Abstract
This article describes an initiative launched at a Canadian bilingual university in order to encourage L2 French and L2 English learners to take ‘linguistic risks’: authentic, autonomous communicative acts where learners are pushed out of their linguistic comfort zone. The initiative was operationalized through the development of a Linguistic Risk-Taking Passport, which contains 74 linguistic risks that students can take in their L2 across the university campus and in their everyday life. An analysis of interviews with participating teachers (n=6) and learner self-report data from completed passports (n=410) examines how the initiative was integrated into the classroom and which passport items were perceived by students as particularly high-risk. A cyclical process of risk-taking within a broad Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) framework is described in which risks are viewed as learner-selected tasks with a dynamic affective slant; risks can be used to connect classroom learning with real-life L2 use and vice versa. The data illustrate that linguistic risk-taking can help TBLT practitioners generate ideas on how to narrow the gap between the classroom and the real-world. The article concludes with a list of practical implications and suggestions for adapting linguistic risk-taking to other institutional contexts.
Highlights
This article describes an initiative launched at a Canadian bilingual university in order to encourage L2 French and L2 English learners to take ‘linguistic risks’: authentic, autonomous communicative acts where learners are pushed out of their linguistic comfort zone
The goal of the article is twofold: 1) to bring linguistic risk-taking to the attention of TaskBased Language Teaching (TBLT) researchers and practitioners, arguing that linguistic risks are types of tasks with special characteristics and with potentially interesting implications for the field; and 2) to report the results of an exploratory study on linguistic risk-taking from a TBLT perspective
The overall research problem we explore is how we can better connect the outside world with the L2 classroom and vice versa, with the help of linguistic risk-taking tasks
Summary
This article describes an initiative launched at a Canadian bilingual university in order to encourage L2 French and L2 English learners to take ‘linguistic risks’: authentic, autonomous communicative acts where learners are pushed out of their linguistic comfort zone. The passport was not based on a single theory or approach but inspired by a mixture of theoretical frameworks, as well as by individual learner and teacher experiences It drew on: a) the foundations of language socialization and second language socialization theory (Duff, 2017; Duff & Talmy, 2011; Ochs and Schieffelin, 2008) in emphasizing authentic, contextually embedded, naturally occurring interactions in the community as an important conduit of L2 development; b) positive psychology (Csikszentmihalyi & Nakamura, 2011; MacIntyre & Mercer, 2014) in positioning language learning as part of the study of how humans thrive and what they enjoy doing; and c) cognitive theories relating to interaction (Gass & Mackey, 2015; Long, 1996) associated with TBLT.
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