Complex Dynamic Systems Perspective Research Articles

Motivational Change in EFL Students before and after Entering College: A Complex Dynamic Systems Perspective

Motivational Change in EFL Students before and after Entering College: A Complex Dynamic Systems Perspective

The development of EFL students’ speech fluency

Abstract This study investigated phase transitions in EFL students’ speech fluency development using a complex dynamic systems perspective. Two students with different proficiency levels were selected from an intact speaking class. These students learned and practiced specific strategies to improve their speech fluency. Phase transitions were analyzed based on three criteria: sudden jumps, anomalous variance, and qualitative change in the attractor. Number of syllables was used as the speech fluency measure. The results suggest that only the higher-proficiency student underwent one phase transition. These findings imply that a short explicit fluency strategy training intervention could improve the speech fluency development of high-proficiency students in EFL classrooms. The results have implications for theory and pedagogical practice relating to EFL students’ speech fluency development.

Promoting creative autonomy support in school music education: An intervention study targeting interaction

IntroductionThe notion of autonomy in Self-Determination Theory is at the core of intrinsically motivated learning, and fulfilment of the need for autonomy is essential for thriving at school. Therefore teacher-provided autonomy support has grown into a key concern in educational research. In the present study into primary school music education, the notion of creative autonomy support is introduced. Research into autonomy support is typically focused on verbal interaction. However, from an enactive perspective, teachers’ gesturing, bodily movement, facial expression, and musical action form an integral part of the socially situated interaction in music lessons, inherently involving autonomy support. In the present study, a distinction is made between creative verbal autonomy support and creative musical and non-verbal autonomy support.MethodsApplying a process-based time-serial methodology, rooted in a Complex Dynamic Systems and Enactive perspective, the effects of an intervention with Video Feedback Coaching for teachers were investigated. Video data of 105 music lessons of 18 teachers (intervention and control condition) from six primary schools was gathered, to examine teachers’ creative autonomy support at both the individual and group level.ResultsThe findings show that teachers in the intervention condition, compared to the control group, achieved a meaningful increase in their ability to offer creative autonomy support verbally. Teachers also showed development for the non-verbal and musical aspects of offering creative autonomy support. However, particularly for offering higher-level creative autonomy support in the non-verbal and musical mode, significant results were found for less than half of the intervention teachers.DiscussionThese results underline the importance of embracing and studying the bodily dimension as an integral part of teacher autonomy support, aimed at emergence of students’ musical creativity, in primary school music education and in teacher training. We explain how these results might be relevant for autonomy enhancing musical activities in vulnerable groups.

L2 Development from a CDST Perspective and the Issue of Generalizability

From a complex dynamic systems (CDST) perspective, language is understood as a dynamic system comprised of subsystems that change and develop over time in response to learner-internal and -external factors (Verspoor et al., 2008). Accordingly, language development is seen as a process responsive to the dynamic interaction between the learner and her context over time. While CDST prefers a process over product approach to analyzing language and its development, extant research on language learning has traditionally taken a more static and rigid perspective on acquisition, generally operating under the assumption that development can be understood (more or less) by drawing a straight line between individual variables or conditions and changes in the interlanguage. Findings from traditional research are often presented in “before and after” terms, framing language outcomes as a product of treatments, rather than characterizing developments as an ongoing and variable process.

An Ecological Perspective on Classroom‐Based Assessment

AbstractClassroom‐based assessment (CBA) takes place in learning environments influenced by myriad individual and contextual factors. Nevertheless, factors related to individual differences and learner psychology are seldom considered in creating instructional environments designed to facilitate learners' use of CBA. This article introduces the concept of language assessment ecology (LAE)—a dynamic classroom environment where learners' needs are addressed through deliberate and informed orchestration of a language learning environment so that learners can make effective use of assessment for their learning. Informed by Ecological Systems Theory, we postulate that LAE is a multi‐layered system, where learners' engagement with CBA is an outcome of alignment between learning contexts and learners' cognitive‐psychological needs. At the outset of this article, we provide a review of current CBA frameworks to underscore the merits of LAE. Contextual and learner variables that need to be considered in an LAE are then identified and discussed. From a complex dynamic systems perspective, the versatility and complexity of the interplay among these variables will be stressed. The article concludes with the implications of LAE for conducting CBA research.

