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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 around us (Cahour, 2013; Lemke, 2013). They comprise bodily reactions, expressive behaviour, as well as a subjective feeling – conscious aspects of our interactions with/in context (Cahour, 2013; Damasio, 2003). The trigger for an emotion is known as its object or event focus (Shuman & Scherer, 2014 – although see later in the chapter for my revised conceptualization). Emotions are also said to involve an action-tendency element (Shuman & Scherer, 2014). They channel our behaviour, through processes of ‘appraisal of the situation by the persons, as a function of the meaning that they attribute to it, as well as their interests and goals … including beliefs, values, and aspects of previous experience that are mobilized in the situation’ (Cahour, 2013: 58). Finally, while there are undoubtedly problems with dichotomizing emotions, they have traditionally been grouped into negative and positive valences based on whether the feeling is pleasant or unpleasant. On the one hand, negative emotions are said to prompt ‘fight or flight’ actions, such as anger engendering attacking tendencies or fear calling forth the urge to run away; on the other hand, positive emotions elicit broader tendencies to build resources, such as curiosity to seek information (e.g. Fredrickson, 1998; Plutchik, 2001; Shuman & Scherer, 2014).

Concerning L2 learning, researchers have tended to focus on distinct emotions. One of the most researched, language anxiety, is a situation-specific worry or nervousness about using an L2 (Horwitz et al., 1986). In many cases, it concerns perceived negative evaluation by others and threats to self-image due to difficulties in presenting ideas to the same degree as in one’s native language (e.g. Dewaele & Alfawzan, 2018; MacIntyre & Gregersen, 2012). A good deal of recent empirical work has also begun to investigate the relationships between anxiety and enjoyment (Boudreau et al., 2018; Dewaele & Alfawzan, 2018; Dewaele & Dewaele, 2018; Dewaele & MacIntyre, 2014, 2016). Such a focus would seem overdue, as positive L2 emotions have been correlated with greater willingness to communicate (Dewaele & Dewaele, 2018), motivation (MacIntyre & Vincze, 2017) and performance in L2 classes (Dewaele & Alfawzan, 2018). This line of research has revealed that L2 anxiety and enjoyment function independently rather than proportionally (Dewaele & MacIntyre, 2016: 230; see also Dewaele & MacIntyre, 2014). Dewaele and MacIntyre (2016) moreover illuminated two different dimensions of L2 enjoyment – a social dimension from supportive peers and teachers, and a private dimension involving an internal sense of pride through succeeding in the face of challenges.

Situated and dynamic research into L2 study emotions is much more limited in extent yet has provided alluring insights. For instance, research by Garrett and Young (2009) has found the profound impact of understandings of identity on L2 feelings. In their study, the participant’s identity as a proficient speaker of other additional languages lead to negative emotions connected with her comparisons between abilities in languages; her social identity as a student initially fostered negative emotions as she made erroneous social comparisons between her own ability and that of her peers, yet transformed into positive emotions as she revised her appraisal of peers and developed relatedness with them; and her identity as an L2 French teacher connected with positive emotional evaluations of the teaching styles of her instructors and materials. In another study, Méndez López and Peña Aguilar (2013) unearthed some fascinating relationships between classroom emotions and action tendencies. Intriguingly, while positive emotions at times spurred greater self-efficacy and motivation to take risks, at other times such feelings engendered a kind of coasting wherein students sat back and just enjoyed the pleasant feeling; conversely, negative emotions such as anxiety about assessment tasks led some participants to stop trying in class and consider giving up entirely, while a sense of difficulty such as when learners realized a mistake elicited motivation to improve that particular skill. Their study reveals that, while teachers may prefer students to always experience pleasant feelings, in fact, both pleasant and unpleasant feelings can prompt helpful and detrimental action tendencies. As Pinner (2016: 182) similarly articulates based on his experiences with classroom research, ‘not all learning experiences have to be good. In fact, some of the best learning experiences come from bad experiences and these have an important contribution to make in both education and learning.’ Lastly, Imai (2010) followed a group of three Japanese university EFL students as they participated in a series of lesson-external meetings in order to prepare for a group presentation in English. Imai collected data from multiple perspectives, through video recording discussions (in Japanese), asking participants to fill out emotion logs and questionnaires and using stimulated recall to gain participants’ own interpretations. Imai uncovered that while participants brought their own understandings of the task and course to the discussions, these understandings were adapted via verbally manifested ‘emotional intersubjectivities.’ Intriguingly, these co-formed, emotional understandings had a large, non-linear impact on the learning task, as group members collectively changed their goal for the presentation in rejection of the teacher-intended pedagogical outcome. As such, Imai (2010: 288) argues that there is a need to consider ‘emotions as socially and discursively constructed acts of communication that mediate learning and development’.

