Preview of Ch.8: Affect

Summary
This chapter introduces affective factors that cause individual differences in L2 learning. Nowadays it is viewed that affect and cognition are intertwined, and it is difficult to determine some individual differences come from only one of those two.Throughout the chapter, the question we need to keep in mind is “Where do individual differences in L2 learning exist?” Total of eight affect is concerned with findings and suggestions from research.

• Personality: Stable traits in a person with reference to the cognitive processing of emotion or personal inclination through social experience. Recently, “openness to experience“ has received researchers’attention as an advantageous personality asset.
• Extraversion/Introversion: These traits may show some differences in language learning such as communication fluency for extroverts and accuracy for introverts. But the traits do not determine L2 acquisition. Rather, they affect learners’ behaviors and goals, which in turn have an impact of L2 achievement.
• Foreign language anxiety: High-levels of anxiety hold back learner’s processing and achievement in language learning. Studies indicate that self-perception, self-concept , perfectionist attitudes and high-expectation are strongly related to anxiety. At the same time, some degree of tension affect positively on language learning, which is called “facilitating anxiety”.
• Willingness to communicate (WTC): It’s the self-reported intention to initiate communication when free to do so. Anxiety (more in the SL context) and self-perceived competence (more in the FL context) affect communicative confidence in the L2, which, in turn, affects WTC in the L2. Likewise, the frequency and quality of past L2 contact have an impact on L2 attitudes, which, in turn, affects WTC in the L2. WTC can change over time and across contexts.
• Field dependence and independence: These characters are bipolar dimensions with preferred ways of processing information, Recently, new constructs has been addressed,” field independence and field sensitivity” claiming that successful language learners can integrate information both in and out of the context and therefore are expected to get a high score on both sides.
• Learning style: Studies on learning styles are inconclusive. However, the most recently developed “the synopsis-ectasis dimension” creates research interest, focusing on the degree of conscious control of learning desired or needed.
• Learning strategies: strategies are conscious mental and behavioral procedures that serve people to reach a goal in their language learning. There are no clear lines between cognitive and affective strategies. Language strategies can differ across contexts. “Self-regulation theory” (Dörnyei, 2005) attracts attention as a principled way of theorizing strategic behaviors.
• Self-regulation theory: The theory claims that people are able to self-regulate their behaviors with creative and conscious efforts. Not only actions and thoughts but also feelings can be self-regulated. The strength of this theory is that it can be investigated with not only self-report questionnaires but also multiple methods.

My personal interest : WTC
Although WTC is just a self-reported intention and not supported by actual observation of communication behavior, it has been posited as a predictor of frequency of communication in L2. If communication is a goal in language learning, I think it is interesting to investigate WTC on the grounds that WTC is not a fixed tendency and leaves a room for a change for the better. In the FL context where perceived competence and attitudes towards the target language (TL) seem to have a strong impact on WTC, raising self-perceived competence and providing a pleasurable TL experience for students would be the best shot to boost their actual use of the TL in the long run. I believe that these two attempts are something teachers can carry out in their classroom by using various teaching materials, tasks, and approaches. Of course, none of affective variables alone can guarantee successful language learning, but I hope WTC is one of the factors that teachers can still activate in their students.

Preview of Ch. 6: Foreign Language Aptitude (Merica)

Activating background knowledge:
Before reading this chapter, take a moment to consider some of these questions. You might want to jot down some ideas and/or discuss some of these briefly with a partner.

1. What does it mean when people say that someone has a gift or a knack for learning languages?

2.a. Think about your own experience learning a language. Do you think that you have an aptitude for language learning?
b. Why or why not?
c. Can you think of specific examples from your L1 and/or L2?

3.a. Have you observed others who you think have an aptitude for language learning? Try to think of somebody you know (this could be a family member, a friend, a fellow student in a class you have attended or a student who you have taught). What qualities do they exhibit?

d. How is learning a language in a classroom different from learning outside of a classroom?

e. What role do you think memory plays in language learning?

A few points that I found interesting from chapter 6:

- Intuitively, it seems that aptitude accounts for more significant differences in implicit learning situations than in explicit learning in the classroom. However, empirical evidence on this matter remains inconclusive.

