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Theorizing Affect in ForeignLanguage Learning: An Analysisof One Learner’s Responsesto a CommunicativePortuguese CoursePAULA GARRETTa and RICHARD F. YOUNGb

In this study we explore a student’s affective responses to classroom foreign language learn-ing. In 2 meetings each week throughout an 8-week Portuguese course for beginners, thefirst author described her language learning experiences to the second author. Sessions weretranscribed and then coded and analyzed. A theoretical model grounded in the learner’s expe-riences was developed to understand the learner’s affective responses to the language learningprocess, the events from which her affect sprang, and her affective trajectory over the 8 weeks.This study is a response to the need for methodological and epistemological diversity in secondlanguage acquisition research and contributes to studies that focus on the affective responsesof the learner to the language learning experience. Implications for the role played by emo-tion in learners’ classroom foreign language learning and the development of socioculturalcompetence in a second language are discussed.

ALTHOUGH LEARNERS IN ONE FOREIGNlanguage classroom are exposed to the samelessons, each individual may process lessons differ-ently, resulting in very different language learningexperiences. For example, in a study of learners’beliefs about the language learning process, somedescribed their experience as “traveling to newplaces,” whereas others described their experi-ence as “undergoing a painful medical proce-dure” (Kramsch, 2003, p. 116). These vastly dif-ferent interpretations of the language learningexperience illustrate its uniqueness for each in-dividual. Learner accounts, which tend to focuson the affective (emotional) responses of thelearner to the language learning process, not onlysupply information about how different learners

aUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Frenchand Italian, 612 Van Hise Hall, 1220 Linden Dr., Madi-son, WI 53706-1403, Email: [email protected] of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of English,7163 Helen C. White Hall, 600 N Park Street, Madison, WI53706-1403, Email: [email protected]

The Modern Language Journal, 93, ii, (2009)0026-7902/09/209–226 $1.50/0C©2009 The Modern Language Journal

appraise their experiences but also provide in-sight into where learners focus their attention dur-ing foreign language lessons.

With certain notable exceptions (Arnold, 1999;Ehrman, 1996; Horwitz, 2001; Horwitz & Young,1991; Stevick, 1996), affect and emotion are termsthat have been in the shadows of discussions ofclassroom foreign language learning, where theprimary focus has been on the development ofknowledge and use of the new language. We be-lieve that one reason for this is the neglect ofemotion by psychologists during most of the 20thcentury. At the end of that century, Damasio(1999) wrote:

Emotion was not trusted in the laboratory. Emotionwas too subjective, it was said. Emotion was too elusiveand vague. Emotion was at the opposite end fromreason, easily the finest human ability, and reason waspresumed to be entirely independent from emotion.(p. 39)

Largely inspired by the work of Damasio and hiscolleagues, 21st-century psychologists have begunto research the relations among emotion, cog-nition, memory, and consciousness, and applied

210 The Modern Language Journal 93 (2009)

linguists have sought to understand the role ofemotion in language learning.

According to J. Schumann (1998), affective ap-praisal of stimuli is at the core of cognition, andit drives our decision-making processes. He de-scribed two important roles of affect in learning:“emotional reactions influence the attention andeffort devoted to learning, and . . . patterns of ap-praisal may underlie what has been consideredmotivation in SLA” (p. 8). A positive affectiveassessment of a stimulus encourages approachto similar stimuli in the future, whereas a nega-tive affective assessment promotes avoidance. Itis through experiencing the world and conduct-ing an affective appraisal of these experiencesthat individuals develop their own unique pref-erences and aversions. Schumann cited researchby Scherer (1984a) and Leventhal and Scherer(1987) that indicates that organisms exhibit pref-erence or aversion to environmental stimuli basedon whether the stimuli are novel, pleasant, en-hancing of goals or needs, compatible with cop-ing mechanisms, and supportive of self-image andsocial image.

Schumann (1998) suggested that two basicbiological regulatory systems—homeostatic andsociostatic—are innate, survival-enhancing ten-dencies that lead to the formation of preferencesand aversions. Homeostatic regulation providesthe value system that guides early motor and so-matosensory behavior in the environment. Socio-static tendencies drive human organisms to seekout interaction with conspecifics. Sociostats are“the inherited drives for attachment and social af-filiation, which are initially directed toward theinfant’s mother or caretaker and are gradually ex-tended to others in the individual’s network ofsocial relations” (Schumann, p. 3). Extending thetheory of sociostatic regulation to the languagelearning experience, Schumann suggested thatinterpersonal relations between students also af-fect a student’s sense of well-being in a profound,survivalist sense. Situations that students interpretas threatening to their membership in a classroomcommunity can adversely affect their desire to cre-ate and preserve social affiliations.

Although these researchers have provided acomprehensive theoretical framework for thestudy of affect, few studies of classroom sec-ond language acquisition (SLA) have consideredlearners’ preferences and aversions during theiractual language learning experiences. One ex-ample of sociostatic regulation at work in adultsecond language learning can be seen in Bailey’s(1983) research on competitiveness and anxiety.The language learning diary entries by students

collected by Bailey show they experienced anxietywhen comparing themselves with others, and shefound that such comparisons created images offailure.

Bailey (1983) also included her personal lan-guage learning diary in her study, in which sherevealed many instances of her own anxiety dueto a desire to appear successful in front of herpeers. She wrote in her journal: “This fear of pub-lic failure seems to have been caused or at leastaggravated by comparing myself with the otherstudents (or with an idealized self-image), ratherthan by any fear of rebuke from the teacher”(p. 74). In addition to the anxiety that she as-sociated with comparing herself to her peers, Bai-ley developed ill feelings toward those in the lan-guage class whom she perceived to be at a higherlevel of proficiency. She described how she soughtout peers whom she perceived to be at her levelas well as her negative reactions toward those withwhom she felt competitive: “I was apparently veryuncomfortable . . . . My feelings of inadequacy incomparing myself to the other students led me toseek out allies and react negatively to some stu-dents” (p. 75).

The importance of studying the emotionaldimensions of foreign and second language learn-ing was stressed by Dewaele (2005). He empha-sized that a majority of cognitive psychologistsagree that emotion is essential to human cogni-tion (Harris, Gleason, & Aycicegi, 2006; Panksepp,1998). Research by Pavlenko and Dewaele (2004)investigated the role of emotion-related factorsin language alternation by bilinguals. Their find-ings indicated a superior emotionality of the firstlanguage and the preference for using that lan-guage to express emotions. Now that the affec-tive dimension is recognized as a crucial aspectof human mental and social life, the tendency toinclude emotional and affective responses in SLAresearch has increased. Dewaele contended that

Research on instructed SLA would benefit from anincreased methodological and epistemological diver-sity and . . . a focus on affect and emotion amongresearchers might inspire authors of teaching mate-rials and foreign language teachers to pay increasedattention to the communication of emotion and thedevelopment of sociocultural competence in a L2.(p. 367)

Dewaele also saw the second language learner as“not only an object of scientific curiosity, but also acrucial witness of his or her own learning process”(p. 369).

The important role of emotion in languagelearning and language use thus has been

Paula Garrett and Richard F. Young 211

previously established through the work of J. Schu-mann, Pavlenko, Dewaele, and others. However,few studies have examined the first-person experi-ences of language learners or attempted to relatetheir experience of emotion to their individualsuccesses and failures in language learning.1,2

The study reported in this article is based on thetestimony of one language learner who bears wit-ness to her own learning process. It is an attemptto construct a theory that interprets her emotionas constituted by her changing experiences in theclassroom over the 8-week trajectory of her courseof study and by her personal struggles with a newforeign language.

