Complexity Perspectives on Researching Language Learner and Teacher Psychology. Группа авторов
re-analysis presented in Sampson (2020) revealed a variety of object foci. However, as I was conducting this analysis, I found my categories to be too static, and that there were usually multiple object foci in the context of a learner’s experience of emotion. While object foci are commonly considered as ‘triggers’ for an emotion, I began to recognize that ‘which emotion surfaces is neither determined solely by the context nor by an individual’s psychological tendencies, but by the organismic interplay of the two’ (Boiger & Mesquita, 2015: 383). I was moreover reminded that a recurrent quality mentioned in studies is the ‘momentary’ or ‘instantaneous’ nature of emotions. Yet my understandings instead seemed to suggest that the feelings of my participants were not in most cases a fleeting and linear response to a currently present event.
Complexity thinking reminds us that the L2 classroom is open and interacting with other systems, rather than being a completely ‘bounded’ entity (van Lier, 2004). Multiple agents with past experiences, evolving identities and projections about the future come together to focus on this domain of study. These open psychological systems interact with learners’ moment-to-moment experiences of materials and activities, even as learners also socially interact with their classmates. One key aspect of such dynamicity is the ways in which complex systems interact over different timescales. A timescale appertains to the granularity of a developmental process (de Bot, 2015). As de Bot (2015: 36) reminds us, ‘we cannot undo the interaction between timescales and study phenomena on one timescale without taking into account other timescales’. I therefore wondered how coding and representing object foci based on interacting timescales might provide a more detailed picture of the emergence of L2 study feelings of my learners (Sampson, 2019b).
I approached what I term rather unimaginatively the ‘timescales analysis’ over several recursive stages:
(1)I coded object foci across participants by timescales ranging from seemingly short perceptions during an activity, to a lesson or series of lessons, to months or years of continuing (past, present and future) L2 study experiences and still longer life timescales of personality, multiple identities and beliefs. In this sense, the timescales appear similar to Yashima and Arano’s (2015) use of sociocultural domains or Aoyama and Yamamoto’s (this volume) levels in Trajectory Equifinality Modelling; however, I used timescales which made sense to me as someone working in and dealing with data from an educational context.
(2)I next homed in on coding for individual participants. I employed the matrix coding function of NVivo, a kind of Boolean search tool, in two ways: To glimpse intersections between object foci and different timescales for each learner, and to obtain a picture of data coded to object foci and timescales at each week.
(3)I examined such coded data for each participant, and organized brief summaries and excerpts into an egocentric coding comparison table. These tables were designed with timescales running across as rows, and week of study as columns. The process of representing analysis in this fashion raised my awareness of a need to revisit some coding to explore dynamics across weeks of the study. I moreover reviewed the weekly seating charts to reconfirm students’ partners during any given lesson, and investigate related data concerning shared events and object foci. Relevant partner-perspectives were incorporated into the egocentric coding comparison tables. Figure 3.2 displays a truncated example of one such table for a period of two weeks of the semester.
Figure 3.2 Timescales coding comparison table example (egocentric for one student, Kanata, revealing the emergence of his classroom feelings focused on cooperation with different female students over a two-week period)
(4)Finally, Dörnyei (2014) contends that, in conducting complexity research, one must look for salient patterns or signature dynamics associated with system outcomes. He continues: ‘even though we cannot generalise such signature dynamics from one situation to another … the identified patterns are fundamental enough to be useful in understanding the dynamics of a range of other situations’ (Dörnyei, 2014: 10). In my analysis, the ‘system outcomes’ of interest were the feelings that students experienced. I therefore looked across the coding comparison tables of individuals to describe patterns in the emergence of these classroom L2 study feelings.
Towards a Situated, Dynamic View of L2 Feelings
My interpretation through the timescales analysis revealed the feelings that students experienced in the classroom to not be a linear, instantaneous reaction to something currently present. Advocates of complexity perspectives view development as non-linear (parallel, inconsistent and disproportionate cause–effect), that is, as not occurring in ordered stages with proportional effects linearly attributable to specific, proportional causes. Up to the point in time at which we observe it, a present phenomenon (such as a feeling) instead emerges through the accumulation of dynamics in numerous interrelated, nested systems (de Wolf & Holvoet, 2005; Witherington, 2011). The novel, emergent qualities at the level of the system we are observing are a representation of the non-linear interactions making up its history (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008). The L2 study feelings of participants were a complex and emergent outcome of various psychological timescales interacting with a particular situation, with these psychological timescales themselves also often involving traces of feeling (Sampson, 2019b). Minami’s extract is illustrative:
My weak point is talking with others aggressively. Also, I’m shyness. So I want to improve it. In today’s class, it was easy to speak because my partner was friendly. Also, I could ask and react aggressively through Lego. Unfortunately, we didn’t finished making Lego. However, I could enjoyed and act positively! (Minami, W3)
From the extract, we can understand Minami’s long-term sense of disappointment in what she perceives as an aspect of her core personality, whereby she does not ‘talk[] with others aggressively’ and has ‘shyness’ (life timescale – personality). Interactions between this overall personality and her L2 identity are evident as she writes about bringing these perceptions into the classroom, with motivation to ‘improve it’ (L2 study experiences – L2 identity – to lesson timescale). In the context of these ongoing, unpleasant understandings of identity she reflects upon two occurrences that hold significance for her (Phelps, 2005): First, the co-constructed nature of feelings is apparent as she expresses gratitude for the actions of her partner in the lesson (lesson timescale), in that it was ‘easy to speak because my partner was friendly’. The second event occurred while learners worked in pairs with simple Lego kits; one learner had the manual, the other the Lego blocks, and they needed to negotiate in English in order to construct a model. While Minami notes disappointment that she was not able to complete the Lego model (activity timescale), in the context of this activity she remarks upon what, for her, seems a breakthrough: ‘I could ask and react aggressively’. Minami’s use of an exclamation mark gives a sense of the impact her present experiences have on her understandings of personality, and the strongly positive feelings emergent: ‘I could enjoyed and act positively!’
In considering emergence, we might be inclined to understand purely the interaction of local processes giving rise to a global phenomenon. However, complexity exponents contend that emergence involves circular causality, or bottom-up and top-down processes (Juarrero, 2002; Witherington, 2011). As Witherington (2011: 67) describes, ‘a system’s patterning is not merely an end product of more fundamental system process dynamics’, but instead ‘such patterning itself contributes, by means of constraint, to the very processes that give rise to it’. Such features are clearly evident in the emergence of feelings described by Minami. What the timescales analysis encourages us to bear in mind is that her excitement and sense of achievement in the present are contextually situated in understandings of personality, interpreted through the lens of feeling (Immordino-Yang & Fischer, 2016). Ongoing disappointment with her personality provides a salient through which her sense of achievement is strongly channelled (Kauffman, 2008), yet these new feelings also feed back to impact longer timescale understandings of personality (Lemke, 2000, 2013).
Noticeable also in Minami’s reflection, the timescales analysis provided me with insight into the complex, socially formed nature of my students’ feelings in the classroom.