Using second language (L2) socialization theory as a theoretical framework, this book investigates the ways in which four advanced learners of Japanese on an immersion program in the USA exercise their agency to pursue their language learning goals. The work presents their learner portraits and documents the different ways in which the four learners negotiate the meaning of their participations in the new community of practice, navigate and shape the trajectories of their learning and eventually achieve their goals of learning from their emic perspectives. The book re-examines Norton’s (2000) constructs of investment, investigates its applicability and argues that L2 learners’ desires and drives for learning an L2 are more diverse, unique and contextually situated than Norton’s notion of investment alone can explain. The research will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of applied linguistics, second language acquisition, foreign language education and language and literacy education.
Using second language (L2) socialization theory as a theoretical framework, this book investigates the ways in which four advanced learners of Japanese on an immersion program in the USA exercise their agency to pursue their language learning goals. The work presents their learner portraits and documents the different ways in which the four learners negotiate the meaning of their participations in the new community of practice, navigate and shape the trajectories of their learning and eventually achieve their goals of learning from their emic perspectives. The book re-examines Norton’s (2000) constructs of investment, investigates its applicability and argues that L2 learners’ desires and drives for learning an L2 are more diverse, unique and contextually situated than Norton’s notion of investment alone can explain. The research will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of applied linguistics, second language acquisition, foreign language education and language and literacy education.
Portraits of Second Language Learners: An L2 Learner Agency Perspective
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Portraits of Second Language Learners: An L2 Learner Agency Perspective
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Overview
Using second language (L2) socialization theory as a theoretical framework, this book investigates the ways in which four advanced learners of Japanese on an immersion program in the USA exercise their agency to pursue their language learning goals. The work presents their learner portraits and documents the different ways in which the four learners negotiate the meaning of their participations in the new community of practice, navigate and shape the trajectories of their learning and eventually achieve their goals of learning from their emic perspectives. The book re-examines Norton’s (2000) constructs of investment, investigates its applicability and argues that L2 learners’ desires and drives for learning an L2 are more diverse, unique and contextually situated than Norton’s notion of investment alone can explain. The research will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of applied linguistics, second language acquisition, foreign language education and language and literacy education.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783099894 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 05/25/2018 |
| Series: | Second Language Acquisition , #122 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Chie Muramatsu holds a PhD in Second Language Acquisition from the University of Iowa, USA and has worked as a teacher and lecturer in Japanese, most recently at Stanford University, USA. Within the field of second language acquisition, her work focuses on Japanese as a foreign language and her particular interest is in narrative inquiry, the stories of second language learners and the dynamic yet intimate interplay between their personal variables and the social world in which they live.
Chie Muramatsu holds a PhD in Second Language Acquisition from the University of Iowa, USA and has worked as a teacher and lecturer in Japanese, most recently at Stanford University, USA. Within the fields of second language acquisition, her work focuses on Japanese as a foreign language and her particular interest is in narrative inquiry, the stories of second language learners and the dynamic yet intimate interplay between their personal variables and the social world in which they live.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Beginning
On an early summer's day in 201x, I was driving down a country road in northern New England. All I could see from my car windows were barns, cows, fields and farmhouses. I was beginning to worry whether I was heading in the right direction. I had been driving on this country road for a while, so I looked at my clock. I wanted to arrive there before sunset. I wished that I had invested in a GPS. For a graduate student heading off on her first field trip for her dissertation study, however, a GPS just wasn't in my budget. I looked at my printout of the directions. I should be getting very close to Middlebury by now. Comfortingly, a road sign appeared and informed me that Middlebury was a few miles away. Feeling relieved, I laughed cynically at myself. This was not my first time driving to Middlebury. I had taken this road trip – a two-day journey from Iowa City to Middlebury – several times over the past summers to teach at Middlebury College. This summer, as a novice researcher, I would be conducting an ethnographic study for a period of nine weeks. With my teacher's lens replaced by my researcher's lens, I was more nervous and scared than excited and happy to return to my old teaching post.
What is Middlebury?
