The pre-­intermediate course: First challenges 141

In February 2006, with the university option out of the question, Francesco’s only choice is to go back to the Centro Italiano; yet remembering the limitations of the Beginners’ Stage One course, Francesco is reluctant to join Beginners’ Stage Two. The solution emerges during a conversation with Teresa, Francesco’s private tutor who also happens to run the Centro’s advanced courses:

what I said to Teresa was I want to study, I want to push myself, and that and I wasn’t sure that the course would do that for me and so I said you are the tutor at the Centro, you know where I am at from when you were tutoring me, and must have some thoughts about my level and whether if you think there is a place in a class that would be suitable so that I don’t hold everyone up but that it also challenges me. (F2)

Having personally witnessed Francesco’s Italian skills, Teresa shows no hesitation and fast-tracks Francesco’s studies by granting him a space in her own pre-intermediate course. The prospect of joining a new and more advanced class fills Francesco with

excitement, pride and a little apprehension – an emotional mix which proves to be beneficial for his motivation:

I felt as if it was a reward, you know you work hard and you get rewarded, and a bit of an ego-boost, and I gained a bit of confidence from it, but I guess it’s like taking someone from some rugby… And say ‘right, you’re playing for the All Blacks’, and you have to step up. (F3)

Francesco’s first impression of the new class is very positive. When asked to comment on the state of his motivation at this stage of his journey, Francesco’s answer reveals not only the way he feels, but also something of what he considers motivation to be:

A: Do you think your motivation has changed since last year?

F: I am not sure that it has. I don’t think that my reasons for doing it are different. I am spending as much time now studying as before, not less, not more, you know and I kind of put it down to I understand more what it means to me to be studying it because when I first starting it was all new and… But now I understand more, I go to my classes, and I prepare and it feels good when I come home to spend an hour reading and then I pick the book up twice or three times during the week. So I got more into a habit about it. (F2)

The first element Francesco mentions is the reasons driving his learning, which in Francesco’s case also include his goal to converse with his mother in Italian. However Francesco also comments on the resources he is prepared to dedicate to studying Italian in terms of time and effort, and the positive feelings he experiences when he studies. It is interesting to notice that up to this point, according to Francesco, all of these elements have remained fairly stable, as Francesco has not so far encountered any major obstacles to his motivation and his learning. However things are about to change.

Between February and June 2006, Francesco is generally satisfied with the way his studies are progressing. His decision to join Teresa’s course in an attempt to find a more suitable learning setting has had the desired effect of affording him an environment that encourages him to use his Italian skills creatively and to find personal ways to express himself. One of the main outlets for this newly found linguistic freedom is the compiti

The homework that we looked at last night was commenting on the film that we’ve seen, and it was quite open ended, and so I enjoyed that ‘cause you can choose ideas and ways to express yourself that are personal, so I quite enjoy that. One night it was write a story about being on a deserted island using two past tenses that we know, so I quite enjoy that. (F3)

Contrary to the tasks of the previous course, Teresa’s activities sustain Francesco’s motivation because they hold high subjective task value (Eccles & Wigfield, 1985). The motivational advantage of such activities is twofold, as Francesco finds them both useful in relation to his personal goals, and highly interesting and enjoyable. Interest and enjoyment are also key elements in the definition of intrinsic motivation (Deci & Ryan, 1985), which is universally recognised as a highly desirable state for any type of learning.

On the other hand, the ability to compose texts that reflect one’s imagination comes at the price of acquiring what to even syntax-loving Francesco appears like an enormous amount of grammatical rules and particles. Verbs, in particular, and the various suffixes associated with the many Italian tenses, prove particularly taxing for Francesco, not only in cognitive terms (i.e. they need to be memorised) but also because the difficulties encountered in mastering the distinctions between their usages and their English counterparts drain Francesco’s confidence in his own abilities and commitment, and lead him to doubt the attainability of his goals. It goes perhaps without saying that in such moments of frustration and uncertainty – which Francesco calls “lows” – his motivational state is less that optimal:

