Abstract:
Affect has been shown to be inseparable to learner’s cognition. The recent affective turn and positive psychology movement in SLA has shifted scholarly attention to the essential role of affect, especially positive emotions, in L2 education. However, in teaching practice, affective domain in general and positive emotions in particular have not been sufficiently capitalised on. Although global ELT textbooks are pervasive and have occupied a privileged position in teaching curriculum, (parts of) these textbooks are believed to be non-humanistic for certain groups of target learners in that they are culturally unsuitable, ignore learner affective domain, and do not make sufficient use of human resources of learners in language learning (Tomlinson, 2013a). Drawing on current literature, this study argued that tapping into positive emotions in L2 classroom and enhancing the relevance and meaningfulness of classroom events to the target learners can result in effective learning in terms of both learner affective experience and language performance. In response to the recent calls of a number of authors (e.g., Bao, 2013; Masuhara, 2013; Timmis, 2015; Tomlinson, 2013a) for attention to affect in L2 teaching materials, this study proposed to humanise textbook materials and examined the possible impact of humanised materials on learner interest and language performance.
To achieve this, the study conceptualised humanistic materials as ones that tap into learners’ positive emotions and connect classroom events with learners’ minds and lives and humanising textbook materials as a creative process of enhancing the humanistic quality of the textbooks by circumventing non-humanistic elements and replacing those elements with designed humanistic ones. Grounded on relevant literature, the study proposed principles for humanising materials. A set of five textbook activities were selected from popular global textbooks and five comparable humanistic activities were developed. This study employed a mixed-method approach with Quan-qual design in which qualitative methods were integrated into Alternating Treatment Design. The participants included two small classes of Vietnamese university students. The five pairs of materials/activities were applied in alternating and counterbalanced manner within and between the two classes. Oral learners’ interactions during the activities were recorded and transcribed. A questionnaire measuring learners’ interest and individual interviews were administered at the end of each activity. At the end of the data collection, two focus group interviews were conducted. The data were analysed quantitatively using non-parametric tests and a mean-based method, and qualitatively used a deductive-inductive coding process and content analysis. The results were presented for each pair of comparable materials, and then combined for discussion.
The study found that overall while the participants had low-to-moderate interest during the textbook activities, they were consistently highly interested during the humanistic ones. There was a great variation in the emotions they experienced, the values they appraised toward the activities and the knowledge-seeking behaviours they performed during textbook and humanised activities. More importantly, the study identified a number of inherent and emerged factors/features of the selected textbook materials and of the humanistic materials as influencing learner interest. These findings were interpreted and explained with reference to previous research into interest, and especially, Tin’s (2016) model of stimulating learner interest in language learning. The study also found that the learner language performed in humanistic activities was better than that during the textbook activities in many of indices of complexity, accuracy, and fluency. This result was discussed with reference to Trade-off Hypothesis (Skehan, 1998) and Broaden-and-Build Theory (MacIntyre & Gregersen, 2012) of positive emotions. The contribution of the study to theory, research and practice were also discussed.