Middlebury is a small town in northern New England with a population of approximately 6588 according to the 2010 US census. Like many other places in New England it is known as a summer vacation destination. I was sometimes asked by a stranger at a random place, such as a bookstore or grocery store in Iowa City, if I had been to Middlebury when that person saw me wearing Middlebury T-shirts. When I answered 'yes', the response was almost always, 'It's a beautiful place!' with an emphasis on the word 'beautiful.' Yes, indeed, Middlebury is a beautiful place. If I mentioned that I had taught Japanese at one of the summer language schools there, the response was almost always, 'Lucky you! It's a great school!'.
Middlebury means different things to different people. To those who spend their vacations in northern New England, Middlebury is one among many small, yet beautiful, historic towns. Otter Creek, the longest river in the state, divides the downtown into east and west. From the Main Street Bridge which connects the two sides of downtown, you can look over Otter Creek. Along the creek are restaurants where you can dine outside with a view of the flowing river. A little further down the hill you will find a suspension bridge, where you can look over the Otter Creek waterfall as it splashes down right in front of you.
If you continue across that suspension bridge you enter a district called Mable Works. At first glance it looks like an old warehouse, which is not far off the mark. The building was originally constructed as a gasworks in the first half of the 19th century, according to the local museum. Mable Works now houses restaurants, shops and offices. On Saturday mornings the parking lot is taken over by the Farmers' Market. Fresh vegetables, fruit, bread, pastries, cookies, cheese, honey, maple syrup, soaps, crafts, pottery, flowers and other local goods are sold there.
To those who know someone who attended a private liberal arts college in New England, Middlebury is known for its college, one among many great schools in New England. It is a small liberal arts institution founded in the early 19th century, initially as a school to train young men for the ministry, like many other colleges and universities started during that era. In the late 19th century the college became coeducational and in the early 20th century it continued to grow student enrollment, facility size, faculty number, curriculum breadth and endowment value. Middlebury College is now known as one of the leading liberal arts colleges in New England.
For someone like me, who is in the field of foreign language teaching and learning, Middlebury is known for its summer intensive immersion foreign language programs, which are grouped under the general name of the Middlebury Summer Language Schools. Every summer since 1915 the college has hosted its Summer Language Schools in various foreign languages. In the summer of 201x, when I obtained permission to conduct an ethnographic study in the Japanese School, the college offered Summer Language Schools in 10 languages: Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
The Middlebury magic
I pulled my car over in front of the Campus Security Office and walked inside. 'Can I help you?', a woman said in a businesslike tone. Five minutes later, I walked out the office with a parking sticker, my dorm room key and reactivated college ID card in my hand. Middlebury, here I come! My summer at Middlebury had officially begun. I returned to my car and took a deep breath before I started the engine.
The campus was quiet – almost too quiet. I looked for people driving along College Street, heading to Hepburn Hall where the Japanese School was housed that summer. The Language School students would arrive on Friday. I arrived early because I wanted to attend the Japanese School faculty/staff meeting the next morning. The campus would soon revive when the students arrived to participate in the language school. Every summer, approximately 1300 students come from all over the United States and some travel from outside the United States. They gather at Middlebury to study a foreign language for a period of seven or nine weeks depending on the length of their programs.
It was the year after I received my Master's degree when I first taught in the Japanese School at Middlebury College. I was a fresh, young, ambitious and also naïve second language (L2) teacher. Working with many experienced Japanese language instructors I soon felt overwhelmed and incompetent. In those days, in the hallways, on the way to the cafeteria and in informal gatherings I overheard other instructors mention the 'Middlebury magic', referring to the students' language development while they are studying at Middlebury. It is so remarkable that instructors like to joke that it is the work of magic – a magic that exists at Middlebury.
At that time I was preoccupied with my immediate tasks and teaching and did not give any more thought to it, but the idea of 'Middlebury magic' stayed in the back of my memory. Then later, when I was given the opportunity to return to Middlebury to teach, I started to wonder again what the magic was really about. Does such an idea really exist in the context of foreign language teaching and learning? What is the essence of the magic that the instructors were referring to? What is the magic that can only be observed at Middlebury? What was really happening inside the Middlebury Language Schools? These lingering questions led me to pursue my research interest in ethnographic study at Middlebury.
