ForumSprache 6.2011
Inhalt / Contents
Sarah Mercer
Frames of reference used by language learners in forming their self-concepts
Sabine Weiß und Ewald Kiel
Berufswunsch Fremdsprachenlehrer/in:
Motive und Selbstbild
Karsten Senkbeil und Simona Engbers
Sprachmittlung als interkulturelle Kompetenz –
Interkulturelle Kompetenz durch Sprachmittlung
Hannele Dufva, Mari Aro, Riikka Alanen & Paula Kalaja
Voices of literacy, images of books –
Sociocognitive approach to multimodality in learner beliefs
Dieter Wolff
Der bilinguale Sachfachunterricht (CLIL):
Was dafür spricht, ihn als innovatives didaktisches Konzept zu bezeichnen
Joachim Appel
Two for the price of one? Leise Zweifel am bilingualen Sachfachunterricht
Simona Engbers, Karsten Senkbeil
Materialien zur Schulung interkultureller Kompetenz durch Sprachmittlungsaktivitäten
Eine Unterrichtsreihe für die 8. Klasse
Johann Aßbeck, Annette Schraml
Nicht nur für die Schule, sondern für das Leben lernen wir –
gilt das auch für den Englischunterricht?
Nicole Kösters
Es ist Englischunterricht und keiner macht mit – Erfahrungen in Uganda
6
24
41
58
75
85
90
107
119
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Artikel – ISBN 978-3-19-586100-7
aus Ausgabe 06 / 2011 ISBN 978-3-19-546100-9
3. Jahrgang, No 2, 2011
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ForumSprache 6.2011
Voices of literacy, images of books
Sociocognitive approach to multimodality in learner beliefs
Hannele Dufva, Mari Aro, Riikka Alanen & Paula Kalaja
Abstract
Socioculturally oriented views that are based on Vygotskyan thinking argue that
embodiment and materiality are an essential aspect of human semiosis and thinking.
Similar orientation can be found in the dialogical notion of language in the works of
Voloshinov and Bakhtin. Their view, which opposes the Saussurean decontextualism
and abstractivism, sees the focus of language studies to be on the concrete events
of language use. Accordingly, the view necessitates that the multimodality of these
utterances be taken into consideration. Starting from sociocultural and dialogical
assumptions, but also drawing on other arguments that have been presented in other
paradigms and frameworks (e.g. conversation analysis, systemic-functional approaches),
increasing attention is given to multimodality that is present in human interaction. Are
beliefs, then, different in verbally articulated and visually represented data? In this
paper, we will present our indings, relate them to our theoretical approach and discuss
the multimodality of semiotic resources as a source of beliefs from a sociocognitive
perspective.
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Soziokulturell orientierte Ansätze, die auf den Theorien Wygotskis basieren, gehen
davon aus, dass Materialität und Medialität wesentliche Aspekte der Semiose
und des Denkens sind. Ähnliche Herangehensweisen sind in Voloshinovs und
Bakhtins dialogischen Auffassungen von Sprache zu inden. Ihre Ansicht, die den
Dekontextualismus und die Abstraktion de Saussures ablehnt, sieht den Fokus von
Sprachstudien in konkreten Sprachverwendungsereignissen. Konsequenterweise setzt
diese Ansicht auch die Berücksichtigung der Multimodalität von Äußerungen voraus. Aus
soziokulturellen und dialogischen Perspektiven, wie auch z.B. in Forschungsansätzen
der Konversationsanalyse oder der systemisch-funktionalen Sprachforschung, steigt die
Aufmerksamkeit für multimodale Aspekte menschlicher Interaktion. Manifestieren sich
Anschauungen und Überzeugungen in verbal artikulierten und visuell dargestellten Daten
auf unterschiedliche Weise? In diesem Artikel stellen wir Ergebnisse unserer Studie
dar, beziehen sie auf unseren theoretischen Ansatz und diskutieren die Multimodalität
semiotischer Ressourcen als Quelle von Anschauungen und Überzeugungen aus einer
soziokognitiven Perspektive.
Sosiokulttuuristen, vygotskilaiseen ajatteluun perustuvien suuntausten mukaan
ruumiillisuus ja materiaalisuus ovat erottamaton osa inhimillistä merkityksenantoa ja
ajattelua. Samankaltaisia ajatuksia ovat esittäneet myös dialogistit Valentin N. Vološinov
ja Mihail Bahtin pitäessään konkreettista, eri modaliteeteissa tapahtuvaa kielenkäyttöä
tutkimuksen lähtökohtana. Dialogisista ja sosiokulttuurisista lähtökohdista tuntuisi
seuraavan myös se mahdollisuus, että kieltä koskevilla käsityksillä on juurensa
materiaalisissa, eri modaliteettien esitystavoissa ja perinteissä. Tarkastelemme
artikkelissamme käsitysten multimodaalisuutta ja oletusta siitä, että verbaalinen ja
visuaalinen esitystapa tuovat esiin osin erilaisia käsityksiä.