In Tune? Multimodal Mother-Child Interpersonal Coordination During Early Childhood’

ABSTRACT A complex dynamic systems perspective was applied to explore how mother and child mutually shape interpersonal coordination. Applying a microanalytic design, this study examined the moment-to-moment interaction behavior of 39 Dutch mothers and their three- and four-year-old children (53.8% girls, predominantly White) during a collaboration task. Fine-grained time-series data were extracted about the verbal, affective, and body movement modalities. Research Findings: Cross-recurrence quantification analysis showed that mothers and children were coupled within all three modalities. Recurrent behaviors were found with varying delays, spanning from the immediate to the entire length of the interaction. Many of the interactions were characterized by a certain degree of patternedness, whereby the amount of patternedness varied substantially between dyads. Measures of interpersonal coordination were not associated between modalities. Practice or Policy: Next to the content of interaction behavior (e.g., what a parent actually says), practitioners should also consider how behaviors of a mother and her child vary together. Thereby, an appraisal of the caregiver–child relationship should not merely focus on caregiving behavior, but acknowledge the active and autonomous involvement of the child. It remains to be investigated how different patterns of interpersonal coordination may serve as a diagnostic marker of (mal)adaptive child development.

Language learners’ emotional dynamics: insights from a Q methodology intensive single-case study

ABSTRACT Learner emotions represent sudden, dynamic, and complex adaptations to the language classroom environment. Recent Second Language Acquisition research calls for a more holistic perspective in approaching classroom emotions, one that considers emotional variations between and across learners, and which foregrounds the interconnections among emotions and between emotions and the learning environment. This paper approaches emotions from a complex dynamic systems perspective and investigates the classroom emotions of five university students of Korean as a foreign language using a Q methodology intensive single-case study design. Overall results show that students have sometimes similar, sometimes different emotional reactions depending on classroom events, indicating different levels of interaction between a learner’s emotional system and other individual characteristics. Additionally, a more fine-grained analysis at the level of individual learners reveals clusters of emotions triggered by the same event and foregrounds the relevance of epistemic emotions for instructed foreign language learning. The results are discussed focusing on new hypotheses to inform future SLA emotion research and classroom practices.

Versifying adversity: Using dramaturgically framed poetic inquiry to explore complexity in the second language learning experience

Over the past 15 years, research in the field of second language learning motivation has been dominated by the second language (L2) motivational self system, conceptualizing motivation as a combination of the ideal L2 self, ought-to L2 self, and L2 learning experience. Despite the analytical strength demonstrated by the self components of the L2 motivational self system, the influential role of the L2 learning experience component is still in need of greater elucidation. Using a hybridized research approach combining a complex dynamic systems (CDS) perspective with dramaturgical coding and poetic inquiry, we unpack a Japanese undergraduate student's L2 learning experience. Taking the learner as both a complex system and a situated actor, key themes are identified and explored as attractor states. Humanizing what can often be an impersonal perspective, dramaturgically framed poetic inquiry is seen to add analytical power to the CDS perspective and afford its artistic and evocative representation.

A Per-second Investigation of the Interconnectedness between Linguistic and Cognitive Factors Underlying L2 Willingness to Communicate