Second Language Learners and Second Language Learning: A Socially Situated View
If I am asked about my occupation, I answer that I am a Japanese language teacher. My career began at the University of Iowa as a teaching assistant. At that time the Japanese economy was not as strong as it had once been, sushi restaurants were not as popular as they are now and Japanese popular culture was not as widely recognized as it is today in the United States. Nonetheless, some students were interested in the Japanese language and culture and studying Japanese at the University of Iowa. As a novice teacher and graduate student, I spent many nights in my office writing lesson plans, grading homework and preparing for the next day's lesson. On Friday nights I walked home through a downtown filled with college students heading to a bar or already tipsy and loud. At weekends I went to the library and watched the crowd of people dressed in Iowa Hawkeye T-shirts tailgating at a football game.
I have been teaching Japanese in the United States ever since. I am now an older, more experienced teacher. During all my years spent teaching Japanese, what always kept me engaged were my students. Therefore, when the time came for me to start writing the proposal for my dissertation study, I knew what the topic was going to be – L2 learners. In particular, I was fascinated and amazed by the great degree of variability among the students whom I met in their views of Japanese language and culture, their understanding of social and academic affordances made available to them, the ways in which they engaged in the task of learning Japanese and the ways in which they define themselves as speakers of Japanese. I wanted to shape my dissertation study around my fascination with these students by undertaking a detailed inquiry.
Hence I turned to the second language acquisition (SLA) literature. The area of studies I first concentrated on was the literature on individual differences. The studies on individual differences are one of the most well-established areas of inquiry in the SLA literature. The topics of investigation typically focus on L2 learners' variability in their socio-psychological state (e.g. anxiety, beliefs, motivation and willingness to communicate), cognitive abilities (e.g. aptitude and working memory) and learning styles and strategies (for more information, see chapters in the recent SLA handbooks by Dewaele, 2009; Dörnyei & Skehan, 2003; Ellis, 2008; Skehan, 2012; Gregersen & MacIntyre, 2014). As I read, the arguments that researchers made and the implications that their study results suggested made real sense to me on paper; however, when I tried to locate my own undefined, yet definite, research interests in the literature, I was lost. These studies were able to establish the categories or profiles of L2 learners – the categories or the profiles of L2 learners who are likely to lead to success in L2 learning – yet they were not able to adequately address the dynamic, intricate and organic relationship between L2 learners, social affordance and L2 learning that I had observed. Indeed, I felt a sense of strangeness about the absence of individual learners as real people in these studies.
Therefore, I was delighted when I discovered a new emerging line of study on motivation that had been initiated by Dörnyei and Ushioda (2009). In particular, Ushioda's (2009: 215) 'person-in-context relational view of language motivation' gave me a theoretical warrant and a clear direction for my own future study. The following excerpt explains more clearly this 'person-in-context' view of language motivation:
Let me summarize then what I mean by a person-in-context relational view of motivation. I mean a focus on real persons, rather than on learners as theoretical abstractions; focus on the agency of the individual person as a thinking, feeling, human being, with an identity, a personality, a unique history and background, a person with goals, motives and intentions; focus on the interaction between this self-reflective intentional agent, and the fluid and complex system of social relations, activities, experiences and multiple micro- and macro-contexts in which the person is embedded, moves, and is inherently part of it. (Ushioda, 2009: 220)
Second Language Learner Agency: Second Language Learners as Social Agents
Ushioda is not the only researcher who called for a reconceptualization of L2 learners in SLA research. Firth and Wagner (1997, 2007) more boldly criticized the uniform and inorganic representation of L2 learners in SLA research and emphasized the need to expand our understanding of L2 learners as actual socially situated beings. Many researchers, such as Block (2007), Thorne and Black (2007), Kramsch (2010), Lantolf and Pavlenko (2001), Norton (2000) and van Lier (2008), among others, also raised their voices to emphasize the need to (re)conceptualize L2 learners as 'intentional human agents who play a defining role in shaping the qualities of their learning' (Dewaele, 2009: 638), while simultaneously recognizing that they might be vulnerable to variable social positions in a community by being caught in the complex web of social power relations.
