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3
Interacting Levels and Timescales in the Emergence of Feelings in the L2 Classroom
Richard J. Sampson
Weaving my way between desks, the students seemed oblivious to my passage. As I watched them in activity, I had been drawn in by the expressions on their faces. Smiles seemed to be amplified as they rippled to the surface in many pairs. Yet, at other times and in other individuals, there were looks of consternation met by empathetic understanding; outbursts of laughter and flourishes of voices raised in excitement. Moving again to one side of the room, I stood back and tried to take it all in, this feeling classroom.
I work in Japan with undergraduates studying English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and language learning psychology. At the same time, I am a researcher of my own classrooms. My interest in researching second language (L2) emotions has emerged naturally through my teaching career, across daily experiences like that in the vignette. Learning involves a complex interplay with our feelings, so much so that ‘it is literally neurobiologically impossible to build memories, engage complex thoughts, or make meaningful decisions without emotion’ (Immordino-Yang, 2016: 18). Yet, in terms of additional language learning, there is still clearly room for empirical work, as Boudreau et al. (2018: 149) remark with dismay: ‘Prior research in SLA has either ignored emotions, underestimated their relevance, or has studied them as a relatively stable individual difference variable’.
In this chapter, therefore, I wish to lay out some of the ways in which I have recently been working to gain situated understandings of the L2 feelings of learners in my classrooms. I commence by briefly reviewing a key selection of literature concerning emotions in general and L2 education settings. The chapter then turns to a narrative exposition of my own developing interest in researching feelings. I touch upon two different angles from which I examined the same introspective data collected from undergraduate EFL students in my classes. In particular, I present tools founded on complexity thinking through which to consider L2 emotions in terms of individual learners and a class group (multiple threading), as well as in terms of different interacting timescales (timescales analysis). Ultimately, the chapter argues implicitly that complexity perspectives furnish reminders to maintain a focus on describing situated phenomena rather than prescribing to rules.
Emotions and L2 Learning
Emotions are believed to have evolved as an adaptive tool in response to the necessities of the environment (e.g. Plutchik, 2001). They are considered to be psychological and physiological episodes emergent from interactions with the world