Finland, Finland, Finland...

...if not the country where I want to be, at least somewhere I wouldn’t mind staying longer. It’s nice here, it is. Lots – seriously, LOTS – of lovely trees and lakes, dendrophilic hydrophile that I am; a miracle of efficiency and functionality, with everything designed to make life as easy as possible for as many as possible; beautiful, lingering taffeta sunsets; and helpful, interested people, not at all as shy and silent as I’d been led to believe (though I suspect Jyvaskyla was somewhat atypical in that respect). It was just too hot, which is hardly Finland’s fault, and lack of air-conditioning, sealed mosquito-feart windows and almost endless daylight made for a couple of turbulent nights’ sleep. But it was lovely to walk home along the lake in the feathery midnight dusk.

I’ve barely seen Jyvaskyla, what with being conferent and all, but like the university campus, it sparkles white and glassy. As a pedestrian you’re always at risk from Jyvaskyla’s Lycra Army, a constant and perilous flow of cyclists, skateboarders, rollerbladers, rollerbladers with skis, and the occasional little sperm-shaped luge, which tend to crash amusingly into the grass verges. And there’s been some great eating – all pretense to vegetarianism shamelessly tossed out to compost so we could fill our faces with reindeer liver, venison, and bear sausage, with mouthwateringly sharp berry sauces, sauerkrauts and salads. My favourite, though, was the pickled courgette at breakfast – by the end of the week I’d even mastered the inadequate wee serving tongs to the extent that I could spear a whole wedge of them…

And of the conference: a very positive experience overall, and one that’s boosted my academic confidence. There were a fair few motivation papers, mostly from individual differences perspectives, including some interesting work from Ursula Lanvers of the Open University on the motivational perspectives of British learners of foreign languages, and Charlotte Ohrstrom of the University of Copenhagen on the motivation of adults learning Danish. A symposium on beliefs and agency in language learning also led to fruitful discussion, and included a paper on Bakhtinian dialogical perspectives and voice work among Finnish young learners of English, which was particularly encouraging for me given the comparative lack of interest in Bakhtin in L2 scholarship. Perhaps inevitably, there were some poorer presentations too; which, though always disappointing, will go into the store of academic experience, reiterate that shoddy scholarship can appear at all levels, and reinforce ways in which I can (hopefully) avoid it in my own work. Most surprising (and ‘tis perhaps surprising that it was surprising) to me was the solid but uninspiring work, the middle-of-the-road work, the fair-enough but unoriginal work, the work without any real ‘so what?’ I guess I’d been prepared for good, I’d been prepared for bad, but not really for indifferent. Perhaps it’s a result of the long psychological-emotional build-up to my first conference and presentation – perhaps I was coming to it in a heightened state of emotional responsiveness. I don’t know… Just as importantly, there was quality hanging-out time with my conference buddies, Manchester colleague Achilleas ‘The Beardless Wizard’ Kostoulas and Taha Hamad from Aarhus University in Denmark, and much good socialising and collegial/collaborative potential. A great conference, I’d say, and I had a wonderful (and exhausting) time.