- According to Ross et al. (2002) and DeKeyser (2000), aptitude plays a more significant role for late learners because they usually learn the L2 in a formal classroom setting and have limited exposure to natural L2 input (Ortega, forthcoming Ch. 6, p. 13).

- At the bottom of page 15, Dr. Ortega mentions how some students benefit from recasts more than others. “Noticing the gap” refers to the learner comparing what they said with what they heard from the interlocuter. Reading this made me think of the Spanish 102 class that I am currently taking. I enjoy observing how the teacher skillfully helps raise students' awareness and leads them to correct themselves in verbal utterances. She uses a variety of helpful techniques such as repeating what the student said with rising intonation and sometimes writing something on the board to help the student see their mistake. I find this highly beneficial for the student involved as well as those listening.

- In the middle of page 16, after motivational and affective forces are mentioned in bold, Dr. Ortega adds that those with high motivation may benefit more from recasts by viewing every L2 encounter as an opportunity to learn. I agree with that conclusion.

- Section 6.12 offers evidence that matching teaching styles to students learning style preference yields more successful learning in the classroom. Think about your own learning experience. Can you think of a situation in which the teaching style matched (or did not match) your learning style? How did this affect your success in that class?

The following website provides more detailed information including additional sample questions and answers as well as frequently asked questions:
http://www.2lti.com/htm/Test_mlat.htm

A final note: I’m quite curious to learn how my L2 aptitude measures on this aptitude test. I wonder if others in our department or university have recently taken it. I would like to find out if we can take this on campus.

P.S. The fancy editing options do not appear on this old computer, so I apologize that I cannot enrich the text with bold and colorful additions now.

Pre-Reading: Chapter 7 Motivation

Chapter 7 discusses about the motivation as the influence on foreign language learning. The author defines motivation as “the desire to initiate L2 learning and the effort employed to sustain it” (p.1).

Key Words
There are many different types of motivation mentioned in the chapter.

• Integrativeness—“a genuine interest in learning the second language in order to come closer to the other language community” (p .2 cited from Gardner, 2001, p. 5)
• Orientations—“reasons for learning the L2” (p. 3)
• Attitudes—“both towards the L2 community and its speakers and towards teachers and curriculum in the instructional setting” (p.3)

In the mid 1990s, the new way of looking at the motivation occurred by focusing on quality rather than quantity on motivation.

• Intrinsically motivated—motivation that is self-initiated by choice and for their own sake (e.g. hobby—I want to learn English because I want to listen to American songs.)
• Extrinsically motivated—not chosen or caused by individuals (e.g. exam, rewards, punishment—I want to learn English because I want to pass a university entrance exam.)
• Introjected regulation—pressure developed by feelings of guilt or shame (e.g. I would feel ashamed if I couldn’t speak English.)
• Identified regulation—similar to the intrinsic motivation, individuals accept the external values and adopt to their own sake (e.g. I want to be like a person who can speak more than one language.)
• Amotivation—Individuals suffer from this because they do not see the exact reasons why they are studying the language in compulsory language courses (e.g. I don’t know why I am studying English because I live in Japan.)

There are some newer perspectives to look at the motivation.

• Dynamic
  o Time—motivation changes over time
  o Context—group dynamics
  o Behavior—language choice and intended learning effort

Reflections
There are numbers of empirical studies mentioned in this chapter in order to support the concept of motivation. I especially found interest in the section 7.5: motivation from a distance, which discusses about the motivation of the learners in the FL setting. It makes sense that because of its fewer contacts with L2 speakers in FL settings, learners in FL settings may have less integrativeness, but instrumental type of orientation (e.g. good grades) and class room attitudes (e.g. to the teacher, materials) may strongly influence their learning especially at the beginning level. That means the instruction style of the classroom teacher could easily change the learners’ motivation toward learning the target language.

It reminds me the time when I started to take English at my junior high school. When we started to take English, everyone loved to study English because a) it was the easiest class “at the beginning” since we were learning the basic, b) nearly most of my classmates got good grades on exam because of its easiness, and c) English teachers were promoting the importance of learning English in order to succeed in our academic life and professional career in the future (English as an international language). However, as we took tests and tests over times, sentence structures got complicated and many classmates started to receive unsatisfactory grades. As a result, there were two-way directions in my class: highly motivated learners and less motivated learners. Furthermore, many of my classmates suffered from amotivation because they didn’t see any reasons to study English at all.

