The Department of English Language Pedagogy and Translation Studies cordially invites you to
Jakub Bielak's guest lecture on language learning strategies
16.00 - 17.00 on May 3, 2018 (Thursday)
Ambro 129, Piliscsaba
English majors' and their teachers' emotion-regulation strategies
The importance of language learner emotions was recognized a few decades ago, and their relevance to linguistic development still inspires new research in various contexts. In this talk I am going to focus on the emotion-regulation strategies used to increase the positive and deal with the negative emotions that English department students in Poland employ in various language learning situations, as well as their language teachers' student-directed strategies of the same sort used in the same situations. The data were collected by means of
(a) a new scenario-based research tool called Managing Your Emotions for Language Learning (MYE; Gkonou & Oxford, 2016) in the course of an international validation effort which is currently under way (Gkonou & Oxford, 2017; Kantaridou & Psaltou-Joycey, 2017; Bielak & Mystkowska-Wiertelak, 2017). MYE uses the so-called vignette methodology (Collet & Childs, 2011; Hughes, 1998), i.e. it asks participants to respond to a series of scenarios such as imagining that one has just been corrected by a language teacher in front of the whole class.
(b) follow-up semi-structured interviews with selected participants (both students and teachers).
Besides the general picture of the emotions occurring and strategies employed in the cultural and educational context under study, I will talk about the student-perceived effectiveness of the student- and teacher-generated emotion-regulation strategies. The results reveal among other things the great flexibility of language learning strategies, which often serve multiple functions, and the limited strategic repertoires and effectiveness of many language teachers in the area of student-directed emotion-regulation strategies. I will consider some pedagogical implications of the research and show how the results support a reconsideration of Oxford's (2017) newest attempt to classify language learning strategies used for emotion-regulation.
All welcome.
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Jakub Bielak is Assistant Professor at the Department of English Studies of the Faculty of Pedagogy and Fine Arts of Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań/Kalisz, Poland. His major interests include form-focused instruction, individual learner differences, language learning strategies and applications of cognitive linguistics to language teaching. Among his publications there is one book (Applying Cognitive Grammar in the Foreign Language Classroom: Teaching English Tense and Aspect, 2013, Springer, co-authored with Mirosław Pawlak), several articles in journals and edited volumes, and two co-edited volumes. Jakub is Editor of the journal Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching and was previously Head of a university press at the Konin State University of Applied Sciences, Poland.
