Affective Factors in 2nd Language Acquisition. Risk Taking, Resúmenes de Idioma Inglés

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Risk Taking is an important characteristic of successful learning of a second language. Learners have to be able to gamble a bit, to be willing to try out hunches about the second language and take the risk of being wrong.

Language teachers are encouraged to create a positive classroom environment where participants feel confident.

They need “to assist learners in knowing when and how to take risks, particularly in conversational settings”.

also noted that fossilization, or the relatively permanent incorporation of certain patterns of error, may be due to a lack of willingness to take risks.

The implications for teaching are important. In a few uncommon cases, overly high risk takers, as they dominate the classroom with wild gambles, may need to be “tamed” a bit by the teacher. But most of the time our problem as teachers will be to encourage students to guess somewhat more willingly that the usual student is inclined to do, and value them as persons for those risks that they take.

This initiative launched at the University of Ottawa, the largest Canadian bilingual (French-English) postsecondary institution, in order to encourage second language French and second language 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 second language across the university campus and in their everyday life.

On the one hand,this sense of risk is related to potential discomfort or anxiety caused by factors such as fear of making errors, (perception of) failing to be understood or to understand others, loss of face or identity,the inability to socialize with others, etc. On the other hand, second language speakers may also attest to the

transformative power of overcoming such challenges: tasks achieved, meaningful connections made, self-esteem raised, or enjoymentfelt.

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 drewon: 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 animportant conduit of second language development.

In practical terms, the design of the passport involved the creation of a list of situations or contexts in which language learners may find themselves engaged in, throughout their everyday lives on the bilingual campus and beyond. This formed the basis for over seventy suggestions for second language risks contained in the passport, including ordering at the university cafeteria, writing to a professor in their second language, changing the language of their smartphone to their second language, using their L2 at a job interview or at a party, etc.

Therefore, they left it to the learners themselves to determine which items listed in the passport constituted high, medium, or low risk for them and asked them to indicate this,using checkboxes, in the passport for the risks they decided to take. Most risks in the passport were designed to be taken up to three times (i.e., three checkboxes were available) to encourage some repetition for pedagogical purposes. Learners were asked to complete at least 20 risks over the course of a semester in order to be entered into a prize draw. They were free to choose only risks that were relevant to them in recognition that they must be agents in their own learning. However, they were specifically instructed to select only items that represented risk for them and not simply daily activities that they were comfortable doing and that constituted no challenge to them in the L2.

https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/CJAL/article/view/31308/

Learners have to gamble a bit with the language and take a risk of being wrong.

Language teachers do not help students take the risk of trying out the language.

A learner with high self-esteem seems to be willing to take a risk

A bad grade, a fail on the exam are some of the negative consequences that learners face outside the classroom

The classroom antidote to such fears, is to establish an adequate affective framework.