In FL settings, learners can easily lose their interest. Teachers who teach Japanese at the adult school once mentioned to me that it is hard to keep students because they easily stop coming to the class if they lost their interest in learning Japanese. I wonder what kinds of motivation will work well in FL settings and how we (as teachers) can promote the motivation in order to keep our learners stay in interest to learn the target language.

I personally think that the group dynamics can be great motivation for the FL setting. If teachers could establish positive relationship among learners, learners enjoy coming to class and can learn from each other. It reminds me about Near Peer Role Models discussed in Murphey (1998). Near Peer Role Models (NPRMs) are peers who are close to the learners’ social, professional, and/or age level and whom the learners may respect and admire. Students can look up to and model NPRM’s positive behaviors. While we may be hard to create integrativeness toward native speakers/cultures of the target language, we may be easy to establish the positive attitudes toward peers who are learning the same target language and learners can model their behaviors.

Look forward to discussing the topic in class!!

Preview of Chapter 3 with discussion questions: Crosslinguistic influences

As Samantha said, I developed some discussion questions which are believed to help you to think more deeply on some issues in this chapter. The questions are seemingly general and are relatively affected by my own curiosity, so your understanding and cooperation would be necessary to make the discussion to be viable if you would like to use those questions. Also, your own questions or ideas regarding the same issues or any other issues would be so welcomed.

This chapter introduces us to the term transfer or crosslinguistic influence, replacing the older term interference, which implies that crosslinguistic influence is two-dimensional: both positive and negative. A number of empirical studies have reported that this influence happens due to similarities or differences in the features of two languages, such as grammar structure or their social aspects (e.g., attitudes about accepting the boundary of politeness). The important thing to note further is that the interlingual identifications of two languages is affected not only by the characteristics of specific language phenomenon and universal language development, it is also due to the learner's conscious or subconscious judgment on the distance of L1 and L2. In addition, the identifications are affected by the learner's proficiency level.

The manifestation of interlingual identifications can be largely perceived through learners’ production, which might drive researchers to pay attention to the many aspects of learners’ language, further to learners’ performance analysis or error analysis. Selinker (1972) coined the term interlanguage for learners’ developing L2 knowledge. He also introduced fossilization to describe the fact that some features of a learner’s language might not change. This may be true, for example, for learners who are only exposed to positive evidences with absence of negative evidences showing inadequacy of their performance.

(a) We may discuss more profoundly in class on systematic, universal features of interlanguage (including factors on shaping interlanguage patterns) in terms of syntax, vocabulary, pragmatics, and so on. For example, frequency and the presence of cognates (words that look similar and have the same meaning in two languages) might influence development of vocabulary acquisition. (b) What kinds of approaches have been used to extract some features of interlanguage to date may be treated in class as well. Recently, corpus studies have drawn the attention of researchers in SLA. What others? (c) Pedagogically, you may think of the ways of efficiently handling the phenomena of interlanguage and fossilization in class. (d) The chapter later deals with the direction of crosslinguistic influence (the recent attention to bidirectional transfer). It would be more interesting to discuss this issue with more empirical studies.

Preview of Chapter 3: Crosslinguistic influences

Jung Min and I are doing the preview of this chapter. I will begin by giving you a summary of the chapter, after which Jung Min will post the discussion questions.

Definition
Crosslinguistic influence is also known as "transfer", and has displaced the older term "interference", to preempt the unwanted implication that L1 knowledge hinders L2 development.

Overview
In the '50s and '60s, the hypothesis was that differences between L1 and L2 resulted in the learner experiencing difficulties in her L2 (among specific learner groups with the same L1). Contrastive Analysis sought to compare similarities and differences between L1 and L2 pairs.

In the '60s and '70s, SLA researchers (turning to analyses of actual learner language using the new methodology of Error Analysis and Performance Analysis) found out that externally catalogued L1-L2 differences could determine neither the linguistic knowledge nor the linguistic behavior of L2 learners.

