The effects of (in)attention and (hyper)activity on conversation abilities by multilingual individuals in Austria and Poland

After the outbreak of COVID-19, schools were forced to close because of the quarantine, which hastened the sudden switch to online learning. Existing studies show conflicting results. For example, Tessarollo, Scarpellini & Costantino (2022) and Shuai, He, Zheng et al. (2021) have shown that distance learning made learning difficulties worse for all students, particularly for students with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (henceforth, ADHD). In contrast, the teacher participants in Kałdonek-Crnjaković’s study (2022) claimed that students with ADHD found the online learning environment less distracting; this eventually had a positive effect on their language learning behavior. This research shows how important the learning environment is. For example, the relationship between the usage of digital media and ADHD symptoms was evidenced and it was shown that ADHD affected individuals experienced worse problems with increased exposure to digital media during the period of epidemic quarantine (Shuai, He, Zheng et al., 2012). This has resulted in many individuals casting doubt on whether they have (developed) and/or have become more aware about particular difficulties and deficits with attention when it comes to daily communication.
ADHD is a condition or a specific learning difficulty that may affects one’s completing tasks, routines and learning (e.g. APA, 2022; Kormos, 2017). There are two main presentations of this condition: inattention, hyperactivity/ impulsivity. Inattention manifests as a lack of attention to details, inability to keep attention for a longer time or follow instructions, poor organizational strategies, forgetfulness, and being easily distracted by an external stimulus. Hyperactivity may cause, for example, frequent hands and legs movement, walking or running, and fidgeting. Impulsivity, on the other hand, is associated with lower self-control, impatience, extensive talking, and unintentional destruction, and disturbing others. Therefore, an individual with ADHD can exhibit either a combined presentation of inattention and hyperactivity-impulsivity, predominantly inattentive or predominantly hyperactive-impulsive presentation.
Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has been widely researched in medicine, psychology and education, but not in applied linguistics and multilingualism. However, ADHD is more than relevant for areas, such as language education, multilingualism and pragmatics (i.e. the study of language use) as ADHD may affect receptive and productive skills in an additional language (Kałdonek-Crnjakovic 2018; Kormos and Smith 2012; Liontou 2019). Calls for focusing on the individual differences by multilingual individuals have been made in the area of pronunciation - which is related to conversation skills (cf. Angelovska, 2021). However, there is still a lack of research on how (in)attention and/or hyperactivity/impulsivity affects the conversation management skills in a chronologically acquired first or second foreign language among multilingual individuals who have learnt more than one foreign language in their lifespan.
We can safely assume that discourse management skills (such as initiating, maintaining, and ending a conversation, cf. CEFR, 2020; Staikova et al. 2013; Green, Johnson & Bretherton, 2014) may be affected by certain ADHD inattention and/or hyperactivity/impulsivity manifestations. Existing research usually refers to data conducted with children with ADHD with less prominent research about adults. For instance, in the area of pragmatics, previous results by Bishop & Baird (2001) and Staikova et al. (2013) have found that children with ADHD have poorer pragmatic language skills than their typically developing peers. What is less known is, whether this is the case with adults, who have rather broader communication experience than children and possibly have already developed communication strategies which could mask specific ADHD aspects - possibly this can be viewed as a reason why we have less cases of adults with an ADHD condition. Similarly, there is a lack of knowledge in regard to how specific presentations or profile of an adult individual (with a combined presentation of inattention and hyperactivity–impulsivity, predominantly inattentive or predominantly hyperactive–impulsive presentation) of ADHD impacts pragmatic skills in an additional foreign language (in our case English as a foreign language - EFL). There are some studies with children pinpointing a link between ADHD and L1 pragmatic skills, but there seems to be a lack of methodologically sound studies that focus on the relationship between ADHD and the conversation skills of adult multilingual individuals in the context of EFL communication. So, in line with previous calls for assessing properly the effects of ADHD on foreign language learning, our project has several aims of scientific and practical importance. On one hand, this interdisciplinary project team aims to analyze existing ADHD screening tools in regard to whether they include enough detailed items on communication and conversational behavior and consequently either adapt an existing one or design and validate a new screening tool with pragmatics-relevant aspects of ADHD. Such a complete and fully validated tool could potentially be used by foreign language teachers aiming at differentiated language teaching where the needs of all learners are considered and as a cost-free alternative to already expensive and less available ADHD medical diagnosis. On the other hand, we aim to contribute to the fundamental research on ADHD by expanding the existing research line with experimental data on assessing the EFL pragmatic skills (in particular turn-taking prediction abilities) by ADHD-affected and typically developing multilingual individuals from two European countries (Austria and Poland).