A CONVERSATION ANALYTIC APPROACH TO MOTIVATION: FOSTERING MOTIVATION IN THE L2 CLASSROOM THROUGH PLAY

Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Dobs, Abby Marie Mueller
- Graduate Program:
- Applied Linguistics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- October 10, 2016
- Committee Members:
- Joan Kelly Hall, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Joan Kelly Hall, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Suresh Canagarajah, Committee Member
Karen E. Johnson, Committee Member
Mari A. Haneda, Outside Member - Keywords:
- conversation analysis
motivation
second language classroom
second language learning
teacher-student interaction
interactional competence
membership categorization analysis
language play
identity - Abstract:
- Second or foreign language (L2) motivation is one of the most researched second language acquisition (SLA) variables, and decades of L2 motivational research have established the importance of fostering learner motivation within the language classroom. Yet, a lack of consensus or certainty remains in terms of how to conceptualize and operationalize L2 motivation. For the most part, researchers tend to rely on teacher and student self-reports, questionnaires and surveys, to measure motivation, and they apply a series of statistical analyses to predict how certain conditions, related to the learner or the learning situation, will influence motivation. With these tendencies, extant L2 motivational research has yet to sufficiently consider how motivation is actually achieved in the contingencies of classroom interaction. This dissertation is a partial attempt to fill this gap in the research. Drawing on the tenets of conversation analysis (CA), the study treats L2 motivation as a socially-shared, observable phenomenon co-constructed and displayed by teachers and learners as they participate in everyday classroom activities. Based on the empirical and theoretical work connecting motivation with the presence of positive relationships (e.g., Allen, Witt, & Wheeless, 2006; Deci & Ryan, 2000; Dörnyei, 2001; Schumann, 2010, 2013), this dissertation assumes that teacher-student affiliative interactions offer a productive starting point for investigating the interactional realization of L2 motivation, and because shared laughter is considered to be affiliative (e.g., Ellis, 1997; Glenn, 1991, 2003), it operationalizes motivation as shared laughter. The data for the dissertation come from the Corpus of English for Academic and Professional Purposes (CEAPP) and consist of approximately 30 hours of audio and video recorded classroom interaction collected over the course of a semester in an adult, high beginner-level grammar class of an intensive English program at a US university. From the 30 hours of video, 453 episodes of teacher-student interaction featuring shared laugher were identified and transcribed in detail, and the methods of CA, and membership categorization analysis (MCA) were used to examine and compare the teacher’s and students’ participation in and across the episodes. The analysis discovered that identity play was the primary source of shared laugther, and it revealed eight interactional practices the teacher used for doing identity play, four practices involving play with the teacher’s identity and four reciprocal practices involving play with the students’ identities. Each of the practices involved playful category work that juxtaposed two opposing elements of teacher or student identity. The teacher-initiated identity play practices engendered a high level of student involvement, evidenced in an abundance of student self-selected turns. The practices encouraged students to affiliate with the teacher and each other, motivating them to initiate and extend affiliative interactions in pursuit and achievement of both pedagogical and interpersonal goals. Finally, the anlaysis offers some evidence that student participation may become more diverse and complex as students repeatedly participate in the playful interactions. This finding suggests that the students’ motivated action, then, may bring about the development of interactional competence. These findings have significant implications for teaching and learning. They confirm the crucial role affiliation plays in motivating language learners and they contribute to our understanding of how teachers may effectively nurture L2 motivation and development in the classroom.