58
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ForumSprache 6.2011
Hannele Dufva, Mari Aro, Riikka Alanen & Paula Kalaja
Postal address:
PL 35
40014 University of Jyväskylä
Finland
E-mail:
hannele.dufva@jyu.i
mari.aro@jyu.i
riikka.alanen@jyu.i
paula.kalaja@jyu.i
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ForumSprache 6.2011
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Introduction
This paper describes language learners’ beliefs about language, language learning and
language teaching. We will discuss and summarise indings from our studies in which
beliefs of second and foreign language learners have been examined and connect this to
theoretical and methodological points concerning irst, the relationship between social
and cognitive approaches and second, the role of multimodality. We will approach
multimodality by drawing on our own work on ‘beliefs’ (aka everyday knowledge,
subjective theories or conceptualisations) that language learners have about language,
language learning and language teaching. Looking at both verbal data coming from
oral interviews and visual data – learners’ self-portraits – we argue for multivoicedness,
situatedness and dynamicity of beliefs. Our results speak for a sociocognitive stand
where individual beliefs continuously intertwine with the social world of e.g. interactive
events and institutional discourses.
Here, we use the term multimodality to refer to the human capacity to perceive semiotic
resources through different sensory channels (most importantly visual and auditory) and
to employ different means in their meaning-making, such as articulated speech, different
types of gestures, different types of written representations, and also other types of
visuality that are present in arts and also, in drawings that we will discuss in this paper.
Thus multimodality refers here to the essentially multimodal nature of human semiosis.
Multimodality of language use is an increasing focus in language studies and research
is now emerging in different frameworks and research contexts. Multimodal approaches
have been used in, e.g., discourse analysis, text analysis, conversation analysis, and
interaction analysis (e.g. Goodwin 2000; Norris 2004). Within systemic-functional
approaches Kress & van Leeuwen (2001) have developed systematic ways of analysis
and have also discussed multimodality in (on-line) teaching and learning (e.g. Kress,
Jewitt, Osborn & Tsatsarelis 2001). Ecological-semiotic approach has been discussed by
Thibault (2004). The cognitively oriented approaches to multimodality include those of
cognitive linguistics (e.g. Forceville 2006) and a sociocognitive, embodied approach to
language use and second language acquisition has been discussed by Atkinson (2011) and
Churchill, Okadam, Nishino & Atkinson (2010). Recently, different types of visual and
multimodal data have also been used in the studies of language, language use, language
learning, language learners and multilingualism, which has resulted in rich collections
of data involving both visual and verbal representations. Learners’ self-portraits have
been analysed by Kalaja, Alanen & Dufva (2008) and Kalaja, Alanen, Palviainen &
Dufva (2011). Photographs of teenagers’ use of English have been explored by Nikula
& Pitkänen-Huhta (2008) and Sami-Finnish bilingual children’s experiences have been
explored by means of photographs and drawings by Pietikäinen, Alanen, Dufva, Kalaja,
Leppänen & Pitkänen-Huhta (2008). Menezes’ (2008) study uses language learners’
multimedia language learning histories as its data. The indings of these studies speak
for the power of visualisation in eliciting the subjective experiences and views, but they
also suggest that visualisation adds something extra to the indings gained in studies
employing verbal data.
Beliefs: social or cognitive?
Until fairly recently, the study of beliefs has been committed to theoretical and
methodological assumptions typical of the cognitivist paradigm of SLA (second
language acquisition). Duly, beliefs were deined as static mental schemata possessed by
the individual and were mostly examined using experimental methods and quantitative
measures such as questionnaires. While these cognitivist approaches have now been
justly criticised, one answer has been to turn to exclusively socially oriented – and/
or constructionist – paradigms, in which the value of the subjective expressions and
personal accounts as research data has been questioned. Thus people have been treated
as users of socially and culturally available resources only, and what is being said (in
interaction, in interview talk etc.) is considered as socially/discursively constructed
only. For example, the ethnomethodologically oriented conversation analysts have
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Dufva/Aro/Alanen/Kalaja – Voices of literacy, images of books
ForumSprache 6.2011
often quoted Sacks (1992) saying that in analysing interaction, it is important to “just
try to come to terms with how it is that the thing comes off”, at the same time regarding
beliefs, intentions, and thoughts of the participants as less important or non-important.
Further, the radical social constructionist views, such as expressed within discursive
psychology, for example, often suggest that ‘mental’ phenomena (attitudes, memory,
intentions) are essentially, or perhaps exclusively, discursively constructed (e.g.
Edwards & Potter 1992). Thus one inds arguments that it is possible to analyse the
observable discourse “without assuming any particular version of cognition, or even
that cognition…is taking place at all” (Potter 2006:138, italics the present authors’).
