Monica Waterhouse
EMO-TISSAGE / EMO-LEARNING
Affects dans l’apprentissage des langues
Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgique, Le 5, 6, et 7 Juillet 2017
Emotions in Immigrant
Language Education: from
Acquisition Barrier to
Affective Pedagogy
Overarching objective: examination of the
affective dimensions of adult immigrant second
language education in Canada from a Deleuzian
perspective.
Ongoing Research Program
3 angles
1. Curriculum = what to teach or content
2. Teachers’ perspectives = who teaches
3. Pedagogy = how teaching might go on
• Research has established the complex ways in which
emotion and cognition are intimately intertwined in
language learning (Arnold, 2011; Dewaele, 2013) and in
the professional experience of language teaching
(Benesch, 2012; Golombek & Doran, 2014).
• A proliferation of theoretical perspectives with distinct
strands that focus on “linguistic, psychological and
social aspects of the L2 learning process” (Pavlenko,
2013, p.6).
• Explicitly critical approaches (see Benesch, 2016 for a
review)
Conceptual Proliferations
• Anwarrudin’s (2017) discursive, materialist
critique of research that frames migrant and
refugee students “as emotionally vulnerable
‘problems’ in need of fixing” (p.113)
• “The goal of this [critical] research is not to
capture what emotions are, biologically or
cognitively, or to discover whether they are good
or bad for language teaching and learning, but
instead to examine how they work socially”
(Benesch, 2016, p.6).
Conceptual Proliferations
Resists binary oppositions (Spinoza’s monism)
“The perspective of the affects requires us
constantly to pose as a problem the relation
between actions and passions, between reason
and the emotions. We do not know in advance
what a body can do, what a mind can think –
what affects they are capable of. The
perspective of the affects requires an exploration
of these as yet unknown powers.” (Hardt, 2007,
p.x)
What Deleuzian affect theory does…
Affects:
• exceed individual bodies; they are relational
• are powers or capacities to affect and be affected, transform
(i.e. becoming, Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987)
• are visceral, preconscious, and autonomous
• may actualize in classrooms as emotions: fear, sadness, joy.
• described not in terms of what they are or what they mean for
an individual human subject (student or teacher), but are
studied in terms of what they do in the context of classroom
(Benesch, 2012) and what they produce (e.g. emotions, or
teacher pedagogical choices/responses)
• Non-human bodies (e.g. text-bodies) also affect and are
affected.
What Deleuzian affect theory does…
• Project title: Exploring the transformative powers of
Deleuzean affect in immigrant English language
classrooms: curricular and pedagogical implications
• Acknowledgement: funded by a Nouveaux
chercheurs grant (2013-2014), Budget de
développement de la recherche (BDR), Faculté des
lettres et des sciences humaines, Université Laval
• Research Question: How is affect conceptualized in
Canadian adult immigrant second language
programs?
Angle 1 - Curriculum
• Identification & collection
of key policy and
curriculum documents
from government funded
immigrant official
language education
programs in Canada.
• Government websites: – federal for the Language
Instruction for Newcomers to
Canada (LINC program)
– provincial & territorial programs
– 2012 Canadian Language
Benchmarks (CLB) & CLB
curriculum support docs
• 30 e-documents analyzed
from 8 provinces & 2
Territories
8
Angle 1 - Curriculum
Waterhouse & Mortier-Faulkner, 2014
• Psycho-cognitive orientations:
motivation and willingness to communicate
learner self-confidence and self-esteem
key role that teachers play in supporting the learning
process
• Linguistic orientations:
learning outcomes related to communicative
competence including sociocultural, pragmatic and
sociolinguistic conventions.
Angle 1 - Curriculum
• Title: Perspectives des enseignants sur les dimensions affectives des
classes de langue pour les immigrants : implications pédagogiques et
sociales/ Teacher perspectives on the affective dimensions of
immigrant language classes: pedagogical and social implications.
