Language Empowerment and Attitude Defossilisation

The evolutionary and transformational process that has invested the field of second language (L2) teaching and learning in the last thirty years has seen a number of gradual but constant shifts in focus from teacher to student-oriented, from grammar to content-oriented, from teacher’s full control to students’ autonomy in learning and many more. All these changes have needed time to be tried out and accepted by those (e.g., teachers, students, families, school administrators, etc.) who play a role in teaching/learning situations. These changes have generated a number of benefits but they have also left many issues unanswered and unsolved. The present paper addresses some of these issues. In particular, it focuses on the treatment of fossilized attitudes in L2 learning at university, proposes ways and functional procedures to empower students so that defossilization may take place and unblock stagnating situations of impasse. The paper reports on a recent seminar conducted on 28 volunteer fuori corso students at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. It shows that the emergence of cancerous and distorted attitudes toward L2 learning paralyzes students who, in most of the cases, develop an inefficient sense of learning self-regulation, augment forms of inability to overcome difficult situations (e.g., reiterate failures to pass written tests), and miss the trajectory of their educational goal. In time, these infelicitous results fossilize students’ behaviors and attitudes toward L2 learning. They block the disenrollment of their academic path and negatively affect their self-appraisal and self-esteem. The seminar has proven to be capable of inverting this negative trend. It has shown that felicitous modalities to induce learning self-regulation and self-made goal-oriented visions can lead students to successful results through mindset restructuring and restored attitudes.