Willingness to communicate (WTC) research has recently witnessed a paradigm shift with the more recent studies looking at the shifting and dynamic nature of the variable. A growing body of literature has interpreted such dynamicity from a complex dynamic systems (CDS) perspective. The theory of CDS has four basic properties, one of which, and the focus of this study, is the interconnectedness among subsystems. This property mainly involves the interplay amongst parts of a system, which interact and influence one another, determining the subsequent dynamics in the system. This qualitative, exploratory study employed an idiodynamic method to investigate the interconnectedness of the cognitive and linguistic factors underlying second language (L2) WTC. To this end, 20 participants completed four three-minute monologic speaking tasks while being video-recorded. Immediately after, they viewed their recordings, rated their WTC moment by moment, and explained the WTC changes in stimulated recall interviews. The interviews were coded, and instances where WTC was affected by cognitive and linguistic factors were identified and analysed. Three patterns of interconnectedness emerged: (1) WTC and linguistic factors; (2) WTC and cognitive factors; and (3) WTC, and linguistic and cognitive factors. Findings provide a clearer account of the interconnectedness property in the WTC system, lending support to viewing WTC as a CDS. The article highlights the importance of self-perception and availability of content message, in addition to the above factors, and concludes with a brief discussion of the pedagogical implications for L2 classroom.

Second language writing from a complex dynamic systems perspective

This work provides a chronological and thematic account of empirical studies and position papers on second language (L2) writing scholarship from a complex dynamic systems theory (CDST) perspective. As a theoretical framework, CDST was formally introduced into applied linguistics research by Diane Larsen-Freeman in 1994 (Larsen-Freeman, 1994). However, more than a decade passed before CDST-L2 writing studies emerged in the literature, with Larsen-Freeman (2006) frequently cited as the first related publication. Initially, scholarship focused primarily on the quality of linguistic output (e.g., measures of complexity, accuracy, and fluency, or CAF) in North American and European contexts. Since these early foci, studies have expanded to cover a range of constructs and contexts that employ increasingly sophisticated and diverse research methods (for a recent collection of studies, see Fogal & Verspoor, 2020). In this time, a CDST approach to L2 writing research has matured alongside a general CDST view of language change that has contributed, through empirical studies, to understanding the nonlinear, adaptive, context dependent, and complex and dynamic nature of L2 development (see Hiver et al., 2021, for an overview).

Trajectories of Idea Emergence in Dialogic Collaborative Problem Solving: Toward a Complex Dynamic Systems Perspective.

According to the complex dynamic systems (CDS) perspective, learning emerges at various system levels. This study built a coherent theoretical framework based on CDS and Bakhtinian dialogic theory and further employed the concept of attractor (i.e., certain stable states that recur over time) in CDS theory to investigate the trajectories of idea emergence and how they diversified group outcomes in dialogic collaborative problem solving (D-CPS). Two contrasting groups were compared using visual and qualitative analysis approaches. The analysis based on idea tree diagrams showed that new ideas emergent in group discussion tended to attract local utterances and performed features of attractors in CDS in both high-performing and low-performing groups. The analysis based on idea hierarchy diagrams revealed how ideas emerged at various system levels. It was also found that status problems were likely to affect the functioning of regulative feedback loops, which might give rise to different structures of idea evolution. This study proposed CDS theory as an alternative perspective, augmented by the ethical considerations of Bakhtinian dialogism, for examining the dynamics of D-CPS.

A longitudinal study of formulaic sequence use in second language writing: Complex dynamic systems perspective

This study investigates the use of formulaic sequences (FS) in academic writings of Chinese learners of English as a foreign language across different levels of studies at a public university in China. Frequency-based formulas were retrieved from a corpus of student academic texts written at five time points between Year 1 and Year 3. The structure, semantic transparency (as measured by mutual information, abbreviated as MI), function of the formulas and first language – second language (L1–L2) congruency were explored to identify factors influencing FS development over time using generalized linear mixed-effects modeling (GLMM). Results indicate that MI, structure and assumed learners’ proficiency (time points) and their interactions produced significant effects on the development of L2 FS, but function and congruency did not. The individual variation and nonlinearity of FS development were interpreted with Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST). Based on the longitudinal study, we highlight the usefulness of GLMM in accounting for both systematicity and individual variation in L2 development from a CDST perspective.

