The Affective Dimension in Second Language Acquisition

Danuta Gabryś-Barker, Joanna Bielska, Danuta Gabryś-Barker, Joanna Bielska

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847699701
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Psycolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Affectivity is at the core of everything we do in life. Thus, its development is also central to learning/acquisition and is important for educational contexts. The studies presented in this volume consider the different contexts of language learning and examine different types of participants in this process. Most of them look at a formal instruction context, while others look beyond the classroom and even report on the author's own affectivity and its involvement in learning experiences. Affectivity is discussed here in relation to learners but also to teachers in their own professional contexts of teaching foreign languages. In the majority of cases, affectivity is explored in the case of bilinguals, but there are also articles which focus on multilingual language users and their affectivity as an evolving factor.

Part 1

Affective Variables in Language Learning

1 The Affective Turn in SLA: From ‘Affective Factors’ to ‘Language Desire’ and ‘Commodification of Affect’

Aneta Pavlenko

In memory of my mother, Bella, who, undaunted by the Iron Curtain, decided that I will be multilingual when I was all but six years old.

It was an early morning in May of 2011. I was standing in front of a room full of strangers, about to begin a plenary talk about multilingualism and emotions at the International Conference on Foreign/Second Language Acquisition (ICFSLA) meeting in Szczyrk, a mountain resort in Poland. I am usually quite confident as a public speaker and this was not my first plenary, yet this time I was almost paralyzed by anxiety. This was my first visit to Poland and this particular talk was not intended to be just a plenary – it was a declaration of love, a remembrance of things past and the hold the Polish language had on me in my teenage years. And so I opened the plenary with a Polish love poem by Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, Nie widziałam ci

ju

od miesi

ca [It has been a month since I had seen you], and heard a surprised gasp from the audience – most of my Polish colleagues were unaware that I actually knew Polish. Encouraged by friendly smiles I went on and then the strangest thing happened – I realized that I no longer spoke of things past, rather, then and there, I was falling in love with Polish all over again, like a woman who meets her first love after two decades of separation and finds him as irresistible as she did when she was a love-sick teenager.

My first encounter with Polish took place in Kiev, when I was 8 years old. My mother, who taught English at an evening foreign language school for adults, decided that I too should be learning languages. Yet her attempts to teach me English did not go far – I was utterly bored. Then she decided that a Slavic language may be a better way to start and asked one of her colleagues, charming Pani Zhanna, to teach me Polish. On her first visit, Pani Zhanna brought with her a well-thumbed green book with a mysterious name Elementarz [A primer]. From then on, she came over once a week to read with me about the adventures of Ala, Ola and the dog As. (Decades later, in Szczyrk, I will learn that Marian Falski’s Elementarz has been in use in Poland for over a century and is fondly remembered by almost all Polish adults.) Once I had mastered the basics, Pani Zhanna and I began reading a real book, Przygody Misia Uszatka [Adventures of Teddy Floppy-ear], adding from time to time stories from a children’s magazine Płomyczek [Little fire]. Two years later I was so into it that my mother decided that I no longer needed a Polish teacher and hired a teacher of Spanish instead.

Meanwhile, I continued reading in Polish, even though I had no one to speak the language to. This attraction to Polish, at the time, was not an idiosyncrasy – rather, it was the Zeitgeist. In the 1970s and 1980s, Polish culture had a lot of cache in the USSR, and especially in Ukraine, the former Polish dominion. We loved the intellectualism of Polish film-makers, from Hoffman and Holland to Wajda and Zanussi, admired dazzling Polish movie stars, from dramatic Zbigniew Cybulski and Daniel Olbrychski to coldly elegant Beata Tyszkiewicz and Barbara Brylska, longed together with the singer Maryla Rodowicz to board a random train leaving everything behind, and watched in rapture cult TV series Stawka wi

ksza ni

ycie [Stakes larger than life] and Czterej pancerni i pies [Four tank-men and a dog]. Russian-language readers also relished – and still do – Polish literature, from Stanisław Lem’s incomparable science fiction to Joanna Chmielewska’s ironic detective stories.