My Path to Studying L2 Feelings

As a classroom teacher, I have always been keenly interested in the emotional experiences of learners in my classes. However, my entry to exploring L2 feelings as a research focus involves a somewhat more meandering path. A couple of years ago, I received funding to study the social nature of L2 learning motivation. I implemented action research together with undergraduates in two of my compulsory EFL classes (n = 47), introducing change-action through classroom activities that encouraged learners to think about and discuss the meaning of their EFL studies. My interest was in the ways in which motivation and action emerged through social processes connected to students’ hopes for the actions of their peers in the classroom (Sampson, 2018), as well as their felt expectations from significant others and society (Sampson, 2017, 2019a). Data were collected via action research activity worksheets, classroom seating charts with observational notes (students were randomly assigned new partners every lesson), introspective learner journals and an open-ended semester-final questionnaire. It is the journals that inform discussion in this chapter.

As a form of introspective data collection, journals in classroom research have the potential to ‘take us to a place that no other data collection method can reach – into the mind of the learner or teacher’ (Nunan & Bailey, 2009: 307). They offer a feasible tool that does not overburden participants nor interrupt the natural processes of classroom action, yet has the ability to provide contextualized, dynamic, personal and candid perceptions of learning experiences (Gilmore, 2016; Nunan & Bailey, 2009; Sampson, 2016a). In arguing for the aptitude of journals for classroom research, Phelps (2005: 40) remarks that:

No-one knows the complex interplay of factors that impact on an individual, or the significance of any one factor, greater than the individual themselves. This is not to assume for a moment that the individual learner is fully aware of all these factors, but rather that they are in a better position to understand them than anyone else.

Based on past experiences using journals in classroom research (e.g. Sampson, 2012, 2016a, 2016b), I worked to ensure such benefits, whilst trying to alleviate possible drawbacks sometimes found in this method of data collection. In order to reduce concerns about low compliance rates and large variations in the length of entries (Gilmore, 2016), the journal was introduced as a reflective pedagogical task. Students were assessed by how many weekly entries they submitted, and whether entries were over a minimum of 70 words. As part of facilitating the journaling process, as well as trying to head off problems of recall (Hall, 2008; Nunan & Bailey, 2009; Porto, 2007), participants wrote the journals as an email to me directly following each lesson. The prompt was simply:

Please write about your experiences in lessons. However, do not merely list the activities we did in the lesson. Try to write your perceptions and reflections about your actions and those of other class members doing the various activities.

Hall (2008) warns of utilizing data collected in the L2 of participants, as their capacity to write what they truly think is determined by their level of L2 capability. However, the English level of learners in this context was reasonable (Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) scores ranged from mid-400 to 800). Being part of pedagogical practice, it was also my wish as a teacher to show my respect for participants’ developing L2 identities (Sampson, 2016a). Learners were therefore encouraged and wrote these journals in English, although occasionally using some Japanese phrases. Entries were collected for 13 of 15 lessons across a semester.

As I was reading and replying to students’ email journals every week, what struck me was their consistently emotional tone. This was certainly not dry data. It was literally bursting with feelings. As I have argued elsewhere (Sampson, 2016a; see also Radford, 2007), I find that action research offers the possibility of looking back historically after the collection of data in order to explore new directions in the researcher’s understandings. It was an interest in investigating the situated, emotional nature of my own EFL classrooms that prompted me to re-analyse participant journals from the perspective of L2 study feelings.

