The dynamic development of student immunity in language learning

Many foreign language (FL) learners are struggling to continue their learning journey despite the numerous damaging factors which can have an effect upon their desire to learn. Some of these students have the ability to cross over these hurdles via their own self-motivation and self-organizing strategies, while others find themselves inadequate to deal with such problems possibly because they are unaware of their sense of self and identity. The other area which is open to a question is that whether this concept can raise students' consciousness and make the necessary transformative change on their motivation so that it redevelops more productively to carry on their language learning journey despite its adversity. To do this, a data-driven case study was designed to investigate whether there is the emergence of any stages which can be termed as "student immunity" (the coping strategies students acquire in time) through the lens of complexity theory (CT) and discuss its contribution to understand their sense of self and identity by means of the self-organization process and also to examine whether it is possible to redevelop any overprotective, negative immunity into a more desirable and productive one through raising consciousness to carry on learning a foreign language despite its overexertion. The qualitative interview data suggested that an emergent outcome, student immunity, was developed in return for disturbances which were confronted by the subject students in their school-life experiences. The new emergent outcome became visible to function as a defense system to be able to sustain on an ongoing basis to deal with relatively ongoing academic difficulty.