Published By Melissa (1507042035)
In today’s world, society is facing extremely
tough challenges in the form of global warming, natural disasters, economic
recession, unprecedented homelessness, terrorism and the draining continuation
of war. With all this sadness and horror, where in the world does a science
based on testing happiness, wellbeing, personal growth and ‘the good life’ fit
into the modern-day agenda?
Positive psychology is not simply the focus
on positive thinking and positive emotions. It’s much more than that. Indeed,
the area of positive psychology is focused on what makes individuals and
communities flourish, rather than languish. Flourishing is defined as ‘a state
of positive mental health; to thrive, to prosper and to fare well in endeavours
free of mental illness, filled with emotional vitality and function positively
in private and social realms’ (Michalec et al., 2009: 391). Indeed, existing
figures show that only 18 per cent of adults meet the criteria of flourishing,
65 per cent are moderately mentally healthy and 17 per cent are languishing.
Unsurprisingly, flourishing has several positive correlates such as academic
achievement, mastery goal setting, higher levels of self-control and continued
perseverance (Howell, 2009). Thus, a science that focuses on the development
and facilitation of flourishing environments and individuals is an important
addition to the psychological sciences.
Positive psychology concentrates on positive
experiences at three time points: (1) the past, centering on wellbeing, contentment
and satisfaction; (2) the present, which focuses on concepts such as happiness
and flow experiences; (3) the future, with concepts including optimism and
hope. Not only does positive psychology distinguish between wellbeing across
time points but it also separates the subject area into three nodes:
■ the subjective node, which encompasses
things like positive experiences and states across past, present and future (for
example, happiness, optimism, wellbeing);
■ the individual node, which focuses on characteristics
of the ‘good person’ (for example, talent, wisdom, love, courage, creativity);
and
■ the group node, which studies positive
institutions, citizenship and communities (for example, altruism, tolerance,
work ethic) (Positive Psychology Center, 1998).
Contrary to criticism, positive psychology is
not a selfish psychology. At its best, positive psychology has been able to
give the scientific community, society and individuals a new perspective on
existing ideas as well as providing empirical evidence to support the
phenomenon of human flourishing. Above all, though, positive psychology has
challenged and rebalanced the deficit approach to living while connecting its
findings to many different disciplines. Throughout this textbook you will see
how inducing positive emotions, committing acts of kindness and enhancing
social connections enable individual and societal flourishing, demonstrating
the usefulness of the discipline for individual, group and community wellbeing.
Applications
of Positive Psychology
Positive psychology can have a range of
real-world applications in areas including education, therapy,
self-help, stress management, and workplace issues. Using strategies from
positive psychology, teachers, coaches, therapists, and employers can motivate
others and help individuals understand and develop their personal strengths.
The Goals of Positive Psychology
The goals of Positive Psychology mirror the
goals of language learning. Most
professionals enter the field of teaching in order to make a difference in the
lives of students. What motivates
teachers to continue is the reinforcement of seeing students thrive and perform
at optimal levels. Positive Psychology
seeks to do the same, promoting general well-being and life satisfaction across
the broader spectrum of individuals and institutions.
Positive psychology is a rapidly expanding
subfield in psychology that has important implications for the field of second
language acquisition (SLA). Positive Psychology also has application in all
aspects of teaching and learning, from pre-school level to post graduate, for
faculty and students alike. The concept of positive education seeks both higher
academic achievement, increased character strengths, self awareness and
emotional control, self efficacy (not self-esteem), resilience, flexible and
accurate thinking skills, strategies for positive relationships and learned
optimism. There are reasons for both encouragement and caution as studies
inspired by positive psychology are undertaken.
POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND LANGUAGE LEARNING
On the trail of positive psychology in SLA As
with the field of psychology, PP in SLA could perhaps be viewed as having a
short history and a long past. Lake (2013) was one of the first to explicitly
adapt and apply PP concepts in his study of Japanese learners’ positive self,
positive L2 self, self-efficacy, and intended effort. Lake successfully
demonstrated that PP-inspired measures correlate with effort, self-efficacy,
and TOEIC Bridge scores. There are several additional, established concepts
familiar to those studying SLA that could also be brought under a PP umbrella.
Although there are a number of lines of inquiry that we could consider, let us
focus on five especially salient ones: the humanistic movement in language
teaching, models of motivation that draw upon a range of affective factors, the
concept of an affective filter, studies of the good language learner, and the
more recent literature on concepts related to the self and its development.