DESIGN OF THE STUDY

As a review of the literature demonstrates, stu-dents of second/foreign languages have bornewitness to their own learning process in a num-ber of different ways. Personal narratives of sec-ond language learners, either in the form of thediary studies cited earlier or in the more struc-tured form of learner memoirs, have recently re-ceived increased attention (Block, 2003; Kramsch,2003; McGroarty, 1998; Pavlenko, 2001; Pavlenko& Lantolf, 2000; J. Schumann, 1998; Young, 1999).In the 1970s and 1980s, diaries were kept by ap-plied linguists who were themselves in the pro-cess of learning a language (Bailey, 1983; Schmidt& Frota, 1986; Schumann & Schumann, 1977).More recently, learner memoirs by nonlinguistshave provided a rich source of data on the sec-ond language learning process (Davidson, 1994;Hoffman, 1989; Kaplan, 1993; Z. Liu, 1984; Mori,1997; Rodriguez, 1982; Watson, 1995).

According to Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000):

In recent years narrative genre and personal narra-tives per se have gained increasing stature in psychol-ogy, sociology, sociolinguistics, and anthropology aslegitimate and rich data sources for a variety of inves-tigations including that of narrative construction ofselves and realities. (p. 159)

Pavlenko (2001) further argued that the field ofSLA can benefit from autobiographic narrativesin which adult immigrants recount the stages ofidentity loss and recovery during their second lan-guage learning as they try to create identities asmembers of a new culture. These personal narra-tives “bring to the surface aspects of human activ-ity, including SLA that cannot be captured in themore traditional approach to research” (p. 159).Goodson and Sikes (2001) also believed that thetechnical, scientific language used in many studies“is usually inadequate and inappropriate when it

comes to expressing human emotions which are,after all, at the heart of human perception andexperience” (p. 2).

However, the narrative method is not withoutits critics. Some have questioned the relation be-tween a narrative and the events it depicts. Carr(1997) noted that “any narrative account willpresent us with a distorted picture of the events itrelates” (p. 7). He believes that narration is consti-tutive not only of action and experience but also ofthe self that acts and experiences. Rosenwald andOchberg (1992) questioned the narrative “self,”arguing that the sense of self is partly one’s senseof who one is in relation to an audience. These au-thors have also questioned the presence of an in-terviewer in the creation of the oral narrative of aninterviewee. Thus, many critics caution readers toquestion the contextual nature of narratives andthe depiction of reality created by the narrator.

Partly in response to these criticisms of narra-tive and phenomenological research, researchersin sociology have developed procedures of whatthey have termed grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006;Glaser, 1978; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss, 1987;Strauss & Corbin, 1990, 1998). Grounded theoryemphasizes the meaning of experience for partic-ipants while allowing the researcher to generateor discover a theoretical framework within whichsocial processes can be accurately described andfully explained.3 Thus, theories or ideas about asocial and psychological process such as languagelearning can become “grounded” in data from thefield and, more specifically, in the actions, inter-actions, and social processes of learners.

Within grounded theory, one response to crit-icism of the role of the narrator in reporting onevents is the systematic method of data collectionand analysis described by Charmaz (2006). Theresearcher first asks participants to focus on theirreactions to a particular process and, if possible,to identify specific steps in that process. Theseand other issues are described in interviews, afterwhich participants’ responses are openly coded.In open coding, a researcher segments the talkin the interview into several different categoriesof information. The researcher then looks withineach category for several properties or subcate-gories that could allow him or her to construct alarger level of explanation.

The next stage in carrying out grounded theoryresearch is axial coding, in which the researcheridentifies a major category4 and then (a) ex-plores conditions that influence the category, (b)identifies actions or interactions that result fromthe major category, (c) identifies the conditionsthat influence the actions, and (d) delineates the


outcomes for this category. In the final stage—selective coding—the researcher blends the in-formation from the first two stages into a largernarrative storyline. The result is a theory writtenby the researcher, which emerges with the help ofwritten notes on the evolving observations madethroughout the process of open, axial, and selec-tive coding. These procedures were followed inthe study that we describe in the rest of this article.

METHOD

In the summer of 2005, Garrett, the first au-thor, attended an intensive 8-week Brazilian Por-tuguese course at a university in the AmericanMidwest. Like many of her peers in the course,she had received a Foreign Language and AreaStudies (FLAS) fellowship to study Portuguesefor the summer as well as throughout the follow-ing academic year. (Her primary reason for ap-plying for the FLAS fellowship in the first placewas because she was interested in tensions inFrench Guiana between the French- and creole-speaking Guianese and the large numbers oflegal and illegal immigrants from Brazil.) ThePortuguese summer course was intensive andwas offered only to students who were alreadyproficient in Spanish or other Romance lan-guages. Although Garrett’s Spanish skills wereweak, she was accepted into the program basedon her proficiency in French. (Garrett has a mas-ter’s degree in French and had spent 7 yearsteaching the language at the secondary andpostsecondary levels prior to this experience.)

The Portuguese course in which Garrett en-rolled met for 2 hours in the morning and 2 morein the afternoon 5 days a week. The morning ses-sions were taught by an experienced male nativespeaker of Brazilian Portuguese, who had workedas an instructor in the program for over 15 yearsand had co-authored the program’s required text-book. These sessions were primarily devoted tothe introduction of new grammatical structuresas well as to their contextualization in authen-tic language materials, including Brazilian songs,advertisements, and articles from magazines. Theafternoon sessions, in contrast, were taught by afemale nonnative-speaking teaching assistant andfocused mainly on promoting language use andincreased cultural awareness. Students watchedmovies, listened to guest speakers, and engagedin communicative activities that required them touse Portuguese.

Throughout the course, Garrett met withYoung, the second author, twice each weekto talk at length about her language learning

experiences and feelings. The meetings weregenerally short and informal in nature, with nopredetermined agenda or set of questions. Gar-rett’s accounts of her experiences were recordedon audiotape, resulting in a total of 6 hours ofdata. She then transcribed the tapes 3 weeks afterthe end of the program (except the tape for Week3, which was inadvertently destroyed).

The analysis consisted of the repeated sorting,coding, and recoding of data that characterizesthe grounded theory approach. The most salientfeature of the transcripts was the richness of Gar-rett’s affective responses to her learning experi-ence. Using J. Schumann’s (1998) definitions ofaffect in learning, affective appraisal of stimulithat appeared to be driving Garrett’s learning de-cisions were coded. The 91 pages of transcriptswere then coded for words and expressions thatappeared to be related to emotional reactions andpatterns of appraisal. Next, a list of affective re-sponses was made and linked to the event thatelicited the response. Examples of some wordsand phrases that indexed positive and negativeaffect are shown in Table 1.5

Subcategories of the topics that appeared toelicit the learner’s affective reactions were thenidentified, confirmed by both authors, and coded.After several refinements of the subcategoriesthat emerged from the transcripts, they were re-assessed. Table 2 illustrates the four main topicsthat ultimately emerged from the transcripts aseliciting the most affective responses. They are(a) language awareness—Garrett’s awareness ofher own knowledge of Portuguese and her com-parisons of the language with other languages sheknew; (b) teacher voice—Garrett’s own profes-sional teacher’s voice that appeared in the wayshe evaluated her instructors’ teaching styles andcourse materials, as well as in her own learn-ing strategies; (c) social relations—with other stu-dents in the class and with her instructors; and (d)

TABLE 1Examples of Terms in the Transcripts IndexingAffect

Positive Affect Negative Affect

It’s fantastic . . . is annoying. . . was nice! I don’t know if I can do thisI find . . . interesting I’m not very good at this yetIt was kind of cool . . . was driving me nuts

that . . .

