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ОглавлениеIntroduction: [simple and complex?]
Richard S. Pinner and Richard J. Sampson
This edited volume brings together both established and emerging researcher voices from around the world to illustrate how complexity perspectives might contribute to new ways of researching and understanding the psychology of language learners and teachers in situated educational contexts. We have encouraged contributors to very much include themselves in their discussions of the research of which they are a part. At this juncture, we are reminded of a pertinent thought from Miyahara (2015: 177):
It is somewhat surprising that not many researchers make transparent their journeys as learners, teachers or researchers. Rarely do we find information about them in their writings, yet we are expected to read, contemplate and discuss their research.
We hope that the voices and stories of our contributors are ‘visible’ in the chapters that follow. We also would like to make ourselves as editors more transparent by including here two short vignettes detailing our own roads into appreciating what complexity might offer.
Our (abridged) Journeys into Complexity
Richard P
My interest in complexity comes initially from a single chapter which I read about chaos theory and complexity by Menezes (2013) in an edited volume by Benson and Cooker (2013) called The Applied Linguistic Individual. I was reading up on autonomy and identity as part of my work on authenticity, which shows that I was already looking at other concepts in order to understand connections between abstract phenomena. Until reading this paper by Menezes, my only encounter with chaos theory was on my bachelor’s degree in Fine Art; we’d had a rather funny young teacher, who I will call Mr Lick, who we felt wasn’t all that bright. He was using ‘chaos theory’ by putting maggots on a canvas and letting them squirm around in paint, which of course we had all made fun of behind his back. However, this chapter was my first real introduction to the theory, and completely drove bad art from my mind. It did not just speak to me as a teacher, but more generally to the way I think about the universe. It mainly dealt with chaos theory, which is of course connected with and indeed part of what we refer to as complexity perspectives in this book. One thing I particularly liked was the discussion of fractals, which are patterns or shapes that are self-similar at all levels, so that, like the universe, they are ‘no simpler or more complicated whether examined through microscope or telescope’ (Davis & Sumara, 2006: 43–44). These shapes appear in nature all the time, from snowflakes to coastlines. Going back to my art school days, I actually experimented with such drawings when I was working on a project about infinity (see Figure 1.1 for an example of a fractal I drew), although I don’t think Mr Lick thought much of my drawings back then, which perhaps explains why I ended my artistic career and found myself doing a PhD in applied linguistics. Nevertheless, I wound up using complexity as a unifying lens for my hybrid of methodologies in my doctoral thesis.
Figure 1.1 A fractal known as the Levy Curve drawn by hand using a computer mouse, started from three interconnected pixels
Menezes posits that language learning identities are fractals of our whole identity. As we develop a voice in the target language and learn to express more and more of ourselves, the fractal set expands, and with it so does our identity. Fractals seemed very apt as a way of thinking about the smaller and bigger connections between the classroom and the external contexts that people bring to it, too. This did not just pique my interest and capture my attention as a teacher researcher, but more broadly it was a theory which could easily map onto my own philosophical understanding of being. Further reading, such as Kramsch (2002), Dörnyei et al. (2015) and especially Sampson (2016a), confirmed that complexity thinking would also be useful for me professionally, in terms of the metaphors it uses to describe lived experience, as well as the connections and drives (motivations) behind them. I briefly mentioned complexity in my first book, and as I already pointed out, I employed a complexity paradigm in my doctoral research to investigate the complex relationships between authenticity and motivation.
In my PhD viva I came up against some resistance to complexity by both of my examiners. They seemed to be under the impression that as I was doing practitioner research (which would be of primary interest to fellow practitioners) complexity would not be useful or accessible to this intended audience. I disagreed strongly, and managed to pass the defence, but I was still asked to remove some of the data and analysis which the examiners felt was too ‘complex’, by which I think they really meant technical. I will be presenting these data in my chapter later in this volume. I still believe that this paradigm helped me make sense of how I see the classroom, and what unites both Richard S and I is our shared and passionate belief that complexity is not an elite-only and inaccessible research paradigm that further alienates research from practice (Horn, 2008), but on the contrary it is something that could unite these two professional strands in applied linguists and language teaching.
