards school and the teacher. their behavior towards their peers is, however, more than infrequently much more important than their behavior vis-à-vis the teacher as bullying and hate speech are easy to overlook when attention is directed to unpleasant, though much less dangerous, behavior. misdirected attention on the part of the teacher is definitely among topics rarely addressed in the course of preand in-service teacher education. conclusion in preand –in-service teacher education curricula attention does not seem to be granted the status it deserves. as a factor crucial for learning, it should be attracted to stimuli relevant for the learning process, yet in the influx of stimuli, there is no certainty that didactic procedures will automatically ensure goal-oriented behavior in the school context. not all verbal techniques function effectively and some, especially those based on domination strategies, are counterproductive causing boredom, negative attention, frustration or aggression. content interesting for students and positive teacher-student rapport always help, yet without appropriate forms of feedback they are not likely to guarantee full success. extra resources need to be sought among less frequently used classroom procedures, such as innovative self-assessment and peer-assessment hanna komorowska46 techniques as well as in non-verbal strategies involving silence and gesture. making trainees aware of the need for constructive attention attracting techniques is today one of the primary goals of teacher education. it should, however, be remembered that to give attention to others, teachers themselves also need attention not only from their learners, but also from parents and administrators. evidently they do not get enough considering the data collected in the talis survey quoted above. if more than four-fifths of a huge sample of european teachers feel dissatisfied and undervalued, it is crucial to start searching for underlying processes. research on causes of this undesirable state of affairs was launched by the oecd by a group of researchers who came up with a list of four basic factors—a lack of autonomy in professional decisions (the intrinsic component), unpleasant atmosphere of the workplace (the external component), barriers in professional development resulting in a blocked career path (the temporal component) and stress or burnout caused by lack of success and limited options. the oecd report explicitly states that positive atmosphere in the staff and administrative decisions respecting teachers and supporting their work are crucial for the quality of education: “teachers cannot make progress unless they are happy” (looney & wiliam, 2015). if governments expect to see high educational achievement in their countries, they must invest in schools and teachers. references baidak, n., balcon, m.-p., & motiejunaite, a. 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(2017). the formation of language teacher professional identity. słupsk: wydawnictwo naukowe akademii pomorskiej. witosz, b. (ed). (2006). style konwersacyjne. katowice: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego. the role of attention in teacher education… 49 zanto, th. p., & gazzaley, a. (2009). neural suppression of irrelevant information underlies optimal working memory performance. the journal of neuroscience 29(10), 3059–3066. www.ecml.at www.humanetech.com hanna komorowska tdas phänomen der aufmerksamkeit in der lehrerbildung und dessen bedeutung für die qualität des europäischen schulwesens z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g der artikel präsentiert überlegungen zu den ursachen für missverhältnis zwischen dem durch europäische einrichtungen im bildungsbereich geleisteten aufwand und der an umsetzung von programmzielen gemessenen qualität einzelner bildungssysteme. in anbetracht dessen, dass sich die beunruhigenden bildungstrends hauptsächlich auf dem niveau der schulklasse bemerken lassen, scheint es relevant zu sein, dass man in erster linie die psychologischen und nicht die organisatorischen faktoren unter die lupe nimmt. im artikel wird die these gestellt, dass man auf der suche nach gründen für misserfolge das phänomen der aufmerksamkeit analysieren sollte, während bisher die motivation im fokus des interesses stand. es wurden daher die typen und aspekte der aufmerksamkeit, die tendenzen zu deren umlenkung, sowie die techniken zur gewinnung und aufrechterhaltung von schüleraufmerksamkeit erläutert, um deren ablenkung entgegenzuwirken. darüber hinaus wurde die frage der ausrichtung von lehreraufmerksamkeit angesprochen. auf dieser grundlage wurden die forderungen an lehrprogramme und die fortbzw. weiterbildung der lehrer formuliert, die man um solche verbalen und nonverbalen förderungsstrategien für anziehung und aufrechterhaltung von schüleraufmerksamkeit erweitern sollte, die mit keiner notwendigkeit, das vorher entwickelte unterrichtsszenario zu modifizieren, zusammenhängen würden. schlüsselwörter: fremdsprachenlernen, bildungsqualität, aufmerksamkeit, lehrstrategien, lehrerbildung theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 8 (1), 2022, pp. 85–104 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.9629 agnieszka ślęzak-świat https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0940-0532 university of silesia in katowice, poland development of digital literacy—translanguaging and transmedia note taking formats for academic reading a b s t r a c t generative note taking, being one of the strategies applied to manage difficult texts, requires not only comprehension and selection of information but also production. the current study focuses on note taking formats for a text read with the intention to summarize. its focal aim is to improve both practical and theoretical understanding of this activity. it involves the investigation into note taking behaviors of 103 second-year english department students, how they, as readers of fl, engage with complex texts, how they were instructed in note taking and what note taking strategies they employ for comprehending academic texts. the analysis of the collected data attempts to identify how readers’ (n = 103) translanguaging and transmedia (n = 103) note taking formats help increase their engagement in and access to difficult texts in l2. it shows that the subjects have not transitioned from the paper interface to the digital one, since they still display the screen inferiority effect in their reading habits. the collected data shows that only some subjects (n = 42/103) received some form of instruction in paper note taking techniques or digital applications facilitating note taking. the students were not able to enumerate more than four note taking applications which would be conducive to their formation of a coherent interpretation of the digital text they read. the author contends that overt note taking instruction in both paper and digital mode will create avenues for encouraging, interacting and engaging in reading. instruction in that field needs to be modified with regard to digital note taking/annotating tools to make use of the note taking formats available for processing digitally interfaced texts. keywords: note taking, screen inferiority, reading strategies, note taking applications, translanguaging https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.9629 agnieszka ślęzak-świat86 digital literacy—instruction literacy instruction is under challenge to change because the pedagogies have to be integrated with students’ everyday technology practices. students do not only need to excel in paper but also digitally interfaced texts, drawing information from a text and forming coherent interpretation of it (grabe & stoller, 2020). one of the strategies aiding the formation of coherent interpretation of the text is note taking (muller & oppenheimer, 2014; morehead et al., 2019). an analysis of note taking has a potential to illustrate the process of forming coherent interpretation of texts. long before having access to the digital interfaces, readers’ process of paper-based interpretation text was accompanied by physical actions of a reader such as using bookmarks, tracing the text with a finger or pencil, making notes on the margins, that is, annotating, plain scribbling or doodling. such interpretation facilitating tools appearing as comments on the margins (marginalia) can be traced back to 500 b.c. in the form of scholia (dickey, 2007), which contained additional clues to the interpretation of the texts that they accompanied. now, with education shifting into the online realm, we have to take into consideration lorenzo and dzuiban’s (2006, p. 2) claims that “students aren’t as net savvy as we might have assumed.” the problem is that students might not be savvy in interaction with paper text either. both paper and digital note taking formats need to be overtly taught to foster digital literacy that will support learning and skills, allowing students to manage enormous amounts of information that they have to filter and organize to form coherent text interpretations. the paper begins with a brief characteristic of the reading purposes and a discussion of the imprecise use of the terms note taking and annotating for reading in both paper and digital interface. next, the research on the use of translanguaging and transmedia note taking formats as well as the increase in cognitive effort conducive to the engagement in reading a text is reported. then the collected data is presented and discussed. the conclusions from the present study indicate that students have to be provided with environments in which they can both build knowledge and increase their skill-sets to manage difficult texts, thus teaching implications involve an overview of available digital note taking applications conducive to interpretation of digitally interfaced texts. development of digital literacy—translanguaging and transmedia… 87 note taking techniques in reading to integrate information and write undoubtedly, students must be equipped with strategies to cope with difficult texts (afflerbach et al., 2008; grabe, 2009; chodkiewicz, 2015; kiszczak & chodkiewicz, 2019; grabe & stoller, 2020). strategic readers begin with a purpose for reading and recognize that different goals require different types of reading (schwanenflugel & knapp, 2016, p. 219) and—consequently varied note-taking techniques. grabe and stoller (2020) enumerate the following purposes of reading: (i) reading to search for simple information; (ii) reading to skim quickly; (iii) reading to learn from texts; (iv) reading to integrate information; (v) reading to write (or search for information needed for writing); (vi) reading to critique texts and (vii) reading for general comprehension. all of the enumerated purposes will require generative note taking, however, for the purpose of the present study only reading to integrate and to write will be taken into consideration. generative note taking (summarizing, paraphrasing, concept mapping) requires three important activities: comprehension, selection of information and production (piolat et al., 2004). the major function of taking notes is to gather and transmit information conveyed in a text that needs to be remembered (armbruster, 2000; piolat & boch, 2004). in academic contexts, manipulating and anticipating relevant information are crucial because a note taker has to judge (middendorf & macan, 2002) and make decisions on what to prioritize (castello & monereo, 1999). note taking in reading to integrate information and write requires the ability to select, critique, and compose information from a text. thus, in the case of note taking with the purpose of summarizing the text, notes constitute the first step of the composition, as it requires additional decisions about the relative importance of complementary, mutually supporting, or conflicting information and the likely restructuring of a rhetorical frame to accommodate information from multiple sources (grabe & stroller, 2020). the reader/note taker has to remember points of comparison or opposition, assess the relative importance of the information, construct a framework in which the information will be organized, and establish the main theme (grabe & stroller, 2020), thus note taking techniques may take the forms of substitutive techniques like mathematical (=) or iconic (→; ←; ↑; ↓, *), which are used not only to increase the speed of note taking (piolat et al., 2004) but also to facilitate the hierarchy of items in lists; or to transform the physical formatting of a linear text into special organization of notes (piolat, 2001). comments referred to in literature as annotations (marshal, 1997, p. 132) may take the forms of near or in the text markings, which record interpretive activity as the agnieszka ślęzak-świat88 result of careful reading. marshal (1997, p. 134) views them as a visible trace of a reader’s attention, a focus on the passing words, and a marker of all that has already been read. as writers, note takers must select the information to record and format it in ways that differ from the source material (pilat, 2001). thus, notes may take the form of marginal jottings and interpolations—being the record of an interpretive activity; highlighting; underlining; circled words or phrases (marshal, 1998) and help trace the progress through a difficult narrative. translanguaging and transmedia note taking formats the use of mother tongue or other languages that one knows while taking notes has not been thoroughly investigated, however, chaudron et al. (1994) and clerehan (1995), conducted research, showing that some note taking formats are automatized sufficiently to be transferred from one language to another, which might be conducive to their effectiveness due to the fact that the more deeply information is processed during note taking, the greater the encoding benefits (kiewra, 1985). unfortunately, due to the omnipresence of foreign language immersion learning programs—deliberately discouraging learners from using languages other than the target language in any activity connected with learning—the potential of l1 in developing l2 competence has been overlooked. using l1 for note taking purposes has many advantages as it serves as a sheer reference and a straightforward access to the concepts that are already well rooted in the brain, where the memory systems are intertwined to support the learning process. garcía et al. (2017) indicated the salient purposes for the strategic use of translanguaging in education in general. for the present study, the use of l1 (or other languages that one knows better than the target language—at least in the context of the text read) is of high importance as such a use of the other languages supports the students in comprehension of complex content of texts written in the target language. second of all, translanguaging provides opportunities for students to develop linguistic practices for academic contexts, and finally it makes space for students’ bilingualism and ways of knowing. vogel et al. (2018) expanded the definition of translanguaging treating the concepts not only as encompassing the linguistic resources individuals draw upon to make meaning, but also as the unique social actions enabled by the use of technology like sharing ideas in social networking and gaming as well as video sharing. the increasing uses of digital media for information seeking greatly expand the importance of both translanguaging and transmedia abilities needed development of digital literacy—translanguaging and transmedia… 89 to integrate information (van den broek & kendeou, 2017). readers have to manage texts acquired from multiple both print and online sources adjusting their note taking formats accordingly. as far as research on longhand vs. typed notes is concerned, it still displays screen inferiority effect (kong et al., 2018; singer & alexander, 2017; ślęzak-świat, 2019) as it indicates to the fact that that annotation on paper integrates more smoothly with reading than the on-line one (o’hara & sellens, 1997). further neurolinguistic research (vinci-booher et al., 2016; james, 2017) corroborates such integration, proving that handwriting connects more visual and motor networks in the brain being conducive to memorization and retrieval of concepts that are written down. such observations are also in line with the research of fiorella and mayer (2017) as well as luo and colleagues (2018), reporting that there is a greater number of images in longhand notes than the laptop ones. despite the screen inferiority effect, the issue of digital annotating will have to be attended as most of reading is done on screen generating greater cognitive effort. cognitive effort in note taking the digital culture has fostered immediacy expectation (perez-vega et al., 2016), which has led to general problems with focusing and sustaining attention in reading (salmeron et al., 2018). nevertheless, human cognitive capacity will have to adapt to accommodate to the rapid digitalization of educational context. annotations can serve as a visible trace of the reader’s attention (marshal, 1997)—the reader can support their attention by means of note taking when the text is difficult; they can chunk the text into pieces which are easier to interpret— displaying negotiation for meaning strategy. what is more, students report that they prefer reading their own notes because of the change of/in the register of the text into less formal language (marshal, 1998). surprisingly the immediacy expectation makes students choose longhand, paper format of their note taking. as kellogg and mueller (1993) indicate, writing by longhand is less effortful than using a word processor even for skilled typists and gérouit and collegues’ (2001) research shows that taking notes from a digitally interfaced text is more effortful. note takers as readers have to interweave both comprehension and production processes (piolat, 2005, p. 305). they first need to comprehend information and only then try to store it in the long-term memory by writing it down (piolat, 2001). thus, notes might be referred to as an external memory, whose content is more or less explicit (piolat, 2005, p. 292)—facilitating inferencing, memorizing points of comparison or opposition and functioning as compreagnieszka ślęzak-świat90 hension monitoring strategies. yeung et al. (1997) indicated that note taking viewed as an external working memory is a means to decrease cognitive load during reading. following the abovementioned view, it can be assumed that the major function of note taking is to capture and preserve information in a form that most conducive for the recall of ideas convey in the text. siegel (2018, p. 86) defines effective notes as selective, organized and elaborating on ideas expressed by the text authors so that the note taker can learn in generative and constructive ways. salmeron and colleagues (2018) note that a new set of advanced reading skills emerges with digitally interfaced reading, including focused searching and navigating of hypertext and multimedia sources as well as integrating multiple sources of information. skillful digital note taking (annotating and marking the text) would provide a scaffolding for the abovementioned skills and support working memory decreasing cognitive load during digitally interfaced texts. description of the study the present study attempts to address the following questions: what kinds of note taking training the students received and who delivered the instruction; in what language students recorded their notes; what motivated the students’ choice of language of note taking; what the declared and recorded note taking habits of the students were. the participants of the study were 103 university students aged majoring in english who were 20–23, taking the on-site/on-line course of academic writing in the summer term of 2020. as regards their learning history, the majority of the subjects (39) had a long english learning history covering the period of 10–15 years. the remaining subjects were placed in two extremes labelled as “less than 10” and “more than 15 years,” represented by 25 and 36 students, respectively. the main areas investigated involve the subjects’ note taking habits concerning texts that they need to summarize. the study involved collecting data from a computer-assisted questionnaire at the moodle platform as well as collection of note taking samples that the subjects were supposed to prepare before writing a summary of an article they chose to work on during a term-long course of academic writing. the articles of their choice were supposed to comply with the apa style sheets, they were of various length and content as they were chosen according to students’ interests. the subjects were allowed to perform the task at their own pace so there was no time pressure involved. the summary was to development of digital literacy—translanguaging and transmedia… 91 be submitted in a common (all study group had access to it) google document as one of the assignments required for obtaining the credit. the subjects in the current study can be considered as experienced but not distinguished note takers as they declare to have been taking all sorts of notes since they were 12 (n = 56) and 16 (n = 29) years old, and those (n = 18) who do not take notes at all. subjects declaring not to take notes were not really consistent in their statements, as this number declined with the answers provided for further, more detailed questions, for example, in the question about which language they chose for note taking, only eight (n = 8) persisted on the claim that they did not take any notes at all but then they (n = 18) declined to submit the assignment in which they were asked to take notes for the summary they were supposed to write during the next classes. out of the subjects who declare to take notes (n = 74), instruction on note taking was received by 42. instruction was provided by an english language teacher (n = 20); a computer science teacher (n = 5), a youtube tutorial (n = 5); a polish language teacher (n = 3), a parent (n = 2), self-study (n = 2); a schoolmate (n = 2); a website (n = 1) and the remaining two indicated others, unfortunately without listing them. as far as instruction of note taking in electronic documents is concerned, only three subjects (n = 3) reported to have received some form of instruction, enumerating the following note taking applications: evernote, onenote, google keep and simple note. none of them mentioned the application allowing for electronic annotating and note taking in google document that the group has worked on throughout the summer term of 2020, tools like, among others, stoplight annotator, highlight tool, which are free, easily accessible google documents add-ons. results and discussion the results presented and discussed demonstrate two areas of note taking conditions involving translanuaging and transmedia practices. the analysis found evidence for the discrepancy between what was declared by subjects in their questionnaire and what they performed in their notes taken. it is worth discussing these interesting facts in the light of the note taking applications available to digital readers. agnieszka ślęzak-świat92 translanguaging note taking practices as regards the language the notes were taken in, most of the subjects declared to use both l1 and l2 (n = 67). the group subdivides into those who conditionally use either l1 or l2 (n = 52) depending on their goals, and those who mix the two languages. table 1 shows the categories of conditions of language choice depending on the goal of the note taker. table 1. the conditions of language chosen for notes taken to summarize a text in l2 i take notes in l1 (polish) if … i take notes in l2 (english) if … number i have to memorise a lot of information quickly i have ample of time to study 21 i need deeper explanation i take general notes 17 i want to understand the text better i want to see a particular phrase in context 15 i can’t find a word in english i need full, proper definition of a word 6 there is a word i don’t know i make general notes 3 i find the word useful there is no good translation 2 as far as the condition for l1 choice for note taking is concerned, the goaloriented group can be categorized into representing three most salient choices: the selection of l1 is determined by effective memorization of information and shortage of time (n = 21) in contrast to the abundance of time for the use of l2; issues relating to detailed explanation (n = 17) and general note taking, and comprehension improving/monitoring (n = 15) in contrast to the need of contextualizing a given word/phrase. the collected results indicate the fact that the subjects strategically use translanguaging to take notes in a most efficient and time-saving way. those who opportunistically mix the two languages (n = 15) substantiate for their choice with the following arguments: — opting for the language that is more conducive to memorization (n = 6): polish or english depending on which of them is easier to memorize; — their need for knowing the equivalents in both languages (n = 4): i like to know equivalents in both languages; — linguistic economy (n = 2): i mix english and polish to make my notes shorter; — convenience (n = 1): in whichever language it’s easier; — immediacy of registering the idea (n = 1): in language the idea comes to me first; development of digital literacy—translanguaging and transmedia… 93 — for thorough comprehension (n = 1): in any language that allows me to understand it correctly. the group of subjects opting only for l2 notes when reading a text in l2 provided the following categories of arguments, which overlap with those given by the abovementioned groups. as far as the group declaring to use only l2 for their notes, they (n = 24) divided into the following categories: — convenience (n = 8): it is easier to take notes in english; — improved comprehension (n = 2): because they are easier to comprehend in the same language; — consistency, being further subdivided into: • read in l2—think in l2 (n = 7): the text is in english, so my thoughts are in english when reading it; • l2 text—l2 notes (n = 4): if a given text is in english then it’s easier to make notes in the same language; • l1 would be confusing (n = 2): i think that taking notes in polish would confuse me; • l2 summary l2 notes (n = 1): because it is easier to summarise the main topic if it is in the same language. just like in the groups conditionally and opportunistically using translanguaging, in the group declaring to use polish only, it is done mostly for facilitating purposes as the subjects (n = 4) claim that: if i find the text difficult—polish notes help me understand the text (original spelling); to translate difficult vocabulary; the meaning is not clear enough; because it helps to focus on the main points. figure 1. language chosen for note taking (annotating) interestingly enough, out of those who initially declared not to take notes (n = 18) in the question concerning the use of l1 or l2 language for notes agnieszka ślęzak-świat94 only (n = 8) of them persisted on not taking notes at all (n = 4), claiming that it was unnecessary (n = 1), they did not see a point in taking notes (n = 1). two of them (n = 2) declared that they do not take any notes apart from new vocabulary which allowed for determining the inconsistencies in their answers. transmedia ote taking practices the choice of note taking strategy starts with the decision of printing the text to be read (n = 75) and only 28 subjects decided not to print the article they were required to summarize. the group of subjects who decided to print the text emphasized first of all the physical aspect (i.e., eye fatigue, touch of paper, ease of navigating the text) of a paper copy that was important for them (n = 21): i find it easier to work with a text when i hold it physically, then general preference (n = 14), speed of taking notes (n = 13): it’s much faster to scribble something down than to open a program, choose a tool, and then scribble; convenience (n = 12); conducive to concentration (n = 10): it’s easier for me to follow the text on paper; improving comprehension (n = 7): it helps me to understand better; conducive to memorization (n = 4): i find it more effective to write right next to the tasks and writing helps me memorize; more organized (n = 1): much less hassle. the answers provided by the group of subjects who did not decide to print (n = 28) can be categorized into those ecologically oriented (n = 6): i’d rather go green; paper is made from dead trees; paper saving; i am eco-friendly and those (n = 6) for whom the pdf document is enough. the next category with answers relating to being more technology oriented (n = 5) claims: i think that it is high time to start working while using technology; i prefer digitalized version as my handwriting is bad and i write faster on a keyboard, and there is a group of subjects who have an electronic device allowing for paper-like experience when taking notes (n = 4): i have an electronic version on my ipad. as in the previous groups, there is a group of subjects choosing an electronic note taking format out of convenience (n = 4) google doc work became easier, and general, not substantiated, preference (n = 3). after having collected 85 note taking samples (18 subjects consistently declined taking notes, they even asked to do it as an assignment required for a credit) the notes can be divided into those generated on a separate piece of paper, printouts, e-text (pdf, print screen, referencing mode), and word-processing document (microsoft word). an interesting phenomenon is that only ten subjects (7.5%) out of those who decided to print it out (n = 75) decided to take notes on their printouts. it illustrates the fact development of digital literacy—translanguaging and transmedia… 95 that note taking is strategic and purpose driven, as subjects adjusted the preferences to the purpose of writing a summary which had to be typed. contrary to the declared reading preferences, most subjects (n = 33) decided to take notes in an electronic form. figure 2 shows the distribution of the subjects’ choices across the interface the subject chose for note taking. neither the digitally-oriented nor the word processing groups chose any of the enumerated note taking applications, neither of them chose the format of google document that is automatically supplemented with note taking applications such as stoplight annotator, highlight tool, mindmeister, and lucidchart. figure 2. interface chosen for note taking and average number of markings for a subject in a chosen interface. as far as the diversity of the formats of markings in note taking is concerned, the greatest number (n = 119) was generated by the group who chose to take notes on a separate piece of paper then the digitally-oriented subjects followed with (n = 70), and those who chose to take notes on printouts (n = 34) and the least note-taking marking was registered in the group who took their notes on a word processed document (n = 18). it turns out that the most note-taking, flexible, and generative—as far as markings are concerned—were those who chose the paper interface for their note taking with average of four markings for a single note taker. as for the formats of markings, they involve: paraphrase as a comment, character change (size, color, format of fonts), arrows (indicating the relationships between the concepts), lists, underlining, key words, color underlining, agnieszka ślęzak-świat96 highlighting, non-linear (e.g., change of writing from horizontal into vertical), graphic representation, mathematical symbols, exclamation marks and circling. thus, when it comes to the registered formats of the marking (n = 13) used in the notes, the group who chose a separate piece of paper for their note taking medium was the largest (n = 13), which was followed by the printout (n = 9), word processing (n = 6) and with electronic (n = 4) as the last one. it adds up to the paper superiority phenomenon not only in reading but also in note taking, showing that it allows for grater creativity and less linearity of the note taking formats allowing to express concepts in radiant mind mapping fashion that allows for the categorization of the concepts presented in a linear text to become areas and allowing to prepare the conceptual map of the processed text table 2 presents the formats of note taking marking for a given preference group. table 2. categories of note taking markings for a given note taking preference group markings separate piece of paper printouts digital word document total paraphrase 24 paraphrase as a comment 6 23 9 62 character change 17 3 2 22 arrows 14 4 2 2 22 lists 15 2 2 19 underlining 6 6 6 18 key word 12 3 2 17 underlining colour 10 3 2 15 highlighting 6 5 1 12 non-linear 6 6 graphic representation 6 6 mathematical symbol 1 1 exclamation mark 1 1 circling 1 1 total 118 33 33 18 202 as table 2 shows, a plain piece of paper allows for the greatest number of operations and manipulations of the ideas the note taker as a reader wants to present. as a result, it generates more engagement in the text. paraphrasing, in all of the preference groups, is the most often used marking format of reference to the text. the next two in popularity are character changing and the use of arrows. they seem to be like the posts directing the note taker’s development of digital literacy—translanguaging and transmedia… 97 attention to the issues of interest, showing the relationships and connection between facts—they are also used together with lists (which were also very highly applied markings), allowing for hierarchical representation of the text. the next two important formats of note taking are key words and underlining with coded colors. it is important to note here that when subjects were asked in the questionnaire about in what ways they indicated points of importance in the text, the answers they provided were not overlapping with the ones that were registered during their actual performance. the five categories that they enumerated were highlighting (n = 73), underlining (n = 48), paraphrasing (n = 33) and circling (n = 18). the abovementioned results highlight that students know little about note taking formats and their use is more intuitive than strategic. thus, increasing awareness of the possible note taking formats will lead to more skillful and effective use of them, resulting in an improved ability to select, critique, and compose information from a text. as far as the content of the comments provided near and within the text is concerned, most of the registered comments involved paraphrases of the text read (n = 25) identifying relationships to other concepts (n = 8) and key words (n = 5), which illustrate the interpretive activity as the result of careful reading and indeed show traces of a reader’s attention. note taking applications once subjects craft commenting, the following note taking applications can be recommended: evernote, microsoft onenote, google keep, and simplenote. their functionality and effectiveness shows best on a shared screen illustrating how it can be applied and tailored to the needs of paper-oriented subjects. mastering their functionality may help in the transition from paper to digital note taking, preventing the screen inferiority effect. the four note taking applications enumerated by subjects, evernote, simplenote, microsoft onenote, and google keep are free applications whose functionality would cater for diverse needs and preferences of note takers. when outlining the functionalities of the abovementioned note taking applications, it is evernote which is the first and the most popular one. it is an application allowing for saving web pages for offline use as well as creating notes and tags. notes can be accessed on laptops, mobile devices and through the web. it supports a wide variety of note types (text, images, audio memo, sketches, scanned documents, checklists, and clipped web pages). it also has tools for organizing and searching notes as well as its search text function in images. it can constitute a powerful note taking tool for subjects who rely on the use of key words which are a popular note taking tool in the present study agnieszka ślęzak-świat98 among paper-oriented subjects and hardly used among those taking notes digitally. both groups would benefit from an overt training in tagging (key word) functionality, which is also available in simplenote, which is accessible across devices for working on text only. it has simpler interface than evernote, which makes it easy to keep track of notes and tags. then, having in mind that most of the subjects in the present study are paper-oriented in their note taking, microsoft onenote is a note-taking application that mimics paper and can help in transition to electronic note taking for those who are paper-oriented. creating a new note involves clicking anywhere on the page and adding content to that spot, just as if working with paper. for the note takers relying on non-linear graphic representations of their track of thought as well as those who use a lot of arrows this is the application tailoring to their needs as sketches can be drawn. note takers who use a lot of color codes will also benefit from it as a background for notes looks like textured or lined paper. a text can be typed and images and file attachments can be dragged and dropped into notes. for note takers basing their notes on highlighting, there is a digital highlighter; those who like to create lists (that was a very often used marking in paper oriented subjects) can easily create checklists in onenote. as each note is meant to appear like a piece of paper, it can be moved around the page, placing a sketch memo next to a block of text. there is one feature which undoubtedly may be appealing to both paper and digitally oriented note takers, namely, optical character recognition (ocr) that can make all the writing searchable. it is important to highlight that for every note there is a record of its version history and there is an ink-to-text feature lets handwritten text be converted to type. finally, the simplest in use because of moderate functionalities is google keep. its interface has a form of digitized post-it notes (there are 12 bright colors for each note that can be categorized). note taking is done by typing, drawing, or adding an image. it is used as the google keep chrome extension, urls, text, and images can be saved while browsing the web. everything that is saved in google keep stays synced across all platforms. the most outstanding feature of electronic note taking is the possibility of having them recorded and searched through in a systematic way. apart from applications working independently from a browser, there are also such that function as extensions to browsers (liner, weava highlighter, super simple highlighter, multi-highlight, yellow highlighter pen for web) or google document add-ons. they allow for highlighting the content of web pages and tagging them with the key words. google documents, which were used by the subject of the study, is accompanied with a number of applications that can be downloaded, for example, stoplight annotator (simple commenting tool), highlight tool, mindmeister (allows for mind map like note taking), development of digital literacy—translanguaging and transmedia… 99 lucidchart (for those who take notes in list-like fashion). unfortunately, none of the subjects used them. figuratively speaking, it is as if using only a pencil having a pen case full of other writing utensils and never using or just trying them out. conclusions and teaching implications the results of the present study confirm that note taking formats are individual “writing signatures” (van waes & schellen, 2003) and that “more heterogenous view of taking notes” would be beneficial for learners of english (badger et al., 2001, p. 406). notes are idiosyncratic signatures, however, signing requires knowing how to write. knowing how to write requires training, which is planned and controlled. to develop handwriting, hours must be spent on tedious, repetitive exercises and, likewise, in the case of developing note taking, marking techniques would be conducive to the development of students’ abilities to select, critique, and compose information from the text. thus, students must be offered a range of opportunities to choose from so as to tailor it to their needs. as far as the use of l1 in note taking is concerned, the obtained results show what potential it offers. the subjects’ translanguaging practices provide fluid connections between the learned concepts without narrowing students’ range of thought. in the case of note taking, the richness of information that a student is exposed to and the speed and reliability of the note that are being made are important. a particular piece of information that is being recorded in notes is to trigger memories in the form of words which facilitate recall. translanguaging practices provide students with transitions they make between what they know and what they are yet to master. unfortunately, these are only translation programs which focus on l1; however, the results obtained indicate to their encoding (improved memorization) and better comprehension benefits, confirming that the more information is processed and manipulated during note taking, the greater the encoding and organization benefits for the generated summaries in terms of integration of conceptual items expressed by specialized academic vocabulary. now, having so many applications available, the choice of them constitutes individual signature. note taking while reading might be regarded as hyperlinking the text to the note taker’s ways of knowing, which allows for constructing means by which new information is integrated with the existing knowledge and personalizing the text in a way that is meaningful to the reader. lack of overt instruction on how to take notes presents possibilities of improving literacy in agnieszka ślęzak-świat100 general, be it paper of digitally interfaced. in the case of digital reading, such training will improve in general using, evaluating, and managing digital texts. to facilitate learning, technology needs to support it in authentic ways. thus having collected data on the subjects note taking formats, building instruction on note taking can be built on what students already know without imposing on them solutions that would not be practical or feasible for them and for lecturers/teachers. instructing how to take notes, that is, decomposing texts into smaller components, has to be taught by providing a scaffolding for assigning significance to information processed. such scaffolding can be provided by, for example, annotation studio (www.annotationstudio.org), which is an open source web application with commenting tools immediately accessible to students and lecturers. it facilitates the process of visualization of the readers’ approach to texts in the context of commenting it on the screen as both the lecturer and students can see the comments made. the visualizations provided by the application show instructors which passages generate most interest or difficulties. yet another tool for social digital reading and commenting is ecomma, which is a plug-in that works with most learning management systems such as canvas, blackboard or moodle, it allows a group of users to annotate the same text together and to share their annotations with each other. highlights can overlap. to distinguish which note corresponds to which highlighted passage, both light up when either is under the mouse cursor. if a passage of text corresponds to more than one note, both light up. each annotation is associated with a specific username. considering a forced and accelerated transition of education into the digital realm, the collected data indicate that students’ shift into digital note taking is not as rapid as could be expected. there was hardly any 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(2016). visual-motor functional connectivity in preschool children emerges after handwriting experience. trends in neuroscience and education, 5, 107–120. vogel, s., ascenzi-moreno, l., & garcía, o. (2018). what counts as a literacy act? examining pedagogical spaces created through digital translanguaging. in j. choi & s. ollerhead (eds.), plurilingualism in teaching and learning: complexities across contexts. taylor & francis. wylie, j., thomson, j., leppanen, p., ackerman, r., kanniainen, l., & prieler, t. (2018). cognitive processes and digital reading. in m. barzillai, j. thomson, s. schroeder, & p. van den broek (eds.), learning to read in a digital world (pp. 57–90). benjamins. agnieszka ślęzak-świat die entwicklung von digitalen kompetenzen – sprachund medienübergreifende notiztechniken für akademisches lesen z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g generatives notieren, eine der strategien zur bewältigung komplizierter texte, erfordert nicht nur das verstehen und die selektion von informationen, sondern auch die produktion. die vorliegende studie befasst sich mit notiztechniken für einen text, der mit der absicht gelesen wird, ihn zusammenzufassen. ihr hauptziel ist es, sowohl das praktische als auch das theoretische verständnis der tätigkeit zu verbessern. sie umfasst die untersuchung der art und weise, wie 103 studierende des zweiten studienjahres im fachbereich englisch notizen erstellen, sich als fremdsprachige leser mit komplexen texten auseinandersetzen und in notiztechniken unterrichtet worden sind sowie der strategien, die sie zum verstehen von akademischen texten anwenden. ziel der analyse der erfassten daten ist herauszufinden, wie sprachund medienübergreifende notiztechniken den lesern (n = 103) dabei helfen, ihr engagement für bzw. verständnis von komplizierten fremdsprachigen texten zu verbessern. es zeigt sich, dass die probanden vom papiernotizbuch zu digitalen notizen nicht übergegangen sind, weil der bildschirm in ihren lesegewohnheiten immer noch eine inferiore stellung hat. die erhobenen daten weisen darauf hin, dass nur ein teil der probanden (n = 42/103) in irgendeiner form in notiztechniken auf papier oder digitalen anwendungen zur erleichterung des notierens unterwiesen worden ist. die studenten waren nicht imstande, agnieszka ślęzak-świat104 mehr als vier notizanwendungen zu nennen, welche für die erstellung einer kohärenten interpretation des von ihnen gelesenen, digitalen textes förderlich wären. die autorin der arbeit behauptet, dass ein offener unterricht in notiztechniken, sowohl auf papier als auch in digitaler form, zur förderung, interaktion bzw. zum engagement beim lesen beitragen würde. der unterricht müsste im hinblick auf digitale notizanwendungen bzw. anmerkungswerkzeuge entsprechend modifiziert werden, um die für bearbeitung von digitalen texten verfügbaren notiztechniken in anspruch zu nehmen. schlüsselwörter: notieren, unterlegenheit des bildschirms, lesetechniken, notizanwendungen, translanguaging reviews theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 7 (1), 2021, pp. 143–147 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.9238 sarah mercer, tammy gregersen, teacher wellbeing [handbooks for language teachers]. oxford: oxford university press, 2020. isbn 978-0-19-440563-8, 155 pp. the book teacher wellbeing is a long-awaited resource handbook for (language) teachers. it comes from two renowned scholars, sarah mercer and tammy gregersen. they are both well-known for their pioneering work on positive psychology applications in second language acquisition and foreign language teaching and learning contexts. the present book is also written within the paradigm of positive psychology and the perma model of martin seligman (also the emaphatics framework of rebecca oxford) in its understanding of human emotions, character strengths, relationships and enabling institutions as applied in teaching contexts. the choice of the topic’s focus, which is the well-being of a language teacher, is justified by scarcity of material on how to keep teachers happy and functioning effectively and with full satisfaction in their jobs. as a consequence, advice given in the book shows how to avoid burn-out after some years spent in the classroom and how to keep high spirits and at least some degree of satisfaction and happiness in doing this demanding job. the aims that the authors set for themselves are to introduce and make teachers aware of the concept of teacher well-being in its different dimensions, pointing out its importance as a necessary condition for learner well-being. as the authors say in the introduction, “[d]rawing on research, we want to guide you towards a recognition of the importance of self-care, not only for you personally but also for your capacity to teach to the best of your abilities” (p. 1). a teacher who cares about his/her wellbeing is also seen as being well-prepared to develop his/her learners’ well-being. so the authors offer a helping hand to teachers not only in making them aware, danuta gabryś-barker144 but also in offering ideas on how to develop their wellbeing in various dimensions. the book contains eight chapters, an extensive bibliography and, importantly, a glossary of terms and an index. the chapters constitute a comprehensive picture of the concept of (teacher) wellbeing, as each of them focuses on a different aspect of wellbeing. the book starts with the introductory text entitled “it’s all about me,” which offers a justification for the topic, defines the concept of wellbeing and gives an outline of the book to help the readers make the best use of it. it resembles a guidebook leading its readers through different domains of well-being, where the authors discuss both external factors such as workplace and institutions, and internal qualities (mindsets, emotions) conducive to (or impeding) the development of one’s state of wellbeing. wellbeing is portrayed from the personal perspective of an individual but importantly the role of context and collaboration are also stressed as part of it. what is to be found in the chapter to follow, “me and my workplace” is the idea of a positive (enabling) institution, a construct well-known from positive psychology and defined as a place of work which allows the teacher to thrive both as a teacher and as a human being, to be autonomous and creative but, at the same time, to be able to identify with the institution. the authors believe that “the well-being of language teachers is a shared responsibility—for individuals and institutions as well as for wider educational and cultural systems” (p. 33), thus promoting a proactive approach of the teacher which will allow him/her to improve the workplace through autonomy and innovation. in turn, the chapter “me and my mind” introduces the role of self-beliefs, mindsets, multitasking—all the different facets of how our mind and the beliefs we hold influence what we do and how we do it. as the authors put it, “[…] we have asked you to reflect on how the habits of your mind influence the way you see yourself, juggling the multiple identities and roles” (p. 48). the next chapter, “me and my motivation” offers teachers a moment of reflection on different dynamics of teacher motivation combined with learner motivation and the role of achievement in the former case. the main consideration is said to be “the role of time as a resource, and how safeguarding time and using it wisely can sustain language teachers’ motivation […] the boost to our wellbeing that can be found through achievements, and the especially gratifying emotions that ensue when such accomplishments are savoured” (p. 67). being a teacher and functioning in a given educational context (and beyond it) is the main theme of “me and my relationships,” where the role of interaction (for example, a rapport with learners and with colleagues) is reflected upon and the development of socio-emotional competences is seen as fundamental. the authors focused, among other things, on “how we can strengthen our relationships with and between learners, and also with colleagues, by attending to our interactional style” (p. 85). one of the corner-stone principles of positive psychology is portrayed in sarah mercer, tammy gregersen, teacher wellbeing… 145 the chapter on “me and my emotions,” where the authors reflect on the multiplicity of emotions that exist in the workplace and assign a major role to them in managing teacher well-being. thus, the chapter looks at hochschilds’s idea of emotion labor (hochschild, 1983), this time in the educational context to cope with a variety of teacher personal anxieties, emphasizing the role of compassion—for oneself and for others. the authors, however, express the belief that “[s]elf-compassion needs to come first; only then we are in a position to share strength and positivity with others” (p. 101). the holistic view of human functioning so strongly promoted by humanistic psychology, and now by positive psychology, in particular postulates the view that physical well-being is also a necessary condition for success in life, here teacher life (the embodied mind). thus, the chapter “me and my physical wellbeing” reflects upon how stress and an inappropriate (unhealthy) balance between one’s personal life and work can affect one’s physical condition. the authors propose the need to achieve the physical wellbeing of teachers by “improving time management, rethinking how one perceives stressors, optimizing beneficial stress, and reducing negative concerns” (p. 117). in the concluding chapter, “me and my future,” the need to reflect on one’s personal development combined with personal growth and taking pride in being a teacher are the major focus. the authors ask the readers to visualize their ideal self, ought-to-be self, and feared self in a form of reflection looking into their future as (language) teachers. the authors also stress the importance of professional development through exploratory practice (ep), in which a teacher becomes a researcher in his/her own pedagogical context but, at the same, time stressing the need for appreciative inquiry for teacher wellbeing (4d model). in conclusion, the authors once again express their main aim in publishing a practical manual in language teacher wellbeing and offer a way forward for readers in the form of a list of questions for action, which are meant to “motivate you and inspire you to take steps towards wellbeing goals that are realistic, meaningful, and sustainable for you” (p. 130). in terms of presentation, each aspect of well-being is reflected upon in an individual chapter in a structured way. on each occasion, the authors introduce some theory; digested enough not to be too heavy for the readers. in this way, it constitutes background and gives credibility to what is the core of each chapter, that is, “a moment of reflection” for teachers based on a carefully constructed variety of tasks to be performed. the tasks embrace various reflective activities in a form of short surveys, each relating to a given aspect of well-being, sharing thoughts and observations with other colleagues in the staffroom, assessing one’s development over a prescribed period of time, making pledges, using de bono’s six hats, challenging one’s beliefs through reflection, to mention just a few. it is not only the “be inspired” quotations that the authors placed in each chapter, but also the tasks, which are so well-focused and uplifting that compel to become engaged in these genuinely creative awareness-raising activities. the danuta gabryś-barker146 tasks in each chapter are followed by a brief summary and a set of questions for individual reflection. for those who would like to read a bit more on a given topic, the authors have prepared a list of further reading for each chapter. there is much to admire in the comprehensive content, clarity of expression and engaging character of reflective tasks. the main merit of the book, i would say, is its treatment of the topic of teacher wellbeing, which is fundamental in helping teachers to discover or recover their sense of professionalism and the satisfaction they can draw from it. second, the book is grounded in theory but balances it well with practical applications and advice. last, it is so wellstructured and reader-friendly that it cannot help but be engaging and inspiring. it clearly demonstrates the authors’ passionate desire to pass on their conviction to other teachers. the authors cut the distance between themselves and the reader by using an informal you form of address, which creates a climate of caring and sharing (moskowitz, 1978). if i were to point out an element that is perhaps less achieved, it would be that although the authors refer to language teachers as addressees of the book, language teaching itself is not developed equally strongly throughout the book. it is loaded with specific anxieties of a linguistic nature (am i good enough to teach a language? will my learners spot my mistakes? will i lose authority?). on the other hand, all that is said and reflected upon in the book is universal for all the teachers. it demonstrates what significant implications positive psychology may have for teachers (and learners) and contributes to a whole body of research and its practical applications for (foreign language) education and beyond that, for the personal growth of teachers. i believe that this publication, although meant to be a handbook for language teachers, is much more valuable than that. it can become an important source for mentors, teacher trainers, and their trainees as well as for scholars not working in the area of second language acquisition and foreign language teaching. above all, it is an effective tool for making the reader reflect. this is in fact the authors’ ultimate goal, as they themselves write, “we hope this book offered you support in nurturing your wellbeing and understanding the value of self-care for your personal and professional lives” (p. 129). certainly, this book has the potential to achieve this ambitious outcome. references hochschild, a. (1983). the managed heart: commercialization of human feeling. berkeley: university of california press. moskowitz, g. (1978). caring and sharing in the foreign language class. rowley, ma: newbury house publishing. sarah mercer, tammy gregersen, teacher wellbeing… 147 oxford, r. (2016). powerfully positive: searching for a model of language learner well-being. in d. gabryś-barker & d. gałajda (eds.), positive psychology perspectives on foreign language learning and teaching (pp. 21–38). cham: springer. seligman, m. (2011). flourish: a visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being. new york: free press. danuta gabryś-barker university of silesia, katowice https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703 theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 7 (2), 2021, pp. 61–82 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.9986 christopher j. l. hughes https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1866-4329 university of illinois at urbana-champaign, usa jamie costley https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1685-3863 national research university higher school of economics, russia christopher lange https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3962-3278 dankook university, south korea the relationship between attention and extraneous load: bridging second language acquisition theory and cognitive load theory a b s t r a c t there has been a call in recent years for an integration of cognitive load theory into instructed second language acquisition practices to assist language learners by taking advantage of theories on human cognitive architecture (sweller, 2017). this paper seeks to move the conversation on how this integration might be achieved by presenting findings from survey data conducted with learners enrolled in online courses that use asynchronous video instruction at a cyber-university in south korea (n = 68). findings show a statistically significant positive relationship between distraction and extraneous load. these results are used to postulate a model for explaining how the relationship between extraneous load on attention can be integrated into second language learning theory. pedagogic implications of this model are then offered. these include explicitly signaling key vocabulary and grammar, ensure spatial and temporal considerations are made when using multimodal instruction, and placing learners at the center of decisions on the blend of media they experience in instruction. keywords: cognitive load, second language learning, media, online learning, video lectures an increasing number of university courses are offered partially or entirely online (seaman & allen, 2017). this includes language learning courses offered online by universities in south korea (lim et al., 2019). online courses in these contexts will often use asynchronous video instruction as a means of transferhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.9986 62 christopher j. l. hughes, jamie costley, christopher lange ring learning content to learners (costley, hughes, & lange, 2017; scagnoli et al., 2019; chorianopoulos, 2018; crook & schofield, 2017). asynchronous video instruction, when used in online learning environments, is said to be beneficial to both the learner and the instructor. for the instructor, there exists the capacity to review their lecture, making edits and corrections before sharing with learners, to tailor instruction for different audiences, and to play with different combinations of media to control for cognitive load (hughes, costley, & lange, 2019; morgan, 2002; sorg et al., 1999). for the learner, these recorded forms of instruction are said to offer affordances of ubiquity, self-pacing, and review (nces, 2008; traphagan et al., 2010). two ways to explain how individuals learn languages from asynchronous video instruction that could provide a framework for deciding the appropriate blend and use of multimedia instruction in the context of language learners engaged in online learning environments are instructed second language acquisition theory (isla) and cognitive load theory (clt). research into isla occurs in an environment featuring instruction or formal exposure to the l2. this instruction or formal exposure could be facilitated by a teacher, in a classroom, online, or a hybrid/blend of these mediums (allen & seaman, 2013). definitions of instructed second language acquisition point to three features as explained by leow (2019a): (1) the instructed setting, (2) the focus on the ‘mechanisms of learning’ (cognitive processes) employed in this instructed setting, that is, how l2 learners process l2 data in this setting, and (3) the potential manipulation of these processes by instructional intervention with the assumption that superior or faster l2 development will result. (p. 2) the most prominent theories that seek to explain second language acquisition through cognitive processes all state the importance of attention as a variable or process of language learning (leow, 2015). cognitive load theory seeks to explain the way learners process information input into their short term memory and then on to the long term memory where it is incorporated into schemas (cierniak, scheiter, & gerjets, 2009; paas et al., 2010). learners are said to possess a finite amount of processing capacity to complete this process. cognitive load is said to comprise three constituent parts: extraneous, germane, and intrinsic. germane load is the information related to a topic that needs to be processed for a learner to understand and generate meaning schemas leading to retention and output. intrinsic load is the naturally occurring difficulty inherent to a topic and is relative to the complexity of the topic. extraneous load is that which is detrimental to learners’ ability to process information. extraneous load may be caused by distracting elements in the instruction, unclear explanations, or unclear language whether spoken or the relationship between attention and extraneous load… 63 written. the greater degree of strain, the less processing power is available to learners to cope with intrinsic and maximize germane load. sweller (2017) has pointed out second language acquisition theories have focused on authenticity and immersion in a