. . . that was exciting! Difficult to processI’m feeling more . . . was extremely

comfortable frustrating. . . re-inspires me . . . is weird


TABLE 2Topics That Elicited Affective Responses From the Learner

Topic Examples

Language Awareness Self-evaluation of her comprehensionand production of linguistic aspectsof Portuguese

“I’m still not hearing everything, andI’m still not speaking with precision,I’m kind of mumbling through it.”

Comparisons of Portuguese with otherlanguages

“It is kind of cool how Portuguese islike French, except that you dropsome inner syllables.”

Teacher Voice Her response to her instructor’steaching style

“I felt like I was in the hands of a greatinstructor because I had a feeling heknew which words were hard for us.”

Her response to the course materials “Story making was cute, playful andfun!”

Her own learning strategies “I was prepared because I studied10–15 hours.”

Social Relations With her classmates “Being more comfortable with otherpeople in the class grounds you.”

With her instructor “Everyone wants to be like the TA.”Her self-image as a member of the class “I’m seeing a difference between

myself and others, and realizing Ineed to put more time into this.”

Culture Learning Her responses to cultural instructionand materials

“The cultural information isgrounding the language, making itreal.”

Her own place in the new culture “I think my identity as a learner isstarting to shift, and I think thecultural component of our lessonsplays a big role in this.”

culture learning—her responses to the Brazilianculture to which she was exposed.

Codes and categories were sorted, compared,and contrasted until saturated—that is, until fur-ther analysis produced no new codes or categoriesand when all of the data were accounted for in thecore categories. Individual comments in each ofthe four topic areas were totaled to estimate whichtopics were most frequently mentioned as elicitingan affective response. In each comment, Garrettexpressed either positive or negative affect, andthe totals of positive and negative affective com-ments in each of the four categories are displayedin Figure 1.

FINDINGS

Quantitative analysis of Garrett’s affective com-ments over the entire 8-week course (Figure 1)reveals that the majority of her remarks centeredon social relations in the classroom (134 com-ments) or on assessment of the course with herprofessional teacher voice (121 comments). Shepaid slightly less attention to linguistic aspectsof Portuguese (110 comments) and commentedmuch less overall on the new culture to which shewas exposed (52 comments). Although the topic

of culture received the least amount of overall at-tention, Figure 1 reveals that the comments madeabout it were predominately positive. In compar-ison, the other topic areas were more evenly di-vided between positive and negative comments.

When the aggregate of Garrett’s affective com-ments are divided according to whether she ex-pressed positive or negative affect, however, aslightly different pattern emerges. The highestnumber of positive affective responses to herexperience had to do with her evaluation ofthe course with her teacher voice (97 positivecomments) and with her affective responses tosocial relations in the course (65 positive co-ments). These were followed by her responsesto the cultural aspects of the course (50 pos-itive comments), with language awareness (43positive comments) ranking last. The total num-ber of positive comments was 255, and theproportions of positive comments in the fourtopic areas are displayed in Figure 2.

Counting negative affective comments over the8-week course revealed a total of 69 negativecomments about social relations and 67 negativecomments about language awareness. The num-ber of negative comments about the classmade with the learner’s teacher voice was


FIGURE 1Distribution of 417 Affective Comments by Topic

considerably lower (24 negative comments), withculture learning receiving only 2 negative com-ments. The total number of negative com-ments was 162, and the proportions of negative

FIGURE 2Proportions of 255 Positive Affective Comments byTopic

comments across the four topic areas are dis-played in Figure 3.

These quantitative results are aggregates of Gar-rett’s affective comments throughout the class.They do not, however, provide a representationof how her appraisal of different stimuli changedover the course of the 8 weeks. (This can only bedone by analyzing her responses week by week.)Similarly, the numbers do not provide much in-sight into the kinds of stimuli that may haveprompted her affective responses. The remainderof our analysis is therefore devoted to a week-by-week narrative of the learner’s affective responsesto events in the four topic areas. Tables 3 and4 show week-by-week representations of her posi-tive and negative affective comments, and the fol-lowing sections describe her responses in greaterdetail.

Language Awareness

At the beginning of her language learning ex-perience, Garrett reported struggling with Por-tuguese phonetics. She experienced difficultyin discerning sounds and producing unfamiliarsounds that the instructor wanted the class to im-itate. For example, in Week 1 she reported:


FIGURE 3Proportions of 162 Negative Affective Comments byTopic

I’ve seen this one word ten times yet I still could notunderstand how to say it, or remember it. I thought,“Why is this?” I’d hear him say it, and it wasn’t match-ing what I was seeing written. It was a strange sound Icould not recognize.

Garrett was also frustrated in Week 1 by her in-ability to ask for help using the target language.In fact, she felt, there were many things she didnot understand about the language:

I wanted to ask how to say “How do you say something”and we didn’t cover that until Day 2 and that wasextremely frustrating. I felt extremely limited, thatI had questions and couldn’t ask them, but in theend, it was probably better just to listen to the spokenlanguage for the first day.

Garrett reported feeling “more empowered” onceshe knew how to ask for the meaning of a wordin Portuguese. In addition, she was excited aboutthe novelty of the language learning experience,as demonstrated by comments such as “Eureka!”(when she discovered how to pronounce a word)and “I felt like that was a success” (once she real-ized she could understand the prosody of the lan-guage). She also expressed positive affect whenshe began to discover similarities between Frenchand Portuguese, as can be seen in comments like“It is kind of cool how Portuguese is like French,except that you drop some inner syllables” and“Running into French cognates in Portuguese

inspires me.” Even toward the end of Week 2, how-ever, Garrett continued to criticize herself for notbeing able to discern certain syllables. Overall, herlanguage awareness experience that week provedto be more negative than positive.

During Week 4, Garrett made more positivecomments about language and language learningthan she did in any other week. This is likely dueto her success on an exam she took that week. Shealso remarked, however, that she feared she wassimply memorizing words, rather than becomingcapable of actually using the language to com-municate. She did not express feelings of intim-idation at encountering the written language orat being asked to reproduce it on the test. Morespecifically, she stated that she did not find gram-matical information daunting:

Especially now that we’ve done past tense, preterit,conditional and future—which he just explained tous ten minutes before we left class today and it’s onour final tomorrow. But it’s easy. It’s just the verb anddifferent endings, so it’s not so bad.

Despite her success on quizzes and tests, whichhelped to support her self-image as a successfullearner, Garrett’s oral communication had notyet been evaluated as of Week 4 and she did notfeel that she was communicating successfully. Shediscounted improvements in her pronunciationand focused instead on her perceived lack of abil-ity to communicate. The more she learned, themore she realized she did not know. Week 5was the only week when Garrett reported feelingthat she was starting to be able to communicateeffectively (even though she said she still felt over-whelmed by grammatical rules).

