Search

Circular seating arrangements can help instill a sense of belonging within classroom communities with overall positive effects on learning, emotions, and well-being. Yet students and their teachers within certain language classroom contexts, due to sociocultural limitations, may be relegated to learning in antisocial environments instilled partly by rank-and-file seating. Attributions for teacher demotivation can often lie in student misbehaviors, while student demotivation, silence, and resistance relate strongly to lack of bodily displays and physical affordances of interpersonal care, understanding, and trust that, if present, would contribute positively to many social aspects of their learning and identity formation. Specifically, rank-and-file seating constricts the area in the classroom most likely to dispose attention and interest to the learning and to others, whereas circular seating potentially expands this area, known as the action zone, to the whole classroom. Seating arrangements therefore can play an important role in the formation of interpersonal dynamics and identity formation among students and their teachers. In this paper, the purposes and ways of using circular seating in language classrooms will be explored from a social psychological perspective. Language teachers are invited to imagine and experiment with possibilities for uses of different seating arrangements in their own classrooms.

When foreign language education is compulsory, competitive, or coercive, how learners cope with stress can determine outcomes, including value of the subject, persistence on task, and level of proficiency. The development of adaptive or maladaptive coping processes toward situated learning goals is influenced by learners' beliefs about themselves and their experiences. This study consisted of 157 university learners in Japan who responded to an open-ended questionnaire about the ways they lost, regained, and maintained motivation when learning English as a foreign language (EFL) as a compulsory subject. Data were analyzed using a framework of coping processes. Short- and long-term coping processes were compared between learners with positive and negative self-concepts regarding EFL. This paper reports on the stages and types of developmental coping processes that can lead to building a wide range of adaptive processes, or to self-defeating helplessness, when facing impediments to learning. Findings indicate that establishing adaptive processes early in learning appeared critical for long-term self-confidence and eventual proficiency. Moreover, learners with positive self-concepts more often reported using their social networks for motivational support than learners with negative self-concepts, who believed such support would have helped them to remotivate. Implications for teaching are also discussed. (Contains 1 note, 4 tables, and 8 figures.)

Educational systems endemic of demotivation might signify a stagnating rather than nurturing ecology of learning, due in part to an obstruction in the loops of shared information between the organisms within these systems, i.e., teachers, educational researchers, teacher educators, school administrators, and educational policymakers. Working within the ecology of English as a foreign language education in Japan, we have been endeavoring over several years to open loops of communication with students through a learning-teaching-researching process we call critical participatory looping (CPL). We reported successes in various publications about how CPL has improved our students' motivations, and this paper elaborates upon two recent examples to provide a grounding of CPL in practices that support activating ecological adaptability. First, we theorize that individuals and groups (classes) can be seen as socially intelligent dynamic systems, and examine this perspective in relation to intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics of students needing nurturing loops of open communication in order to foster greater self-awareness and mutual care. Then we suggest that through soft assembling expansive learning, students and teacher-researchers might open communications explicitly about themselves and their contexts, deepen mutual appreciation and understandings, and act purposefully as agents toward promoting healthy qualities in themselves. Finally, we show with two examples that the social life of valuable information can be extended by looping it not only back to those that created it but also by looping it forward (similar to paying it forward) across expanding networks that might benefit from it with ecological adaptability.

Results from research about language learners can be strengthened by including the learners themselves in the data analysis, and inviting them to check researcher interpretations to confirm the validity of the data, to search for alternative interpretations, and to delve deeper into their beliefs. Using critical participatory looping (CPL), the authors give compiled results, gathered from surveys or assignments, back to the original participants. They developed CPL based on Freire's (2007/1970) participatory principles and Dewey's (1910) pedagogy of reflective thinking for motivating learners, the four phases of which are experience, description, analysis, and intelligent action. In this article, the authors outline a rationale for practicing CPL and relate it to past research and preexisting teaching methods that they discovered were relevant. They provide two examples of their own research with CPL and discuss how it strengthens the credibility of their interpretations, and how it has increased learner engagement and motivation. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

Demotivation can negatively influence the learner's attitudes and behaviors, degrade classroom group dynamics and teacher's motivation, and result in long-term and widespread negative learning outcomes. 900 university EFL learners were surveyed to investigate the demotivating factors in learning English as a foreign language (EFL) in Japan, and the relationship between past demotivating experiences and present proficiencies. Affective states and capacity to self-regulate learning were compared among learners with varying academic interests, experiences, and proficiencies. Demotivating factors were grouped into three categories: external conditions of the learning environment, internal conditions of the learner, and reactive behaviors to demotivating experiences. Internal and reactive factors were shown to correlate with long-term EFL learning outcomes. Findings from this study indicated that beginning, less-proficient learners in non-English majors were least likely to control their affective states to cope with demotivating experiences. Finally, this paper discusses steps that might prevent or minimize demotivation and facilitate remotivation. (Contains 7 tables.)

The article presents an analysis of the use of critical participatory looping (CPL) for students in second language acquisition studies. Based on a study of CPL involving member checking of interpretations, the authors believe that CPL could offer a paradigmatic shift in data analyses by giving learners the opportunity to engage in educational practices. It emphasizes that CPL is contributive in making students participate and create critical inquiries in their learning environments.