a paradigm, complexity seems to offer intriguing new avenues to investigate and describe the interrelated, co-adapting and emergent nature of the social psychodynamics among the actors in learning. Yet, the drive to incorporate complexity perspectives into education research has been met with caution by some (Hardman, 2010; Richardson & Cilliers, 2001). Fears remain that a rush to apply novel metaphors or advance neoteric models may hinder the development of deeper understandings rendered by research and analysis built on the philosophical underpinnings of complexity. While many valuable contributions to our understandings have been forthcoming, at times there is also a tendency towards systems theories (such as dynamic systems theory), many of which ‘started as a branch of theoretical mathematics’ (de Bot & Larsen-Freeman, 2011: 9). Ushioda (this volume) asserts that ‘such discussions of human behaviour can create, as Larsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008: 74) openly admit, something of a “distancing” effect, where individual intentionality, reflexivity and decision-making become transmuted into mathematical models representing abstract systems above the level of the individual person’. Moreover, approaches from a complexity perspective may pose challenges for researching the psychology of self-aware agents in language learning and teaching (Al-Hoorie, 2015; MacIntyre et al., 2015). This volume aims to dispel such fears through looking at concrete examples of how researchers are doing research into the field of language learner and teacher psychology with complexity.
When we wrote the proposal for this edited volume, we originally said that this book would be for language teachers, students and scholars of applied linguistics, and researchers in the field of SLA. The publishers, to their credit, asked for a more focused audience rather than trying to please everyone, which actually aligned with our initial intentions. We united under the motto complexity should be simple. Our aim was to make complexity paradigms and research more accessible to people like ourselves, that is, practitioning language teachers who also engage in research. Our reasons for feeling this volume was necessary were based on various observations and discussions we had had with colleagues in which at times people had expressed fear or confusion about the concept of complexity in language research. An example from Richard S: For better or worse, recently his proposal for a presentation on using complexity thinking to explore the psychology of L2 learners was accepted for a conference in Taiwan, at which the majority of sessions would revolve around technology and language teaching. Apprehensive as to whether anyone would indeed turn up for his session, he was astonished when he found himself with a packed room. So much so, that he joked at the start of his presentation, ‘I presume you’re all here because of the word “psychology” in my title, rather than the word “complexity”?’ To which there was a resounding nod of assent from the assembled participants. Some even appeared to grimace at the mention of ‘complexity’. Nevertheless, as the session concluded, the room seemed to emit a collective energy in the realization that in complexity, there was something that does justice to understanding the real learners in our real classrooms. When Richard S organized a symposium at the 3rd Psychology of Language Learning (PLL3) conference in Tokyo entitled Simply Researching Complexity (Sampson et al., 2018), we were both able to feel a similar wave of enthusiasm for the topic, and this book was born out of that enthusiasm.
Yet, various experiences led us to the working theory that complexity was seen from the perspective of practitioning teachers as either a mere buzz-word, or (worse) an intimidating and elitist direction for SLA research which could possibly exclude classroom research from the future research agenda. Both of us were particularly worried about this as, from our reading, much of the literature on complexity was actually very loudly and clearly saying that we needed more insights from the classroom and more involvement with practitioners themselves. Considering the strongly relational approach in a complexity worldview, in a recent commentary on links between complexity and the study of the psychology of language learners, Larsen-Freeman (2019: 75) urges: ‘Clearly, more attention needs to be given to the relationship between the researcher and research participants’. Practitioners-as-researchers are uniquely placed to add more contextualized understandings of the complexity of the psychologies of learners in their class groups, whilst also recognizing their positions as part of the observed.
Even more importantly, the complexity paradigm seemed to us to offer an approach to understanding knowledge which could really help us make sense of the lived realities of our classrooms. The metaphors used in complexity perspectives give us a set of tools to describe things we have been observing in our practice for a long time, they help us to explore why things don’t always go as planned, and why research that isolates single factors or attempts to control experiments in laboratory conditions has little relevance for those of us who interact with real people in a real classroom environment.
Complexity in Bringing the Chapters Together
In order to show how all this might work in practice, we have collected some sample data from our experiences of preparing this manuscript. This book is the product of around 713 emails, over 300 hours of editing and writing, with approximately 1000 comments on 25 different drafts of chapters, with an uncountable number of Skype comments and calls between the two of us (uncountable literally, as many of these chats descend into banter and then come back to professional work as our friendship developed, making it almost impossible to tell which ones to include in this quantifying exercise).
These data help us to illustrate an important point about complexity. These data on their own tell us nothing about the process of editing this book. They need to be situated within the context of the narrative and framed from a human perspective in order to be meaningful. For example, these numbers tell us nothing about how long each of the authors spent preparing their chapters, or the banter and professional work that went on between the co-authors of individual chapters. The numbers show that a lot of work went into the book, but they speak nothing of the difficult human aspects that came up with missed deadlines and negotiations over content, with authors having personal events interrupt their professional lives (changing jobs, moving house, car crashes and other serious family events) which then had a knock-on effect on this book. It has certainly been an eye-opening experience for the two of us, and we shall never pick up an edited book and flippantly look through the pages now without wondering at what a huge labour is involved in putting together such a volume. At the same time, the narrative and the context have little impact without the data to show that we are not making surface-level assumptions. There were undoubtedly a multitude of other happenings that impacted authors and us as editors as we strove to bring this volume together, yet without data – in this case, an email record and an estimate of the number of hours we put in – we can say very little. It is also important that we stress this is our experience, and by no means is this generalizable to other contexts. There may be some books that have been through an even more tangled journey, and others that seem to slide effortlessly down a water chute. All we can say is, this was our experience and we both feel it was worth every moment.
Returning now, as we do in our daily work, to the classroom, complexity paradigms allow us to think about classroom experiences and contexts in ways which help us make sense of their various realities. The tools and the methods of complexity approaches allow us to tell our stories in convincing ways. They support us in efforts to turn classroom research and practice into a valid and robust category of research which we believe should allow teachers’ voices to find their way into even the most prestigious and selective of journals and publications. In other words, by understanding complexity as it can apply to our work, we hope to empower other practitioners and encourage them to share their rich understandings about the realities of classroom teaching and learning. We feel that this is a crucial step, in order that our field can benefit and move forward, without falling back into reductionist, isolating, statistic-heavy and yet reality-evading research practices which do little to further our understanding of the vital psychological aspects to foreign language learning and teaching.
What the Chapters Offer
In the chapters that follow, authors discuss their own perspectives on researching within a complexity paradigm, exemplified by concrete and original examples from their research histories. Moreover, as the title of the volume suggests, chapters explore research approaches to a variety of learner and teacher psychological foci of interest in SLA. Each chapter draws on concrete examples of research conducted by the author(s) with a meta-discussion to expound their take on complexity and researching