However, these positions have also been criticised (see, e.g., Hammersley 2003, Dufva
2010). The highly polarised opposition between radical individualist cognitivism and
radical social constructionism seems to lead only into a cul-de-sac where certain essential
questions, such as the theorising of learning, are ultimately left unanswered. Just as
many recent studies have given us important and highly useful descriptions of the social
events and interactions that involve language learning (Suni 2008), many scholars of
second/foreign language development and multilingualism have increasingly pointed
out the importance of the experienced views of learners for understanding the process of
language learning and development (see, e.g., Breen 2001) and for further developing
teaching practices (see e.g., Dufva & Salo 2009).
The approach we introduce here aims at transcending the representation of the
relationship between social and cognitive as a dichotomy between internal and external.
It draws both on dialogical philosophy of Bakhtin and Voloshinov and sociocultural
arguments by Vygotsky, being also tangential with non-Cartesian approaches to cognition
– or rather, cognising (see, e.g., Järvilehto 1998; Cowley 2009). We start with the
argument that beliefs (about something) are not entities such as schema or propositions:
once learned/acquired and since imprinted in the memory, as was envisaged in the
cognitivist argument. Rather, beliefs are refractions of the presence of many voices at
the social arenas – that is, social heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1981). Thus, we argue that they
are dynamic and multivoiced (see Dufva 2003, Aro 2009). Metaphorically, words (and
their ideological contents) are being recycled from the events of the social arena to the
events on one’s own psychological arena and back again to the diverse events of social
activity. Bearing in mind the social origin and nature of beliefs, it is natural that some
beliefs may be more readily available, “at the surface” as it were, being, e.g. more
frequent or more powerful in the particular language community, while others are
“deeper”, weaker and perhaps less conscious in nature and less verbalisable. Here,
Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope is relevant: neither time nor space is privileged by
Bakhtin, they are interdependent and should be studied as such. Speciic chronotopes
are said to correspond to particular genres, or relatively stable ways of speaking,
which themselves represent particular ideologies. Holquist and Emerson have
deined chronotope as “an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the
culture system from which they spring” (in Bakhtin 1986: 426): while the speaker or
writer is a unique individual in a unique situation, they necessarily use and
recycle certain ways of expression. A chronotope is thus both related to cognising
and a narrative feature of language. The sociocognitive approach aims at a new
understanding of the interrelationship between a person and the social activity she is
involved in. Rejecting the cognitivist view of the early research on language learning
and psycholinguistics (for criticism of cognitivism, see Still & Costall 1991, Dufva
1998), but inding also the exclusively social view inadequate, we discuss the dialogical
epistemology as a position that sees social and individual aspects of activity as not only
interrelated but parallel and intertwining. Personal beliefs do have a social origin – they
are appropriated through participation in social practices, or, more broadly, are socially
and culturally mediated (cf. Vygotsky 1986). However, as Voloshinov (1973: 39) argues,
the social and psychological are in a constant, reciprocal relationship where one intrudes
in the realm of the other – and becomes the other. Thus, to understand beliefs – or any
personal views, such as attitudes or memories – as emerging in discursive practices
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ForumSprache 6.2011
is correct, but they are not exclusively so. They are also ‘personal’ or ‘individual’,
expressed by an individual with a unique set of life experiences. Beliefs – what people
know or believe about something – have continuity in two senses. It is precisely the
continuity that makes it impossible to pin down their ontology in either of these two
realms exclusively and also makes it insuficient to regard them only in terms of the
language (e.g. discourses, texts, interaction) they emerge in. First, continuity is created
by the fact that there are socially and culturally available ways of speaking that get
repeated across time and/or space in communities, from one person to another. It is also
clear that at the level of external language use, certain ways of speaking emerge more
often and thus gain authority or popularity. But, on the other hand, the ways of speaking
are (by necessity) encountered by individuals who have a choice of appropriating or
rejecting them and who, in manner of speaking, have an ownership of them: the words
of the others become words of one’s own (Bakhtin 1981). This does not mean that views
expressed in the words of others would be accepted and repeated as such (although
this may as well happen): language users are (generally) at liberty to express their own
points of view either as direct echoes of the societal discourses, as counter-arguments
of the same, or as various modiications that arise in a situated fashion. However, it has
to be pointed out that there is clearly continuity in the way individuals express their
beliefs in different situations and along the continuum of their own life span. While
there are many situated effects in what one expresses, speakers are also operating on
a continuum. Thus in emphasizing the interplay between continuity and situatedness
in the expression of beliefs, we also wish to argue that it would be nihilistic to see a
person’s beliefs as random or as ad hoc productions of the current situation. Further,
we also wish to point out that the subjective views or personal accounts are valuable as
research data.