second language at the expense of factoring in the kind of cognitive architectural considerations clt provides to employ explicit instruction. this echoes discussions in the field of second language acquisition centered around how l2 input should be processed to maximize internalization of input: implicit/incidental or explicit/intentional (chen et al., 2011; faretta-stutenberg & morgan-short, 2011; hama & leow, 2010; leow, 2000). this paper goes some ways towards suggesting how clt and isla could be bridged by taking the element of attention, central to isla, and the element of extraneous load, central to clt, and calculating the strength of the relationship between these two constructs as reported by university students (n = 68) engaged in english as a foreign language courses at a cyber university in south korea. it is shown that loew’s (2015) model of l2 learning process in isla draws on all preceding theories and places attention as a vital factor for language learning. it is also shown that clt offers explanations of distraction through extraneous load. a model is presented factoring extraneous load into loew’s (2015) model. this augmented model is followed by suggestions on possible pedagogic implications pulling from sweller’s (2107) ideas on how clt can positively be combined into isla. this is of value because clt has presented answers to the problems incurred by extraneous load. by determining whether a statistically significant relationship can be identified between attention (as a key element in isla) and extraneous load (a key element in clt), it may be possible to address inattention/distraction as a construct of extraneous load and for isla practitioners to take advantage of the oven ready research and solutions offered by clt. literature review the role of attention in instructed second language acquisition loew (2019b) supplies a synopsis of the cognitive processes and variables postulated in the isla literature to play important roles in the l2 learning process. the synopsis shows attention is the only process or variable featured in every one of the theoretical underpinnings reviewed. some theories, mclaughlin’s (1987) cognitive theory, schmidt’s (1990) noticing hypothesis, tomlin & villa’s (1994) model of input processing in sla, van pattens’s (2007) 64 christopher j. l. hughes, jamie costley, christopher lange intake processing model/theory, and swain’s (2001) output hypothesis posit that linguistic data needs to receive attention/be noticed and receive repeated activation at the input or intake stages in the short-term memory for it to be processed on to long-term memory where new information is worked in with existing information. other theories have sought to provide more holistic or unifying theories to explain second language acquisition. in robinson’s (1995) model of the relationship between attention and memory, detection (i.e., attention) occurs before noticing in the process of acquisition. when detection is combined with rehearsal in the short-term memory, noticing occurs. this noticing is necessary for information to be passed to long-term memory. gass’s (1998) integrated model of second language acquisition, meanwhile, suggests the addition of apperceived input. this is, according to gass, the first stage of input, occurring in advance of detection and noticing. acting as a priming device, apperception is the internal cognitive act of observing and identifying qualities of a linguistic object and relating them to past experience in order to notice the input. this primes the learner to further analyze the input into meaningful units of language. a third group of theories suggest that language acquisition skills are the same as any other type of skill. ellis’s (2007) associative-cognitive creed states that learning a language is subject to the same associative and cognitive learning as any other type of human knowledge. l2 learning is more challenging than l1 learning because, when learning an l1, learners have come to pay attention to the constructions inherent in that language, but, when they learn an l2, this attention works against them as the constructions are different. this can be overcome by the learner being involved in a dialectical process of conscious-language development through the analysis of deficiencies. this requires sustained attention by the learner with distraction being detrimental. de keyser’s (2007) skill acquisition theory proposes that, initially, learning is explicit. after enough exposure and practice, learning shifts to an implicit process. with sufficient practice, through constant display of the particulars, learners develop skills with total fluency, spontaneously, and without error. attention, therefore, is required in higher degrees at the early stages for the more automatic stage to be reached. at these earlier stages, learners are also more susceptible to interference or distraction from other input irrelevant to development of the skill. lastly, truscott and sharwood-smith’s (2004) modular online growth and use of language (mogul) attempts to explain how acquisition occurs through interaction between language and cognition. the mind is divided into modules or systems that perform specialized tasks, with two modules specializing in language. there is interaction between the language and other specialized the relationship between attention and extraneous load… 65 modules (including conceptual, auditory, and visual) as language grows and is processed in the mind. if the conceptual, auditory, or visual systems are strained attempting to process information, there may be inhibitions to their working effectively with the language systems. the model of l2 learning process in isla the model of l2 learning process in isla draws on all the theories discussed thus far (leow, 2015). the model proposes three processing stages: input processing, intake processing, and knowledge processing. at the input processing stage, input transforms to intake. initially, intake is stored in working memory. the success of this stage is dependent on the level of attention (which can be peripheral, selective, or focal) and accompanying depth of the process, cognitive registration, and level of awareness. leow states that learning is unlikely to occur if the learner does not pay minimal attention to new information in l2 instruction. leow proposes three types of intake. these are attended intake (high peripheral attention, low cognitive registration, and low depth of processing), detected intake (high selective attention, high cognitive registration, and minimal depth of processing), and noticed intake (high focal attention, high cognitive registration, low levels of awareness, and low depth of processing). all three of these types can be lodged in working memory where they are available for recognition and incorporation into learners’ internal systems. deeper levels of processing could result in higher levels of awareness and allow learners to restructure or reinforce newly internalized information lodged in the system. the implicit/incidental vs. explicit/intentional debate in sla this debate focuses on the merits of l2 input processed either implicitly/ incidentally, without awareness and in the absence of deliberate exposure to a targeted l2 data set to be processed, or explicitly/intentionally, with learners’ attention being drawn to target language via formal instruction (loew, 2019b). there is empirical research to suggest that l2 learners may learn incidentally some elements of a target language without any formal instruction. studies have shown learners acquiring knowledge of syntax or morphosyntax in this fashion (grey et al., 2014; hamrick, 2014; kachinske et al., 2015; rebuschat & williams, 2012; robinson, 1995; rogers et al., 2016). other studies have shown implicit vocabulary learning is possible implicitly (day et al., 1991; godfroid et al., 2013; krashen, 1989; pitts et al., 1989). additionally, studies have pointed to the learners acquiring knowledge of phonology and form-meaning connections 66 christopher j. l. hughes, jamie costley, christopher lange (chan & leung, 2014; chen et al., 2011; graham & williams, 2016; leung & williams, 2014; marsden et al., 2013; williams, 2005). the weight of empirical research, however, points to the benefits of explicit/intentional learning. studies seeking to confirm l2 learners’ acquisition of phonology and form-meaning connections have been unable to demonstrate empirical evidence for this phenomenon (chen et al., 2011; faretta-stutenberg & morgan-short, 2011; hama & leow, 2010; leow, 2000). additionally, when conditions are compared, the benefits of explicit/intentional learning are evident (barcroft, 2009; denhovska, serratrice, & payne, 2016; hamrick & rebuschat, 2014; kachinske et al., 2015). furthermore, of four meta-analyses into the benefits of implicit/incidental vs. explicit/intentional, three showed significant effect sizes favoring explicit/intentional (goo et al., 2015; norris & ortega, 2000; spada & tomita, 2010), while the fourth (kang et al., 2018) also showed an effect in favor of explicit instruction in immediate post-tests, but an effect size for implicit instruction on delayed post-tests. clt and sla recently, sweller (2017) has argued that language acquisition instruction ignores what is known of evolutionary educational psychology and would benefit from heeding recommendations that stem from the understanding of cognitive architecture put forward by clt. the central structures and processes of this architecture are, says sweller, made up of five principles (see sweller & sweller, 2006 for a full overview). two of these principles are of relevance to this paper: the borrowing and reorganizing principle and the randomnessas-genesis principle. the borrowing and reorganizing principle states that learning a second language requires large quantities of clear written or spoken instruction and that anyone deliberately engaging with this instruction is using the principle. information gathered by borrowing from the instructed content is reorganized with existing information to achieve learning. the randomness-as-genesis principle states that a greater amount of accurate information being available will reduce the need for learners to attempt to fill in gaps by generating at random and testing their own interpretation of information without support or correction. knowledge that has randomness as its genesis is more likely to be inaccurate. missing instruction because of distraction will, then, reduce the amount of exposure to accurate information and increase the need for generation from randomness. the relationship between attention and extraneous load… 67 extraneous load and language learning contexts there is much related to attention/distraction and extraneous load in research carried out in the field of language learning. of most interest are studies focused on confirming the existence of two theories said to explain negative effects of multimedia on learning: the redundancy principle and the split attention hypothesis. redundancy has been shown to exist when a combination of text, narration, and images is used to explain a single concept. it has been demonstrated in multiple contexts that learners process information more effectively from images + narration only than they do when text is added (adesope & nesbit, 2012; kalyuga & sweller, 2014; mayer, 2009; mayer et al., 2014; mayer & fiorella, 2014). while some studies suggest that the redundancy principle does not apply to language learners (liu et al., 2018), it has been confirmed by a number of others (diao et al., 2007). additionally, the use of images to annotate text is said to be redundant for language learners (plass et al., 2003). the use of competing stimuli from multimedia forces language learners to be selective with their attention (wickens, 2007). the spatial split-attention principle occurs when learners view images and text that are poorly integrated. this can negatively affect cognitive processing because students are forced to split their attention between sources (liu & lin, 2011; mayer & moreno, 1998; rasch & schnotz, 2009). while questions have been raised about whether cognitive load explains this phenomenon in language learners (schroeder & cenkci, 2019) and there has been a suggestion that a reverse split-attention principle could be put forward to account for the combination of image + text to reduce cognitive load (lin et al., 2016), other studies have shown influences from this principle can be detected in language learning contexts (cierniak, scheiter, & gerjets, 2009; hung, 2009; al-shehri, & gitsaki, 2010). hypotheses h1. there will be a positive relationship between distraction and extraneous load. h2. there will be a positive relationship between illustration distracting from text and extraneous load. h3. there will be a positive relationship between text distracting from illustrations and extraneous load. h4. there will be a positive relationship between difficulty relating text to illustrations and extraneous load. 68 christopher j. l. hughes, jamie costley, christopher lange method participants this study was conducted on 68 students who were taking english as a foreign language (efl) classes at the open cyber university (ocu) in south korea. many students responded to the survey, but only the students taking efl classes were used in the present study. as many as 2,225 students submitted surveys. from the 2,225 surveys that were submitted, 230 were removed from the analysis used as part of this study, as the respondents had failed to fill out significant parts of the survey relevant to the study. this left 1,995 valid respondents, of which 1,027 were female (51%) and 968 were male (49%). the oldest subject was 61 while the youngest was 16, with an average respondent age of 25.2 and a standard deviation of 3.0. the respondents took a wide range of classes from several different colleges within the ocu. there were 122 different classes represented in the original data set, and they can be divided based on the ocu categorization as follows: lifestyle and health 28%, social science 27%, humanities 9%, business and management 10%, computers and information technology 8%, foreign language 7%, natural science 7%, and mathematics 4%. as the present study was about efl classes in the ocu, from the 1,995 subjects, students who were taking language learning classes were separated for the specific analysis used in this study. out of the 1,995 valid submitted surveys, 68 (4%) participants were taking efl classes online in the ocu. of these participants 35 (51%) were male and 33 (49%) were female. the ages ranged from 20 to 45 with a mean age of 26 and a standard deviation of 6.7. research context the ocu is the largest open online university in south korea with 23 member universities participating to provide online full-credit classes (jung & rha, 2001). the classes and subjects covered by the ocu are varied and the design, contents, and instruction within the ocu are provided by the 23 universities that make up the consortium (jung & rha, 2001). the classes in the ocu are mainly focused around the video lecture with limited learner-tolearner interaction as part of the formal class instruction. the relationship between attention and extraneous load… 69 research procedures the research that the data used in this study comes from was part of a series of surveys into the ocu. these surveys were varied, but many of them focused around the application of media within the context of cognitive load theory. the survey used was originally written in english, with items coming from previous research in online environments (see instrument development below). the items were then translated into korean, which is the language of the ocu. the translation was checked by an expert in online learning and an expert in the ocu itself. after the translation was found to be acceptable, the survey items were put into a google sheets form and sent to the ocu’s research ethics administrative department. once the ocu had determined that the research items were appropriate for their learners a link to the google sheet was put up on the ocu’s main administrative board with an invitation to take the survey as part of this research. all students who logged into the ocu during the time the survey was active were invited to participate. not all students who logged in completed the survey, so the data collection was one of convenience. however, this still gives some insight into how students perceive the learning context that is the ocu. the survey was left online for one month before it was taken offline and the data was downloaded for analysis. instrument development to create the construct used to measure media diversity in the lectures two differing approaches were used then combined. initially, 20 videos from the ocu were watched by the authors and the differing types of media contained therein were made into a list by the authors. also, 10 students who had taken ocu classes were asked to list the types of media that were used in the video lectures and how they interacted with them. these students were drawn from a group known to one of the authors of this paper to have taken ocu classes. they were helpful in double checking the initial list of media. the students agreed that the final compiled list accurately represents the way how they interacted with the media that was present in the ocu video lectures. the list created by the authors was then discussed with them, and the students agreed that the list seemed to accurately note the differing aspects of the ways they might interact with the lectures. thus, three items were drawn: (1) during the videos it was difficult to relate text and illustration to each other; (2) during the videos illustrations distracted from text; (3) during the videos text distracted from illustrations. to create the construct used to measure extraneous load, three items were used from leppink et al.’s (2013) article entitled “the development of an 70 christopher j. l. hughes, jamie costley, christopher lange instrument for measuring cognitive load.” this paper presents an overview of the three types of cognitive load (intrinsic, extraneous, and germane) and how to measure them. the present study uses three items from this research: the explanations during the lecture were very unclear; the explanations were, in terms of learning, very ineffective; the explanations were full of unclear language. the cronbach’s alpha for the extraneous load construct was .933. results in order to examine the relationship between distraction and extraneous load in an instructed second language acquisition context, the relationship between the combined distraction and extraneous load were analyzed. results from this analysis can be seen in table 1 and figure 1. table 1. the relationship between distraction and extraneous load mean distraction n mean extraneous load 5.33 2 2.83 5.00 2 4.00 4.33 4 2.83 4.00 8 3.50 3.67 10 3.57 3.33 5 3.27 3.00 9 2.93 2.33 2 3.00 2.00 14 2.29 1.67 2 1.67 1.33 1 2.00 1.00 9 1.00 table 1 and figure 1 show that when students reported multimedia was distracting in asynchronous video instruction, their experience of extraneous load increased. in other words, the higher levels of extraneous load students experienced, the more positive was their relationship with distracting media employed in the video lectures. in order to further investigate the relationship between the distraction from multimedia and the resulting extraneous load, statistical analysis was conducted to generate p and r values. these results can be seen in table 2. the relationship between attention and extraneous load… 71 figure 1. the relationship between distraction and extraneous load table 2. statistical analysis of results n mean range sd p r distraction 68 2.89 1–5.33 1.19 .00* .31 extraneous load 68 2.7 1–5.67 1.33 *sig. at .05 table 2 shows that there was a statistically significant relationship between the distraction experienced by learners when processing multimedia information and extraneous load as the p value is <0.05. it also shows that the strength of this relationship is, for this field, moderate at .31. in order to examine the correlations between variables, pearson’s bivariate analysis was conducted. the results of these analyses can be seen in table 3. table 3. correlations between variables variables 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 distraction 1 2 extraneous load .56* 1 3 age .13 –.00 1 4 gender .12 –.01 .05 1 5 years of study .13 –.01 .41* –.18 1 6 experience online learning –.11 –.28* –.13 –.15 –.06 1 *sig. at .05 72 christopher j. l. hughes, jamie costley, christopher lange table 3 shows a correlation of .56 between extraneous load and distraction. that is, students who experienced greater challenges from the distracting use of multimedia also experienced greater extraneous load. results also showed that older learners, those who identified as female and those who had studied for more years of study, experienced greater distraction from multimedia instruction. however, those with more experience of online learning experienced a negative relationship with distraction. all these groups had a negative relationship with extraneous load. this means that, while older, learners, and those with more years of language learning experienced greater levels of distraction, they were able to process distracting information better and therefore experienced less extraneous load than those younger, male, and with fewer years of experience of language learning. results showed that learners with greater experience of online learning also experienced a negative relationship with extraneous load as shown in table 3. of greatest significance (and two points that the reader should remember for the discussion section) is that those with more years of study and greater experience of online learning both experienced a negative relationship with extraneous load. next, the relationships between the distraction and extraneous load items were examined. correlations between the items can be seen in table 4. table 4. the relationships distraction and extraneous load variables * sig. at. .05 ** sig. at 0.1 items the explanations were full of unclear language. the explanations during the lecture were very unclear. the explanations were, in terms of learning, very ineffective. el combined difficult to relate text and illustration to each other .30* .36** .37** .40** illustration distracted from text .47** .62** .26* .52** text distracted from illustration .46** .64** .37** .57** table 4 shows a positive correlation between all the variables. of these the strongest relationships were between the diversity items textual information distracted me from the illustration and illustration distracted from text and the extraneous load item the explanations during the lecture were very unclear at .64 for the former and .62 for the later. this indicates that text—when used in a manner that will distract learners from illustrations—will cause the greatest amount of extraneous load caused by making explanations difficult to the relationship between attention and extraneous load… 73 understand. the relationship between illustration distracted from text and the explanations during the lecture were very unclear was the joint second strongest at .62. this demonstrates that the more distracting students found illustrations, the less clear explanations became. behind these were the relationships between illustration distracted from text and the explanations were full of unclear language (.47) and text distracted from illustration act and the explanations were full of unclear language (.46). these indicate that when text and illustrations are used in ways that are distracting, students are more likely to find the language used in instruction unclear. the explanations were, in terms of learning, very ineffective had a correlation of .37 with both difficult to relate text and illustration to each other and text distracted from illustration. this shows that when texts and images have unclear relationships, extraneous load is more likely to occur in the form of ineffective explanations. text distracted from illustration had a correlation of .36 with the explanations during the lecture were very unclear and .3 with the explanations were full of unclear language. this indicates that when text and images seem unrelated students will experience higher extraneous load through unclear language and explanations. finally, illustration distracted from text and the explanations were, in terms of learning, very ineffective. had the lowest correlation with .26. this depicts a weaker, but still positive, relationship between the distracting nature of illustrations and extraneous load caused by ineffective explanations. discussion all four of the hypotheses offered in this paper were proven: h1 stated there will be a positive relationship between distraction and extraneous load; h2 stated there will be a positive relationship between illustration distracting from text and extraneous load; h3 stated there will be a positive relationship between text distracting from illustrations and extraneous load; and h4 stated there will be a positive relationship between difficulty relating text to illustrations and extraneous load. these hypotheses were based on theories and findings in language learning contexts that suggested distraction would cause strain on learners’ ability to manage cognitive load. explanations for these findings could be found in the redundancy principle, said to occur when text, narration, and images appear together in instruction that explains a single concept (mayer, 2009; mayer et al., 2014). evidence of the redundancy principle existing in language learning contexts is supported by findings in this paper as text was shown to be distracting from illustration and illustration from text correlating with extraneous load. these findings support others that have shown 74 christopher j. l. hughes, jamie costley, christopher lange redundancy to exist in language learning instruction (diao et al., 2007) and counter those that suggest the principle does not apply in language learning contexts (liu et al., 2018). the positive correlation between distraction and extraneous load could also be explained by the split-attention principle. this principle states that using multimedia in ways that force learners to split their attention between text and images negatively affects cognitive processing. the research results showed that learners were distracted from illustrations by text and from text by illustration correlating with extraneous load and could, therefore, support the contention that split-attention is a valid principle in language learning contexts (cierniak, scheiter, & gerjets, 2009; hung, 2009; al-shehri & gitsaki, 2010) and counter those that suggest image + text reduces cognitive load (lin et al., 2016). the last result of note is that more experienced learners, both in terms of years of study and experience of online learning, experienced a negative correlation with extraneous load. this suggests the reverse-split attention principle, in which more experienced learners benefit from text + illustration combinations, may be present in this language learning context. this finding can add weight to the suggestion that reverse-split attention exists and should be considered when creating instruction (lin et al., 2016). this paper started from the position of exploring the suggestion by sweller (2017) that ideas generated in clt be applied to isla contexts to explain the process of learning and hindrances to that process. these findings present an opportunity for a model to help explain the detrimental effects of extraneous load on attention by adapting the input processing section of loew’s model of the l2 learning process in instructed sla (2015, p. 242). figure 2 shows a graphic illustration of extraneous load as hindrance in the l2 learning process. the relationship between attention and extraneous load… 75 figure 2. the model of extraneous load as hindrance in the l2 learning process this model can be called the model of extraneous load as hindrance in the l2 learning process. the model shows the proposed effects of extraneous load on input processing, attention, and intake in the working memory. in figure 1, low levels of extraneous load are present in the input. as a result of this low level of extraneous load, there is little strain on input processing meaning that cognit ive registration, awareness, and depth of process are fully activated as are the related attended, detected, and noticed intake. in figure 2, input is shown with high extraneous load. there is strain on input processing because of increased extraneous load. this means cognitive registration, awareness, and depth of processing are not fully activated. this, in turn, means attended, detected, and noticed intake are reduced. if one integrated these figures in the full version of loew’s model of the l2 learning process in instructed sla, the effects of extraneous load would show that less information is transferred to long-term memory meaning it is not available to learners when needed and learning is impeded. pedagogic implications it has been established that it is possible to model how extraneous load might be a hindrance on attention in l2 learning processes. this section suggests some practical implications of this idea. these are guided by sweller’s (2017) set of implications for applying clt to language teaching and focus on the benefits of reducing extraneous load. 76 christopher j. l. hughes, jamie costley, christopher lange sweller states that a reduction of extraneous load on working memory should be made essential in the organization of instruction. this is supported by the findings in this paper because a positive relationship between extraneous load and distraction was demonstrated. sweller recommends that instruction should be explicit and makes use of the borrowing and reorganizing and randomness-as-genesis principles meaning learners are not left to fill in gaps caused by extraneous load and distraction by creating their own meaning. one way instructors can do this is to clearly and explicitly signal to learners key vocabulary and grammar items. this takes advantage of the signaling principle (mayer, 2001), which says using cues and highlights, either aurally or visually, helps learners organize and process novel instruction. this will ideally be done by presenting words and pictures to each other and simultaneously to take advantage of the spatial and temporal contiguity principles (mayer, 2001) and to avoid split attention. in asynchronous video content this could be achieved by the instructor using vocal variety to direct learners through change and stress in the voice, explicitly stating an item is important, or the explicit presenting of keywords. if control over the display or hiding of keywords is placed with the learner, so much the better as more experienced learners have been shown to experience redundancy when audio, text, and illustration are all present (lin et al., 2016) leading to the expertise-reversal effect (sweller, 2017). this view is supported by findings in this paper that showed learners with more years of experience of language learning experienced less extraneous load. additionally, having narration that is conversational in nature and avoids using machine voices exploit the personalization principle that suggests people learn more when they are spoken to casually and the voice principle that states a human voice is more effective than a computerized one (mayer, 2001). conclusion this paper examined the relationship between attention and extraneous load experienced by language learners enrolled in fully online courses using asynchronous video instruction as the main form of instruction at a cyber-university in south korea. it was shown that a statistically significant positive relationship exists between distraction and extraneous load. this means when media is used in ways that are distracting for learners, the learners will experience greater levels of extraneous load. this is an important point because extraneous load has been shown to inhibit learning. using these findings, a model of extraneous load as hindrance in the l2 learning process was proposed that adapted the input & intake sections of loew’s (2015) model of l2 learning process. this the relationship between attention and extraneous load… 77 adaptation demonstrated a way in which an element of cognitive load theory could be integrated into isla. this integration addressed sweller’s (2017) assertion that language learners would benefit from practitioners employing ideas around human cognitive architecture in their pedagogic practice. following from this, suggestions were made to inform practice by suggesting that consideration be given to the way multimedia is deployed in online language learning contexts to reduce cognitive load. it was suggested this could be achieved by explicitly signaling key vocabulary and grammar items and presenting illustrations and text in a way that makes them clearly related by considering spatial and temporal deployment. findings also showed individual differences among learners correlated differently with variables. the most important finding was that more experienced learners experienced less extraneous load. it was speculated that this was because experience as a variable affects how learners process multimedia in language learning and that, while multimedia use may be a hindrance for less experienced learners, it may be advantageous to more experienced learners. following this finding, it was suggested that learners be given control of the media available in instruction so as to tailor and personalize content according to a learner’s processing needs. these findings will be of interest to instructors and instructional designers engaged in developing online educational content for language learners. limitations the findings presented in this paper should be treated with caution because they reflect the experiences of one group of learners consisting of a relatively small sample size engaged in a particular educational context. additionally, the negative correlation between years of study and extraneous load was weak and not statistically significant. more research will need to be conducted in similar contexts and with larger sample sizes in order to confirm the validity of the model of extraneous load as hindrance in the l2 learning process and whether clt can usefully be integrated into sla. future research based on the findings and discussion in this paper, a number of research questions can be proposed for future research. first, if extraneous load constricts attention, then does greater germane load expand attention? second, what effect does placing learners in control of the media they consume in instruction have on distraction and extraneous load? last, what effect does explicitly 78 christopher j. l. hughes, jamie costley, christopher lange signaling key vocabulary and grammar have on language learners’ experience of distraction 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(2005). learning without awareness. studies in second language acquisition, 27, 269–304. 82 christopher j. l. hughes, jamie costley, christopher lange christopher j. l. hughes, jamie costley, christopher lange die beziehung zwischen aufmerksamkeit und extrinsischer belastung: zweitspracherwerbstheorie und theorie der kognitiven belastung z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g in den letzten jahren wurde immer wieder dafür plädiert, die theorie der kognitiven belastung in den gesteuerten zweitspracherwerb miteinzubeziehen, damit sprachlernende durch die verwendung von theorien der menschlichen kognitiven architektur (sweller, 2017) unterstützt werden. der beitrag setzt sich zum ziel, die diskussion darüber zu öffnen, wie diese integration erreicht werden könnte. hierfür werden die ergebnisse von umfragen analysiert, die unter sprachlernenden in online-kursen an einer cyber-universität in südkorea durchgeführt wurden, in denen asynchroner videounterricht verwendet worden war (n = 68). die ergebnisse zeigen eine statistisch signifikante, positive beziehung zwischen ablenkung und der kognitiven belastung. in bezug darauf wird ein modell postuliert, das erklärt, wie die beziehung zwischen der kognitiven belastung und aufmerksamkeit in die zweitspracherwerbstheorie integriert werden kann. darüber hinaus werden pädagogische implikationen dieses modells vorgeschlagen. sie berücksichtigen unter anderem eine explizite signalisierung von schlüsselvokabeln und grammatik, räumliche und zeitliche bedingungen im multimodalen unterricht sowie die zentrale stellung von sprachlernenden bei den entscheidungen hinsichtlich der auswahl von medien im unterricht. schlüsselwörter: kognitive belastung, zweitspracherwerb, medien, online-lernen, videounterricht adam palka university of silesia in katowice, poland metaphors we academicize the world with? – metaphor(icity) perceived in the context of academia (a case study of english philologists-to-be) a b s t r a c t since the advent of cognitive linguistics in the 20th century (cf. lakoff & johnson, 1980/2003), the role and perception of metaphor(ization) started to change, not only among theoretical linguists and researchers, but also in the context of applied linguistics. thus, no longer treated as a mere ornament or anomaly, metaphor has been more and more appreciated by educationalists, course book writers, and teachers, but also by psychologists, clinicians, and other professionals. in short, it has become an educational and a diagnostic tool in many ‘applied’ areas of human development. in line with this rekindled interest in metaphoricity, in my study i attempt to learn more about awareness and perception of metaphoric conceptualisations among english philology university students (both freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors) in the environment of academia, an environment they naturally function in and belong to. my preliminary assumption is that despite the already widely acknowledged importance of metaphors in sciences and humanities (cf. cameron & maslen, 2010; haase, 2009, 2010; hermann, 2013), the perception and awareness of metaphorical construals in the ‘academic habitat’ among prospective english philologists may be variegated, ranging between more traditional and more modern perspectives. my intention is, then, to obtain feedback from them as it concerns their views on (the role of) metaphor(ization) in the academic habitat and beyond it, in their life and in the world in general. the results reveal that the students are closer to traditional rather than modern stances on metaphor, though the situation is more complex. keywords: metaphor(ization), academic environment, metaphor perception by students, metaphor awareness among students theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 6 (1), 2020, pp. 143–181 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.7744 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6879-6429 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en adam palka144 introduction since the present study attempts to ‘gauge’ various aspects of metaphoricity as they are identified and perceived by students of english philology (who are both languageand linguistics-oriented), it is essential at this point to present some preliminaries that may help the reader to place it within a proper framework and to see it from the appropriate perspective (as i believe it to be). even though metaphor is commonly sighted in audio-visual images (see, e.g., forceville, 2008), the mode which it is almost intuitively believed to reside in is language. in my study i hope to elicit answers shedding some light on my research questions by asking students to specifically write how they understand and perceive the notion of metaphor(ization). thus, it may be so that they will allude to other modes of metaphoric expression (like audial or visual), but it seems that language is, after all, the prevailing means of expressing metaphors, as humans often speak or write about and in metaphors. as nacey aptly points out, “[m]etaphor is a symbiosis of three different dimensions: language, thought, and communication. that metaphor is found in language – that is, the words we speak and write – likely comes as no surprise, but views differ as to whether metaphor is best viewed as an optional or intrinsic component” (2013, p. 9). theory and background the two opposing views on the nature of metaphor highlighted by nacey (2013) are crucial in the light of my considerations in this paper. along these lines one may formulate further (dichotomous) distinctions which may prove useful in the ensuing analysis. they will be presented and elaborated on gradually in the discussion and results sections here, but a few main traditions and ways of approaching metaphor need to be introduced right at the beginning. also, the idea that metaphor is ‘found’ in language, thought, and communication, and often at the intersection of these three modes, provides an inspiration for other theoretical sections that follow. still, my intention here is not really to provide the reader with a detailed overview of research on metaphor; rather, what i attempt is to highlight certain metaphor-related aspects, such as terminology, typologies, and classifications in relation to the issues underlying the goal of my study (which is metaphor perception and awareness among philological students). i employ these theoretical constructs selectively while structuring the main methodological tool of my analysis (the questionnaire given to students), both prescriptively and descriptively–prescriptively, as i offer students certain metaphors we academicize the world with?… 145 lexical items from which to choose, to facilitate the presentation of their views on metaphors; descriptively, as i expect that some of their own ‘private’ formulations characterizing/defining metaphor will coincide with some academic considerations about metaphor. metaphor in research—the aristotelian vs. the platonist tradition it is chronologically justified to start with two classical views, namely the aristotelian tradition and the platonist tradition of understanding metaphor. as nacey (2013, p. 10) further elaborates, the aristotelian tradition treats metaphor as a form of a substitution (a case of saying one thing but meaning another) or as a form of comparison (in cases when one thing is similar to another thing in some way, rather than the same as that thing). such a view implies that literal language is primary and figurative language is secondary, or, in other words, auxiliary. as nacey (2013) puts it in a nutshell, “[a] brief summary of the aristotelian view is then that everyday language is literal, and that metaphor is a detachable poetic ornament, no more than “a frill, a deviant, decorative aspect of language” (cited in winner, 1988, p. 15). in turn, the platonist view stresses the idea that metaphor is an intrinsic element of language, and so it “holds that metaphor is inseparable from language as a whole” (2013). here nacey enumerates certain theories of metaphor positioned within semantics, pragmatics or somewhere between these two. thus, metaphor residing in semantics is represented by black’s (1981) ‘interaction’ view, whereas metaphor embedded in pragmatics can be glimpsed in searle’s (1993) indirect speech act proposal and in sperber and wilson’s (1991) relevance theory (for details see nacey, 2013, pp. 10–11). the approach which i consider to be cogent is the one represented by the platonist tradition since it to a large extent corresponds with research and findings currently developed within the contemporary cognitive linguistic paradigm. it will be, then, intriguing to check which of the two traditions delineated above the participants of the study are drawn to. metaphor research in the 20th century—the terminological conundrum and a metaphor metalanguage in the second part of the 20th century we can see a breakthrough when it comes to the understanding of mechanisms governing metaphor. in short, many researchers believe these mechanisms are no longer solely linguistic, but predominantly cognitive. with the formulation of lakoff and johnson’s (1980) conceptual metaphor theory (cmt) starts a new era of metaphor research. adam palka146 an increasing number of scholars is drawn to the idea that metaphor undergirds our understanding and perception of the world, something encapsulated in the telling title of the seminal work written by the two researchers mentioned above––metaphors we live by. “[m]etaphors as linguistic expressions are possible precisely because there are metaphors in a person’s conceptual system” (lakoff & johnson, 1980, p. 6, as cited in nacey, 2013, p. 12). as nacey summarizes, “metaphor pervades both our everyday language and our thought, with the former merely a reflection of the latter: […] the words we use are derivatives of the metaphors structuring our thought” (lakoff & johnson, 1980, p. 6, as cited in nacey, 2013, p. 12). the theory initiated by lakoff and johnson is further developed, modified, and refined by other scholars, and what is obviously needed is new terminology. by this i mean that academics both coin new words or phrases to embrace new metaphor research, but also that they harness already existing lexis in different configurations and contexts. thus, for instance, every conceptual metaphor (understood in terms of cognitive linguistics) is believed to consist of the so-called source domain and the target domain, and usually a more abstract target domain is structured in terms of a more concrete source domain, and the whole process is called a “cross-domain mapping” (for more clarifications see, e.g., evans, 2007, pp. 51, 61–62). then it is also argued that numerous concrete domains are ‘embodied,’ meaning that they originate form bodily experiences. the point that i make by the aforementioned exemplification is that researchers mix and employ together well-known entrenched vocabulary with newly-coined words and phrases, and this usage (or ‘merger’) counts as technical language. when such a new approach to the study of language as cognitive linguistics is born, linguistic nomenclature should keep abreast of this change and the ‘gap should be filled’. professor vyvyan evans, who is a cognitive linguist, makes an attempt to do so by creating a glossary of cognitive linguistics. in the preface to his work he writes: [t]here are many terms employed in cognitive linguistics that enjoy wide currency within the field. nevertheless, there are many others which are primarily used within the context of one of the two main sub-branches. there are also other terms that are only used in the context of a specific approach or theory. hence there are inherent difficulties in selecting the terms to be covered so as to avoid a volume of this sort becoming too unwieldy. (evans, 2007, p. viii) the citation above is meant to be illustrative of something characteristic of modern meta-language concerning metaphorization, and that is terminological confusion and imprecision. (cognitive) linguists are anxious to describe various aspects of metaphors, such as, for example, their processing and typologies, metaphors we academicize the world with?… 147 so they proliferate words and phrases in various configurations. however, the more not necessarily means the better. the opening of the section in which nacey (2013) confronts convoluted typologies of metaphors reads as follows: “the typology of metaphor—typically as ‘alive,’ ‘dead,’ or somewhere in between—is an area of varied terminology, inconsistent or absent definitions, and strong opinion” (p. 21). here, i do not really try and aspire to present in detail the plethora of metaphor typologies, since this has already been done by nacey—i express my admiration, as she did it very skillfully and painstakingly. instead, i enumerate an impressive number of words appearing in nacey’s account, especially adjectives, employed by linguists who are at pains to pinpoint the essence and characteristics of metaphor (nacey calls them monikers and states that certain metaphors are discussed in the literature under these monikers; for details see nacey, 2013, pp. 21–30). sometimes i also briefly delineate academic contexts in which these monikers and other metaphor descriptors function, that is, i show them in certain constructed frameworks, if i believe certain juxtapositions and co-occurrences of these lexical items appear relevant. when it comes to alive metaphors, they may be further called innovative, active, fresh, live, novel, literary, newly-invented, poetic, and/or creative. dead metaphors are considered literal, which to many may sound contradictory, and rightly so; as black (1993) observes, “[a] so-called dead metaphor is not a metaphor at all” (p. 25). within cmt, the label ‘alive’ converges with the adjective ‘conventional,’ and these conventional metaphors are characterized as “[…] most deeply entrenched, efficient, and powerful” (see lakoff & turner, 1989, p. 129; and nacey, 2013, p. 22). it is worthwhile to note that the first adjective (entrenched) reads formal, while the other two appear less formal, but definitely more evaluative (efficient, powerful). conversely, for black (1993) cmt’s conventional metaphors overlap to a large extent with dead ones, which have become collectively institutionalized, and, as a result, banal; we may also discern a dichotomous distinction: dead metaphors are connected with banality, whereas novel metaphors (another adjectival metaphor descriptor) are characterized by vitality, and for black should be the focus of any theory of metaphor. metaphors that are no longer readily recognized as such are often labelled as historical, and these are further specified as opaque, whereas the other metaphoric pole, namely, conventional metaphors are considered to be potentially transparent and easily recognizable (but all of them are codified). interestingly, these two adjectives meant to be meta-linguistic in the context of metaphor characterization are metaphoric themselves, as they make use of the notion of the amount of light reaching something, in this case human cognition. more or less in the same vein, cornelia müller (2008) in her book metaphors dead and alive, sleeping and waking. a dynamic view presents her new adam palka148 dynamic model of metaphoricity by metaphorically employing the notion of sleep: in her view, metaphors are neither traditionally dead nor alive, but they are rather sleeping or waking, this degree of activation or metaphor alertness depending on context and intention. to continue this discussion and illustrate even more explicitly how metaphorically rich, dense, and potentially confusing the academic metadiscourse concerning metaphor can be, let us look once again at a longer fragment from nacey: black (1993, p. 25) too recognizes a cline ranging from ‘extinct’ to ‘dormant’ to ‘active’ metaphors, but adds “not much is to be expected of this schema.” thus, although he recognizes the validity of a tripartite typology of metaphor, black feels justified in conflating the extinct and dormant metaphors into the single (for him, uninteresting) category of dead metaphors in favor of focusing his energies on active metaphors alone, the “metaphors needing no artificial respiration” and thus the only ones he deems worthy of study. … goatly (2011: 29–38) posits a five-fold cline, ranging from ‘active’ to ‘dead and buried’, the stages in between characterized by the supposed ease with which the metaphorical source is evoked – although exactly how one goes about identifying the degree of metaphorical evocation when confronted with metaphor in actual discourse is left unsaid. … [a specific] portrayal of the life of a metaphorical expression is also reflected by the terminology of researchers who refer to conventional metaphors as ‘dying’ (e.g. traugott 1985) or ‘moribund’ (e.g. alm-arvius 2006), indicative of the apparently unidirectional nature of a metaphor’s progress from birth to death. (nacey, 2013, pp. 24–25; emphasis added) the quotation above is saturated with metaphors. i highlighted the lexical items characterizing metaphor in bold type to show that they are in fact metaphoric themselves, and that metaphor researchers do not really shy away from metaphoric metalanguage to address metaphor(ization). in a way, what we see above may be viewed as a good example of a metatext—it is about and in metaphors. metaphor-related metalanguage is also an issue raised by applied linguists in the context of numerous aspects, such as teaching/learning foreign languages, and metaphor application, perception, and awareness. the importance of metaphoric language as regards teaching and learning is stressed by block (1992) and later by cameron (2003), and boers (2000) specifically highlights metaphor awareness as being conducive to vocabulary retention; in turn, littlemore (2005) concentrates on metaphor in more academic settings, whereas gabryś-barker (2017) in her research addresses the issue of metaphor application and perception in the context of multilingualism. the metaphors we academicize the world with?… 149 common denominator in the case of the abovementioned strains of research is that they raise awareness (among students and teachers alike) concerning the role of metaphor that may be treated as a tool with which to accomplish specific educational goals. thus, metaphor-as-tool can be considered in the context of learners’ l2 language competence, or specifically, in the context of the so-called metaphoric competence. space constraints prevent me at this point from discussing the topic in detail, but a few aspects need to be mentioned, as they correspond with the study that follows. metaphoric competence is basically an array of skills to be mastered by learners for them to be competent users of the (second) language (see low, 1988), and it also consists of certain components (see littlemore, 2001). macarthur (2010), delving deeper into the production of metaphors by foreign language learners, suggests that, just as the metalangauge of syntax to discuss grammar is taught to students, so should be taught the metalanguage enabling students to discuss metaphor in the classroom (see also nacey, 2013, p. 34). this should be done with a view to improving students’ metaphoric competence, further specified by littlemore as the “ability to acquire, produce, and interpret metaphor” (littlemore, 2001, p. 459, as cited in nacey, 2013, p. 32). the rationale behind the present study is somewhat different, as i ask the philology students to provide me with information that is, in a way, ‘next to’ (though related to) littlemore’s definition quoted above. thus, in the questionnaire provided they rather attempt to define, capture, and contextualize metaphor in the world around them, so they basically strive to establish its position in this world and specify how they relate to metaphor(ization). this purpose seems to dovetail more with the communicative ingredient added by steen (2011) to the contemporary theory of metaphor, and new (or rehashed) meta-words appear to structure this new paradigm, namely, antonymous non-deliberate and deliberate. the former is associated with processing the language that is potentially metaphorical but perceived as literal or conventional, whereas the latter with more conscious and active processing of the language, a search for metaphor seen as such. deliberateness of metaphor for steen (2008, 2011) is not merely intentional (just like all communication), but is linked to “the clear intention of using one entity to think about another […] [and it] refers to an express strategy of molding one’s message in a certain way to achieve a certain effect” (nacey, 2013, pp. 28–29). i did not specifically include the adjectives non-deliberate or deliberate in any part of my questionnaire as potential metaphor descriptors since i assumed that without further clarification these items may be misleading and confusing; instead i suggest some other metaphor qualifiers that may more overtly point to metaphor’s non-deliberateness or deliberateness (e.g., implicit/hidden and explicit/obvious respectively). adam palka150 to clinch the considerations of this section, it is worth referring to six dimensions of metaphor highlighted by cameron (2010), and, again, couched in adjectival terms. thus, according to cameron, metaphors in use are “linguistic” (employed by people engaged in specific social interactions involving language), “embodied” (connected with our bodies participating and interpreting, and also reflecting certain aspects of physical experience), “cognitive” (in the light of the cognitive processes of connecting two concepts, see lakoff, 1993), “affective” (carrying evaluations, attitudes, values, perspectives, or beliefs), “socio-cultural” (emerging from social interaction), and “dynamic” (specifically connected with language use and broadly understood interaction between participants). i use these terms as an inspiration while structuring a specific portion of my questionnaire, not necessarily incorporating all of them in it, but instead employing words that i believe are functionally synonymous yet more self-explanatory. the issue of using specific descriptors (words and phrases alike) to help the philology students present what is for them the essence of metaphor(icity) is pursued further in this paper (for details see the sections: instrument and results and discussion, and the discussion following table 5). the theory and background—an overview the intention of the previous sections was, as already implied, to signal certain theoretical issues related to metaphor, since i may draw from specific tenets of some of the abovementioned theories while analyzing students’ considerations concerning metaphor(ization). for this reason, particular aspects of these theories were not discussed in detail, as they will be only selectively highlighted when i consider them to be pertinent to and illustrative of my analysis. also, the scholarly deliberations indicated above provided me with certain typologies, classifications and ‘labels,’ elements that i have readily (though selectively) woven into the questionnaire structured for the purpose of my study. this means that the theoretical section ending here not only correlates with subsequent empirical sections in terms of a (hopefully) wellreceived review of relevant literature and justification for this paper (provided above), but—first and foremost—that it to a large extent merges into my analysis in terms of being a crucial and extensive part of a methodological tool i employ below. more details concerning this correlation and ‘merger’ are discussed in the participants, research procedure, and instrument section that follows. metaphors we academicize the world with?… 151 the study purpose of the study the main purpose of the ensuing study is to first match and juxtapose the data obtained from what i call the metaphor perception and awareness questionnaire (given to students, henceforth referred to as mpaq, described in detail in the instrument subsection) with what various strains of research on metaphor offer, and then to draw conclusions concerning the ways in which, and the degree to which, these variably subjective and idiosyncratic students’ views on metaphorization converge or diverge with those more objective and scientific ones (stemming from the scholarly world). this is perhaps a good moment to clarify the wording of the title of the article at hand, as its first part may be somehow enigmatic to the reader. what i have in mind in the context of this investigation when i refer to metaphors we academicize the world with is that the philology students in question may be endowed with a certain type of metaphoric awareness and perhaps even metaphoric competence (cf. nacey, 2013, pp. 32–34). it is my initial premise that this type of awareness and competence may enable budding philologists to describe and process the world around them via metaphors, and to do so not only in the academic world (where metaphorization is assumed to be inherently present, at least in certain realms of this world ), but in the world at large. in short, i wish to check the awareness and perception of metaphoric realizations/conceptualizations among various groups of english philology university students (both freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors; full-time and part-time). research questions certain research questions have already been implied in the previous part of this paper, but they need to be formulated more precisely. 1. considering that the philology students interviewed have been exposed on a regular basis to numerous language classes since at least secondary school (both polish and foreign language lessons), what impact could these languageand linguistics-oriented classes have on the perception and functioning of metaphors in their lives? to put it more specifically, will philological students lean towards the more traditional aristotelian pole, and then place metaphor in the realms of the ornamental, the poetic, or the extraordinary (apparently the view traditionally promoted and embraced by teachers in adam palka152 polish schools)? or will they rather gravitate towards the more modern1 platonist pole, and for this reason position metaphor in the realms of the quotidian, the interactive, or the ordinary (ideas introduced and highlighted during linguistics classes at philological departments)? the above can be broken into two subquestions, namely: a. do the students highlight metaphor’s novelty and its conscious use? b. do the students emphasize metaphor’s automaticity, the fact that we hardly ever notice metaphors as they are so entrenched/conventional(ized)? 2. for the participants of the study, does metaphor reside in language, or rather in thought, or in some different realm? 3. to their way of thinking, in what areas of life is metaphor to be found? 4. which opinions on (the role and usefulness of) metaphor were prevalent, positive or negative? participants, research procedure, instrument, and methodology of data analysis participants. a total of 115 english philology university students from the english department (university of silesia in katowice) filled out mpaq (see the instrument subsection below) during the academic year 2017/2018. they were both freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors; full-time and part-time, and there were 86 female students and 30 male students among them, and their age range was quite broad, between 19 and 48. their exposure to english ranged between eight and 40 years. for the sake of simplicity and clarity, i grouped them into six categories, every six years, with the last category spanning eight years (33–40 years of exposure). eight participants did not provide any data concerning their exposure to english; in each of the groups—27–32 and 33–40—there was only one student; the group 20–26 included only six students (mean exposure: 22), 31 subjects put themselves in the group 8–13 (mean exposure: 12), whereas the largest number of the participants, namely 68 students, declared that they belong to the group 14–19 (mean exposure: 15). it may be safely assumed, then, that their level of english oscillated between b1 and c2, according to the criteria present in the common european framework of reference for languages (2001). a high level of proficiency in english attributed to the majority of the interviewed students is confirmed by the language they employ while addressing the open-ended parts of mpaq. research procedure. while nacey (2013) conducts a qualitative and quantitative research on the presence of metaphors in students’ writing (both 1 what i mean by ‘modern’ here is that the students often acquire linguistic knowledge within the broadly understood platonist tradition, as they are exposed to notions concerning modern theories of metaphor (e.g., the conceptual metaphor theory promoted by cognitive linguistics). metaphors we academicize the world with?