Autonomy and Agency

This chapter reviews autonomy and agency as related to second language (L2) learner and teacher psychology. It discusses the significance of the two constructs in understanding the personal, yet socially mediated nature of L2 learning and teaching processes. Psychology and education seem to be the main disciplines that have influenced developments in fostering on autonomy in second language acquisition (SLA). Research on autonomy has typically been conducted on the initiative of a teacher or groups of teachers working in their specific educational contexts and with their specific groups of students. Compared to agency, autonomy has had a much longer history in SLA, and it has been researche…

CEFLING: Combining Second Language Acquisition and Testing Approaches to Writing

A Review of Five Studies on Learner Beliefs About Second Language Learning and Teaching : Exploring the Possibilities of Narratives

This article reviews five studies carried out within two projects in Finland on the subjective experiences of second language learning and teaching and the related beliefs held by university students of English or other foreign languages. The studies to be reviewed have been conducted using contextual approaches, and written or visual narratives. The aim is to explore how narratives have been used in doing research on learner beliefs by illustrating some of the units of analysis applied within different theoretical frameworks. In addition to summarizing the studies, the article will discuss the methodological lessons learnt and indicate directions for future research. peerReviewed

‘The Class of My Dreams’ as Envisioned by Student Teachers of English : What Is There to Teach about the Language?

As part of a bigger project on the motivation of future EFL teachers, this chapter sets out to find out what a group of student teachers (N = 67) in Finland thought teaching English would involve once they had graduated from an MA programme and entered the profession a few years later. They were asked to envision ‘An English class of my dreams’ as the final home assignment on one of their first professionally oriented courses. The envisioning was done visually so the students produced pictures (by a variety of means) and provided further details about the class in writing, on the reverse side of the task sheet. The pool of multimodal data collected was subjected to content analysis, and it …

Raising awareness of multilingualism as lived – in the context of teaching English as a foreign language

Tässä artikkelissa esitellään mahdollisuuksia herätellä kielen oppijoiden kieli- ja kulttuuritietoisuutta. Esitellyt mahdollisuudet pohjautuvat 24 empiirisen tutkimuksen kriittiseen arviointiin. Tutkimuksissa käytettiin kuvataiteisiin pohjautuvia visuaalisia menetelmiä. Tällaisten menetelmien avulla on mahdollista pohtia aikaisempia kokemuksia tai kuvitella tulevaisuutta ja näin reflektoida erilaisia monikielisyyden kokemuksia. Näitä voivat olla identiteetin rakentumiseen liittyvät kysymykset, käsitykset eri kielten käytöstä tai tulevaisuuden unelmat. Arviointimme perusteella esitämme, että niitä tehtäviä, joita käytettiin tutkimuksissa, voidaan soveltaa eri tavoin erilaisille vieraan kiele…

Conclusion: Exploring Possibilities for Future Research on Beliefs about SLA

Monikielisyydestä subjektiivisesti koettuna : tutkittua vuosien varrelta

Artikkeli tarkastelee monikielisyyttä subjektiivisesti koettuna ja esittelee joitakin tutkimuksia, jotka on tehty tälläisesta lähtökohdasta Jyväskylän yliopiston Kielikampuksella. nonPeerReviewed

Student teachers and their identity construction and awareness of multilingualism: re-visiting three studies

[EN] This article re-visits three studies that originally focused on beliefs about second language (L2) learning and teaching held by student teachers. The studies have been conducted in the same educational context (that is, at a Finnish university). The participants in the studies are majors or minors in English, Swedish, German, etc., and they range from first-year students to fifth-year students about to graduate as qualified L2 teachers. Data have been collected by a variety of means over the past few years (questionnaires, sentence-completion tasks, drawings), and partly longitudinally. The pools of data (verbal and visual) will be re-analysed from the perspective of identity construc…

Revisiting Research on L2 Learner Beliefs : Looking Back and Looking Forward

Deviance, did you get it? An experiment in reading to learn

Abstract This article reports an experiment in which an attempt was made to test reading a scientific text under as natural study conditions as possible. After reading a lengthy text from a Sociology textbook in English, five out of 25 Finnish college students understood a basic concept the way it had been defined by a sociologist; 4 weeks later, after going over the text the second time in Finnish, the number increased to 12. However, even after the second reading of the text in their first language, only half of the students had learnt the basic concept. This indicates that the problems in studying were not only linguistic problems; they seem also to have been study skill problems in gene…