Early SLA researchers concluded that not only differences, but even more often, misleading similarities between L1 and L2 cause the so-called learning difficulties. German researcher Henning Wode (1976) called this principle the Crucial Similarity Measure. Roger Anderson (1983) in the US added the principle of Transfer to Somewhere, suggesting that both L1 and L2 must have some feature that invites the (mis)perception of a similarity.

The findings in the '70s and '80s led to the understanding that learners' psychological perceptions of L1 and L2 similarities and/or differences are really the forces the shape crosslinguistic influence, rather than external language comparisons. The judgement can be (but not necessarily) made as a conscious, strategic choice, such as when there is a gap in L2 knowledge, and the best available solution is to rely on L1 knowledge.

Key Concepts
Universal sequences of language development: L2 learners, regardless of L1 background, go through predictable paths in their acquisition of certain L2 phenomena, especially in:

• morphology, particularly grammatical markers like -ing, -s, -ed
• morpho-semantics, such as the encoding of verb tense
• word order, for example, in questions and with negation
• other syntactic phenomena, such as relative clauses

Interlanguage: the language system each learner constructs at any given point in development and which reflects an interim competence that contains L1 and L2 elements, and beyond.

Interlanguages are said to be systematic, natural languages in their own right. Note however that while L1 transfer cannot radically alter the route of L2 acquisition, it can impact the rate of learners' progress along their natural developmental paths. This was first proposed by Zobl (1982).

For example, for L2 English learners whose native languages do not contain articles, there is a big initial disadvantage in the rate of acquisition.

Markedness: closed set of possibilities within a linguistic system, where the given possibilities rank from simplest and most frequent among languages of the world (unmarked) to the most complex and rarest (marked). This is an important source of universal influence, and the existence of each marked member presupposes the existence of the less marked members, but not the other way around.

Markedness Differential hypothesis: the general implication for L2 development is that marked froms tend to be more difficult to learn and therefore cause more interlanguage solutions, and that a form that is more marked in the L1 is less likely to be transferred than a form that is less marked.

Transferability (psychotypology): the claim that L1 transfer is partly a function of learners' conscious or subconscious intuitions about how transferable certain phenomena are. Kellerman (1985) noted that transferability interacts with L2 proficiency to shape what may or may not be transferred, regardless of apparent L1-L2 similarities or differences.

Avoidance (errors of omission): where negative L1 transfer does not lead to noticeable errors of commision or ungrammaticalities in L2. In such cases, because learners take fewer risks in the L2, avoidance may also delay their L2 development of the area being avoided.

Underuse and Overuse: there tends to be an underuse of certain L2 forms because the same forms are not present in the L1 (i.e., they are more marked in L1); conversely, there is usually an overuse when the forms are more marked in the L2. While knowledge of the L1 can often have a positive impact on the rate of L2 learning, especially if they are typologically and genetically close (such as sister languages German and English), it is interesting to note that it is possible for one L1 group to learn faster than another through overuse in a particular L2 form.

Information structure: a subtle L1 transfer comparing topic-prominent and subject-prominent languages. Carroll et al. (2000) argue that information structure in the L1 continues to exert an important if subtle influence on the L2 even at very advances stges of proficiency.

For example, English and Romance languages prefer existential constructions (where new referents are introduced), while German favors locational constructions.

Pragmatic competence - crosslinguistic influences go well beyond form-form or form-function correspondences to extend to and include all layers of language at the levels of form, meaning, and function, as well as pragmatic competence.

Latest Developments
There is growing evidence that suggests that knowledge of two (or more) languages can accelerate the learning of an additional one, especially if L1 and L2 are typologically related to L3, because there are more relevant cognates and similarities in forms and meanings.

Also, better vocabulary learning strategies would have been developed by the time L3 is being learned.

Of note is that all previously learned languages (and not just L1) can influence additional learning, usually because they are typologically closer to L3, or that the learner is more proficient in that language, or that it is the last one learnt immediately prior to the learning of L3 (especially if it was also learnt as a foreign language). L1 does not hold a privileged status in the acquisition of additional languages, except in the area of semantic transfer.

However, as the learner gains proficiency in L3, the presence of or the functional roles played by each language in L3 production gradually recede.

Next, Jung Min will post some questions to help you think more about this chapter. In particular, she will refer to interlingual identifications, which is found in section 3.2 on page 2 of the chapter.

Happy holidays, and don't sweat over this! ;-)