• Acknowledgement: funded by Fonds de recherche du Québec sur la
société et la culture (2016-2019)
• Online questionnaire for teacher-respondents. Part of a three-year
qualitative study exploring the pedagogical choices of French and
English second language (FSL & ESL) teachers working with adult
immigrants to Canada (Québec & Ontario) with respect to the affective
dimensions of classroom life
How do the affective dimensions of their classrooms influence
these teachers’ pedagogical choices?
How do these teachers respond to affective events that present
themselves in their classrooms?
Angle 2 - Teachers’ Perspectives
The need to develop a data collection tool aligning
theory & method:
• theoretical-methodological commensurability in
educational research on emotions (Kuby, 2016;
Zembylas, 2007b).
Tierney (2011) makes the case for vignettes in research
investigating:
• sensitive topics or ethically weighed dilemmas
• rarely occurring (not easily observable) and context-
dependent phenomena
• decision-making situations
Angle 2 - Teachers’ Perspectives
• Online, vignette-based
questionnaire distributed
to teachers by Ontario
and Quebec teacher
associations via their list-
serves and social media
(e.g. facebook)
• French version https://monicawaterhouse.limequery.c
om/431225?lang=fr
• English version https://monicawaterhouse.limequery.c
om/239992?lang=en
• open prompts invite
affective responses to
four fictionalized
vignettes inspired by real-
life experiences of teachers
and students involving
affectively charged events
in adult immigrant second
language classrooms
(Waterhouse, 2011)
Angle 2 - Teachers’ Perspectives
Preliminary thinking with data & theory
• As suspected, emotionally charged events like the ones
described in the vignettes are relatively rarely occurring.
• However, when they do, they are affectively impactful
within the classroom, for both teachers and students.
• Teachers are responding positively to a research focus
on questions of affect and are volunteering for the next
phase of the study.
Angle 2 - Teachers’ Perspectives
Classroom-based ethnographic research around arts-
based pedagogy (October 2017 to June 2018):
• Another component of the three-year qualitative study
exploring the pedagogical choices of teachers working with
adult immigrants to Canada with respect to the affective
dimensions of classroom life
How might an arts-based, affective pedagogy offer
teachers a way to meet the dual objectives of newcomer
language programs: language learning and integration
of immigrants?
Angle 3 - Pedagogy
From acquisition barrier to affective pedagogy:
• from exclusively linguistic texts to an appreciation of art as affective
thinking and knowledge creation in the learning process (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1994; Semetsky, 2009)
• from teachers’ emotional labour (Benesch, 2012) in managing
emotions to a critical reflection on the ethical-political stakes of
responses to emotions.
• from teacher-centred control to unknowablity of exactly how learning
will go on.
– “There are no ultimate or final guarantees – political, ethical,
aesthetic, pedagogic, and otherwise – that capacities to affect and
to be affected will yield an actualized next or new that is somehow
better than ‘now.’” (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, pp.9-10).
Angle 3 - Pedagogy
Inspirations for an arts-based, affective pedagogy:
• ”Exactly what forms such a pedagogy might take is to be
constructed by each teacher and his/her students. To
prescribe the sort of pedagogical techniques or classroom
activities that teachers and students should be engaged in
would be to institute another normalising discourse for
teachers and students to submit to” (Zembylas, 2007a,
p.343)
Angle 3 - Pedagogy
Choice of text
(Cole, 2016;
Danzak, 2011)
• Affectively
powerful art
• Benefits of a
language-free
text
• Shaun Tan’s graphic
novel The Arrival
Working with the text
• See Cole, D. R. (2016). Affective literacy and
TEFL. Presentation slides retrieved June 12,
2017 from
https://www.slideshare.net/dracle99/affective-
literacy-and-tefl.
• Also, advantages for low literacy learners
Cole
(2
01
6)
You have left your readers with a very special gift: a headache.
By which I mean a problem: what in the world to do with it all.
That’s their problem. That’s where their experimentation begins.
Then the openness of the system will spread. If they have found
what they have read compelling. Creative contagion.
