Contributions of the system of Appraisal for the analysis of student reflections on emotions and orality

Abstract

This paper is set in the field of spoken discourse and emotions in academic contexts. The objective is to analyze learning diaries written in Spanish by students in the first year of the Profesoradoand Licenciatura en inglésat the National University of Rio Cuarto resorting to the system of Appraisal (Martin y White, 2005), specifically the subsystem of Attitude, to find out about the entities students assess and the emotional, ethic, and aesthetic aspects they evaluate. The diaries are collected with thepurpose of helping students reflect on their learning rocesses and classroom experiences in relation to reading aloud tasks used in the Introduction to Phonetics course. The analysis of 29 narratives written in Spanish on the reading aloud in English task shows that the entities that are evaluated most frequently are the students themselves while the least frequently assessed are strategies, emotions, and teachers. The evaluations show positive polarity which are inscribed in the areas of affect and judgement where the evaluations that stand out are in/security and dis/inclination on the one hand, and capacity, tenacity and integrity, on the other. The insights provided by this analysis can contribute to the understanding of the phenomenon of academic emotions (Pekrun, Goetz, Titz, & Perry, 2002) in higher education which can be useful for students and teachers (Bonetto, Vaja & Paoloni, 2017). We think that good quality training implies focusing on an approach that fosters the development of the cognitive, ethic, affective, social and political dimensions of students upon entering university.