The role of L1 English speakers’ familiarity with Brazilian-accented English (L2) in the intelligibility of Brazilian learners of English (L2): a discussion on intelligibility from a Complex Dynamic Systems perspective

The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of familiarity with Brazilian-accented English (L2) in the intelligibility of speech samples when judged by native English listeners. Speech samples were collected from five native Brazilian Portuguese individuals from Southern Brazil, with a pre-intermediate level of proficiency in English. Following a Complex Dynamic Systems account (De Bot et al., 2007), this is a longitudinal study in which a group of four British listeners participated in weekly intelligibility transcription tasks, applied over the course of five weeks. This group was comprised of individuals who had recently arrived in Brazil. Results suggest that familiarity with a speaker’s L1 and accented-L2 has an effect on the intelligibility of what is heard. From the perspective of Complex Dynamic Systems, we argue that there is an alteration of a listener’s perception of his/her own language system due to exposure to it as an L2.

Thoughts on the Launching of a New Journal: A Complex Dynamic Systems Perspective

The launching of The Journal for the Psychology of Language Learning is a signal achievement. I begin this commentary by speculating on why it is that the Psychology of Language Learning (PLL) has enjoyed such vigor of late. I expect that one reason is the coming together of a critical mass of researchers and strong leaders over their shared interests. A second reason may be that a new way of looking at familiar phenomena was introduced in the form of complex dynamic systems theory (CDST). Building on this supposition, I proceed to recommend extending CDST thinking in some new ways in PLL. These ways are phenomenological, relational, processual, and transdisciplinary. I conclude by urging the PLL community to remain connected with other areas of applied linguistics so that it may continue to contribute to a knowledge-building community.

An Autobiographical Study of Language Teacher’s Perceived Psychological Dynamics: Methodological Issues and Insights

Psychological research in second language acquisition (SLA) is a growing field. Much of this research has primarily focused on examining the language learner with comparatively little emphasis on exploring the language teacher. Moreover, psychological research informed by process-oriented approaches views individuals’ psychological constructs stable individual difference variables. Recently, there has been a growing interest in the complex dynamic systems perspective, which has led researchers to focus increasingly on the dynamic nature of individuals’ psychological variables. This study explores the psychological dynamics of two male participants working at tertiary-level as English language teachers in Pakistan over the long-term timescale of years. Data were generated using autobiographical narratives. An inductive approach, which is inspired by Grounded Theory was then used to analyze the data. The findings demonstrate both stability and change in teachers’ experiences, thus suggesting the dynamic nature of their psychology. The paper concludes by discussing the methodological challenges facing future research on individual’s psychological dynamics. Keywords: autobiographical narratives, complexity perspective, dynamism, English language teachers, psychology

Complex Dynamical Systems in Human Development

Researchers from the complex dynamical systems perspective seek their explanations of human behavior and development in the dynamical interactions across many levels in an active, situated individual. Tat is to say, behavior and development are both constraining and constrained by the continuous exchange between a myriad of processes distributed across brain, body, and environment. This fundamentally questions the more traditional rationale that behavior and development of any kind can be explained by targeting a low number of domain-specific, static components or environmental factors. In such a mechanistic approach, components are typically thought to exert their causal effects in a chain-like fashion, and development is explained by the function and place of the components in the chain. However, compiling evidence demonstrates that human behavior and development are dynamic, multi-scaled, and emergent phenomena. It is for this reason that they should be studied from a complex dynamical systems perspective.

A complex dynamic systems perspective on teacher learning and identity formation: an instrumental case

ABSTRACTScholars have called for new conceptualisations of teachers’ learning that capture the complex, contextualised, and dynamic nature of professional growth. In this article, we describe the Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (DSMRI) that portrays teacher learning as inseparable from the complex and dynamic processes by which teachers form their professional identities. The model depicts theoretical and procedural learning about teaching as integrated with other ontological and epistemological beliefs, self-perceptions and self-definitions, purpose and goals in teaching, and perceived action possibilities that constitute the teacher’s professional role identity. After describing the DSMRI, we demonstrate its application with an instrumental case of a science teacher who participated in a professional development (PD) institute designed to foster learning and motivation for implementing student-centred, inquiry-based instruction. DSMRI-guided analysis of pre-, mid-, and post-institute interviews highlighted the role of pre-PD role identities of learner and teacher in the teacher’s PD experiences, which, in turn, fostered both new alignments and new tensions in the teacher’s role identity that promoted an overall change towards a more student-centred teacher role identity. The article demonstrates the utility of the DSMRI for conceptualising teachers’ learning as contextualised and dynamic identity formation processes.