(Massumi, 2002, p.19)
Onwards…
Affective dimensions of adult immigrant
second language education in Canada
from 3 angles:
1. Curriculum
2. Teachers’ perspectives
3. Pedagogy
• Anwarrudin, S. M. (2017). Emotions in the curriculum of migrant and refugee students. Curriculum
Inquiry, 47(1), 112-124.
• Arnold, J. (2011). Attention to affect in language learning. Anglistik. International Journal of English
Studies, 11(1), 11-22.
• Benesch, S. (2012). Considering emotions in critical English language teaching. New York, NY:
Routledge.
• Benesch, S. (2016). Critical approaches to the study of emotions in English language teaching and
learning. In C. A. Chapelle, The encyclopedia of applied linguistics (pp.1-6). John Wiley & Sons. DOI:
10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal1478.
• Cole, D. R. (2016). Affective literacy and TEFL. Presentation slides retrieved June 12, 2017 from
https://www.slideshare.net/dracle99/affective-literacy-and-tefl.
• Danzak, R. L. (2011). Defining identities through multiliteracies: EL teens narrate their immigration
experiences as graphic stories. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 55(3), 187-196.
• Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. (B. Massumi,
Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980)
• Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? (H. Tomlinson, & G. Burchell, Trans.). New
York: Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1991).
• Dewaele, J.-M. (2013). Affect and language learning. In C. A. Chapelle (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of
Applied Linguistics (pp.1-5). Blackwell Publishing. DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0011
• Golombek, P., & Doran, M. (2014). Unifying cognition, emotion, and activity in language teacher
professional development. Teaching and Teacher Education, 39, 102-111.
• Hardt, M. (2007). Foreword: what affects are good for. In P.T. Clough with J. Halley (Eds.), The
affective turn : theorizing the social (pp.ix-xiii). Durham & London : Duke University Press.
References
• Kuby, C. R. (2016). Emotions as situated, embodied, and fissured: methodological implications of thinking
with theories. In M. Zembylas & P.A. Schutz (Eds.), Methodological advances in research on emotion
and education [e-book] (pp.125-136). Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. doi: 10.1007/978-3-
319-29049-2
• Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual : movement, affect, sensation. Durham : Duke University
Press.
• Pavlenko, A. (2013). The affective turn in SLA: From ‘affective factors’ to ‘language desire’ and
‘commodification of affect.’ In D. Gabryś-Barker and J. Bielska (Eds.), The affective dimension in second
language acquisition (pp.3-28). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.
• Seigworth, G. J. & Gregg, M. (2010). An inventory of shimmers. In M. Gregg & G.J. Seigworth (Eds.),
The Affect Theory Reader (pp.1-25). Duke University Press.
• Semetsky, I. (2009). Deleuze as a philosopher of education: Affective knowledge/effective learning. The
European Legacy, 14(4), 443-456.
• Tan, S. (2006). The arrival. New York : Arthur A. Levine Books, Scholastic Inc.
• Tierney, R. D. (2011, April 10). Vignettes as a complementary method in educational research. Paper
presented at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting, New Orleans, LA.
• Waterhouse, M. (2011). Experiences of multiple literacies and peace: A rhizoanalysis of becoming in
immigrant language classrooms. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Ottawa. Available
electronically at http://hdl.handle.net/10393/19942
• Waterhouse, M., & Mortier-Faulkner, G. (2014, May 27). Conceptualizations of affect in Canadian adult
immigrant second language education. Paper presentation at the Canadian Association of Applied
Linguistics, Brock University, St.Catherine’s, Ontario.
• Zembylas, M. (2007a). 'Risks and pleasures: a Deleuzo-Guattarian pedagogy of desire in education',
British Educational Research Journal, 33 (3), 331-347. DOI: 10.1080/01411920701243602
• Zembylas, M. (2007b). Theory and methodology in researching emotions in education. International
Journal of Research & Method in Education, 30(1), 57–72.
References
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