Richard S
My mother was a home-economics teacher. From a young age (and during my secondary education also), I learnt the joys of combining various ingredients in sometimes radically different ways, via which exquisite wonders of taste, smell and vision would emerge that seemed to have very little to do with their components. Naturally, at times I was also successful in concocting what could only be seen as an affront to the term ‘cuisine’, despite my understanding that the ingredients ought to have combined well. My father was a geography and history teacher. He used to ask me interesting questions whenever we went anywhere ‘historical’, like ‘What was going on in the world at the time these people were living such that they decided to build like this?’. And we would together make an image of a diverse range of historical currents in the context of which some phenomenon occurred. Perhaps also influenced by his thoughts on geography, in my secondary school days I was fascinated by the interactions between earth systems and the way that everything seemed connected. However, it was not until my postgraduate studies that I re-encountered similar ideas in the form of complexity (even at one point prompting me to ponder the possibility of changing my entire research focus and occupation to something related to earth systems). I connected with complexity at a number of levels. As a classroom teacher, it just made sense, a lot more sense than much research that I was reading, of what I experienced day-in day-out of being part of language learning class groups. Experiences from my ongoing identity projects as a person other than a language teacher/researcher also connected with complexity: the non-linearity of my own Japanese language learning motivation and identity development; the co-adaptive nature of my attempts at bilingual childrearing with my Japanese–Australian children in Japan; and, more recently, the attrition of my first language. Even further back, growing up in countryside Australia had already allowed me to experience the interactions between ‘the whole and the parts’ of the beautiful natural ecosystems around me, such that complexity was not an earth-shatteringly novel idea.
The more that I read and thought about complexity, the more I came to believe that one of the main benefits of drawing on complexity theories is the philosophical aspect. Complexity thinking cautions against simplism, and asks us to consider experience and perception in deeper, more relational terms. And this is not such an overwhelming ask: We already live our lives in complex webs of dynamic interaction with both material and ideological artefacts (including other humans) across different timescales. In our existence and interactions and interpretations the world becomes a different place, and we become different at the same time. As Kuhn (2007: 173) remarks, in a complexity philosophy ‘not only are the knower and the known dynamic, self-organizing and emerging, the relationship of the knower to the known is likewise dynamic, self-organizing and emerging’. Complexity offers a fundamentally different way of approaching and thinking about life to that offered by much of our education into simplistic ideas (Morin, 2008).
Our Reasons for Bringing these Chapters Together
Complexity theory has been taken up with vigour in both theoretical and empirical psychology due to recognition of a longstanding tension between the inherent dynamism in everyday life and psychology’s quest to understand stability and coherence in phenomenal experience (Vallacher & Nowak, 2009). Prompted by Larsen-Freeman’s (1997) seminal paper, complexity research has also spread throughout the field of second language acquisition (SLA), not least in the investigation of various aspects of language learner and teacher psychology. A small sample of the diverse dimensions explored to date includes:
•learner agency (Mercer, 2011a);
•learner motivation (Dörnyei et al., 2015a, 2015b; Muir & Dörnyei, 2013; Nitta, 2013; Sampson, 2015, 2016a);
•learner self and identity (Menezes, 2013; Mercer, 2011b, 2011c; Sade, 2011; Sampson, 2016a);
•learner images of ideal classmates (Murphey et al., 2014; Sampson, 2018);
•learner emotions (Gkonou, 2017; Sampson, 2020a, 2019);
•critical incidents in learning (Finch, 2010; Pinner, 2016a, 2018);
•learner reticence and silence in the classroom (King, 2015; Yashima et al., 2016);
•learner willingness to communicate (Yashima et al., 2018);
•learner demotivation (Kikuchi, 2017);
•language learner group dynamics (Poupore, 2018);
•synergy between teacher and student motivation (Pinner, 2019);
•teacher identity (Henry, 2016; Pinner, 2019);
•teacher immunity (Hiver, 2015);
•teacher motivation (Kimura, 2014; Sampson, 2016b; Pinner, 2016b, 2019);
•teacher cognition (Feryok, 2010, 2018).