Given this framework, L2 learning can be viewed as a process of L2 socialization by participating in a new social community of practice, navigating their lives, negotiating their social positions and identities and establishing their voices in a new target language community. L2 learners, as social agents, create, navigate and define their own learning processes. They do not passively emulate the normative practices of the target language communities or accept undesirable social values and positions being simply imposed on them; instead, they negotiate, resist and shape their learning processes and experiences. SLA research thus needs to abandon its rather simplistic portrayals of these complex phenomena and understand and document L2 learning as a dynamic social process shaped by the interplay between the social world and its human agents.
Human agency is the concept originally defined and used in various disciplines in the social sciences and relatively recently introduced into the fields of applied linguistics and SLA. As the socially and contextually grounded L2 learning theories and research became an important pillar in the fields, L2 learner agency has become an important theoretical concept. Deters et al. (2015), in their recent edited volume, provided an overview of diverse approaches to the conceptualization of human agency in SLA research, concluding that there is no single definition of L2 learner agency which adequately addresses the diverse research interests and contexts of L2 learning. My study adopts the definitions of agency that are used in the poststructuralist models of L2 learning which view L2 learning as a fundamentally socially mediated activity and process; in addition, 'agency is never a property of the individual but a relationship that is constructed and renegotiated with those around the individual and with society at large' (Lantolf & Pavlenko, 2001: 148).
Lantolf and Pavlenko (2001), from a perspective of sociocultural theory, view agency as a mediated relationship between individual learners and the social world. Even though L2 learners are engaging in the same activity, socioculturally, they are not all engaging in the same activity because each individual learner's relationship to the social world is not the same. Therefore, the meaning or 'significance' (Lantolf & Pavlenko, 2001: 148) that individual learners construct through their engagement in a particular activity is not the same for all learners. What they find meaningful or significant in the process of the engagement is mediated by individual learners' personal histories, goals of learning, beliefs and relationships to the social world in which they live. Lantolf and Pavlenko argue that it is this significance that ultimately shapes the individual learners' orientation and engagement in the activity of learning.
Ahearn (2001: 112), in the field of linguistic anthropology, views agency as the 'socioculturally mediated capacity to act.' Duff (2012: 417) explains agency as 'people's ability to make choices, take control, self-regulate and thereby pursue their goals as individuals leading, potentially, to personal or social transformation.' More recently, Duffand Doherty (2015), in the framework of second language socialization research, emphasize the aspects of agency as the personal enactment of L2 learners and address the powerful role of L2 learners who take charge of their own learning processes – namely, 'self-directed socialization' (Duff& Doherty, 2015: 54, italics in original).
My study follows the footsteps of these scholars and understands that L2 learner agency is the very force of L2 learners to navigate, control and take charge of their own learning processes in pursuit of their learning goals. A sense of agency enables individuals to imagine, perform, accept, refuse and resist. In other words, agency enables individuals to make deliberate and purposeful choices with regard to how they relate as individuals to the social world, how they take ownership of their actions in the pursuit of enterprises in their lives and create opportunities for self-transformation.
Despite the increasing recognition of the importance of agency in L2 learning, agency has not yet gained a central focus as a topic of investigation. In the current SLA literature, especially in the framework of social theories of learning, agency is often associated with studies on identity. Especially after the publication of the groundwork by Norton (2000), in which she proposed the two influential concepts of identity and investment, agency has been placed, in a sense, in the shadow of identity and treated as a sort of umbrella term for investment and identity overall.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Portraits of Second Language Learners"
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Copyright © 2018 Chie Muramatsu.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Second Language Socialization, Community, and L2 Learner Agency
Chapter 3. Community
Chapter 4. Parker: Lost Opportunities, Reconnection, and Transforming
Chapter 5. Alison: Shame, Resistance, and Overcoming
Chapter 6. Naiya: Separation, Resistance, and Accomplishing
Chapter 7. Danielle: Identities, Ambivalence, and Becoming
Chapter 8. Conclusion