The humanistic movement in language teaching
was at its peak in the 1970s and 1980s. Characteristically, humanistic
approaches took a holistic view of the learner, combining cognition and affect;
the underlying assumption, as expressed by Roberts (as cited in Stevick, 1990),
being that “the affective aspects of language learning are as important as the
cognitive aspects, [and therefore] the learner should be treated in some sense
as a 'whole person'” (p.26). Today few would dispute such core principles and
their importance for understanding language learner psychology and behaviours.
However, humanism became closely associated with alternative forms of language
teaching such as Suggestopedia, The Silent Way, and Total Physical Response
(Asher, 1969; Gattegno, 1963; Lozanov, 1979). As with humanistic psychology,
these instructional methods came under considerable criticism for their lack of
scientific support and validity; however, the humanistic tradition as a guiding
approach and epistemology has had a considerable, lasting influence in SLA.
Indeed, integrating affect and cognition remains a key tenet of many
contemporary SLA models. In particular, work by R. C. Gardner and his
colleagues has played an important role in drawing attention to socio-affective
factors and the importance of positive attitudes toward the language, its
speakers and related cultures (Gardner & Lambert, 1972; Gardner, 1985,
2010). In the socio-educational model, Gardner (2010) holds that positive
attitudes towards the learning situation (teacher and course) facilitate
language learning. The social milieu in which the learning takes place is a key
source of both positive and negative attitudes, as learners internalize
elements of the context in which they live. Clément’s (1980, 1986) socio-contextual
model places even more emphasis on the learning context, the power
relationships among language groups, and tensions between language acquisition
and language loss, especially for members of a minority group learning the
language of a majority group. In addition, Clément proposes a secondary
motivational process within the individual, self-confidence, which is defined
by low anxiety and perceptions of high linguistic competence. Both Gardner’s
and Clément’s models foreground the role of social and cultural contexts,
highlighting that an individual’s psychology does not exist in a vacuum; an
individual learner is always embedded in multiple contexts.
A third perspective of note is offered by
Krashen (1985), who also drew attention to the role of emotions with what he
termed the affective filter. Krashen argued that a high degree of negative
emotion raises a filter that reduces the amount of comprehensible input reaching
the learner. Conversely, in the presence of positive emotions, the affective
filter is lower and the learner is open to being exposed to more comprehensible
input. A fourth noteworthy approach, studies of the “good language learners.” (GLLs;
Naiman, 1978, Rubin, 1975; Stern, 1975; Stevick, 1989), provides recognizable
parallels to the holistic approach of Maslow’s studies of self-actualizing persons.
Essentially, GLL studies sought to understand the lessons that can be learned
from “good” or “expert” learners or teachers (Griffiths, 2008). The related set
of studies of “expertise” (see, e.g., Farrell, 2013; Johnson, 2005; Tsui, 2003)
also examined positive examples of learners and/or teachers, typically
focussing on the integrated use of competences and skills. An important feature
of many GLL studies has been the tendency to look at the processes by which
“good” language learners acquire a foreign language and not just merely describe
the learner and their language output. Such a process-oriented approach to
understanding the learner resonates with more recent developments in complexity
perspectives.
Most recently, a fifth line of relevant
research has developed that emphasizes the self as a central concept. With
respect to motivation, Dörnyei’s (2005) L2 self system model proposes that
people are motivated to deal with perceived discrepancies between their current
sense of self and their future selves, one to move closer to their vision of an
ideal self and another to prevent developing negative aspects of the self, such
as a sense of failure or disappointing important others. This approach stresses
the importance of having positive future goals, a requisite level of optimism
that one is able to change and potentially achieve these future self-states, as
well as the strategic knowledge necessary in order to achieve future goals. Related
studies investigating the self in its various forms also highlight the role of positive
self-beliefs, a sense of competence, a growth mindset and accompanying optimism
about the potential for positive change in one’s abilities (e.g., Mercer &
Ryan, 2010; Mercer & Williams, 2014).
