Excerpt 6 June 1988)
3.5 Diaries, Memoirs, and (Auto)biographies of Linguistic Experiences
Ioup (1989) focused on a Chinese teenager in New Orleans, Jeanne, considered to be a bright and capable student, especially in courses requir- ing little writing, but was a very unsuccessful English writer. She was fully proficient in Chinese reading and writing, having attended school in Taiwan up to age 9, and 10 years later still enjoyed reading both Chi- nese and English literature. She was also good in music and mathemat- ics. Yet, despite her native-like English pronunciation and her success in high school, Jeanne had to repeat two required nonintensive ESL courses multiple times after she entered university. She produced sentences like Because of many influences and education are for the making money (p.
166). Ioup then compared this student to a Vietnamese male student, Minh, who had mastered English as an adult and had only lived in an English- speaking environment for five years. On the basis of a series of linguistic and neuropsychological (cognitive) tests, the major difference that emerged between them was their verbal memory subscores and performance on tests of linguistic knowledge (e.g., semantics) and composition, in which Jeanne obtained much lower scores than Minh. Ioup found the results baf- fling, especially considering the length of exposure to English Jeanne had enjoyed from childhood in a city without an established Chinese-speaking community outside of the family home. There were no obvious affective or sociolinguistic explanations.
3.5 Diaries, Memoirs, and (Auto)biographies
One of the most comprehensive and analytical case studies in recent years, a variation of diary study, was carried out by Schmidt and Frota (1986). The study describes Schmidt’s attempts to learn conversational Por- tuguese while in Brazil for several months, and the data are analyzed in a triangulated manner from different perspectives, the learner’s (Schmidt’s) and a Brazilian applied linguist’s. Frota interacted with him throughout the study and was instrumental in analyzing the data. Their work is very infor- mative in a review of developments in case study methods for several rea- sons. One striking feature of the research is the scope of the investigation and the discussion of how it relates to a number of current issues in SLA theory. Unlike many of the case studies examined above, Schmidt and Frota examine Schmidt’s linguistic ability in Portuguese in many different areas: conversation, pragmatics, grammar, vocabulary (lexical verbs), and formulaic speech. The analysis is rather ambitious in scope in trying to cover so much, but it is quite comprehensive as a result. The methodologi- cal strengths of the study are that it includes both qualitative and quantita- tive analysis, provides two points of view of the same learning process, as well as actual production data, and includes Schmidt’s perceptions of his input/intake and output. Finally, the main theoretical insight that emerged from the study was the “notice the gap” principle accounting for the acqui- sition of new structures (i.e., learners need to notice or become aware of new target-language forms before they can acquire them). The study also addressed issues connected with the role of instruction, interaction, cor- rection, and formulaic speech in adult L2 learning.
A more recent departure from established case study research meth- ods and reports of the sort reviewed earlier in this chapter are studies of L2 teachers, students, events, and sites using more humanistic narrative inquiry traditions that emphasize personal voice, identity, affect, agency, and lived experience (e.g., Bell, 2002; Granger, 2004; Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000; Pavlenko, 2002). Hoffman’s (1989) autobiography, Lost in Transla- tion (unrelated to the movie with the same title), is an often-cited book- length narrative of the author’s experiences as a Polish immigrant who came to Canada as a child and then moved to the United States. Hoffman reflects on her English language learning and concomitant loss of crucial aspects of her sense of self (see below).
Other personal narratives of language learners include those by Kaplan (1993) in French Lessons, Mori’s (1997) Polite Lies, and Lvovich’s
(1997) The Multilingual Self, which Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000) analyze, together with other narratives in this genre, from Vygotskian and Bakhtin- ian perspectives. Pavlenko and Lantolf’s focus is the loss, recovery, and reconstruction of “self” in the lives of bilinguals who “attempt to become native speakers of their second language” (p. 162).
Schumann (1997), a strong proponent of diary-based research in applied linguistics for its social, psychological, and now neuroscientific insights, provides a detailed analysis of these and other autobiographies, biographies, and diary studies in L2 learning in his book on the neurobi- ology of affect in language learning. For example, he presents numerous excerpts from Kaplan’s (1993) narratives of her experiences, desires, and even disappointments studying French in the United States and Europe, and later becoming a professor of French working alongside expatriate French native speaker colleagues. He analyzes Kaplan’s “appraisals” of her French learning as extremely positive: identifying completely with the language, the methods of teaching French, the people and culture, and her ongoing socialization into it. He observes:
What are some of the unique factors that contributed to Alice [Kaplan’s]
trajectory? She suggests that a French identity allowed her to escape the sadness of her father’s death and the awkwardness of her adoles- cence. Her interest in French Nazis perhaps linked her with her father, a Nuremberg lawyer, but quite remarkably allowed her to find something positive even in the darker side of France. (p. 125)
Hoffman’s (1989) language learning was, like Kaplan’s, very success- ful on many levels: she became a doctoral student of English literature at Harvard University, and later an English professor and writer in the United States. Unlike Kaplan though, her appraisals of her experiences were quite negative, at least superficially. In a third case study, Schumann describes Watson (1995), a philosopher whose specialty was Descartes. In anticipa- tion of a conference to be held in France, Watson enrolled in half a year of oral French tutoring. However, unlike both Kaplan and Hoffman, who began their L2 learning as children and became nearly infatuated (if not obsessed) with the target languages, the 55-year-old Watson did not appre- ciate the sound of French or the methods used to teach it to him and felt humiliated and intimidated by not being able to speak French well. His
low appraisal led him to abandon his goal of mastering spoken French, even though he was a highly skilled reader and translator of French.
Schumann provides many other narratives and commentaries on the appraisals of language learners and concludes that “variable success in SLA is the product of the history of one’s stimulus appraisals, whose influence on second-language learning is highly variable, and essentially unique for each individual” (p. 188).
Finally, diaries have also been a component in case studies of lan- guage teachers as well as learners. Miller (1997) reported that the diarized reflections of an itinerant German L2 teacher in Australia yielded quite different insights, and much more affectively charged ones, than the same teacher’s interview comments did in a case study of teachers’ beliefs and experiences teaching modern languages at the primary level. The teacher, Joanna, was studied in two classes in different schools, one much more conducive to the teaching and learning of German than the other. In one interview, for example, Joanna remarked relatively calmly: “I end up with one hour 15 minutes contact time because you lose it with the students not being on time” (p. 47). In contrast, a diary entry by the same teacher for the same class was much more critical in tone: “The students are disruptive, unsettled, ratty, distracted, rude and antisocial.… There are some incred- ibly rude and insolent girls in that class. Nagging and ranting and raving from my side plus at times sheer despair” (p. 48). Miller concluded that teachers’ research diaries provide complementary data to interview data alone, and certainly in this study revealed the level of frustration experi- enced by the itinerant teacher with an extremely uncooperative class.