In Ukraine, as in Lithuania, part of the population was able to read these books in Polish. On the main street of Kiev, Khreshchatyk, right opposite the metro station, there was a book store Druzhba [Friendship] that sold books from socialist countries: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia. Each Saturday mom and I took the metro train from our far-away suburb to center city to browse in Druzhba’s ever-popular Polish section. The few books I still own from those times vividly remind me of the thrill of entering this magical world, so different from the piteous offerings of regular Soviet book stores. You never knew what surprise awaits you: a new edition of a Polish classic, by Sienkiewicz or Prus, travel adventures by Fiedler or Szklarski, a contemporary drama by Zofia Posmysz or Elzbieta Jackiewiczowa, a detective novel by Joanna Chmielewska or Joe Alex, or even a Polish translation of a ‘taboo’ Western book such as The Godfather or Gone with the Wind. For us, living behind the Iron Curtain, Polish was not just a window into the life in Poland – it was a window into the wider world. The popularity of Polish was at an all-time high and Polish-language classes in my mother’s evening language school were always full.

Owing to this popularity, particularly sought after Polish books never made it to the book shelves and were sold exclusively from ‘under the counter’. For us, this was not a problem – mom knew most of the salesgirls in Druzhba, because they attended her language school to get certificates that qualified them for a salary raise, and we always remembered to bring them little gifts for various Soviet holidays to ensure our continuous access to the best of Polish books. And so when Valechka told us that she had an exciting new book in the back room, we did not ask what it was – we only asked how much and went to the cash register to pay for it, returning to the Polish department with a check. We also had friendly relations with several saleswomen working in press kiosks, because Polish women’s magazines were also sold largely from ‘under the counter’. These magazines were in great demand in Kiev, because they were very different, visually and content-wise, from Soviet women’s magazines Rabotnitsa [Female factory worker] and Krestianka [Female peasant]. Polish magazine Uroda [Beauty] was the only glossy in circulation at the time – its issues were treasured, kept and passed from friend to friend. But the most popular of them was the weekly Kobieta i

ycie [Woman and life], the first true women’s magazine I encountered and the only one I ever read cover to cover, looking forward to it every week and enjoying its blue gossip page, which kept us abreast on the love lives and adventures of Western celebrities, from Jackie Kennedy to Princess Caroline of Monaco.

The relationship that many Kievites, myself included, had with the Polish language could easily be described with the term ‘instrumental motivation’. Or at least it could until the day I came across a little volume, bound in plum-colored leather with golden lettering stating Poezje [Poems]. I had never heard of its author, Konstanty Ildefons Gałczy

ski, before. Furthermore, Polish was the language I used only in the silent, written mode, yet I was immediately swept away by the music of Gałczy

ski’s poems and captivated by their tone, both casual and unapologetically romantic. I fell in love – first with Gałczy

ski’s poems and then with Polish poetry in general. It was not love for a speaker of the language (those were far and few in between in Soviet Kiev), nor a desire for an alternative identity in Polish (where would I perform such an identity and for whom?). It was pure and unadulterated love for the music of a foreign language (FL), which I never experienced again – to this day, poetry in English leaves me cold.

Until recently, such feelings remained unnamed and undertheorized in the study of second language acquisition (SLA). In the past decade, however, we have witnessed an affective turn, which has dramatically transformed and expanded the scope of research on the role of affect in SLA (Benesch, 2012; Dewaele, 2010; Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2009, 2011; Hanauer, 2010; Kramsch, 2009; Norton (Peirce), 1995, 2000; Pavlenko, 2005, 2006; Pavlenko & Dewaele, 2004a, 2004b; Piller, 2002; Schumann, 1997; Takahashi, 2012). The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the key aspects of this turn, with the focus on second language (L2) learning and use.

What is the Affective Turn and Where is it Taking Us?