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Efects of modality
In this paper, we add an important dimension to our sociocognitive arguments by claiming
that not only words of the others, but also socially and culturally available images are
being recycled in people’s beliefs and conceptualisations. The data we discuss consist
of interviews (Aro 2009) and visual data (Kalaja et al. 2008; Kalaja et al. 2011), that
is, language learners’ drawings. We also refer to indings of other studies on written
narratives (see, e.g. Kalaja & Dufva 1996). Below, we will examine how different
methods of data collection may elicit different aspects of beliefs, or, simply, different
beliefs. The characteristics of the task, for example, its modality, are a strong inluence
in the beliefs that are expressed. People may express different beliefs in interviews
where they are asked to put their views into words than in tasks where they are invited
to present their views by visual means. Here, we draw on the Vygotskian arguments of
sociocultural thinking in particular. We will argue that beliefs may involve not only voices
(in the sense of verbally articulated beliefs, evoked by language use at the social arena),
but also images, inluenced by visual memories, or, of visual representations the persons
have been exposed to. Thus both voices and images travel from the social sphere to
people’s minds and return there in the form of verbally or visually articulated/performed
activity. To summarise our theoretical and methodological points of departure, the focus
of our analysis is not to analyse the data as ‘language’, ‘texts’ ,’narratives’ , ‘interview
interaction’ or ‘images’ alone but aim exploring the sociocognitive activity in which the
inner, psychological world of the participants is related to the particular situation (here:
the tasks by which the data was collected) and to the particular expressions (verbal or
visual) that result in externally observable language use (such as the interview talk or
written narrative).
We make some observations on the relationship between verbal and visual data
drawing on the sociocultural argument that speaks for the important role of mediation
and that also observes the potential difference brought about by different mediational
means, an argument that derives from Vygotsky’s (e.g. 1986) work. In sociocultural
thinking, human knowledge is seen to result from mediated action that employs various
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Dufva/Aro/Alanen/Kalaja – Voices of literacy, images of books
social and cultural tools/artefacts. Here, we will argue that what we here refer to as
‘beliefs’ also are inluenced by the process of mediation, both when they irst emerge
(are appropriated from different sources) and when they are expressed in, e.g. in different
types of tasks that are used as research data. To specify, the situated and mediated nature
of knowing argues that the materiality of the resources used leaves its trace in the ways
people conceptualise something: “what we hear” is thus (to a degree) different from
“what we read” and “what we see” and remembering and conceptualising something
when, e.g., writing a story or drawing a picture, people draw on these particular sources.
In short, we will argue that also beliefs are mediated not only through language use but
also through other semiotic resources, and, the modality of expression moulds what is
expressed (see also Voloshinov 1973, Kress et al. 2001:15).
From the point of view of methodology, talking, writing and drawing about something
draw on (partly) different cultural conventions and rules, such as, for example, how to
write a life story, how to make a self-portrait or how to talk with an interviewer, and the
data is also inluenced by the particular modality and materiality of the task. Looking
at that from the point of view of collecting and analysing data for research, we must
conclude that what emerges as data is basically inluenced by the task and situation both
in the social sense but also in the material sense. The nature of the particular task, seen
at the social level as an interplay between various participants, the roles designated for
them, and such factors as the time limits have of course been known to inluence results.
Talking in an interview differs from illing up a questionnaire and responses given in a
laboratory task might be different from those gathered by ield-work.
Obviously, we see the great value in analysing interaction or language use at large.
However, we do not wish to limit our analysis to that and argue that subjective views –
such as beliefs – are important in two senses. First, we see it as important to listen to the
research participants’ voices in order to gain important information on the aspects of,
e.g., learning process they, experientially, see as important. As Riley (1997: 128) argues:
“the issue is not one of inding the objective reality, the truth, but subjective reality,
their truth. What [the learners] believe will inluence their learning much, much more
than what we believe, because it is their beliefs that hold sway over their motivations,
attitudes and learning procedures”. In a sense, we need to take the research participants
as epistemic authorities of their personal knowledge – as the dialogical epistemology
argues, any knowledge results in an encounter between I and you, or, between two
consciousnesses (Bakhtin 1984: 81, 88). We also wish to point out that an analysis of
language use – e.g. recorded and transcribed interaction – does not capture reality in
any true sense either; because it is never a neutral description of “what really happens”,
but relects both the researcher’s chosen perspective and his/her use of conventional
methods and tools of analysis. Thus our focus of analysis is not located in the “external”
product alone, but it does not aim at giving a direct view to a certain personal belief
either. In fact, as we argue, there is no such thing, and this is our second important point:
we consider the study of personal beliefs as an important means to speculate about the
world of cognising and see it as important to relate our indings to those theories that
emphasise the dynamic and distributed nature of cognition (e.g. Cowley 2009). While
the subjective reality cannot be directly accessed, it can be tapped on – fragmentarily –
for example by asking people to express and articulate their views. In analysing these,
we cannot regard the manifest expressions as “identical” or “same as” of the experience
or conceptualising itself. Rather, what appears as a voice in an interview or written
narrative or as an image in our visual data may be described as an aspect of the person’s
beliefs. Beliefs are not singular entities, but, rather, dynamic clusters of multivoiced
(Aro 2009) and multimodal conceptualisations.