Positive and negative emotion
One of the most important findings in the PP
literature thus far has been Fredrickson’s (Fredrickson, 2001, 2003;
Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005) clarification of the difference between positive
and negative emotion (MacIntyre & Gregersen, 2012), that is, emotions that
are generally experienced by individuals as pleasant versus unpleasant. Emotion
research has been successful in identifying a relatively small number of basic,
universal emotions that are closely tied to physiological responding and basic
survival (emotions such as fear, disgust, anger, and so on). Fredrickson’s
broaden-and-build theory (2001, 2003) examines the nature and function of
positive emotion. Fredrickson concludes that positive and negative emotions are
not dichotomous or opposite ends of the same continuum (as was implied by
Krashen’s concept of the affective filter); they are better conceptualized as
two dimensions of experience. At the core, the function of positive emotion is
qualitatively different from negative emotion. Whereas negative emotion tends
to narrow a person’s field of attention and predisposes specific action
tendencies, positive emotion creates tendencies toward play and exploration,
yielding a broadened field of attention and building resources for future
action.
The implications of positive-broadening
emotions for SLA can be profound. Differentiating positive and negative
emotions leads to a more nuanced understanding of how they affect L2 learning
and communication. The most widely studied emotion in SLA has been anxiety
(Dewaele & MacIntyre, this volume). Prior research has presented a
conventional, one-dimensional view of positive and negative emotion using a
see-saw metaphor (positive goes up, negative goes down). A two-dimensional view
of emotion can accommodate the see-saw view of emotion, but also opens up the
possibility of examining ambivalence (MacIntyre, 2007) which is the
co-occurrence of negative with positive emotion (see Table 2). Ambivalence is a
common experience in SLA; for example, when a person is feeling both confident
and anxious before giving a classroom presentation or approaching a native
speaker. Further, a twodimensional view allows for understanding amotivation,
apathy or the absence of emotion in the situation as the lack of arousal of
both positive and negative emotions in a particular context.
Goals of language learning
For us, as with many language educators, one
of the goals is to foster the positivity of our learners’ educational
experiences, and supporting them as individuals in reaching their personal
highest levels of achievement and success (Fredrickson, 2001). Whilst learners’
ultimate levels of achievement and proficiency will be a focus of SLA research,
perhaps a vital additional perspective would be to focus on the processes and
timescales in which learners can be seen to be happy and experience flourishing
in language learning. Griffiths (2008, pp. 1-2) asks key questions in her
collection on the GLL such as, what is it that makes a good language learner?
And why are some learners more successful than others? Viewed through a PP
lens, these questions might take a slightly different focus concentrating not
on levels of proficiency, language competence and achievement, but instead
considering the processes, rather than the product of learning. The following
are example questions that capture processes over different timescales:
1. Over the long term (measured in years),
why are some learners happier, more resilient, and enjoy language learning more
than others?
2. In what ways/how do learners appear to
develop a sense of flourishing whilst engaging in language learning
(activities) during a specific course (measured in days and months)?
3. What features of short-term, immediate
experience are associated with the ebb and flow of engagement in the learning
situation, such as a classroom, during the minutes that teacher and students
spend together? Can we better understand what leads to greater engagement for some
learners and not others (measured in seconds and minutes)?
4. How do learners’ immediate experiences
interact with their mediumto-long-term emotional trajectories whilst learning a
foreign language (measured on multiple timescales)?
As research progresses with a
process-oriented approach, positive experiences can be understood in more
nuanced terms as we consider not only moment-tomoment experiences but also how
ongoing experiences fit within the language and self-development process.
Kahneman and Riis (2005) draw a valuable distinction between these two
processes that they link to the conceptualization of self. First, the
experiencing self, with a timeframe of approximately 3 seconds, is our ongoing
window of conscious experience; the experiencing self is active and fleeting.
Second, the remembering self has a long history in memory. The remembering self
knits together the narrative that captures the meaning of events in our life,
and is open to reinterpretation. Kahneman’s (2011) studies of the experience of
happiness draw the distinction between the experiencing and remembering selves,
helping to clarify ways in which immediate negative events can ultimately be
interpreted within a positive narrative or vice versa. Thus, the multiple
processes involved in learning a foreign language might produce a complex
answer to a deceptively simple question such as “what makes learners happy?”
When we consider these different perspectives on experiences?
Four encouraging trends for the future of PP research in SLA
If PP is to be taken up in SLA, it needs to
develop along strong empirical lines. In considering the potential for
PP-inspired research to have an impact on SLA, we see four trends that support
emerging research in this area.
First, the social turn in SLA means that the
field is taking seriously the idea that contexts in which language learning
occurs are diverse, nuanced, and they matter. The three pillars of PP include
positive emotions, positive character traits and positive institutions.
Conducting studies of enabling institutions, so far, has been the weakest link
for PP (Waterman, 2013). However, in SLA research, greater care is now being
taken to describe the contexts in which learning occurs, especially at the
classroom level. Perhaps the next step is to focus a little more on the
institutions (broadly defined formal and informal organizational structures)
that enable success and promote positive language learning environments.
