Education paper by Túri, Krisztina
Storied Self - Mental Imagery in SLA. Visualization Activities to Enhance Motivation and Engagement to Narrate our Storied Self. (Accepted)
Type of Abstract (select):Abstract (max. 250 words):
Humans inherently live their lives in and through stories. As actors, agents and authors in our lifespan we tell stories to others and ourselves about ourselves to comprehend our everyday life, to interpret and re-interpret our past and present, to create pathways we envision for our future. We are innate narrators of our own narratives through our mind’s eye.
Mental images are what our mind creates and is made of as representations of the unfolding world on our narrative journey. The power of imagination, the connection between cognition and mental imagery is a crucial, yet often untapped resource in second language acquisition (SLA). With mental imagery and through autobiographical memory our selves are activated, our past, present and similarly our future selves are narrated and re-narrated. Our actual self, our ought self and ideal self are once again put on stage with discrepancy (Self-Discrepancy Theory), when and where individuals are motivated to decrease the discrepancies between those of the actual and ideal selves. Our autobiographical memory - our lived Hungarian past and our anticipated future (our Hungarian nurture and education) thus is constantly triggered by and contrasted with the Second Language and its culture, creating a blended flow of mental representations: therefore SLA is not merely „the accumulation of skills and knowledge” of language learning, but „it is a process of becoming, or avoid becoming a certain person.’ (Pavlenko & Norton, 2007: 590).
The presentation is to guide through some of the fundamental concepts and theoretical frameworks which can be related to mental imagery such as Dan McAdam’s New Big Five with its identity multi-layer model, Paivio’s Dual Coding Theory, flow triggers or Zoltán Dörnyei’s L2 Motivational Self System alongside an ample amount of practical guidance and task types for teachers of foreign languages in the classroom, with special emphasis to the Hungarian context.
Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Currently I have been teaching English in Bonyhádi Petőfi Sándor Lutheran Grammar School. I graduated from Pécsi Tudományegyetem with English and History majors in 1997 where in the same vein, I gained my postgraduate diploma last year in the field of talent management. My special field of interest and research is motivation and engagement in Second Language Acquisition.