Beliefs, Agency and Identity in Foreign Language Learning and Teaching

Paula Kalaja, Ana Maria F. Barcelos, Mari Aro, Maria Ruohotie-Lyhty

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137425959
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Languages

This book explores the phenomena of believing (or giving personal meanings), acting, and identifying (or identity construction), and the interconnectedness of these phenomena in the learning and teaching of English and other foreign languages.

Part I

Learning English as a Foreign Language: From School Children to Young Adults

When a learner wants to learn English as a foreign language, he or she has to find an answer to one simple question: if one wants to learn English really well, what should one do?

Chapter 3 and 4 follow the experiences of young Finnish learners of English over a period of 14 years. They start studying English as their first foreign language (and as an obligatory school subject) in Year 3 at school. Chapter 3 focuses on the beliefs these young learners have about language learning: how do they think English is learnt? As Quotation 1 above by a fifth-year learner illustrates, their beliefs are heavily influenced by the practices of the school. Over time, and as their learning experiences accumulate, the learners adopt more inclusive beliefs about English learning, and even begin to question certain practices in the English classroom.

In Chapter 4 beliefs are, in a sense, put into action: the chapter examines the learner agency of two girls. One of the girls does very well in her English studies, while the other experiences more difficulties. During their school years, their descriptions of the language learning activities they engage in are similar, yet their sense of agency, and consequently their language learning experiences are dissimilar. As they grow into young adults, they both gain a deeper perspective on their agency and on what influenced it during their language learning careers – as illustrated by Quotation 2.

Part I begins our account of experiences of foreign language learning as narrated by young learners, in one mode – orally.

Part I consists of two related studies (and so some details will not be repeated from Chapter 3 to Chapter 4). These studies focus on the attempts to learn English of a small group of young learners who, during the course of the study, turn into young adults. English is the first foreign language studied at school in Finland from Year 3 onwards. Chapter 3 reports on the development of their beliefs about learning English, and Chapter 4 compares and contrasts the development of the agency of two girls in the group. The learners were observed in their studies over an exceptionally long research period.

3

Authority Versus Experience: Dialogues on Learner Beliefs

Mari Aro

1 Introduction

This chapter reports on a study of the beliefs young learners hold about language learning and how those beliefs can change over time. Young learners were interviewed over a period of more than a decade about their beliefs about how English is learnt, and excerpts from the longitudinal data gathered are here analysed from a dialogical viewpoint. The data are used to trace the development of the learners’ beliefs in terms of Bakhtinian notions of voices and authority.

1.1 Key concepts

The study adopts a dialogical approach to the study of beliefs (for more information about the history of and approaches to the study of beliefs, see Section 2.1 of Chapter 2). The dialogical framework is inspired by the dialogical philosophy of the so-called Bakhtin Circle (for example, Bakhtin, 1981, 1986; Voloshinov, 1973), and it also draws on approaches to cognizing that seek to overcome the mind/body dichotomy, such as the ideas of systemic psychology (see, for example, Järvilehto, 1998) and distributed languaging (see, for example, Cowley, 2009). In a dialogical approach to learner beliefs, beliefs are conceptualized as shared: necessarily both social and individual. (For theoretical and practical concerns from a dialogical viewpoint in foreign language learning and teaching, see Hall, Vitanova, & Marchenkova, 2005).

Dialogism stems from the notion of dialogue, which is seen not only as an act of conversation between two people, but as an overall metaphilosophical principle of interaction, governing human existence. According to Bakhtin (1984), dialogical relationships are an almost universal phenomenon, permeating all human speech, relationships and manifestations of human life: individuals are in continuous interaction with their social and physical environment. The people with whom individuals communicate and the contexts in which they do so determine what they can learn. It is through such dialogical relationships that individuals learn and appropriate language, viewpoints, attitudes, memories, and other personal knowledge. Individuals’ beliefs, too, have a social origin: they emerge while the individual is interacting with the physical world or taking part in social practices, and often, as Bakhtin (1986) notes, they emerge through the words of others. Individuals rely not only on their personal experiences, but also on the recounted experiences of others. Beliefs are therefore rooted in social and cultural interactions. However, beliefs are never exclusively social. This is because each individual has a unique life history. No two individuals can share the exact same experiences, even if they share a culture and a social community. According to Dufva (1998), the belief reservoir of each individual is therefore unique, comprising the specific set of experiences of that particular person.

When individuals encounter ways of speaking and thinking, they encounter contextual, socially charged words – words that are used by people in real interaction to mean and to refer; not words that are merely listed, as if someone were reading them aloud from a dictionary. What individuals learn are not neutral words, but value-laden words. In Bakhtin’s (1981) terms, words used in real-life interactions always contain and reflect ideological interpretations of what the world is like. It is important to note that while the English word ‘ideology’ tends to have a strong political association, the dialogical notion of ideology, according to Emerson (1981, p. 23), refers broadly to a socially determined idea system, something that simply means. Whenever people speak, they express intentions, evaluations, opinions, emotions – that is, meanings, ideologies.

