CHAPTER 6

PRINCIPLES OF LANGUAGE
LEARNING AND TEACHING

“AFFECTIVE FACTORS”
 THE AFFECTIVE
DOMAIN

Refers to emotion or
feeling. The emotional
domain is the emotional
aspect of human behavior,
which can be contrasted
with the cognitive aspect
when treated with caution.
 AFFECTIVE FACTORS IN
SLA

In the 1970s, affective factors were a hot

topic in SLA. The budding field eagerly
made connections between psychological
personality constructs and SLA and
offered fruitful implications and
applications to classroom teaching
methodology.
 SELF-ESTEEM
Is at the heart of virtually every
aspect of human behavior. It
could easily be claimed that no
successful cognitive or affective
activity can be carried out
without some degree of self-
esteem, self-confidence,
knowledge of yourself, and self-
efficacy-belief in your own
capabilities to successfully per­
form an activity.
ATTRIBUTION THEORY AND SELF-EFFICACY

• The issues and questions about the role of

self-esteem in language learning are the
foundational concepts of attribution and
self – efficacy. Attribution theory focuses
on how people explain the causes of their
own successes and failures (Bernard
Weiner 1986,1992,2000).
 WILLINGNESS TO COMMUNICATE

• Willingness to communicate is a
factor related to attribution and self-
efficacy as they tackle a second
language. This could be defined as
underlying continuum representing
the predisposition toward as away
from communicating (McIntyre et at
2002
 INHIBITION
• Human beings build sets of defenses to protect the
ego. We gradually learn to identify a self that is
distinct from others, and then in stages of awareness
constructs a self-identity.
• The process of building defenses continues into
adulthood. Those with weaker self-esteem maintain
stronger “walls” of inhibition to protect what is self –
perceived to be a weak or fragile ego or a lack of self
– efficacy.
 RISK TAKING
• Risk taking is one of the prominent characteristics of “good language learner” Learners have to be
able to gamble a bit, try out hunches about the language and take the risk of being wrong. The
antidote to such fears, is to establish an adequate affective framework so that learners feels
comfortable as they take their first public steps in the strange world of a foreign language (Beebe
1983).
 ANXIETY
Intricately intertwined with self-esteem,
self-efficacy, inhibition, and risk taking,
the construct of anxiety plays a major
affective role in second language
acquisition. Even though we all know
what anxiety is and we all have
experienced feelings of anxiousness,
anxiety is still not easy to define in a
simple sentence.
 ANXIETY

Trait anxiety is a more permanent

predisposition to be anxious. At a
more momentary, or situational
level, state anxiety (ansaiti) is
experienced in relation to some
particular event or act.

It is important in a classroom for a teacher

to try to determine whether a student’s
anxiety stems from a more global trait or
whether it comes from a particular context
at the moment.
However, recent research on
language anxiety as it has come to ANXIETY
be known, focuses more
specifically on the situational
nature of state anxiety.

Another important insight to be

applied to our understanding of
anxiety lies in the distinction
between debilitative and
facilitative anxiety called hamful
and helpful anxiety.
 EMPATHY
Language is social, and the social
transactions that L2 learners must
nativage are complex endeavours.
transaction in the process of reaching
out beyond the self to others, and
language is a major tool used to
accomplish that process. Two of these
variables, chosen for their relevance to a
comprehensive understanding of SLA,
will be treated here: emphaty and
extroversion.
 EMPATHY

Emphathy is the process of putting

yourself into someone else shoes, of
reaching beyond the self to understand
what another person feeling. Language is
one of the primary means of empathizing,
but nonverbal communication facilitates
the process of empathizing and must not
be overlooked.
EMPATHY
In L2 learning, the problem of a form of
linguistic empathy become acute. Not only
must learner-speakers correclty identify
cognitive and affective states in the hearer,
but they must do so in a language which
they ate insecure. Then, learner-hearers,
attempting to comprehend an L2, are called
upom to correctly interpret potentially
garbled messages, and the result can be
tangle of crossed wires.
 EXTROVERSION
AND
INTROVERSION

Extroversion is the extent to which person has a

deep-seated need to receive ego enhancement,
self-esteem and a sense of wholeness from other
people as opposed to receiving that affimation
withnin one self. Extroverts actually need other
people in order to feel good and are energized by
interaction with others.
 EXTROVERSION AND INTROVERSION
Introversion, on the other hand, in the
extent to which a person derives a sense
of wholeness and fulfillment within
oneself.
Introverts can have an inner strength of
character, be more attentive to thoughts
and concepts, and be energized by
concentration on the inner world.
Introverts can be pleasantly
conversational, but simply require more
reflection, and possibly exercise more
restraint in social situtation.
 EXTROVERSION
The extroverted person may
actually behave in an extroverted
manner in order to protect his or
her own ego, with extroverted
behavior being symptomatic of
defensive barriers and high ego
boundaries.
 MOTIVATION