As 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 from a complexity perspective. How do complexity understandings underlie the phenomena or processes that are being researched? How does complexity inform the research approach? How do researchers conduct empirical investigation from a complexity perspective, for example, looking at dynamics, timescales, co-adaptation, emergence? What data collection tools and analysis methods are appropriate? How can we represent findings in ways that sufficiently express the complexity of lived experience, while ensuring representations are conceptually accessible to more than just a few complexity enthusiasts? And, importantly, how does all of this complexity perspective-taking add anything new and useful to our understandings of language learner and teacher psychology? Through contributors detailing and discussing their experiences of conducting complexity research, chapters present practical illustrations of how complexity research can be done, with convincing evidence of why a complexity perspective is useful to investigating and conceptualizing the psychology of language learners and teachers.
In Chapter 2, Peter MacIntyre, Sarah Mercer and Tammy Gregersen offer us their reflections on researching dynamics in language learning psychology. We as editors were very grateful for this contribution, not least because it includes a very handy glossary of terms associated with complexity research, which makes it essential reading for those wishing to learn more about the complexity theory itself. They discuss some useful terms which will appear again and again in the volume, such as timescales, attractor states, self-organization and fractals. What is more, they do so in accessible language and provide a blueprint really for those seeking to apply the complexity lens to their own enquiries.
For Chapter 3, Richard Sampson shares his research on emotions, using timescales to understand how emotions change and develop, and how they possibly influence learning and teaching at various levels. His presentation of multiple threading for learners’ feelings offers not only a fascinating way to understand the myriad of emotions that students reported feeling in the classroom, but it is also a lovely vision of complexity in its own right (according to Richard P).
In Chapter 4, Rebecca Oxford and Christina Gkonou continue the discussion of emotions, and tell us how they developed the Managing Your Emotions survey tool. While a survey might not seem overly complex, they argue that this new, scenario-based method which encourages narrative responses can take into account the ecologies of learning and teaching and focus the complexity lens on affective strategies.
Chapter 5 by Tomoko Yashima is an extended report of her work with Willingness to Communicate (WTC). As Tomoko was one of the original symposiasts at the PLL3 conference, we were delighted that she accepted our invitation to contribute this chapter, especially as her work so artfully demonstrates the use of both qualitative and quantitative data for gaining situated and nuanced understandings from the classroom.
We could not resist following up Tomoko’s paper on WTC with a wonderful paper by Lesley Smith and Jim King, which focuses on the complex issue of silence in the classroom. We thought this juxtaposition was very interesting as it shows the range of complexity research. Their thorough examination of silence also skilfully utilizes both qualitative and quantitative data to gain a more holistic picture of why students do not contribute to foreign language classes in Japanese universities.
We are very happy to feature the fourth and final member of our original symposium, Joe Falout, in Chapter 7. Joe brings the concept of motivational resonance to learner self-concepts, and applies a complexity perspective from outside of SLA. What is intriguing about Joe’s chapter is the way that he provides a narrative of his researching lifetime, rather than homing in on any one particular study. Although not explicitly doing so at the times specific research was carried out, his experiences all speak to complexity.
For Chapter 8, Sal Consoli provides us with an up-close and personal account of his own teaching and research with pre-sessional courses in a UK university, working from an ecological perspective that employs Exploratory Practice to gain contextually situated insights into learner motivation. He draws on Bordieuan sociological ideas to situate his learners’ personal motivations, following Ushioda’s (2009) person-in-context relational view of motivation, and shares some samples of Potentially Exploitable Pedagogic Activities, which give us an insight into his classroom and his learners’ lives and experiences.
In Chapter 9, Kedi Simpson and Heath Rose argue that a complexity approach offers a more ‘ecologically rich’ foundation for research. In rejecting the reductionist approaches which attempt to compartmentalize the ‘messy’ complex nature of real-world classroom research, they invite a complexity perspective which draws on a wonderful horticultural metaphor to help situate aspects of learner psychology in a listening class with children learning French. As such this is an invaluable chapter as it brings another contextual dimension to the volume and helps broaden the discussion.