… 153 natives and non-natives), i approach the problem from a more meta-linguistic and even meta-conceptual perspective, attempting to gauge students’ understanding of what metaphor(ization) is to them and how these views work against the background of both the academic (university) environment in which they have been functioning for some time as well in other nonacademic settings. thus, the purely academic and objectivized (linguistic, philosophical) views on metaphor will be juxtaposed and confronted with more every-day and individual perceptions of metaphors by philologists in the making. it is intriguing to observe which of the poles discussed earlier (the aristotelian or the platonist one) they actually gravitate towards, also bearing in mind that the informants in this study in a way straddle the non-academic, folk, intuitive realm, on the one hand, and the academic, intellectual, learned one on the other. as already stressed, in my questionnaire i do not employ (meta-)terminology (presented in the theory and background section) in its entirety, as i was afraid that some of the interviewed students may find a large number of these terms and formulations at best oversophisticated and intimidating, and at worst confusing and incomprehensible (even though i assume, as stated above, that numerous of them represent an advanced, if not proficient, level of english). the concept of metaphor was not discussed with the participants as, in my view, this would have distorted the purpose of the present study. my intention was not to suggest anything, and thus to elicit from the students responses concerning metaphor(ization) based either on their intuition or, even more so, on their knowledge they acquired either in primary and secondary school, or both. for this reason, i specifically instructed the students to not make use of any internet sources or other materials and rely solely on what they ‘have in their heads.’ the questionnaire was administered at the beginning of academic writing classes, and all necessary instructions were given and potential problems clarified. i also warned the participants that filling in mpaq (the metaphor perception and awareness questionnaire, described in detail in the subsequent section) would be a time-consuming and challenging task, and that the issues involved may appear to many participants rather abstract, regardless of their academic immersion. this is why i asked them to deal with it at home, at a leisurely pace, and fetch the completed questionnaire for the next class. consequently, the students had about one week to address it. it turned out that they approached this task very seriously and conscientiously, and only two respondents did not for some reason tackle the part devoted to selecting words/expressions characterizing metaphor, a thing that can be considered negligible. instrument. the metaphor perception and awareness questionnaire (mpaq) is divided into two parts, and both parts contain open-ended and multiple-choice questions. the language of instructions is english, and the inadam palka154 structions, in my view, are quite detailed and precise. in the open-ended parts the interviewees are allowed to express their views not only in english, but also in their mother tongue, or a mixture of english and polish, if for some reason they feel at a loss for words. at some point in part 1 of mpaq the students are also asked to enumerate a few examples of metaphors they know and use, but metaphor elicitation and production as such are not the objectives of the presents study. as already signalled towards the end of the theoretical part of this paper, the cameron’s (2010) classification of various dimensions of metaphor is echoed in the list of 94 descriptors included in table 5. thus, i do employ a semantically spacious term ‘linguistic’ and many other words that can be subsumed under this term in the light of metaphoricity, like, for example, ‘verbal,’ ‘grammatical,’ ‘poetic,’ ‘novel’ or ‘conventional,’ which corresponds with cameron’s (2010) conviction that “what counts as linguistic metaphor includes the full range from novel through to the most conventionalized” (p. 4). further, ‘embodied’ is replaced with more transparent ‘bodily’ or ‘experiential,’ the last lexeme being the reflection of the idea that metaphor is embodied when it is based on “memories of physical experience” (2010, p. 4). ‘cognitive’ (not employed in the questionnaire) is still implied by being broken into more specific mental and conceptual, the latter in accordance with the assertion that the idea of conceptual metaphor hinges on “the cognitive processes of connecting two concepts (cameron, 2010, p. 5 referring to lakoff, 1993). affective in the context of metaphorization implies that certain elements of linguistic metaphors infrequently “carry evaluations, attitudes, values, perspectives or beliefs, [and] when metaphor is used to talk about ‘something in terms of something else,’ it seems that people choose that ‘something else’ so that it expresses how they feel about what they are saying” (cameron, 2010, p. 5 referring to lakoff, 1993). in the questionnaire employed here, these overarching terms are reflected by ‘evaluative’ or ‘emotional’, but also by ‘religious’, ‘ideological’, ‘political’ and ‘stereotypical.’ the idea of ‘metaphor as sociocultural’ may be more specifically characterized as dialogic, (socially) interactive, and as something shared by people belonging to certain discourse communities (cameron, 2010, p. 6). thus, this aspect of metaphor may be found in such questionnaire items as ‘academic,’ ‘scientific,’ ‘professional,’ ‘specialist,’ ‘used in business and commerce,’ ‘medical,’ ‘culture-specific.’ finally, the sixth facet of metaphor stressed by cameron is ‘dynamic,’ which is also interactive, “as one participant in a conversation responds to another, or from the development of ideas, as a speaker or writer builds an argument, clarifies a position, or constructs a description” (cameron, 2010, p. 6). in my questionnaire, this dimension is potentially embraced by such lexemes as ‘descriptive,’ ‘informative,’ ‘illustrative,’ ‘persuasive,’ ‘theory-constitutive,’ ‘diagnostic,’ ‘pedagogic,’ ‘educational,’ or metaphors we academicize the world with?… 155 even ‘therapeutic.’ it is, however, highly probable that the participants of the study did not necessarily understand and interpret them exactly in the same manner as cameron (2010) or lakoff (1993). for this reason, the students had the chance to elaborate on their choices in the justification for your choices section and additionally come up with other overarching categories (for which they could invent ‘labels’ of their own) and thrust in them the selected descriptors (see part 2 in figure 1). in sum, all 94 descriptors were either inspired by or accessed from the current literature of the subject, and while selecting them i had in mind aspects and dimensions which are most representative of metaphor (research). as to the metalanguage, it is a crucial element of mpaq as it facilitates the characterization of metaphor in my questionnaire. i consider the language present in the questionnaire a compromise between an academic register and a less academic one. thus, some of the words/phrases presented earlier in this work may be given to the students as prompts, with the aim to encourage, trigger, and facilitate them to divulge their views on metaphor more precisely. still, it is important to stress here that they are not forced to opt for one specific approach, as the questionnaire offers numerous words and formu lations originating from all possible ‘camps’ of understanding metaphor. thus, the participants are not imposed anything, and they can select these items that best reflect their convictions on metaphoric language. also, i believe that, alongside the ‘metaphor meta-words’ at their avail, drawn from the literature of the subject, the students have their own metaphoric baggage, that is, their own experiences with and convictions concerning metaphoricity still from the pre-university period of their lives, ones that may be expressed by different words, their own words, not necessary included in mpaq and suggested by myself. generally, the questionnaire is structured in such a way that it combines open-ended with multiple-choice questions, and they are supposed to complement one another when it comes to eliciting information from the respondents. the names of registers employed in mpaq are inspired by the study carried out by steen and his team of linguists, who were identifying linguistic metaphors in dutch and english texts, and the registers they settled for were news texts, conversations, fiction, and academic discourse (steen et al., 2010). to this group i added the category other types in case some students decided that some other register types was/were not included in the list. the structure and the content of mpaq are presented in figure 1. for the sake of saving space, i made the font smaller and removed spaces and some other elements. adam palka156 part 1 → basic information about the student–tick as appropriate: □ female □ male □ age … □ exposure to english (in years) ……. □ freshman (1st year) □ sophomore (2nd year) □ junior (3rd year) □ senior (4th year) □ super senior (5th year) → your university specialty (e.g. business, teacher, translation): ……………… □ full-time □ part-time → when did you for the first time hear of and/or learn about metaphor? □ i don’t remember □ i remember: it was □ elementary school □ junior high school □ secondary school □ university i was …… years old then or/and →i was □ a kid □ an adolescent □ a youth □ an adult → in the box below, define metaphor(ization) using your own words (preferably in english; if for some reason you are not up to it, use your mother tongue, or a mixture of two languages) enumerate the most characteristic features of metaphor–the ones that for you encapsulate the essence of metaphoricity (you may use adjectives, nouns, verbs, phrases, sentences, or present them in any other way, also visually/pictorially). [the box provided] → do you use metaphors when you speak/write? tick below: □ never □ never in every-day life situations □ never within the university environment □ hardly ever □ hardly ever in every-day life situations □ hardly ever within the university environment □ often □ often in every-day life situations □ often within the university environment □ very often □ very often in every-day life situations □ very often within the university environment □ almost always □ almost always in every-day life situations □ almost always within the university environment □ all the time □ all the time in every-day life situations □ all the time within the university environment → do you hear/see other people use metaphors? tick below: □ never □ never in every-day life situations □ never within the university environment □ hardly ever □ hardly ever in every-day life situations □ hardly ever within the university environment □ often □ often in every-day life situations □ often within the university environment □ very often □ very often in every-day life situations □ very often within the university environment □ almost always □ almost always in every-day life situations □ almost always within the university environment □ all the time □ all the time in every-day life situations □ all the time within the university environment → could you please enumerate at least five examples of □ the metaphors you use? → …………………………………………….………………………………………………………….… □ the metaphors you notice people use? → ……………………………………………..................................................................... ...........…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..…... → usage of metaphoric language is most popular and easily seen □ in my contacts with peers □ in my contacts with family members □ in the university environment □ in different settings → where? …………………………………………………………………………………………..……. □ whenever people communicate → in my view, the level(s) of linguistic organisation where metaphors are mainly to be found and identified is/are □ morphology □ syntax □ lexical units/words □ others? …………………………………...………….. → in my view, the biggest number of metaphors can be found □ in news texts □ in conversation □ in fiction □ in academic discourse □ in other registers; where? ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. part 2 → basic information about the student–tick as appropriate: □ female □ male □ age ……. □ exposure to english (in years) ……. □ freshman (1st year) □ sophomore (2nd year) □ junior (3rd year) □ senior (4th year) □ super senior (5th year) → your university specialty (e.g. business, teacher, translation): ………………………... □ full-time □ part-time → do any of the words/expressions enumerated below coincide with your vision/role/understanding of metaphor(isation). which of them do you associate with metaphor? you are welcome to tick a few options. write a brief justification for your choices. in all probability, the words/expressions of your choice form some bigger groups/categories that can be named. could you please put these words/expressions together/classify them and label the categories they belong to? □ rare in language □ ornament used mainly in literary texts □ ornament used mainly in scientific/academic texts □ ornament used in all types of texts □ pervasive/popular in language □ carrier of crucial meaning in literary texts □ carrier of crucial meaning in scientific/academic texts □ carrier of crucial meaning in all types of text □ abstract □ concrete □ bodily □ general □ specific □ explicit/obvious □ implicit/hidden □ anomalous □ ornamental □ deviant □ irregular □ random □ misleading □ boring □ derivative (=not original) □ subjective □ artistic □ exaggerated □ controversial □ shocking □ emotional □ experiential □ evaluative □ intuitive □ oversophisticated □ insignificant □ impractical □ imaginary □ useless □ vague □ inexplicable □ elegant □ subtle □ poetic □ religious □ creative □ imaginative □ original □ novel (=new) □ extraordinary □ compact □ conventional □ realistic □ predictable □ systematic □ structural □ conceptual □ mental □ verbal □ non-verbal □ linguistic □ grammatical □ ideological □ philosophical □ political □ stereotypical □ neutral □ universal □ objective □ academic/scientific □ culture-specific □ useful □ descriptive □ practical □ precise □ down-to-earth □ ordinary □ informative □ illustrative □ persuasive □ theory-constitutive □ scientific □ professional □ literal □ specialist □ research tool □ diagnostic (tool) □ pedagogic (tool) □ educational (aid) □ used in business and commerce □ therapeutic/useful in therapy □ medical □ cinematic □ musical □ pictorial □ other ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. justification for your choices: ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. named categories of words/ expressions (taken from the list above) characterising metaphor (can be fewer or more than five) : [five square bubbles provided] …………………….. ……………………. …………………… ……………………. ……………………. thank you very much for your help ☺☺☺ figure 1. metaphor perception and awareness questionnaire (mpaq; my own design). metaphors we academicize the world with?… 157 methodology of data analysis. the results of data analysis emerging from mpaq are presented in seven tables, each illustrating a different mode or level of the usage of metaphoric language. table 1 shows the number/percentages of respondents who position metaphor in certain social environments (e.g., in family or university environments, among peers, and the like) in terms of frequency of metaphor use in these settings. table 2, in turn, reveals the frequency of metaphor use at specific levels of linguistic organization (pragmatics, semantics, discourse, morphology, syntax, lexis) according to the participants of the study. table 3 contains the quantitative data concerning the presence of metaphoric language in specific registers (news texts, academic discourse, conversation, fiction) in the opinion of the interviewed students. in table 4 i include the results reflecting the respondents’ choices concerning the frequency of metaphor use among/by themselves and others, with an additional variable being the setting (everyday settings and the university setting). table 5 summarizes the results concerning the frequency of the students’ choices from the list of 94 metaphor(icity) descriptors; these descriptors are ordered in the table from the least frequent to the most pervasive. table 6 is summative in nature as it contains students’ sample definitions of metaphor(ization) grouped according to the ‘saturation’ of certain features, elements, or relations. it should be noted at this point that the names of these features/elements/relations appearing in the left column of the table have been arrived at as a result of prior analysis of the definitions put in the right column. also, these ‘labels’ are mentioned in the order reflecting their frequency—from the least to the most common. obviously, in numerous definitions provided by those interviewed we can discern the overlap of these ‘labels,’ but the criterion selected for placing specific definitions into a given category is the predominant presence of a particular feature/element/relation. in parenthesis i also provide the sex and age of the participants. finally, table 7 is the continuation of table 6 in that it presents the frequency of occurrence of features/elements/relations characterizing metaphor in the students’ definitions from the most to the least numerous (numbers of respondents and percentages are provided). in sum, my intention was to analyze the data while proceeding from the (quantitatively) most graspable, general, and concrete aspects to the ones which are (qualitatively) more specific, detailed, but also more unwieldy in terms of measuring them. in my view, the order of introducing and discussing the tables described above reflects this train of thought. data presentation and analysis as already indicated, i divided the data that i elicited with the help of mpaq into seven areas. the quantitative data are presented in tables 1–7 adam palka158 and commented upon underneath. the quantitative results in fact stem from the qualitative analysis of the participants’ discourse and will also be presented selectively in the raw data, that is in the students’ authentic examples/accounts (taken from mpaq) which i classified as representative on the basis of the frequency of responses. thus, the areas explored are the following: 1. students’ initial exposure to metaphor. 2. usage of metaphoric language—its frequency in certain environments. 3. usage of metaphoric language—its frequency at certain levels of linguistic organization. 4. usage of metaphoric language—its frequency in specific registers. 5. frequency of employing metaphors (by students themselves and by others). 6. qualifying metaphor(ization) by means of descriptors (words/expressions). 7. identifying features/elements/relations present in and emergent from the students’ definitions of metaphor(ization). the total number of participants was 115 (n = 115, 100%). however, in all areas formulated above (except for point 1), the students were allowed to make a few choices (provided they were logical and not contradictory), which means that their views and preferences may in fact be reflected simultaneously in various rows and columns of the tables. also, in some tables i emphasize crucial elements by employing capital letters. 1. students’ initial exposure to metaphor. at the beginning of mpaq, i check when the students heard of and learned about metaphor for the first time. as it emerges from the questionnaire, a considerable number of the respondents (76 students; circa 66.09%) claimed to have had the first ‘contact’ with metaphor as children (either in elementary or junior high school), while 32 participants (27.83%) admitted that they did not remember the moment they had heard of/learned about metaphor; finally, only seven students (6.09%) asserted that they had encountered metaphor as late as in secondary school. it may be conjectured that many of those from the ‘don’t remember’ group may have come across or experienced (the use of) metaphor early in their lives, and so they have ‘known’ metaphor since time out of mind. 76 other students ‘discovered’ metaphor a long time ago, back in their childhood, so it appears reasonable to merge these two groups— the ‘childhood’ group and the ‘don’t remember’ one—into one group of the students who have had a long exposure to metaphor (108 students; 93.91%). 2. usage of metaphoric language—its frequency in certain environments. the distribution of metaphoric language in specific milieus as perceived by the philology students is illustrated in table 1. metaphors we academicize the world with?… 159 table 1 usage of metaphoric language—its frequency in certain environments environment number of respondents percentages (115→100%) in different settings 14 12.17 whenever people communicate 25 21.74 in my contacts with family members 27 23.48 in the university environment 28 24.35 in my contacts with peers 38 33.04 fourteen students (12.17%) ticked off metaphor’s presence in different settings without providing specific examples. however, a certain percentage of the respondents (16 students; circa 13.93%) did specify some different settings in which, in their view, metaphor may be present. thus, they enumerated the following settings where metaphors may feature: at work, in videos, in tv series, films, stand-up shows, books, literature, and poetry, among writers and poets, in the bible, in advertisements and commercials, in mass media in general, on the internet, in social media communication, while explaining something to another person, as well as among friends and co-workers (some of them also coincide with ‘other types’ discussed below in usage of metaphoric language—its popularity/frequency in specific registers). twenty-five students (almost 22%) claimed that metaphoric language is employed whenever people communicate, which would indicate that for them metaphor is something pervasive in communication and ubiquitous. this conviction is, in fact, confirmed by the choice of descriptor 78 (‘pervasive/popular in language’) by 31 respondents, which constitutes almost 28% of those interviewed (27.43%, to be more precise; see table 5). while analyzing students’ personal definitions of metaphor, i also established that 24 of them (21.23%) point to metaphoric ubiquity, which is again in line with the above findings (see tables 6 and 7). a comparable number of those interviewed consider family and university to be very popular settings for using metaphoric language (27 and 28 participants respectively, which is roughly 24% in each case). finally, the largest number of the interviewees (38 students; 33.04%) assert that they make use of metaphors while conversing with peers, in this way also suggesting that metaphor is common, informal, ordinary, and down-to-earth. this result does not appear to tie in with the usage of descriptor 6 (‘ordinary’) and descriptor 47 (‘down-to earth’), which were ticked off by only one respondent (0.88%) and 11 respondadam palka160 ents (9.73%) respectively to capture a characteristic of metaphor (see table 5). in the same vein, i found only three definitions of metaphor highlighting its daily and down-to-earth character (three respondents, which is 2.65%; see table 7). 3. usage of metaphoric language–its frequency at certain levels of linguistic organization. table 2 illustrates the ‘visibility’ of metaphor at certain levels of language structure according to the interviewed group of students: table 2 usage of metaphoric language—its frequency at certain levels of linguistic organization level of linguistic organization number of respondents percentages (115→100%) others (pragmatics, semantics, discourse) 13 11.30 morphology 15 13.04 syntax 24 20.87 lexical units/words 79 68.70 a relatively small number of the students would perceive metaphor as being associated with the category ‘others’ (13 students, constituting 11.3%). here, i did not suggest any specific area of language or linguistics, so those who marked this category specified it as ‘discourse’ (only one person), ‘pragmatics’ (two students), and ‘semantics’ (ten students). this is comparable to 15 students (13.04%) stating that morphology is the area where metaphors are mainly to be identified. however, by far the highest proportion of the students opted for lexical units (words) as the main source of metaphor. this does not come as a surprise in the light of more traditional views on metaphor (within the aristotelian tradition) within which metaphor is perceived as an element of figurative language and just as an ornament. thus, the platonist tradition, basically stressing the idea that metaphor is present everywhere in language (so also at the semantic, pragmatic, and interactive levels) seems to be less popular among the students (see also the metaphor in research—the aristotelian vs. the platonist tradition section, earlier in this paper). to make the above interpretation more complete, it is also worthwhile to look at languageand linguistics-related descriptors from table 5 and to check which of these the students filling in mpaq chose and in what numbers. that metaphor generally belongs to language and is conveyed by such descriptors as ‘linguistic’ (descriptor 49, 13 students, 11.5%), ‘verbal’ (descriptor 71, 26 students, 23%), and ‘pervasive/popular in language’ (descriptor 78, 31 students; 27.43%). there are also descriptors that point to the idea of metaphor being sporadic or not present in language—these are ‘rare in metaphors we academicize the world with?… 161 language’ (descriptor 28) and ‘non-verbal’ (descriptor 43) respectively. these were, however, selected by a relatively insignificant number of participants (five students, 4.42%, and ten students, 8.85% respectively). finally, the students had the chance to select certain descriptors that may characterize a specific manner in which metaphor functions in language, such as ‘precise,’ ‘ordinary,’ deviant,’ ‘anomalous,’ ‘oversophisticated,’ ‘vague,’ ‘literal,’ ‘ornamental,’ and ‘poetic.’ the last nine descriptors are enumerated in the order reflecting their growing frequency (and percentages) among the interviewees (in my view, exact numbers are not so relevant here; see table 5). 4. usage of metaphoric language–its frequency in specific registers. apart from linguistic organization, i was also interested in finding out what specific registers were considered by the philology students as the most metaphorical. the results are presented in table 3. table 3 usage of metaphoric language—its frequency in specific registers register number of respondents percentages (115→100%) other types 12 10.43 news texts 14 12.17 academic discourse 21 18.26 conversation 38 33.04 fiction 62 53.91 there were 12 respondents (10.43%) who decided to mark ‘other types’ option and specify what they had in mind. the ‘labels’ have already been mentioned in one of the previous sections (usage of metaphoric language—its frequency in certain environments) as they coincide with various ‘metaphoric environments,’ but it appears that some of these names can be in fact subsumed under one of the four main categories as a specific subregister (e.g., poetry, the bible, romance, drama, and books are labeled as fiction). apart from these, the students also came up with tv series, films, stand-up shows, commercials, and advertisements. a comparable proportion of respondents opted for news texts being the most metaphoric register (14 students; 12.17%), but a considerably higher percentage of those interviewed claimed that it is in conversation (38 students; 33.04%,) and in fiction (62 students, 53.91%) where metaphor is mainly to be found. the outcome presented in table 3 is contrary to that of steen et al. (2010), who found that english academic discourse is the register containing the greatest number of metaphor-related words, followed by news discourse, fiction, and conversation being the least metaphorical of them all (for details see steen et al., 2010, pp. 201–208). thus, when we compare the adam palka162 tendencies concerning metaphoricity of the four analyzed registers in steen et al.’s study and the ones emerging from mpaq, one may see that they are to some degree reversed: for the students news texts do not abound in metaphors, but in the light of the study by steen at al. they are quite rich in metaphors, being the runner-up after academic discourse, which in turn is not teeming with metaphors for the philology students filling in mpaq; conversely, conversation and fiction are perceived as markedly metaphorical by those interviewed (the former selected by one-third of the students and the latter by more than a half of them), and according to steen et al.’s conclusions fiction and conversation score very low when it comes to metaphoricity. these results may appear surprising at first sight, but what may account for these discrepancies are two different perspectives involved—one is methodological, precise, objective and scientific (represented by steen and his colleagues), whereas the other is more impressionistic, intuitive, subjective and ‘folk’—it is the one that, as i argue, should be ascribed to the interviewed philology students, perhaps some of them scientists-to-be, but still rather scientists in the making. the choice of metaphor descriptors from table 5 below also seems to reflect the perception of metaphoricity present in various registers (table 3). the words/expressions related to academic metaphoricity to a variable degree are selected by a relatively small number of respondents: ‘professional’ (descriptor 8, one student; 0.88%), ‘scientific’ (descriptor 14, two students; 1.77%), ‘carrier of crucial meaning in scientific/academic texts’ and ‘academic/scientific’ (descriptors 17 and 20 respectively, each selected by three students; 2.65%), ‘specialist’ (descriptor 26, four students; 3.54%), ‘research tool’ (descriptor 30, five students; 4.42%), and ‘ornament used mainly in scientific/academic texts’ (descriptor 38, nine students; 7.96%). on the other hand, the ones related to metaphoricity in fiction score quite high: ‘carrier of crucial meaning in literary texts’ (descriptor 83, 40 students; 35.4%), ‘imaginary’ (descriptor 86, 44 students; 38.94%), ‘ornament used mainly in literary texts’ and ‘ornamental’ (descriptors 88 and 89 respectively, with 50 students choosing each item, and this constitutes 44.25%), ‘imaginative’ (descriptor 90, 54 students; 47.79%), and finally the three top descriptors, namely ‘artistic’ (descriptor 92, 70 students; 61.95%), ‘creative’ (descriptor 93, 71 students; 62.83%), and ‘poetic’ (descriptor 94, 79 students; 69.91%). the two words feasibly related to metaphoricity in the news, which are ‘political’ (descriptor 40) and ‘informative (descriptor 41) still score very low, each of them accounting for 7.96% (nine students). as to conversational metaphoricity, it is difficult to capture unequivocally on the basis of the descriptors offered in table 5. 5. frequency of employing metaphors (you and others). another aspect worth exploring was the perception of metaphor usage by the students themselves and by people around them in every-day situations and in the academic (university) setting. the results are summarized in table 4. metaphors we academicize the world with?… 163 table 4 frequency of employing metaphors (you and others) you-every day number of respondents percentages (115→100%) others-every day number of respondents percentages (115→100%) all the time 1 0.87 all the time 0 0.00 never 3 2.60 never 4 3.48 almost always 4 3.48 almost always 4 3.48 very often 12 10.43 very often 16 13.91 hardly ever 38 33.04 hardly ever 31 26.96 often 57 49.56 often 57 49.56 you-university number of respondents percentages (115→100%) othersuniversity number of respondents percentages (115→100%) all the time 0 0.00 all the time 0 0.00 almost always 1 0.87 almost always 1 0.87 never 4 3.48 never 2 1.74 very often 10 8.70 very often 20 17.40 hardly ever 43 37.39 hardly ever 39 33.91 often 48 41.74 often 42 36.52 when it comes to the frequency of employing metaphors by students themselves and other people both in everyday and academic situations, the proportions are comparable. almost half of the respondents (49.56%) argued that both themselves and others use metaphors often on a daily basis. the opposite tendency is encapsulated by ‘hardly ever,’ and again the figures are comparable, as 43 students (37.39%) admitted that they hardly ever make use of metaphors every day, and 39 students (33.91%) attributed a very low usage of metaphors to others in the same everyday setting. as to the academic setting, the discrepancies between the ‘hardly ever’ and ‘often’ choices (in both ‘you’ and others’ categories) are not so significant, since ‘hardly ever’ is ticked off by 37.39% (43 students) and 33.91% (39 students) of all interviewees in the ‘you’ and ‘others’ categories respectively, whereas ‘often’ is marked by 41.74% (48 students) and 36.52% (42 students) of all participants in the ‘you’ and ‘others’ categories respectively. the choices of the expression ‘very often’ to refer to the frequency of employing metaphors by the students themselves and others in every-day settings are quantitatively comparable, as the results yield 12 students (10.43%) and 16 students (13.91%) respectively. however, the situation is different in the context of the university setting, as ten students (8.7%) declare that they use metaphors very often in this academic habitat, whereas twice as many of them (20 students; 17.4%) claim that it is others that very often plunge into metaphorization at university. at this point one may speculate that ‘metaphoric adam palka164 self-monitoring’ is present among philological students, but what appears to be more important among them is paying attention to the ways other students (or members of the academic community in general) express themselves in the university setting, a setting that stresses the importance of not only the content, but also—perhaps to an equal degree–of the form in which the message is conveyed. if we sum up the percentages of the ‘often’ and ‘very often’ groups in the context of the university setting, it transpires that more than a half of the participants (58 students: 50.44%) discern the metaphoric flavor of the university discourse, employed both by themselves (58 students: 50.44%) and other members of this community (62 students; 53.92%). this tendency is in line with the research on metaphor in sciences and in the humanities (cf. cameron & maslen, 2010; haase, 2009, 2010; hermann, 2013). finally, extreme declarations, like ‘all the time,’ ‘almost always,’ and ‘never’ were selected by a very small group of respondents, oscillating between null and 3.48% (four students). altogether, the results seem to reveal that the students acknowledge the presence of metaphor in their lives and that of others, but what attributes these metaphors are endowed with according to the philological students may be glimpsed by analyzing the results yielded in table 5. 6. qualifying metaphor(ization) by means of descriptors (words/expressions). table 5 illustrates the distribution of choices of suggested metaphor descriptors made by the interviewed students of the english philology. table 5 metaphor(icity) qualified by descriptors no. descriptor of metaphor(icity) number of occur ences percen tage [%] no. descriptor of metaphor(icity) number of occur ences percent age [%] 1 precise 0 0.00 48 explicit/obvious 13 11.50 2 boring 1 0.88 49 linguistic 13 11.50 3 insignificant 1 0.88 50 random 14 12.39 4 useless 1 0.88 51 novel (= new) 14 12.39 5 objective 1 0.88 52 universal 14 12.39 6 ordinary 1 0.88 53 practical 14 12.39 7 theory-constitutive 1 0.88 54 specific 15 13.27 8 professional 1 0.88 55 extraordinary 15 13.27 9 concrete 2 1.77 56 persuasive 15 13.27 10 deviant 2 1.77 57 literal 16 14.16 11 compact 2 1.77 58 pedagogic (tool) 16 14.16 12 realistic 2 1.77 59 mental 17 15.04 13 systematic 2 1.77 60 experiential 18 15.93 14 scientific 2 1.77 61 conceptual 18 15.93 metaphors we academicize the world with?… 165 15 diagnostic (tool) 2 1.77 62 stereotypical 18 15.93 16 medical 2 1.77 63 cinematic 18 15.93 17 carrier of crucial meaning in scientific/academic texts 3 2.65 64 exaggerated 19 16.81 18 evaluative 3 2.65 65 ideological 19 16.81 19 structural 3 2.65 66 shocking 20 17.70 20 academic/scientific 3 2.65 67 subtle 20 17.70 21 bodily 4 3.54 68 elegant 21 18.58 22 derivative (=not original) 4 3.54 69 used in business and commerce 21 18.58 23 conventional 4 3.54 70 intuitive 22 19.47 24 predictable 4 3.54 71 verbal 26 23.00 25 grammatical 4 3.54 72 educational (aid) 26 23.00 26 specialist 4 3.54 73 musical 26 23.00 27 other 4 3.54 74 useful 27 23.90 28 rare in language 5 4.42 75 implicit/hidden 28 24.78 29 neutral 5 4.42 76 misleading 30 26.55 30 research tool 5 4.42 77 pictorial 30 26.55 31 impractical 6 5.30 78 pervasive/popular in language 31 27.43 32 anomalous 7 6.19 79 original 32 28.32 33 oversophisticated 7 6.19 80 ornament used in all types of texts 34 30.09 34 inexplicable 7 6.19 81 philosophical 35 30.97 35 general 8 7.08 82 descriptive 36 31.86 36 irregular 8 7.08 83 carrier of crucial meaning in literary texts 40 35.40 37 therapeutic/useful in therapy 8 7.08 84 culture-specific 40 35.40 38 ornament used mainly in scientific/academic texts 9 7.96 85 emotional 43 38.05 39 carrier of crucial meaning in all types of text 9 7.96 86 imaginary 44 38.94 40 political 9 7.96 87 illustrative 45 39.82 41 informative 9 7.96 88 ornament used mainly in literary texts 50 44.25 42 religious 10 8.85 89 ornamental 50 44.25 43 non-verbal 10 8.85 90 imaginative 54 47.79 44 subjective 11 9.73 91 abstract 63 55.75 45 controversial 11 9.73 92 artistic 70 61.95 46 vague 11 9.73 93 creative 71 62.83 47 down-to-earth 11 9.73 94 poetic 79 69.91 adam palka166 for the sake of clarity, i do not refer to these parts in this section and only concentrate on the percentages attached to each descriptor. the information following the list of descriptors may in fact complement the discussion on students’ own definitions of metaphor(ization), which follows after table 6 below. what is striking when one starts to analyze the results presented in table 5 is that not a single person selected the adjective ‘precise’ (descriptor 1) to characterize metaphor. this implied a conviction of all interviewed students concerning the lack of precision of metaphoric language (evocative of the aristotelian stance on metaphor) seems to be consistent with the choice of descriptors scoring very high on the list, like ‘misleading’ (perhaps this descriptor being incongruous in this group as scoring high yet having a negative ring), ‘emotional,’ ‘imaginary,’ ‘ornamental,’ ‘imaginative,’ ‘abstract,’ ‘artistic,’ and finally ‘poetic’ (they range between 26.55% and 69.91%). on the other hand, the adjectives (c)overtly suggesting certain imprecision, like ‘useless,’ ‘deviant,’ ‘impractical,’ ‘anomalous,’ ‘oversophisticated,’ ‘inexplicable,’ ‘irregular,’ ‘controversial,’ ‘vague,’ ‘random,’ ‘exaggerated’ or ‘intuitive’ scored very low or relatively low on the list, ranging from 0.88% to 19.47%. a possible explanation for this tendency might be that many of these adjectives are evaluatively negative or at least not very positive, and if so, in students’ view they may not be associated with the decorative function of language, which in fact cannot reasonably be considered inherently negative. still consistently, numerous descriptors indicating the platonist attitude towards metaphor (according to which metaphor is inseparable form language as such) yielded rather low percentages, even though many of them are evaluatively positive, for example, ‘objective,’ ‘ordinary,’ ‘theory-constitutive,’ ‘concrete,’ ‘compact,’ ‘realistic,’ ‘systematic,’ ‘realistic,’ ‘scientific,’ ‘diagnostic,’ ‘medical,’ ‘structural,’ ‘predictable,’ ‘grammatical,’ ‘specialist,’ ‘informative,’ ‘down-toearth,’ ‘linguistic,’ ‘universal,’ ‘practical,’ ‘persuasive,’ ‘practical,’ ‘literal,’ or ‘verbal’ (the percentages ranging between 0.88% and 23%). in the same breath, one can enumerate three descriptors, namely ‘mental’ (15.04%), ‘experiential’ (15.93%), and ‘conceptual’ (15.93%), which point to the cognitive view of metaphor, apparently not so readily recognized by budding philologists. on the whole, the conclusion that may be drawn on the basis of analyzing the data from table 5 is that the students participating in the survey predominantly identify with the more traditional aristotelian manner of viewing metaphor (as figurative, ornamental, literary, poetic, and the like) rather than with the more ‘modern’ platonist way of treating metaphor (as popular, ordinary, ubiquitous, and something to this effect). 7. identifying features/elements/relations present in and emergent from students’ definitions of metaphor(ization). as many as 113 respondents formulated their own definitions of metaphor(ization). some of them are only slightly modified as it concerns their form—any interventions like spelling and grammar corrections, impromptu elaborations, my own comments, and the metaphors we academicize the world with?… 167 like are italicized and placed in square brackets. otherwise these definitions are left unaltered, with apparent inconsistencies and inadequacies of stylistic and logical character. these are, in my view, valuable in their own right as it makes it possible for the researcher to glimpse the process of structuring these definitions by students, and thus it gives insight into the dynamic, processual, often still-uncrystallized models/conceptions of metaphor(ization).2 additionally, these definitions are often complemented and ‘fine-tuned’ by a corresponding ‘justification for your choices’ section, where the students elaborate on reasons why they have chosen specific (groups of) descriptors to characterize metaphor(ization). this means that these two sections of mpaq are correlated and make the picture more complete. due to space constraints, it is impossible to present all 113 definitions and analyze each of them one by one. however, what is needed here for the sake of clarity is the synthesis of the key elements and tendencies emerging from the students’ deliberations on metaphor, and these are illustrated by sample definitions in table 6. the analysis and discussion of some of the definitions in question is crucial as some of these definitions are, in my view, not fully self-explanatory and need elaborating on. as to the twelve categories of features/elements/relations that i mention in table 6 (and later on in table 7, calling them also ‘labels’), they emerge as a result of analyzing all participants’ definitions and sometimes may be perceived by the reader as imprecise mental shortcuts. for this reason, i also relate them to the sample definitions themselves to show how i understand the link between the ‘label’ and the content of a given definition. while referring to them, i shall use the abbreviations that i attached to each of these ‘labels’ and are to be found in tables 6 and 7 (namely d, p, f, un, i, u, de, t, c, o, ef, and e). the sample definitions grouped in category d highlight the idea that since metaphors are present in numerous every-day contexts, they are not readily recognizable to the point of being almost invisible; yet it is implied by those formulating the definitions that they are practical and useful. additionally, metaphors are perceived as rather enigmatic, as they may contain hidden meaning, but the last wording is not clarified by the ‘definer.’ category d also overlaps with u and c categories, since metaphors pervasiveness (ubiquity) is stressed, and so is the process of comparing certain entities with others while structuring metaphors. 2 the value of students’ definitions-in-f lux seems to a large extent corroborated by the difference-deficiency dichotomy discussed by nacey (2013) in the context of bilinguals’ creativity and their ‘mixing’ of languages. she notes: “kachru (1985: 25) airs the idea of a cline of bilingualism where ‘what is at one stage of language use an error, may, at another stage, be a conscious innovation.’ in so doing, he raises a key issue: how to differentiate difference from deficiency, creative innovation from error” (nacey, 2013, p. 161). adam palka168 table 6 identifying features/elements/relations present in and emergent from students’ definitions of metaphor(ization)—sample definitions feature/element/relation sample definitions d daily/ down-to earth “i can’t enumerate them [metaphors] due to how automatic and instinctual they are. i don’t pay attention to them.” (male, 23) “metaphor is expressing some, usually abstract concepts by the use of other concepts. metaphors are widely used in literature, but also in everyday language; they are often based on comparing one thing/ concept to another.” (female, 21) “metaphor is a linguistic phenomenon used for saying something in other words. it sometimes contains hidden meaning. metaphorisation is a process visible in slang, literature, and everyday language.” (female, 23) p process “a process of stating something that is not straightforward” (female, 24) “a process in which we try to describe a situation, event, or an object in an original way.” (female, 24) f feeling “a ‘lexical device’ which enables us to express our feelings, opinions, statements in an interesting and original way.” (female, 24) “metaphor […] is imaginative [and] its vision depends on emotions of the person describing or explaining [employing?] it.” (female,30) “used when one does not want to say something straightforwardly, or when one wants to picture better their feelings or emotions or emphasise something. it cannot be taken literally.” (female, 23) un understanding “a creative way to make people think, and it brings out topics that normally don’t appear.” (female, 20) “metaphors help us to understand the world, they put abstract concepts into concrete ones, they are useful because they create familiarity; some of them are original and funny—that’s the point—they’re easy to remember and recall later, and they draw our attention...” (female, 23) “…they [metaphors] are not very obvious but commonly understandable.” (female, 22) i incongruity “an extraordinary combination of words that usually do not occur together.” (female, 24) “saying something using words that do not relate to a particular action/feeling.” (female, 23) “metaphor is a linguistic tool in which the meaning is not directly presented, but rather abstract—it occurs when the elements do not function together in every-day language, e.g. the evening of life, meaning ‘old age.’” (female, 24) u ubiquitous “… a stylistic device used both in written and spoken utterances.” (female, 23) “… in poems, but also in casual language.” (female, 23) “metaphorisation is the way of comparing things, situations from every-day life to art, science, literature, and describing them by the use of terms and phrases found in other disciplines, also in science. mostly and most commonly poetry is used as metaphor.” (female, 32) de device “a way of expressing oneself.” (female, 23) “… a metaphor is a stylistic device …” (female, 23) “a combination of words that cannot be translated word for word, but it has its literal meaning that has to be developed.” (female, 24) metaphors we academicize the world with?… 169 t transition “a word or phrase which refers to one thing but means another.” (female, 20) “metaphor is [used] to describe things that cannot be described in a way tangible things are [described]. we use metaphor to give the expression to these intangible things as if they were tangible.” (male, 23) “applying concepts from a not physical domain to the concepts of the physical one, e.g. love in order to understand it better. one thing is represented by something else.” (female, 25) c comparison “metaphor occurs when one object denotes another, and its most characteristic feature is comparison.” (female, 19) “depiction of something as something else” (male, 24) “metaphor is a phrase that is used to refer to another thing. they are built on similarity ...” (female, 22) o ornament “for me people who use metaphors too often want to sound smart.” (female, 23) “metaphor is the way to express the meaning of something in a way different than academic, using counterparts related to the world of nature, fairy-tales, poetry.” (female, 48) “a sophisticated or poetic way of presenting another idea, e.g. ‘a blue lake with an endless depth’ can be used for a description of someone’s beautiful blue eyes.” (female, 23) ef effort “when we think about a meaning of the word and it’s not so obvious on the surface; the word means something, but we think about it longer and we can indicate that it has another meaning as well.” (no data concerning sex or age) “metaphor uses words to express something indirectly, giving it a poetic value. it prevents the recipient [of the message] from perceiving the surrounding world automatically—it ‘stops’ his attention for a moment.” (male, 19) “a linguistic/literary device used for describing a thing in a nonobvious way and indirect way. it is tricky and sometimes ambiguous.” (male, 23) e elitist “saying the same thing in a roundabout manner. trying to sound intelligent. … metaphors are annoying, especially when you wake up and are not able to process information correctly. usually they are hard to understand, but in texts they look quite good.” (male, 20) “it allows us to avoid saying something literally, helps us to attach deeper meaning to the words, messages; as a result, the language is more elegant and poetic.” (female, 23) “metaphor is used very often in poetics or when someone wants to make their speech or text more elegant or to make a description easier. metaphor is using one phrase instead of another one. usually the meaning of these two phrases is not even similar, for example, ‘every cloud has a silver lining’ means that every situation has a positive aspect.” (male, 20) in the two definitions put into category p, the respondents specifically stress the notion of processuality as a pivotal element of defining metaphor (“a process of/in…”). thus, in this way they imply that metaphorization is for them something dynamic. in category f i placed three sample definitions according to which metaphor is employed when people want to convey more intangible content, namely, emotions and feelings. however, as one of the participants claims, emotion can adam palka170 also be something that determines the way a metaphor looks like, especially in terms of its imaginativeness and originality. one of the selected definitions in this group also overlaps with de category as it labels metaphor as a “lexical device.” the definitions in un category point to the conviction among some surveyed students that metaphors contribute to our better understanding of the world in a variety of ways. thus, metaphors make us realize and/or highlight things that would otherwise be dormant; they also make abstract things more tangible. again, as it was the case with some previous categories, un category seems to overlap with a few other categories, like c, t, o, and d, as the authors of metaphor definitions placed in this section of table 6 also stress the aspects of comparing and transiting (from one element to another) while structuring metaphors. the definitions presented in category i concentrate on the presence of a mismatch as concerns the nature, structure, or mechanism of metaphor. this is revealed by using such formulations as words “not occurring together” or “not relating to a particular action/feeling,” as well as by “the elements not functioning in every-day language.” this category may also be said to have some overlap with ef group, as dealing with incongruity may put a certain ‘cognitive’ strain (effort) on those who are to process metaphors; however, this is not explicitly mentioned in the definitions discussed here. according to the students defining metaphor, metaphoric ubiquity (u category) embraces both various modes of language (metaphor present in both written and spoken modes), and metaphors are omnipresent since they may be both conventional (entrenched phrases) and novel (poetry, idiosyncratic usages). one of the definitions considered here explicitly overlaps with c category (“the way of comparing…”). there are numerous words and phrases employed by the interviewees to define the term metaphor. i only highlight but a few in the table, but a longer list of these employed in the definitions situated in category d are a means, measure, tool, way, phenomenon, method, figure, as well as a cluster/combination of words, a developed and extended term, and a concept or reference. the very word ‘device’ (which serves as the name of this category) also explicitly features in some of the definitions (e.g., a ‘stylistic device’). the mechanism of transition, or moving from one place to another, is something noted in metaphor definitions by a considerable number of respondents (see table 7), though the word itself is not necessarily employed. thus, they will write about proceeding from literal to non-literal, abstract to understandable, literary to daily, ordinary to original, plain to semi-poetic, intangible to tangible, or non-physical to physical. as the idea of transition is conceptually rather schematic and general, it may be further specified with the help of some more detailed notions belonging to different categories (e.g., category i). there metaphors we academicize the world with?… 171 is also a considerable overlap of t with c category, as transiting and comparing in the context of metaphoric mechanisms can be conceptually easily connected (comparison can be considered to be a special type of transition). a significant number of definitions created by the respondents prompted me to form ‘c’ category, as the students associate metaphorization with comparison, either explicitly (using the words ‘comparison’ or ‘comparing’) or implicitly (using such wording as, for instance, ‘something as something else,’ or ‘similarity’). as mentioned above, c is infrequently inseparable from t category. in almost fifty per cent of the definitions constructed by the students one may find characteristics that may be embraced by the convenient umbrella term ornament, hence the presence of o category. conceptually, i contrast this category with d category, as ornamental aspects of metaphor are rather distant from its perception in terms of the daily and the down-to-earth. thus, the words/expressions which i managed to discern as employed by the students in the sense of o category are ‘poetic/poetry,’ ‘imaginative,’ ‘sophisticated,’ ‘symbolical,’ ‘literary/literature,’ ‘elegant,’ ‘creative,’ ‘original,’ ‘beautiful, and ‘high’ language’. the claim that certain metaphor definitions constructed by the interviewed students belong to ef category can be strengthened by specific wording and, on the whole, the presence of (cognitive) effort in creating and/or processing metaphors is implied quite overtly. the words/expressions signaling effort in the context of metaphor(ization) employed by the students in their definitions are the following: ‘no so obvious,’ ‘we think about it longer,’ ‘not so/ less/not straightforward,’ ‘more abstract,’ ‘ambiguous,’ ‘tricky,’ ‘non-obvious,’ ‘indirect,’ ‘usually understood by people with a great imagination,’ ‘complicated,’ ‘difficult to understand,’ ‘confusing.’ what transpires from this way of perceiving metaphor is that it is not automatized, it is more conscious, and it takes more effort to elicit it, to find, use, and process it. also, metaphor is seen as something rather rare in language, as some kind of deviation from the normal. this category to a large extent coincides with un category (due to cognitive processing being involved) and with e category, clarified in the next paragraph. finally, e category emerges as probably the most elusive and arbitrary out of all twelve categories employed in the present discussion. what i mean by ‘elitist’ in light of respondents’ metaphor definitions is that they perceive metaphor(icity) as some exceptional, special construct, in the sense of metaphor being employed on some special occasions and for special purposes (‘trying to sound intelligent,’ ‘attach[ing] deeper meaning to words,’ they make our language ‘elegant’ and ‘poetic’). also, they may be ‘elitist’ in the sense of being hermetic and not (fully) grasped by everyone (‘annoying,’ ‘hard to understand’), so in this respect a negative ring can also be detected. in short, according to the students the “elitist flavour” of metaphor may be positive or negative, so adam palka172 this criterion is very evaluative and idiosyncratic. as this category is mainly characterized by the notion of uniqueness, it also quite naturally converges with o and ef categories discussed above. at this point some further general and summative comments should be added. it seems that the ways in which the students approach and grapple the issue of metaphor(ization) indicate that the notion emerges as very elusive and often defies precise defining. thus, respondents’ definitions can be often characterized as imprecise, awkward approximations of what the concept in question is or may be.3 it should still be noted that quite a number of these definitions aspire to be rather precise and academic, but it is difficult to judge whether they drive the point home and are sufficiently effective. after all, even among researchers there is not a single definition of metaphor, and the plethora of classifications, divisions, stipulations are obfuscatory rather than clarificatory (it will suffice to return to the theoretical considerations of this paper). however, on the basis of not only the content but also the form of the definitions, i still argue that the opposite tendency prevails, namely, that most of these definitions are made consciously and deliberately private and impressionistic, and in this sense the philology students augment the more traditional, ‘official’, academic and ‘prescribed’ construal of what metaphor(ization) is and enrich it with a new twist, with something intuitive that is sensed and felt rather than learned and acquired in the process of formal (university) tuition. it seems that defining metaphor is not so much the product but rather a dynamic process, during which the students, by relating it to the world around them, negotiate the meaning of metaphor ‘within’ themselves. they seem to highlight metaphor’s affective, evaluative (positive and negative alike) and original potential, not losing sight of its utilitarian value, though the latter is also open to many interpretations (e.g., its usefulness is considered both in all areas of human activities and in very specific environments and genres, like poetry, literature, the world of academia, and others). i was then particularly ‘sensitive to’ and on the lookout for elements and fragments that would depart from the most predictable, proscriptively academic definitions of metaphor, though it is still risky to claim that we have an array of generally acknowledged definitions of this concept as such. however, if we do adopt the aristotelian and the platonist stances on metaphor as the benchmark against which to analyze the definitions in question (as well as the data presented here as a whole), we may predict that the students’ views on metaphor(ization) will oscillate between these two philosophy-inspired extremes, or perhaps will be the combination of these two approaches, even though somewhat inconsistently. 3 i tend towards the view also professed by nacey (2013) that in many cases we can speak of difference (as something positive) rather than of undesired deficiency (see footnote 2). metaphors we academicize the world with?… 173 the distribution of the ‘labels’/categories (in percentages) that i attach to the respondents’ definitions on the basis of analyzing these metaphor definitions is summarized in table 7. table 7 identifying features/elements/relations present in and emergent from students’ definitions of metaphor(ization)—percentages feature/element/relation number of respondents percentages (113→100%) d daily/ down-to earth 3 2.65 p process 4 3.54 f feeling 13 11.50 un understanding 17 15.04 i incongruity 20 17.70 u ubiquitous 24 2123 de device 28 24.78 t transition 31 27,.3 c comparison 44 38.94 o ornament 55 48.67 ef effort 63 55.75 e elitist 67 59.29 table 7 may be treated as the point of reference as the results presented in it have already been referred to in the previous sections of this paper. these results seem to correspond with the findings discussed earlier in this study, so as such the gleanings presented in table 7 are summative in nature. the daily/down-to-earth and processual perception of metaphor is represented by an insignificant number of those interviewed (2.65% and 3.54% respectively). 11.5%, 15.04%, and 17.7% of the participants of my study associate metaphor in certain ways with feelings, understanding, and incongruity respectively. the middle section of the table contains the ‘labels’ that point to the students’ conviction that metaphor is to be found everywhere (21.23% of those interviewed), that it is some kind of a device (24.78%, so almost onefourth of the respondents), and that it also involves numerous types of transitions (27.43% of the students). the quantitative tendency concerning metaphor’s ubiquity emerging from table 7 is roughly convergent with what is included in table 5, namely, that the descriptive phrase ‘pervasive/popular in language’ was selected by 31 students, which constitutes 27.43% of all respondents (perhaps incidentally, exactly the same number of the interviewees was detected as having stressed some kind of transition as a crucial characteristic of metaphor, as can be viewed in table 7). the mechanism of comparing certain constructs in adam palka174 the context of metaphor(ization) is highlighted by a sizeable sample of those interviewed (38.94%). finally, a high percentage of the students referred to or implied the ornamental character of metaphor (almost half of the respondents––specifically 48.67%), which again corresponds with the number of the participants who opted for the descriptor ‘ornamental’ to characterize metaphor (44.25%; see table 5). also, the assertion that metaphor in certain ways is to be linked with effort and that it is elitist is believed to be true by considerably more than half of the respondents (55.75% and 59.29% respectively). these notions, in connection with metaphor, will be clarified in the ensuing answers to the research questions section. answers to the research questions certain mini-conclusions have already been drawn along the way in previous sections, but it is necessary to address the research questions and come up with more general final conclusions. as concerns research sub-questions 1a and 1b, it appears that the majority of respondents subscribe to the view that metaphor is novel and consciously produced rather than automatic and conventional. metaphor descriptors like ‘imaginative,’ ‘creative,’ ‘artistic’ or ‘poetic’ are selected by almost half and by considerably more than half of those interviewed. in turn, descriptors like ‘conventional’ and ‘down-to-earth’ would yield roughly 3 and 9% respectively. while answering research question 2, it can be argued that the participants of the study claim metaphor to reside rather in language than in thought (the descriptors ‘mental’ and ‘conceptual’ from table 5 ‘attracted’ merely around 15% of the respondents each), as more philology students would perceive metaphor as something verbal than non-verbal (23% versus 8.85% respectively), and generally the students would consider the ‘language environment’ (especially art-related environments) as the natural one for metaphors (see, e.g., table 5). still within the context of metaphoric language, for the students artistic ‘habitats’ are seen (perhaps somewhat predictably and stereotypically) as more appropriate than academic ones, and also, as the results seem to reveal, it takes some effort to produce and process metaphors, so they are not perceived as predominantly automatic (not direct and obvious); rather, they are to be discovered, as they are implicit and hidden, which again may lead to another conclusion that metaphors are élitist, by which i mean that it requires more knowledge, intelligence, sophistication, and creativity to deal with them (see especially tables 6 and 7). within the language itself, for the students it is predominantly lexis that constitutes the source of metaphors (almost 70% of those interviewed opted for lexical units in this respect; see table 2). metaphors we academicize the world with?