Positive Psychology Exercises Build Social Capital for Language Learners: Preliminary Evidence

Abstract

In the seminal article on positive psychology, Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) identify three pillars for the field: positive character traits, positive emotions and positive institutions. Each of these pillars can be central to the field of SLA, where there is strong potential to integrate previous lines of research with emerging positive psychology principles, concepts and actions (MacIntyre & Mercer, 2014). Positive psychology is ‘not a spectator sport’ (Peterson, 2006), meaning that there is a strong emphasis in the field on developing activities that produce positive outcomes, both inside and outside the classroom. In language pedagogy, there have been efforts to develop individualized activities that promote learning (e.g., Gregersen & MacIntyre, 2014). Within positive psychology, there have been a number of exercises that have been tested and shown to have positive effects on individuals, activities such as expressing gratitude, savoring prior experiences and performing altruistic acts, to name only three (Seligman et al., 2005). The emphasis on empirical research means that positive psychology exercises (PPEs) must be shown to be effective (Mongrain & Anselmo-Matthews, 2012; Seligman et al., 2009). Within psychology, the emphasis on evaluating PPEs has been on their effect on personal health and well-being. However, the social turn (Block, 2003) emphasizes that the social and historical context must be taken into account when examining what it means to be learning or acquiring a language. In this chapter, we use mixed methods to explore both the emotional and social consequences of enriching an extracurricular language conversation program with PPEs. In particular, we argue that language learning can be facilitated by PPEs in the context of emerging friendships that provide learning with positive emotional experiences and intangible resources for language acquisition (i.e., building social capital).