Apparently, comparing Portuguese to otherlanguages was important only right at the begin-ning of the course. It was not until Week 5 thatGarrett mentioned contrasting French and Por-tuguese again: “Preterits and imperfects are notused the same in French as Portuguese. I findthis interesting.” Also in Week 5, Garrett still feltshe was having difficulty discerning the differentforms of the copula (ser and estar in Portuguese).She felt like she was starting to be able to com-municate, although not nearly as well as she hadhoped: “I’m still not hearing everything and I’mstill not speaking with precision. I’m kind of mum-bling through it.” Once again, the number ofnegative comments exceeded positive commentsin Week 5. Although Garrett felt she was becom-ing more skilled, her expectations of the level shewanted to reach were also increasing.

In Week 6, the numbers of positive and nega-tive affective comments were equal. The class took


TABLE 3An Affective Trajectory: Weekly Sources of Positive Comments

Language Awareness Teacher Voice Social Relations Culture Learning

Week 1 French cognates,pronunciation,empoweringvocabulary

Teacher’s approach toteach phonetics,word association,humor, eye contact

Finding a group,relations with theprofessor

None

Week 2 The challenge oflearning a newlanguage

Learner strategies;colors, reviewsheets; teacher’sability to push us toour limit

Study group; groupconfession of howstressful this is

History andgeography ofBrazil; “culturalinfo compensatesmy lack oflinguistic mastery”

Week 3 N/A N/A N/A N/AWeek 4 Grade on a quiz;

confidence withtesting ability

Correction, dictationexercises;story-making activity

More peoplecontributing inclass; variety ofpartners

None

Week 5 Final exam results Fun activity after test;Anglophone gave alecture inPortuguese

Developing myidentity in groupas “silly”

Anthropologistguest lecturer,history of soccer,movie

Week 6 Feeling wellprepared for aquiz

Useful subjunctivereview sheet, theconversation group

Conversation group,classmate’sbrother

Meeting a Brazilian,songs, carnival,capoeira, samba

Week 7 Interesting verbs,comparison toFrench

Sequence in which welearned verbs,grammar exercises

Everyoneparticipates morein class, party atprofessor’s house

NS professor’sresponse torequest to keepour class quieter

Week 8 Word order;successfulcommunication

Professor pushes us toour limit, FOF,describing atraumatic event

Classmates morerelaxed after party,relying onclassmates for help

Feeling empowereddue to culturalknowledge gainedin course

Note . The audio tape for Week 3 was inadvertently destroyed. FOF = focus on form; NS = native speaker.

another quiz, and Garrett said that she felt muchmore comfortable with written evaluations likequizzes and tests because she thought she could bemore successful at those. It is worth mentioning,however, that she still did not feel like a success-ful speaker. In Week 7, students learned present,future, and past subjunctives, but after Garrettmissed a class, she began to feel she had fallenbehind the other students and was becoming over-whelmed. Talking about these feelings consumed24% of her total comments during this week. ByWeek 8, Garrett felt overstuffed with grammaticalinformation—“I can’t put the words together, be-cause I’m scanning through my memory to findthe words and verbs, and then trying to conjugateit in a sentence”—and this was affecting her abilityto communicate:

Oh, I would be satisfied with achieving understand-ing with my interlocutor. Seriously, like the incidentwhere the professor corrected me from asking R [a

classmate] if he was going to eat with his “hand” whenI meant to say his “mom,” (they sound similar in Por-tuguese). At least the professor understood what I wastrying to say.

Ultimately, at the end of the 8-week program, Gar-rett still did not feel confident about her ability tocommunicate in Portuguese, and the total num-ber of negative comments related to languageawareness exceeded the positive.

Teacher Voice

Garrett’s attention to events during her lan-guage learning experience was also influencedby her professional training and experience asa foreign language teacher. She commented onher instructors’ teaching styles, the course mate-rials, and her own learning strategies; she alsomade considerably more positive than negativecomments in this area. Some of the most positive


TABLE 4An Affective Trajectory: Weekly Sources of Negative Comments

Language Awareness Teacher Voice Social Relations Culture Learning

Week 1 Lack of ability torecognize andproduce phonemes

Criticism of NNS TAcodeswitching

Awkwardness andcompetition withclassmates due to lackof group cohesion

None

Week 2 Pronunciation Not knowing thegrading system

Competition andanxiety whenspeaking

None

Week 3 N/A N/A N/A N/AWeek 4 Memorizing words and

not using thelanguage because ofthe final exam

Criticism of activity thatinvolves not tellingthe truth

Anxiety when speakingduring the collectivecreation of a storyactivity in class

None

Week 5 Difficulty with thegrammar

Study tactics for thefinal exam in Week 4

Fear of participating inthe Thursday eveningconversation group

None

Week 6 Subjunctive Too much subject-specific vocabulary

Fear of self-image dueto speaking poorly atconversation group

Fatigue dueto capoeira

Week 7 Grammar: future andimperfectsubjunctives andirregular verbs

None Social anxiety aboutbeing behind othersdue to absence

None

Week 8 Grammar and ability toretrieve words frommemory

Preparing lessonsbefore class

Comparisons: jealousyof those who speakwell

None

Note . The audio tape for Week 3 was inadvertently destroyed. NNS = nonnative speaker; TA = teaching assistant.

comments she made about the main instructorwere at the beginning of the course:

I felt like I was in the hands of a great instructorbecause I had a feeling he knew which words werehard for us and would focus on these words and wouldsay these words backwards so that we could focus onthe syllables and pronounce them correctly. I feel likehe is constantly scanning the class looking for visualcues of students having difficulties.

Overall, she said she thought this instructor hada gift for pushing students to their limits and mak-ing the course interesting. Her respect for thenonnative-speaking teaching assistant (TA), whotaught the class in the afternoon, was initially notas high but increased with time. At first she wasnot fond of the TA’s mixed use of Portuguese andEnglish: “It’s annoying that the TA stops speakingPortuguese to speak English, especially for Span-ish cognates, which are easy to understand in Por-tuguese.” By the end of the course, however, heropinion of the TA had changed completely. InWeek 8, she commented on how the TA had be-come a positive example for the students, creating

a voice that she tried to emulate: “I think it’s fan-tastic to have male and female Portuguese speakermodels.”

Overall, Garrett had positive responses to thelessons, particularly the instructor’s way of break-ing down the pronunciation of words into syllablesand writing out dialogues on the board beforeasking students to memorize them. She also en-joyed collective story-making exercises, where allclassmates participated in the creation of a shortnarrative. The instructor introduced upcominggrammatical structures and vocabulary by demon-strating their use in natural conversation beforeexposing students to written forms from the text-book. For example, the day before introduc-ing color vocabulary in the book, the instructorbrought in a collection of ties and commented ontheir colors and styles. This piqued students’ cu-riosity and made it easier for them to process andrecognize the sounds and meaning of the colorwords once they were presented in written form.Garrett appreciated this approach. She also ap-preciated the prompt return of quizzes and home-work, which she felt validated the students’ efforts.


However, Garrett’s overall assessment of thecourse was that it covered far too much materialto absorb in such a short amount of time. Twosemesters of Portuguese in 8 weeks was truly anintensive language learning experience.