… 175 according to the respondents, the most popular areas of life where metaphor is to be found (research question 3) are fictitious texts and conversations, which corresponds with the idea (and is also consistent with the students’ assertion) of metaphor being to a large extent artistic/ornamental and present in interaction (see, e.g., cameron & maslen, 2010, and metaphor being searched for and analyzed in discourse). as concerns the evaluation of metaphors’ usefulness by the philology students, it can be glimpsed mainly either in their choice of overtly evaluative descriptors (table 5) or in some fragments of the definitions that they structure. on the basis of the metaphor descriptors offered in table 5, it is difficult to unequivocally state whether the students’ assessment of metaphors is positive or negative, though the former option seems to prevail. on the one hand, negatively-loaded words like boring, insignificant, useless, deviant, impractical, oversophisticated, inexplicable, irregular, controversial, and vague score quite low among the students (between 0.88% and 9.73%). on the other hand, rather negative random, exaggerated, shocking, and misleading range between 12.39% and 26.55%, which is markedly more than it was the case in the previous ‘negative group’. still, overtly positive practical and useful are selected only by 12.39% of the students and by slightly less than one-fourth of the participants (23.9%) respectively, and certain descriptors that may be interpreted as positive score even higher—original, descriptive, and illustrative with 28.32%, 31.86%, and 39.82% respectively. if we consider the ‘artistic bunch’ of descriptors to be also positive (ornamental, imaginative, artistic, creative, and poetic), then these are absolute leaders and indicate that the students appreciate the value of metaphors (they range between 44.25% and 69.91%). if we take a closer look at the definitions of metaphor(ization) provided by the participants of the study, then it may be concluded that the overwhelming majority of those interviewed attach a positive value to metaphor, or at worst describe it in neutral terms (108 definitions), claiming that it enriches our language and makes it more effective, elegant, creative or imaginative. if there is some negative ring detected in merely five definitions, then it is usually moderately negative, in the sense of students finding it effortful and arduous to process metaphors. the excerpts from the few more negatively coloured definitions are the following: excerpt 1: saying something simple in a very complicated way […]. for me people who use metaphors want to sound smart if they do it too often. excerpt 2: [metaphor] is tricky and sometimes ambiguous. excerpt 3: metaphor is a phrase which seems to be ambiguous and difficult to understand. excerpt 4: a metaphor is the usage of, most likely, intentionally indirect words or phrases, that one, for one reason or another, wishes to convey in adam palka176 a vague and/or less obvious manner. metaphors are unclear (for the ones unaware of their true meaning) […]. excerpt 5: metaphor [is something] complicated, […] using a lot of adjectives and nouns. the same tendency (mostly positive evaluation and vestigially negative one) is also discernible in mpaq in the students’ justifications following the part where they selected specific metaphor descriptors. thus, out of 103 accounts, 94 of them are neutral or positive, whereas only nine fragments contain features of negative assessment, but i would argue that some of them are ‘crypto-positive’ (accounts 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, and 9) and/or bordering on sarcasm and wit (account 8) account 1: they are not shown overtly, they are hidden and misleading; what is more, misunderstanding them may hinder the proper understanding of a text. account 2: when there are too many metaphors in a text, it discourages me to read it when a person uses too many metaphors. it intimidates me or makes me think that they want to show off. account 3: […] [metaphors] very often carry some deeper or hidden meaning that sometimes is difficult to understand, and as a result they can be misleading […]. account 4: not many people use metaphor because it is rather difficult, it is rare to use; most people read metaphor only in literary texts during classes at university or at school; metaphors are abstract and because of that they are difficult to understand and use in every-day life situations. account 5: [metaphors are] implicit, hidden—meaning of the metaphor is not clear; misleading— meaning of metaphor can be confusing; abstract. account 6: metaphors for language learners pose a great difficulty—they usually can be taken literally, which is why they are misleading and one has to be creative in order to get the meaning. account 7: metaphors are abstract, they do not obey any system. people who use/create them tend to be creative and usually intelligent. metaphors are misleading, especially for foreign language learners, as the latter treat them literally, like one of the characters from “guardians of the galaxy.” account 8: metaphors are annoying, especially when you just woke up and are not able [to] process information correctly. usually they are hard to understand, but in texts they look quite good. account 9: i usually associate the usage of metaphors with artistic, sophisticated, intentionally vague and ornamental context. in reverse order, i finally address the overarching research question 1. taking into account the data analyzed on the basis of all tables presented in this paper, metaphors we academicize the world with?… 177 the overall conclusion is that the philology students gravitate towards a more traditional aristotelian understanding and perception of metaphor, and a smaller percentage of the respondents would identify with the ‘modern’ platonist view on metaphoricity. thus, even though the awareness of metaphoric processes and mechanisms among the said students is high (from how they characterize metaphor, one can gather that they do seem to be endowed with university-acquired knowledge of metaphor), the more traditional (primary and secondary) school knowledge concerning metaphor seems to persist in those students. another thing is that occasionally the students structure their definitions awkwardly, imprecisely, or even intuitively, in this way oscillating between the aristotelian and the platonist poles, and this is only the matter of degree. it appears that irrespective of the formal schooling they received, the students possess a kind of intuitive (meta-)knowledge—they have a certain idea of what metaphors are for them and they just ‘live by them’ without actually pinpointing them on every occasion. so, as signaled before, they may sometimes feel at a loss for words when it comes to talking/writing about metaphors (though they rarely do), but they certainly do not behave like drax the destroyer, implied by a male student in account 7 above: rocket raccoon: [about drax the destroyer] his people are completely literal. metaphors go over his head. drax the destroyer: *nothing* goes over my head…! my reflexes are too fast, i would catch it. an excerpt from the script of guardians of the galaxy (2014) it appears that the students (and possibly other members of the academia) not necessarily academicize the world via metaphors, but they certainly metaphorize their world, and they also have diverse perceptions and variable awareness of metaphoric constructs. conclusions the purpose of the present study was to gain insight into the perception and awareness of metaphors by the students of english philology. in my view, the study has met its purpose in revealing certain tendencies among budding english philologist as regards their perception, knowledge/awareness, and application of metaphor(ization). however, potential limitations of the study should be mentioned. firstly, the length of mpaq may constitute a problem to some students since they may adam palka178 consider it to be excessively long, and thus unwieldy, time-consuming, and overwhelming. secondly, open questions in mpaq may be also discouraging for the interviewees as they are asked to provide much detailed information on the subject that many of them may find arcane (even though they are told to rely on their ‘feel’ and intuition and express themselves informally, or even resort to their mother tongue if they are not able to convey some complex ideas in english). thirdly, the list of 94 metaphor descriptors (see part 2 of mpaq in figure 1) may also be regarded as unnecessarily long, and the choice of these descriptors as arbitrary. one of the possible caveats could be that the number of the descriptors could be reduced as some of them are nearly synonymous and convey the same idea. still, i wanted them to point to subtleties and shades in terms of characterizing metaphors and decided to include so many adjectives and formulations. besides, i analyze these words/expressions in tandem with more descriptive parts of mpaq (especially definitions) as, in my view, only then can the picture be (more) complete. all in all, the saving grace in the case of mpaq (even though post-factum) is that my students took pains to fill it in to the best of their abilities (as i understand it—to the best of their knowledge and intuitions), and they acted in accordance with my instructions given prior to the distribution of the metaphor questionnaire. as regards students’ perception of metaphor, the most general conclusion that seems to emerge from the present analysis is that future philologists are on the whole attached to a more traditional ‘embellishing’ model of metaphor than to the one promoted by cognitive researchers, according to which metaphor is a mental construct pervasively reflected in language (e.g., lakoff & johnson, 1980). the research at hand altogether indicates that for the surveyed philology students metaphor is not so automatic and instinctual, but rather it is created and/or processed consciously, with a considerable amount of cognitive effort put into these processes. by far, the most significant number of students’ responses (and definitions) reveal that metaphor is in many ways abstract, artistic, creative, and poetic, and a rather small percentage of the participants acknowledge metaphors’ concrete, daily, and down-to-earth dimensions (see tables 5, 6, and 7). on the other hand, in terms of students’ knowledge of metaphor, it also transpires from the study that there is a certain percentage of the philology students who think of metaphor in line with the tenets of the cognitive model of metaphor, as circa 15% of the students who filled in mpaq characterize metaphor as mental, experiential, and conceptual (see table 6). also, the (metalinguistic) formulations detected in their metaphor definitions may suggest that they have some prior academic knowledge of metaphor and are familiar with terminology with which to capture precisely various aspects of metaphorization. (e.g., they employ expressions such as “a lexical/linguistic/literary/stylistic device,” “a stylistic figure,” “a linguistic construct/measure/phenomenon/tool,” metaphors we academicize the world with?… 179 ‘a figure of speech,” “(non-)figurative language,” “abstract and less abstract notions/words”). finally, as regards the issue of applying metaphors by students themselves and by others, the respondents claim on the whole that metaphors are pervasive in specific genres, settings, and communicative situations and decidedly less ubiquitous in others. according to more than half of them, metaphoric language is to be found predominantly in the language of fiction (see table 4), and also more than half of them would admit to employing metaphors in rather informal environments, like in contacts with peers and family members (circa one-third and one-fourth respectively; for details see table 1). as concerns the presence and frequency of employing metaphors in informal (every-day) and formal (university) situations, the students were asked to evaluate these criteria taking into account two more variables, namely, the application of metaphors by themselves and by others. again, 50% of the philology students are of the view that they and other people use metaphors often, whereas circa one-third of the respondents maintain that both themselves and others hardly ever employ metaphors (in each case this applies to both ‘every-day’ and ‘university’ variable). thus, when we conflate students’ perception of metaphor with their application of metaphoric language, we may conclude that a significant number of those interviewed purports to make a frequent use of metaphor(ization) even though, or maybe because metaphoricity is in many ways more challenging and special (artistic, ornamental, requiring effort while being created and processed, and the like). in the present research i was employing specific parts of mpaq as a springboard from which to depart to discussing certain aspects of metaphor perception and awareness among philology students (see figure 1). due to time and space constraints, i was not able to elaborate on everything that is worth exploring. in supplementary part 3 of mpaq (not attached here) the students provided me with extensive and often insightful definitions of metaphor(ization), also illustrating them with examples. here i embrace these definitions holistically, presenting only a few of them almost anecdotally, to validate my claims and results along more general lines. still, a detailed analysis of 112 definitions, in terms of their contents and form (type of discourse, style, meta-language employed, and the like) is something that i shall embark on in a separate study (palka, forthcoming). i hope to fully use the potential of these gleanings and not only to ‘fine-tune’ present results/conclusions, but also to shed more light on the role of metaphor in students’ lives and careers. as a linguist with cognitive leanings, i support and promote the conviction that metaphor is an integral part of language and thought, and that students (if not people at large) should be fully aware of what metaphor is and how it works in their lives. thus, in my view it is important to make people realize “why metaphors are necessary and not just nice” (ortony, 1975, p. 45) as well as to check whether and to what degree they realize that fact. adam palka180 references alm-arvius, c. 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(1988). the point of words: children’s understanding of metaphor and irony. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. adam palka „akademisieren’ wir die welt durch metaphern? metapher (metaphorizität) aus der sicht der akademie (fallstudie von künftigen philologen) z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g in diesem artikel werden die ergebnisse einer studie diskutiert und zusammengefasst, die im studienjahr 2017/2018 unter 115 studierenden der englischen philologie an der schlesischen universität durchgeführt wurde. ziel der studie war es, die rolle der metapher im leben dieser studierenden sowohl im akademischen als auch im allgemeinen kontext zu verfolgen. ich konzentrierte mich hauptsächlich auf das bewusstsein (des auftretens) von metaphern und deren wahrnehmung durch die studierenden, wobei ich mich auf verschiedene ebenen der sprachlichen und außersprachlichen realität bezog. das instrument, das mir einen einblick in die oben genannten aspekte gewährte, war der von mir erstellte fragebogen, der sowohl geschlossene als auch offene fragen enthielt. die schlussfolgerungen werden auf den einzelnen etappen der studie formuliert, aber das allgemeine fazit, das aus den durchgeführten analysen resultiert, scheint darauf hinzudeuten, dass künftige philologen im allgemeinen mehr an das traditionelle („verschönernde“) metaphernmodell als an das von wissenschaftlern immer häufiger durchgesetzte konzeptionelle/kognitive modell gebunden sind, obwohl viele von ihnen das wissen um dieses letzte haben. schlüsselwörter: metaphorisierung, akademisches umfeld, metaphern im sinne der studierenden, bewusstsein für metaphern unter studierenden reviews theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 7 (1), 2021, pp. 75–98 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.8642 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5951-4167meihua liu tsinghua university focus and effects of peer and machine feedback on chinese university efl learners’ revisions of english argumentative essays a b s t r a c t the present mixed-method study examined the focus and effects of peer and machine feedback on the revisions of english argumentative essays. the study collected data from 127 chinese university efl learners, which included draft 1, peer feedback (pf), pf-based draft 2, machine feedback (mf), mf-based draft 2, questionnaires, and interview recordings. the main findings were: (a) peer feedback was primarily concerned with content errors while machine feedback mainly involved language errors, (b) significant differences occurred in most types of errors between draft 1, pf and pf-based draft 2, and between draft 1, mf, and mf-based draft 2, (c) the uptake of ‘introducing a new topic in conclusion’ was a powerful predictor of pf-based draft 2 scores, and (d) the participants generally moderately considered peer and machine feedback to be useful. based on the findings, some implications are discussed on how to better implement and enhance the quality of peer and machine feedback. keywords: peer feedback, machine feedback, focus, effect, rewrite, argumentative essay introduction as an essential component of students’ academic development in a second/ foreign language (sl/fl), writing requires a considerable amount of time and effort since it involves higher order thinking, which makes it very challenging for many sl/fl writers (cope et al., 2011; dikli & bleyle, 2014). consequently, feedback plays a critical role in enhancing the quality of students’ compositions. nevertheless, assessing writing and providing feedback are also timeconsuming and challenging. this is why though teacher feedback is more meihua liu76 effective (goldstein, 2004; hattie & timperley, 2007; keh, 1990; sterna & solomo, 2006; vardi, 2009), machine and peer feedback has been developed and implemented in both classroom and other learning situations (allen & katayama, 2016; shintani, 2015). even though both peer review and machine feedback have proved to have positive effects on sl/fl learners’ rewrites (caulk, 1994; hyland & hyland, 2006; rollinson, 2005; rollinson, 1998, 2005; topping, 1998; yu & lee, 2015), conflicts always exist about the actual effects (anson, 2006; xie, ke & sharma, 2008). few studies have examined peer and machine feedback simultaneously either. moreover, considering that accuracy is both an important and frustrating issue in writing (li, link & hegelheimer, 2015), it is worthwhile to analyze more specifically the impact of peer and machine feedback on the quality of sl/fl learners’ rewrites. for these reasons, the present mixed-method study, targeting chinese university efl (english as a fl) learners, explored the focus and effects of peer and machine feedback on learners’ rewrites of english argumentative essays. literature review defined as the “information with which a learner can confirm, add to, overwrite, tune, or restructure information in memory, whether that information is domain knowledge, meta-cognitive knowledge, beliefs about self and tasks, or cognitive tactics and strategies” (winne & butler, 1994, pp. 5740), feedback has been long held to facilitate the learning of sls/fls (ellis, 2011; ferris, 2010; hattie & timperley, 2007). peer feedback student peer assessment (review/feedback) (pa) refers to an educational arrangement in which students assess the quality of their peers’ work and provide feedback (dochy, segers, & sluijsmans, 1999). there have been many studies on the results of pa in relation to grading and student satisfaction, as well as on effective organization of pa in higher education (cho & schunn, 2005; gielen et al., 2010; ion, barrera-corominas & tomàs-folch, 2016; kulkarni, bernstein & klemmer, 2015; lin & yang, 2011; rollinson, 1998, 2005; topping, 1998; xie et al., 2008). though some studies reveal that pa has little or even negative effect on sl/fl learners’ writing (xie et al., 2008), more studies show that peer readers can provide useful feedback (caulk, 1994; rollinson, 1998, 2005; topping, 1998; yu & lee, 2015). topping’s (1998) review indicated that focus and effects of peer and machine feedback… 77 pa was of adequate reliability and validity in a wide variety of applications and had positive formative effects on student achievement and attitudes. ion et al.’s (2016) analyses of 637 feedback units showed that peer feedback helped students better develop the task in their writing. in addition, trained pa can be more effective (ellis, 2011; kulkarni et al., 2015; min, 2006). for example, min (2006) examined the impact of trained responders’ feedback on efl college students’ revisions in terms of revision types and quality. after a four-hour in-class demonstration of how to do peer review and a one-hour after-class reviewer-teacher conference with 18 students, the instructor-researcher collected students’ first drafts and revisions, as well as reviewers’ written feedback, and compared them with those produced prior to training. the results indicated that students incorporated a significantly higher number of reviewers’ comments into revisions after the peer review training, and that the number of revisions with enhanced quality was significantly higher than that before the peer review training. the researcher thus concluded that trained peer review feedback could positively impact efl students’ revision types and quality of texts, supported by a subsequent study (liu & chai, 2009). moreover, peer feedback proves to be beneficial to students in other aspects (ellis, 2011; kurt & atay, 2007; lundstrom & baker, 2009; miao et al., 2006). miao et al. (2006) examined peer and teacher feedback on essays of the same topic written by chinese university efl learners. analyses of student texts, questionnaires, video recordings and interview transcripts revealed that peer feedback improved student autonomy thought it was less adopted in students’ rewrites. kurt and atay’s (2007) eight-week experimental study of 86 turkish prospective teachers (pts) of english showed that the peer feedback group experienced significantly less writing anxiety than the teacher feedback group at the end of the study. the study also revealed that the peer feedback process helped the pts become aware of their mistakes and helped them look at their essays from a different perspective. lundstrom and baker (2009) did a study with 91 university students in nine writing classes at two proficiency levels to see which was more beneficial to improving student writing: giving or receiving peer feedback. the results indicated that the givers, who focused solely on reviewing peers’ writing, made more significant gains in their own writing over the course of the semester than did the receivers, who focused solely on how to use peer feedback. machine feedback as technology develops, machine feedback becomes possible via computers and internet. the technology often used for feedback on writing is automated writing evaluation (awe) software which generates automated scores based meihua liu78 on techniques such as artificial intelligence, natural language processing and latent semantic analysis (philips, 2007; shermis & burstein, 2003; ullmann, 2019), and provides written feedback in the form of general comments, specific comments and/or corrections (stevenson & phakiti, 2014). in recent years, using awe to provide feedback in the writing classroom has steadily increased, such as project essay gradertm (peg), e-rater, intelligent essay assessortm (iea), and intellimetrictm (stevenson & phakiti, 2014). in china, the most widely used is www.pigai.org.1 while many scholars applaud awe as a means of freeing instructors from marking assignments and enabling them to devote more to writing instruction (hyland & hyland, 2006; philips, 2007; ullmann, 2019), others doubt whether awe is capable of providing accurate and effective feedback (anson, 2006). for example, li et al. (2015) used mixed-methods to investigate how criterion1 affected writing instruction and performance. four esl writing instructors and 70 non-native english-speaking students participated in the study. the results showed that criterion1 led to increased revisions and that the corrective feedback from criterion1 improved accuracy from a rough to a final draft. abuseileek and abualsha’r (2014) investigated the effect of computermediated corrective feedback on 64 efl learners’ performance in writing over the course of eight weeks. the participants were randomly assigned to either a no-feedback control condition or a corrective feedback condition. the researchers found that students who received computer-mediated corrective feedback while writing achieved better results in their overall test scores than students in the control condition who did not receive feedback. cheng (2017) employed a mixed-method to investigate the impact of online automated feedback (oaf) on the quality of 138 university students’ reflective journals in a 13-week efl course. the findings showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in the overall score of the final reflective journal and demonstrated a significant improvement in scores across reflective journals. the results of these two studies show that awe has a positive impact on the quality of students’ writing, supporting those of earlier studies (chen & cheng, 2008; warschauer & ware, 2006). ullmann’s (2019) study of 76 essays showed that the automated analysis was immediate, scalable, and only on average 10% less accurate than the manual analysis. even so, stevenson and phakiti’s (2014) review found little evidence for positive effects of awe on the quality students’ rewrites based on awe. stevenson and phakiti (2014) attributed this to little research, heterogeneity of existing research, the mixed nature of research findings, and methodological issues. other explanations are that computers do not possess human 1 the most popular online platform which provides feedback on and assesses english writing automatically in china. users create accounts on it first, upload their writing and then receive feedback immediately on it. focus and effects of peer and machine feedback… 79 inferencing skills and background knowledge (anson, 2006) and that awegenerated comments primarily focus on grammar in writing (hyland & hyland, 2006). this may be why awe-generated feedback is less acceptable to students than teacher feedback (dikli & bleyle, 2014). dikli and bleyle (2014) investigated the use of an aes system on 14 advanced students from various linguistic backgrounds in a college esl writing classroom. the findings showed that the instructor provided more and better quality feedback and the aes system. rationale for the study as reviewed, there have been many studies on the results of peer and machine feedback in relation to grading and students’ compositions (bijami et al., 2013; cho & schunn, 2005; gielen et al., 2010; kulkarni et al., 2015; lin & yang, 2011; rollinson, 1998, 2005; topping, 1998; xie et al., 2008). however, little has been said as to the focus of peer and machine feedback in educational designs (abuseileek & abualsha’r, 2014). few studies have simultaneously examined peer and machine feedback either. more insight into the nature of peer and machine feedback would indicate more clearly how technology and students could be more helpful in sl/fl writing and what kind of assistance teachers should preferably provide. for example, if technology and peers can provide useful feedback on grammar, teachers can direct their assistance more to textual coherence or content (abuseileek & abualsha’r, 2014). moreover, since writing accuracy is both an important and frustrating issue (li et al., 2015), it is worthwhile to examine more specifically the focus and effects of peer and machine feedback on the quality of sl/fl learners’ writing. for these reasons as well as the intent to make better use of peer and machine feedback, the present study adopted mixed methods to explore the focus and effects of peer and machine feedback on chinese university efl learners’ rewrites of english argumentative essays. to achieve this purpose, the following research questions were formulated: (1) what is the respective focus of peer and machine feedback on students’ english argumentative essays? (2) how does peer and machine feedback impact students’ rewrites of english argumentative essays? meihua liu80 research design context the present research was conducted in a highly accredited university in beijing, where english reading and writing courses were compulsory to undergraduate non-english majors. upon entering the university, all nonenglish majors took a standardized english placement test, the results of which put the students into three band levels (a higher band level meant higher english proficiency). based on their band levels, the students registered in compulsory and optional english courses accordingly. the majority fell into band level 2 and were required to take the english argumentative reading and writing course, which contextualized the present study. the respondents of this study were randomly selected from those registered in the course taught by the same instructor. the students met the instructor once a week for a 90-minute period, who were required to write three long argumentative essays (more than 400 words) as well as a few short ones (about 100 words) during the 16-week semester. the instructor, phd in applied linguistics, had been publishing widely in international journals and teaching the course for five years. in class, the students and the instructor discussed the techniques related to english argumentative essay reading and writing such as text structure, statement of arguments, paragraph structure, argument-developing skills, use of evidence, cohesion and coherence, and use of references. adopting the process approach to writing, the instructor stressed the importance of revision and encouraged students to revise their drafts on the same composition at least twice from different sources: teacher feedback, peer comments and machine feedback. prior to writing, a 30-minute peer review training based on kramer, leggett and mead’s scheme (1995) was arranged in class, which covered both content and language errors with more focus on content errors in that students had learned english grammar systematically but had not been trained how to write english argumentative essays effectively in previous schooling. then students practiced peer review for each subsequent assigned writing task. once a writing assignment was finished, each student sent his/her writing to the instructor, a peer, and www.pigai.org, independently. the instructor provided feedback electronically on each draft at sentence, paragraph and text levels, then gave a 25-minute summary report of the feedback and had individual discussions about the feedback when required by the students in the subsequent class; students assessed their peers’ writing either electronically or in paper and must finish it within two days upon receiving the writing; www.pigai.org generated feedback in both chinese and english (namely, focus and effects of peer and machine feedback… 81 machine feedback in the present research) immediately upon receiving the submission. to avoid cross impact, students were required to revise their writing separately upon receiving different types of feedback. participants 127 (102 male and 25 female) students participated in the present study and answered the questionnaires related to their background information and perceptions of peer and machine feedback, of whom 64 were interviewed for their verbal perceptions about peer and machine feedback. meanwhile, the first and second drafts of the same composition of 111 students, as well as peer and machine feedback, were complete for analyses. with an age range of 16–27 and an average of 19.42, the participants were from various disciplines such as civil engineering, mathematics, chemistry, and architecture. prior to the course, they had never taken an english argumentative writing course. instruments the collected data in the present study included interview transcripts, peer feedback (pf), machine feedback (mf), student draft 1, pf-based draft 2, mfbased draft 2, and writing scores, as detailed below. student texts. draft 1, peer feedback, pf-based draft 2, machine feedback, and mf-based draft 2 of the course’s second composition on global warming were collected. based on student consent and the completeness of both drafts, 111 compositions of each draft as well as peer and machine feedback were finally collected for analyses. writing scores. the scores of each draft were collected, which was rated by the instructor on a scale of 1–15 in terms of text structure, power of argumentation, coherence, grammar and use of words (appendix i). perceptions of peer and machine feedback questionnaire. this 14-item perceptions of peer and machine feedback questionnaire (ppmfq) was selfdeveloped to investigate students’ attitudes towards peer and machine feedback in terms of their roles and usefulness in their composition revisions. the questionnaire involved such issues as grammar, use of words, expression of viewpoints, use of evidence and references, which are crucial elements of argumentative essays (wyrick, 2008). all the items were placed on a 7-point likert scale, ranging from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’ with values of 1–7 assigned to each of the alternatives respectively. informal semi-structured interview. the informal semi-structured interview guide covered such questions concerning teacher feedback, peer and meihua liu82 machine feedback, their advantages, disadvantages and effects on composition revisions. the background questionnaire. the background questionnaire aimed to collect informants’ personal information such as age, gender, and major. procedure data were collected during weeks 7–9 of the semester when the second argumentative essay on global warming was assigned with the instructor’s consent. to help students better understand the nature of argumentative essays, prompts on the task were provided such as effects of global warming on agriculture and major cause for global warming. draft 1 was finished and submitted to the instructor, peers and www.pigai.org online (an account was created for the class beforehand) in week 7, followed by peer feedback within two days and immediate machine feedback, respectively. based on the feedback, students revised their drafts 1 independently according to the peer and machine feedback they had received respectively, and then submitted the rewrites to the instructor thereafter. piloted to two students who had took the same course in the previous semester, the questionnaire was slightly modified, and then distributed to students together with a consent form who answered them in about 10 minutes in week 9’s class meeting. according to their consent forms, a total of 64 students was informally interviewed by two research assistants thereafter in week 9. each time, two students were interviewed together, which was mainly conducted in chinese, recorded and lasted for 15–20 minutes. data analyses since a writer needs to utilize an established language system to organize and present ideas in a certain mode in writing, the present study analyzed student texts and feedback in terms of both grammar and content. for this purpose, this study categorized errors with reference to the revision scheme in kramer et al. (1995). the scheme (see appendix ii) used in the present study covered four types of errors: content errors (nine aspects involving failure to show a controlling idea, improper topic sentence and failure to achieve paragraph coherence, etc.), mechanical errors (misspelling, punctuation, and capitalization errors), syntactical errors (errors involving tense, part of speech, article, verb, adjective/adverb degree, agreement, and case, etc.), and lexical errors (errors in word formation, word choice, collocation, and unclear expression). draft 1, pf-based draft 2 and mf-based draft 2 were focus and effects of peer and machine feedback… 83 analyzed carefully according to the scheme to identify the errors students made in their writing. all the analyses were done by two research assistants with an overall inter-rater coefficient of .91. then the number of each type of error was counted for each text. the results were then analyzed via spss 20 to explore the distribution of and differences in different types of errors between draft 1, peer feedback, pf-based draft 2, machine feedback and mf-based draft 2. to explore the effects of peer feedback on student revisions, draft 1 and pf-based draft 2 were compared to count and compute the uptake of peer feedback in the corresponding rewrites, so were draft 1 and mf-based draft 2. then, multiple regression analyses were run, with scores of pf-based and mf-based draft 2s being the dependent variable and the uptake of peer and machine feedback of errors of different types being independent variables. the survey data were computed via spss 20. the mean and standard deviation of each survey item were computed to determine how students perceived peer and machine feedback respectively. the interview recordings were first transcribed, double-checked and then subjected to thematic content analyses by the two research assistants respectively with an inter-rater reliability of .932 (charmaz, 2006). the themes were then generalized, counted, and supported with excerpts from the interviewees’ comments. example themes were strengths of peer feedback, weaknesses of machine feedback, benefits of peer and machine feedback. when reporting the comments, a number was used for each interviewee for the sake of privacy and convenience. results text analyses results distribution of errors. preliminary analyses of peer feedback showed that students commented on content errors in specific places of their peers’ writing but provided very general comments on language problems such as ‘there are lots of grammatical errors in the essay’ in the writing. by contrast, www.pigai.org generated fairly specific suggestions on language problems but offered no content-related suggestions in students’ writing. consequently, further analyses of pf and pf-based draft 2 focused on content errors while those of mf and mf-based draft 2 focused on language errors. the errors in draft 1, pf, pf-based draft 2, mf, and mf-based draft 2, were coded and counted, which were then analyzed in terms of mean and standard deviation (see table 1). meihua liu84 table 1 means and standard deviations of errors in student texts, pf and mf (n = 111) error types draft 1 pf pf-based draft mf mf-based draft 2 m sd m sd m sd m sd m sd c1 .62 .68 .095 .30 .14 .35 c2 .50 .76 .65 .72 .25 .51 c3 1.19 1.43 .32 .47 .54 .53 c4 .36 .74 .16 .41 .16 .41 c5 .21 .45 .02 .13 .14 .35 c6 .21 .47 .03 .18 .095 .30 c7 .299 .46 .54 .69 .19 .396 c8 .31 .46 .87 1.02 .21 .41 c9 .25 .43 .00 .00 .02 .13 totalc 3.96 2.81 2.68 1.68 1.75 1.37 me 1.07 2.41 .91 2.49 .51 .84 ss1 1.19 1.76 .397 .64 .856 1.27 ss2 1.68 1.77 .286 .96 1.22 1.62 ss3 1.22 1.21 1.79 1.68 .48 .79 ss4 .83 1.18 .302 .59 .58 .91 ss5 .09 .34 .064 .25 .04 .198 ss6 2.67 2.22 .73 .95 2.20 2.22 ss7 1.49 1.51 .524 .95 .92 .95 ss8 .15 .42 .032 .25 .102 .31 ss9 .09 .29 .00 .00 .02 .14 ss10 .55 1.09 .032 .25 .469 .92 ss11 .79 .94 .206 .48 .469 .74 ss12 .11 .47 .00 .00 .00 .00 ss13 .26 .79 .048 .28 .265 .73 ss14 .07 .25 .064 .30 .082 .28 ss15 .14 .51 .032 .18 .327 .63 ss16 .73 .82 .095 .39 .56 .79 totalss 13.09 5.96 4.97 3.35 8.46 4.16 le1 .06 .27 .00 .00 .02 .14 le2 2.13 2.02 .238 .67 1.52 1.89 le3 1.25 1.25 1.44 1.47 .92 1.12 le4 1.25 1.11 .016 .13 .76 .87 totalle 4.68 2.32 1.698 1.58 3.22 2.09 grammar .365 .87 .00 .00 totale 21.74 8.15 7.03 4.28 13.72 5.67 writing score 11.38 1.83 11.77 1.67 11.48 1.789 notes: please refer to appendix i for the abbreviations of error types. totalc = total number of content errors; totalss = total number of syntactic errors; totalle = total number of lexical errors; totale = total number of errors focus and effects of peer and machine feedback… 85 as seen from table 1, the errors with highest mean scores in draft 1 were se6 (article errors) (mean = 2.67), le2 (word choice errors) (mean = 2.13), se2 (tense errors) (mean = 1.68), se7 (errors of plural or singular nouns) (mean = 1.49), le3 (collocation errors) (mean = 1.25), le4 (unclear expressions) (mean = 1.25), se3 (agreement errors) (mean = 1.22), se1 (errors in part of speech) (mean = 1.19), c3 (failure to provide adequate evidence) (mean = 1.19), and me (mechanical errors) (mean = 1.07). peer feedback predominantly focused on content errors, barely involving syntactic errors except for such comments as “there are many tense errors in the writing” or “grammatical errors are too many” (comments like these were not counted in the final analyses in the paper because they were not specific). the means of content errors ranged from 0 (c9-introducing a new topic in conclusion) to 1.02 (c8-inconsistency between the conclusion and the main argument). on the other hand, machine feedback was solely concerned with mechanical, syntactic and lexical errors. the errors in mf ranged from 0 (se12-illogical comparison or ill parallelism) to 1.79 (se3), and errors with highest mean scores were se3 (agreement errors) (mean = 1.79), le3 (collocation errors) (mean = 1.44), me (mechanical errors) (mean = .91), se6 (article errors) (mean = .73), and se7 (errors of plural or singular nouns) (mean = .524). since pf and mf focused on certain aspects of draft 1, most of which were incorporated into respective rewrites, the analyses of draft 2 focused on the type of feedback students received correspondingly. as reported in table 1, the mean scores of content errors ranged from .02 (c9) to .54 (c3) in pf-based rewrites and from 0 (se12) to 2.20 (se6) in mf-based rewrites. comparison of mean scores of the errors across draft 1, pf, and pf-based draft 2 shows that all content errors scored the highest in draft 1 and that most content errors scored higher in pf than in pf-based draft 2. paired samples t-test results (see table 2) indicated that draft 1 differed significantly from pf in all types of content errors except c2 (improper topic sentence/no controlling idea/no topic sentence), largely with a small or medium effect size. namely, significantly more content errors of all types existed in draft 1 than identified by peers. table 2 also shows that pf differed significantly from pf-based draft 2 in c2 (t = 3.97), c3 (failure to provide adequate evidence) (t = –2.50), c5 (lack of the power of the argument/weak arguments or evidence) (t = –2.65), c7 (fail to achieve paragraph coherence: poor organization/lack or misuse of transitional markers) (t = 3.73), c8 (inconsistency between the conclusion and the main argument) (t = 4.66), and totalc (t = 3.66). alternatively, significantly more errors of c2, c7, c8, and totalc (total content errors) were identified in pf than in pf-based draft 2, but the latter had significantly more errors of c3 and c5 than in the former. yet draft 1 had significantly more errors of c1 (failure to show a controlling idea/more than one controlling idea) (t = 5.47), c2 (t = 3.16), c3 (t = 4.10), c7 (t = 2.31), c9 (introducing a new topic in conclusion) (t = 2.78), and totalc (t = 5.88) than in pf-based draft 2. meihua liu86 a similar pattern was observed for draft 1, mf, and mf-based draft 2, as reported in table 1. mechanical errors and most syntactic and lexical errors scored the highest in draft 1, and errors of some types scored higher in mf than in mf-based draft 2 while it was reversed for errors of other types. paired samples t-test results (see table 3) demonstrated that draft 1 differed significantly from mf in all syntactic errors except se5 (adjective/adverb degree errors), se12 (errors of illogical comparison or ill parallelism), se13 (errors of sentence fragments/run-on sentence/dangling modifiers), se14 (errors of mixed or confused expression and sentence structure), se15 (missing a part of the sentence), and all lexical errors except le1 (errors in word formation) and le3 (errors in collocations). namely, significantly more errors of most types were identified in draft 1 than in mf except se3 (errors in agreement) and le3. table 3 also suggests that mf identified significantly more errors of se3 but significantly fewer errors of se1 (errors in part of speech), se2 (tense errors), se6 (articles errors), se10 (errors in word order), se11 (errors in coordinating conjunctions and subordinating conjunctions), se16 (overuse of a part of the sentence), totalse (total syntactic errors), le2 (errors in word choice), le4 (unclear or incomplete expressions), totalle (total lexical errors), and totale (total errors) than in mf-based draft 2. in addition, draft 1 had significantly more errors in se2 (tense errors), se3 (errors in agreement), se6 (articles errors), se7 (errors in the use of plural or singular forms/uncountable nouns), se11 (errors in coordinating conjunctions and subordinating conjunctions), se15 (missing a part of the sentence), se16 (overuse of a part of the sentence), totalse, le2, le3, le4, totalle, and totale than in mf-based draft 2. table 2 paired samples t-test results of peer feedback (n = 111) (degree of freedom = 110) draft 1 & pf pf & pf-based draft 2 drafts 1 & pf-based 2 t p d t p d t p d c1 5.17 .000 0.99 –.77 .443 / 5.47 .000 1.04 c2 –1.18 .241 / 3.97 .000 0.76 3.16 .002 0.60 c3 4.55 .000 0.87 –2.50 .015 -0.48 4.10 .000 0.78 c4 2.83 .006 0.54 .00 1.00 / 1.52 .133 / c5 3.02 .004 0.58 –2.65 .010 -0.51 1.35 .182 / c6 2.18 .033 0.42 .39 .698 / .629 .531 / c7 –2.795 .007 –0.53 3.73 .000 0.71 2.31 .024 c8 –4.35 .000 –0.83 4.66 .000 0.89 1.43 .159 / c9 3.00 .004 0.57 –1.00 .321 / 2.78 .007 0.44 totalc 2.46 .017 0.47 3.66 .001 0.70 5.88 .000 1.12 score –1.52 .131 / notes: effect size of cohen’s d: small = d ≤ 0.2; medium = d = 0.5; large = d ≥ 0.8 (cohen, 1988) focus and effects of peer and machine feedback… 87 table 3 paired samples t-test results of machine feedback (n = 111) (degree of freedom = 110) error types draft 1 & mf mf & mf-based draft 2 drafts 1 & mf-based 2 t p d t p d t p d me .56 .58 / 1.01 .319 / 1.39 .172 / ss1 3.10 .003 0.59 –2.40 .020 –0.46 1.37 .177 / ss2 6.12 .000 1.17 –3.31 .002 –0.63 2.18 .034 0.42 ss3 –2.79 .007 –053. 5.13 .000 0.98 4.67 .000 0.89 ss4 2.25 .028 0.43 –1.70 .096 / –.72 .472 / ss5 .38 .709 / 1.43 .159 / 1.00 .322 / ss6 6.20 .000 1.18 –3.99 .000 –0.76 2.99 .004 0.57 ss7 4.38 .000 0.84 –1.76 .084 / 2.31 .025 0.44 ss8 2.31 .024 0.44 –1.35 .182 / .000 1.00 / ss9 2.56 .013 0.49 –1.00 .322 / 1.77 .083 / ss10 4.05 .000 0.77 –3.59 .001 –0.68 .28 .785 / ss11 4.22 .000 0.80 –2.53 .015 –0.48 2.07 .044 0.40 ss12 1.84 .070 / .00 .000 / 1.66 .103 / ss13 1.90 .063 / –1.75 .086 / –.330 .743 / ss14 .30 .766 / –.33 .743 / –.57 .569 / ss15 1.52 .135 / –3.10 .003 –0.59 –2.22 .031 –0.42 ss16 4.93 .000 0.94 –3.52 .001 –0.67 2.06 .044 0.39 totalss 9.79 .000 1.87 –4.36 .000 –0.83 5.81 .000 1.11 le1 1.00 .321 / –1.00 .322 / –1.00 .322 / le2 6.65 .000 1.27 –4.15 .000 –0.79 3.21 .002 0.61 le3 –1.13 .263 / 1.87 .068 / 2.78 .008 0.53 le4 8.02 .000 1.53 –6.17 .000 –1.18 3.28 .002 0.63 totalle 9.35 .000 1.78 –4.14 .000 -0.79 4.91 .000 0.94 totale 14.32 .000 2.73 –6.02 .000 –1.15 7.83 .000 1.49 score –1.82 .091 / notes: effect size of cohen’s d: small = d ≤ 0.2; medium = d = 0.5; large = d ≥ 0.8 (cohen, 1988) effects of peer and machine feedback on students’ rewrites. to explore the effects of peer and machine feedback on students’ rewrites, multiple regression analyses were run, with pf-based and mf-based draft 2 scores being dependent variables and the uptake of errors of different types being independent variables respectively. regression analyses yielded no model for mf-based draft 2 scores and 1 model for pf-based draft 2 scores, as shown in table 4. meihua liu88 table 4 multiple regression coefficients and significance of error predictors for pf-based draft 2 scores uptake of errors β t p df vif cohen’s f2 c9 .261 2.11 .039 1 1.00 .012 notes: df = degree of freedom effect size of cohen’s f2: small = f2 ≤ .02; medium = f2 = .15; large = f2 ≥ .35 (cohen, 1988) as shown in table 4, with the change in r2 being .068, c9 (introducing a new topic in conclusion) was the only predictor (β = .261, t = 2.11, f2 = .012) that positively predicted the scores of students’ rewrites based on peer feedback. self-reported results survey results. the mean and standard deviation of each survey item concerning peer and machine feedback were computed (see table 5), table 5 self-reported questionnaire result (n = 127) self-reported questionnaire items pf mf the feedback mean sd mean sd 1. improved my ability to use grammar correctly. 4.93 1.11 5.56 1.21 2. improved my ability to use vocabulary appropriately. 4.87 1.16 5.54 1.17 3. enhanced my knowledge of the structure of academic english argumentative essays. 5.28 1.15 4.06 1.46 4. improved my ability to state the main argument clearly in academic english argumentative essays. 5.22 1.18 3.95 1.43 5. improved my ability to state supporting arguments clearly in academic english argumentative essays. 5.24 1.07 3.94 1.50 6. enhanced the logic of arguing for points in my academic english argumentative essays. 5.26 1.03 3.94 1.46 7. improved the coherence and cohesion in my academic english argumentative essays. 5.01 1.14 4.38 1.47 8. improved my ability to cite properly in academic english argumentative essays. 4.67 1.17 4.06 1.58 9. improved my ability to use vocabulary formally in academic english argumentative essays. 4.63 1.23 5.08 1.19 10. improved my ability to argue adequately in academic english argumentative essays. 5.10 1.16 4.02 1.48 11. improved my ability to argue substantially in academic english argumentative essays. 5.29 1.12 3.97 1.55 12. improved my ability to use argument-developing skills in academic english argumentative writing. 4.97 1.27 4.25 1.45 13. was mostly incorporated into my revised draft. 5.33 1.18 5.20 1.35 14. was largely acceptable. 5.42 1.09 5.24 1.29 focus and effects of peer and machine feedback… 89 which shows that the students scored 4.63–5.42 on the perceptions of peer feedback questionnaire (ppfq) items and 3.94–5.56 on the perceptions of machine feedback questionnaire (pmfq) items. the five ppfq items with the highest means were items 14 (acceptability of peer feedback) (mean = 5.42), 13 (uptake of peer feedback) (mean = 5.33), 11 (relevance between [main] claims and supporting evidence) (mean = 5.29), 6 (logic of arguing) (mean = 5.26) and 5 (statement of supporting arguments) (mean = 5.24), centering on content. the five pmfq items with the highest means were items 1 (improved ability to use grammar) (mean = 5.56), 2 (improved ability to use vocabulary appropriately) (mean = 5.54), 14 (acceptability of machine feedback) (mean = 5.24), 13 (uptake of machine feedback) (mean = 5.33), and 9 (improved ability to use vocabulary formally) (mean = 5.08), centering on the use of expressions and grammar. these findings indicated that the students were generally moderately positive toward peer and machine feedback. interview results. table 6 summarizes the interviewees’ perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of peer and machine feedback. as seen in table 6, around 20% of the interviewees commented that peer feedback provided more communication (23.4%), more chances to learn from each other (21.3%), new perspectives (21.3%) and good advice on language use and sentence polishing (17%). according to the interviewees, peers “feel more at ease and communicate frequently when reviewing each other’s writing. this helps us to understand each other’s writing better” (no. 34), and could “identify problems in logic” (no. 22), peer review enabled “me to know others’ views of my writing” (no. 46), and “me to be aware of similar mistakes in my own writing” (no. 51). meanwhile, since “we peers are at a similar english proficiency level, most peer comments are not much professional or appropriate” (no. 53), and “it is difficult for us to offer specific suggestions” (no. 35). as seen in table 6, machine feedback could “identify language and grammar mistakes effectively” (no. 31), and “better the sentences and format in my writing” (no. 18). however, because it was a machine, it could not “identify logical problems” (no. 10) or offer any content-related suggestions on aspects like “paragraph structure, statements of main and supporting arguments, and use of evidence” (no. 25). moreover, the machine frequently “misidentified mistakes” (no. 31). probably because of these reasons, 72.3% and 63.9% of the interviewees reported that peer and machine feedback was helpful to the revision of their writing, respectively. on the whole, 100% and 71.7% of the interviewees reported feeling satisfied with peer and machine feedback, respectively. meihua liu90 table 6 self-reported perceptions of peer and machine feedback (n = 64) feedback advantages disadvantages pf a) more communication (11/23.4%), b) chances to learn from each other (10/21.3%), c) new perspectives (10/21.3%), d) good advice on language use and sentence polishing (8/17%), e) suggestions being very specific (6/12.8%), f) being friendly (4/8.5%), g) feeling at ease (3/6.4%). a) not being inclusive (15/31.9%), b) comments being not deep (12/25.5%), c) comments being not professional or appropriate (8/17%), d) time-consuming (4/8.5%). mf a) good and specific comments on vocabulary and grammar (38/80.9%), b) being timely (15/31.9%), c) being very convenient (6/12.8%), d) being very clear (5/10.6%). a) having no contentrelated comments (40/85.1%), b) having a high mis-identification rate (13/27.7%). discussion focus of peer and machine feedback analyses of the data showed that peer feedback primarily focused on content errors in the present study. although the interviewees were intermediate-advanced learners, they were not confident enough to pinpoint language problems for their peers. this was also evident in the number of content errors they identified in pf, which was significantly lower than that in draft 1. apart from that, this might be partly attributed to the time-consuming nature of reviewing a text, which made the participants unwilling to provide detailed and specific suggestions. meanwhile, as discussed in yu and lee (2015), efl students’ group peer feedback activities are often driven and defined by their motives, which are shaped and mediated by the sociocultural context. the learning context where the instructor emphasized content more than linguistic forms of argumentative writing might be partially accountable for the participants’ performance in their pf in the present study. the students thus focused more on content errors correspondingly, which, nevertheless, needs to be further explored. the present study also revealed that machine feedback was predominantly concerned with language errors, as found in hyland and hyland (2006). this might be because the so-called machine, though modeled on human intelligence, could still not detect human thinking to provide useful comments on contents of an essay. in addition, though it offered timely and generally accurate feedback focus and effects of peer and machine feedback… 91 on language problems, it mistook the correct use of grammar and expressions to be incorrect or provided wrong suggestions for “correctly pinpointed mistakes” “at a rather high rate” (no. 62). for example, www.pigai.org marked the part ‘will in’ in the sentence “it will in turn lead to the large scale release of the greenhouse gas into the atmosphere” (writing 44, draft 1) to be wrong. this finding partially supports the view that awe is incapable of providing accurate feedback in certain aspects (anson, 2006). hence, it is necessary for both instructors and learners to be cautious when utilizing machine feedback. this is especially so for learners with lower proficiency in the sl/fl who are more unlikely to distinguish wrongly identified errors by machines. moreover, to what extent and what type of language use is identified as errors by machines need to be further researched. effects of peer and machine feedback regressional analyses indicated that the uptake of ‘introducing a new topic in conclusion’ was a significant predictor for students’ pf-based rewrites. this might be related to the culture of writing in chinese, which tends to bring about something new in concluding parts of an essay. this thus deserves attention in formal classroom teaching and the effects need to be further researched as well. analyses of self-reported data showed that the participants were generally positive about peer feedback, as found in the current literature (liu & chai, 2009; miao et al., 2006). apart from positively affecting students’ rewrites, peer feedback offered students chances to communicate with and learn from each other, to become (more) aware of their own mistakes, to look at their own writing from a new perspective, as found in some existing studies (miao et al., 2006; wang, 2014). miao et al.’s (2006) study indicated that peer feedback helped promote student autonomy, especially in cultures which look up teachers as authority figures. self-reported data indicated that the participants were generally moderately positive towards machine feedback, commenting that it was good, specific, timely, clear and convenient. this suggests that machine feedback did have positive effects on the polishing of sentences in students’ rewrites, consistent with the finding in many existent studies (cheng, 2017; hyland & hyland, 2006; li et al., 2015; philips, 2007). on the other hand, machine feedback was sometimes wrong, which frustrated the participants in the present research. because of this, students are advised not to solely rely on machine feedback and consult peers and/or the instructor when being unsure of the comments. these findings suggest that developers of such platforms/softwares have to enhance their reliability and validity and pay more attention to providing content-related feedback, which is of central importance to an essay. they also meihua liu92 indicate that efl learners, especially low or low-intermediate learners, have to be cautious when using machine feedback. writing instructors had better remind their students of this limitation of machine feedback. otherwise, some feedback would be misleading and the uptake of such feedback would lead to (even worse) mistakes. as illustrated in the present research, peer and machine feedback had positive effects on students’ rewrites, at the same time they were not satisfactory in certain aspects. for example, peer feedback sometimes is not professional or appropriate, and superficial, as found in the present study. thus, it is important to improve the quality of peer and machine feedback. as found in yu and lee (2015), student motives could have direct influence on students’ participation in group peer feedback activities and their subsequent revisions. it is necessary to foster positive and constructive motives towards peer and machine feedback in students prior to revising the first drafts. meanwhile, if peer feedback can be done anonymously, students may feel more comfortable in providing more and better feedback on different aspects of their peers’ writing, as found in lu and bol (2007). if students become more proficient in the target language, they will be able to provide better feedback as well, so are they trained to provide peer feedback and to write (more) effectively. integrating technology into the peer review process may also be beneficial to providing better and timely feedback (ellis, 2011; lin et al., 2011; nobles & paganucci, (2015). nobles and paganucci’s (2015) mixed-method study of 18 high school students in a hybrid freshman english class at an independent school revealed that students perceived their writing to be of higher quality when writing with digital tools and that writing in online environments enhanced writing skill development. kulkarni et al.’s (2015) study showed that students’ final grades improved when feedback was delivered quickly, but not if delayed by 24 hours. in addition, it is equally important to train students to do peer review (gielen et al., 2010; liu & carless, 2006; rollinson, 1998). it is better for writing instructors to familiarize students with the peer review criterion and their expectations. as put in stanley (1992, p. 230), “it is not fair to expect that students will be able to perform these demanding tasks [peer feedback] without first having been organized practice with and discussion of the skills involved.” strategies such as engaging students with criteria and embedding peer involvement within normal course processes may help promote peer feedback (liu & carless, 2006). lastly, as found in wang’s (2014) investigation of 53 chinese efl learners’ perceptions of peer feedback on their efl writing over time, various factors affect students’ perceived usefulness of peer feedback such as their knowledge of assigned essay topics, proficiency in the target language, attitudes, time constraints, and classroom environment. it is necessary for writing instructors to consider these factors when implementing peer feedback. focus and effects of peer and machine feedback… 93 conclusions the present mixed-method study examined the focus and effects of peer and machine feedback on the rewrites of chinese university efl learners’ english argumentative essays. the main findings were: (1) peer feedback was primarily concerned with content errors, while machine feedback mainly involved language errors, (2) significant differences occurred in errors of most types between draft 1, pf and pf-based draft 2, and between draft 1, mf, and mf-based draft 2, (3) the uptake of ‘introducing a new idea in conclusion’ was a powerful predictor of pf-based draft 2 scores, and (4) the participants generally moderately considered peer and machine feedback to be useful. although the present study yielded insightful findings, given that the participants were intermediate-advanced learners and the instructor was experienced in academic english writing, it is worth doing further research on different types of sl/fl learners and instructors to explore more about the focus and effects of peer and machine feedback. for example, lower proficient sl/fl learners may not be able to identify all language problems and/or distinguish correctly and incorrectly identified errors by machine; sl/fl learners with no/little training in argumentative writing may not be able to identify content errors. all these may not only lower the quality of peer feedback but also mislead learners to blindly depend on peer and machine feedback. more research on these issues with different sl/fl learner populations helps both learners and instructors to have a better understanding of peer and machine feedback. then accordingly, peer and machine feedback may be better implemented to complement teacher feedback to improve the quality of sl/fl learners’ writing as well as to alleviate writing teachers’ workload. conflict of interest statement on behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no 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(2015). understanding efl students’ participation in group peer feedback of l2 writing: a case study from an activity theory perspective. language teaching research, 19(5), 572–593. a p p e n d i x i marking criterion 12–15 8–11 4–7 • clearly state the main idea of the paragraph, • adequate evidence is presented, • clear organization, • coherently and grammatically presented • state the main idea of the paragraph, • some evidence is presented, • good organization, • adequately presented (i.e., not that coherently and grammatically) • vaguely state the main idea of the paragraph, • little evidence is presented, • poor organization, • poorly presented (i.e., not coherently and grammatically) focus and effects of peer and machine feedback… 97 a p p e n d i x ii error