One of the (expected) highlights was the appearance of The Man Himself, Zoltan Dornyei – or Dr D, as he was commonly referred to by the conference chair – who, in true rock n’roll fashion, appeared only on the final day to give his plenary address. I felt uncharacteristically awkward about approaching him, and was grateful for Taha’s gentle bullying; and he was a very nice man, supportive of our idea for forming a collaborative L2 motivation research group and offering to participate as and when he could. He was also an entertaining and engaging speaker, and his talk on Dynamic Systems Theory reiterated one of the things I most admire about him: that he constantly challenges his own ideas, not only refining his models and theories but actively seeking to address their limitations, to the extent that he wonders, as he said in our breaktime chat, whether his approaches thus far have really created a broad enough picture of L2 motivation. Owing to the thronging crowds around him and the awareness that others wanted their share of his time, I wasn’t really able to pursue this point with him; but waited with some excitement for his talk. Which, though interesting, seemed to me still to place learners at the passive periphery of research, victims of the dynamics, the system and the theory which they themselves (presumably, if the goal is to stimulate more effective teaching and learning) have inspired and from which they are (presumably – see above) ultimately expected to benefit. In fairness, Dornyei was applying the system to group dynamics, where, as he pointed out, some level of generalisation should be possible if we are to say anything meaningfully applicable to the vast variety of classroom contexts. But still, but still… it doesn’t sit well with me. Even less so his enthusiastic espousal of Retrodictive Qualitative Modelling as not merely a new qualitative research methodology, but THE ULTIMATE qualitative research methodology. Given his assertion that ‘ALL qualitative research should be done this way’, the word ‘dogmatic’ may not be going too far. At one point he actually said something along the lines of:


[dismissively] You can take six or so participants and do some kind of interviews with them, then analyse the results according to something you might call grounded theory and claim that the results ‘resonate’…


But what be the use in that, pray? Hello, Dr D. That’s my PhD right there. It was so scornful, so sweeping… I wouldn’t say it depressed me, as I don’t have the level of personal investment in Dornyei’s work that many others there did; but it did teach me that open-mindedness is not necessarily a prerequisite for a successful and admired academic. There was no Q & A session after – presumably owing to time constraints, although from my own beer-terrace vantage point it appeared that all everyone wanted to do was go to the pub – but I wonder if anyone would have raised this. I’m not sure I would have done – perhaps because I was somewhat deflated, and didn’t feel psychologically equipped for the argument even if I’d thought there was any point starting it.

I’ve also come away from the conference with a clearer understanding and articulation of my problems with the terms ‘social/cultural/emotional capital’, liberally used by a fair few researchers at the conference and with which I’ve never been entirely comfortable without being able to say exactly why. I was at a presentation with a particular focus on these terms, and began to observe the frequency with which the verbs ‘acquire’ and ‘accumulate’ were used to refer to them, and I came to realise what my problem is: they have explanatory power only in a unidirectional relation, positioning the acquirer/accumulator of capital (in this case, the English language learner) as wanting to move towards the centre of the society they wish to access, gathering symbolic capital to themselves until they feel equipped for this move. However, the communities and society in which the language learner is situated are not fixed, and are fluid and changing as a result of the variety of people constantly moving within them, including the language learner. A co-conferent, who'd heard me trying to articulate this rather more hesitantly in the discussion following the presentation, wondered if I’d read Sfard (I hadn’t), and thought my point resonated with her acquisition/participation metaphors – something for me to follow up there. More broadly, it made me think about why we do research, what our purpose is: is it enough simply to illuminate, to show the workings of a phenomenon, or should we then be actively working for change as a result of our knowledge, to make things better? I don’t mean to suggest that one or the other of these should be the case for all researchers everywhere; of course there are myriad research foci and purposes, and there will never be one size to fit all. However, it seems a fundamental question: if the forces of capitalism are instrumental in the movement of so many people across the world, and in the oppression and domination of these people – and, importantly, if English is the language of the trade and business through which capital flows and the system is upheld – how can we justify using the vocabulary of capitalism to describe the power structures learners are negotiating? If our aim is only to describe, then maybe there’s an argument; but if our aim is to describe and challenge, then it becomes more complicated. Should we be contributing to the perpetuation of the system by imprisoning ourselves and the people with whom we’re working within its own vocabulary? Or should we be looking for something new, contributing to a move towards change starting with the words we use?

Big stuff, this, and a very long blog post, and I’m tired, and I flag. I’ll certainly be coming back to this point. But for now, I’ve a whole weekend off, with many exciting possibilities – the most appealing of which is a lie-down and a good book. A NOVEL, for, like, PLEASURE. Lovely lovely.

For now - hyvaa paivaa.