Social Relations

The topic area that elicited the greatest numberof affective responses from Garrett was her socialrelations with classmates and instructors. Theserelations also affected the image she formed ofherself as a member of the classroom community.During Week 1, she felt very uncomfortable aboutnot being able to speak with her classmates andnot knowing more about who they were, why theywere taking the class, or their prior experiencewith Portuguese: “It is weird to not have talkedto anyone sitting in the same classroom as me.”She also found herself constantly comparing herprogress to theirs: “I’m seeing a difference be-tween myself and others and realizing I need toput more time into this. I took a day off with-out studying and felt like others used this time tostudy, and now I am behind.”

Garrett mentioned in Week 2 that she felt com-petitive toward and a little threatened by otherstudents. She compared herself to them:

So, this kid is so far ahead of everyone else. We arebarely forming incorrect basic sentences and he isspeaking with complex, elaborate sentences. It’s a lit-tle frustrating. However, it is interesting to watch howthe instructor changes his language when he speakswith Student S.

In Week 3, she mentioned once again that she feltinsecure and uncomfortable speaking in front ofher peers:

I can tell when I work with partners that I sound aw-ful. For example, with French, it’s such a pretty lan-guage that I might wince or correct students whenthey grossly mispronounce a word. And when I workwith partners in class, I get this same feeling thatthey’re not enjoying hearing me speak.

Week 4 had the largest number of negative com-ments about social relations. During that week,the instructor had the students do a collaborativespeaking activity in class. Together, contributingone line at a time, students created a narrativeabout a young couple having dinner at a restau-rant when something happens. After a long awk-ward pause, Garrett was the first to try to break thesilence and get the activity started, but she soonregretted succumbing to the pressure to partici-pate:

I needed to complete the sentence I had started outloud, “Once upon a time, there was a young couple. . .”but I couldn’t think of the word for couple , and I wasreally afraid, because, I kind of know the words atthis point, it’s just the precision that makes me un-comfortable, like I know it’s joven [young] but I don’tknow if it’s pronounced “hoven” like in Spanish . . .

I realized that even if I was making a lot of mistakes,comprehension can be reached, and . . . it’s a greatexercise.

Despite feeling extremely anxious in this situ-ation, Garrett ultimately found this exercise use-ful because she proved to herself that she couldcommunicate effectively despite her limitations.Once the students did a collective task togetherin the target language, Garrett felt more com-fortable contributing because she realized thateven though their levels differed, everyone wasstruggling to communicate. She felt this created astronger cohesion in the class. She switched fromusing the pronoun I as in the previous quote tothe pronoun we in comments during the final3 weeks of the course, which could be interpretedas a sign that she was beginning to feel more partof the group. The following are some examples ofher use of we :

1. Referring to samba dance lessons: “We wereall a little nervous to be doing this physical activitytogether” (emphasis added).

2. Referring to the capoeira martial art les-son: “So everybody was sore, and we kind ofbonded through the pain of walking up and downthe stairs together during our break” (emphasisadded).

3. “We’re laughing a lot more in class and every-one is contributing more. I think this is becauseof the ‘add your own answer’ grammar exercise”(emphasis added).

Week 7 was hard for Garrett because she misseda day and felt that doing so put her “terribly be-hind.” Due to the anxiety of feeling behind, sheonce again began comparing herself to others. Bythe end of the week, however, she had more or lessrecovered: “I feel like I’ve finally caught back upwith the group. Tuesday I felt completely behindand distressed and felt like I couldn’t participate,but today I feel like I am almost caught up.”

At the end of Week 7, there was a social gath-ering at the instructor’s house. Also invited to theparty were all the guest speakers who had pre-sented to the class. Garrett described the party as“very pleasant . . . and it was just fun. It was verybonding.” Consequently, during this week, Gar-rett showed a high percentage of positive com-ments about relations with other students.


Finally, in Week 8, Garrett mentioned the inter-dependence she felt with a fellow student duringher language learning experience:

I always sit next to him [Student R] and whenever I saysomething wrong he’ll look at me, so I feel a bit like ateam when he’s there, I feel like he helps monitor me.And if I don’t understand something he’ll discreetlyhelp me out with it . . . I don’t know. This kid is sonice! We kind of look out for each other.

Although she made a number of positive com-ments concerning interpersonal relations withother students, Garrett still persisted in compar-ing herself to them. Even at the end of 8 weeksshe commented, “I’m so jealous. Student S, shejust speaks it, and it flows, and it’s almost like she’sa native speaker.”

She also reevaluated her relations with the in-structors throughout the class. For example, in thebeginning she felt that the TA was not connectedwith the needs of students. However, by the endof the course she admired her, stating “everyonewants to be like the TA.”

Interpersonal relations elicited more affectiveresponses than any other topic, and they werehighly significant in Garrett’s evaluation of herlanguage learning experience. In the beginning,she was very uncomfortable trying to speak a newforeign language in front of her classmates andfelt like she was with strangers, unable to talkto anyone. She remained very aware of the lan-guage proficiency of her classmates and neverstopped comparing herself to them. She devoted alarge portion of her attention during the languagelearning experience to observing class dynamicsand social relations. However, the topic that sur-prised her most was her change of perspectivetoward the importance of cultural instruction inlanguage learning.

Culture Learning

Although Garrett made no comments aboutculture during Week 1, this topic apparently be-came very important to her during Week 2. Shecommented on the interesting cultural informa-tion the class received on cannibalism and tropical-ismo. She realized that cultural knowledge wouldallow her to communicate with a native speaker,even on occasions when her linguistic ability wasdeficient. Her comments reveal a shift in her as-sessment of culture as a linguistic tool:

The cultural information is grounding the language,making it real. Because at first I felt that I was onlyinterested in the language, but the culture is mak-ing this more interesting. The culture is actually quite

useful although I was critical of it at first. If I ever meeta Brazilian I will actually have something to communi-cate with him . . . . I mean, even if I’m speaking poorly,if it’s an interesting topic we could connect throughthe topic which would give me more room for errorwith the language. I would be able to keep their at-tention longer.

Again in Week 5, Garrett mentioned the valueof cultural instruction in her class. Specifically, shementioned that she believed cultural knowledgecould empower her to communicate with nativespeakers:

We’re watching a movie about monkeys this after-noon, primates, and then we’re having a biologicalanthropologist come in Wednesday to talk to us abouther research in Brazil—fun! This is just the funnestlittle summer I’m having! This is a little sofa travel ex-perience I’m having, traveling the world via my sofa.I feel like I’m going to Brazil without the effort.

When Young asked how she would feel aboutgoing to Brazil and speaking with native speak-ers, Garrett mentioned yet again how cultural in-struction was empowering her and how she feltit would affect her ability to communicate withnative speakers:

I’d want to talk to everyone about everything! Yes, thisculture part has been just . . . like the dessert. It’s a lotof fun. I don’t think I could maintain my endurancefor this without having the movies, and the songs, andthe treats.

Week 6 had the highest number of positive com-ments about culture. Students took samba lessonsin a dance hall one afternoon and had instructionin the Brazilian martial art of capoeira the follow-ing afternoon. In addition, they listened to andanalyzed numerous authentic songs in the morn-ing session. Garrett also attended an optionalevening conversation group, Bate Papo. Bate Papois open to all Portuguese native speakers in thecommunity and was designed to help Portugueselanguage learners to experience authentic conver-sation and culture. In the excerpt below, Garrettexplains why she found the group both sociallyrewarding and beneficial to her linguistic and cul-tural development:

[We three students] all decided to show up at 6:15 sothat we could all go together since we were all kind ofnervous about what to expect, and it was fun. We gotto know each other a bit more in English as we werewaiting for beer, and then, once we got our pitcher ofbeer we walked up to the group. We started speakingin Portuguese before we arrived, and it was a lot offun.