Chapter 10 sees Takumi Aoyama and Takenori Yamamoto demonstrating the Trajectory Equifinality Approach. This is an approach that can be used to retrospectively explore the psychology of L2 learners and teachers, and delve into both the redundancy and diversity of life experiences evolving to similar points of interest. We are delighted that these authors were able to join us, as it allows a methodology which has been chiefly developed in Japan (and hence written about in Japanese) to be brought to an English-speaking audience.
Ryo Nitta and Yoshiyuki Nakata then share their use of a retrodictive research approach to understanding class climate in Chapter 11. Once again exemplifying the skilled combination of quantitative and qualitative tools, they highlight differences between the English class climates that developed in two separate groups at a Japanese senior-high school. A key insight from their study is the value of collaboration between the local teacher and the researchers, through which they were able to understand their data in a more contextualized fashion.
Chapter 12 by Christine Muir again demonstrates the utility of collaboration between teachers-as-co-researchers and academics. Drawing on recent research into directed motivational currents (DMCs), she extends this construct by investigating the emergence of group-level DMCs during project work in an Australian setting. Her chapter aims to demonstrate to practitioner-researchers the suitability of formative experiments as one situated way of exploring the emergence and management of group-level motivation.
In Chapter 13, Richard Pinner shows how he used autoethnography and social network analysis to question assumptions about his learners, providing us with a short narrative of two very different students with surprising characteristics in common. There are unfortunately those who believe research done by teachers ought to simply focus on teaching ‘tips and tricks’ (see Sampson, in preparation). Richard P’s chapter is a fine (according to Richard S) example of the valuable, deeper understandings of practitioners, their learners and their contexts of practice that can emerge through looking back at a ‘completed’ teacher-researcher study.
Alastair Henry brings together a collection of contradictory selves in Chapter 14. Drawing on the theory of the dialogical self, under-researched in L2 settings, he presents research from Sweden looking at teacher identity. His studies uncovered the ways in which student-teacher understandings of teacher identity evolved through a teaching practicum, impacted in large part by the presence or not of their mentor-teacher in the classroom with them. His fascinating demonstration of the use of both introspective and dialogical data suggests a constructive approach to exploring mediated and less-mediated psychological processes.
In Chapter 15, Anne Feryok provides a refreshingly clear account of the non-linearity of the research process. She describes how she picked up on a particular utterance in data from a study with one of her doctoral students. Conducting microgenetic analysis prompted by this seemingly trivial starting point led to a further application of frame analysis to understand the situated emergence of a language teacher’s cognition.
To conclude this volume, we are honoured to feature Ema Ushioda’s chapter which rounds everything off better than we possibly could …
Finally …
In closing this introductory chapter, we would like to thank the contributors for their amazing work with us in seeing this project through to this stage. From the very outset, various people expressed their hopes for this volume, with the feeling that it was high time such a work be undertaken. Yet, to be completely honest, when we put out the initial call for proposals, and then gave authors the guidelines for construction of their chapters, little did we know how much we were asking. It was only when it came time for us to also write our individual chapters that it finally sank in. Naturally, it is quite a skill in itself to see a research project through to completion, and write about it as an empirical article or chapter. We then pushed our contributors to expound on their take on complexity theory, and the actual practice of researching from a complexity perspective. We asked them not simply what, but also how they do what they do. At the time of putting together the call for proposals, we often used the metaphor of a magician revealing their tricks. The trouble is, researchers are not magicians, and the research we do is not a trick or an illusion. And, so, we now realize that writing up a previous study with this reveal-all approach is extremely hard. The balance of narrative, data and methods all need to come together in order to help the reader retrace the steps of the researcher through what was no-doubt a very windy and uphill path. That being said, we hope that this book helps pave the way as one smoother path for complexity research into the psychology and practice of language teaching and learning.
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