Learning Language under Tension: New Directions from a Qualitative Study

Abstract

This article examines the role of tension in the process of instructed second/foreign language acquisition, on the basis of findings from a comprehensive ethnography of the 7‐week intensive beginners' class in the summer French School of Middlebury College. This project both completes and challenges the current research paradigm on “language anxiety,” as it shifts the focus on the negative (anxiety) to a study of tension, defined as an unstable phenomenon that may be generated by any situation or event and may be perceived differently by each individual experiencing it. Our findings confirm that, regardless of its cause and manifestations, tension may engender euphoric or dysphoric effects (perceived as beneficial or detrimental), but also non‐euphoric or non‐dysphoric effects whose salience had previously not been established. These valuations appear linked not to the allegedly objective quality of instruction, materials, and learning environment, but to personal expectations and a priori beliefs about language learning. In addition, we found it necessary to separate operationally the effects of tension in the cognitive and the affective domains, and assess these effects qualitatively, rather than quantitatively, because students reacted most productively not to the degree of difficulty and expectation in the course, or to the reduction of affective dysphoria (or “anxiety”) by a nonthreatening teaching style, but to the quality of materials and activities. Their overall perception of the learning experience was ultimately bound to the opportunity to reinvent themselves successfully in the target language. Achievement of linguistic or communicative proficiency mattered less than the satisfactory development of an emerging L2 self, which had to be fostered by a curriculum and instructional method providing the best possible balance of both cognitive and affective euphoric tension. In retrospect, dysphoria under its various guises was not found to play a particularly strong role, because it was dismissed and forgotten in a remarkable “amnesty effect” triggered by the students' realization of their eventual achievements in the program.

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