Garrett then expressed her positive responseto discovering the proper usage of a grammaticalconcept explained in class concerning the use ofpossessive articles. When speaking with a Brazilianwoman,

I said to her, “Oh what a cute baby, I like her shirt.”And I said in Portuguese, gosto de sua camisa and thewoman looked at her own shirt. And my instructor,who was sitting next to me, said, that’s why with thepossessive articles you need to say a camisa dele ‘I likehis shirt,’ instead of sua. . . . So, that was a great exam-ple to understand a lesson from class.

Interestingly, the music portion of the courseelicited an extremely high number of positive af-fective comments:

We did a song, which was very exciting because I firstheard this song over ten years ago . . . and I rememberthat I just loved, loved this song . . . . And, I didn’t evenknow what language it was in then. I think I thoughtit was in Spanish. Certainly I didn’t understand that itwas Brazilian [Portuguese] . . . so when he explainedwhat the lyrics meant, I got really excited, and I couldunderstand most of it the first time listening to it,because it’s very slow.

In the following quotation, Garrett describesin detail how her cultural training assisted her tobetter understand this song:

It’s called Ile aie and it goes, Ile aie, Como voce e bonitode se ver . Ile aie, Que beleza mais bonita de se ter andwhat it is is, ‘How you are so beautiful to see, you havethe greatest beauty that one could have, your beautytransforms in me, or you.’. . . So, at first I thought hewas singing about a woman that he found beautiful. . . then someone asked what the title meant, and heexplained to us that it’s a bloco, a group of peoplewho get together and create a . . . march together inthe . . . parade for carnival, and that it originates inYoruba . . . and that the rhythm of this is a ritual usedin Condomble, which is the religion that we’ve beenstudying about, that came to Brazil, so it was all justvery exciting to learn this.

Finally, Garrett concluded her comments inWeek 8 by admitting that although she still feltlinguistically deficient, she also felt culturally em-powered to communicate:

Well, I think my identity as a learner is starting to shift,and I think the cultural component of our lessonsplays a big role in this. It would be interesting to seewhat it would be like to learn a language without theculture to ground it. Because, I really feel like I’mbecoming more knowledgeable about this culture andlanguage, but . . . my language ability is still so bad!

DISCUSSION

Understanding the Learner’s Unique Experience

As Kramsch (2003) remarked, each languagestudent’s learning experience is extremely subjec-tive. An analysis of the events that elicited affec-tive responses by this language learner revealedthat she was constantly evaluating her learningexperience from the perspective of a foreignlanguage teacher—evaluating the teaching style,instructional materials, and her own learningstrategies. The two unexpected categories toemerge from the analysis of the transcriptsrevealed the influence of the immediate commu-nity (the classroom) and the distant community(Brazilian culture) on Garrett’s affective re-sponses to her language learning experience. Al-though Garrett’s perspective as a teacher as well asher attention to culture learning and social rela-tions in the classroom were very important to her,the same would not necessarily be true of all lan-guage learners.6 Rather, it is through understand-ing Garrett’s specific preferences and aversionsthat the importance of emotion in any learner’sencounter with a new language becomes clear.The following pages set forth the beginning of aconstructivist theory of one learner’s emotion inher classroom language learning, as grounded inthe data. In particular, the two aspects of the ex-perience that appeared to be most important toGarrett—her emotional responses to the Brazil-ian culture that she was meeting for the first timeand her emotional responses to her classmatesand her teachers—are discussed. The final sectionpresents a brief discussion of how this learner’s ex-perience as a beginning language learner mightinfluence or shape her future activities as a lan-guage teacher.

Emotion and Classroom Language Learning

Before recording Garrett’s responses to her8-week Portuguese course, emotional responsesto the course were not the presumed focus of thestudy. Previous longitudinal research on languagelearners such as Huebner (1983), G-q. Liu (2000),Schmidt (1983), and Schmidt and Frota (1986)focused not on emotion but on learners’ develop-ment of linguistic ability or communicative com-petence in the target language. However, duringthe open coding process, the learner’s expressionsof positive or negative affect were by far the mostfrequent comments made. During axial coding,it was noted that those expressions of affect clus-tered mainly around four kinds of experiences.


For Garrett, then, emotional responses to the lan-guage learning experience (mostly in the class-room but occasionally outside of it) were the mostsalient features of her learning endeavor.

Surprisingly, the emotional states of languagelearners have received relatively little attention inthe SLA literature. In a major textbook, Gass andSelinker (2008) devoted only a portion of onechapter (out of a total of 14) to affect and mo-tivation. In a handbook of cognitive approachesto SLA, Doughty and Long (2003) chose not todedicate a single chapter to the role of emo-tion in language acquisition. In contrast, cognitivescientists have paid increased attention to emo-tion in recent years, and neurobiological researchby Leventhal and Scherer (1987), among others,points to the conclusion that cognition derivesfrom emotionally colored perception. Neverthe-less, the emotion of language learners is an issuethat has remained in the background in our field.What this study has attempted to show—in weeklydetail—is how one learner’s emotional responseswere engendered by particular topics and experi-ences, how some of those responses were modifiedby new experiences, and how Garrett’s affectiveappraisals changed over time.

What emerged from the process of analysis isthat emotion became the focus of Garrett’s at-tention in her acquisition of Portuguese. Garretttestified to her emotional assessments of the ex-perience as either pleasant or unpleasant, which,in turn, prompted categorization of her com-ments into those that expressed positive or neg-ative affect. One of the drawbacks of this binarydistinction, however, is that it masks the multi-tude of different ways in which the learner ex-perienced emotion. Her responses should not beinterpreted as either happy or sad. To attemptto distinguish among this learner’s emotional re-sponses to events, the system of stimulus evalu-ation checks devised by Scherer (1984a, 1984b)was used.7 This system allowed the events that thelearner evaluated to be categorized as either (a)novel, (b) intrinsically pleasant or unpleasant, or(c) enhancing or inhibiting progress to achievingher goals or needs. An additional possibility wasfor the learner to evaluate events in terms of (d)the degree of control she believed she had overthe event or its consequences and (e) whether theevent was consistent or inconsistent with her idealself-concept as well as whether it conformed tothe norms of her social group. The following ex-amples illustrate how Scherer’s classification wasused for categorizing stimulus appraisal.

As mentioned earlier, in Week 5 the learnerexpressed her delight at the novelty of a film about

wildlife in Brazil by saying it was the “funnest”summer she was having. On other occasions, sheexpressed frustration at repeating an activity thatshe had done previously, such as a dictation inWeek 2, which she thought was a waste of time.

On several occasions, Garrett reported eventsthat enhanced progress toward her goal of learningPortuguese. For example, in Week 1 she describedrefocusing her attention on spoken input fromher teacher: “I was focusing on what was writtenand focusing on the pronunciation of the individ-ual words . . . today was the first day I realized Ineeded to focus on the prosody, so I felt like thatwas a success—that I’ve switched from the needto focus on the individual words to focusing onthe flow.” At other times, however, Garrett expe-rienced an event that did not further her goalsas stressful: “I feel I can hear things being done[spoken] differently than I’m saying them, but Ican’t quite identify where the problem is.”