To summarise, when studying the individual’s beliefs from a sociocognitive point
of view, we should consider the affordances and constraints by the research task and
situation, the modality being one of the aspects important to consider. The surrounding
research environment is not an “external” scene in which or against which individuals
operate, but rather, a context for activity within which the individual agents act with
mediational means to achieve the goals they set for themselves (cf. Engeström 2005,
ForumSprache 6.2011
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ForumSprache 6.2011
Wertsch 1998). When context is thought of in the latter way, it cannot be reduced to an
external environment; instead, there is an ambiguous and dynamic relationship between
an object and its context: “the combination of goals, tools, setting […] constitutes
simultaneously the context of behaviour and ways in which cognition can be said to be
related to that context.” (Cole 1996: 137).
Two cases and two modalities
The focus of our research is beliefs about language(s), language learning and language
teaching. Since the 1980s, learner beliefs have mainly been looked at from two very
different perspectives. Beliefs have either been conceptualised from a cognitive
psychological viewpoint, where they are seen as characteristics of the individual,
something learners have inside their head and which they can put into words, and that
are relatively stable – often studied using questionnaires. On the other hand, learner
beliefs have been seen from a more discourse analytical point of view, where they
are considered to be functions of social interaction, and ever changing depending on
the context of the interaction and in these cases. Kalaja & Barcelos (2003), in their
collection, introduced many new approaches in the study of language learners’ beliefs,
such as metaphor analysis (e.g. Ellis 2001), diary research (e.g. Nunan 2000) and
ethnographic methodologies (e.g. Allen 1996). All in all, belief research has focused
on verbal data.
In the present paper, we draw particularly on the dialogical approach to beliefs which
is more fully discussed in Dufva (2003) and Aro (2004, 2009). We will summarise
research from two contexts: one case studying Finnish children’s beliefs about English
(using interviews as data) and the other case focussing on Finnish university students’
beliefs about language learning (using visual drawings and their verbal explanations
as data). Below, we will discuss those elements which seem to be repeated in both sets
of data and in both modalities the role of books and literacy being our most important
observation here. We will also point out differences between different sets of data that
may be important. Here, we discuss the role of modality in particular. We will show that
certain beliefs and conceptualisations seem to be similar – and that they may be typical
of our culture at large – but we will also show how differences may appear as a result
of the task and modality. In both sets of data English occupies an important position,
but, in the children’s data, it is a school subject that is studied by everybody while at the
university, it is a major chosen by the research participants themselves.
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Children: verbal descriptions of language learning
The irst case explores longitudinal interview data on how 15 Finnish L1 children
talk about the learning of English as a foreign language. It draws on Aro’s (2009)
dissertation study, where a group of elementary school pupils were followed over
a course of several years. The data were collected in the research project “Situated
Metalinguistic Awareness and Foreign Language Learning” (for other results, see, e.g.,
Dufva & Alanen 2005). The children were interviewed on three occasions: in Year 1
(aged 7), Year 3 (aged 9) and Year 5 (aged 11) about their views and experiences of
learning English. English was introduced as a school subject in Year 3. The data were
analysed both for content and using Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of polyphony, or multivoicedness. Bakhtin’s concept of voice is a metaphor for the intention and worldview
embedded in the speaker’s utterance. Polyphony is an inherent quality of each utterance,
because all our words and knowledge have been learnt in interaction with other people
and thus relect the voices of others in addition to our own. These others’ words can
be for example “internally persuasive” (Bakhtin 1981); open, dynamic and lexible:
words that we can easily take over and use for our own intentions. Others’ words can
also be “authoritative”, which means that the speaker must take them as they are and
merely repeat them – examples of authoritative words include e.g. religious dogmas or
recognised scientiic facts. Exploring the polyphony in learner beliefs thus gives us a
glimpse of what kinds of voices (and consequently the ideological contents these voices
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ForumSprache 6.2011
stand for) the learners have come into contact with, and which voices are privileged in
their beliefs, that is, whose words the learners ind worth repeating.
In the following, we shall take a look at what the learners said about learning English:
what, in their opinion, were the best ways to learn the language. Within this topic, the
authoritative voices of school and society turned out to be particularly important. In the
irst year, the learners did not have many experiences of purposely studying English.
However, many of them did know a word or two of English that they had usually learnt
from a parent, older sibling, or a friend. There were also a few other kinds of sources
for English mentioned:
MP: Mistä sä oot oppinu [englannin sanoja]?
Eeva: Äiti on sanonu ja sitte meillä on semmonen kirja.
MP: Yhym, minkälainen kirja?
Eeva: Jossa on kaikkia sanoja englanniks.
MP: Joo-o, ootsä ite sieltä opetellu?
