Summary and refrection on week 11

Reminder :Due date of our draft
Dr. Ortega extended the due date of our draft from Tuesday, November 6 to Tuesday, November 11.

Summary:
This week, we read chapter 8 on Affect on Tuesday (Hatsumi, Megumi, and Miyung, thank you for great facilitation!). On Thursday, we discuss myths about affect and L2 learning.

Tuesday

As we did last week, the facilitators give us chance to brainstorm in pairs to think about own definition on affect, one aspect of affect, and how affect relate to our second language learning. The groups mentioned about anxiety, correlation of WTC and communicative competence, personality (introvert vs. extravert), affect on self language learning (pleasure of challenging knowledge can be affect) and so on.

According to Arnold & Brown (1999), affect is “The aspects of emotion, feeling, mood, or attitude, which condition behavior.” Three dimensions of affect are personality (e.g. shyness), changeable factors (e.g. positive/negative language attitude), and constantly fluctuating states (e.g. enthusiasm, anxiety, boredom, apathy, elation.) Although we covered personality, anxiety, WTC, and strategies, the facilitator emphasized affect cover more than them.

We were divided into 4 groups in order to summarize and report influence of each affect. Scenario was given to each group.

1. Personality in L2 Learning
Scenario: In your class, you identify some talkative students dominating and some students who avoid participating in class activities. (Do you see it as problematic? If so, how do you deal with it? If not, why not?)

According to Group 1:
It ranges from slightly problematic to problematic depending on the context and expectation of the class. Solutions are preparing a variety of exercises with various topic and assign roles and so on.

2. Foreign Language anxiety
Scenario: You are in Japan studying abroad. All of your classmates are Japanese who don’t speak English well. Then you are asked to introduce yourself in Japanese. You feel very anxious. (How would you overcome the situation and survive the rest of the semester?)

According to Group 2:
•Comforting myself first and introduce myself.
•Making friends and conduct language exchange.
•Sending email to ask questions.
We argued the last point because it may be difficult for the person to write questions in Japanese.

3. Willingness to communicate
Scenario: You are taking 3 courses this semester.
Class 1. You know a lot about the topic
Class 2. You don’t know a lot but are very interested in the topic.
Class 3. You are neither knowledgeable nor interested in the topic. But the classroom atmosphere is very friendly.
(In which class do you feel most comfortable initiating the conversation? Why?)

According to Group 3:
Each group member seemed to have a different preference. One member said that she preferred the class 1 at first but in the class 3 also she could feel comfortable to initiate the conversation because of her experience. In one class which has a lot of international students, everybody nodded to whatever she said.

4. Learning strategies
Scenario: You are hosting an international student who has a poor memory for vocabulary learning. You try to introduce new words but the student keeps forgetting them. (What kind of effective strategies would you provide the student?)

According to Group 4:
Since the context was home stay, task base would be effective. The international student would not be assessed because we were a host family. (I do not want be assess when I home stayed… )

At last, we worked on WTC battery test and come up with critiques.

Thursday

We were divided into 4 groups in order to discuss myths about affect and L2 learning.
The two myths which Dr. Ortega prepared were:

Myth 1:
Extraversion is something that helps language learning; extraverted people have a good start, an advantage, and are likely to be better language learners.

Myth 2:
Concern for accuracy is a good thing, students who are accuracy-oriented (i.e., they are care about being accurate and pay attention to it) are likely to learn more and better than people who do not worry about accuracy.

Next week will continue to talk about Myths on language learning. I try to collect other myths now.

These are myths I got from each group so far

Masaki's group
Myth 1:
Intrinsic motivation is better than extrinsic motivation.

Myth 2:
Language learners cannot acquire the native-like language fluency and accuracy until they live in the foreign county where people speak the target language.

Myth 3:
Learners can dramatically improve their language skill in the second language context.

Myth 4:
Making a lot of mistakes help you learn the target language.

Myth 5:
Talking with native speakers help you learn the target language rather than talking with non-native speakers.

Myth 6:
Watching TV in the foreign language help you learn the target language.

Myth7:
The more motivation, the more participation in the class.

Ben's group
Myth 1:
The Japanese brain is neutologically wired in a way which makes speaking and understanding Enflish extremely difficult when compared to other ethnic groups.

Myth 2:
People who speak faster are smarter and better at languages.

Myth 3:
People who speak many languaegs are smarter.
People who are smart can learn language fast.

Hatsumi's group
Myth 1:
Musicality is related to languagelearning ability. People who have learned music when they were young have high aptiude in language learning.