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20 Cynthia White Kramsch and Thorne’s telecollaborative project, described as ‘two local genres engaged in global confrontation’ where ‘the exchanges ... only exacerbated the discrepancies in social and cultural genres of communication’ (2002, 99). The projects did, however, give students experience in working with intercultural communicative practices online, in all their complexity: participating in such communities demanded that students were able to learn about, meet and adjust to the interactive demands of participation in intercultural virtual contexts and communities in the target language. The ideal of the collaborative learning community where learners find support for and develop control of their learning in interactions and exchanges misses one critical component—that communities are also inherently complex, at times involve conflict and are potentially at variance with the expectations and needs of learners. The philosophy of ILL has tended to focus on individual learners and much less on communities, and I suggest that this is a very limiting perspective through which to understand ILL. As a field, we now need to widen our focus beyond individual learners to acknowledge that the communities they connect with and perform within are not inert elements in ILL. Seeing ILL in terms of not only the individual but also in terms of the complex and often problematic forms of engagement it requires in communities is an important starting point in re-examining some of the assumptions of ILL. New perspectives on ILL: Affect and cognition In this section, I draw on a longitudinal, qualitative study (Bown and White 2010a, b) which investigated the complex interplay between students’ affective experiences in learning Russian and their engagement with individualised instruction, as one form of ILL. The setting for the study was a large public university in the mid-west of the United States.All 19 participants had chosen individualised instruction, a hybrid of distance learning and self-access learning, rather than the traditional classroom format for learning Russian. In the programme, they received course materials and a specially prepared handbook to guide them. They worked at their own pace and had face-to-face meetings with an instructor for conversational practice and assessment. Thestudents’experienceoflearningRussianthroughindividualized instruction was clearly imprinted on them as seen in the feelings they expressed about what took place: they experienced a wide range of emotionsrelatingtothetargetlanguage,thelearningcontext,themselves, Inside independent learning 21 progress and assessment, the process of language learning and many other domains. Positive emotions such as enjoyment, hope and pride were intertwined with more negative emotions such as frustration, shame, anxiety and despair. Specific aspects of the individualised context created strong emotional reactions in some students. One student, Susan, characterised her experience in individualised instruction as ‘lonely’, and noted that she felt ‘abandoned’. Another, Emma, stated that she ‘hated’ the learning format of individualised instruction, adding that those same negative emotions related to her appraisal of herself as, in her view, she struggled to work effectively in that context: ‘When I say hate, I’m also saying that it’s how I feel about myself and my lack of ability to work well within that structure’. For another student, John, some features of Russian grammar created salient emotional responses, particularly verbs of motion ‘which I just detest [laughs]’, and the complexity of verbs continued to present him with both cognitive and affective challenges throughout the course of the study. One feature of those verbs made him feel particularly ‘awkward’: ‘it wasn’t a fact of having them memorised, it was just a fact of knowing when to use them’. While John was confident about his ability to acquire the language, how he felt about his progress was the critical dimension for him: he did at times speak of recurrent episodes of ‘frustration’ which he managed by reminding himself of the progress he had made. John was acutely aware of the need to minimise the impact of negative emotions, and did that by reappraising the emotional antecedent, reminding himself of the progress he had made and what he had accomplished. John was adroit at generating positive emotions to good effect in individualised instruction, in order to protect his motivation and sense of self-efficacy. For the students in this study, emotions were an essential part of their understanding of what was going on during the process of learning Russian, and were integral to the processes that created the learning context moment by moment, shaping the ways in which they engaged with the language. The emotions students experienced and reported were also integral to the...

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