Looking at Levels: Describing the Whole and the Parts

I started with a seemingly straightforward quest to look at the collected data and describe the feelings and connected object foci to which writing in the participant journals pointed. I will not dwell in too much detail on this initial re-analysis, but instead refer readers to Sampson (2020). Suffice to say, I carried out routine thematic content analysis, without predetermined categories, of different feelings and object foci using the qualitative data management application NVivo. Entries were additionally coded to ‘week’ codes in order to facilitate an examination of the ebb and flow of feelings across the semester. This first stage of analysis involved a process of quantifying the qualitative data to gain a sense of the kinds of emotions and the extent of their experience by my students (Onwuegbuzie & Daniel, 2003).

Analysis revealed a kaleidoscope of feelings. Confirming my initial intuition of the emotional tone to the journals, an incredible 94% of collected responses touched upon feelings in some way. A total of 10 feelings frequently emerged across the entries of learners in the two classes: seven pleasant (or ‘positive’) feelings – a sense of achievement, enjoyment, gratitude, interest, admiration, excitement, surprise – and three unpleasant (or ‘negative’) feelings – disappointment, a sense of difficulty and anxiety. In congruence with past research (Garrett & Young, 2009; MacIntyre & Vincze, 2017), and supporting Pavlenko’s (2013) call for an expansion of research away from an obsession with L2 anxiety, there was a far greater incidence of pleasant feelings. As the most prevalent, a sense of achievement was apparent in a remarkable 44% of entries. Moreover, the greatest spread of students (45 of 47) wrote about enjoyment. In terms of unpleasant emotions, disappointment (31% of entries) and a sense of difficulty (27% of entries) were more prominent than anxiety (18%). All in all, suggesting the range of feelings experienced in the L2 classroom, over 30 different students mentioned eight of the feelings at least once. Even the remaining two feelings were mentioned by around 20 different students.

However, complexity thinking fosters an understanding that in looking only at the averaged, generalized whole, we may lose sight of the experience of any one learner. As Morin (2006: 6) describes, ‘knowledge of the parts is not enough, the knowledge of the whole as a whole is not enough’ but we must attempt ‘to comprehend the relations between the whole and the parts’. Teaching, even more so than other ‘helping’ professions like nursing and social work, requires a focus at one and the same time upon individuals as well as a group as a whole (Urdan, 2014). In order to more adequately represent the whole (class group, whole semester) and the parts (individual participants, specific lessons), I employed a tool known as multiple threading (Davis & Sumara, 2006). In their original exposition, these researchers used this tool to illustrate how often and to what extent individual voices or ideas contribute to an overall text, such as a research paper or dramatic performance. Multiple threading ‘involves the presentation of several narrative strands’ in which ‘some may be only brief phrases or single images that punctuate the text, and strands may overlap or interlink at times’ (Davis & Sumara, 2006: 162). I adapted this tool to visually represent not only how often, but also in what ways individual students joined the overall ‘feeling narrative’ of their class group on any specific day, and over the semester. The multiple threading used weeks across a horizontal axis and individual learners along a vertical axis. As such, I allocated a ‘square’ to each learner for each week of data collected. Emergent from analysis of the qualitative data, I then counted the number of different feelings experienced by a learner for a particular week. The square at the intersection of learner-week was then divided as evenly as possible based on this count, and different shading or hatching applied to represent these feelings (see Figure 3.1 – names are pseudonyms). (One word of caution here is that squares with a larger area devoted to a specific feeling do not imply that this feeling is stronger.)

Figure 3.1 Multiple threading of learners’ reference to feelings by lesson

The multiple threading representation is somewhat of a visual overload which requires more effort – or allows more freedom of insight – on the part of the observer. Nevertheless, using multiple threading from a complexity perspective reminds us to maintain our understanding of the ways in which individual students all contribute to the whole of the feeling narrative of their class.