Eeva: En ku mun äiti on lukenu sieltä.
MP: Where have you learnt [English words]?
Eeva: Mom has said and then we have this book.
MP: Mm hm, what kind of book?
Eeva: With all these words in English.
MP: Uh huh, have you studied it yourself?
Eeva: No my mom’s read from it.
Eeva knew English words because her mother had told her some, and she also added
that they had this book, with all these words in English. Eeva could not yet read herself,
so she could not make use of the book, but she had seen her mother read from it. The
book was clearly something that contained knowledge of English in the form of words
in English, and the fact that her mother used it possibly meant that is was a source to be
trusted – a parent was also certainly an authority.
In the third year, at the time of the interview, the learners had studied English for
a few months. The practices of the school world were evident in their answers: the
English teacher was a fairly prominent igure in the learners’ answers, and they talked a
lot about homework, exercises and tests, and particularly about their English text book.
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MA: Osaaksää jo paljo puhua ja kirjottaa englantia, mitäs te ootte täs oppinu?
Valtteri: No, ollaan me niinku hirveesti niitä sivujaki menny eteenpäin ja kaikkee
tällasta.
MA: Do you already know how to speak and write English, what kinds of things have
you learnt?
Valtteri: Well, we’ve like gone through a whole lot of pages too and all that kind of
stuff.
When asked to talk about what he had learnt over the past months, Valtteri said that they
had gone through a whole lot of pages – in the text book. Not only did the text book
appear to be the most important source of learning for the learners, but it also made
learning countable: the English language became pages of the book, chapters studied,
or the number of tests taken, rather than content. It also made English learning very
school-centric: English in the learners’ answers was often learnt through memorising
words from vocabulary lists in the book in order to remember them in a test. The voice
of the school world began to be very pronounced in the learners’ answers and appeared
to deine their views of learning to a great extent.
In the ifth year, the learners talked in more detail about how English was learnt.
Many felt that the best place to learn would be the school or a course and that having
a good teacher would help. But even their descriptions of studying with the help of a
teacher focused around written material: reading, vocabulary lists and chapters. When
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asked to describe the business of language learning, the focus on written language
remained a constant:
MA: No, mitenkäs englantia opiskellaan jos joku haluaa oikei hyvin oppia englantia
nii mitä sen kannattaa tehdä?
Emma: Lukee niitä sanoja ja harjotella kirjottamaan niitä.
MA: So how does one learn English, if one wants to learn English really well what
should they do?
Emma: Read the words and practice how to write them.
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Over time, the model of learning focusing on the book – sometimes introduced by
parents before school began and later reinforced by school practices – had become ever
more prevalent. The learners’ answers to how English was learnt indicated that they
predominantly viewed it as a literary pursuit: many said that the best way to learn would
be to read an English textbook. The irst example may shed light on how these beliefs
come to be: they are rooted in the learner’s experiences and become recycled over and
over again.
Over the years, the learners began to ind their own voice as language learners and
bring their own experiences to the fore. They began to talk more and more about how
they used English outside of the school context and about the various language resources
they came into contact with. However, as these viewpoints of how to go about language
learning emerged, it appeared that the authoritative voice, testifying to the power of
the written word, seemed to have a great effect on them. Authoritative ideas were not
only authoritative in the sense that the learners needed to repeat them as they are: it
seems they also began to function as a ilter through which the learners’ viewed English
learning in general. Consequently, when asked which outside-of-school activities could
be useful in learning English, written material such as books, comics and computer
games were considered useful – English-language television programmes, movies or
music were not. Their assessment of what was useful for the learning of English was
thus affected by the authoritative idea, and not only within the conines of the classroom,
but also in their free time where they all, in fact, actively used and consumed English.
The authoritative idea of learning through books was a constant in the learners’
interview answers over the years. Even though the learners began to bring up their own,
more personal opinions about and experiences with the English language over time,
the question is raised whether these voices, too, were spoken through the authoritative
viewpoint – whether these authoritative beliefs prevented the participants from
perceiving learning opportunities, language affordances and resources outside of school
and, more importantly, outside of books, and consequently affected their learning paths.
While different questions, of course, solicited different answers and there was plenty of
idiosyncracy in the learners’ answers, they all very consistently echoed the authoritative
idea that English is learnt from books.
Young adults: Visual and verbal representations of learning
The research project called “From Novice to Expert” is a ive-year research project on
the development of university students’ professional knowledge of language, language
learning and language teaching (see e.g., Kalaja et al. 2008). Its participants are
Finnish university students majoring in English. The data that was collected during the
students’ 1st study year consists of their life stories, “language learning histories”, their
questionnaire answers and their drawings (N=110). Here we will discuss the drawings
and their short “captions”. First, the students were asked to draw their self-portrait as
a learner of English on a sheet of paper (“My self-portrait: this is what I look like as
a learner of English”). Then they were asked to give a short explanation of what they
had drawn on the reverse side of the task sheet (“Give your own interpretation of the
drawing in a few sentences.”).