Self-Esteem as a Complex Dynamic System: Intrinsic and Extrinsic Microlevel Dynamics

The variability of self-esteem is an important characteristic of self-esteem. However, little is known about the mechanisms that underlie it. The goal of the current study was to empirically explore these underlying mechanisms. It is commonly assumed that state self-esteem (the fleeting experience of the self) is a response to the immediate social context. Drawing from a complex dynamic systems perspective, the self-organizing self-esteem model asserts that this responsivity is not passive or stimulus-response like, but that the impact of the social context on state self-esteem is intimately connected to the intrinsic dynamics of self-esteem. The model suggests that intrinsic dynamics are the result of higher-order self-esteem attractors that can constrain state self-esteem variability. The current study tests this model, and more specifically, the prediction that state self-esteem variability is less influenced by changes in the immediate context if relatively strong, as opposed to weak, self-esteem attractors underlie intrinsic dynamics of self-esteem. To test this, parent-adolescent dyads (N=13, Mage=13.6) were filmed during seminaturalistic discussions. Observable components of adolescent state self-esteem were coded in real time, as well as real-time parental autonomy-support and relatedness. Kohonen’s self-organizing maps were used to derive attractor-like patterns: repeated higher-order patterns of adolescents’ self-esteem components. State space grids were used to assess how much adolescents’ self-esteem attractors constrained their state self-esteem variability. We found varying levels of attractor strength in our sample. In accordance with our prediction, we found that state self-esteem was less sensitive to changes in parental support and relatedness for adolescents with stronger self-esteem attractors. Discussion revolves around the implications of our findings for the ontology of self-esteem.

Connecting the dots to see the whole: Learner variables, wellbeing and coping strategies in student narratives‡

Taking a complex dynamic systems perspective and following an adapted theory of wellbeing, the present mixed-methods project looked into the wellbeing of Iranian postgraduate students majoring in English Language Teaching (ELT). The participants included 29 male and 45 female 24–31 year-old students whose language learning histories were analysed for elements of wellbeing and coping strategies. In addition, the impact of learner variables of resiliency, language learning strategy use, multiple intelligences, and language learning aptitude on the participants’ wellbeing was investigated. The elements of wellbeing in narratives written by students were found to be emotional responses, accomplishments, meaningful engagement, and relationships in a descending order. Hierarchical multiple regression showed resiliency, language learning strategy use, multiple intelligences, and aptitude (but not gender) affected wellbeing. While male students used accomplishments, meaningful engagement, emotional responses, and relationships as their coping, their female peers used emotional responses, accomplishment, meaningful engagement, and relationships.

On the possible interactions of varied EFL activities and learning styles with EFL students’ motivational changes

ABSTRACTL2 classroom is a place and process that undergoes an array of incessant and concurrent changes affecting its main agents, i.e. the teacher and students in a non-linear and unpredictable manner. Various aspects of their cognitive and affective potential fluctuate and intensify or weaken depending on what is going on in a particular L2 learning/teaching environment at a particular point of time. The present paper, drawing on the idea of complexity, multifariousness and spatiotemporal situatedness of a language classroom, is intended to examine the likelihood and dynamics of the reciprocal co-occurrence of a range of practical English learning activities, learning styles and changes in motivation. In the first, theoretical part the authors will present literature review with a special regard to the complex dynamic systems perspective on motivation. The second part is devoted to a discussion of findings from the qualitatively and quantitatively oriented research conducted on two groups of English philology students. Data gathering instruments included the questionnaires investigating the subjects’ while-class and after-class involvement, the learning style survey, the teacher's evaluation of conducted classes and participant observation. Obtained results revealed certain patterns of motivational variability in relation to the students’ general learning preferences.