I recognize that multiple threading is partial, as proponents of complexity understand all representations of data and ‘knowing’ to be (Davis & Sumara, 2006). I do, however, find it offers potential as one tool to preserve a sense of the whole and the parts, in terms of learner-class and lesson-semester. It allows us to zoom in on the feelings of an individual student in one particular lesson, or trace their emotional trajectory across the semester; concurrently, we can contrast the feelings of multiple students in the same class during a lesson or across time. By examining any week in Figure 3.1, we can gain a sense of the ambivalent nature of feelings perceived by individual students and across students in any given lesson. That is, the multiple threading aligns with Boudreau et al. (2018) in hinting that there is a great deal of interpersonal variation in how feelings evolve over the course of classroom experiences. Multiple threading moreover allows us to maintain sight of the longer timescale of the semester: Some learners tended to mention positively-valenced feelings more consistently across the semester, other students more negatively-valenced feelings, while still others revealed a relatively even mix. In line with Garrett and Young (2009: 221), it suggests a focus on how feelings were ‘modified by new experiences … over time’ and emerged in different ways within and across lessons. Finally, we can also use the multiple threading matrix to gain a sense of the general emotional orientation of the class as a whole. By assigning contrasting colours or hatching for more pleasant or unpleasant feelings, we can make a rudimentary analysis of the emotional valence dynamics of the whole. This said, we must remain cognizant that more pleasant feelings across the class group does not necessarily equate with constructive action tendencies or motivation, with the reverse also being true (Méndez López & Peña Aguilar, 2013; Pinner, 2016). Notwithstanding, I feel that a multiple threading does a reasonable job of representing the kinds of implicit understandings that teachers develop of the general emotional climate dynamics of a class group.

Describing the Emergence of Feelings over Interacting Timescales

My take on complexity as a philosophical and research position aligns with Kuhn (2007: 299 – emphasis mine) in understanding that ‘it is more useful to have evocative rather than prescriptive descriptions,’ such that research based on complexity thinking ‘is utilized for exploring possibilities rather than prescribing relationships and processes’. Ushioda’s (2009: 217) argument that much research to date has intended to ‘uncover rule-governed psychological laws that explain’ instead of ‘explor[ing] the dynamic complexity of personal meaning-making in social context’ sums up well a fundamental difference in perspective. Complexity thinking runs in opposition to ‘the principle of simplicity [which] either separates that which is linked (disjunction), or unifies that which is diverse (reduction)’ (Morin, 2008: 39). As Morin (2008: 5) also proposes:

Complexity is a fabric (complexus: that which is woven together) of heterogeneous constituents that are inseparably associated: complexity poses the paradox of the one and the many. … Complexity is in fact the fabric of events, actions, interactions, retroactions, determinations, and chance that constitute our phenomenal world.

I therefore wanted to further explore dynamics in the situated emergence of feelings from the perspectives of individual learners. The initial 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. A two-lesson series of extracts focused on one participant, Kouhei, is illuminative of such processes:

Help others understand. I always talk quitely even when I speak Japanese. In addition to this, I can’t speak English well. So when I don’t speak English loudly, you can’t hear and understand what I want to say. It is not good. That is the reason I chose this one. I could teach the English word meaning to my pair. And I speak clearly in that, and my pair look like he understand. … I tried to speak loudly and clearly in today’s class. I can almost do, but sometimes I can’t. I thought I should keep trying. (Kouhei, W4)

To provide some background: As part of the wider action research, I had encouraged students to choose and try to act on a behavioural hope each lesson (Sampson, 2018). In the extract, Kouhei hoped to ‘help others understand’ (lesson timescale – motivation). Long timescale processes of personality and past experiences form the psychological context for this intention. It seems that Kouhei feels disappointment with his personality – ‘I talk quitely even when I speak Japanese’ alongside conflict between understandings of his L2 identity as somebody who ‘can’t speak English well’ and a belief that ‘it is not good’ when others ‘can’t hear and understand what I want to say’ (L2 study experiences – life timescale). Interactions with these understandings strongly channel his actions at the activity timescale (Witherington, 2011), whereby he notes that he ‘could teach the English word meaning to my pair’. He attributes a partial sense of achievement of his behavioural hope to his perception that he could ‘speak clearly in that, and my pair look like he understand’, feeding forward to additional motivation to ‘keep trying’ similar actions (activity, lesson and lesson-series timescales). That is, Kouhei’s sense-making is heavily dependent on his perceptions of his own actions and the re-actions from his partner, in the ongoing context of his psychology.

