SEMINAR - Asian Studies Seminar : “How do you think learning Korean will shape your future?" A Q methodology study into university student’s future language selves. - Fri, 05 Oct 2018 11:00

Being able to speak a foreign language is often considered a valuable skill for university students, and to make foreign language learning at the university level more relevant to student’s future careers it is important to understand what learners want to do with the language and how they see themselves as future speakers of a foreign language. This talk presents the results of a survey on student’s future L2 selves, conducted on learners of Korean using Q methodology, a qualitative/quantitative mixed research method. Q methodology, often defined as an inverted factor analysis, it is used for the investigation of subjectivity; however its application to the field of language education has been extremely limited and restricted to students of English as a foreign language. The potentiality of Q-methodology for research in the field of foreign language learning is worth more exploration since it is a promising technique for the investigation of student’s individual differences, among them mainly learner’s motivation. In this presentation, after an outline of Q methodology, I will show how its application to the study of future L2 selves in a cohort of Korean language students highlighted the presence of four main types of students, each with a clearly defined future perspective on how they see themselves in the future as speakers of Korean as a second language. These results are further discussed with reference to other foreign languages and to foreign language teaching at the tertiary level.