The Role of Affect in Intraindividual Variability in Task Performance for Young Learners

Abstract

Young learners (defined as children ages 5–12) of English as a foreign language are growing in number worldwide. At the policy level, foreign language (FL) programs for young learners are increasingly emphasizing the use of task‐based language teaching (TBLT). In practice, however, designing and implementing tasks for young learners poses numerous challenges, especially considering that young learners are in the midst of developing cognitively, socially, linguistically, and affectively. In this article, the author focuses on the role of affect (emotion and mood) in TBLT, a research topic that has largely been ignored. Drawing on existing theories in psychology that explain relationships between affect and cognition or learning, as well as on research on children's development, play, and game research, she advocates for the need both to pay more serious attention to affect and to incorporate research findings on the role of affect in task designs and implementation into theory building and practice in TBLT. Instead of treating affect as an individual and stable trait (i.e., as an interindividual variable) and searching for a linear cause‐and‐effect relationship between learners’ affect and their performance in tasks, she argues that we need to pay more attention to intraindividual variability in children's task performance (i.e., variability in performance within individuals) and to examine the role of affect in such intraindividual variability in a dynamic fashion. Though her argument is primarily based on TBLT for young learners, she believes that the importance of affect in TBLT applies to wider contexts as well.