One of the key aspects of the academic enterprise is the change of paradigms and it is this change that turns our scholarly road from a direct and fairly boring journey into a trip full of surprising turns. In multilingualism and SLA, we have experienced a number of such turns inspired by paradigm changes in the fields of linguistics and psychology: the cognitive turn of the 1960s and 1970s brought in the sociopsychological paradigm, which until recently dominated the field, the narrative turn of the 1980s and 1990s raised the interest in narratives and opened SLA to sociocultural approaches, and the social turn of the late 1990s and 2000s brought with it critical approaches and the interest in power relations and access to linguistic resources.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the most recent, affective, turn, inspired by increased attention to emotions in the neurosciences and cognitive psychology (e.g. Barrett, 2009; Brosch et al., 2010; Damasio, 1999, 2003; Ekman, 2003; Scherer, 2009) and in social sciences (e.g. Ahmed, 2004; Hochschild, 1979, 1983; Lutz, 1988; McElhinny, 2010; Wierzbicka, 1999). This paradigm change has not yet found its way into SLA textbooks and encyclopedias which continue to discuss the relationship between L2 learning and affect in terms of ‘affective factors’ (e.g. Ellis, 2008; Gass & Selinker, 2008; Ortega, 2009). Consequently, I will begin the discussion by explaining why the ‘affective factors’ paradigm has exhausted its limited explanatory potential. Then, I will discuss the affective turn in terms of three research directions that focus, respectively, on linguistic, psychological and social aspects of the L2 learning process. I will end by arguing that to understand the affective dimensions of language learning we need to merge the three lines of inquiry, placing embodied subjects in their linguistic and social contexts.

Affective Factors and Why They do not Work

At present, three SLA textbooks dominate the English-language market: Ellis (2008), Gass and Selinker (2008) and Ortega (2009). All three discuss the relationship between L2 learning and language affect, with the latter defined as ‘feelings or emotional reactions about the language, about the people who speak the language, or about the culture where that language is spoken’ (Gass & Selinker, 2008: 398). These feelings are grouped together with other ‘individual differences’ and discussed in terms of anxiety, motivation, personality characteristics and willingness to communicate (Ellis, 2008; Gass & Selinker, 2008; Ortega, 2009) and in Gass and Selinker (2008) also in terms of the affective filter, risk-taking and language and culture shock. The purpose of the discussion is to establish whether there is a causal relationship between ‘affective factors’ and L2 acquisition and whether ‘affective variables’ can explain individual variation in SLA and be used as ‘predictors’ of success.

Based on the studies conducted in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and the theories put forth at that time (e.g. Gardner & Lambert, 1972; Krashen, 1982), the authors reach three conclusions: (1) positive attitudes toward the L2 and its speakers, an integrative motivation or identification with the L2 group, and willingness to communicate facilitate L2 acquisition and lead to better outcomes; (2) high levels of FL anxiety, negative attitudes towards the language and its speakers and counterproductive beliefs about language learning lead to lower levels of achievement; (3) personality factors that correlate with L2 achievement include openness to experience and willingness to communicate. Ellis (2008) and Ortega (2009) also refer to more recent developments, such as Dörnyei’s (2005) work on self-regulation and the ideal language self. The discussion concludes with varying degrees of critique. Ortega (2009), for instance, states that ‘the area of affect and L2 learning is fraught with theoretical, conceptual, and methodological challenges’ (p. 214). While I agree with this conclusion, I also see two omissions: the texts lack a principled analysis of why this area of research has been fraught with problems and a recognition that the study of affect has moved beyond the ‘affective factors’.

Let us begin with the analysis of why the research on ‘affect’ – as conceived in the sociopsychological paradigm – is ‘fraught with challenges’. The first and perhaps the most obvious reason is the lack of a principled theory of affect, which is treated as an individual characteristic. The research also failed to pay attention to any emotions besides anxiety. For instance, in Ellis (2008) the term emotions in the Subject Index refers the reader to anxiety, while the other two texts do not include any references to emotions. The atheoretical and reductionist nature of the paradigm is also seen in the poor definitions of ‘affective factors’, which range from lay generalizations (e.g. ‘language shock refers to the realization that, as a learner, you must seem comical to speakers of the TL’ in Gass and Selinker, 2008: 398; ‘learning and using a foreign language poses a threat to one’s ego’ in Ortega, 2009: 192) to confusing...