Garrett also often remarked on her ability to copewith an event. Sometimes she felt overwhelmed,as in Week 1: “We were supposed to memorize apage of Portuguese dialogue and I thought, ‘Howcan I memorize this when I don’t even know howto pronounce it?’” On other occasions, she ex-pressed pleasure at the events she found she hadmanaged well. At the end of her 8-week languageprogram, for instance, Garrett reflected that “I re-ally feel like I’m becoming more knowledgeableabout this culture and language.”

The learner’s self-image was enhanced by some ofher experiences. For instance, when she managedto talk more in class, she reported: “I’m startingto talk in class. It’s fun.” On other occasions, how-ever, her ideal self-image was challenged: “I’ve justkind of been getting by. I haven’t been the stellarPortuguese student.” She also became aware ofthe image that she was projecting to other stu-dents in the class, especially in Week 5 after stu-dents received grades for their exam: “Everyone’ssuccess is private. Or it could just be that peopledon’t talk to me about it because I’m such a badspeaker that they don’t want to embarrass me. Idon’t know. In general I don’t talk to people aboutgrades.” On still more occasions, Garrett felt shewas projecting an image of a stellar student: “I canwrite this language like a star, and I can read it andunderstand it within the upper tier of my class.”On a few occasions, she experienced an event thatwent against accepted social norms and beliefs: “Stu-dent S would do irritating things like how he saidthat he thought Barcelona was an awful city to abunch of Spanish speakers.”

This learner’s affective encoding of her experi-ences thus falls within Scherer’s (1984a, 1984b)


preference or aversion schemata. Events werecoded with positive or negative affect accordingto whether they were novel, pleasant, enhanc-ing of the learner’s goals or needs, compatiblewith her coping mechanisms, or supportive ofher self-image and social image. The events thatelicited affective responses were categorized intofour groups: (a) language awareness, (b) teachervoice, (c) cultural knowledge, and (d) social re-lations. In the following subsections we use theexplanatory power of preference and aversionschemata to construct a theory that the sociostaticpressure of distant communities and immediatecommunities greatly influenced this learner’s af-fective responses to her language learning expe-rience.

Understanding the Importance of CulturalKnowledge in Communication

Garrett’s interest in the structure of the Por-tuguese language was initially very high. It grad-ually decreased as the course wore on, exceptduring the weeks of the exams, when class-room instruction focused more on grammar (herstrength). She first acknowledged the importanceof cultural knowledge in Week 2, expressing anew understanding that cultural instruction wasgrounding the language, making it real. She alsoreported feeling that she could communicatemore effectively with a native speaker on a cul-tural topic because it would give her more roomfor language error. In Week 5, Garrett observedthat cultural instruction helped keep her moti-vated to get through the intensive course. In Week6, which had the most culturally rich instruction,she perceived the most progress in understand-ing Portuguese. As she told Young, “Things arecoming better together.”

Garrett described her excitement at being ableto understand a song that she listened to in class.In addition to the slow tempo of the song, thelyrics told about cultural topics that the class hadbeen studying. This cultural information enabledGarrett to use cultural context to fill in parts of thesong that were incomprehensible to her. At first,she did not understand the words Ile aie in thesong. Once told that the expression came fromYoruba and was the name of a bloco, she was ina position to better understand the meaning thesinger intended to convey.

In addition to helping her understand lyrics tosongs, cultural knowledge helped Garrett in con-versations with more advanced speakers of Por-tuguese. For example, when the instructor hosteda party for the class, the vast majority of the

guests spoke exclusively in Portuguese. Althoughshe could not understand all of the conversa-tions, Garrett’s familiarity with the topics peoplewere discussing provided a tool other than lin-guistic ability that allowed her to negotiate mean-ing and communication effectively with proficientPortuguese speakers.

In the last week of the course, Garrett ques-tioned whether learning 2 years of Portuguesein 8 weeks would have been possible without thecultural component to ground it. She appraisedculture learning as positive not only because shefound it novel and pleasant but also because shefound it to be compatible with her coping mech-anism because it enhanced her goal to be a suc-cessful speaker of Portuguese and because it wassupportive of her self-image and social image.She felt she could better cope with her linguis-tic limitations with the help of culture learning.This culture learning helped her become a moresuccessful communicator, thus enhancing herown social image as she tried to enter aPortuguese-speaking community. The culturelearning component of her language learning ex-perience met all five of Scherer’s (1984a, 1984b)criteria for preferential environmental stimuli.

Understanding the Importance of Social Relationsin the Classroom

J. Schumann (1998) suggested that we have aninnate, survivalist desire to strengthen our affili-ation with others and to improve our self-imagewith our conspecifics. Garrett’s experience showshow sociostatic value develops in a language class.She described an improvement in her feeling ofgeneral well-being once she started to form agroup in class during the first week: “I’m find-ing my little group of cool women who are in an-thropology and I’m feeling more comfortable.”In Week 2, she mentioned how working withother students helped her feel more successful: “Ilove working with other people because it quizzesyou and gets you to think about [the material]differently.” In addition to finding working withothers beneficial for her success on a quiz, shementioned that she felt that it affected her well-being: “Being more comfortable with other peo-ple in the class grounds you.”

In Week 6, she described a positive experiencewith her classmates at a conversational group as“fun because we got to know each other a bitmore.” In Week 7, she described another socialevent, the party at her instructor’s house, as “justfun. It was very bonding . . . . It was just nice to sitand listen, and I contributed a little bit, and it


was just a very pleasant evening.” In the last week,she reported the bond forming between herselfand another student because of the help he pro-vided her in communicating in Portuguese. Inter-personal relations elicited many positive affectivecomments in her narrative and appeared to be acrucial part of her language learning experience.

It is apparent from the transcripts, however,that classroom relations also elicited many neg-ative comments. Most of the negative commentshad to do with Garrett’s fear of speaking in classor working with partners. She did not feel com-fortable with her proficiency level and believedothers to be at a higher level than her. Continu-ally assessing herself at a lower proficiency levelthan her peers did not improve her self-image.In fact, it had an adverse affect on her sociostaticneed to strengthen affiliations with others.

Implications for Teaching

As Dewaele (2005) foresaw, focusing on the roleof emotion in foreign language learning can in-spire teachers to pay increased attention to therole played by emotion in learners’ classroom for-eign language learning and to the developmentof their sociocultural competence in a second lan-guage. In this final section, we discuss Garrett’sreflections as a foreign language teacher on herexperience as a learner and the implications thatshe drew for her future language teaching. Gar-rett’s affective appraisal of the events she experi-enced as a learner greatly influenced her futureintentions regarding her own teaching.

Garrett’s analysis of her experience learningPortuguese directed her attention to the impor-tance of affect, cultural instruction, and interper-sonal relations in the language learning process.Beyond analyzing her own experience, reviewingstudies of other personal narratives has led her tochallenge her pedagogical training and the cur-rent practices regarding cultural instruction andinterpersonal relations in the classroom.

In her teaching career prior to the experiencestudied in this report, Garrett had viewed culturalinstruction as a fun activity to be done if timepermitted. She had not appreciated its contribu-tion to the learner’s strategic competence in com-municating in the target language. Through herown language learning experience, however, Gar-rett experienced for herself how knowledge ofthe target culture can provide tools to achievemore effective communication, which, in turn,enables language learners to more fully partici-pate in a community. In addition to making herfeel more empowered in communication, cultural

instruction also appeared to be a key motivationalfactor in Garrett’s language learning experience.