Although the two sets of data – from children and from young adults – discussed in
this paper do not come from the same project, we were interested in examining whether
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the tendencies were similar or different. Is there, continuity to be observed between
children’s beliefs and those of university students’ beliefs and, what kind of role does
the situatedness play? Particularly, can we ind the inluence of literacy and books also
in this type of data?
Two most important indings in the analysis of the students’ portraits suggest that
irst, the students portrayed themselves most often alone and second, although there are
various mediational means represented in the drawings (such as other people, television,
music, computer) books were the most important (for a closer discussion, see Kalaja
et al. 2008). The irst inding seems to be closely related to the individualist notion of
learning: the underlying discourses, representations and/or metaphors that seem to be
at work here are those that rely on notions such as ‘knowledge is individual’, ‘learning
means transferring information’ or ‘mind is a container’. These are metaphors typical
of rationalist philosophy, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics and also, traditional
SLA and thus powerful and are recycled in pedagogical practices by textbooks, teachers,
etc. The second inding – the strong presence of books – seems to suggest a particular
view of ‘language’, but also seems to be a portrayal of classroom practices. It has
been repeatedly argued that the notion of language in linguistics is literacy-based (see
Voloshinov 1973: 71), and that one can observe a written language bias in linguistics
(Linell 2005). The literate world view is also seen in language education: both ideals and
practices frequently lean on written standards and literacy skills (for textbook-oriented
and literacy-centred classroom practices, see, e.g. Pitkänen-Huhta 2003). Thus, it is no
wonder that also in learner portraits ‘learning involves books and reading’.
When comparing the drawings with short verbal descriptions the students wrote
about their self-portrait, similar trends emerged: students did not mention other people,
but named books as important sources of learning, although slightly more infrequently
than in the drawings (Kalaja et al. 2008). However, when considering these indings in
the light of the results of another project – consisting of written narratives (life-stories)
– we ind some interesting similarities, but also differences. One striking difference is
that in drawings, the teachers were almost completely missing, while in life stories, the
importance of the teacher for the learning process was frequently mentioned (Kalaja
et al. 2008). The life stories also included more references to social interaction, other
people, out-of-the-school experiences and travel.
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Voices and images
We argue that the beliefs and conceptualisations expressed in the different sets of data we
discussed above suggest both continuity and situatedness that intertwine. First, certain
conceptualisations of learning seem to be more salient – as they appear both in children
and young adults and both in verbal and visual data. An example of this is the strong
presence of literacy in all sets of data (children and young adults; verbal and visual). We
propose that this suggests a commonly held and inluential view of learning, “a shared
belief” (cf. ‘language ideologies’, e.g., Woolard 1998), that language learning is a
literacy-based project. However, we are not saying that what is common and inluential
is necessarily explicit and consciously recognised. Although the common, culturally
inluential beliefs may often be mediated by explicit wordings in educational discourse,
media, parental talk, classroom interaction, textbooks, there are also hidden agendas.
Considering the role of literacy, we might in fact speculate that it is more of a hidden
agenda, not necessarily articulated as such (for the hidden agenda of written language
bias, see e.g. Linell 2005), but that is possibly mediated mostly through practices that
are literacy-based, means of assessing language proiciency that focus on academic
and literacy-based skills and values that are attached to literacy. There is a somewhat
curious dissonance to be found in the fact that while, for example, oral, communicative
and interactional skills are much highlighted in both national curricula and European
language education policy documents, as well as in teachers’ expressed views (see e.g.
Kalaja & Dufva 1996), the data we have collected seems to tell another story. Also the
young learners who were interviewed said that the point of learning English was to be
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able to speak it with other people – yet they said the best way to learn English was to
read it. Second, it is clear that somewhat different conceptualisations are elicited by
different tasks. Although the literacy-inluenced conceptualisations of learning seem
to be present both in verbal and visual data and thus speak for the continuity of this
powerful idea, there were also differences. For example, drawings elicited more images
of “lonely” learner with an emphasis on receptive learning whereas in verbal captions
and frequently in life story data, other people – e.g. teacher or various native speaker
contacts – and activity through other mediational means – e.g. media – were more
important. Similarly, in the interview data, the learners usually spoke from a position of
“we learners” (in the classroom, we read, we do exercises, we study words...) rather than
presented themselves as “lonely” agents.