I went through a bit of a patch like you know sometimes you get …The more you know the more you realise you don’t know sort of thing and went through this stage thinking I am never going to get all the tenses and all the idioms, it’s just beyond me. I mean I could study this for fifteen years and I still wouldn’t be able to talk with an Italian, you know, so I guess I went through a bit of that but now… I think I got to the stage where you suddenly realise you have actually built up a little store of information, not much but a little store and then you think well if can build that up then maybe in another six or eight month or a year there’ll be something more there. (F3)

Confidence in his own linguistic abilities – and lack thereof – is another recurring theme in Francesco’s data, and one that is closely associated his motivational fluctuations. The concept of linguistic self-confidence (Clément, Dörnyei, & Noels, 1994) can be useful to understand Francesco’s mental processes before and during his

“lows”, as it describes the motivational consequences of an individual’s own judgement of their linguistic abilities. Low self-confidence is linked to motivational impairment and likelihood to abandon a task, however it is clear that in Francesco’s case this state has so far been temporary, as he has always been able to counteract his “lows” by focussing on the positive aspects of his learning, such as his own sense of progress and the enjoyment he gains from the learning process. In this sense Francesco shows good self-regulating abilities in that he can consciously shift his attention to powerful intrinsically motivating factors if and when the situation requires it:

I felt oh gosh here I am, I have been studying it for a year and I know two tenses and my vocabulary is limited and it is so big ohhh that’s gonna be hard, it wasn’t that something had gone wrong, I realised the enormity of studying a language and I questioned whether I had to commitment to get to a level that is good, but then I thought well, I enjoy it, therefore, let’s not worry about it. (F3)

However soon Francesco encounters a problem he just cannot seem to be able to overcome or to neutralise. A few weeks into the course, Teresa decides to make the viewing of non-subtitled Italian television programmes a weekly feature of her lessons, and so begins to close each lesson by showing thirty minutes of an Italian production on the life of Edda Mussolini, the famous daughter of the Italian dictator. The activity, which involves watching short sections of the programme interspersed with translation and discussion, was introduced as a way to help students improve their comprehension of naturally sounding Italian speech, but for Francesco, the weekly appointment with the programme is a recurring source of frustration:

I really struggle to understand TV. At the beginning I could understand maybe five or ten percent and I thought it would get better but it hasn’t, and you know I have become… Not depressed – it’s not the right word – but become a little bit setback and it knocked my confidence a little bit. (F3)

Although triggered by this particular task, Francesco’s discontent does not derive from the difficulty in understanding the actors on the screen, but in his assumption that this difficulty is the same he would experience when face to face with a native speaker of Italian. This leads him to conclude that his comprehension skills are so limited as to make any oral exchange with speakers of Italian impossible, therefore invalidating any feeling of confidence he might have previously experienced. In spite of this, Francesco’s

tendency to react positively to challenges leads him to the conclusion he should intensify his studies and in particular his oral practice. However, in evaluating the potential of his current learning setting to help him achieve this, Francesco is once again brought face to face with some of the course’s limitations, and in particular with the mismatch between his own learning needs and the content the course provides:

The course is always going to be a compromise. (F3)

I think I would probably focus it more on strictly language… I find it interesting but it’s not my preferred thing… Like we have a lot of discussion about the culture and that’s great, but if I could add more language content and have more language discussions at the expense of the cultural side I would. (…) My end of the game, my result if you like, would be that I could conduct a basic language exchange. That’s what I want to achieve, and in order to do more I need to study more language and practice talking the language, and therefore anything that doesn’t directly lead me there I would do without. (F3)

If the Centro had more students, then you could have more like-minded students of the same ability and interest in the same class, you could say right who wants to study grammar and put them all in one class, who wants to have more of a cultural discussion… You know, so that’s not a criticism… If you could have classes that focussed on particular students’ interests more, specific interests more, that would be a fast track to learning. (F3)

It is at this stage that the thought of university studies makes a comeback in Francesco’s data, as in his mind, the students populating the university Italian courses are the “like-minded people” he speaks of above, and the university is the learning environment that would best cater for his personal learning needs. It is for these reasons that at this stage Francesco expresses his intention to attempt to organise his work and family commitment in a way which will allow him to enrol at university in the second part of the year.