Mediation in group identity and sense of belonging for language learning
This is the subject of the doctoral thesis defended in November by María Sanz Ferrer, a member of GR@EL, winner of the 2020 ASELE Doctoral Thesis Prize. Her work was supervised by Carmen López, a researcher at the Department of Translation and Language Sciences.
María Sanz Ferrer, a member of the Learning and Teaching Languages Research Group (GR@EL), at the UPF Department of Translation and Language Sciences (DTCL), has won the 2020 ASELE research prize for doctoral theses of the ASELE collection awarded by the Association for Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language (ASELE) for her thesis: Mediation in the co-construction of group identity and the sense of belonging. An approach to the beliefs of learners of Spanish as a foreign language (SFL). Sanz Ferrer defended her thesis on 19 November 2019, which was supervised by Carmen López, an expert on speech analysis, and was conducted within the PhD in Translation and Language Sciences at UPF.
The paper presents interdisciplinary research that combines linguistics, educational psychology and social psychology. Based on the concept of mediation, it explores the beliefs of a group of learners of Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) in relation to affective factors, mobile learning and the teacher-mediator. Specifically, the basis for this research is to define mediation and identify the mediating elements involved in the co-construction of the group-class identity and the sense of belonging.
Positive management of the mediating elements involved in the processes of the co-construction of group-class identity and a sense of belonging leads to multiple opportunities for learning SFL
To address this goal, qualitative research was conducted to examine the processes of mediation from two interrelated planes: on the one hand, the mediating elements that have been involved in group identity and sense of belonging in the classroom (architectural elements, teaching materials, the role of the teacher and the WhatsApp group); on the other, a taxonomy of mediating elements involved in the research (paraphrasing, comparisons, examples that participants use to explain to the researcher what they understand by “group-class” and how they feel about it).
A mediation analysis model that can be extrapolated to other research
Thus, and echoing the importance of mediation in the SFL classroom, her work presents the development of a holistic, understanding and comprehensive model used to analyse mediation, which can be extrapolated to other investigations. This mediation analysis model is one of the main contributions of the doctoral thesis. Also, this research highlights the role of the teacher in the social processes that take place in the classroom (group identity and sense of belonging). Positive management of the mediating elements involved in the processes of the co-construction of group-class identity and a sense of belonging leads to multiple opportunities for learning SFL.
María Sanz Ferrer intends to continue combining teaching with research. “The prize I was awarded encourages me to continue researching, with great enthusiasm, into mediation and social processes taking place in the SFL classroom”, she revels. The prize will be awarded at the 31st International Congress of ASELE in León (Spain), on 3 September 2021.
Related work:
Maria Sanz Ferrer (2019), La mediació en la coconstrucció de la identitat de grup i el sentiment de pertinença. Una aproximació a les creences de aprenents d'ELE, tesi doctoral inèdita, defensada el 19 de novembre a la Universitat Pompeu Fabra i dirigida per Carmen López. https://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/668118
e-Repositori UPF: https://repositori.upf.edu/handle/10230/43152