Institutions are embedded in the broader cultural milieu that will shape the
ways in which the aims of PP are pursued and various possible configurations of
its pillars (see Leu, Wang, & Koo, 2011; Sheldon, 2009).
A second trend that bodes well for developing
interest in PP is the idea of complex dynamic systems, which has become a “hot”
topic in SLA (MacIntyre, Dörnyei, & Henry, 2015). Larsen-Freeman and
Cameron (2008) have argued that L2 development involves complex, dynamic,
emergent, open, self-organizing and adaptive systems. Systems thinking adopts
inherently holistic perspectives and examines dynamism across different
contexts and timescales. Models of the learning and communication process are
incomplete without explicit consideration of positive emotions, individual
strengths, and the various institutions and contexts of learning, such as
governments, public/private schools, community groups, and networks in which
learning occurs. In addition, Lazarus (2003) questioned whether one can
consider any emotion positive or negative. In a functional sense, all emotions
are adaptive (e.g., fear serves a protective function). Quickly moving between
positive and negative affective states, and explicitly considering ambivalent
states (MacIntyre, 2007), is one of the strengths that dynamic models have over
prior approaches to individual differences research (MacIntyre & Serroul,
2015).
A third reason that PP topics might be especially
relevant to SLA is the methodological diversity already present in the field.
As noted previously, core epistemological advances have been made toward
reconciling the humanistic and PP traditions that sometimes seem impossible in
psychology (Waterman, 2013). However, SLA research has been receptive to a
variety of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods research for several
years now, with studies routinely collecting data from multiple types of sources.
The strength of large- scale quantitative surveys lies in assessing the reliability
and generalizability of the findings, but the weakness is that general trends
in large datasets might not apply to any single individual within those data
sets. On the other hand, the strength of individual-level qualitative data is
that a rich description of the relevant factors for an individual can be
proffered, with the weakness that reliability and generalizability typically
cannot be assessed. The strength of each method is the weakness of the other
(Creswell, 2003). It is highly desirable to maintain the empirical base for PP
in SLA, and the diversity of rigorous research approaches already available is
encouraging.
A fourth, related sign that SLA is ready for
PP is what might be called an “individual turn” (MacIntyre, 2014). The dense
data that is required to study in detail the processes of language learning
often must be collected and interpreted at the individual level (de Bot, Lowie,
& Verspoor, 2007). Research that uses group averages and correlations among
variables has been a mainstay of SLA theory development over the years (Dörnyei
& Taguchi, 2010). More recently, alongside the existing large-sample methods,
there has been a burgeoning interest in documenting the complexity of
individual cases; it is for this reason we have opened this paper with the
personal stories of Csikszentmihalyi and Seligman. Individual level research
can describe in some detail the processes that lead to happiness, the
protective force of learned optimism, or describe the most enjoyable facets of learning
for a specific person, with nomothetic studies identifying how commonly occurring
these events might be. An example of a dense, individual-level, mixed methods
approach (quantitative and qualitative) to SLA research can be found in MacIntyre
and Serroul’s (2015) idio dynamic study that integrates motivation with perceived
competence, anxiety and willingness to communicate as part of an ongoing,
dynamic process. Perhaps we are at an optimal time for a wide ranging research
program devoted to study the role of PP in SLA from both the individual and
group perspectives.
References:
Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Nakamura, J. (2011). Positive psychology: Where did it come from,
where is it going? In M. K. Sheldon, T. B. Kashdan, & M. F. Steger
(Eds), Designing positive psychology: Taking stock and moving forward (pp.3-8).
New York: Oxford University Press.
Retrieved from https://repozytorium.amu.edu.pl/
Fredrickson,
B. L. (2001). The role of positive
emotions in positive psychology: The broaden and build theory of positive
emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218-226.
Gable,
S. & Haidt, J (2005). What (and Why)
is Positive Psychology? Review of General Psychology, 9(2), 103–110.
Retrieved from http://psychology.about.com/
Lake,
J. (2013). Positive L2 self: Linking
positive psychology with L2 motivation. In M. Apple, D. Da Silva, & T
Fellner (Eds.), Language learning motivation in Japan (pp 225-244). Bristol:
Multilingual Matters. Retrieved from https://repozytorium.amu.edu.pl/jspui/bitstream/
Seligman, M. E. P.
& Csikszenmihalyi, M. (2000). Positive
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