Promoting confidence in English speaking skills

What does it mean for a foreign language speaker to be "confident" in speaking that language? The feeling of "I can do it" or "I can manage to get the job done" is an important psychological plane for foreign language learners to reach, but little systematic research seems to have been done on what it takes for learners to get there, and why some learners reach that positive psychological state, while others do not, often in spite of having basically similar language skill levels. "Confidence" is most likely closely related to ability, motivation, anxiety and other concepts that have been studied in second language acquisition, but it seems important to analyze it further in terms of what it is, where it comes from, and how can it be attained or maintained.

In a still unpublished study on self-confidence in language learning, Dr. Kota Ohata, my colleage and research partner at ICU, and I have started to identify the following factors as main influences on confidence. These emerged from thematic analysis of qualitative data from interviews with college age English language learners of Japanese background at ICU:

Internal, personal factors including:

-personality,

-a sense of accomplishment,

-comparison of self with others,

-self-evaluation based on personal standards or goals

Task related factors including:

-difficulty of task

-familiarity of task

-authenticity of tasks used for practice, and

Social factors

-feedback from instructor

-feedback from peers

All of these were mentioned by the interviewees in various ways as playing a role in raising or lowering levels of their self-confidence as language learners. There may be more, of course, and the categories need to be worked on with more data.

The next step in our research is to use the factors that emerged from the qualitative data to construct a quantitative study using a questionnaire to survey a larger number of learners.

This is one of the many projects I need to work on during this spring break...let's keep pushing forward Ohata-sensei!