coding & classification scheme content errors c1 failure to show a controlling idea/more than one controlling idea c2 improper topic sentence/no controlling idea/no topic sentence c3 failure to provide adequate evidence c4 failure to provide substantial evidence c5 lack of the power of the argument/weak arguments or evidence c6 failure to keep the necessary consistency in meaning/inconsistency between the topic sentence and supporting sentences c7 fail to achieve paragraph coherence: poor organization/lack or misuse of transitional markers c8 inconsistency between the conclusion and the main argument c9 introducing a new topic in conclusion mechanical errors (me) me1 misspellings me2 punctuation errors me3 capitalization errors syntactical errors (se) se1 errors in part of speech (noun/adj./adv./prep./pron./conj./verb) se2 tense errors se3 errors in agreement se4 verb errors se5 adjective/adverb degree errors se6 articles errors se7 errors in the use of plural or singular forms/uncountable nouns se8 case errors se9 errors in mood /auxiliaries (including modal auxiliaries) se10 errors in word order (positive and negative sentence/questions/subordinate clause/ adverbs and adjectives) se11 errors in coordinating conjunctions and subordinating conjunctions se12 errors of illogical comparison or ill parallelism se13 errors of sentence fragments/run-on sentence/dangling modifiers se14 errors of mixed or confused expression and sentence structure se15 missing a part of the sentence se16 overuse of a part of the sentence lexical errors (le) le1 errors in word formation le2 errors in word choice le3 errors in collocations le4 unclear or incomplete expressions meihua liu98 meihua liu ziele und ergebnisse des kollegialen und automatisierten feedbacks bei der korrektur englischsprachiger argumentationsaufsätze von efl-studierenden einer chinesischen universität z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g in anlehnung an eine empirische untersuchung präsentiert der vorliegende artikel die ziele und ergebnisse eines kollegialen und automatisierten feedbacks (engl. peer feedback, machine feedback) bei der korrektur des inhalts eines englischsprachigen argumentationsaufsatzes. an der untersuchung nahmen 127 studierende einer chinesischen universität teil, für die englisch eine fremdsprache ist. die gesammelten daten entstammen verschiedenen versionen des aufsatzes (arbeitsversion nr. 1, kollegiales feedback (pf), arbeitsversion nr. 2 – basiert auf kollegialem feedback, automatisiertes feedback (mf), arbeitsversion nr. 2 – basiert auf automatisiertem feedback) sowie fragebögen und aufgenommenen interviews. aus der analyse erhobener daten ergeben sich wesentliche unterschiede in bezug auf die erhaltenen feedbacks, die im text auf grundlage verschiedener versionen des aufsatzes im einzelnen erläutert werden. es wird beispielsweise unter beweis gestellt, dass das kollegiale feedback in erster linie auf inhaltliche fehler konzentriert war, während sich das automatisierte feedback meistens auf sprachliche fehler bezog. in anlehnung an die durchgeführte analyse werden implikationen betreffend kollegiales und automatisiertes feedback präsentiert. schlüsselwörter: kollegiales feedback, automatisiertes feedback, argumentationsaufsatz theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 8 (1), 2022, pp. 71–84 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.9501 bogusława maria gosiewska-turek https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8438-1618 university of opole, poland dyslexia, self-efficacy, and language instruction in foreign language learning— a mixed quantitative-qualitative study a b s t r a c t the aim of the research is to investigate the interdependence between dyslexia, selfefficacy, and foreign language instruction. the author of the study applied a mixed-method: quantitative and qualitative. the quantitative data were collected through self-efficacy questionnaires filled out by dyslexic and non-dyslexic students, and the qualitative data were collected during a case study conducted with a dyslexic student. the research findings in the first quantitative part of the study reveal that self-efficacy in dyslexic students is substantially lower than in non-dyslexic students. according to the results of the second mixed, quantitative-qualitative part of the study encompassing a case study, foreign language instruction has an impact on dyslexic students’ self-efficacy and appropriate language instruction rises self-efficacy in students with dyslexia. keywords: dyslexia, self-efficacy, foreign language instruction, language learning, language teaching dyslexia and dyslexia related foreign language learning problems in each school environment teachers deal with students of at least average intellectual level but displaying symptoms of learning difficulties, primarily in reading and writing. according to the data revealed by the polish dyslexia association 10–15% children worldwide are affected by dyslexia, 4% by deep dyslexia. based on various learning difficulties bogdanowicz (1993) distinguished four dyslexia types: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.9501 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8438-1618 bogusława maria gosiewska-turek72 • visual dyslexia: learning problems cover mainly perception, aural memory combined with difficulties related to language function; • integrative dyslexia: difficulties concerning motor skills-integration of perception; • mixed dyslexia: difficulties related to aural perception and memory, visual memory of words, visual sequencing memory as well as spatial imagination; • aural dyslexia: related to perception and auditory memory disorders frequently combined with language function disorder. dyslexic students experience educational difficulties not only learning their native language but also foreign language (crombie, 2000; kormos et al., 2009). these difficulties concern orthographic and phonological processing of sentences, reciting or weak utterance fluency; poor phonemic awareness characterized by lack of proper spelling which in turn results in problems with vocabulary learning due to poor working memory; lack of metacognitive abilities or individual language analysis, self-assessment or weak concentration. foreign language learning difficulty is determined by interdependence between graphic signs and sounds, which in science is called deep orthography (frost, 2005). deep orthographies can be characterized by inconsistent and unpredictable interdependence. english is a language with deep orthography in which this relationship is unstable, and the same graphic signs can be read in different letters in various ways which affects and increases learning difficulties (spencer, 2007). polish language, on the other hand, is a transparent language where graphic signs are always read in the same way. as a result, foreign language learning proves to be exceptionally difficult for students with dyslexia. self-efficacy affective factors have an impact on learners’ foreign language success. according to some authors affectivity is even more important than students’ aptitude (chastain, 1988), and self-efficacy is believed to be crucial in academic performance. self-efficacy theory has been introduced by albert bandura (1977, 1997), who based his model on socio-cognitive theory according to which people are capable of undertaking the intentional activity. this activity is prioritized in accordance with trifold relations. it points out that individuals’ acts have an impact on their future behavior being a result of trifold interrelated associations which cover: the environment in which individuals are brought up, their behavior, and biological factors. the trifold model determines people’s opinions about themselves and affects their acts (bandura, 1977). dyslexia, self-efficacy, and language instruction… 73 albert bandura came to the conclusion that people’s opinions about their opportunities to act and the effects of their efforts have an impact on the way they behave. in his book social foundations of thought and action, bandura claims that people’s personal development is based on “what people think has an impact on their behaviour” (bandura, 1983, p. 8). bandura (1977) in his cognitive theory enumerated the main sources of selfefficacy. among them he listed: mastery experiences, modelling, verbal-social persuasion, and physiological and affective states. mastery experiences are the most essential sources of self-efficacy and they relate to people’s perception of their own previous success or failure. thus, after the task is done by individuals, they assess the result of their effort. when they come to the conclusion that their effort led to success, self-efficacy when dealing with similar task, increases. conversely, when they perceive their effort unsuccessful, they become unsecure during similar task. moreover, students built their self-efficacy through modelling, that is, observing the others and interpreting their experiences (usher & pajeras, 2006). the more students identify themselves with role models, the more probably it is that their self-efficacy will increase (bandura, 1986). for instance, when the learner gets 50 out of 100 points in the test and discovers that the other classmates obtained fewer points, it is likely that student’s self-efficacy will increase. on the other hand, when the student learns that the other classmates received more points, the learner’s self-efficacy will decrease. the subsequent source of self-efficacy is the verbal-social persuasion of significant others. in verbal-social persuasion students’ self-evaluation is realized based on students’ assessment of significant others. the students’ attitude towards those people depends on how they trust them and their professionalism. moreover, bandura (1986) underlined that verbal persuasion is more efficient when it causes a long-lasting increase in self-efficacy. thus, it is advisable to find a person, role-model who is capable of doing the task sufficiently. it could be a teacher, a parent, or symbolic model such as a person known from media (bandura, 1997). in foreign language learning self-efficacy relates to self-regulation noticeable in metacognitive strategies. academic self-efficacy describes individuals’ assurance in realizing educational activities on a given level (shunk, 1991). thus, learners with a higher level of aptitude are more successful learners than those with lower aptitude. however, academic performance is a process covering various factors so high aptitude does not determine success. bogusława maria gosiewska-turek74 multisensory instruction contemporary foreign language teaching theories suggest language learning which resembles native language learning: firstly, by listening, then speaking and reading, followed by writing. the widely employed teaching method is a communicative method in which meaning is inferred from the context, grammar rules are taught directly and the interdependence between a sound and a symbol has been limited (ganschaw et al., 2000). nevertheless, researches confirm that the traditional teaching approach proves to be more efficient in teaching students with learning difficulties (ganschaw et al., 1998). reading comprehension with verbal processing combined with processing through recognition of words, symbol identification was efficient in teaching students with learning difficulties. very important is early contact with orthography (relation between sound and its graphic sign) (sparks et al., 2006). since the communicative method turned out to be inefficient in teaching dyslexic students, multisensory teaching instruction appeared the more effective method in teaching these students. in this method all senses are activated in accordance with the rule: seeing, hearing, and doing. it was presented for the first time by gillingham and stillman in 1960, and subsequently introduced in some schools around the world as a teaching method for dyslexic students. teaching is realized with the employment of direct instruction, the meaning should not be inferred by students, but rather provided by a teacher. dyslexics benefit primarily when they receive systematic and structured grammar and phonetic rules which are followed by relevant exercises and consolidation of knowledge they obtained. moreover, activation of various sensory channels is essential. therefore, children make letter models from plasticine, trace words written on paper, carpet or sand. when their perception channel has been opened, they find the relationship between graphic and phonological aspects of words. as a result, information is acquired in complex activation of different senses. in multisensory teaching, students learn vocabulary using pictures. they are asked to look at the picture with a written word, they say the word and then write. they also learn vocabulary at the board by repeating the word after the teacher, who then writes the word on the board. finally, students repeat the word again and write in their notebooks. the teacher can also separate syllables and sounds in words (sparks et al., 1991). grammar concepts are taught directly. for instance, the teacher can introduce color code according to which red color is used to match the subject, blue to match the object and yellow, the verb. when such code is dyslexia, self-efficacy, and language instruction… 75 used systematically, the learners will understand grammar better (kormos & smith, 2012). communicative exercises can also be conducted with the employment of multisensory teaching. this activity begins with natural communication through listening and speaking. nevertheless, students should activate more senses while learning. that is why they can be asked to prepare cards with personal pronouns my, your, his, etc. later they write a few sentences with these pronouns and finally the learners are paired and one student is asked to read the sentence with personal pronoun, and the other student choses the second card with matching picture and repeats the sentence (sparks et al., 1991). however, opponents of multisensory instruction claim that in this method it is impossible to develop metacognitive processes and it does not take into account various learning and cognitive skills (wearmouth & reid, 2008). empirical research methodology this part of the paper outlines the empirical study. the primary objective of a study was to explore the relationship between self-efficacy and dyslexia, and the secondary objective, to investigate the impact of teaching methods on self-efficacy in dyslexic student. even though there are many studies concerning self-efficacy in a school context, only a few of them have been investigating the relationship between self-efficacy and foreign language learning. however, none of the researches examine self-efficacy in connection with teaching instruction employed in teaching students with dyslexia. therefore, the author of the study formulated the following research questions: rq1: what is the relationship between self-efficacy and foreign language learning? rq2: how does foreign language learning instruction affect dyslexic students’ self-efficacy? the study’s data collection method was a mixed study. the quantitative study relates to the objective analysis of the data achieved from self-efficacy questionnaires conducted among dyslexic and non-dyslexic primary school students. the qualitative method is realized in the form of a case study conducted with a dyslexic student. bogusława maria gosiewska-turek76 participants, the instrument, and the procedure the informants in the quantitative part of the study were 20 dyslexic and 50 non-dyslexic primary school students who attend a primary school in lędziny, poland. there were 22 non-dyslexic girls, 28 non-dyslexic boys, and 20 dyslexic boys. the average age of the students was 13. all students studied english as a part of their school curriculum and had three hours a week of english class. as a result, they had at least 6-year english exposure at school. in the first part of the study conducted with the application of the quantitative method, the employed instrument was a questionnaire consisting of 15 questions and distributed among the participants. prepared by the researcher the foreign language self-efficacy questionnaire measured the level of english language learning related self-efficacy. the researcher applied a scale evaluated according to a 4-point likert scale ranging from 1 to 5 with the possible responses: strongly disagree—1, disagree—2, agree—3, and strongly agree—4, where 1 indicted very low, and 4—very high self-efficacy. the data were collected within two weeks. the headteacher’s permission to conduct research was obtained in the primary school. the second part covered the qualitative case study without generalizing to the whole population, combined with the quantitative one. the participant of a qualitative case study was a 13-year-old boy with dyslexia who is a sixthyear student of a primary school in mysłowice. the qualitative study helped to understand the situation which is unique, and has not been analyzed before. the case study lasted six weeks during which the researcher conducted six 45-minute classes with the student. also, the researcher applied foreign language self-efficacy questionnaire, the same which was filled out by 70 primary school students. the questionnaire was employed to a dyslexic student before and after a case study. research results in the first part of the study the author attempted to answer the first research question. hence, the quantitative methodology was applied. the data were collected within one week and was computed by means of the statistical software rstudio with the primary calculations being descriptive statistics: mean (m), and standard deviation (sd), as well as interferential statistics operations: the mann whitney test, and the shapiro-wilk t-parametric test conducted in order to investigate whether there was a statistical difference between self-efficacy means scores in dyslexic and non-dyslexic students. dyslexia, self-efficacy, and language instruction… 77 table 1 research results obtained from dyslexic and non-dyslexic students’ self-efficacy foreign language questionnaires variable all (70) non-dyslexics (50) dyslexics (20) dyslexics and non-dyslexics m sd m sd m sd p-value t-value self-efficacy 39.84 6.13 41.80 5.59 34.95 4.53 3.466e-06 –5.32461 the research results reveal that there is a substantial difference in dyslexic and non-dyslexic learners of english with dyslexics experiencing lower levels of self-efficacy (m 34.95), than non-dyslexic students (m 41.80). furthermore, the score of 6.13 obtained from sd calculation in all (dyslexic and non-dyslexic students) revealed a normal distribution of scores in all students where students’ lowest score was 28 points in the self-efficacy foreign language questionnaire, and the highest was 53 points in non-dyslexic students. the highest score which could have been obtained by the participants was 60 points, and the lowest—15. the result 5.59 achieved from non-dyslexic students’ questionnaires also show normal distribution of scores with the lowest score amounted 30 points and the highest—53. nevertheless, dyslexic students with a score 4.53, displayed non-normal distribution, and their lowest score in the questionnaires was 28, and the highest 45. following the procedure, as the sample size is not large, in order to compare the two groups of participants (dyslexics and non-dyslexics), the researcher applied the mann whitney interferential (willcoxon rank-sum test). it is a non-parametric test which tests whether there is a significant difference in the two groups of participants. the value above 0.05 shows that there is no statistical difference. in this study, the p-value which amounted 3.466e-06 indicates that there is a substantial difference in self-efficacy between dyslexic and non-dyslexic students. finally, in order to examine the result obtained from the willcoxon rank the researcher applied the shapiro-wilk t-parametric test. the score –5.32461 confirmed the result achieved in the willcoxon rank-sum. in order to answer the second research question, the author of the study administered a mixed quantitative-qualitative study. the participant of a qualitative study was a 13-year old dyslexic boy who holds an opinion from pedagogical-psychological suspensory. in the statement it has been stipulated that the boy has got decreased aural-vision-kinaesthetic integration as well as graphomotor abilities. in writing the boy commits many orthographic mistakes and distorts longer words. the boy reads slowly word by word. moreover, his aural and phonological memory is limited, which results in weaker auditory channels. bogusława maria gosiewska-turek78 to see the whole picture of the conundrum, the author began the research with the foreign language self-efficacy questionnaire filled out by a student. the mean was 2.3 which clearly indicates that the boy had low self-efficacy regarding foreign language learning. for instance, to the statement “english is one of the easiest subjects,” he responded “strongly disagree.” he also gave the same answer to another statement “teachers take care of everything to ease me to understand what they explain.” moreover, the learner assessed himself as a weak english language student. the case study was performed by the researcher, who is simultaneously an active english teacher and was conducted from 9 november until 20 december 2019. for the purpose of the study the researcher changed the boy’s name into adam. adam is the student in a state primary school in mysłowice. the author decided to work with adam to examine what can be done to help a dyslexic student in foreign language learning. the study was based on the learner’s student book flash 6 (2019). the first week. the author began the study examining the student’s english language skills. thus, she tested adam’s speaking, writing, listening, and reading skills. adam did the language tasks as well as he could. at first, he seemed to be reluctant so as “an ice breaker” she applied taboo game. in the game, the student had to describe the words he saw on the card without using enumerated words. subsequently, the researcher checked adam’s writing skills to which she used vocabulary from student’s book flash. to encourage adam to work, for listening the researcher selected a video from youtube entitled “what are computers for kids. intro to computers.” after the first session with adam, it has been noticeable that the learner who is willing to communicate in english, struggles while speaking making a number of language mistakes. moreover, he commits many grammar mistakes and pronounces incorrectly most of the english words. regarding writing, adam wrote correctly 4 words out of 20. however, mistakes in his writing were not substantial for instance, instead of “ear infection,” he wrote “er infection,” or instead of “stomach ache,” he wrote “stomachkage” and adam’s handwriting was illegible. while testing listening skill adam watched the video with interest. however, it was problematic for adam to report what he heard, either in polish or in english. the last examined skill was reading the text escape room from adam’s student’s book. during reading adam mispronounced many words or skipped some lines. hence, initial diagnosis revealed the necessity of working on all the language skills. the second week. during the second session the study was based on the fourth chapter in the news from adam’s student’s book. the researcher focused on learning the vocabulary from the introduction to the chapter. she prepared flashcards with words such as “customer” or “virtual reality.” firstly, the tutor gave adam flashcards with polish and english meanings and his task was to dyslexia, self-efficacy, and language instruction… 79 join the meanings in both languages. then she read the words in english and the student repeated after her. the next stage was to tell words in english. finally, the student traced the words in english on the sand, and the last task was to say and write words in a notebook. towards the end, to make the session more attractive the researcher asked adam to draw eight words and to make a story with these words. the training based on multisensory instruction, activating various perception channels proved to be successful. adam was able to recall from his memory 18 out of 20 learned words. the task in which adam was asked to make a story was done with enthusiasm. as adam is interested in history, he created the story set during world war ii. his story was incorrect and while creating it adam asked about a few words but the aim of this part was rather to convince him that he can break the language barrier. the third week. in the third session the researcher, following what student’s book suggested focused on grammar, that is teaching modal verbs such as can, can’t, could, couldn’t, must, mustn’t, have to, should, shouldn’t. firstly, the author of the study explained to adam the usage of modal verbs referring to learner’s experiences, for instance, “when you want to go out with your friends to play football you ask ‘can i go to the football pitch?’” the next step was to teach adam how to use modal verbs. here, the researcher used earlier prepared cards where the person, modal verb, and object were written in different colors. with these cards adam learnt how to build affirmative sentences, questions, and negations. in the last task, the student did the exercises from his book. learning grammar with the reference to the boy’s personal experiences helped him to understand the usage of modal verbs easier. the boy enjoyed learning grammar through cards, and later examination of acquired skills showed that the boy understood the topic and was able to build sentences with modal verbs himself. the only tasks which were done incorrectly were the ones where adam did not understand the meaning of sentences. fourth week. this time the teacher focused on teaching reading comprehension. adam worked with a text droids at work from his student’s book. initially, adam had to underline words he perceived difficult. then, the trainer taught him these words and a few others with the multisensory method used earlier. the next point of the session was “shared reading” (cimermanova, 2015) in which at first the researcher and then the student together with the teacher read the text in turns. adam received a bookmark from the researcher, thanks to which he did not skip the lines. subsequently, when it proved to be impossible for adam to answer the questions to the text, they translated it together into a student’s mother tongue. the following activity was to create his own comic with the words learnt during the session in which the webpage www. storyboardthat.com was valuable. bogusława maria gosiewska-turek80 fifth week. this class involved listening comprehension. the text internet safety tips served as a basis. in order to rise student’s interest, the researcher prepared cards with vocabulary from the listening that is shopping online, logging in, antivirus software, and a stranger in the internet. firstly, the teacher and the student discussed the problems from the cards, and then adam listened to the recording with the book closed. finally, the boy did the task in which he filled in the gaps in the sentences placed under the text. adam did not manage to do the whole exercise, thus he listened to the recording again to finish the task. subsequently, the researcher focused on vocabulary which she taught adam with cards and educational sand, after which the boy wrote the words in his notebook. the last, final stage of the fifth session was to check whether the student learnt the vocabulary doing a quiz prepared by the teacher with the assistance of the web application www.classtime.com. sixth week. the aim of the last session was to examine the effectiveness of earlier applied strategies and whether these methods had a considerable impact on adam’s self-efficacy. to achieve this goal the researcher examined all taught skills. she began with speaking in which the student participated in the conversation about his family, interests, and friends. these were not the topics discussed earlier. however, the teacher noticed that although adam still made grammar and lexical mistakes, he willingly took part in the speaking practice. then the researcher suggested the so-called controlled conversation that is based on one of the topics discussed during the sessions. this time, adam had to select cards with vocabulary related to the text internet safety, then he discussed the topics suggested in the cards. the following task was to write ten words which adam had learnt during our case study and the learner wrote correctly six out of ten. compared to the knowledge of vocabulary learnt before our sessions it was a good result. subsequently, adam read loudly the text he had never read before. the first thing he did was to reach for a bookmark which helped him read without skipping lines. he still made a lot of mistakes but he tried to read slowly and carefully. however, the last grammar task examined whether adam was able to learn how to use modal verbs proved successful. although the session related to modal verbs took place a few weeks before, the exercises were done perfectly with only a few mistakes. in the last stage of the study adam filled out the self-efficacy questionnaire, the same which he received before the case study. this time the average score was higher and it amounted for 2.9 which showed that after 6-week sessions with the trainer the boy’s self-efficacy increased and he began to believe that he could make decisions related to foreign language learning independently. for instance, to the statement “i could get better grades if i worked more,” he responded “yes,” and not “no” like before the case study. dyslexia, self-efficacy, and language instruction… 81 likewise, he agreed with the statement “teachers care for us to understand everything.” discussion and conclusion the presented study aimed to answer two research questions. the objective of the first research question was to examine foreign language self-efficacy in dyslexic and non-dyslexic students. not surprisingly, the research results show that dyslexic students display a significantly lower levels of english language self-efficacy. the study results confirm the findings obtained from the research conducted by stagg and eaton (2018) who investigated self-efficacy in dyslexic, and non-dyslexic university students. nevertheless, according to the researcher’s knowledge, the present study is the first one investigating dyslexia, self-efficacy, and foreign language instruction. the second research question examined the relationship between selfefficacy and english language learning in the dyslexic student. the results received from the foreign language self-efficacy questionnaires filled out by a participant in a case study reveal that the employment of multisensory instruction improved his english learning related self-efficacy. it increased from 2.3 to 2.9. the lowest score which could have been obtained was 1, and the highest—4. summing up, 6-week time spent with adam, the boy primarily needed serious support in order to help him to believe that he is capable of achieving success in foreign language learning. observing adam’s engagement, it can be concluded that he needed the teacher’s attention, and positive relation with the trainer encouraged him to work. each session began with small talk and the teacher complemented each student’s success. regaining self-confidence in dyslexic student is perceived as an essential factor conditioning the skill to read and write (nijakowska, 2010). the participant benefited from multisensory instruction based on the simultaneous activation of a few senses while doing the task, which eased him to learn vocabulary and understand grammar, primarily creating the relationship between visual and phonological aspects of words. the employment of modern technologies: applications for creating comic books and a website for preparing quizzes was beneficial and motivating in boosting participant’s confidence. individual approach during private sessions caused that the boy began to believe in his language capabilities which lifted his self-efficacy, in dyslexic students usually lower than in students without any special educational needs (stagg & eaton, 2018). bogusława maria gosiewska-turek82 there is a wide range of pedagogical implications of the present study. research findings indicate that it is relevant to introduce special educational accommodations in public schools in order to ensure dyslexia-friendly education. more individualized approach should be realized in the form of special correction-compensation classes conducted with the application of the method adopted for teaching dyslexics during which students with special educational needs will receive positive feedback and support. also, forgoing study shows that the application of multisensory instruction combined with modern technologies can be beneficial. however, the attempt to generalize the following study results to the whole population can be a subject of certain limitations. the participants of the study filled out the questionnaires without the presence of the researcher which resulted in a lack of control over the procedure of data collection in the quantitative part of the research. moreover, qualitative data were analyzed solely by the author. in order to avoid bias, another independent researcher with the same qualifications is recommended. the number of participants can also be inadequate. the quantitative study was conducted on 20 dyslexic and 50 non-dyslexic students. thus, the research findings can be considered as assumptions rather than the facts relevant to the 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[assessment and planning of teaching and learning]. in g. reid & j. wermouth (eds.), dysleksja. teoria i praktyka [dyslexia. theory and practice] (pp. 211–234). gdańskie wydawnictwo psychologiczne. bogusława maria gosiewska-turek legasthenie, selbstwirksamkeit und sprachunterricht beim fremdsprachenlernen – eine gemischte quantitativ-quantitative studie z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g das ziel der arbeit ist es, die wechselbeziehung zwischen legasthenie, selbstwirksamkeit und fremdsprachenunterricht zu untersuchen. die autorin der studie wandte eine gemischte (quantitative und qualitative) methode an. die quantitativen daten wurden anhand der von bogusława maria gosiewska-turek84 legasthenen und nicht legasthenen studenten ausgefüllten fragebögen zur selbstwirksamkeit erhoben und die qualitativen daten – im rahmen einer fallstudie mit einem legasthenen studenten. die forschungsergebnisse im ersten quantitativen teil der studie zeigen, dass die selbstwirksamkeit bei legasthenen studenten wesentlich geringer sei als bei nicht legasthenen studenten. laut ergebnissen des zweiten gemischten (quantitativ-qualitativen) teils, der eine fallstudie umfasste, habe der fremdsprachenunterricht einen einf luss auf die selbstwirksamkeit legasthener studenten und der entsprechende sprachunterricht erhöhe die selbstwirksamkeit von studenten mit legasthenie. schlüsselwörter: legasthenie, selbstwirksamkeit, fremdsprachenunterricht, fremdsprachenlernen, fremdsprachenlehren theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 6 (2), 2020, pp. 107–132 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.8527 oleksandr kapranov western norway university of applied sciences the dynamics of needs in a course in english phonetics for in-service primary school teachers of english a b s t r a c t this article presents a study that seeks to explore the dynamics of needs experienced by a group of in-service primary school teachers of english as a foreign language (efl) who are enrolled in a course in english phonetics at a regional university in norway. the course in english phonetics is designed for the group of efl teachers (further – participants) who combine working full-time with taking in-service efl courses. the aim of the study is to explore how the dynamics of the participants’ needs change within the time frame of two semesters. the study is based upon theoretical premises of needs analysis (further – na) formulated by hyland (2006), who regards efl learners’ needs as a continuous process that changes over time. the results of na indicate that whereas initially the participants explicitly express the need for obtaining tertiary-level education in english to be able to teach english at primary school, their needs change towards the end of the course to involve the focus on becoming role models in an efl classroom, paying attention to speech f luency, intonation, and conducting english-only efl classes. these findings will be further discussed in the article keywords: english as a foreign language (efl), in-service teachers, needs analysis (na), phonetics, primary school introduction this article presents and discusses a study that seeks to explore a dynamic account of needs experienced by in-service primary school teachers (further – participants) during their enrollment in the university course in english phonetics at a regional university in norway. the participants are certified https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9056-3311 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en oleksandr kapranov108 primary school teachers with at least three years of tertiary education who teach english to young learners in years 1–7 within primary school settings in norway, in addition to teaching other subjects in norwegian as the language of instruction, for example, literacy, numeracy, the norwegian language, and digital skills. even though the participants are university educated and certified teachers, they have no prior tertiary education in english as a foreign language (efl). in order to be able to continue teaching efl at primary school, they need to complete a university program in english that is comprised of such courses as functional grammar of english, english phonetics, and children’s literature the study further discussed in this article is embedded in a broad area of teaching english pronunciation to efl learners. however, whereas the majority of the studies seem to focus upon efl learners’ pronunciation (waniekklimczak, 2015), little is known about the acquisition of english pronunciation by adult in-service primary school teachers and the associated needs they might experience in the process of acquisition (henderson et al., 2015). a novel facet of the present study rests with the scarcity of research publications that address the needs of those in-service efl teachers (gaye, 2020; hyland & wang, 2019; pérez cañado, 2016, p. 268) who combine a dual role of efl primary school teachers and adult efl students enrolled in an in-service efl course. moreover, little is known about the needs of those in-service efl primary school teachers who are enrolled in a tertiary course in english phonetics. the present study seeks to provide more insight into this under-researched issue by means of exploring the participants’ needs in the course. specifically, the focus of the investigation involves the question of potential dynamic changes in the participants’ needs during their course enrollment. the notion of needs analysis (henceforth – na) is central in this study. it should be noted that the importance of na is routinely mentioned in research in applied linguistics, efl and english for specific purposes (esp) studies, respectively (li, 2018, p. 8). prior literature indicates that na involves a systematic collection and analysis of data necessary for the course curriculum development (belcher, 2006; brown, 2009; flowerdew, 2013; hyland, 2006; li, 2018; malicka, guerrero, & norris, 2019; paltridge & starfield, 2013). the methodological and theoretical premises in this study are based upon hyland’s (2006) approach, who refers to na as the techniques for collecting and assessing information relevant to course design: it is the means of establishing the how and what of a course it is a continuous process, since we modify our teaching as we come to learn more about our students, and in this way it actually shades into evaluation—the means of establishing the effectiveness of a course. (hyland, 2006, p. 73) the dynamics of needs in a course in english phonetics for in-service… 109 hyland’s (2006) view of needs as a continuous process is especially relevant to this study, since its specific aims involve an account of how the participants’ needs change throughout their enrollment in the course in english phonetics. in this regard, it should be mentioned that scholarly attention to the foreign language (fl) learners’ needs as a dynamic process has been growing in applied linguistics, efl and esp research communities (larsen-freeman, 2016). a relatively recent interest in dynamic aspects of efl teaching and learning is evocative of the dynamic systems approach towards the teaching and learning of a foreign language in general (de bot, 2008; larsen-freeman, 2016; van geert, 2008; waninge, dörnyei, & de bot, 2014). the main concept that is present in the dynamic systems theory approach towards efl is that language acquisition and language learning are operationalized as non-linear, often chaotic, and liable to change due to a host of variables that are dynamically distributed and redistributed in time (larsen-freeman, 2016; van geert, 2008). following this line of argument, it could be reasonable to suggest that efl learners’ needs as a continuous process as posited by hyland (2006) are dynamic, liable to change, non-linear and marked by the presence of adaptation, and variability on the part of an efl learner (larsen-freeman, 2016), as well as, presumably, on the part of other stake-holders involved in efl teaching and learning. the study that is further described in this article is grounded in the aforementioned construal of efl learners’ needs as a continuous and dynamic process as postulated by hyland (2019). the specific aim of the study is to explore how the participants’ needs change over the period of two semesters of study. further, this article is structured as follows. first, theoretical background notions associated with na will be given. second, a literature review of prior studies of na in efl contexts will be outlined. thereafter, an overview of the application of dynamic systems theory (dst) to efl teaching and learning will be discussed. the literature review will be followed by the context of efl teaching and learning at norwegian primary schools. then, the present study, its hypothesis, participants, methodology, and major findings will be provided. finally, the article will be concluded with the summary of the findings and their implications. na: theoretical background as previously mentioned in the introductory part, na is extensively employed as a means of collecting and analyzing data in conjunction with course development, especially in applied linguistics and esp studies (li, 2018; malicka, guerrero, & norris, 2019; romanowski, 2017), and, quite recently, in oleksandr kapranov110 efl studies that are associated with preand in-service efl teachers (barriosarnuco et al., 2018; kang, 2018; zein, 2017). as indicated by flowerdew (2013), na “has a long history and is constantly evolving and redefining itself” (flowerdew, 2013, p. 326) since its inception in the early 1960s. while it is beyond the scope of this article to present an exhaustive account of na in terms of its development (see, e.g., belcher (2006), flowerdew (2013), hyland (2019), & romanowski (2017) for detailed meta-analyses), it should be mentioned that traditionally there has been a variety of approaches towards the definition of the term. specifically, it is often used as a synonym for needs assessment in the literature (widodo, 2017, p. 128). concurrently with this view, however, there is an alternative approach to the definition of na, which posits that needs assessment involves obtaining data, whereas needs analysis involves assigning value to the data (graves, 1996, p. 12). it should be noted that further in the article, the term needs analysis abbreviated as na will be referred to as a synonym for needs assessment. as far as the definition of na is concerned, the present research follows hyland (2019), who regards na as a series of interlinked techniques that are comprised of (i) the initial “fact-finding stage to discover the current proficiencies and wants of the students and the constraints of the learning situation in terms of time, resources, and so on” (hyland, 2019, p. 57), and (ii) the subsequent identification of the competencies and tasks that will be required of students and/or desired by the students. by means of expanding upon this definition, hyland (2019) further argues that na is actually an umbrella term that embraces many aspects: what are learners’ goals, backgrounds, and abilities? what are their language proficiencies? why are they taking this course? what kinds of teaching do they prefer? what situations will they need to write in? how are writing knowledge and skills used in these situations? needs can be perceived objectively by teachers or subjectively by learners, can involve what learners know, don’t know, or want to know, and can be analyzed in a variety of ways. (hyland, 2019, p. 58) an approach which is similar to that formulated by hyland (2019) is found in brindley (1989), who distinguishes between objective na on the one hand and subjective na on the other hand. the former involves factual data concerning the learners, their current language use and language proficiency inclusive of the challenges posed efl acquisition (brindley, 1989, p. 70). the latter is regarded as the learner’s context-situated cognition that is associated with the data that are informative of personality, attitudes, and expectations (brindley, 1989). more specifically, subjective na is thought to reveal the leaners’ “self-knowledge, awareness of target situations, life goals, and instructional expectations” (belcher, 2006, p. 136). the dynamics of needs in a course in english phonetics for in-service… 111 brindley’s argument concerning the role of the learner’s context-situated cognition in subjective na (1989) is commensurate with the approach proposed by hutchinson and waters (1987), who refer to the context-bound target situation needs that are associated with the necessities, wants and challenges in the learning process in a given target situation. in addition to the target situation needs, hutchinson and waters (1987) argue that there is a separate set of needs, which is referred to as learning needs that are comprised of the learner’s algorithm of action in order to learn. arguably, learning needs involve a host of variables that include the learners’ backgrounds, their motivation, individual learning styles, and other factors. among a number of potential variables involved in the learners’ needs, romanowski (2017) emphasizes the consideration of the types of needs. romanowski (2017), as well as hyland (2019), and li (2018) seem to share a contention that the types of needs in na involve perspective and/or perspectives, and contextual environment of the learners’ needs that can be analyzed from the vantage points of various stake-holders. for instance, romanowski (2017) indicates that na can be conducted from the learner’s, teacher’s, and institutional perspectives, respectively. in addition to the aforementioned types of needs, a na procedure may focus on the considerations of the learners’ language needs as a product or as a process. in this regard, tzotzou (2014) suggests that na involves objective needs and subjective needs, such as motivation and personal learning preferences. it should be observed that a subjective process-oriented perspective to na is employed in the present study. following tzotzou (2014), a process-oriented aspect of na allows to gain insight into how learning as a time-bound process takes place in a variety of efl teaching and learning contexts. one of the contexts involves the teaching and learning of english in primary school with, arguably, a context-specific set of needs that an efl learner as well as an efl primary school teacher might experience. the next section of this article presents an outline of prior studies of na in efl contexts that involve efl teaching and learning in primary school. na in efl contexts there is a growing body of current research literature on na in different efl contexts that are associated with primary schooling (barrios-arnuco et al., 2018; kabilan & veratharaju, 2013; kang, 2018; nieman & hugo, 2010; nijakowska, tsagari & spanoudis, 2018; o’sullivan, 2003; tzotzou, 2014; walker, 1999; zein, 2017). in the literature on na in primary school contexts, it seems possible to identify several research themes associated with na that focus on (i) the use of the english language in an efl classroom (nieman & oleksandr kapranov112 hugo, 2010; o’sullivan, 2003; tzotzou, 2014; walker, 1999), (ii) professional development of in-service efl teachers (kabilan & veratharaju, 2013; zein, 2017), (iii) efl learners with special needs in an efl classroom (nijakowska, tsagari, & spanoudis, 2018), and (iv) the needs and challenges experienced by pre-service primary school efl teachers (barrios-arnuco et al., 2018; kang, 2018). the needs that involve the use of the english language in an efl classroom are investigated by nieman and hugo (2010), o’sullivan (2003), tzotzou (2014), and walker (1999). in the study conducted by nieman and hugo (2010), primary school teachers are asked to comment on the main problems and needs that they experience in using english as the medium of instruction in their classrooms. it has been established by nieman and hugo (2010) that the needs involve variables that are associated with the learners’ awareness of correct english pronunciation and their comprehension of oral communication in english. other needs, according to nieman and hugo (2010), are related to the teachers’ needs for a more sophisticated vocabulary and confidence in teaching english. the classroom use of the english language is the focus of na conducted by tzotzou (2014), who investigates primary school learners’ attitudes towards efl learning and their learning preferences in a greek l1 efl classroom (tzotzou, 2014, p. 59). tzotzou’s na (2014) is suggestive of a desired focus upon those activities that are relevant to the efl primary school context. in addition, tzotzou (2014) argues that efl teaching and learning in greek primary school contexts would benefit from a focus on teacher development programs. in concert with tzotzo (2014), walker (1999) has found that efl teachers in spanish primary schools are in need of further in-service training that, in particular, involves attention to english pronunciation. walker (1999) has established that spanish l1 efl primary school teachers are “keen or very keen that their students pronounce english well” (walker, 1999, p. 25). whereas efl primary school teachers in spain need attention to pronunciation in efl, the na conducted by o’sullivan (2003) in the united arab emirates highlights primary school teachers’ sensitivity to the flexibility in efl curriculum that allows them “to use whichever methods and available resources best enable the development of their students’ english language skills” (o’sullivan, 2003, p. 454). the research theme of primary school english teachers’ needs that involve their professional development is explored by kabilan and veratharaju (2013), and zein (2017), respectively. kabilan and veratharaju (2013) seek to establish the needs associated with professional development of primary school efl teachers in malaysia. kaliban and veratharaju (2013) indicate that the participants in their study express the need for professional development programs and activities that reflect their own needs and their students’ needs. the study suggests that primary school teachers’ and their students’ needs are construed as a fluid and dynamic discursive space that is comprised of the verbally exthe dynamics of needs in a course in english phonetics for in-service… 113 pressed needs for planning, development, and engaging teachers in their professional development (kaliban & veratharaju, 2013). similarly to kaliban and veratharaju (2013), professional development needs of primary efl teachers are addressed in an empirical study by zein (2017). that study aims at elucidating the needs of primary school efl teachers by means of combining the teachers’ and teacher educators’ perspectives. notably, the findings in zein (2017) are evocative of those reported by kaliban and veratharaju (2013). specifically, these two investigations are indicative of the focus on knowledge of primary school students in addition to the needs of primary school efl teachers’ own needs. among other needs reported by zein (2017), there is a need for introducing a course on children psychology that is seen as playing a facilitative role in a primary school teacher’s professional development. the topic of primary school teachers’ willingness and preparedness to include dyslexic learners into an efl classroom is examined by nijakowska, tsagari, and spanoudis (2018). the authors report that statistically significant effects are observed in relation to the teachers’ training and previous experience with dyslexic efl learners. nijakowska, tsagari, and spanoudis (2018) indicate that the needs of those primary school teachers who have to teach english to dyslexic efl learners are associated with the teachers’ preparedness to successfully include these learners in an efl classroom. additional facets of the na that have been discovered by the authors involve the need for professional training in efl and dyslexia. the na conducted by barrios-arnuco and the colleagues (2018), and kang (2018) focus upon the needs of pre-service primary school efl teachers. specifically, kang’s (2018) study has established that efl primary school teachers in south korea express the need for efl teaching methods, whereas their needs do not appear to reflect the importance of efl proficiency. the na in the study by kang (2018) highlights the importance of practical english teaching courses and efl classroom-related courses that are prioritized by the pre-service teachers. in contrast to the studies by kaliban and veratharaju (2013), and zein (2017), the na in kang (2018) does not indicate the presence of needs that focus on the knowledge base of primary school students. it also should be mentioned that whereas in the study by kang (2018) efl didactics and teaching methods appear to be among the main needs of pre-service primary school teachers, the investigation by barrios-arnuco et al. (2018) points to the pre-service primary school teachers’ need for efl literacy assessment. particularly, they have found that the participants in the study express the need for the alignment of assessment practices with the national classroom assessment reform policy in the philippines. it is evident from the present literature review that while there are numerous studies associated with in-service and pre-service primary school efl teachers’ needs, research that focuses upon na related to in-service primary oleksandr kapranov114 school efl teachers who lack formal qualifications in efl is not sufficiently represented. the study further described in the article seeks to address that issue. however, prior to proceeding to the present study, it seems pertinent to provide (i) a brief outline of dynamic systems theory in relation to needs in efl teaching and learning and (ii) the background context of the teaching and learning of english in norway. dynamic systems theory (dst) in relation to needs in efl teaching and learning as previously indicated, needs are thought to be specific to efl learners’ (e.g., primary school efl learners, efl learners with special needs) and/or efl teachers’ cohorts (e.g., in-service teachers, pre-service teachers), contextdependent (e.g., primary school, college), and liable to change due to a myriad of competing needs and stake-holders’ interests (widodo, 2017). these characteristics of needs in efl contexts are evocative of the theoretical approaches to efl teaching and learning which are found in the dynamic systems theory (dst). in general, a complex dynamic system is characterised by “(a) […] at least two or more elements that are (b) interlinked with each other but which also (c) change independently over time” (dörnyei, 2011, p. 81). one of the principal contentions in dst is that complex dynamic systems involve variables and elements, or sub-systems, which are non-linear and interact in a difficult-to-predict and chaotic manner, whereby the result of their interaction and change appears to significantly disproportionate to its cause either in qualitative or quantitative terms, or both (dörnyei, 2011; kruk & zawodniak, 2019; larsen-freeman, 2016). the variables and/or sub-systems in a complex dynamic system evolve in the space-time continuum (dörnyei, 2011) by means of undergoing a sequence of states, for example, relatively stable states, or those states that are marked by instability and an abrupt change or a series of chaotic changes (dörnyei, 2011; waninge, dörnyei, & de bot, 2014). in its relatively stable state, the complex dynamic system is stabilized and anchored by a strong attractor that renders it less dynamic (mercer, 2016). in contrast to that state, a complex dynamic system may be influenced by an agent of change (e.g., one variable or several variables that simultaneously impact upon the system). in this regard, change is construed in dst as the repeller state of a system that alters its stability and enters a period of flux or an abrupt catastrophic change (kruk & zawodniak, 2019; mercer, 2016). having originated in cognitive sciences and the philosophy of mind (van gelder, 1995), there is a fairly recent application of dst to the realm of applied linguistics (cameron & larsen-freeman, 2007), bilingualism (shook & marian, 2013), second language acquisition (sla) and efl studies (de bot, lowie, & the dynamics of needs in a course in english phonetics for in-service… 115 verspoor, 2007; larsen-freeman, 2016). from the dst perspective, an efl learner can be regarded as an open-ended contextualized and context-dependent complex system that dynamically changes in the process of efl acquisition (larsen-freeman, 2016). the efl learner as a complex dynamic system is conceptualized as an “interplay of multiple, temporally and spatially situated systems, including motivation and learning styles” (kruk & zawodniak, 2019, p. 179). the efl learner’s motivation could be conceived of as a complex dynamic system that undergoes changes from a state of flux to stability and vice versa, and interacts in a difficult-to-predict manner with other variables in the efl classroom (kruk & zawodniak, 2019; ghafarpour & moinzadeh, 2019; mercer, 2016). efl classrooms can be regarded as complex dynamic communicative systems “in which behaviours are primarily determined by situation, context and class atmosphere” (ghafarpour & moinzadeh, 2019, p. 3). similarly, efl students’ needs could be seen through the lenses of dst. presumably, an efl learner’s desirable future needs to deepen their efl proficiency could be regarded as a repellent state that acts as an agent of change, which shifts the leaner’s stable zone into a new and often chaotic trajectory of language growth and development. at the same time, if an efl learner’s needs are stable as an attractor state, they can facilitate the maintenance of relative stability of the learner’s language development. as far as contextual needs are concerned, it could be argued that from the dst perspective they are conducive to variability on the part of the learner, since macroand micro contexts in a typical efl classroom are comprised of a multitude of interactive variables that contribute to variation in the classroom dynamics and, in their turn, impact upon the trajectory of efl acquisition by an individual learner (larsen-freeman, 2016; mercer, 2016). efl teaching and learning in norwegian primary school contexts in norwegian primary schools, english is taught as an obligatory school subject from year 1 or from grade one in american terminology to year 7 (krulatz, neokleous, & henningsen, 2016, p. 142). thereafter, students study english in lower secondary school (years 8–10), which is compulsory to attend (udir, 2018). from year 1 to year 4 of primary school, there are 138 teaching hours allocated for english, whereas in the upper primary school (from years 5 to 7) the number of teaching hours increases to 228 (scheffler, horverka, & domińska, 2018, p. 134). with this allocation of teaching hours, primary schools in norway typically offer english lessons at least once a week (rugesæter, 2014). current research suggests that english is regarded as an essential international language in norway (rugesæter, 2012, p. 120). the teaching and learning oleksandr kapranov116 of english in norwegian primary school contexts is marked by a prestigious status of the english language. in this regard, bøhn and hansen (2017, p. 55) indicate that while “english does not have status as a first or an official language in norway, it has a strong position in norwegian society.” the growing importance of english and its prestigious status are reflected “in the tendency for national school systems to start teaching english from an increasingly early age” (coburn, 2014, p. 1). this situation creates a current demand for efl teachers in norwegian primary schools (udir, 2018). to meet the growing demand for efl teachers, norwegian universities and university colleges offer teacher education programs, where pre-service primary school teachers can choose whether or not they want to teach efl in years 1–7 of primary school, or years 5–10 that combine upper primary and lower secondary school (krulatz, neokleous, & henningsen, 2016). whereas there are teacher education programs that are tailored to the needs of pre-service primary school teachers, a significant number of in-service primary school teachers “teach english to children on a regular basis without formal qualifications or preparation” (coburn, 2014, p. 1). this observation is specifically topical for the age bracket of primary school teachers between 40 and 67 years of age. typically, primary school teachers in that demographic group (i.e., 40–67 y.o.) did not have to study english as an obligatory part of their teacher training. according to coburn (2014), “it is safe to say that many thousands of primary school teachers in norway currently teach english without formal competence in the subject” (coburn, 2014, p. 2). to reiterate the point, coburn (2016) posits that in norway, efl teaching in primary school is done almost exclusively by generalists in the 1st–4th grades, with more semi-specialists in the 5th– 7th grades. as indicated, a high proportion of those who teach english to children in norway have no specific efl teacher education. (coburn, 2016, p. 7) in order to address the issue of primary school teachers’ competence in the english language, the norwegian government has introduced a scheme which is commonly referred to as kompetanse for kvalitet (in english “competence for quality”) program of in-service training for those teachers who need formal university-level education in english (udir, 2019). usually, these in-service programs are co-financed by the norwegian ministry of education and research and local municipalities (coburn, 2014) and administered by local universities and university colleges. however, the municipality is responsible for the selections of primary school teachers to participate in the course (coburn, 2014; udir, 2019). the dynamics of needs in a course in english phonetics for in-service… 117 the present study the present study is contextualized within an in-service efl program that is offered at a regional university in norway to in-service primary school teachers, who are referred to as participants further in the article it should be emphasized that the participants are generalist primary school teachers without formal tertiary education in efl. however, they are all certified primary school teachers who completed university teacher training programs. in terms of its