Читать книгу New Perspectives on Older Language Learners - Miriam Neigert - Страница 28

What’s past is prologue.

- Shakespeare, The Tempest, act II, scene I, lines 253-54 -

Mercer and Williams (2014), in their concluding remarks, divide research on the self in the SLA classroom into two broad categories: the contextual self and the temporal self.1 Based on this distinction I would like to focus on the latter – the temporal – aspect of self-concept in this section. This is not to say that context or the contextual self do not play a role in my study, as we will see in the next chapter. I focus on the temporal aspect for two main reasons:

Firstly, as we will see in this and the following section, the temporal perspective on the self in psychology and SLA research lays the foundation for central theories and models used to explore the self. In SLA research, for example, Dörnyei ’s (2005) L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS) draws on future-oriented self-aspects such as ideal and ought-to selves of L2 language learners (see section 3.4.1).

Secondly, for no other younger age group does time play such a central role as for the young-old (Carstensen 2006; Koutoukidis et al. 2013: 234; Russell 2011). They can look back onto a longer past than younger age groups, with various experiences to feed their current perception of self and construct future-oriented selves. Simultaneously, this particular phase of life is connected to major life changes, such as retirement, children having moved out from home (‘empty-nest syndrome’), or higher death rates among friends of their age, which trigger an increased awareness of time and the limits of life.

A first basic distinction of the temporal self can be past, present, and future self. Pinpointing the present, where it begins and where it ends (and inextricably linked to this are the beginnings and ends of past and future), is debatable. Is the present, and with it the present self, just that millisecond moment slicing the past and the future?2 Keeping this in mind, I am going to introduce and discuss three different constructs, which subsume influences of our past, present, and future selves: possible selves (Markus & Nurius 1986), self-discrepancy (Higgins 1987), and self-determination (Deci & Ryan 1985).