Effect Of The Teacher On The Affective Component Of The Process Of Foreign Language Learning
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Effect of the Teacher on the Affective Component of the Process of Foreign Language Learning
In the last decades, the rise of English as a lingua franca has affected the field of education in terms of definition of essential competences that would ensure the quality of foreign language teacher education who will be ready to meet the challenges of modern society. Furthermore, the birth of the communicative approach which places the learner in the center of the learning process imposes new methods and procedures in the foreign language classroom. The need for an improvement of quality in foreign language teaching, as a consequence of the contemporary 21st century fluctuations, has also been recognized in Croatia. In that sense, the Project Foreign Languages at Primary Level: Training of Teachers was designed. The Project's focus was the initial and continual professional development of foreign language teachers at primary level on the basis of which the Document Competences of Primary School Foreign Language Teachers in the Republic of Croatia was drawn up. The Document welcomes the contemporary approach of foreign language teaching and learning since it recognizes the importance of cognitive, behavioral and emotional aspect of the profession. It also highlights the importance of teacher's role in fostering motivation and positive attitudes as well as in reducing the debilitating effects of foreign language anxiety. Namely, numerous studies have shown that language teacher plays a vital role in shaping students' attitudes and motivation but may also represent one of the potential sources of foreign language anxiety. In this connection, a considerable amount of research argues that students' subjective perceptions of teacher have stronger effect on their affective variables, than those defined by 'objective' measures. However, the existing research has been, to the great extent, conducted on a secondary and university level, whereas primary level students have rarely been in the focus of the attention. Moreover, the existing studies, both in Croatia and abroad, concentrated on students' perceptions of either ideal (good) or actual language teacher in relation to their affective factors. We believe that both of these perspectives are equally important and necessary in any study which explores the relationship between students' perceptions of language teacher and their affective factors. For this reason, the central interest of this research is the investigation of elementary school foreign language teacher competences as perceived by students and their relationship with the affective component of the process iv of foreign language learning. For this purpose, we conducted an exploratory research which included both quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection. The quantitative part of the research included three different instruments which were used for measuring students' motivation, foreign language anxiety and their perceptions of good and actual language teacher competences, characteristics and skills. The purpose of the qualitative part of the research, in the form of a semi-structured interview, was to gather a personal perspective about the topic, i.e. to get a deeper and more detailed description of foreign language teacher competences and characteristics which students perceive as (un)important and (de)motivating. The results of our research reveal that there are statistically significant differences between the two types of competence perceptions, where more positive perceptions are ascribed to good language teacher and less positive to actual language teacher. Further analysis of data confirmed that the small difference between good and actual language teacher perceptions positively correlates with motivation. The data, in other words, confirmed that the greater the difference in perceptions on teacher's personal characteristics and instructional competences, the lower motivation. Second affective factor, foreign language anxiety, positively correlated with small differences in perceptions of teacher's intrapersonal and interpersonal characteristics and skills. This implies that the smaller the difference between the perceptions of good and actual teacher personal characteristics, the lower level of foreign language anxiety. The analysis of the obtained results also indicates that students' perceptions of their foreign language teacher statistically significantly differ in relation to age and level of achievement, whereas they do not differ in relation to students' gender as we initially hypothesized. In that sense, students with higher level of achievement assess teache's competences related to foreign language classroom instruction and teacher's intrapersonal and interpersonal characteristics and skills more positively than students with lower level of achievement. The negativity in perception of teacher's competences, characteristics and skills grows with students' age. Qualitative study results indicated the importance of teacher's intrapersonal and interpersonal characteristics since most of the students viewed the language lessons through the prism of teacher's personal characteristics. This was particularly evident v among younger students, who ascribed the most importance precisely to this aspect of teacher's profession. Older students, on the other hand, expressed satisfaction with their language teacher but with less enthusiasm than their younger peers. Regarding level of achievement, several low achievers viewed language teacher as a partial cause of their low success, and were more dissatisfied with language teacher's instructional competences, among which the most frequently mentioned was the one related to assessment methods and criteria. Taken together, obtained results confirm our general hypothesis that teacher's competences as perceived by students of various age, gender and level of achievement correlate with students' affective factors - motivation and foreign language anxiety.
The Ecosystem of the Foreign Language Learner
This volume examines selected aspects of the foreign language learning process from an ecological perspective, adopting a holistic view on complex interrelations among and within organisms (L2 language learners) and their milieus (family, school and society). First of all, the personal ecosystem of the learner is taken into consideration, whereby two powerful influences are intertwined: cognitive and affective aspects. The learning space formed by the individual is largely shaped by their affective states coexisting in conjunction with their cognitive processes. Moreover, this specific space is also modified by a wider array of other personal ecosystems or those of cultures. Hence, the ecosystem of the foreign language learner is also subject to influences coming from sociocultural leverage that can be represented by people they know, like parents and language teachers, who can both directly and indirectly manipulate their ecosystem. At the same time other important forces, such as culture as a ubiquitous element in the foreign language learning process, also have the power to shape that ecosystem. Accordingly, the book is divided into three parts covering a range of topics related to these basic dimensions of foreign language acquisition (the cognitive, affective and socio-cultural). Part I, Affective Interconnections, focuses on the body of original empirical research into the affective domain of not only L2 language learners but also non-native language teachers. Part II, Cognitive Interconnections, reports on contributions on language learners’ linguistic processing and cognitive representations of concepts. The closing part, Socio-cultural Interconnections, provides new insights into language learning processes as they are affected by social and cultural factors.
Negotiating Identity in Modern Foreign Language Teaching
This edited book examines modern foreign language teachers who research their own and others’ experiences of identity construction in the context of living and teaching in UK institutions, primarily in the Higher Education sector. The book offers an insight into a key element of the educational and socio-political debate surrounding MFL in the UK: the teachers’ voices and their sense of agency in constructing their professional identities. The contributors use a combination of empirical research and personal reflection to generate knowledge about MFL teachers’ identity that can enhance how they are perceived in the social and educational establishments and raise awareness of key issues affecting the profession. This book will be of particular interest to language teachers, teacher trainers, applied linguists and students and scholars of modern foreign languages.