design, the in-service program in efl is comprised of the courses in children’s literature, functional grammar of english, and english phonetics, respectively. the program’s duration is two semesters, or one academic year. the course in english phonetics follows the book “english phonetics for teachers. third edition” written by nilsen and rugesæter (2015). the course in english phonetics involves in-mural sessions, two obligatory written assignments that are expected to be written individually and submitted by the participants online via the study platform canvas, and two written exams in functional grammar and phonetics, where the mark is equally distributed between these two subjects (i.e., 50% of the total mark is for grammar and 50% is for phonetics). the exams are the so-called take-home exams, that is, after the participants have been provided with the exam questions on the digital platform, they are expected to work on the exam individually at home and submit it via the digital platform within one week. the outline of the course design in english phonetics is summarized in table 1. the course design outlined in table 1 allows the participants to combine full-time employment with the in-mural and extramural forms of efl training at tertiary level. the participants are given a work-free paid week during the examination period. in addition, their study-related costs, such as course books, study materials, hotels and transportation for those who reside far from the university campus are paid for by the state via the municipality. table 1. course design in english phonetics n course design topics 1 autumn semester, in-mural seminar 1. introduction to the course. the participants’ writing of their course-related expectations and needs 2 autumn semester, in-mural seminar 2. chapter 2 in nilsen and rugesæter (2015). introduction to phonetics. sound foundation. introduction to the international phonetic alphabet (ipa) 3 autumn semester, in-mural seminar 3. chapter 3 in nilsen and rugesæter (2015). consonants. ipa oleksandr kapranov118 4 autumn semester, in-mural seminar 4. chapter 4 in nilsen and rugesæter (2015). vowels. ipa 5 autumn semester. an obligatory assignment either in grammar or phonetics (extramural). take-home written exam in grammar and phonetics (extramural). the participants are free to choose one topic either in grammar or phonetics. they are expected to write a reflective essay of approximately 1000 words upon a topic in english phonetics in relation to the teaching and learning of efl phonetics in norwegian primary schools. the essay writing is carried out individually within the timeframe of one month. the take-home exam consists of two halves, for example, functional grammar of english and phonetics, respectively. the time frame of the takehome exam is one week. 6 spring semester, in-mural seminar 1. the participants’ writing of their mid-course expectations and needs. chapter 5 in nilsen and rugesæter (2015). stress, rhythm, and sounds in company. ipa 7 spring semester, in-mural seminar 2. chapters 6–7 in nilsen and rugesæter (2015). intonation. varieties of spoken english. ipa 8 spring semester, extramural seminar 3 delivered online via the study platform canvas feedback on the participants’ pronunciation problems 9 spring semester. an obligatory assignment either in grammar or phonetics (extramural). take-home written exam in grammar and phonetics (extramural). the participants’ writing of their course assessment (extramural) the participants are free to choose one topic either in grammar or phonetics. they are expected to write a reflective essay of approximately 1000 words upon a topic in english phonetics in relation to the teaching and learning of efl phonetics in norwegian primary schools. the essay writing is carried out individually within the timeframe of one month. the take-home exam consists of two halves, for example, functional grammar of english and phonetics, respectively. the time frame of the takehome exam is one week. as far as the hypothesis in the present study is concerned, it is based upon an assumption that the participants’ needs are reflective of the dynamics associated with their in-service study contexts, learning trajectory, individual internal needs and needs that are external to the participants. specifically, the hypothesis involves a contention that the participants’ needs could be regarded as a continuous process that changes over time throughout the course in english phonetics. following the dst approach to efl teaching and learning (larsenfreeman, 2016; mercer, 2106), it is hypothesized in this study that the participants’ needs would be liable to change and would exhibit variability throughout the duration of the course in english phonetics. based upon the hypothesis, the following research question has been formulated: rq: would the participants’ needs be stable during the course in english phonetics or would they be subject to change and variability? the dynamics of needs in a course in english phonetics for in-service… 119 in conjunction with the aforementioned research question, the present study involves the following specific research aims: i) to conduct the analysis of the participants’ needs at the beginning (na 1), mid-course (na 2), and the end of the course (na 3); ii) to analyze the participants’ needs by means of a na procedure; iii) to juxtapose the participants’ needs at the beginning (na 1), mid-course (na 2), and the end of the course (na 3) in order to establish whether or not they are marked by the presence dynamic changes. participants in total, this study involves 32 participants (30 females, 2 males, m age = 43 y.o., standard deviation = 8.3). whereas all participants are university educated primary school teachers, none of them reports prior efl studies at college/university. all participants are speakers of norwegian as their first language (l1). there are neither native speakers of english nor bilinguals among the participants. given that none of the participants is a university-trained efl specialist teacher, it is assumed in the study that the participants can be regarded as adult efl students, who need to obtain formal instruction in efl for work purposes. the participants’ experience with the learning of the english language appears to be confined to primary and secondary school (m years of learning english at school = 8, standard deviation = 2.3). to reiterate, all participants are in-service primary school teachers who are enrolled in the in-service efl course concurrently with full-time employment at their respective primary schools. thirty-two participants signed the consent form allowing the author of the article to collect and analyze their needs associated with the course in english phonetics. to ensure confidentiality, the participants’ real names are coded as p1,…, p32, where the abbreviation p stands for participant and the number from 1 till 32, respectively. methods and procedure na in the present study is regarded as a means of collecting and examining data associated with the participants’ needs, inclusive of their “perceived and present needs, as well as their potential and unrecognized needs” (tzotzou, 2014, p. 59). as previously mentioned in the introduction, the methodological premises of this study are based upon hyland’s (2006) contention that na should be treated as a continuous process. following that contention, oleksandr kapranov120 the methodological design in the study involves a series of analyses of the participants’ needs, for example, (i) prior to the beginning of the course (na 1), (ii) upon the completion of the first semester (na 2), and (iii) at the end of the second semester of their studies (na 3). in accordance with hyland (2006), na procedure in the study reflects the methodological approach that involves the foci on what the participants know, do not know and want to know. following hyland (2006), who posits that na can be collected and analyzed in a variety of ways, the procedure of na in this study is conducted by means of soliciting the participants’ written reflections upon their needs at the very beginning of the first semester (na 1), upon the completion of the first semester (na 2), and at the end of the second semester after the completion of the course (na 3). in each of the na (i.e., in na 1, na 2, and na 3) the participants are asked to reflect upon their current needs (what they know and do not know) and their future needs and expectations and write their reflections down in the form of short reflective essays written in the english language. apart from those open-ended and general instructions, the participants are given no specific support questions in conjunction with their essay writing. the corpus of the participants’ essays in total is comprised of 9 545 words (the total number of words in na 1 = 3 328, number of words in na 2 = 2 119, and in na 3 = 4 098). methodologically, the analysis of the corpus of the participants’ reflective essays in na 1, na 2, and na 3 is based upon the premises that are embedded in a discourse-analytical framework described in garzone (2018). in accordance with garzone (2018), the analysis of needs in the present study is associated with the attitudes and evaluation on the part of the participants. following garzone (2018), attitudes and evaluation are conveyed by various elements in written discourse, such as lexis and textual constructs that are explicitly found in the text. since the present data are comprised of the participants’ written reflections on their needs, it can be argued that the reflections are subjective, value-laden and as such are based on the “criteria of “what is good” and “what is bad” defined in terms of goals, achievement, and/or parameters of certainty, expectedness, and importance” (garzone, 2018, p. 18). in the analysis, the notions of certainty, expectedness, importance, positivity and negativity were investigated contextually in the corpus of the participants’ written reflections. in order to facilitate the analysis, the participants’ reflections were merged into one file per each na (e.g., na 1, na 2, na 3) and analyzed quantitatively by means of using the software program wordsmith (scott, 2012). in accordance with garzone (2018), it was assumed in the study that the computer-assisted word frequency analysis would be suggestive of lexico-semantic categories in the corpus of the participants’ written reflections. once the word frequencies of the words associated with attitudes, certainty, evaluation, expectedness, negathe dynamics of needs in a course in english phonetics for in-service… 121 tivity, and positivity were compiled in wordsmith (scott, 2012), the frequency lists were examined qualitatively by means of establishing correspondences between the most frequent lexical words and possible themes in the corpus of the participants’ written reflections. then, the participants’ written reflections were analyzed in wordsmith (scott, 2012) again with the data being reduced by means of omitting articles, pronouns, discourse markers, and auxiliary verbs. afterwards, a meticulous reading of the reflections followed. it was executed with the help of the aforementioned word frequency lists in order to identify possible themes and cluster those themes into the categories that represented the participants’ in english phonetics. afterwards, the categories were manually checked again with the frequent words lists. the labeling of the categories was executed by the author of the article and verified by a university lecturer in didactics, who confirmed the coding. results and discussion the analyses of the participants’ needs in na 1, na 2, and na 3 have yielded several categories that, in accordance with hyland (2006), can be classified into two discursive spaces, such as (i) current needs that reflect the state of affairs, that is, what the participants know and do not know and (ii) future needs, that is, what they want to achieve in the course. table 2 summarizes the results of the data analysis in na 1. table 2. the participants’ needs in na 1 n na 1 percentage of participants % 1 the participants’ current needs: do not have university education in english do not feel confident in teaching english worry about the course struggle with english pronunciation 91.00 9.00 6.00 3.00 2 the participants’ future needs: to get university education in english to become a better teacher of english to speak english confidently in class to improve english pronunciation to be inspired by the course to teach english pronunciation to dyslexic students 56.00 53.00 31.00 22.00 13.00 3.00 the results of na 2 are presented in table 3. analogously to the data summarized in table 2, the needs in table 3 fall under two broad discursive spaces, namely the participants’ current and future needs. oleksandr kapranov122 table 3. the participants’ needs in na 2 n na 2 percentage of participants % 1 the participants’ current needs: realize the importance of pronunciation in efl like to study problematic english sounds know relevant terminology 100.00 88.00 66.00 2 the participants’ future needs: to improve english pronunciation to listen to authentic audio texts in english to practice difficult english sounds to be corrected when they make mistakes to master english rhythm and intonation 97.00 88.00 56.00 34.00 22.00 similarly to tables 2–3, table 4 provides an account of the participants’ current and future needs in na 3, which the participants express at the end of the course table 4. the participants’ needs in na 3 n na 3 percentage of participants % 1 the participants’ current needs: confidence in using english in the classroom awareness of their own pronunciation difficulties improved self-esteem in relation to english awareness of the varieties of the english language increased speech fluency in english 78.00 38.00 38.00 31.00 28.00 2 the participants’ future needs: to be a role model in efl classroom to improve english pronunciation to use ipa in efl classroom to continue working on english intonation to change how they teach english pronunciation to use english-only instruction in efl classroom 59.00 34.00 28.00 25.00 25.00 18.00 as previously mentioned, the participants’ needs in the present investigation are regarded as a continuous process in the sense posited by hyland (2006). it is seen in tables 2–4 that the needs change over time from na 1 (the beginning of the first semester) to na 3 (the end of the second and final semester). in particular, the change is evident from the juxtaposition of the participants’ needs. further in the discussion section of the article, the participants’ needs will be compared by means of juxtaposing na 1 and na 2, na 2 and na 3, and na 1 and na 3, respectively. the dynamics of needs in a course in english phonetics for in-service… 123 juxtaposing needs in na 1 and na 2 as mentioned in the hypothesis in the present study, the participants’ needs would be reflective of the dynamics of their in-service study contexts, learning trajectory, as well as internal and external needs. the juxtaposition of na 1 and na 2 seems to support the hypothesis. in particular, the change in the dynamics of needs related to the course in english phonetics is evident from the comparison of the participants’ current needs (i.e., what they know and do not know) in na 1 and na 2. specifically, it is seen in table 2 that the major current need in na 1 is the participants’ lack of university education in english (91%). arguably, this need maps onto the participants’ future need in na 1 to obtain tertiary education in english (56%). these findings are further illustrated by excerpts (1)—(2) below: (1) i am an english teacher with very little formal training. i have to take some courses to be allowed to continue to teach english. i expect to be able to speak english in a comfortable and relaxed way, without having to doubt myself when i speak english in front of my students. i would also like to learn some tips and tricks on how to teach phonetics in an appropriate way to small children. i have already read that this course is going to be closely tied to our jobs as english teachers. also i hope i will become more confident in speaking english, which is crucial to my job as an english teacher. (participant p 2, female) (2) i chose this course because i have been teaching english in school for about 15 years, although i have no formal education in english. i think the course was an opportunity i couldn’t miss. i think the course will make me confident when it comes to spoken english. in the classroom i often use soundtracks to let the pupils hear the audio file of the text. after this course, i will hopefully be able to speak more myself, instead of presenting the text through soundtracks on the pc. (participant p 5, male) whereas the need to be university educated in efl could be regarded as fulfilling a dual role of both an internal need and an external need, another set of the participants’ current needs in na 1 appears to be associated with internal factors, such as anxiety. for instance, the participants report that they do not feel confident in teaching english (9%), worry about the course (6%), and struggle with english pronunciation (3%). for example, one of the participants indicates that “i never studied english at university. i am a bit worried about homework and studies. will i manage?” (participant p 25, female). notably, the needs associated with anxiety are not reported in the previous literature (kabilan & veratharaju, 2013; kang, 2018; nieman & hugo, 2010; o’sullivan, 2003; walker, 1999; zein, 2017). while anxiety as a variable is present in na 1, oleksandr kapranov124 the anxiety-related needs are not observed in the participants’ current needs in na 2. instead, the current needs in na 2 are predominantly internal and oriented towards the participants’ learning trajectory that involves the realization of the importance of pronunciation in efl (100%), the focus on problematic english sounds (88%), and the awareness of relevant terminology (66%). the juxtaposition of the participants’ future needs in na 1 and na 2 reveals a substantial difference between what the participants desire and want at the beginning of the semester and at mid-semester. whereas there is one category of future needs that is common to the participants in na 1 and na 2 (their desire to improve their english pronunciation), all other future needs in na 1 and na 2 appear to be qualitatively different. there is a substantial change in the most frequent future need between na 1and na 2. whereas in na 1 the most frequent need is to be university educated in efl (56%), in na 2 it is the internal need to improve english pronunciation (97%). in contrast to na 1, we can observe in na 2 that the participants’ future needs involve languagerelated considerations, such as listening to authentic audio texts in english (88%), practicing difficult english sounds (56%), mastering english rhythm and intonation (22%), as well as the need to be corrected by the course teacher when the participants make mistakes in pronouncing english words (34%). the efl-specific and internal future needs in na 2 are in opposition to the participants’ future needs in na 1 that are centered, predominantly, on more general notions, such as becoming a better teacher of english (53%), speaking confidently in class (31%), and being inspired by the course (13%). it can be inferred from these findings that the participants’ trajectory of needs changes from the dominant need to obtain higher education in efl to the participants’ wants and desires to focus upon their individual efl-related problems. juxtaposing needs in na 2 and na 3 whereas there is a substantial change in the needs between na 1 and na 2, the juxtaposition of the participants’ current needs in na 2 and na 3 does not reveal a major dynamic change. on the contrary, it can be argued that the participants’ current needs in na 2 and na 3 exhibit a relatively stable state in the sense postulated by dst (larsen-freeman, 2016). presumably, this stable state is explicable by the participants’ needs being anchored in efl-related variables that are internal to the participants. at the same time, while the future needs in na 2 and na 3 are generally efl-related, they are different in terms of the application of the needs. it follows from the data analysis that the participants’ future needs in na 2 are primarily associated with their own efl-related issues, for instance, listening to authentic audio texts (88%), practicing difficultto-pronounce sounds (56%), mastering english intonation and rhythm (22%), the dynamics of needs in a course in english phonetics for in-service… 125 and being corrected by the course teacher when mistakes in pronunciation are made (34%). arguably, these efl-related future needs are concomitant with the dominant future need of improving the participants’ pronunciation (97%). these findings are in concert with the prior research conducted by nieman and hugo (2010), who argue that efl teachers’ needs involve awareness of correct english pronunciation. additionally, the findings in the present study provide indirect support to walker (1999), who indicates that efl teachers in primary school are in need of a substantial focus on english pronunciation. similarly to the observations made by nieman and hugo (2010), and walker (2010), the participants’ attention to pronunciation in this study can be exemplified by excerpt (3), for example: (3) it has been great to learn about the theory of phonetics, and especially to learn about how the different sounds are pronounced in english. this course has shown me what i need to work more with to improve my english in relation to pronunciation. (participant p 1, female) whereas the need of improving english pronunciation is present among the participants’ future needs in na 3 (34%), the future needs with the efl-focus in na 3 are in contrast to the future needs in na 2, since they involve the considerations of being a teacher, who is a role model in an efl classroom (59%), who uses ipa in their teaching (28%), changes how they teach english pronunciation (25%), and employs english-only approach to efl teaching and learning in norwegian primary school contexts (18%). these needs are exemplified by excerpts (4) and (5) below, for example: (4) i guess i am much more conscious of how to pronounce english sounds correctly and my awareness of correct sounds has improved considerably. this is particularly important when it comes to the fact that the meanings of many words depend upon the use of one specific sound, for instance in minimal pairs. this awareness will definitely help me in my teaching career. i find myself much more capable of teaching my students how to pronounce correctly. i am much more confident as a teacher. this is an important aspect of my life. i feel that i have improved my knowledge, and that makes me a better teacher, and it is something that both i and my students will benefit from. (participant p 21, female) (5) i have learned a lot about phonetics. that said, i still have a lot to learn. i had previously minimal knowledge of phonetics, so i almost started from scratch. the content of the course in phonetics has been a little difficult for me since i never studied phonetics before. still, i can now say that i am quite sure that this knowledge i have acquired in phonetics will help me in my teaching career. to a much greater extent, i will be concerned with oleksandr kapranov126 my own pronunciation of words. this will in turn lead to better learning outcomes by the students. i’ve got a much better overall picture of teaching english. it is an advantage for both me and the students. (participant p 29, female) the aforementioned future needs represent a change in the participants’ focus from their own efl-related needs as efl learners to efl-related needs as efl teachers. the qualitative change in future needs from na 2 to na 3 eventuates within the same domain of knowledge and experience, namely efl pronunciation. as future needs in na 3 show, pronunciation by an efl teacher should be continuously addressed by the participants even after their graduation from the course. these findings are commensurate with the results that are reported in kabilan and veratharaju (2013), and tzotzou (2014), who suggest that efl teaching in primary school contexts should involve a specific focus on continuous in-service efl teacher development which is aimed at ameliorating teachers’ language skills. juxtaposing needs in na 1 and na 3 by means of juxtaposing the participants’ needs in na 1 and na 3, it is possible to note a series of substantial qualitative changes. one of the major changes is associated with the initial need to obtain formal qualifications in order to be able to teach english at school in na 1 (56%), which is superseded by the need to become a role model in efl classroom in na 3 (59%). arguably, the need of obtaining formal qualifications can be described as both internal and external to the participants. its external aspect eventuates from the requirements of the norwegian ministry of education and research. however, the external as well as internal aspects of obtaining formal qualifications in efl in na 1 are overridden by the internal dominant need to become a role model in teaching english in na 3. this finding is exemplified by the following quote made by the participant: “mainly, the course in phonetics has made me being a more fluent speaker and wanting to be a better role model in speaking english” (participant p 4, female). the participants’ need to be a role model for their primary school students is evocative of the findings that are discussed in kabilan and veratharaju (2013), and zein (2017), respectively, who suggest that the needs of primary school teachers of english involve the focus not only on their immediate personal needs, but also on the needs of primary school students in terms of their efl acquisition. in addition, the findings in the present investigation lend indirect support to walker (1999), who has also observed efl primary school teachers’ need to provide the best example in terms of pronunciation to the students. the dynamics of needs in a course in english phonetics for in-service… 127 as far as the participants’ internal needs are concerned, it can be argued that the dynamic changes in the participants’ future needs are associated, to an extent, with the learning trajectory they have experienced between the start of the first semester and the end of the second (i.e., final) semester. the major change involves the participants’ generic needs in na 1 of becoming better efl teachers (53%) and speaking confidently in class (31%), which are overridden by specific needs in na 3, such as using ipa in efl classroom (28%), continuing working on english intonation (25%), changing the ways how they teach english pronunciation (25%), and using english-only instruction in their efl classrooms (18%). in contrast to na 1, the analysis of the participants’ future needs in na 3 indicates that they seem to prioritize their teaching of english phonetics and pronunciation by referring to english-only instruction, the use of ipa, and changing the way they teach english pronunciation. however, the participants do not specify how these future needs will eventuate from a didactic perspective. this finding is explained by the fact that norwegian primary school teachers are flexible in choosing any teaching methods they deem necessary provided that they ensure the learning outcomes that are prescribed by the ministry of education and research (udir, 2019). notably, this finding appears to be in contrast with the na reported in the study by o’sullivan (2003), who argues that flexibility in efl curriculum is regarded among the desirable needs by efl primary school teachers in the persian gulf. the juxtaposition of the participants’ needs in na 1 and na 3 reveals a dynamic change in what they know, what they have achieved, and what they consider desirable. in particular, whereas 9% of all participants do not feel confident in teaching english and explicitly express a future need of speaking english confidently in class (31%) in na 1, 78% of them indicate that they are confident in using english in classroom in na 3. the participants’ current confidence in using english by the end of the course is reinforced by the increased level of self-esteem (31%) in relation to speaking english in na 3. similarly, while 22% of the participants express the future need for improving english pronunciation in na 1, 28% of them report the increase in speech fluency in english as the current need in na 3. this increase seems to be concomitant with other current needs in na 3, such as awareness of their own pronunciation difficulties (38%), as well as the varieties of the english language (31%). presumably, these findings are suggestive of the dynamic changes in the participants’ needs that involve a trajectory of desirable future needs that turn into achievable and internalized needs by the end of the course in other words, it could be argued that certain aspects of the participants’ future needs in na 1 have been mapped onto the current needs in na 3. by means of comparing na 1 and na 3, it is possible to observe the disappearance of the need of teaching english pronunciation to dyslexic students oleksandr kapranov128 (3%) that is present in na 1 and absent from na 3. this finding provides indirect support to the study conducted by nijakowska, tsagari, and spanoudis (2018), who have found that typically primary school efl teachers experience insufficient awareness of young efl learners with dyslexia. judging from the present data, the participants’ awareness and professional needs associated with dyslexic efl learners appear to change from epiphenomenal (3%) in na 1 to non-existent in na 3. similarly, the change in needs from epiphenomenal to none at all is evident from the juxtaposition of the participants’ anxiety concerning the course (6%) and struggle with english pronunciation (3%) in na 1 with their needs in na 3. it seems that their initial worries and anxieties have undergone a substantial change by the time of na 3, since they appear to be non-existent in na 3. this finding could be taken to reflect a substantial change in the participants’ learning trajectory that has progressed from internally motivated needs associated with anxiety in na 1 to a qualitatively different internal need of being confident in speaking english. conclusions the article discusses a study that aims to identify the participants’ needs in the course in english phonetics that is offered to efl primary school teachers at a regional university in norway. the na in the study is conceptualized as a continuous and dynamic process in accordance with hyland’s (2006) methodology. following that view of na, the analyses of the participants’ needs have been carried out during the course, for example, at the beginning of the course (na 1), mid-course (na 2), and at the end of the course (na 3). the series of na reveal dynamic changes in the participants’ needs. in particular, it has been established that na 1 is focused upon the participants’ lack of prior tertiary education in english and the need to obtain it. it could be concluded that initially the participants’ needs are associated with the requirements of the external stake-holders, such as the norwegian ministry of education and science that mandates primary school teachers of english to be formally educated in order to be able to teach english in primary school. however, the needs that are dominant in na 1 have undergone a dynamic change towards the end of the course. specifically, in na 3 the participants’ needs are internal, such as their need to be a role model in teaching english and, in particular, english pronunciation. in contrast to na 1, in na 3 the participants exhibit such internally motivated needs as the future need to focus on improving their pronunciation, intonation and fluency in english. the dynamics of needs in a course in english phonetics for in-service… 129 the findings in the present study are taken to indicate that na reflect dynamic changes in the participants’ needs. consequently, it could be concluded that the hypothesis in the study is supported. namely, it is assumed in the hypothesis that the needs of in-service primary school teachers would be dynamic and subject to change due to a host of variables. from a linguo-didactic perspective, it could be concluded that the in-service primary school teachers’ needs in the present study are subject to change from externally motivated (i.e., the desire to obtain university-level qualifications in teaching english to be able to work at school) to internally motivated (i.e., the participants’ ambitions to become role models in terms of english pronunciation in an efl classroom). taking the present findings into consideration, a course design in english phonetics for in-service primary school teachers should involve externally and internally motivated components that would be reflective of the dynamic changes in the participants’ needs. another suggestion that could be drawn from the na in this study involves a contention that a course design in english phonetics for in-service primary school teachers should be receptive to the teachers’ (i) course-initial anxieties concerning the course content, (ii) course-final motivation to share their acquired knowledge with the primary students, and (iii) course-final motivation to introduce changes in the current efl teaching practices, such as english-only 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(2017). professional development needs of primary efl teachers: perspectives of teachers and teacher educators professional development in education, 43(2), 293–313. oleksandr kapranov dynamik der bedürfnisse in den kursen zur englischen phonetik für eine gruppe berufstätiger englischlehrender z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g dieser artikel stellt eine studie zur dynamik der bedürfnisse von berufstätigen lehrenden für englisch als fremdsprache (efl) in der grundschule vor, die an einem kurs zur englischen phonetik an einer regionalen universität in norwegen teilnehmen. der kurs richtet sich an englischlehrende (im weiteren als „teilnehmer“ bezeichnet), die ihren vollzeitunterricht mit der beteiligung an kursen für englisch als fremdsprache verbinden. ziel der untersuchung ist es herauszufinden, wie sich die dynamik der bedürfnisse der teilnehmer über einen zeitraum von zwei semestern ändert. die forschung basiert auf den theoretischen prämissen der bedarfsanalyse (na) von hyland (2006), der die bedürfnisse von fremdsprachenlernenden als einen kontinuierlichen prozess betrachtet, der sich im laufe der zeit ändert. die ergebnisse der bedarfsanalyse verweisen darauf, dass die teilnehmer am anfang ein starkes bedürfnis nach abschluss des sprachunterrichts auf einem höheren niveau zum ausdruck bringen, um eine fremdsprache an der grundschule zu unterrichten. diese einstellung entwickelt sich jedoch gegen ende des kurses dahingehend, dass der rolle des lehrers, der als nachzuahmendes vorbild für lernenden im bereich der geläufigkeit, der intonation und des unterrichtens nur in der fremdsprache fungiert, mehr gewicht beigemessen wird. diese beobachtungen bilden eine basis für weitere überlegungen in dieser arbeit. schlüsselwörter: englisch als fremdsprache, berufstätige lehrkräfte, bedarfsanalyse, phonetik, grundschule theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 8 (2), 2022, pp. 1–25 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.8989 anna borkowska https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3900-3554 podhale state college of applied sciences in nowy targ the relationship among age-advanced learners’* in-class willingness to communicate in english, intrinsic motivation, classroom environment and teacher immediacy—a pilot study a b s t r a c t the article aims to scrutinize third agers’ in-class willingness to communicate (wtc) in english as well as to determine the relationship among wtc, intrinsic motivation, classroom environment, and teacher immediacy. the instrument adapted to this study was a questionnaire comprising biodata items, the in-class wtc tool (peng & woodrow, 2010), intrinsic motivation (noels, clément, & pelletier, 2001), classroom environment (fraser, fisher, & mcrobbie, 1996), and the teacher immediacy scale (zhang & oetzel, 2006). the data revealed that senior learners’ wtc was higher in meaning-focused than in form-focused activities. this finding indicates that the participants paid due attention to communicative interactions in english. also, they were more eager to be actively involved in dyadic exercises as it might have given them a sense of security and confidence. it is noteworthy that intrinsic motivation turned out to be the strongest predictor of in-class wtc. the analysis showed that communication in english abroad and in-class was of paramount relevance for the informants. the older adults also underscored the fundamental role of the language instructor. in this respect, the students attached great importance to a non-threaten ing atmosphere, and the teacher’s personality traits, namely patience, professionalism, and empathy. keywords: willingness to communicate, seniors, motivation, teacher immediacy * language learners aged 55 plus are defined in various sources as age-advanced learners (pfenninger & polz, 2018), third-age learners (gabryś-barker, 2018), third agers (oxford, 2018), late language learners (singleton, 2018), older adults/learners (e.g., kliesch et al., 2018; ramírez gómez, 2016), senior learners/students (e.g., derenowski, 2018; niżegorodcew, 2018), and seniors (e.g., pawlak, derenowski, & mystkowska-wiertelak, 2018). i am going to use the terms interchangeably. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.8989 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3900-3554 anna borkowska2 without a doubt, seniors constitute one of the most autonomous language learners, and as such they have their linguistic needs and goals clearly defined (cf. gabryś-barker, 2018; oxford, 2018). it has been well-established that older adults place great weight to developing communicative skills in-class, which is of practical relevance in real-life situations (e.g., grotek, 2018; jaroszewska, 2013; ramírez gómez, 2016). my numerous observations of third agers as language students have indicated that they are eager to speak english, and share their opinions during classes. regardless of the level of proficiency, they are open to experimenting with english, and their eagerness to speak seems to be even higher in dyadic interactions. to the best of my knowledge, however, there are no publications regarding older learners’ willingness to communicate (wtc) or the variables that might shape their readiness to speak english. therefore, the present pilot paper attempts to explore seniors’ in-class wtc in english, and identify the relationship between classroom wtc, intrinsic motivation, classroom environment, and teacher immediacy. in-class wtc in a second language originally, the concept of wtc was developed with reference to the first language, and it was related to an individual’s general predisposition to initiate and sustain verbal interaction with other people (mccroskey & richmond, 1987). l2 wtc, on the other hand, concerns both trait-like and situation-based factors, and is traditionally defined as “a readiness to enter into discourse at a particular time with a specific person or persons, using a l2” (macintyre et al., 1998, p. 547). the desire to communicate is of great value as it exerts a positive effect on language learners’ communicative behaviors in the classroom context, and as aptly stated by macintyre (2020, p. 112), “choosing to communicate or not may be one of the most important decisions a person can make” in second language interactions. it seems fundamental to note that initial and early studies were conducted without any distinction between in-class and out-of-class wtc. macintyre et al. (2001) examined readiness to communicate for all four skills using the same scale for both wtc inside and outside the classroom in an immersion context. a significant modification was proposed by weaver (2005), who designed a scale that aimed at measuring eagerness to speak in typical classroom situations. peng and woodrow (2010) adapted weaver’s (2005) tool, and supplemented it with mccrockey and baer’s (1985) scale with a view of creating a new instrument based on wtc in meaning-focused and form-focused tasks. this scale was intended to measure l2 wtc in a variety of exercises among the relationship among age-advanced learners’… 3 three kinds of interlocutors, such as the teacher, a peer and a group of peers. it turned out that chinese university students tended to have a higher level of wtc in form-focused activities (e.g., peng, 2014; peng & woodrow, 2010). they were more likely to speak in teacher-centered situations, and meaningful communication, which is typically more risky and unpredictable, might be a source of losing face or public humiliation (cf. simpson, 2008; wen & clément, 2003). much in a similar vein, cao and philp (2006) conducted a substantial study which investigated wtc in three interactional situations, namely, dyadic work, group work, and whole class. as also indicated in previous research, some students preferred group work with three or four partners as that form of learning offered multiple perspective opportunities (e.g., cao, 2011; cao & philp, 2006; riasati, 2012). in this respect, fushino (2010) manifests that cooperation in groups may encourage learners with lower linguistic competence to involve themselves actively in a task as well as to “experience a growing degree of success” (p. 718). by contrast, pair work is deemed to be less competitive and generates less anxiety when compared to whole class activities (cao, 2013; mystkowska-wiertelak, 2016; riasati, 2018). also, students tend to express a lower level of wtc while giving a lecture in front of class as they feel less secure and confident (e.g., riasati & rahimi, 2018). it is worthwhile to note that mystkowska-wiertelak and pawlak (2014) conducted a study whose main aim was to measure younger adults’ wtc in a monologue and a dialogue. it was reported that the initial high wtc in monologues was likely to decrease while readiness to communicate in dialogues was lower at the onset, and it tended to boost during the task performance. the scholars write that “the initial unwillingness to talk tended to fade away as the students became more engaged in the task, perhaps in response to the points raised by the other participants” (p. 254). what also appears critical is that interlocutors play a key role in facilitating in-class wtc. it has been manifested that students have a preference for speaking with classmates they know well since familiarity has a significant impact on l2 wtc (e.g., kang, 2005; mystkowska-wiertelak & pawlak, 2017). likewise, cooperative partners are of particular significance as they motivate learners to active engagement in a task (e.g., cao & philp, 2006; nagy & nikolov, 2007; pawlak & mystkowska-wiertelak, 2015). students may also feel encouraged to discuss a topic when classmates’ opinions are different (riasati, 2018; riasati & rahimi, 2018). in actual teaching practice, in-class wtc is facilitated by a supportive and non-threatening atmosphere (e.g., j.-m. dewaele & l. dewaele, 2018; khajavy, macintyre, & barabadi, 2017; mystkowska-wiertelak & pawlak, 2017). class climate is perceived as one of the situation cues affecting wtc. in the proposed framework of situational antecedents of state wtc, zhang, beckmann and beckmann (2018) have clearly emphasized that a positive atmosphere is anna borkowska4 an influential factor shaping wtc. in this regard, the teacher is a powerful figure who is a capable of creating and maintaining a laid-back atmo sphere (dewaele, 2019; piechurska-kuciel, 2014; riasati, 2018; sheybani, 2019). in a large number of studies a stress-free environment as well as teacher support have been detailed as potent factors fostering in-class communication (e.g., eddy-u, 2015; mystkowska-wiertelak & pawlak, 2017). the language instructor who is capable of creating a supportive classroom environment may build a good rapport with students. the teacher’s verbal and non-verbal behaviors in-class serve a beneficial purpose as they reduce potential discomfort while using a l2 at the oral level. therefore, teacher immediacy has a positive influence on boosting in-class readiness to speak as it provides encouragement that, in consequence, prompts more open and active involvement during classes (e.g., cao, 2011; wen & clément, 2003; zarrinabadi, 2014; j. zhang, beckmann, & beckmann, 2019; q. zhang & oetzel, 2006). third agers in an english classroom in-class wtc among third age learners, who are mainly defined as 55 years of age and older (cf. gabryś-barker, 2018; ramírez gómez, 2016; stuart-hamilton, 2012), has not been investigated in the literature of the subject. however, there is a rich body of research which indirectly suggests that older adults ought to be eager to speak a foreign language inside a classroom environment. it seems significant at this juncture to concentrate on english as it is the most commonly learnt language at third age universities in poland (e.g., jaroszewska, 2013; matusz & rakowska, 2019; szarota, 2009). basically, seniors may be viewed as unique language students in terms of their motivation to learn english. owing to the fact that their professional paths have come to an end, extrinsic motivation is no longer a driving factor that might facilitate improvement of language skills in late adulthood (e.g., pawlak, derenowski, & mystkowska-wiertelak, 2018). as opposed to younger adults, they are not interested in passing exams in order to get formal qualifications and start their careers (cf. derenowski, 2018). for this reason, third agers typically turn to activities that give them a meaningful goal in their personal life, as well as open doors to being a worthy member of the community (cf. lawrence & lightfoot, 2009; wieczorkowska, 2017). moreover, they tend to put their emotional well-being first because they are aware of the fact that they have less time left (sigelman & rider, 2015). gabryś-barker (2018, p. xv) points out that learning a foreign language may be treated as “a lifestyle choice and a pleasurable pastime,” which results the relationship among age-advanced learners’… 5 in evoking positive emotions. as evidenced in the studies by pfenninger and polz (2018), as well as pot, keizer, and de bot (2018), second language acquisition promotes interaction and integration that, in turn, lead to fostering overall well-being and self-esteem. additionally, seniors are conscious of the fact that language education has a positive effect on brain plasticity as it cannot only increase working memory capacity and attention, but the onset of dementia may be delayed as well (e.g., bialystok, craik, & freedman, 2007; cox, 2017; goral, 2019; mackey & sachs, 2012; wong et al., 2019). thus, age-advanced learners’ active participation during english classes seems to be mediated by their intrinsic motivation, which as the most self-determined form of motivation, is a paramount factor maintaining students’ effort and engagement in the second language process of learning (noels, clément, & pelletier, 2001). in this respect, the strongest motive to learn english at a senior age is gaining the ability to communicate abroad in real-life situations (e.g., niżegorodcew, 2016; oxford, 2018). interactions in a foreign language have a powerful role in establishing or maintaining relationships with seniors’ friends and family, and those communicative behaviors may result in eliminating a potential feeling of isolation or age stereotyping about dependence on others (e.g., escuder-mollón, 2014; świderska & kapszewicz, 2015). independent communication in english may become a source of self-realization, satisfaction and happiness that facilitate quality of life (pfenninger & polz, 2018; wieczorkowska, 2017). in order to become an effective english speaker, one needs to be willing to use the language verbally inside the classroom (e.g., macintyre et al., 1998). students in the third age perceive learning as a social activity, and appear to attend a language course with a view of being a part of group (e.g., grotek, 2018; jaroszewska, 2013). my hands-on experience shows that older adults enjoy performing tasks in dyads, such as dialogues and role plays. what is significant from a methodological point of view is that meaning-focused exercises ought to be introduced from the very beginning of english learning because, as already mentioned, seniors’ intention is to practice speaking skills which gets them used to natural reactions in various daily situations outside the classroom. much prominence should also be given to learning “relatable vocabulary” that may be germane and useful in realistic contexts (ramírez gómez, 2016, p. 169). as learners in the third age simply wish to communicate in meaningful interactions in-class, form-focused tasks seem to be of much less importance to them (cf. matusz-rakowska, 2019). at this point, it is reasonable to hypothesize that in-class wtc in english among seniors should be higher in meaning-focused activities as their main purpose is to prepare learners for natural language communication (peng & woodrow, 2010). also, they may be more eager to speak english in pairs because dyadic work enhances a sense of security, particularly when a partner is anna borkowska6 familiar, cooperative, and open to share opinions (e.g., fushino, 2010; riasati, 2018). the teacher role in shaping senior learners’ in-class wtc in english it is also assumed that senior students highlight the importance of a language teacher who should provide opportunities that promote communication. what appears to be seen in other studies is that the teacher immediacy plays an unquestionable role in a seniors’ language classroom (cf. pawlak et al., 2018; pot et al., 2018). in this regard, both instrumental immediacy (i.e., the teacher’s attitude towards his or her profession), and relational immediacy (i.e., the teacher’s behaviors towards his or her students) seem to shape senior learners’ engagement, as well as active involvement in english classes (cf. q. zhang & oetzel, 2006). also, the educator’s personality features, and classroom management have a vast influence on older learners in a holistic manner (e.g., derenowski, 2018; grotek, 2018; larrotta, 2019). patience, empathy, and professionalism are considered to be of great value when it comes to a foreign language teacher. the educator needs to be capable of understanding older students’ potential physical and mental limitations (cf. jaroszewska, 2013; oxford, 2018). some scholars have remarked that older language learners tend to self-stereotype and undermine their skills, which may have a detrimental effect on their active engagement in-class (singleton, 2018; steuden, 2011). thus, it is essential for the teacher to have a good rapport with his or her students translated as showing them positive emotions (e.g., respect and encouragement), and paying due attent ion to their language learning successes as it plays a key role in maintaining older students’ self-esteem (cf. kozerska, 2016; q. zhang & oetzel, 2006). much in a similar vein, an ability to create and sustain a relaxed atmosphere constitutes the core of teaching a foreign language to seniors since these components of language instruction help learners become more secure and confident to experiment with english (e.g., matusz & rakowska, 2019; ramírez gómez, 2019). the positive environment is an effective facilitator that encourages cooperative learning and willingness to share linguistic knowledge during task performance. likewise, the teacher support is surmised to build or strengthen social bonds between classmates and improve group cohesiveness that, as already discussed, is of unquestionable relevance to seniors (derenowski, 2018; grotek, 2018). what should also be noted is that a friendly classroom climate may exert a great influence on seniors’ communicative behaviors in english since “having experienced a constant pleasant classroom environment, students the relationship among age-advanced learners’… 7 may be able to develop rewarding feelings about speaking english” (peng & woodrow, 2010, p. 857). this paper is an attempt to identify seniors’ in-class wtc both in meaningfocused and form-focused activities in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of their in-class communicative behaviors, and to confirm that older adults have a preference for performing realistic activities based on meaningful communication. the goal of this article is also to investigate variables that may foster readiness to speak english inside a classroom setting, as well as to indicate which aspects of intrinsic motivation, classroom environment, and teacher immediacy are reported to be the most vital for the subjects. study research aims and questions the primary objective of the current study was to scrutinize in-class wtc in english among senior learners, as well as to investigate the relationship between wtc in english, intrinsic motivation, classroom environment, and teacher immediacy. it also sought to determine whether the participants found meaning-focused or form-focused activities more relevant in the classroom context. additionally, the present research was intended to explore the older adults’ standpoints in terms of internal motives to learn english at a senior age, as well as to identify their perceptions of the relationships with class members (group cohesiveness), and the teacher (teacher immediacy and support). in particular, the present study aimed to address the following questions: to what extent are the third agers willing to communicate in english both in meaning-focused and form-focused tasks inside classroom settings? which aspects of intrinsic motivation, classroom environment, and teacher immediacy are the most eminent among the seniors? what is the relationship among the third agers’ wtc in english, intrinsic motivation, classroom environment, as well as teacher immediacy? participants the informants were 30 students (29 females and one male) of the third age university in nowy targ and zakopane who had been regularly attending english courses for seniors (two didactic hours a week). as regards their age, one student declared to be between 50–55, four third agers were between 56–60, anna borkowska8 eight respondents reported to be between 61–65, 11 participants between 66–70, and six subjects were between 71–75. when it comes to the place of residence, 90% declared living in a town, and 10% in a village. likewise, 60% admitted having tertiary education while 40% reported having graduated from a secondary school. the participants were also asked about learning english throughout their life, and including only english courses at the third age university. the analysis showed that seven students had studied english for 1–3 years, seven informants for 3–5 years, six seniors for 5–7 years, five respondents for 7–10 years, two third agers for 10–15 years, and three learners for more than 15 years. in a general sense, the students represented the a1 and a2 level of proficiency. as far as the english courses for seniors were concerned, most of the informants (60%) declared 1–3 years of attendance. interestingly, 90% of the subjects admitted knowing other foreign languages, mainly russian (24 informants), and german (12 learners). the knowledge of french, italian, and latin was also mentioned. the subjects were taught by myself and another teacher, and our teaching styles varied considerably. we used two different approaches to teaching english. i promoted learner-centeredness, offering the seniors many communicative opportunities that were principally relevant for encouraging active involvement inside the classroom. likewise, i paid a lot of attention to giving as much english input as possible, and the language of instructions was mainly english. my students were exposed predominantly to meaningful exercises (such as role-plays and dialogues) even at lower levels of proficiency, and i placed great emphasis on giving my seniors much talking and reaction time. the second instructor explained tasks in polish, and his approach was more teacher-centered. his learners also had some opportunities to talk, yet in a more controlled manner. moreover, this teacher did not provide any room for his students to be absorbed in spontaneous interaction between each other. grammar structures were introduced and practiced mostly by means of translations. instruments and procedure the instrument adapted to this study was a questionnaire which included demographic information: gender (male; female), age (between 50–55 years old; between 56–60 years old; 61–65 years old; between 66–70 years old; between 71–75 years old; 75 years old and older), place of residence (village; town up to 50,000 residents; town/city with more than 50,000 residents), and education (tertiary; secondary; primary). in addition, the participants were asked about the duration of learning english throughout their life, and during english courses for third agers. the subjects were also to report their knowledge of foreign languages other than english. the questionnaire comprised four scales the relationship among age-advanced learners’… 9 (wtc in english, intrinsic motivation, classroom environment, and teacher immediacy), and responses to their items were given on a six-point likert scale ranging from 1—i strongly disagree to 6—i strongly agree. in order to measure readiness to communicate in english in the classroom, an in-class wtc in english scale was used (peng & woodrow, 2010). the aim of this instrument was to investigate seniors’ wtc in english both in meaning-focused and form-focused activities, as well as to confirm whether tasks based on meaningful communication would shape a higher level of wtc when compared to tasks based on forms. the whole 10-item instrument was utilized in the questionnaire. sample items included: “i am willing to do a role play standing in front of the class in english (e.g., ordering food in a restaurant),” “i am willing to ask my group mates in english how to pronounce a word in english.” one item was rewritten so that it could refer to the polish context, and “chinese” was replaced with “polish,” namely, “i am willing to translate a spoken utterance from polish into english in my group.” another instrument was intrinsic motivation (noels et al., 2001). this 9-item scale was adapted to determine senior learners’ intrinsic motivation to learn english, and to examine whether the subjects would be mainly encouraged and motivated by the ability to communicate in english in and outside the classroom. the tool originally referred to french, and thus this language was changed into english, as for instance in the following item: “for the pleasure that i experience on knowing more about english literature.” the main question to all items was changed to “why are you learning english in your senior age?” six original items were used. sample items were: “for the enjoyment i experience when i grasp a difficult construct on english,” “for the satisfied feeling i get in finding out new things.” three item were excluded as they were unsuitable in the case of third agers, for example: “for the pleasure i experience when i surpass myself in english studies.” in order to adapt the scale to specific seniors’ motives to learn english, three new items were added: “for the pleasure i experience when i can use english abroad,” “for the satisfaction i feel when i communicate in english during classes,” “for the high i experience when i can use newly learnt vocabulary.” another scale, classroom environment (fraser, fisher, & mcrobbie, 1996) aimed to provide information about task orientation, group cohesiveness, and teacher support. in this study, task orientation was excluded as the main objective was to scrutinize how relationships between the older learners and their peers (group cohesiveness), as well as between the seniors and the teacher (teacher support) would influence in-class wtc. this instrument was also to indicate which statements subcategorized as group cohesion, and teacher support, would be reported to have the highest means, and to be of the greatest importance for the subjects. four items measuring group cohesion were used, and sample items included: “i work well with other class members,” “i help anna borkowska10 other class members who are having trouble with their work.” as regards teacher support, one item was eliminated, namely, “the teacher smiles at the class while talking,” and two new items were constructed: “the teacher praises the students,” and “the teacher creates a positive and supportive atmosphere during classes.” teacher immediacy scale (q. zhang & oetzel, 2006) was applied to estimate instructional immediacy, relational immediacy, and personal immediacy. as it was my intention to focus on a classroom setting, personal immediacy was excluded from the present study. this instrument was used to investigate the third agers’ perceptions of the instructor’s attitudes towards his or her teaching, and behaviors towards his or her students. moreover, the scale was adapted to show the most crucial aspects of teacher immediacy in the case of senior learners. the examples of instructional immediacy were as follows: “the teacher is committed to teaching,” “the teacher answers questions earnestly.” sample items of relational immediacy were: “the teacher treats students fairly and equally,” “the teacher does not hurt students’ self-respect.” the questionnaire was written in polish, and all items were translated in polish to eliminate the risk of being misunderstood by the respondents. as an initial step, it was given to one of the my colleagues who provided valuable feedback that helped to correct or paraphrase polish translations in order to construct very clear statements. from a technical point of view, the survey was prepared to accommodate specific seniors’ needs, that is, to reduce difficulties resulting from potential visual impairments. therefore, the font size was 14 points, and in-between line space was 1.5 points (cf. ramírez gómez, 2016, 2019). the study was conducted in january and february 2020. as far as the members of the third age university in nowy targ are concerned, the questionnaire was administered by anna borkowska who ensured the infor mants that all the data would be gathered and analyzed for research purposes only. the third age learners were also informed to ask questions in case they had any doubts or problems while filling out the questionnaire. when it comes to the third agers from zakopane, the questionnaire was conducted by their teacher. the survey was completed during the seniors’ regular class time, and it took the respondents approximately 15 minutes to fill out all the questions. once the questionnaires were collected and coded, microsoft excel was used to calculate the total means and standard deviations for all the items. the next step was the analysis of the scales. this was followed both by tallying cronbach’s alpha for each scale, and the pearson correlation by means of appropriate formulas in microsoft excel. the relationship among age-advanced learners’… 11 study findings the analysis of four scales – the internal reliability, means and standard deviations as illustrated in table 1, cronbach’s alpha for wtc in english, intrinsic motivation, and classroom environment were acceptable, and the internal reliability for teacher immediacy was good. table 1 the means, standard deviations and values of cronbach’s alpha for wtc in english, intrinsic motivation, classroom environment and teacher immediacy scale no. of items m sd cronbach’s alpha wtc in english 10 3.85 1.29 0.72 intrinsic motivation 9 4.57 0.76 0.76 classroom environment 9 5.49 0.63 0.74 teacher immediacy 11 5.78 0.43 0.85 the high mean was reported in teacher immediacy (m = 5.78), and the value of the standard deviation here was relatively low (sd = 0.43). the low standard deviation showed that the older learners’ responses were rather homogenous and consistent. it seems reasonable to think that they found it enjoyable to spend their time in-class with the teacher since they accepted his or her teaching style and classroom management. a relatively high mean was also declared in classroom environment (m = 5.49) which was intended to measure group cohesion and teacher support in the present study. the standard deviation was low amounting to 0.63. it transpires that the informants put an emphasis on interaction with peers and mutual help during english lessons. the third agers’ process of learning strongly hinged upon teacher support. as far as intrinsic motivation is concerned, the mean was 4.57, and the standard deviation was quite high (sd = 0.76). in essence, the students’ answers were rather diverse, and each individual admitted to be motivated by different aspects of english learning. the most prominent motives will be analyzed in a further part of the article. a relatively low mean (3.85) was found in wtc in english. also, the value of standard deviation was rather high in this scale revealing the fact that the third agers’ responses were very heterogeneous. anna borkowska12 the seniors’ classroom wtc in english table 2 indicates the means and the standard deviations for all individual items of the in-class wtc in english scale. as previously mentioned, the relatively low mean for all the scale was reported (m = 3.85). however, bearing in mind the fact that the instrument was subcategorized into meaning-focused and form-focused exercises, a more positive picture is brought to light. table 2 the means and the standard deviations for in-class wtc in english (n = 30) m ea ni ng -f oc us ed t as ks no. item m sd 1. i am willing to do a role play standing in front of the class in english (e.g. ordering food in a restaurant). 