Thus the modality modiies of what is being expressed, irst, purely materially and
then also by setting certain conventions as models for expression. In the words of
Kress et al. 2001: 15): “Each meaning making system – mode – provides different
communicative potentials. In other words, each mode is culturally shaped around the
constraints and affordances of its medium – its materiality”. Thus one reason for the
fact that they draw themselves alone is just in the fact that this is a highly conventional
way of portraiture while this is clearly not so with written biographies. We suggest that
here continuity and situatedness intertwine in an interesting manner. Thus the research
participants draw on particular genres and models typical of that particular task and
modality, echoing particular conventions and traditions that are involved. When they
are interviewed, they answer the questions the researcher asks them – even if they feel
other topics might have been more important and relevant – because that is what you
do in an interview. When people are asked to write their personal learning history, they
choose a genre and a model for this: to take an example, written life stories may be
modelled as an autobiography, a fairytale, an essay, a letter, a CV or a drama. Similarly,
when the research participants are asked to draw a portrait, that is what they do.
Thus a methodological point for the researchers looking for beliefs is that different
beliefs may emerge, depending not only on the situation as such, but also on the
affordances and constraints of expression. Experimental research and questionnaires
yield different results than methods that allow the subjects to speak in their own words.
Verbal language affords certain ways for self-expression while other semiotic resources
(e.g. visual, pictorial) provide different means. Any research design calls for a particular
kind of interaction that elicits particular events and responses. Here, we have discussed
how using multimodal research methods may highlight certain particularities and may
provide multiple angles to analysis – and shown that learners can and do express their
beliefs regarding language learning.
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Summing up: Beliefs about language learning
An important theoretical suggestion we wish to make is that ‘beliefs’ are not only
multivoiced – they can also been pictured as multimodal. Our everyday knowledge of
various things, such as marriage, health, cat food, and how to operate a cellular phone,
are mediated to us through language but also through various types of images. Thus
the origin of believing something, or knowing something, about something is to be
found in the concrete events that are multimodal in nature. We listen to other people’s
talk, read instructions and newspapers, study textbooks, see movies and images in the
magazines and go to the art galleries to have a look at the portraits hanging on the wall.
In this sense, individuals are not only ‘language users’ (in the sense of verbal language)
but users of semiotic resources that are afforded to them. Thus the knowledge we rely
on and operate with in our everyday life is mostly, if not entirely, mediated through
different semiotic resources and their interpretation. As Voloshinov (1973: 90) said:
“Outside objectiication, outside embodiment in some particular material (the material
of gesture, inner word, outcry) consciousness is a iction”.
The socio-cognitive view of beliefs suggests that we look at the past and present social
events not only as the origin of beliefs but also as a force that both provides affordances
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and sets constraints to their rearticulations. Beliefs about something are – as also the
social constructionist views suggest – varying and situated. But at the same time, they
have continuity, both in the way the society recycles its ways of speaking and powerful
discourses and in the way particular individuals appropriate and rearticulate them. Thus
our dialogical and sociocultural approach argues against views saying that what people
say or do in everyday interaction, or as research participants, is exclusively socially or
discursively constructed. At the same time, we aim at inding new ways for studying
how, precisely, the cognitive nature of beliefs should be understood. Answers may be
provided by non-Cartesian – systemic, ecological and distributed – views of cognition
that take the connection between the individuals and their environment as their starting
point (see, e.g. Gibson 1979, Järvilehto 1998; van Lier 2004; Cowley 2009). In these
frameworks, human cognising is regarded in terms of a human-environment system.
Individuals are born to an environment that is not only a language community but also
a cultural, semiotic community where various kinds of meaning-making signs are used.
In these views, a fundamental reciprocity is assumed between the affordances (what
is available in the environment) and what is noticed, taken heed of and appropriated
by those human agents populating this community. Put simply, individuals build their
own knowledge – whether that be formal, factual knowledge or more intuitive ‘beliefs’
gathered in various contexts of one’s everyday life – in a multimodal semiosphere.
In articulating their beliefs about languages and language learning, people draw
on, irst, their own personal experiences (their unique “language learning history”),
second, socially and culturally available (verbal and visual) representations, and, third,
various situational factors that are present in the situation at hand (including the task
and the modality of the expression). Thus beliefs are not direct relections of the societal
ideologies; but rather, in Voloshinov’s (1973) terms, refractions of the social scene.
Also, as dialogical approach indicates (Dufva 2003, Aro 2004, 2009), beliefs are not
singular but rather, plural and multivoiced. Beliefs are thus not ‘ready-made’ schemata,
but emergent from a dynamic and continuously changing data-base, a “mishmash” of
various memories, recollections, images and views, a view that also coincides with
dynamic notions of memory (see, e.g., Edelman 1992). Another way of putting this
is that remembering is both situated (Sutton 2006) and autobiographical (Fink 2003).
Thus the products, i.e. the beliefs and conceptualisations that we are able to examine
in various verbal, visual or multimodal articulations, are expressions of knowledge
potential rather than knowledge as a static schemata (cf. the concept of meaning as
‘meaning potential’, Rommetveit 1992, Lähteenmäki 2004). As we have shown, some
beliefs may be less readily available while others are fairly consistently repeated, as
seen in the role of the book. Voices of literacy and images of books are a strong cultural
stereotype, and, as we see this, an example of authoritative voices.
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