Читать книгу New Perspectives on Older Language Learners - Miriam Neigert - Страница 20

What is a concept in the first place? A concept, broadly defined, is what we associate with and what we believe – true or not – about something. This ‘something’ can be concrete like a bird or a dog (“Can it fly? Does it have four legs? Does it have feathers or fur?”); it can also be rather abstract and complex like war or peace (Neisser 1997: 4). Our concepts of these things can overlap, but are never exactly the same, and the extent to which concepts differ or are similar between different individuals can depend on different cultures (Jopling 2002: 45; Hattie 1992). The network of concepts to which a single concept refers can be considered a ‘theory’ (Neisser 1988: 53).

All of the above factors regarding concepts also apply to our concepts of the people around us and, of course, the network of concepts (or theory) we have about ourselves, i.e. our self-concepts. The important thing here is that self-concepts are more about what we believe to be true of our selves, or as Neisser (1993: 3) put it:

Concepts are one thing, reality is another. The same thing can be said of your concept of Ulric Neisser. More important, the same thing can also be said of my concept of Ulric Neisser. Self-concepts never do full justice to the self.

This makes self-concepts something subjective, something idiosyncratic; in other words, we need to keep in mind that the self creates a reality for an individual – one reality out of many. A reality of one’s self also diverges from how others create it from the outside. We can only assume that it is the sum of these created realities of self, which are shaping what is reality as Neisser describes. Since we as researchers are nowhere near being able to measure this objective reality, it is the subjective view of self of the young-old language learner that is methodologically more feasible to capture here in this study – even if not in its totality. In the light of this, ‘beliefs’ and ‘perceptions’ are the most appropriate terms to define self-concept in the context of my research, since they best capture its subjective and dynamic nature.

In the following, I will also use self-concept in both its singular and plural form, which – as we will see – highlights the fact that we can investigate self-concepts in different domains of our everyday life, but that there is at the same time a relatively stable part – the sum of our self-concepts, our theory of self – that is needed to give us a sense of unity (Canfield & Wells 1976; Markus & Wurf 1987; Jopling 1997). Are there other things we can agree on concerning human self-concept? Taking a closer look at different ideas of its structure and formation, which have been proposed by research so far, might present us with more universal characteristics of self-concept.