3.50 1.31 2. i am willing to give a short self-introduction without notes in english to the class. 4.10 1.11 3. i am willing to give a short speech in english to the class about my hometown with notes. 4.33 1.01 4. i am willing to translate a spoken utterance from polish into english in my group. 4.93 0.73 5. i am willing to ask the teacher in english to repeat what he/she just said in english because i didn’t understand. 3.87 1.48 6. i am willing to do a role play at my desk, with a peer (e.g. ordering food in a restaurant). 4.60 0.92 fo rm -f oc us ed t as ks 7. i am willing to ask my peer sitting next to me in english the meaning of an english word. 3.67 1.64 8. i am willing to ask my group mates in english the meaning of word i do not know. 3.03 1.51 9. i am willing to ask my group mates in english how to pronounce a word in english. 3.00 1.51 10. i am willing to ask my peer sitting next to me in english how to say an english phrase to express the thoughts in english. 3.47 1.63 total 3.85 1.29 as presented in table 3, wtc in meaning-focused activities was at a much higher level than in activities concentrated on form (table 4). the relationship among age-advanced learners’… 13 table 3 the means and the standard deviations for meaning-focused exercises meaning-focused activities item m sd 1 3.50 1.31 2 4.10 1.11 3 4.33 1.01 4 4.93 0.73 5 3.87 1.48 6 4.60 0.92 total 4.22 1.09 table 4 the means and the standard deviations for form-focused exercises form-focused activities item m sd 7 3.67 1.64 8 3.03 1.51 9 3.00 1.51 10 3.47 1.63 total 3.29 1.57 the total mean in meaning-focused tasks was 4.22, and the standard deviation was reported to be 1.09. the highest mean was declared in item 4 concerning translation of a spoken utterance from polish into english (table 2). the next highest mean was obtained in item 6 “i am willing to do a role play at my desk, with a peer (e.g., ordering food in a restaurant).” it is worthwhile to note that the same role play performed in front of the class turned out to have the lowest mean (item 1, m = 3.50). as far as form-focused tasks are concerned, the total mean was much lower (m = 3.29) than in meaning-focused activities. also, as illustrated in table 4, the value of the standard deviation was very high (sd = 1.57) which suggests a substantial difference between the subjects’ responses. the highest mean in exercises based on grammar was declared in item seven “i am willing to ask my peer sitting next to me in english the meaning of an english word” (table 2). the standard deviation was also the highest in this item (sd = 1.64). the analysis presented in table 2 revealed that the lowest means were reported in items 8 and 9 concerning asking groupmates in english about the pronunciation and meaning of an english word. it may be surmised that the anna borkowska14 respondents were more likely to seek a desk partner’s assistance regarding both the meaning of an english word and a phrase they needed to express (item 10). the most prominent aspects of intrinsic motivation, classroom environment and teacher immediacy among the third agers it seems vital at this point to take a closer look at the respondents’ motives to learn english at an advancing age. as shown in table 5, the highest mean was obtained in item 4 “for the pleasure i experience when i can use english abroad.” the seniors’ answers were the most homogenous here (sd = 0.80). table 5 the means and the standard deviations for intrinsic motivation (n = 30) no. item m sd 1. because i enjoy the feeling of acquiring knowledge about the english community and their way of life. 3.50 1.34 2. for the pleasure that i experience in knowing more about english literature. 3.47 1.50 3. for the satisfied feeling i get in finding out new things. 4.97 0.84 4. for the pleasure i experience when i can use english abroad. 5.23 0.80 5. for the satisfaction i feel when i communicate in english during classes. 5.13 0.88 6. for pleasure i get from hearing english spoken by english people/ foreigners. 4.63 1.25 7. for the high i experience when i can use newly learnt vocabulary. 5.03 1.02 8. for the enjoyment i experience when i grasp a difficult construct in english. 4.70 1.07 9. for the satisfaction i feel when i am in the process of accomplishing difficult exercises in english. 4.50 1.23 total 4.57 1.10 another noteworthy item was item 5 “for the satisfaction i feel when i communicate in english during classes” (m = 5.13). apparently, the participants realized that using newly learnt vocabulary (item 7, m = 5.03) was at the heart of real-life communicative behaviors. what is also not to be neglected is that the subjects had a genuine interest in finding out new things (item 3, m = 4.97). it may be deduced that they were open to taking full advantage of english classes with regard to acquiring new knowledge. the relationship among age-advanced learners’… 15 when it comes to the classroom environment scale, as can be seen in table 6, it was subcategorized into group cohesion and teacher support. the highest mean in the first category was reported in item 2 “i am friendly to members of this class.” table 6 the means and the standard deviations for classroom environment (n = 30) gr ou p co he si ve ne ss no. item m sd 1. i work well with other class members. 5.30 0.64 2. i am friendly to members of this class. 5.50 0.62 3. i make friends among students in this class. 4.97 0.84 4. i help other class members who are having trouble with their work. 5.07 1.06 te ac he r su pp or t 5. the teacher is patient in teaching. 5.83 0.37 6. the teacher provides a timely response to students’ concerns. 5.70 0.53 7. the teacher praises the students. 5.60 0.61 8. the teacher creates a positive and supportive atmosphere during classes. 5.90 0.30 9. the teacher asks questions that solicit viewpoints or opinions. 5.53 0.63 total 5.49 0.63 one of the most significant items was statement 1 “i work well with other class members.” as regards teacher support, creating a friendly atmosphere was perceived as being crucial (item 8, m = 5.90). the seniors’ answers here were the most unanimous (sd = 0.30). it should also be noted that the students placed emphasis on the instructor’s patience (item 5, m = 5.83). closely tied to this is the issue of quick reactions to potential learners’ concerns (item 6, m = 5.70). it also turned out that the informants gave priority to being praised during classes (item 7, m = 5.60). the last scale, teacher immediacy, was also divided into two categories, namely, instructional and relational immediacy. table 7 illustrates the means and standard deviations for all items. anna borkowska16 table 7 the means and the standard deviations for teacher immediacy (n = 30) in st ru ct io na l im m ed ia cy no. item m sd 1. the teacher is committed to teaching. 5.83 0.37 2. the teacher is well-prepared in teaching. 5.90 0.30 3. the teacher is passionate about teaching. 5.80 0.40 4. the teacher answers questions earnestly. 5.80 0.40 5. the teacher is patient in teaching. 5.83 0.37 re la tio na l im m ed ia cy 6. the teacher understands students. 5.73 0.44 7. the teacher treats students fairly and equally. 5.77 0.42 8. the teacher respects students. 5.67 0.54 9. the teacher does not hurt students’ self-esteem. 5.80 0.40 10. the teacher encourages students. 5.70 0.53 11. the teacher provides timely response to students’ concerns. 5.70 0.53 total 5.78 0.43 what needs to be noted here is that there were only slight discrepancies between the items. this essentially means that the older learners demonstrated explicit and consistent views about their educators. the highest mean (5.90) was obtained in item 2 “the teacher is well-prepared in teaching” in the first category. as mentioned earlier, patience was of great value, and the data revealed that commitment and passion to teaching played key roles (item 1 and 3). the respondents admitted that the teacher should answer questions earnestly (m = 5.80). taking a rapport between the teacher and the learners into account, the strongest item was associated with students’ self-esteem (item 9, m = 5.80), and the teacher’s ability to be understanding (item 6, m = 5.73). one of the most eminent statements was also item 7 “the teacher treats students fairly and equally.” to a large degree, a sense of fairness indicates the teacher’s professionalism, empathy, and a positive approach to the students. correlations among four factors as shown in table 8, only positive corrections between in-wtc in english (wtc), intrinsic motivation (im), classroom environment (ce), and teacher immediacy (ti) were revealed. the relationship among age-advanced learners’… 17 table 8 correlations among the four factors—values of pearson’s r wtc im ce ti wtc 1 0.63 0.55 0.27 im 0.63 1 0.50 0.38 ce 0.55 0.50 1 0.71 ti 0.27 0.38 0.71 1 the strongest correlation was found between ce and ti (r = 0.71). another positive and strong correlation was reported between wtc and im (r = 0.63). also, ce and wtc indicated a high-degree of positive correlation (r = 0.55). similarly, the data revealed a relatively strong correlation between ce and im (r = 0.50) which may suggest that a classroom environment had a potent influence on im. the moderate correlation coefficient was obtained between im and ti (r = 0.38), and the weakest relationship was reported between wtc and ti (r = 0.27). discussion the pilot study presented in this paper sheds some light on the seniors’ in-class wtc in english. as shown by the results, the subjects’ readiness to speak english in the classroom setting was relatively low, and their responses were very heterogeneous. a possible reason for this could be a discrepancy between their educators’ teaching style, and the amount of student talking time provided. the data analysis also indicated that the third agers were more eager to communicate in meaning-focused exercises, which confirms the fact that they are primarily interested in improving communicative skills, and less so in working on grammar-based tasks (e.g., gabryś-barker, 2018; jaroszewska, 2013; singleton, 2018). the present finding is not in line with peng and woodrow’s (2010) study. the scholars manifested that chinese university students were more actively involved in form-focused activities as they are generally examoriented students. additionally, from a cultural perspective, they tend to avoid spontaneous interaction because it may generate fear of losing face or a risk of humiliation (cf. peng, 2014; simpson, 2008; wen & clément, 2003). the present study also depicts that translation played an eminent role in fostering in-class eagerness to speak english since translation of a spoken utterance from polish into english was reported to have the highest mean in anna borkowska18 meaning-focused items. one plausible explanation for this is that the third agers found translating an effective language learning technique. this might derive from the fact that the participants were accustomed to this technique as it was commonly used in a classical method when the seniors attended formal education (cf. grotek, 2018; ramírez gómez, 2016). in didactic practice, when an older adult representing a1 or a2 level is asked a question in english, he or she tends to translate the question. they are also most likely to say the beginning of their answer in polish out loud before actually responding in english. this observation is of great importance since it helps to understand seniors’ language learning process in a broader dimension. noteworthy is also the fact that the third age learners’ wtc was at a higher level in dyads than in whole-class tasks both in meaning-focused and formfocused exercises. such a view is supported by previous studies (e.g., fushino, 2010; mystkowska-wiertelak, 2016; riasati, 2018) which suggest that working in pairs gives a sense of security, particularly when a partner is familiar, cooperative, and open to share opinions. the interlocutors’ in-class behaviors have a significant impact on shaping wtc, and in the case of older learners, this form of communication provides space to build good relationships among peers who principally seek company during classes (cf. niżegorodcew, 2016; pawlak et al., 2018; szarota, 2014). in a general sense, older students are prone to treat learning as a social activity, and working with a peer is beneficial both on a personal and at an educational level. as outlined by matusz and rakowska (2019), older adults experience a feeling of discomfort while speaking english. therefore, it seems essential to offer them communicative opportunities to interact in pairs since older learners are typically eager to work with a partner they like and sit with at one desk (e.g., grotek, 2018). when it comes to intrinsic motivation, the third agers were mainly motivated by the fact the they could use english abroad. they also felt satisfied to communicate in english during classes. the results lent some support to the fact that authentic communication and real-life communicative exercises performed in-class play a pivotal role in english learning in the case of senior students (e.g., piechurska-kuciel & szyszka, 2018; niżegorodcew, 2018). it may be concluded at this juncture that the core motivation to learn english at a senior age is closely related to oral interaction in english. the participants seemed to be aware of the fact that before actual communication outside the classroom occurs, one needs to practice speaking in-class and have opportunities to use newly learnt vocabulary (cf. oxford, 2018). this research also indicated that the seniors found group cohesion fundamental, particularly with respect to a good cooperation with class members. this is inconsistent with a study by pawlak et al. (2018) in which the third agers tended to have a difficulty in interacting with others. one reason for this discrepancy may be that much attention was placed on a friendly attitude the relationship among age-advanced learners’… 19 towards groupmates which may have resulted in positive views of peer cooperation inside the classroom. furthermore, the role of the language instructor was of unquestionable relevance. the students appreciated encouragement and support manifested through praise, and by addressing their linguistic problems. as a matter of fact, the most paramount factor regarding teacher support was creating a relaxed atmosphere during english classes because it served as an anchor to develop and practice conversation skills (cf. derenowski, 2018; pot et al., 2018; ramírez gómez, 2016). similarly, the subjects underscored the significance of the teacher’s professionalism and patience which, as stressed in this study, were declared to be the most substantial aspects of instructional teacher immediacy. this seems to support the standpoint held by jaroszewska (2013) and grotek (2018), who demonstrate that the most desirable characteristics of educators working with older adults are patience and professional commitment. as far as relational teacher immediacy is concerned, the teacher ought not to hurt the seniors’ selfesteem. he or she should also be capable of treating the students fairly and understanding their needs. fairness as such, however, was not considered to be an imperative in derenowski’s (2018) study as the teacher is an authority for seniors, and his or her judgment ought not to be questioned in-class. it should be stated explicitly here that the awareness of potential mental limitations is of great value for the teacher who may flexibly adapt his or her verbal and non-verbal in-class behaviors as to facilitate older learners’ process of learning (e.g., grotek, 2018; larrotta, 2019). third agers experience a decline in general cognitive functioning which may result in the slowing down of mental processes and a struggle to acquire new skills (e.g., pfenninger & polz, 2018; stuart-hamilton, 2012). in consequence, it seems clear that they should be assured regularly about their ability to be a successful english speaker as they are likely to undermine their linguistic abilities and memory (e.g., oxford, 2018; singleton, 2018). rather unsurprisingly, the strongest positive correlation was found between the older adults’ in-class wtc in english and intrinsic motivation. as already outlined, the major motive to learn english at a senior age was to improve communicative skills, and this may be the reason why a high-degree of positive correlation was reported between wtc and intrinsic motivation in the present study. clearly, intrinsic motivation had a potent effect on wtc in the classroom because it involves learners’ behaviors that are enjoyable, and they may challenge an individual’s language competence (cf. noels, 2001). in a similar manner, hashimoto (2002) and riasati (2018) emphasize that students’ eagerness to speak increases as their motivation to learn a foreign language rises. what can also be seen from the data analysis is a moderate uphill relationship between in-class wtc and classroom environment. these results are consistent with the idea that a good rapport between peers, as well as the teacher anna borkowska20 and students is viewed to be a beneficial factor fostering wtc inside the classroom (e.g., cao, 2011; mystkowska-wiertelak & pawlak, 2017; zarrinabadi, 2014). familiarity with groupmates and peers’ active engagement in task performance may boost learners’ wtc since it reduces fear of speaking a second language (e.g., cao & philp, 2006; kang, 2005). interestingly, an individual’s readiness to communicate may also be underpinned by groupmates’ positive perceptions of interlocutors’ participation. this effective cooperation leads to successful completion of an activity (j. zhang et al., 2018). when it comes to the teacher, he or she plays a pivotal role in creating a safe classroom climate which pushes in-class wtc (e.g., eddy-u, 2015; riasati, 2012). as evidenced in the previous studies, educator support appears to reduce the distance and enhance close relationships between and with students. this is especially vital in the seniors’ language classroom because this age group is susceptible to feelings of insecurity and a fear of losing face (e.g., cao, 2011; derenowski, 2018; grotek, 2018; riasati & rahimi, 2018). more meaningful and trustworthy relationships established during a language course for senior learners have a great potential to increase the quality of life, and learning a second language as such may be recognized as a positive ageing strategy targeted towards seniors’ linguistic accomplishments and positive emotions (cf. konieczna-woźniak, 2013; oxford, 2018; sigelman & rider, 2015). the final comment concerns teacher immediacy, and its weak positive correlation with in-class eagerness to speak in english. it may be hypothesized at this point that seniors were experienced enough to realize that learning starts with a learner, and a desire to speak english comes mainly from a sense of duty (cf. pawlak et al., 2018; piechurska-kuciel, 2014; piechurska-kuciel & szyszka, 2018). in the case of older learners, attending an english course basically means setting their heart on real-life communication which starts in-class, and is of practical relevance outside the classroom. therefore, each communicative opportunity ought to be treated as a step towards achieving older adults’ linguistic goals (cf. macintyre et al., 1998). limitations of the study the present pilot study was limited in terms of the relatively small sample size, as well as the location of the third age universities. nowy targ and zakopane are towns in the south of poland. their residents frequently emigrate to english-speaking countries or they are likely to visit their friends and families abroad. moreover, zakopane as a ski resort and a popular destination among foreigners is typically visited by large numbers of english-speaking tourists. the relationship among age-advanced learners’… 21 thus, senior citizens from zakopane have a lot of communicative opportunities to speak english outside the classroom on a regular basis. taking these limitations into account, i aim to extend the scope of the research and to investigate older adults’ in-class wtc in english in other third age universities in poland both in towns and cities. hopefully, such an approach will not only help to determine readiness to speak english in classroom settings among third agers, but it will also provide sufficient data to analyze and compare wtc between members of the third age university in towns and cities in poland. conclusions and implications in spite of its limitations, this small-scale study has yielded vital insights into the nature of senior learners’ classroom wtc, and substantial factors that might shape an individual’s eagerness to speak in english. the older students’ in-class wtc mostly hinged upon their intrinsic motivation that strongly correlated with their oral involvement. as also demonstrated throughout the present paper, a non-threatening and friendly atmosphere was deemed to have a great effect on readiness to speak english. significantly, a language instructor’s teaching style needs to be based on a supportive attitude towards third age learners. as an initial step, the teacher is required to build and maintain a stress-free environment that enhances active in-class engagement. another remarkable factor is boosting student talking time by offering opportunities to communicate and providing room for dyadic exercises that additionally promote cooperative behaviors. what this basically means is combining learner-centered and communicative approaches. equally important is a patient and emphatic teacher who is capable of understanding third agers’ specific needs with regards to their slower pace of learning, as well as adjustment to potentially new communicative techniques. teacher support, which may be viewed as praising and constant encouragement, is also of unquestionable value as it leads to developing a positive view about the student’s own linguistic abilities. in effect, age-advanced learners are likely to become not only more willing to communicate in-class in a second language, but also develop pragmatic skills they will be able to use outside the classroom in authentic interactions. anna borkowska22 references bialystok, e., craik, i. m., & freedman, m. 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(2014). communicating in a second language: investigating the effect of teacher on learners’ willingness to communicate. system, 42, 288–295. zhang, j., beckmann, n., & beckmann, j. f. (2018). to talk or not to talk: a review of situational antecedents of willingness to communicate in the second language classroom. system, 72, 226–239. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2018.01.003 zhang, j., beckmann, n., & beckmann, j. f. (2019). one situation doesn’t fit all: variability and stability of state willingness to communicate in a chinese college english classroom. language teaching research. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168819891330 zhang, q., & oetzel, j. g. (2006). constructing and validating a teacher immediacy scale: a chinese perspective. communication education, 55 (2), 218–241. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634520600566231 anna borkowska zur beziehung zwischen kommunikationsbereitschaft in englisch bei den senioren und intrinsischer motivation, klassenklima und nähe des lehrers. eine pilotstudie z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g das ziel des vorliegenden beitrags ist es, die ergebnisse der studie über den willen zur kommunikation in englischer sprache bei den senioren darzustellen sowie die beziehung zwischen kommunikationsbereitschaft und intrinsischer motivation, klassenklima und nähe des lehrers unter die lupe zu nehmen. das hauptinstrument der untersuchung war ein https://doi.org/10.1044/2019_jslhr-l-18-0321 https://doi.org/10.1044/2019_jslhr-l-18-0321 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2018.01.003 https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168819891330 https://doi.org/10.1080/03634520600566231 anna borkowska26 fragebogen zur erhebung von biografischen angaben und mit vier skalen zur messung von bereitschaft, im klassenraum in englisch zu kommunizieren (peng und woodrow, 2010), der intrinsischen motivation (noels, clément und pelletier, 2001), klassenlima (fraser, fisher und mcrobbie, 1996) und nähe des lehrers (zhang und oetzel, 2006). die analyse ergab, dass die lernenden im dritten alter bei sinnbasierten kommunikationsaufgaben eine höhere kommunikationsbereitschaft gezeigt hatten als bei grammatischen übungen. das ergebnis deutet darauf hin, dass die kommunikative interaktion während des lernprozesses bei älteren erwachsenen von großer wichtigkeit ist. dementsprechend waren die probanden offener für gespräche in zweiergruppen als für eine direkte kommunikation mit der lehrkraft. daher kann davon ausgegangen werden, dass die partnerarbeit ihr selbstbewusstsein und selbstvertrauen bei der kommunikation in der fremdsprache gestärkt hat. erwähnenswert ist auch, dass intrinsische motivation einen erheblichen einf luss auf die kommunikationsbereitschaft im sprachunterricht hatte. die tatsache ist auf die grundlegenden motive für das englischlernen im seniorenalter zurückzuführen. dabei handelt es sich in erster linie um die kommunikation im ausland und im klassenraum. darüber hinaus betonten die studienteilnehmer die fundamentale rolle des lehrers, die im wesentlichen darin besteht, die lernenden im prozess des spracherwerbs zu fördern und für ein gutes klassenklima zu sorgen. schlüsselwörter: kommunikationsbereitschaft, senioren, motivation, nähe des lehrers teresa maria włosowicz university of social sciences in łódź faculty of applied sciences in cracow translanguaging as the mobilisation of linguistic resources by learners of spanish as a third or additional language a b s t r a c t the present study investigates the comprehension and production of spanish as a third or additional language (de angelis’s (2007) term), paying special attention to the use of code-switching and translanguaging. following lewis, jones, and baker (2012, p. 655), it is assumed that translanguaging involves the mobilisation of all of learners’ linguistic resources “to maximise understanding and achievement,” so the learners’ use of languages other than spanish (especially english, but also e.g. french, italian, etc.) in the tasks could be assumed to be an example of translanguaging too. simultaneously, the use of words from languages other than spanish for lack of a spanish word could be argued to be more precisely classified as code-switching. multilingual repertoires are highly complex and, according to otheguy, garcía, and reid (2018), multilingual competence is unitary rather than divided into several distinct languages, so, in their view, words are selected from a single lexicon. however, as shown by williams and hammarberg (1998), the different languages in multilingual repertoires perform various functions, which gives rise to different types of switches. the study was carried out with english philology and romance philology students studying spanish as a third or additional language. as the results show, even though the romance philology students were generally more skilled at translanguaging, viewed as the use of all their linguistic resources, they avoided switches into other romance languages, probably to minimise interference. by contrast, the english philology students, who had lower proficiency in spanish, were less capable of using their multilingual resources, including english, to provide the missing words, possibly also due to problems with the comprehension of the spanish sentences. keywords: multilingual repertoires, linguistic resources, translanguaging, production strategies theory and practice of second language acquisition vol. 6 (1), 2020, pp. 65–106 https://doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.7770 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8767-9332 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en teresa maria włosowicz66 introduction the purpose of the present study has been an investigation of the written production and comprehension of spanish as a third or additional language (de angelis, 2007, p. 11), taking into consideration the use of code-switching and translanguaging as a reflection of multilingual linguistic and strategic competence. the term ‘third or additional language’ is used here on purpose, as the participants’ language repertoires were varied and spanish was not necessarily their l3, but could also be their l4 or even l5. however, according to williams and hammarberg (1998, p. 296), an l2 can be defined as a previously learnt foreign language, while the l3 is the language currently being studied; in their view, therefore, a learner can have more than one l2 and more than one l3 at a time. in other words, while spanish was, chronologically, for example, a student’s l4, in williams and hammarberg’s (1998) terminology it could still be regarded as an l3, so the participants’ language repertoires could be supposed to be sufficiently comparable to allow the realisation of the study. despite the various definitions and approaches to translanguaging (see section the phenomenon of translanguaging), it can generally be assumed to be the mobilisation of a learner’s linguistic resources in their entirety “to maximise understanding and achievement” (lewis, jones, & baker, 2012, p. 655), so the use of english and, possibly, other languages (especially other romance languages, such as french, italian or portuguese) could also be classified as translanguaging. similarly, while some researchers on translanguaging (e.g., otheguy, garcía, & reid, 2018) regard multilingual competence as unitary, thus rejecting code-switching as switching between different languages (otheguy et al., 2018, p. 16), the approach followed here is more traditional, regarding code-switching as a type of translanguaging (garcía, 2009a, p. 140; macswan, 2017, p. 191), for example, as a communication strategy applied when the target spanish word cannot be retrieved. indeed, this approach seems the most appropriate in the context in which the study was conducted. unlike bilingual immigrant children, the english and romance philology students were studying spanish as a foreign language in formal university contexts and, as it turned out (see results and conclusions), translanguaging was not their natural way of using spanish, but rather, it had to be explicitly encouraged by the research design. otherwise, it can be assumed, the avoidance rates would have been higher (in fact, they were relatively high, especially among the english philology students, see tables 1 and 2), as foreign language classes generally focus on the target language and do not involve the mobilisation of all linguistic resources, so students are not used to translanguaging. translanguaging as the mobilisation of linguistic resources… 67 however, on the basis of the students’ use of resources belonging to languages other than spanish, it is attempted to draw some conclusions regarding multilingual repertoires, the place of spanish as a third or additional language in them, and the use of translanguaging as a comprehension (some prompts in english are also used; similarly, learners tend to translate into their l1 to improve and consolidate understanding, kern, 1994) and production strategy. the use of translanguaging will be analysed in two different groups: english philology students, for whom spanish is just an additional foreign language, unrelated to the other languages they study, and romance philology students, for whom spanish is a more important part of their curriculum and is related to the other romance languages, which may also strengthen the links between spanish and the other language(s) they study (cf. singleton, 2001; herwig, 2001). multilingual language processing and use multilingual competence in general, multilingual systems (often called repertoires, especially in studies related to the choice of one language or another, or of code-switching, in particular sociolinguistic contexts, cf. garcía & otheguy, 2019; li, 2018) are not sums of clearly delineated and separate language systems, but rather networks within which the different languages constitute interconnected and interdependent subsystems. following grosjean (1985, p. 467), who emphasised that a bilingual was not the sum of two monolinguals, de angelis and selinker (2001, p. 45) observe that “a multilingual is neither the sum of three or more monolinguals, nor a bilingual with an additional language,” but rather “a speaker of three or more languages with unique linguistic configurations, often depending on individual history.” indeed, as cieślicka (2000) has shown, the links between l1 and l2 words in the bilingual lexicon vary from one speaker to another and depend on such factors as the language learning context, learning strategies, proficiency, etc. in the case of three or more languages, the system is even more complex, as the words of l3, l4, etc. can become attached, for example, to their l2 rather than l1 equivalents, if the l3 and the l2 are typologically closer (herwig, 2001, p. 117, singleton, 2001). certainly, the languages within multilingual systems are interconnected not only at the lexical, but also at the grammatical level, which led cook (1991, n.p., as cited in cook, 2016, p. 2) to propose the notion of multi-competence as “the compound state of a mind with two grammars.” however, teresa maria włosowicz68 as he later admitted (cook, 2016, p. 2), this definition may be misleading, as it may suggest that multi-competence refers only to syntax, even though his original definition was based on the chomskyan idea of grammar as linguistic knowledge in general. therefore, the current definition of multicompetence postulates that it is “the overall system of a mind or a community that uses more than one language” (cook, 2016, p. 3). as he explains, the term “system” is more neutral than “knowledge,” which might be regarded as static, and the definition “does not confine multi-competence to language alone, brings in language use and implies that language is not separate from the rest of the mind” (cook, 2016, p. 3). therefore, it can be assumed that, if translanguaging involves a learner’s multi-competence, it combines the use of his or her different languages with extralinguistic knowledge, cultural competence, strategic competence, etc. in general, multilingual (or, as coste, moore, & zarate (1997) call it, “plurilingual”) competence, is varied and cannot really be “balanced,” however advanced the learner is in all his or her languages. coste, moore, and zarate (1997, p. 12) define plurilingual and pluricultural competence as the linguistic and cultural communicative competence possessed by a person who has different levels of proficiency in several languages and different degrees of experience with several cultures, but who is able to manage his or her linguistic and cultural capital. in their view, it is not a juxtaposition of distinct competences, but rather a whole complex and heterogeneous repertoire composed of singular, even partial competences, available to the language user (coste el al., 1997, p. 12). in this sense, translanguaging can be regarded as a fully legitimate use of one’s multilingual repertoire to communicate the intended meanings. as mentioned above, the languages in a multilingual repertoire are to some extent interconnected. for example, as illustrated by herwig’s (2001) model of the multilingual mental lexicon, there are links between the words (or, more precisely, between the nodes where different components of lexical knowledge are stored in a distributed way) of the multiple languages at different levels (for example, semantic, phonological, orthographic, etc.) and the strength of those links depends on the similarity between the words. for example, translation equivalents which differ in form may be connected at the semantic level, but cognates can be connected at the semantic, phonological, and orthographic levels. as will be shown in more detail later in this article, the connections between the words of the different languages make possible both their strategic use (for example, code-switching as a communication strategy or an attempt to elicit the target language word) and interference errors. however, as singleton (2003, p. 168) points out, “the existence of marked formal differences between languages,” such as phonological differences, constitutes an argument against full integration. similarly, bilingual and multilingual speakers usually keep translanguaging as the mobilisation of linguistic resources… 69 their languages apart while speaking, and it is even possible that, if one does not expect to hear a particular language, its comprehension may be blocked (singleton, 2003, p. 168). while connections between words can be observed more easily, for example, on the basis of lexical associations (e.g., gabryś-barker, 2005), at the grammatical level, the languages of a multilingual are not fully separated either. on the one hand, grammar is lexicalised and sentence structure depends on the syntactic properties of individual words, especially verbs, more than on general phrase-structure rules, such as s → np + vp. for example, the difference between the sentences “she intends to eat chocolate tonight” and “she regrets eating chocolate tonight” is due to the different syntactic properties of the verbs “to intend” and “to regret” (singleton, 2000, p. 17). therefore, as lexical items belonging to different languages are connected, one might access the properties of a non-target language word. indeed, as shown by gibson and hufeisen (2001), learners do use verbs with inappropriate prepositions, for instance, “*sich konzentrieren an” (target preposition: “auf”; to concentrate on), “*sich fürchten von” (target preposition: “vor”; to be afraid of), etc. (gibson & hufeisen, 2001, p. 185). according to hall and ecke’s (2003) parasitic model, l2 learners copy into l2 lexical entries the properties of l1 words, which may lead to errors if those properties are different, as in the case of “i like x” and “me gusta x,” where the subject is the person or object liked by the speaker (hall & ecke, 2003, p. 77). on the other hand, learning a second language also leads to the restructuring of l1 competence to some extent; thus bilingual english-french speakers’ grammaticality judgements in l1 english were different from those of monolingual english speakers (cook, 1996, p. 65). in summary, even though multilingual systems consist of several languages, which can be used separately, for example, while talking to a monolingual, they are to some extent interconnected and can therefore interact. in fact, following coste et al. (1997), it can be assumed that, as multilinguals’ language repertoires are available to them as wholes, the use of non-target language words or structures, for example, to convey a meaning for which the learner lacks the target language word, is a natural consequence of this interconnection and thus translanguaging can be regarded as a normal phenomenon in third or additional language acquisition. multilingual language production and comprehension since the languages in multilingual repertoires are interconnected and interaction between them is inevitable, the consultation of more than one language occurs in both comprehension and production. as shown by grainger and teresa maria włosowicz70 beauvillain (1987), in visual word recognition, bilingual lexical access does not involve pre-selective search; rather, language-specific orthographic cues point to the activation of words in a particular language (grainger & beauvillain, 1987, pp. 314–315). at the phonological level, there is competition between phonologically similar l1 and l2 words, which supports “the hypothesis of parallel activation of both languages” (marian & spivey, 2003, p. 104). as marian and spivey (2003, p. 109) conclude, “bilinguals can and do experience competition from both languages and into both languages, although the magnitude of the effect changes under different circumstances.” in comprehension, as pointed out by green (1993, p. 260), all the lexical items consistent with the input are activated, not only those which belong to the target language, and similarity between l1 and l2 items can delay comprehension. in production, as herwig (2001, p. 128) concludes on the basis of the results of her study, “lexical selection in situations of non-accessibility of an item in demand involves both automatic and deliberate consultation of several languages.” in fact, as de angelis (2005) has shown, the control mechanism is not perfect and a word from a non-target language can be selected and regarded by the speaker as a target language word, a phenomenon which de angelis (2005, pp. 10–11) calls a system shift. the factors which contribute to system shifts are “perception of correctness” and “association of foreignness” (de angelis, 2005, p. 11). according to de angelis (2005, p. 11, her emphasis), “[p]erception of correctness refers to multilinguals’ resistance to incorporating l1 linguistic knowledge into interlanguage production when other information is available for them to use.” in other words, it is “learners’ ability to successfully monitor their production and identify what is correct or incorrect target language output” (de angelis, 2005, p. 11). by contrast, association of foreignness is the perception of foreign languages as closer to one another, which results in greater acceptance of non-native words, even if they come from a non-target foreign language (de angelis, 2005, p. 12). an example might be the use of spanish and italian words in the written production of portuguese, for instance, “quando o sol tramontava” instead of “quando o sol se punha” (when the sun was setting), where the italian verb “tramontare” was activated and accepted by three participants as the target portuguese word (włosowicz, 2016, p. 79). in other words, the students mobilised their multilingual repertoires in the attempt to retrieve the target portuguese items, but the perceived similarity between the languages was too great to allow effective control. another factor which influences the probability of choosing a non-target language word is the level of activation of each language in the multilingual repertoire. according to green’s (1986) inhibitory control model, a language can be selected, active or dormant. a selected language is the one that is currently being used, an active language is not being used, but it remains actitranslanguaging as the mobilisation of linguistic resources… 71 vated and participates in processing, whereas a dormant language remains in long-term memory and does not have any effect on processing (green, 1986, p. 215). for example, in a bilingual speaker, if l1 is selected, l2 is externally suppressed and thus the phonological assembly of l2 words is inhibited (green, 1986, p. 217). the fact that bilingual and multilingual speakers can use a single language in particular contexts indicates that they can indeed inhibit the nontarget language(s), for example, while talking to a monolingual. on the other hand, a conversation among bilinguals can contain elements of both languages (grosjean, 2001, p. 5). thus, grosjean (2001, p. 3) speaks about a continuum of language modes, ranging from the monolingual to the bilingual language mode. he defines a language mode as “the state of activation of the bilingual’s languages and language processing mechanisms at a given point in time” (grosjean, 2001, p. 3). in the bilingual mode, the dominant language is called the base language, while the less active one is the other language or the guest language. in fact, as grosjean (2001, p. 7) admits, “it is proposed that the other language is probably never totally deactivated at the monolingual end and that it very rarely reaches the same level of activation as the base language at the bilingual end.” however, according to dijkstra and van hell (2001), the amount of control over the activation of languages is limited and lexical candidates belonging to different languages are activated on the basis of the input word rather than the target language. by contrast, the results obtained by dunn and fox tree (2014) show that language mode activation to some extent depends on language dominance. what is also interesting is the fact that, unlike bilinguals, trilinguals possess better control and regulation mechanisms, which cedden and saǧın şimşek (2014, p. 566) summarise as follows: “a third language system represented in the mind has the effect of promoting experience or regulation costs of the executive control system which might lead to the development of a more sophisticated and balanced language system.” undoubtedly, knowing that the interlocutor knows both languages allows bilinguals to switch more freely without being afraid that the interlocutor will fail to understand. code-switching can also be used as a communication strategy, for example, if the speaker does not know the target word or a non-target language word is more available (poulisse & bongaerts, 1994, p. 36). among interlingual communication strategies, faerch and kasper (1983, pp. 46–47) mention code-switching (ranging from single words to complete turns, though single-word switching is also referred to as borrowing) interlingual transfer (a combination of linguistic features from the native language and the interlanguage, also called “foreignizing” if it involves adjusting the l1 morphology or phonology, and “literal translation” in the case of the word-for-word translation of idioms and compounds, p. 47), and inter-/intralingual transfer, where the generalisation of an interlanguage rule is influenced by the l1 teresa maria włosowicz72 rule (for example, an irregular l2 word may have a regular l1 equivalent). it can thus be seen that code-switching cannot be dismissed as a form of interference, but it performs a particular role in bilingual and multilingual communication. as shown by morytz (2017), though polish learners of italian use a variety of communication strategies, the dominant strategies are the use of gestures, that of an electronic translator and transfer from another language (morytz, 2017, p. 203), especially english (p. 199). in her view (morytz, 2017, p. 203–204), foreign language teaching should involve more strategy training and metalinguistic awareness raising. in particular, students should be taught to replace unknown words with synonyms, hyperonyms, paraphrases, etc., rather than resorting to extralinguistic strategies, which do not contribute to the development of language skills (morytz, 2017, p. 204). she also observes that, in the polish context, students who lack an italian word tend to replace it with a polish one, because it is going to be understood anyway (morytz, 2017, p. 197). moreover, as shown by williams and hammarberg (1998), code-switching in multilinguals can be of different types in which the languages perform a variety of functions. for example, l1 (english in their study) predominantly serves such functions as meta (comments on one’s own performance, requests for help, etc.), edit (self-repair, facilitating interaction, etc.), and insert (inserting a word or phrase, for example, to elicit a swedish l3 word, williams & hammarberg, 1998, pp. 306–309). on the other hand, l2 german occurred mainly in wipp switches (“without identified pragmatic purpose,” p. 308), which were non-intentional and, as they were often followed by self-repair, they did not serve to elicit swedish words, which the learner already knew. on the basis of these results, williams and hammarberg (1998) proposed a polyglot speaking model, assigning roles to the different languages: l1 english has an instrumental role, while l2 german is called a “default supplier” (williams & hammarberg, 1998, p. 318), or a language that is co-activated all the time and influences target language lexical planning and structures. williams and hammarberg (1998, p. 322, their emphasis) suggest that “the assignment of default supplier role may be the result of interplay between four factors, namely proficiency, typology, recency, and l2 status.” in other words, a default supplier is a foreign rather than the native language, it is typologically close to the target language, it has recently been used (so it remains active) and one has a fairly high level of proficiency in it. it can thus be concluded that multilinguals do use their language repertoires to communicate the intended meanings, in a way that involves their multiple languages, some of which (if not all) remain active and participate in processing. in fact, even in the monolingual mode the non-target languages are not fully deactivated and the amount of control a speaker can exert is limited. hence, translanguaging as the mobilisation of linguistic resources… 73 it may be assumed that the mobilisation of one’s whole linguistic repertoire is a normal phenomenon and can, at least in some cases, be capitalised on rather than suppressed. translanguaging the phenomenon of translanguaging by and large, translanguaging has been defined by baker (2011, p. 288, as cited in lewis, jones, & baker, 2012, p. 655) as “the process of making meaning, shaping experiences, gaining understanding and knowledge through the use of two languages.” more particularly, in the classroom context, “translanguaging tries to draw on all the linguistic resources of the child to maximise understanding and achievement” (lewis et al., 2012, p. 655). certainly, this does not necessarily have to apply to children as such, as adult learners can also draw upon all their linguistic resources. in a similar vein, garcía (2009a, p. 140) defines translanguaging as “the act performed by bilinguals of accessing different linguistic features or various modes of what are described as autonomous languages, in order to maximize communicative potential.” therefore, as garcía (2009a, p. 140) admits, translanguaging “goes beyond what has been termed codeswitching, although it includes it.” in the present article, all the above definitions of translanguaging will be relied on, regarding it as the use of multilingual resources to make communication more efficient, but also to facilitate learning, and code-switching will be considered one of the ways of facilitating understanding and communication. even though some more recent studies on translanguaging (e.g., otheguy, garcía, & reid, 2018) reject the boundaries between languages in multilingual repertoires and thus also code-switching as the act of switching between languages, there is still evidence in favour of the psychological reality of code-switching and some rules governing it (macswan, 2017; toribio, 2001). certainly, there are situations where the term “code-switching” becomes irrelevant because speakers mix several languages, none of them being dominant, so “translanguaging” is the only appropriate term, as in the case of the multilingual community in singapore described by li (2018, pp. 13–14). in a single dialogue, the speakers use hokkien, teochew, mandarin, malay, cantonese, singlish, and english, and, as li (2018, p. 14) concludes, “[a] classic code-switching approach would assume switching back and forward to a single language default,” which is impossible in that community. however, the participants in the present study teresa maria włosowicz74 do not belong to such a community and are more conscious of code-switching between their different languages. as lewis et al. (2012, p. 659) observe, “[t]here is clearly much overlap between code-switching and translanguaging,” and the difference is mainly related to the fields the terms originate from: while “code-switching” is derived from the linguistic analysis of bilingual speech, “translanguaging” is applicable to situated language use in sociolinguistics. according to juffermans, blommaert, kroon, and li (2014, p. 49, their emphasis, as cited in treffersdaller, 2018, p. 13), the difference between code-switching and translanguaging is not phenomenological but theoretical, as “codeswitching grosso modo takes a structural perspective on bilingual text or talk whereas translanguaging focuses primarily on what speakers actually do and achieve by drawing on elements from their repertoires in situated contexts.” in other words, the learners’ language production may actually look the same in both cases, but, while a code-switching approach would analyse the grammatical elements that can be switched and those which cannot (e.g. toribio, 2001), a translanguaging approach would consider the use of multilingual repertoires to facilitate communication. it must thus be remembered that code-switching and translanguaging can actually be very similar, but that translanguaging takes a broader outlook on multilingual communication, including the use of other semiotic means, such as gestures. as li (2018, p. 20, his emphasis) concludes, “[l]anguage, then, is a multisensory and multimodal semiotic system interconnected with other identifiable but inseparable cognitive systems.” he then moves on to define translanguaging as “transcending the traditional divides between linguistic and non-linguistic cognitive and semiotic systems” (li, 2018, p. 20). another difference between code-switching and translanguaging is that translanguaging is “a more systematic and strategic process that allows the speaker to make meaning and to foster the affective side of language use in such a way that bilinguals use the whole linguistic and semiotic repertoire at their disposal to shape their experiences and create meaning” (doiz & lasagabaster, 2017, p. 160). in fact, not only does translanguaging transcend the boundaries between languages, but some researchers actually assume unitary competence, without any boundaries within multilingual repertoires. for example, otheguy et al. (2018, p. 2) claim that “[t]he myriad linguistic features mastered by bilinguals (phonemes, words, constructions, rules, etc.) occupy a single, undifferentiated cognitive terrain that is not fenced off into anything like the two areas suggested by the two socially named languages.” in their view, the division of languages into separate entities, such as english, spanish, etc., “is anchored in sociocultural beliefs, not in psycholinguistic properties of the underlying system” (otheguy et al., 2018, p. 4, their emphasis). as a result, even though the existence of some internal differentiation is obvious, the claim that the diftranslanguaging as the mobilisation of linguistic resources… 75 ferentiation is specific to the separate languages present in the system is based on the social division between them (otheguy et al., 2018, p. 8). according to garcía and otheguy (2019, p. 10), translanguaging involves “the deployment of features that are most appropriate to communicate a message to a listener,” but those features do not have to belong to a single language and they do not even have to be linguistic, as communication can also include gestures, gaze, posture, etc. by contrast, macswan (2017, p. 169, his emphasis) offers “a multilingual perspective on translanguaging,” which recognises the existence of discrete languages within multilingual repertoires and which regards code-switching as a rule-governed activity. in contrast to the dual competence model, which assumes the existence of fully discrete language systems, and the unitary model of multilingualism, based on the assumption of a single, undifferentiated system (represented, for example, by otheguy et al., 2018), macswan (2017, p. 179) proposed the integrated multilingual model, according to which “bilinguals have a single system with many shared grammatical resources but with some internal language-specific differentiation as well” (macswan, 2017, p. 179). macswan (2017, p. 179) adds that it is not monolingualism but multilingualism that is universal, and that monolingualism is a social construct, because some internal differentiation can be observed even in so-called monolingual systems (macswan, 2017, p. 185). following grosjean (1982), macswan (2017, p. 190) recognises that “[a] bilingual is a uniquely situated language user who functions bilingually, drawing on whatever language resources are appropriate, and is not the sum of two monolinguals.” however, what is regarded by speakers as appropriate is also grammatically based. for example, macswan (2017, p. 181, his emphasis) observes that spanish-english bilinguals may say “the white house, la casa blanca and the white casa, but not the house white, la blanca casa, or the casa white,” which he attributes to “structured and internally organized differentiation of some kind” (macswan, 2017, p. 181) and to bilinguals’ sensitivity to that complex system of rules (p. 190). some evidence of the rule-governed character of codeswitching is provided by toribio’s (2001) study, in which bilinguals at different levels of proficiency made judgements on the grammaticality of different switches. she concludes that advanced bilinguals’ code-switching behaviour reflects the constraints of universal grammar (toribio, 2001, pp. 226–227), but she also observes that “the rule-governed nature of code-switching is upheld by even the non-fluent bilinguals in the sample, whose behaviour suggests at least enough incipient competence in the second language to switch codes” (toribio, 2001, p. 225). according to otheguy et al. (2018, p. 15), grammaticality judgements require specifying the language system in which an utterance is grammatical or not, and bilingual informants who believe that they speak two languages. teresa maria włosowicz76 even so, it can be assumed that learners who grew up in a basically monolingual community (although, following macswan, 2017, it can be admitted that monolingualism is a social construct, so no speaker or community is fully monolingual; rather, it is a theoretical oversimplification based on the fact that they speak one socially named language at home, they learn another socially named language at school, and another at university, etc.) and learnt their l2, l3, etc. as foreign languages, do distinguish between them. certainly, there are communities where the boundaries between the languages are blurred, as in the multilingual community in singapore (li, 2018), but in the present study, the participants can be assumed to be aware of the internal differentiation of their multilingual repertoires and to use code-switching and other forms of translanguaging as conscious strategies rather than their natural language production. undoubtedly, in the polish context, one cannot assume unitary multilingual competence, given the existence of monolingual polish speakers (at least functionally monolingual, because their knowledge of foreign languages, especially russian, which was taught in polish schools for several decades, is dormant), who would not understand a mixture of polish, english, and— in the case of the participants in the present study—spanish and, possibly, french, italian, and portuguese. some translanguaging in possible in the case of regional languages, such as silesian, for example, arabski (2002, p. 211) mentions the use of silesian words as keywords in memorising english and german vocabulary. however, unlike kashubian, silesian has the status of a dialect and, in spite of considerable debate (myśliwiec, 2013), the polish parliament has not recognised it as a language (tvs, 2019). moreover, while polish and silesian are similar enough to make such translanguaging comprehensible, a mixture of polish and english would be comprehensible to polish speakers of english and a mixture of polish, english, and spanish would require of the recipient knowledge of all these languages. in morytz’s (2017) study cited above, polish learners of italian tend to resort to english as a better-known language and, as she observes (morytz, 2017, p. 201), english has now become a lingua franca, so it is likely to be understood, also by an italian speaker. in fact, mixing polish with english as a lingua franca occurs in the polish branches of international companies, but even such an informal, mixed language variety has its own rules, which might challenge otheguy et al.’s (2018) claim that separate languages are only social constructs. as shown by włosowicz (2013), mixing polish, english, and french in an international company is subject to certain constraints (for example, some english and french words are only used as terminology), so even in a community using all three languages certain usages are considered acceptable, while others are not. translanguaging as the mobilisation of linguistic resources… 77 translanguaging as a pedagogical practice translanguaging originated from a pedagogical practice used in welsh schools. the term was first used by williams (1994, as cited in macswan, 2017, p. 170) in reference to “the planned and systematic use of two languages inside the same lesson” (baker, 2011, p. 288, as cited in macswan, 2017, p. 170). as lewis et al. (2012, p. 657) remark, historically, translanguaging is related to classroom code-switching. however, while translanguaging is often spontaneous, initiated by the learners themselves, who use “both their languages to maximise understanding and performance” (lewis et al., 2012, p. 658), “responsible” code-switching (garcía, 2009b, as cited in lewis et al., 2012, p. 658) is used by the teacher to clarify the l2 material, to develop the learners’ metalinguistic understanding and to increase their metacognitive awareness. as duarte (2018, p. 3) points out, there is considerable evidence of the advantages of translanguaging “at different levels of school performance and for both migrant and minority languages.” in her article, duarte (2018) presents two school contexts in which translanguaging is used: at a kindergarten in luxembourg and at a primary school in the netherlands. as she remarks (duarte, 2018, p. 12), her examples are instances of “official translanguaging,” planned by the teachers and systematically applied. she distinguishes three functions of official translanguaging: the symbolic function (acknowledgement of the pupils’ native languages), the scaffolding function (building bridges between the languages and attributing equal value to them) and the epistemological function, or the use of translanguaging for content and language learning, which require of the teacher different levels of competence in the languages involved, from no proficiency at all, except in the instruction language, to proficiency in both (or more) languages (duarte, 2018, p. 13). as duarte (2018, p. 14) concludes, translanguaging