Individuals can choose to accept or not to accept the viewpoints – and the ideological content of the viewpoints – with which they come into contact. In Bakhtin’s (1981) terms, this ideological content can be dealt with in three ways. Individuals can, first, choose to appropriate content that they feel is internally persuasive and begin to use this as their own; second, ignore viewpoints they feel do not concern or interest them; or, third, find that they are faced with authoritative viewpoints, words that they must either accept and repeat as they are, or reject totally. Authoritative content reflects the words of authorities (for example, moral, political or religious authorities) and usually relies on a hierarchical difference in power: authoritative viewpoints can demand that the individual adopt them as they are. In contrast, the internally persuasive content invites the individual to a dialogue: such content is open to negotiation and modification. When individuals talk about their beliefs, they are typically not just mechanically repeating others’ words (though they can certainly choose to do so too); rather, they are recreating and recycling the content for their own purposes, and in so doing, returning the words and their ideologies back into the social sphere.

This idea of intention and worldview embedded in words is captured in Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of voice. The various voices with which individuals come into contact result in a knowledge reservoir that is multivoiced, or polyphonic. Certain voices are privileged (see Wertsch, 1991) in the social community – they are more frequently repeated and more highly regarded – while others are marginalized or even silenced. This has consequences for the individuals’ knowledge reservoirs, too: frequently repeated and therefore frequently heard viewpoints may for example be more easily verbalizable than marginalized viewpoints. Individuals themselves also privilege certain voices over others: their own voices are constantly evolving and changing as they take part in new interactions and gain new experiences (Dufva, 2003). New experiences make individuals reevaluate ideologies: do they still work, do they ring true to experience, or is a change needed? The process of development is pushed forward by dialogue with other people and the environment, and it is never complete.

1.2 Previous studies

This study focuses on the beliefs of language learners. The data are longitudinal, and most of the data were collected when the participants were children. Children have, thus far, been underrepresented in studies on foreign language learning and teaching. Most studies on learner beliefs, particularly in the more individualistic approaches, have focused on the beliefs of older learners, often university students and other adults. There has, however, been a recent surge in studies looking at children’s experiences in multilingual contexts, and especially at immigrant children acquiring a second language (see, for example, Orellana, 2009; Paugh, 2012). The data reported on here were collected as part of a project that also produced results regarding the beliefs children hold about languages and language learning (see, for example, Alanen, Dufva, & Mäntylä, 2006, and Dufva & Alanen, 2005).

Also, while learner beliefs have been fairly widely studied since the 1980s, studies using a dialogical approach are rare (see Dufva, Lähteenmäki, & Isoherranen, 1996 for a dialogical study of adult language learners’ beliefs). Dialogical notions have, however, been applied in many closely related fields of study, such as agency (for example, Vitanova, 2005, 2010), multilingual identity (for example, Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004; Pavlenko, 2006), and foreign language learning in the classroom (for example, Morgan & Cain, 2000).

2 Aims of the study

The data of this study were collected in connection with two projects. The first three sets of interview data were collected as part of the project, Situated Metalinguistic Awareness and Foreign Language Learning, funded by the Academy of Finland and with Riikka Alanen as Principal Investigator. The project was a longitudinal case study focusing on a group of young Finnish learners of English. The goal was to examine what the relationship between the learners’ metalinguistic knowledge and their development of self-regulation was like in order to shed light on the interaction between metalinguistic awareness and foreign language learning in context. The first three sets of data were thus collected as part of a larger project that also had a wider focus. The last set of interview data was collected in connection with a science workshop, Agency and Languaging: Perspectives on Learning-in-the-World, funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation and headed by Hannele Dufva.

The aim of the study reported here was to study language learners’ beliefs about the learning of English and examine how their beliefs (as well as their authored agency, see Chapter 4) developed over the years. Using interview data, the study examined both the content of the learners’ beliefs and the voices they used to convey them. The specific research questions are:

1.What kinds of beliefs do the learners hold regarding how English is learnt?

2.What kinds of authoritative ideologies can be heard in the learners’ beliefs?

3.How do the learners’ voices change and develop over the years?

4.How do the learners’ personal experiences and authoritative ideologies interact?

3 Data collection and analysis

3.1 Participants

The study is a longitudinal case study focusing on a group of Finnish learners of English. The study originally involved 15 elementary school¹ children – seven boys and eight girls – who speak Finnish as their L1 and who started studying English as their first foreign language in Year 3 of lower comprehensive school. A foreign language is a compulsory school subject in Finland, and English is by far the most popular choice as the first foreign language. Acc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I  Learning English as a Foreign Language: From School Children to Young Adults
• Part II  Studying Foreign Languages: From First-Year University Students to Graduates
• Part III  Teaching Foreign Languages: From Novice Teachers to Experienced Professionals
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index