Although Ushioda (2011: 21–22) does not refer to feelings explicitly, she argues that ‘it is through social participation in opportunities, negotiations and activities that people’s motivations and identities develop and emerge as dynamically co-constructed processes’. Individuals co-form social context, which iteratively forms the playing field for behaviour and understandings – including feelings – of individuals making up the social context (Sampson, 2016a). These feelings and perceptions are carried forward to form the context for future interactions (Juarrero, 2002; Kauffman, 2008). By tracing reflections of participants over time and comparing with those of their partners, I could understand not only interacting timescales but moreover the dynamic co-construction of feelings in the classroom from different perspectives. Moving to extracts from the entries of Kouhei and his new partner for the following lesson:

I chose ‘Praise each other’ in today’s class. I could encourage my pair at today’s activity. I remembered what I tried to do last week lesson, so I told my pair that she can speaking English clearly. I could understand well what she wanted to say. I understand clearly because of my partner, so I think it important to speak clearly. … I also could speak more actively and clearly, so I think it was good to improve our English each other. (Kouhei, W5)

I choose ‘help each other understand’ because I have been returned to listen some times. I tried to speak clearly. Today, I wasn’t said ‘one more time’, so I might speak clearly than usual. … I seemed that I could have a conversation in English this lesson. So I would like to keep trying to use English. (Moe, W5)

From Kouhei’s perspective, he chooses an ideal for action different from that of the previous week, with motivation to ‘praise each other’ (lesson timescale). While this is a new intention, it is clearly positioned in the midst of his experiences from the previous week (lesson series timescale): Kouhei recalls his own efforts and reflections on his beliefs such that he ‘could encourage my pair’ by telling Moe that ‘she can speaking English clearly’ (activity timescale – sense of achievement). He also experiences a kind of gratitude towards Moe in that he ‘could understand well what she wanted to say’. Interestingly, it is also possible to see how Kouhei’s perceptions are afforded, perhaps serendipitously, by investigating the journal entry of his new partner: Moe had chosen to act on the hope ‘help each other understand’ (lesson timescale – motivation) through disappointment in her experiences that she had ‘been returned to listen some times’ (life timescale). She acts on this hope to change by trying to speak more clearly. Although she does not mention Kouhei’s praise, she does note a sense of achievement in that ‘I wasn’t said “one more time”’ (lesson timescale). That is, while Moe’s feelings are afforded by both her own and Kouhei’s actions, Kouhei’s belief that ‘I think it important to speak clearly’ (lesson-series to life timescale) is reinforced through the interaction of his own ongoing psychology with his noticing that ‘I understand clearly because of my partner’ (lesson timescale). Moreover, we can also understand that both Kouhei and Moe’s sense of progress, related positive affect and motivation in the development of an L2 identity emerge through the interplay of their ongoing psychologies with the context that they co-formed for the lesson.

Conclusion

The data discussed in this chapter were drawn from a research project which did not initially set out to investigate L2 study feelings. Instead, it was my developing interest in the feelings of my learners emergent from my interactions with the data that prompted me to look at one tool in more detail. To this end, questions may undoubtedly be raised about the reliability of making claims based on only this one form of data (participant journals). Nevertheless, the journals did provide situated insights into the psychologies and perceptions of experience of learners in my classes, suggesting a useful direction for research explicitly focusing on L2 study feelings. In general, employing complexity thinking encouraged me to attempt to interpret the frequently ambivalent ebb and flow of my learners’ feelings through interactions across different timescales with other aspects of their psychologies and the social context. The two methods of data analysis described in this chapter do take considerable time to conduct. However, I also believe that multiple threading and timescales analysis does a reasonable job of furnishing visual representations of the emotional context that any teacher encounters and co-forms together with learners in a classroom (Sampson, 2016b). And, considering that recent work in neurobiology (Immordino-Yang, 2016; Immordino-Yang & Fischer, 2016) and the sociodynamic construction of emotions (Boiger & Mesquita, 2015) reveals the constant, dynamic interplay between emotions, cognition and the environment, our students’ feelings matter for their learning. Future research might usefully mix data collection tools to gain multiple perspectives and explicitly gather data on different timescales, adding to learner and teacher journals by employing classroom observations, video-recording of classroom activity or analysis of (verbal) interactions. It is my hope that the current chapter provides at least some suggestions for how complexity perspectives can further assist in working towards describing more situated and nuanced landscapes of the emergence of L2 study feelings.

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