This author also observed similarities betweenher affective responses to her language learningexperience and that of others, especially regard-ing competition and anxiety in the immediatecommunity of the classroom. Having previouslystudied Krashen’s (1981) Monitor Model and hishypothesis of the affective filter, Garrett had un-derstood that her role as an instructor was prin-cipally to provide comprehensible input to herstudents and to avoid creating negative feelingsamong them. Her own learning experience, incontrast, confirmed J. Schumann’s (1998) obser-vation that it is not only the teacher who influ-ences the emotional state of the language learnerbut that interpersonal relations between studentsin the classroom also affect a student’s sense ofwell-being. Bailey (1983) also discussed competi-tion and anxiety among students in the languageclassroom, which can be interpreted as the desireto establish the affiliative groups of conspecificsthat J. Schumann described. Ultimately, Garrett’sown experience as a language learner confirmedthese two theories and led her to realize that team-building and constructing identities for classroompeers as “conspecifics” rather than “the competi-tion” provide important supports for learning.

Having been trained in the communicative ap-proach to foreign language teaching, Garrett wasused to teaching students simple phrases to re-peat and encouraging them to speak in front ofthe class. Her own experience as a learner, how-ever, indicated that this can create anxiety andcompetition among students. She now feels morereluctant to enforce a target-language-only pol-icy in beginning courses because, in her own lan-guage learning experience, it took her a while toprocess the different patterns of sounds (and shecontinued to feel very anxious about speaking inthe beginning, especially in front of peers). Now,Garrett strives to provide cooperative activities fos-tering positive affiliations among learners as wellas to encourage students to get to know each otherin a noncompetitive, friendly way.

With a new understanding of the importanceof cultural instruction in fostering strategic com-petence, Garrett currently strives to include morecultural instruction in her lessons and is contin-ually searching for ways to balance the linguisticgoals of a curriculum with instruction in culture.In addition to addressing more of the culturalcomponents included in the course textbook andincluding more authentic cultural artifacts, suchas newspaper articles and songs, Garrett is cur-rently exploring the use of supplemental cultural


instruction that students can explore on their owntime online. She directs students to investigate theculture presented online and to reflect on theirfindings in a guided discussion on a weekly discus-sion forum in Blackboard. The intention of thediscussion is not only to afford students an oppor-tunity to reflect on the cultural information butalso to create a third space where students canshare personal information and strengthen theiraffiliations with others.

CONCLUSION

To conclude, work by Damasio (1994, 1999)led cognitive psychologists to realize that emo-tion has been neglected in theories of mind dur-ing the 20th century. Recent work by Pavlenko, J.Schumann, and others also has shown the the-oretical importance of emotion in understand-ing bilingualism and foreign language learning.In this article, with the help of narrative analy-sis and grounded theory, their work has been ex-tended to show one learner’s emotional responsesto foreign language learning in the classroom, theevents that engendered emotion, and her affec-tive trajectory over the 8-week course. A theorygrounded in the experiences Garrett reported toexplain her emotional responses to the languagelearning process has thus been constructed. Inthis learner’s case, her affective responses in theforeign language classroom were grounded in thesociostatic pressure of distant (Brazilian) and im-mediate (classroom) communities.

In this study, the emotional responses of onebeginning learner to her experiences in one for-eign language classroom and the means by whichher responses were recorded and analyzed havebeen described. The learner in question, as wellas her specific experiences, is unique. No claimshould be made that other learners respond insimilar ways to similar experiences. What seemsevident, however, is that the affective responsesof foreign language learners and, in particular,their responses to events in the classroom arean underresearched area of SLA. Greater atten-tion to affect in language learning is neededbecause of the emotional grounding of higherorder cognitive and metacognitive processes suchas attention, memory, planning, and hypothesisconstruction (Damasio, 1994; Lantolf & Thorne,2006, 2007; Vygotsky, 1978, 1986). Affective ap-praisal of language learning events by individ-ual learners often results in approach or avoid-ance when similar events occur in the future andinfluences cognitive and other lower order pro-cesses. What has been proposed in this article

is one way to discover an individual learner’s af-fective states and the trajectory of change in thosestates throughout the language learning process.The two positions argued for are the importanceof affect in foreign language learning and theneed to develop systematic ways of researchingaffect—positions that were framed eloquently byNelson Goodman (1978, p. 81): “Feeling withoutunderstanding is blind, and understanding with-out feeling is empty.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A report on this research was presented at the annualmeeting of the American Association for Applied Lin-guistics, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, June 17–20, 2006.We are grateful for criticisms provided on that occasionby Aneta Pavlenko and for very constructive critiques ofearlier versions of this article by Jean-Marc Dewaele aswell as by students in a graduate class in Research Meth-ods in Applied Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Further valuable comments were provided byfour anonymous MLJ reviewers and by the MLJ Editor.Errors and misinterpretations that remain are the soleresponsibility of the authors.

NOTES

1One such study is by Kinginger (2008), in which sheinfers associations between assessments of the foreignlanguage proficiency of 24 learners of French and theirfirst-person accounts of their individual motives and ex-periences during study-abroad experiences in France.

2One affective aspect of language learning that hasbeen studied at length is, of course, motivation. Inthis article, however, we follow Damasio (1999) in dis-tinguishing among background emotions and feelings,motivational drive, and consciousness. Although moti-vation may well spring from emotions, in this articlewe have chosen not to go beyond emotion or to specu-late on the relations between emotion and motivationaldrive. Those readers interested in making the connec-tion are referred to a recent review of studies on moti-vation and student success by Dornyei (2003).

3Although of recent origin, grounded theory hasalready developed in different directions dependingon the training and epistemology of its practitioners.Objectivist grounded theory falls within a positivist epis-temology in which the grounded theorist assumes thatdata represent facts about a knowable world. The ob-jectivist researcher’s task is to “discover” the theory thatexplains them. By contrast, in constructivist groundedtheory, data and analysis are considered to arise from ex-periences shared by the participants, the researcher, andrelevant others. Practitioners of constructivist groundedtheory, including the authors of the present article,


“take a reflexive stance toward the research processand consider how their theories evolve” (Charmaz,2006, p. 131). To date, there have been relatively fewapplications of grounded theory to describe and under-stand second language learning, of which Aveni (2005);Kalaja and Ferreira (2003); Kalaja, Paiva, and Ferreira(2008); and Yan and Horwitz (2008) are recent exem-plars.

4A major category is one that emerges as most salientand/or frequent from open coding.

5Coding resulted in only two categories of affect,which we termed “positive” and “negative.” Later, in the-ory building, we recognized that the experiences thatengendered learner affect could be more finely cate-gorized according to Scherer’s (1984a, 1984b) stimulusevaluation checks, which we describe in the Discussionsection of the article.

6The systematic procedures of grounded theoryhelped ensure that Garrett did not simply create a the-ory that was a self-fulfilling prophecy about her expecta-tions and perceptions of language learning. In this study,the two authors conducted open coding and axial cod-ing together and when a storyline began to emerge inwhich connections were made between Garrett’s class-room experiences and her affective responses, she oftenexpressed surprise at connections that she had not per-ceived in advance of the analysis.

7In distinguishing between binary responses of “pleas-ant” or “unpleasant” and Scherer’s system of five stim-ulus evaluation checks, we follow Damasio’s (1999, pp.71–79) distinction between sensations of pleasure andpain and the emotional reactions that the sensationsengender.

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