Visual methods in Applied Language Studies

This introductory article serves two purposes. Firstly, it provides the background for the set of 11 articles that appear in the special issue of this journal and summarizes the articles along a number of dimensions. All the articles address aspects of multilingualism as subjectively experienced and they all make use of visual methodologies. Secondly, it subjects the articles to two meta-analyses. The first one compares and contrasts the studies by site: production, image and audiencing. The second one, in contrast, classifies the studies by the research strategy chosen by the researchers: looking, seeing or designing. The article concludes by pointing to future directions in research on mu…

The Book in a Nutshell

In second language (L2) learning and teaching, an emic (or insider) perspective has gained ground in the past few years. This perspective highlights the subjective nature of L2 learning: it throws light on the learner’s beliefs about the language to be learned (when compared, for example, with his or her first language (L1) or other languages he or she may know), being a learner, the learning process, and the learning contexts, all of which are charged with positive and negative experiences and loaded with personal meanings. We would argue that this is also true of aspects of teaching.

Experimenting with computer conferencing in English for Academic Purposes

Englanti on ”tapa matkustaa. Suomi on lähtöasema tai määränpää”: kielikäsityksistä diskursiivisesti ja pitkittäisesti

This article is about holding beliefs about (or assigning subjective meanings to) two languages, L1 (Finnish) and L2 (English). The study was carried out as part of a larger project, and it is discursive in its starting points and longitudinal in its research design. A group of university students, English majors or minors, were asked to do sentence completion tasks twice, while they were studying on a five-year MA degree programme: at the beginning of their studies and just before or after graduation. Overall, the students resorted to a total of four interpretative repertoires in comparing and contrasting the two languages: 1) Affection, 2) Aesthetics, 3) Vitality, and 4) Challenge reperto…

Discursive construction of a high-stakes test: the many faces of a test-taker

As part of a larger project, we studied how a foreign language test got discursively constructed in the talk of upper-secondary-school leavers. A group of students were asked to keep an oral diary to record their ideas, feelings and experiences of preparing for and taking the test over the last spring term of school, as part of a high-stakes national examination. In addition, they took part in discussions either in pairs or groups of three after having learned about the final test results. After transcribing the data, drawing on a form of discourse analysis originally launched by a group of social psychologists, we identified (at least) four interpretative repertoires in the students’ acco…

Introduction to Beliefs about SLA revisited

Abstract This article serves as an introduction to this second special issue of System on Beliefs about Second Language Acquisition (SLA) held by learners and/or teachers of foreign languages in a variety of contexts all over the world, and it compares and contrasts the empirical studies included in the issue. In sharp contrast to the first special System issue on beliefs about SLA, most of the studies reported in this issue draw on sociocultural theory, make use of more than one type of data, and can be characterized as qualitative in nature. In addition, the studies tend to view beliefs as variable and fixed, and focus on changes in these and/or on the interaction between beliefs and lear…

Conclusion: Lessons Learnt With and Through Visual Narratives of Lived Multilingualism, and a Research Agenda

Designing and Assessing L2 Writing Tasks Across CEFR Proficiency Levels

"The English Class of My Dreams!" : Envisioning Teaching a Foreign Language

The psychology of the second (or foreign) language learner has been extensively researched since the mid-1950s. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the psychology of the teacher. Of the psychological make-up of the learner, motivation has been found to be one of the key issues affecting not only the outcome but also the process of learning second (or foreign) languages. Much less is known of the motivation of the teachers involved in these efforts. The teaching of English as a foreign language is faced with new challenges because of the rapid spread of the language in different parts of the world, including Finland. Here, this has meant reconsidering the status of the language, with c…

Research on Students’ Beliefs about SLA within a Discursive Approach

Interview with prof. Dr. Paula Kalaja

Paula Kalaja, Professor Emerita (University of Jyväskylä, Finland), is one of the pioneers in the use of visual methods in Applied Language Studies, having inspired a range of graduates, post-graduates, and researchers around the world. Her research interests crisscross the use of visual methods, beliefs about languages, language teaching and language learning, and identity, with astonishing creativity and a visionary sense of research. The editors of the special issue “Visual methods in the research with plurilingual audiences: multidisciplinary perspectives” talked to her about how she sees the past, present and future of visual methods in research and teaching, across disciplinary fields…