allows “pupils to actively use their dynamic plurilingual practices for learning” and her typology may help teachers to develop their own translanguaging practices in the future. however, multilingualism has long been ignored in education. in general, language teaching has followed what howatt (1984, as cited in cummins, 2008, p. 65) called “the monolingual principle,” according to which foreign language teaching was supposed to take place in the target language, excluding the learners’ l1, while immersion programs were designed to keep both languages separate (cummins, 2008, p. 65). however, cummins (2008) advocates the abandonment of reliance on such monolingual approaches and emphasises the role of promoting cross-language transfer. following donovan and bransford (2005, p. 4, their emphasis, as cited in cummins, 2008, p. 67), who observe that “new understandings are constructed on a foundation of existing understandings and experiences,” cummins (2008, p. 68) claims that foreign language teresa maria włosowicz78 teaching “should explicitly attempt to activate students’ prior knowledge and build relevant background knowledge as necessary.” according to the interdependence hypothesis (cummins, 1981, as cited in cummins, 2008, p. 68), proficiency in lx can be transferred to ly if there is both adequate exposure to ly and sufficient motivation to learn it. such transfer can apply to conceptual and linguistic elements as well as to metacognitive and metalinguistic strategies, pragmatic aspects of language use and phonological awareness (cummins, 2008, p. 69). therefore, it can be said that reference to learners’ prior knowledge (for example, l1 and l2 proficiency in l3 learning) can facilitate learning and should be used responsibly rather than avoided. however, as shown by doiz and lasagabaster (2017), teachers do use translanguaging in english-medium instruction (emi), even though there is some discrepancy between their beliefs and practices. even though they claim to believe that the l2 should always be used, they use the l1 in teaching, for example, to explain specialised vocabulary, or at least for organisational purposes, such as making announcements (doiz & lasagabaster, 2017, p. 169). however, while translanguaging is common outside the classroom, for example, during office hours, “it is not generally accepted in classroom interactions and assessment tasks” (doiz & lasagabaster, 2017, p. 173). as doiz and lasagabaster (2017, p. 174) conclude, teachers should, first, focus on both language and content so that the students profit more from emi and, second, they may need training in translanguaging in order to “break away from the monolingual view of language codes” (doiz & lasagabaster, 2017, p. 174). still, the monolingual view seems to be represented not only by teachers, but also by students and, to some extent, it is actually good to practice the target language as much as possible, but the advantages of positive transfer and language awareness should not be neglected either. last but not least, in the context of the present study, it is worth pointing out that different criteria should be applied to students’ proficiency and language use in different study programmes and at different levels of education. while minority and immigrant children may be encouraged to use all their language repertoires so as to feel that their home languages are valued and to develop additive bilingualism, philology students should, arguably, be taught using a different approach. though some reference to languages other than the target language should be used, for example, to raise metalinguistic awareness, as future teachers, translators, etc., they should obey certain monolingual norms as well. after all, a translation, say, from polish into english, containing a mixture of polish and english words (other than proper names, culturespecific terms explained by the translator, etc.), would be incomprehensible to english recipients. translanguaging as the mobilisation of linguistic resources… 79 the study participants the study was carried out with twenty-six participants learning spanish as a third or additional language, seven of whom were english philology students following a spanish language course at the branch of ignatianum university in mysłowice and at the university of social sciences in cracow, and nineteen were romance philology students studying different romance languages (spanish, portuguese, french, italian or even romanian) at jagiellonian university and at the university of silesia. their spanish was basic (a1/a2) or intermediate (b1) at most, at least by their own admission. as time limitations made it impossible to carry out placement tests in english and spanish, their proficiency levels had to be estimated, on the one hand, on the basis of the questionnaires and, on the other hand, on the knowledge second-year romance philology students could be assumed to have and, in the case of the present author’s english philology students, the syllabuses and their performance during the classes. their native language (l1) was polish, except for one english philology student who indicated russian and one romance philology student who indicated both polish and italian (i.e., she had been raised bilingually). their l2 was predominantly english, as it is the most frequently taught foreign language in poland and, generally, in europe (the l1 russian participant is from belarus). however, two romance philology students indicated spanish as their l2, one indicated italian and one – romanian. it might thus be questionable whether the l2 spanish students can be included in the analysis. actually, it can be assumed that they can because, first, english is more likely to be their l2 (it is taught from an earlier age and it is unlikely that they started spanish earlier or that they achieved a higher level of proficiency in spanish in a much shorter time), second, with parallel language learning, the acquisition order can be established only approximately (cenoz, 2000), and third, they may not necessarily have indicated their language sequences correctly. for example, five english philology students did not indicate spanish at all, even though they were studying it. in fact, at secondary school all the english philology students had also had a foreign language other than english, that is, german or french (włosowicz, in preparation), so spanish was actually their l4, even though only the l5 spanish student indicated french as l3 and german as l4, whereas the other students did not mention their l3 german or french at all. the l1 russian student indicated english as l2 and polish as l3, while spanish as l4 could be assumed because she followed the spanish course. teresa maria włosowicz80 the romance philology students had more varied language repertoires. apart from polish (in one case, polish and italian) as l1 and english (14 participants), spanish (two participants, though the l2 status is questionable, see above), italian (1) and romanian (1) as l2, they had spanish (12), german (2), french (2) and english (2) as l3, spanish (4), french (3), german (2), english (1) and portuguese (1) as l4, and portuguese (5) as l5. even though two of the romance philology students did not mention english in the questionnaires, they can be assumed to have studied it, or else they would not have been able to do the tasks and complete the questionnaire. it can thus be seen that the participants’ language repertoires are varied and the languages can be assumed to have been acquired largely simultaneously rather than consecutively, which complicates the establishment of acquisition orders even further. indeed, as observed by van gelderen et al. (2003, p. 23), l3 learner populations are usually more heterogeneous than the research design would require. at the same time, as cenoz (2000, p. 40) pointed out, in multilingual acquisition, it is no longer possible to mark simultaneously acquired languages as l1, l2, l3, etc., but rather as lx, ly, etc. hence, in simultaneous l3 and l4 acquisition, the sequence would be l1 → l2 → lx/ly. therefore, the participants’ repertoires and acquisition orders were heterogeneous and could be determined only approximately, but it can be assumed that spanish has the status of a third or additional language, whether as l3, l4 or l5, or as lx in the case of simultaneously studied lx, ly, and even lz. method the research tool used in the study was a written test, followed by a questionnaire. the test was designed in such a way as to co-activate the participants’ languages and to provoke some translanguaging and, in particular, code-switching. as translanguaging mobilises all of a learner’s language resources, it was assumed that the use of other languages, especially english, in both comprehension and production, could be regarded as translanguaging (for example, some expressions were prompted in english and the participants were supposed to provide the spanish equivalents). the test consisted of three tasks: first, a gap-filling task consisting of two dialogues, one between a shop assistant and a customer and one between a tourist asking for directions and a receptionist, second, a gap-filling task consisting of ten independent sentences which had to be completed with words or expressions, and third, an error correction task with ten spanish sentences to be classified as correct and incorrect, with a correction and an explanation in the case of the incorrect sentences. in the first task, some of translanguaging as the mobilisation of linguistic resources… 81 the possible spanish target words were prompted in a box below the dialogues, but no translation was provided, so the participants were supposed to recognise them in order to use them. however, some non-target spanish words which had also been studied at the learners’ level, such as “calcetín” (sock) and “falda” (skirt), were also given in the box for the task not to be too easy. alternatively, the students were encouraged to use words from other languages (english, as was written in the instructions, originally designed for english philology students, but also french, portuguese, italian, etc., which the present author told the romance philology students while explaining the tasks to them) to show that they understood the sentences and knew the meanings of the target words. in other words, they were supposed to use code-switching as a strategy. the second task involved translanguaging in the form of l2 english language comprehension, which was supposed to facilitate the choice of the spanish expressions, as leaving gaps without any cues might not have prompted the intended meanings to them, while cues in polish would have triggered lexical-level connections (kroll & stewart, 1994), but they might not have mobilised more of the participants’ language resources. the third task involved translanguaging in a different sense: rather than using words or expressions from other languages to facilitate the task, the participants were supposed to judge the grammaticality of spanish sentences, some of which involved negative transfer from polish, english, or both, so mobilising the language repertoires was rather meant to identify the rules underlying the stimulus sentences and find the correct ones. thus, unitary competence not specifying the divisions between the particular languages (otheguy et al., 2018) would have rendered the error correction task more difficult, while integrated multilingual competence (macswan, 2017) would have permitted the identification of sentences correct in spanish or, on the contrary, based on negative transfer from polish, english or both. the tasks were followed by a questionnaire on the participants’ language repertoires (it even contained an example of a similarity between spanish and russian, for the russianspeaking students of the university of social sciences) and the difficulties and cross-linguistic interaction (herdina & jessner’s (2002) term) they had encountered while studying spanish and performing the tasks. the tasks are presented in appendix 1 and the questionnaire – in appendix 2 at the end of the article. the research questions were as follows: first, to what extent did the participants in each group (english philology and romance philology) use translanguaging to solve the tasks? in particular, to what extent did they use code-switching as a strategy to fill in the gaps with words from languages other than spanish? second, what do the results reveal about their multilingual repertoires and the place of spanish in them, as well as about the character (unitary or differentiated) of their multilingual competence? teresa maria włosowicz82 results as the results show, in task 1 relatively few switches into english were observed (thirteen in the english philology group, nine of which were correct (8) or contextually acceptable (1) and four were contextually unacceptable, and two in the romance philology group, both correct) and none into portuguese, french or italian. the participants preferred to rely on their knowledge of spanish, producing either correct, contextually acceptable or contextually unacceptable responses, but avoidance was also quite frequent, especially in the english philology group. correct responses were considered to be words which fitted well in the context of the dialogue (there was often more than one possible correct answer), contextually acceptable ones sounded slightly odd, but they still could be thought of, for example, “ochocientos gramos de pimienta” (eight hundred grams of pepper (as a spice, not a vegetable)), and contextually unacceptable answers did not fit in the context at all, for example, “¿tiene pimienta?” “no, tiene que ir a la carnicería” (“do you have pepper?” “no, you have to go to the butcher’s”), where the target word had to be some kind of meat, or even “ochocientos gramos de calcetín” (eight hundred grams of sock). similarly, english words provided instead of spanish ones could be correct, contextually acceptable or contextually unacceptable. as a translanguaging approach was adopted, their correctness was regarded as the same as that of their spanish equivalents. at this point, it must be stressed that it was not a traditional error analysis, judging the students’ performance in reference to strict grammatical and semantic rules, but rather an evaluation of the communicative potential of their responses. that is why the use of english words for lack of spanish ones was not rejected, but even encouraged as a communication strategy. following morytz (2017, p. 199), it could be assumed that the participants would resort to english in case of difficulty in finding contextually appropriate spanish words. however, even the most liberal approach to translanguaging, rejecting all boundaries between “socially named languages” (otheguy at al., 2018, p. 2) and all language-specific rules, should, arguably, take into consideration the use of such sentences in communication. thus, telling the shop assistant at the grocer’s or at the greengrocer’s that you want to buy 800 grams of sock does not seem communicative at all, that is why such responses were classified as “contextually unacceptable.” the percentages of the english philology students’ responses to task 1, based on their acceptability and the languages used, are given in table 1 (the dialogue in the shop) and table 2 (the dialogue between the tourist and the receptionist), and those of the romance philology students’ responses are given in tables 3 and 4 respectively. translanguaging as the mobilisation of linguistic resources… 83 table 1 percentages of the english philology students’ responses provided in task 1, dialogue 1 gap in the text correct spanish word correct english word contextually acceptable spanish word contextually acceptable english word contextually unacceptable spanish word contextually unacceptable english word avoidance [%] ¿qué le ? 0 0 14.29 0 14.29 42.86 28.57 dos 28.57 14.29 28.57 0 0 0 28.57 un kilo de 28.57 14.29 57.14 0 0 0 0 diez 42.86 14.29 14.29 0 0 0 28.57 doscientos gramos de 28.57 0 14.29 14.29 0 0 42.86 ¿algo ? 28.57 14.29 0 0 0 0 57.14 ¿tiene ? 28.57 0 28.57 0 0 0 42.86 ¿tiene también ? 28.57 0 28.57 0 14.29 0 28.57 ochocientos gramos de 28.57 0 14.29 0 14.29 0 42.86 una 0 0 57.14 0 14.29 0 28.57 ¿algo ? 28.57 14.29 0 0 14.29 0 42.86 unos 14.29 0 14.29 0 0 0 71.43 ¿tiene ? 28.57 0 0 0 14.29 0 57.14 ¿algo ? 28.57 14.29 0 0 0 0 57.14 tengo , 14.29 0 28.57 0 0 0 57.14 , 28.57 0 14.29 0 0 0 57.14 … 42.86 0 0 0 0 0 57.14 de cincuenta euros 0 28.57 0 0 28.57 0 42.86 teresa maria włosowicz84 table 2 percentages of the english philology students’ responses provided in task 1, dialogue 2 gap in the text correct spanish word correct english word contextually acceptable spanish word contextually acceptable english word contextually unacceptable spanish word contextually unacceptable english word avoidance [%] ¿cómo 0 0 0 0 57.14 0 42.86 muy 0 0 0 0 28.57 14.29 57.14 al del hotel 0 0 0 0 14.29 0 85.71 tiene que 14.29 0 0 0 14.29 0 71.43 todo 42.86 0 0 0 14.29 0 42.86 la mayor 28.57 0 0 0 28.57 0 42.86 atraviese la 28.57 0 0 0 28.57 0 42.86 después 0 0 0 0 28.57 0 71.43 la primera 42.86 0 0 0 0 0 57.14 ¿y decirme 0 0 0 0 28.57 0 71.43 del arte 14.29 0 0 0 14.29 0 71.43 bastante 0 0 0 0 42.86 0 57.14 el metro 0 0 0 0 42.86 0 57.14 tiene que 0 0 0 0 14.29 0 85.71 cinco 14.29 0 14.29 0 14.29 0 57.14 jardín zoológico 0 0 0 0 14.29 0 85.71 a goya 14.29 0 0 0 0 0 85.71 tres 0 0 0 0 14.29 0 85.71 aeropuerto 0 0 0 0 14.29 0 85.71 a la tercera 0 0 14.29 0 0 0 85.71 que se llama 14.29 0 14.29 0 0 0 71.43 los 0 0 14.29 0 0 0 85.71 hay 0 0 0 0 14.29 0 85.71 todas las 0 0 0 0 14.29 0 85.71 la más cercana 0 0 0 0 14.29 0 85.71 dolor de 0 0 0 0 14.29 0 85.71 de flores 57.14 0 0 0 0 0 42.86 la primera 0 0 0 0 14.29 0 85.71 a la izquierda 42.86 0 14.29 0 14.29 0 28.57 todo 28.57 0 0 0 14.29 0 57.14 translanguaging as the mobilisation of linguistic resources… 85 table 3 percentages of the romance philology students’ responses provided in task 1, dialogue 1 gap in the text correct spanish word correct en/fr/ pt/it word contextually acceptable spanish word contextually acceptable en/fr/pt/it word contextually unacceptable spanish word contextually unacceptable en/fr/pt/it word avoidance [%] ¿qué le ? 31.58 0 10.53 0 52.63 0 5.26 dos 94.74 0 5.26 0 0 0 0 un kilo de 89.47 0 10.53 0 0 0 0 diez 94.74 0 5.26 0 0 0 0 doscientos gramos de 100.00 0 0 0 0 0 0 ¿algo ? 100.00 0 0 0 0 0 0 ¿tiene ? 94.74 0 0 0 0 0 5.26 ¿tiene también ? 89.47 0 5.26 0 0 0 5.26 ochocientos gramos de 73.68 0 15.79 0 5.26 0 5.26 una 89.47 0 5.26 0 0 0 5.26 ¿algo ? 94.74 0 0 0 0 0 5.26 unos 57.89 0 26.32 0 0 0 15.79 ¿tiene ? 57.89 0 36.84 0 0 0 5.26 ¿algo ? 94.74 0 0 0 0 0 5.26 tengo , 68.42 0 15.79 0 10.53 0 5.26 , 73.68 0 10.53 0 5.26 0 10.53 ... 68.42 0 15.79 0 5.26 0 10.53 de cincuenta euros 57.89 0 15.79 0 15.79 0 10.53 teresa maria włosowicz86 table 4 percentages of the romance philology students’ responses provided in task 1, dialogue 2 gap in the text correct spanish word correct en/fr/pt/ it word contextually acceptable spanish word contextually acceptable en/fr/pt/it word contextually unacceptable spanish word contextually unacceptable en/fr/pt/it word avoidance [%] ¿cómo 89.47 0 0 0 5.26 0 5.26 muy 63.16 5.26 0 0 26.32 0 5.26 al del hotel 63.16 0 10.53 0 10.53 0 15.79 tiene que 78.95 0 10.53 0 5.26 0 5.26 todo 94.74 0 0 0 0 0 5.26 la mayor 89.47 0 0 0 5.26 0 5.26 atraviese la 84.21 0 5.26 0 5.26 0 5.26 después 15.79 0 78.95 0 0 0 5.26 la primera 94.74 0 0 0 0 0 5.26 ¿y decirme 84.21 0 10.53 0 0 0 5.26 del arte 89.47 0 0 0 5.26 0 5.26 bastante 78.95 0 10.53 0 5.26 0 5.26 el metro 89.47 0 5.26 0 0 0 5.26 tiene que 73.68 0 10.53 0 0 0 15.79 cinco 68.42 0 10.53 0 10.53 0 10.53 jardín zoológico 63.16 0 5.26 0 10.53 0 21.05 a goya 47.37 0 10.53 0 10.53 0 31.58 tres 68.42 0 10.53 0 5.26 0 15.79 aeropuerto 31.58 0 31.58 0 5.26 0 31.58 a la tercera 15.79 0 68.42 0 0 0 15.79 que se llama 68.42 0 0 0 26.32 0 5.26 los 89.47 0 0 0 5.26 0 5.26 hay 52.63 5.26 15.79 0 5.26 0 21.05 todas las 57.89 0 26.32 0 0 0 15.79 translanguaging as the mobilisation of linguistic resources… 87 la más cercana 78.95 0 10.53 0 5.26 0 5.26 dolor de 94.74 0 0 0 0 0 5.26 de flores 94.74 0 0 0 0 0 5.26 la primera 73.68 0 21.05 0 0 0 5.26 a la izquierda 94.74 0 0 0 0 0 5.26 todo 94.74 0 0 0 0 0 5.26 it can thus be seen that the percentages of correct answers are generally higher in the romance philology group. however, even the romance philology students had problems with some items, especially “y después la primera” and “ a la tercera” (15.79% of correct answers in each case), “ aeropuerto,” “¿qué le ?” (31.58% of correct answers in each case) and “ a goya” (47.37% of correct answers). in the case of “y después la primera ” (and then the first ), the target words were “tome” or, possibly, “coja” (take) and “calle” (street). 78.95% of the answers were contextually acceptable, for example, “coge” or “toma”; even though the verbs were chosen correctly, the forms of the less polite imperative (correct while talking to a friend, but not to a tourist who is a customer at the hotel) were used. the english philology students provided no correct answer and the only attempt at filling in the gap was a grammatically incorrect spanish word (not only was the verb form informal, but its syntactic properties did not make it fit in the context either): “y después vas la primera calle” (and then you go the first street). the word “calle” proved much easier, as it was correctly given by 94.74% of the romance philology students and also by 42.86% of the english philology students. with “ a la tercera,” the target word was “baje” (descend at the third [station]), which the romance philology students mostly provided in the informal imperative form, for example, “baja” or “sale” (instead of “salga,” from “salir” – get off/out; 68.42% of the answers were classified as contextually acceptable) and the english philology group mostly avoided this item (85.71% of avoidance), only one person provided the contextually acceptable answer “ir a la tercera calle” (go (infinitive) to the third street); in fact, the other missing word was not “calle,” but “estación” (station) or “parada” (stop). in the case of “ aeropuerto,” the target answer was “dirección aeropuerto” ([in the] direction [of the] airport), which, apparently, was not so obvious, even though the context indicated the final destination of the underground line. other possible answers included “al aeropuerto” (to the airport; accepted as correct), “hacia aeropuerto” (towards the airport; contextually acteresa maria włosowicz88 ceptable), etc. the english philology students mostly avoided this item (85.71%), except one person who wrote “lejos aeropuerto” (far away the airport), which was both semantically and syntactically odd (hence, contextually unacceptable). the romance philology students, apart from the 31.58% of correct answers mentioned above, produced 31.58% of contextually acceptable answers and one contextually unacceptable answer (5.26%), “tres metros del aueropuerto” (three metres from the airport); there was also considerable avoidance in comparison with the other items (31.58%). with “ a goya,” one english philology student provided a correct answer, “ir” (“go”; in the context “tiene que […] ir a goya,” “you have to […] go to goya,” it was fully acceptable) and the remaining six left a gap. the romance philology students were not very sure, as the avoidance rate (31.58%) shows, only 47.37% of the responses were correct (e.g., “bajar a goya”), 10.53% were contextually acceptable, and 10.53% were contextually unacceptable, for example, “arena a goya” (sand at goya; the student may have confused two spanish words, but the source of the error is impossible to identify). the shop dialogue was generally easier, but it is surprising that the expression “¿qué le pongo?” (“what would you like?,” literally: “what shall i give you?,” used by shop assistants and present in spanish language textbooks) caused the participants so much difficulty. in the english philology group, no correct answer was provided, and in the romance philology group, only 31.58% of the responses were correct, while 52.63% were contextually unacceptable and 10.53% were contextually acceptable. interestingly enough, one english philology student provided a contextually acceptable spanish word, “¿qué le gustaría?” (“what would you like?”, but rather in the sense of “what would please you?” than “what would you like to buy?”), which seems to be a case of translanguaging and mobilising all of one’s language resources, including english, and producing a calque of the english phrase “what would you like?”. three english philology students used code-switching, but the english words did not fit in the context (“¿qué le want?” and “¿qué le need?”). the romance philology students mainly produced contextually unacceptable spanish words, such as “¿qué le necesita?” (the intended answer was “¿qué necesita?” (what do you need?), but the pronoun “le” required a verb with other syntactic properties), and, similarly, “¿qué le ayuda?” (what helps you?) and “¿qué le puedo ayudar?” (literally: what can i help you?), probably under the influence of the english “how can i help you?”. the idiomatic, frequently used phrase “¿qué le pasa?” (what is happening to you?, i.e., are you o.k.?) was also observed. in general, the names of the products were provided fairly well, also because there were many acceptable possibilities, such as different names of fruits and vegetables. however, some of the students, especially in the english philology group, provided answers which were either contextually incompatible and thus unacceptable (e.g., “ochocientos gramos de calcetín y una oranja grande,” where translanguaging as the mobilisation of linguistic resources… 89 “oranja” instead of “naranja” (orange) is due to interference from english, or “tengo taquilla, churros, coliflor…“ (i have ticket office, churros, cauliflower…); possibly, the student wanted to write “tequila”), or contextually acceptable (semantically possible in the context), but containing a grammatical gender error, e.g., “una chocolate grande” (a big chocolate), where “el chocolate” is masculine. by contrast, the sentence “¿tiene de cincuenta euros?”, where the target word was “cambio” (“change,” as the customer asked: do you have change for fifty euros?; but “vuelta” was also possible), proved more difficult. in the english philology group, no correct answer was provided in spanish, but two students (28.57%) provided correct english answers: “¿tiene change de cincuenta euros?,” a switch to english which revealed their correct comprehension. however, avoidance was also frequent (42.86%) and two students gave contextually unacceptable answers in spanish: “¿tiene más de cincuenta euros?” (do you have more than fifty euros?) and “¿tiene 98 de cincuenta euros?”. in the romance philology group, 57.89% of the answers were correct spanish words, no-one switched to english or any other language, there were also 15.79% of contextually acceptable answers (e.g., ¿tiene dar la vuelta de cincuenta euros?, which was comprehensible but syntactically odd), 15.79% of contextually unacceptable ones (e.g., ¿tiene coger de cincuenta euros? (approximately: “do you have to take fifty euros?,” but syntactically odd)), as well as 10.53% of avoidance. the numbers of correct, contextually acceptable and contextually unacceptable answers in spanish and other languages, as well as avoidance, in both groups were compared by means of a chi-square test for each dialogue. for the shop dialogue, the difference between the groups was statistically significant at p < 0.001 (df = 6) and, for the dialogue between the tourist and the receptionist, the difference was also statistically significant at p < 0.001 (df = 6). on the one hand, the romance philology students produced more correct answers and less avoidance, and on the other, their higher proficiency in spanish permitted them to use it more often, rather than to rely on code-switching or to resort to avoidance. in general, translanguaging was not used very often, but switches to english were more frequent in the english philology group, probably because of a higher level of proficiency in english and a lower one in spanish; possibly, english was a kind of default supplier for the students, especially because they had been explicitly encouraged to use code-switching as a strategy. however, in both groups some indirect influence of english could be observed, as in the examples “¿qué le ayude?”, “¿qué le ayuda?”, and “¿qué le puedo ayudar?”, based on “how can i help you?”. this indicates that the students mobilised their multilingual resources, rather than limiting themselves to spanish, and it is possible that translanguaging as the consultation of one’s multilingual resources was inevitable, as the other languages are never fully deactivated. moreover, some of the english philology students’ answers contain “wild guesses” which suggest that they did not understand the spanish sentences teresa maria włosowicz90 very well, for example: “hay mantequilla en todas las sandías” (there is butter in all the watermelons). yet, even the romance philology students did not always control the contextual compatibility of their answers, for example: “no, usted tiene que ir a la carnicería. ¿algo diferente? tengo pollo, pescado, carne de cerdo…” (no, you have to go to the butcher’s. anything different? i have chicken, fish, pork…). as the shop assistant did not have any meat and told the customer she had to go to the butcher’s, offering her chicken and pork in the next sentence was incompatible in the context, which suggests that the student processed the text sentence by sentence and, in order not to overburden her working memory, she did not keep focused on a larger context. as mentioned in section method, even though task 2 also involved translanguaging, it was not in the form of switching to a language other than spanish, but rather in the form of consulting the english mental lexicon and mental translation from english into spanish. the english expressions in brackets served to some extent as prompts (e.g.,, that ana goes on holiday to the seaside and not e.g. that she goes with pleasure to the seaside), but they could also provoke some interference errors if the english and spanish expressions differed to some extent (e.g.,, “to go on holiday” and “ir de vacaciones” rather than “ir en vacaciones”). correct responses were the target idiomatic expressions, partly correct ones could be regarded as acceptable in the context (e.g., “también” (too, in the sense of “also”) as a translation of “too” as a degree adverb: “this blouse is too large and too long”), and incorrect ones contained some errors, for example, “no problemo” instead of “no me importa.” failure to provide an answer was broadly classified as “avoidance.” the results of task 2 are presented in tables 5 and 6. here it was not enough for a response to be semantically related to the context, even despite some grammatical error (as in the case of “una chocolate grande” above), but the target form had to be retrieved. however, the mobilisation of all linguistic resources was expected to guide the participants to the target expressions (e.g., “tampoco” is like “neither” in english, but not like “też” (too) in polish). as can be seen, there are more correct answers and less avoidance in the romance philology group. the most errors in both groups (71.43% in the english philology group and 36.84% in the romance philology one) were produced in response to the expression “on holiday.” while spanish uses the preposition “de” (de vacaciones), the polish and english prepositions are equivalent to each other (“na wakacje” and “on holiday” respectively). errors included, for example, “en vacaciones” (possible influence of english, but in the case of a student of italian, also of the italian “andare in vacanza”); “a vacaciones” and “a las vacaciones” were overgeneralisations of the preposition “a” (to) in spanish (ir a casa (to go home), a la playa (to the beach), etc.), “on vacaciones” was apparently a system shift (a switch to english, perhaps without noticing it) and even the form “vacaciones” without a preposition was observed. translanguaging as the mobilisation of linguistic resources… 91 table 5 percentages of the english philology students’ responses provided in task 2 word/phrase correct partly correct incorrect avoidance [%] [%] [%] [%] on holiday 14.29 0 71.43 14.29 i adore it 14.29 28.57 14.29 42.86 i don’t mind 14.29 0 14.29 71.43 too 14.29 28.57 0 57.14 long 0 14.29 14.29 71.43 olives 0 0 14.29 85.71 shoes 14.29 14.29 14.29 57.14 has written 14.29 28.57 14.29 42.86 neither do i 14.29 14.29 0 71.43 to watch 42.86 0 0 57.14 the baker’s 0 14.29 0 85.71 table 6 percentages of the romance philology students’ responses provided in task 2 word/phrase correct partly correct incorrect avoidance [%] [%] [%] [%] on holiday 57.89 0 36.84 5.26 i adore it 52.63 26.32 15.79 5.26 i don’t mind 63.16 5.26 15.79 15.79 too 68.42 26.32 0 5.26 long 73.68 5.26 10.53 10.53 olives 68.42 10.53 5.26 15.79 shoes 89.47 0 5.26 5.26 has written 84.21 5.26 5.26 5.26 neither do i 63.16 0 26.32 10.53 to watch 89.47 0 5.26 5.26 the baker’s 73.68 0 15.79 10.53 another fairly difficult expression was “a mí tampoco” (neither do i), where the verb “gustar” required a prepositional phrase (see hall & ecke, 2003, above), as shown by the very high avoidance rate (71.43%) and only one correct answer (14.29%) in the english philology group, and 26.32% of incorrect answers in the romance philology group. although “tampoco” is used like “neither” in english, one romance philology student used a calque from polish (“a mí también,” like “ja też”); possibly, english was not sufficiently teresa maria włosowicz92 active and thus available as a linguistic resource for her. four students (one in english philology and three in romance philology) used the wrong syntactic structure (“yo tampoco,” which would have been possible with a verb other than “gustar”), due to negative transfer from english and/or polish. one student produced the form “ni yo” (me neither). other sources of difficulty were the expressions “me encanta” (i adore it) and “no me importa” (i don’t mind). in the first case, there was only one correct answer (14.29%) and as much as 42.86% of avoidance among the english philology students, and only 52.63% of correct answers in the romance philology group. “me encanta” is idiomatic, but like “me gusta,” it has unusual syntactic properties (the subject is the thing that is adored and the person who adores it is the indirect object) and, moreover, the verb “adorar” also exists. incorrect answers included, for example, “yo amo” (“i love,” with the direct object pronoun missing), and “me le gusta!” (syntactically odd, as it contains two indirect objects, which might be literally translated as “*it pleases me him”). such answers as “me gusta” (“i like it”; possible but weaker than “i adore it”), “lo amo” (i love it) and “lo adoro” (i adore it) were classified as “partly correct,” and partly correct answers were relatively frequent in both groups (26.32% and 28.57%), in comparison to other items. “no me importa” uses the same structure: while in english the subject is the person who does not mind something, in spanish the subject is the activity and the person is the indirect object. however, the response “no me molesta” ([it] does not disturb me) was also accepted. in the english philology group, there was a high avoidance rate (71.43%), only one correct answer and an incorrect one (“no problemo”; possibly a communication strategy based on the english “no problem,” but formulated as if it were a verb: “no problemo cuidar a tus niños” – “*i don’t problem to look after your children”). in the romance philology group, the number of correct responses was quite high (63.16%), but the avoidance rate was relatively high for that group (15.79%) and there were also three errors (10.53%): “ni pienso” (i have no intention, i do not even think of; possibly due to a problem with understanding the english expression), “no tengo ganas de” (i do not feel like [doing]), and “no pienso en” (i do not think of…), which may have been similarly motivated, as well as one partly correct answer: “puedo” (i can), which signalled agreement and could thus be accepted as similar in meaning. the results obtained by both groups were compared by means of a chisquare test. the difference was statistically significant at p < 0.001 (df = 3), which confirms that the results depended on the philology studied and that the romance philology group performed significantly better. finally, task 3 consisted in correcting errors in spanish sentences or indicating that a sentence was correct. a correct answer involved both finding the error and correcting it, or justifying why the sentence was incorrect. an answer translanguaging as the mobilisation of linguistic resources… 93 was classified as partly correct if the error was found (the student marked the sentence as incorrect) but no correction or justification was provided, or the justification was not fully correct (i.e., the student intuitively knew that the sentence was incorrect, but had difficulty identifying the rule). an incorrect answer was either the acceptance of an incorrect sentence as correct, or the rejection of a correct sentence as incorrect. here, unlike in the previous tasks, where translanguaging as the mobilisation of one’s whole linguistic resources was meant to facilitate the task, the co-activation of several languages was meant to lead to errors, as the erroneous sentences contained negative transfer from english, polish, or both. the percentages of both groups’ responses to task 3 are given in tables 7 and 8. table 7 percentages of the english philology students’ responses provided in task 3 sentence correct partly correct incorrect avoidance [%] [%] [%] [%] 1 14.29 14.29 28.57 42.86 2 28.57 0 28.57 42.86 3 28.57 0 28.57 42.86 4 14.29 0 71.43 14.29 5 42.86 0 14.29 42.86 6 42.86 0 0 57.14 7 28.57 0 28.57 42.86 8 42.86 0 14.29 42.86 9 71.43 0 0 28.57 10 42.86 0 14.29 42.86 table 8 percentages of the romance philology students’ responses provided in task 3 sentence correct partly correct incorrect avoidance [%] [%] [%] [%] 1 42.11 15.79 31.58 10.53 2 73.68 5.26 15.79 5.26 3 21.05 5.26 68.42 5.26 4 63.16 0 31.58 5.26 5 68.42 0 26.32 5.26 6 63.16 5.26 26.32 5.26 7 73.68 0 15.79 10.53 8 57.89 0 31.58 10.53 9 89.47 0 5.26 5.26 10 78.95 0 10.53 10.53 teresa maria włosowicz94 as the results show, the easiest item for both groups was sentence 9, “¿hay un banco cerca de aquí?” (is there a bank near here?), which was correct and was accepted as such by 89.47% of the romance philology and 71.43% of the english philology students. by contrast, the most difficult item was sentence 3, “*el sábado vi susana con su novio” (on saturday i saw susan with her boyfriend), where the target structure required the preposition “a” because susana is a human being (el sábado vi a susana con su novio), a marked rule which is specific to spanish. therefore, translating the sentence into polish or english to be sure of one’s comprehension, to relieve working memory, etc. (kern, 1994), actually hindered the identification of the error. similarly, sentence 4 “*barcelona es en el noreste de españa” (barcelona is in the north-east of spain; for the locations of objects, including cities, the verb “estar” should be used, that is, “barcelona está en el noreste de españa”) involved a marked distinction that is specific to spanish and to portuguese (though in portuguese the locations of cities are used with the verb “ser” and “estar” is used for less permanent locations, for example, objects that are in a room, so transfer from portuguese would have been negative here), but which does not exist in polish, english or french, and the distinction between “essere” and “stare” in italian might be misleading, as they can sometimes be used interchangeably. thus, if one translated the sentence into l1 or l2, the sentence would be perceived as correct, which was most probably the case, as the participants produced 71.43% of incorrect answers in the english philology group and 31.58% of incorrect answers in the romance philology group. in sentence 1, “*es un cuarto después de las cinco” (literally: “it is a quarter past five,” where the target structure was: “son las cinco y cuarto”), negative transfer from l1 polish (jest kwadrans po piątej) and, possibly, english, with a preposition instead of the conjunction “y” (and) is quite visible. six romance (31.58%) and two english philology (28.57%) students accepted it as correct; however, in the english philology group there was a fairly high avoidance rate (42.86%). however, it is possible that such avoidance was an example of negative transfer which occurs in a situation where no similarity is perceived, so reliance on l1 as a point of reference prevents learners from using the l2 structure (ringbom, 1987, p. 50). possibly, as the students were not sure if the spanish structure was similar to the polish and the english ones, they chose to avoid marking it as correct or incorrect. however, as a partly correct answer, a student justified her rejection of the sentence as follows: “cinco (five) is singular (el cinco),” as if the preposition “después” were correct. in fact, hours, except one o’clock, are plural (“es la una”—it is one o’clock, but “son las dos”— it is two o’clock, etc.), so the rule had been incompletely acquired. another item which proved relatively difficult was sentence 8, “*a mí también no me gustan las salchichas” (i do not like sausages either; the error was like the english “*i do not like sausages too”), which was similar to translanguaging as the mobilisation of linguistic resources… 95 sentence 8 in task 2, with the exception that task 2 involved the translation of explicitly given english stimuli, while in task 3 the stimuli were in spanish and translanguaging, as the mobilisation of multilingual resources was more implicit at the level of processing rather than production. as in task 2, the influence of l1 polish was probably quite strong, and if the participants translated the sentence into l1, they could not find the error (cf. toribio, 2001, p. 226), so the activation of multilingual resources led to interference rather than facilitation. the results obtained by both groups were then compared by means of a chi-square test. at df = 3, p < 0.001, which indicates that the difference is statistically significant and that the students’ performance depended on their field of study. last but not least, the responses to the questionnaire were analysed, from the point of view of the learners’ perception of the influence of english and their l1s on their spanish, the difficulty of the tasks they had just completed, and cross-linguistic interaction during the tasks. in general, they did not perceive spanish as very difficult (mean = 3.042, sd = 0.91), though it was more difficult for the english philology (mean = 3.833, sd = 0.983) than for the romance philology students (mean = 2.778, sd = 0.732). as for the difficulty of the tasks, they do not seem generally difficult (mean = 2.647), but the high standard deviation (1.367) shows considerable differences between the participants. indeed, the tasks were perceived as more difficult by the english philology (mean = 4.5, sd = 0.5774) than the romance philology students (mean = 2.077, sd = 0.954). as for the difficulty of the particular tasks, the same tendency can be observed. task 1 was, on average, of medium difficulty (mean = 3.167, sd = 1.129), but it was more difficult for the english philology students (mean = 4.286, sd = 0.756) than for the romance philology students (mean = 2.706, sd = 0.92), and, similarly, task 2 (mean = 2.56, sd = 1.583 for both groups, 4.429, sd = 0.787 for the english philology group and 1.833, sd = 1.15 for the romance philology group) and task 3 (mean = 3.24, sd = 1.393 for both groups, 4.714, sd = 0.756 for the english philology students, and 2.667, sd = 1.138 for the romance philology ones.) however, the participants’ answers concerning the subsystems of the spanish language (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, idiomatic expressions, spelling and, possibly, something else) they found particularly difficult were compared by means of a chi-square test and the difference did not prove statistically significant ( p = 0.127 at df = 5). thus, even though the romance philology group, being more advanced in spanish, performed significantly better and found the tasks easier, there was no difference between the areas of difficulty perceived by both groups. as for the influence of l1 on spanish, the responses of both groups (no influence, some similarities, misleading differences, a tendency to translate teresa maria włosowicz96 literally, the use of both similarities and differences to facilitate learning and avoid errors, and “something else”) were compared, using a chi-square test. the difference was not statistically significant ( p = 0.0477, df = 5), so the influence of the native language on spanish did not depend on the philology studied, nor on the level of proficiency in spanish (which was higher in the romance philology group, as shown by their performance on the tasks). it might be argued that the participants’ native language was the same (with only two exceptions), but the influence of english on spanish was also compared by means of a chi-square test and the difference was not significant either ( p = 0.0556, df = 5). therefore, even though the influence of english might be supposed to be stronger in the case of the english philology students, the difference is not statistically significant. finally, the forms of cross-linguistic interaction (clin, an umbrella term for transfer, interference, borrowing, code-switching, etc., herdina & jessner, 2002, p. 29) perceived by the participants during the tasks were compared by means of a chi-square test. the types of clin taken into consideration were: negative transfer from l1, negative transfer from english, interference between l1 and spanish, interference between english and spanish, interference between another language and spanish, problems with identifying the spanish words (i.e., given in the box), problems with recalling spanish words because of the activation of their english equivalents, difficulty finding errors because, as the sentences were translated into l1 or into english, they seemed correct, and “something else”, which covered any other possible difficulties, not included in the list. again, the difference was not statistically significant ( p = 0.241, df = 9). therefore, even though english philology students might be supposed to experience a stronger influence of english on their spanish, the difference between the perception of clin in both groups was not statistically significant. it is possible that, if multilingual repertoires are activated in their entirety (except dormant languages, such as german in the participants’ case), all the active languages participate in the processing, even if they are not very closely typologically related; rather, the native language and a well-known l2, such as english, can influence a third or additional language quite strongly, both as a point of reference (translation into l1 and, possibly, consulting the corresponding l2 rule) and a supplier of lexical items. conclusions to answer the research questions, it can be observed, first, that translanguaging was used by both groups, but not always in an overt way. while it translanguaging as the mobilisation of linguistic resources… 97 was expected that code-switching, as a form of translanguaging, would be used in task 1 as a communication strategy, it occurred less often than expected (thirteen switches in the english philology group and two in the romance philology group) and did not always result in acceptable sentences (cf. “*¿qué le want?”). in general, the romance philology students performed better, both because of a higher level of proficiency in spanish and probably also because of higher metalinguistic awareness regarding the vocabulary and structure of the romance languages. both their switches into english were correct and may have resulted from the temporary unavailability of the target spanish words: “es muy simple” (it is very simple; target: es muy sencillo/fácil) and “hay ticket machines en todas las estaciones” (there are ticket machines at all the stations; the target word was either “taquilla” (ticket office) or “expendedor automático de billetes” (ticket machine)). it might be surprising that they avoided switches into other romance languages, but it might be supposed that keeping the languages separate was a conscious strategy in order to minimise interference, which suggests considerable language awareness on their part. however, their use of code-switching may also have been influenced by the instructions: they may have followed the written instructions, originally intended for the english philology students, which encouraged switches into english, even though they had been explicitly told to switch into other romance languages as well. in fact, both interpretations are possible: they may have decided to keep spanish separate from the other romance languages and, if necessary, to rely on english as a source of lexical items. on the other hand, more subtle forms of translanguaging can also be assumed to have taken place. in particular, translation into l1 and, possibly, also consulting the corresponding english (and maybe, e.g.,, italian or portuguese) rule to support the decision, could be regarded as a form of translanguaging, which can also be used to facilitate understanding (lewis et al., 2012), although in the case of different rules, its result could be negative transfer and accepting an incorrect sentence as correct. in the english-spanish translation task (task 2), the english expressions served as prompts and, especially in the romance philology group, resulted in correct translations. in fact, judging by the amount of avoidance in the english philology group, the students had difficulty retrieving the spanish words and expressions, so the prompts did not help them much, but, except in the case of “on holiday/de vacaciones,” they did not result in negative transfer either. second, as for the participants’ multilingual repertoires and the place of spanish in them, it can be stated that fully unitary competence cannot be assumed, as there was indeed some internal differentiation between the languages. on the one hand, several languages were co-activated and participated in the processing, including polish, english, spanish and, in the case of the romance philology students, possibly their other romance languages, and the students teresa maria włosowicz98 used their multilingual resources, so the dual competence model, assuming “fully discrete, non-overlapping linguistic systems” (macswan, 2017, p. 180) cannot be confirmed. on the other hand, the relative avoidance of codeswitching and reliance on more implicit forms of translanguaging, such as mental translation, indicates that the participants were aware of the boundaries between the “named languages” (otheguy et al., 2018, p. 2). in contrast to members of multilingual societies where translanguaging is the norm (cf. li, 2018, cited above), the students could to some extent control their production and avoid the use of certain languages, for example, to reduce interference, but at the same time, the impossibility of deactivating “active” (cf. green, 1986) languages completely supports grosjean’s (2001) observation that one is never in a fully monolingual mode. certainly, the place of spanish differs in the participants’ multilingual repertoires, depending, in particular, on the philology studied and the level of proficiency in spanish, though these factors are largely interdependent, as the romance philology students had higher proficiency in spanish and, possibly, also higher motivation for studying spanish, as it was more closely related to their degree course. this resulted in a higher level of language awareness, also in the use of code-switching into english: they switched into english only twice, but both their switches were correct, while the english philology students used switches into english which were either correct, for instance, “un kilo de (potatoes) ,” “¿tiene (change) de cincuenta euros,” or “es muy (close) ,” or acceptable: “¿algo (anything else)?” (put in parentheses by the students to indicate the switches, as suggested by the instructions, though not all switches were put in parentheses), or syntactically incompatible (though to some extent comprehensible), for example: “¿qué le (want)?” in fact, as mentioned above, some of the english philology students’ responses indicate that they failed to understand the spanish sentences. however, it can be stated that there are some connections between the languages in their multilingual repertoires, not only between spanish and polish (mostly l1), but also between spanish and english. consequently, translanguaging as the mobilisation of all of one’s language resources can be regarded as a natural phenomenon which should be capitalised on as a way of facilitating foreign language learning and communication, but at the same time, it should be combined with developing language awareness and strategic competence. indeed, though contrary to “the monolingual principle” (howatt, 1984, as cited in cummins, 2008, p. 65) of language teaching, in some situations it can be a more effective communication strategy than a search for a target language word, ending in “message abandonment” (faerch & kasper’s (1983, p. 52) term) if the intended word is not found. translanguaging as the mobilisation of linguistic resources… 99 references arabski, j. 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(2016). multilingual processing phenomena in learners of portuguese as a third or additional language. theory and practice of second language acquisition, 2(1), 65–86. włosowicz, t. m. (in preparation). the attrition and retention of german after long incubation periods. teresa maria włosowicz102 a p p e n d i x 1 the tasks used in the study task 1: fill in the gaps in the two dialogues. you can choose words from the box below the dialogues, or use some words of your own. verbs in the infinitive may need to be put in the right form, and nouns may need to be changed to the plural or preceded by an article if they are in the singular. there are some words you do not have to use. some words can be used more than once. sometimes there is more than one possible word that fits the context. (if you really do not know which spanish word to choose, you can fill in the gap with an english word that fits the context (in brackets), in order to show that you understand the sentence and you know what the target word should mean.) a) dependienta: buenos días, ¿qué le ? clienta: buenos días. quería dos , una barra de pan, un kilo de , diez y doscientos gramos de . dependienta: ¿algo ? clienta: sí, ¿tiene ? dependienta: por supuesto, están dulcísimas y muy fresquitas. clienta: entonces, póngame un kilo, por favor. ¿tiene también ? dependienta: sí, están aquí. clienta: quería medio kilo y también ochocientos gramos de y una grande. dependienta: aquí tiene. ¿algo ? clienta: tal vez unos _________________, por favor. ¿tiene ? dependienta: no, usted tiene que ir a la carnicería. ¿algo ? tengo , , … todos están riquísimos y fresquitos. clienta: no, gracias. eso es todo. dependienta: pues son veinticinco euros. clienta: ¿tiene de cincuenta euros? dependienta: por supuesto. clienta: muchas gracias, ¡adiós! dependienta: gracias, ¡adiós! b) turista: perdone, ¿cómo a la catedral? recepcionista: es muy . al del hotel, tiene que a la derecha y seguir todo hasta la mayor. atraviese la mayor y después la primera a la izquierda. la catedral está allí. turista: muchas gracias. ¿y decirme cómo llegar al del arte moderno? recepcionista: está bastante , entonces usted tiene que el metro. tiene que la cinco a la jardín zoológico, a goya y cambiar a la tres aeropuerto. a la tercera que se llama picasso. turista: gracias. ¿dónde se puede comprar los ? recepcionista: hay en todas las . turista: ¿y dónde está la más cercana? necesito pastillas para el dolor de . translanguaging as the mobilisation of linguistic resources… 103 recepcionista: está en la de flores. tiene que la primera a la izquierda y seguir todo . turista: muchas gracias, ¡adiós! recepcionista: de nada. ¡adiós! atravesar – to cross el aeropuerto – airport task 2: translate the words and phrases given in english into spanish: 1. todos los años, ana va (on holiday) al borde del mar. 2. ‘¿qué tal este vestido?’ ‘¡ ! (i adore it!) me lo llevo.’ 3. (i don’t mind) cuidar a tus niños. 4. esta blusa es (too) ancha y (long). 5. voy a poner (olives) en la ensalada. 6. pruébate estos (shoes), alicia. 7. hoy paula (has written) cinco cartas. 8. ‘a mí no me gusta la carne.’ (neither do i.) 9. a juana le gusta (to watch) televisión en el tiempo libre. 10. ya no tenemos pan. tengo que ir a la (the baker’s). task 3: are the sentences below correct or incorrect? if they are incorrect, please, explain why and/or suggest a correction. sentence correct justification yes no 1. es un cuarto después de las cinco. 2. ¿comiste alguna vez paella? 3. el sábado vi susana con su novio. 4. barcelona es en el noreste de españa. 5. elena le ha regalado a ernesto una bicicleta. 6. ‘¿has contado tu aventura a luisa ?’ ‘no, no le la he contado.’ 7. margarita acuesta a los niños a las nueve. 8. a mí también no me gustan las salchichas. 9. ¿hay un banco cerca de aquí ? 10. ¿qué te parece este vestido para mí? el noreste – the north east la bicicleta – bicycle sencillo pescado bajar ir poner huevo plaza tomate plátanos arroz coger avena taquilla chorizo chocolate salchicha sandía lejos yogur salir tomar billete manzana piña uva calcetín colif lor fresa patata más pollo dirección museo cambio pimiento pimienta teresa maria włosowicz104 a p p e n d i x 2. the questionnaire used in the study questionnaire sex : f /m l1 (native language): l2: level/time of study: l3: level/time of study: l4: level/time of study: what other languages have you studied? please, indicate the levels. 1a) how difficult do you find the spanish language? (1 – very easy, 5 – very difficult) 1 2 3 4 5 what do you find particularly difficult to learn? (you can choose more than one answer.) □ grammar □ vocabulary □ pronunciation □ idiomatic expressions □ spelling □ something else (please, specify) 1b) what is the influence of your english on your spanish? (you can choose more than one answer.) □ i do not notice any inf luence at all. □ there are some similarities (e.g. the difference between the present perfect tense and the pretérito perfecto on the one hand and the past simple tense and the pretérito indefinido on the other) that make learning spanish easier for me. □ there are a lot of misleading differences that make spanish difficult for me. if so, please, give examples: □ i tend to translate sentences literally from english into spanish. □ that depends: there are both similarities and differences and i use them both to facilitate learning and avoid errors. □ something else (please, specify) 1c) what is the influence of your native language on your spanish? (you can choose more than one answer.) □ i do not notice any inf luence at all. □ there are structures that do not exist in my native language, that is why i find spanish difficult to learn. □ there are some similarities between spanish and my native language (e.g. desayunar in spanish and завтракать in russian) which make those spanish words and structures easier to learn. □ there are a lot of misleading differences that make spanish difficult for me. translanguaging as the mobilisation of linguistic resources… 105 if so, please, give examples: □ i tend to translate sentences literally from my native language into spanish. □ that depends: there are both similarities and differences and i use them both to facilitate learning and avoid errors. □ something else (please, specify) 2a) how difficult do you find the task you have just completed? (1 – very easy, 5 – very difficult) 1 2 3 4 5 how difficult was task 1 (filling the gaps)? 1 2 3 4 5 how difficult was task 2 (translating words from english into spanish)? 1 2 3 4 5 how difficult was task 3 (error correction)? 1 2 3 4 5 why? □ i had forgotten a lot of words during the summer holidays. □ i had forgotten a lot of grammar structures during the summer holidays. □ interference from english was too strong. □ interference from my native language was too strong. □ some of the words or structures were new to me. □ i did not understand the sentences well. □ for another reason (please, specify) 2b) what forms of cross-linguistic interaction did you notice during the tasks? (you can choose more than one answer.) □ negative transfer from my native language. (i relied e.g. on the literal translation of phrases and later i noticed it had led to errors.) □ negative transfer from english. □ negative transfer from another language (e.g. french). □ interference between my native language and spanish. (i made some mistakes and only later did i realise that they were due to my native language.) □ interference between english and spanish. □ interference between another language and spanish. □ i could not identify the right spanish words, that is why i only gave english words in brackets. □ i could not recall the right spanish words because their english equivalents were constantly on my mind. □ i had difficulty finding the errors in the spanish sentences, because as i translated them into my native language, they seemed to be correct. □ i had difficulty finding the errors in the spanish sentences, because as i translated them into english, they seemed to be correct. □ something else (please, specify) thank you. teresa maria włosowicz106 teresa maria włosowicz translingulismus als mobilisierung von sprachressourcen durch personen, die spanisch als dritte oder zusätzliche sprache lernen z u s a m m e n f a s s u n g den gegenstand des artikels bildet die untersuchung des verstehens und der sprachproduktion im spanischen als dritte oder zusätzliche sprache (der begriff wurde von de angelis im jahre 2007 eingeführt), wobei besonderes augenmerk auf die verwendung von code-switching und translingualismus (translanguaging) gelegt wird. in anlehnung an lewis, jones und baker (2012, s. 655) wird angenommen, dass der translingualismus die mobilisierung aller sprachlichen ressourcen eines lernenden umfasst, „um das verstehen und die leistungen zu maximieren“. aus diesem grund kann die verwendung anderer sprachen als spanisch (insbesondere englisch, aber auch z. b. französisch, italienisch u. ä.) durch die teilnehmer in aufgaben ebenfalls als beispiel für translingulismus angesehen werden. der gebrauch von wörtern aus anderen sprachen als spanisch könnte gleichzeitig als codeswitching eingestuft werden. die mehrsprachigen sprachrepertoires sind sehr komplex und die mehrsprachige kompetenz ist – laut otheguy, garcía und reid (2018) – eher einheitlich und nicht in einige separate sprachen unterteilt. ihrer meinung nach werden die wörter aus einem mentalen lexikon ausgewählt. wie williams und hammarberg (1998) nachgewiesen haben, erfüllen verschiedene sprachen unterschiedliche funktionen in mehrsprachigen repertoires, was zu unterschiedlichen formen von code-switching führt. die vorliegende studie wurde unter studierenden der englischen und romanischen philologie durchgeführt, die spanisch als dritte oder zusätzliche sprache lernen. wie die ergebnisse zeigen, vermieden die studierenden der romanistik das code-switching in andere romanische sprachen, um wahrscheinlich die interferenz zu minimieren, obwohl sie im allgemeinen besser im translingualismus waren, der als nutzung all ihrer sprachressourcen verstanden wurde. andererseits waren die studierenden der englischen philologie, deren kompetenzniveau im spanischen niedriger war, weniger dazu bereit, mehrsprachige ressourcen, auch im englischen, zu verwenden, um fehlende wörter zu ergänzen, was möglicherweise auch aus problemen mit dem verstehen von sätzen im spanischen resultierte. schlüsselwörter: mehrsprachige repertoires, sprachressourcen, translingualismus, strategien der sprachproduktion