Essential Motivational Group Dynamics: A 3-Year Panel Study
Using the lens of Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) we look at longitudinal survey results over a 3-year period for EFL students at Japanese universities. This panel study measured motivational changes across single semesters, using multiple measures. Our surv
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Abstract Using the lens of Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) we look at longitudinal survey results over a 3-year period for EFL students at Japanese universities. This panel study measured motivational changes across single semesters, using multiple measures. Our surveys contain questions to investigate what we call Present Communities of Imagining (PCOIz), which is an actively sharing and imagining classroom community, within which each individual’s three notional mind-time frames of English-learning motivation interact among themselves and among those of others inside the classroom. These mind-time frames are the antecedent conditions of the learners, present investments inside and outside of class, and possible future selves. Our teaching methods involve highly interactive activities that address the three mind-time frames explicitly, and we regularly return students’ information back to them through the process called critical participatory looping. We find that the dynamic system of interacting attractors of the three mind-time frames of motivation becomes more positive over time, given good group dynamics, and that the students’ motivations tend to resonate and harmonize with each other the longer they are together. These results seem to support our hypothesis that returning selfinformation back to students creates healthier Socially Intelligent Dynamic Systems (SINDYS) within the classroom.
Y. Fukada (*) Department of International Studies, Meisei University, Hino, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: [email protected] T. Murphey English Department, Kanda University of International Studies, Chiba-Shi, Chiba-ken, Japan e-mail: [email protected] J. Falout College of Science and Technology, Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: [email protected] T. Fukuda English for Liberal Arts Program, International Christian University, Mitaka, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 R. Breeze, C. Sancho Guinda (eds.), Essential Competencies for English-medium University Teaching, Educational Linguistics 27, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40956-6_17
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Keywords Motivational changes • Investment • Possible selves • Social learning • Panel study • Dynamic systems theory • Communities • PCOIz • SINDYS • CPL
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Introduction
Many teachers intuitively know in practice what researchers in educational psychology are just beginning to understand in theory – student motivation is dynamic. Each student’s motivation is a complex and dynamic system, and each classroom has its own complex system of group dynamics involving the motivations of the people gathered there. For second language (L2) motivation theory, in particular, the traditional notion of motivation as a fixed and innate quality of the individual is being replaced by the nascent notion of a changeable and exchangeable social construction (Dörnyei and Ushioda 2011). Such a conception naturally places modern research on L2 motivation in the uncertain terrain of nonlinear, complex, and chaotic systems t
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