”Unelmieni oppitunti” englannin kielen opettajakoulutettavien visualisoimana

This study views the motivation of future teachers from quite a novel perspective: in terms of vision or envisioning. The study was carried out with student teachers of English (n=31) enrolled on a MA degree programme at a university in Finland. They were asked to envision an English class of their dreams after graduating as qualified teachers. The students produced a picture and were asked to comment on it briefly and provide some further details concerning the class. The task was carried out as part of one of the first professionally oriented courses in the students’ university studies. The pictures complemented with commentaries, or pools of multimodal data, were subjected to qualitative…

Comparing and Contrasting the Studies Reported: Lessons Learnt

This volume, with its title Beliefs, Agency and Identity in Foreign Language Learning and Teaching and the seven empirical studies reported in Chapters 3–9, has explored the phenomena of believing, acting, and identifying (or identity construction), and the interconnectedness of these phenomena in the learning and teaching of English or other foreign languages.

Key Issues Relevant to the Studies to Be Reported: Beliefs, Agency and Identity

As pointed out in Chapter 1, this volume is a response to the recent calls for research on learner and teacher beliefs that would be not only contextual and longitudinal, but also interconnected. In other words, beliefs should be viewed in relation to other issues that play a role in learning and teaching foreign languages. These include aspects of those involved in the processes of learning and teaching foreign languages, that is, learners and teachers — their agency and identity, for example. This chapter provides background to the seven studies that will be reported later in Chapters 3–9 by reviewing the key issues addressed: beliefs, agency and identity. In the following, an attempt wil…

Narratives in L2 Learner Identity Development

This article focuses on second or foreign language (L2) learner identity and its development as discursively constructed, and we will summarize four studies conducted on this topic. The studies were conducted in the context of L2 teacher education in Finland, and the participants were student teachers (pre-service teachers) or recently qualified teachers of English or other L2s. As data we made use of narratives in different modes (oral, written, visual). The summarizing of the studies will be followed by a joint critical discussion of the theoretical and methodological lessons learned and possible applications. peerReviewed

"English is a way of travelling, Finnish the station from which you set out" : Reflections on the identities of L2 teachers in the context of Finland

ELT in Finland

Languaging in Ultima Thule: Multilingualism in the Life of a Sami Boy

Abstract In this paper we investigate multilingualism as a phenomenon which pervades different social and cultural levels but is manifested in the everyday life of multilingual individuals. As an illustration, we examine multilingualism from the perspective of a young Sami boy, Ante, and explore how different languages function as a complex – but at times problematic – set of resources for him. To capture the complexity and fluidity in the relationships between various languages in his life, we base our theorising on such concepts as ‘linguistic resources’, ‘heteroglossia’ and ‘languaging’. With the help of multimodal data we examine how the linguistic resources present in Ante's daily life…

ALR special issue: Visual methods in Applied Language Studies

Abstract This introductory article serves two purposes. Firstly, it provides the background for the set of 11 articles that appear in the special issue of this journal and summarizes the articles along a number of dimensions. All the articles address aspects of multilingualism as subjectively experienced and they all make use of visual methodologies. Secondly, it subjects the articles to two meta-analyses. The first one compares and contrasts the studies by site: production, image and audiencing. The second one, in contrast, classifies the studies by the research strategy chosen by the researchers: looking, seeing or designing. The article concludes by pointing to future directions in resea…

Introduction

Student beliefs (or metacognitive knowledge) about SLA reconsidered

In applied linguistics, interest in student beliefs (or metacognitive knowledge) about second language acquisition (SLA) is fairly recent, growing out of the emphasis on learner autonomy and on learner strategies in SLA. The purpose of this paper is to review those few studies that have been published so far, to give an outline of definitions of beliefs and research methodology, and finally to provide alternatives to these, based on recent developments in the social sciences. With a reconsideration of beliefs come reconsiderations of research data and methods.

Editorial