Motivation is a star player in the cast

of chatacters assigned to L2 learning
scenarios around the world. Such
assumptions are metitorious:
countless studies and experiments in
human learning have shown that
motivation is the key to learning in
general.
 DEFINING MOTIVATION
Various operational definitions of motivation have been proposed over the course of
decades of research. Following the historical school of thought, three different
perspectives emerge:

֎ Behavioral Perspective
֎ Cognitive
֎ Constructivist
From the Behavioral perspective, motivation is quite simply
the anticipation of reward.

In Cognitive terms, motivation emphasizes the individual’s

decision, “the choices people make as to what experiences
or goals they will approach or avoid, and the degree of effort
they will exert in that respect”
 INTRINSIC AND EXTRINSIC
MOTIVATION
Edward Deci (1975) defined Intrinsic Motivation as 
expending effort for which there is no apparent reward
except the activity itself and not because it leads to an
extrinsic reward. Intrinsically motivated behaviors are
driven by internally rewarding consequences, namely,
feelings of competence and self-determination, and
are, like Skinner’s (1957) emitted response, willingly
engaged in through one’s own volition.

In contrast, extrinsic motivation is fueled by the

anticipation of a reward from outside and beyond the
self.
 Maslow (1970) claimed that intrinsic motivation is clearly superior to extrinsic. According to his
hierarchy of needs mentioned above, motivation is dependent on the satisfaction of fundamental
physical necessities (air, water, food), the of community, security, identity, and self-esteem, the
fulfillment of which finally leads to self-actualization, or, to use a common phrase, “being all that
you can be”.

Ramage found intrinsic motivation to be positively associated with high school students who
were interested in continuing their L2 in college, while those who only wanted to fulfill language
requirements exhibited weaker performance.
 SOCIAL-PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
Motivation was studied in terms of a number of different kinds of attitudes. Two different clusters of
attitudes were identified as instrumental and integrative orientations:
• An instrumental orientation referred to acquiring a language as a means for attaining practical goals
such as furthering a career, reading technical material, or translation.
• An integrative orientation described learners who wished to integrate themselves into the culture of the
second language group and become involved in social interchange in that group.

Motivational Intensity

• One learner may be only mildly motivated to learn within, say a career context, while another learner
with the same orientation may be intensely driven to succeed in the same orientation.
Sociodynamic and Constructivist Approaches
All of the past constructs offer  fruitful ways to understand
what it means to be motivated, and ultimately, advice on how
teachers can help foster motivation among their students.
The intrinsic and extrinsic contrast tells us that the more we
can encourage autonomy and self-determination among
learners, the higher will be their drive and usually the greater
their success.

We have already seen that SLA involves complex systems,

sometimes even chaotic systems if we borrow a term from
chaos-complexity theory. We have also seen that every
plausible attempt to be linear and predictable in isolating
cause and effect relationships in SLA is as elusive as Roger
Brown’s (1966) models that darts off on an uncapturable
tangent.
 NEUROBIOLOGY
WE CAN FIND SEVERAL CONCEPTS ACCORDING TO THE AREA
IN MEDICINE: Discipline that groups together different specialties that deal
with the study of the nervous system.
THE ROYAL ACADEMY DEFINES IT: Biology of the nervous system.
PSYCHOLOGY: It is the study of the cells of the nervous system and the organization of these cells within functional
circuits that process information and mediate behavior. It is a sub-discipline of both biology and
neuroscience.

WHAT IS THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF AFFECT IN LANGUAGE LEARNING?

There is no more basic a mechanism for language acquisition than the brain. Perhaps one of the most important
applications of neurobiological research to SLA is that brains vary in an almost infinite number of possible ways. So,
"it would be difficult to argue that there is any 'right' way to teach a foreign language" One Method certainly does
not fit all.
MEASURING AFFECTIVE FACTORS
The measurement of affective factors has always posed a big problem. Some affective factors can
be reliably measured (through formal interviews, or Rorschach's inkblot, but they are expensive
and require an expert to apply them).
What can we conclude about the Measurement of
Affective Factors? Considering the pros and cons,
there is no question that we should be cautious and
intuitive in the use of various assessment
instruments.
 CLASSROOM APLICATIONS;
INTRINSIC MOTIVATION

You could not begin to instruct a

classroom of students without attending
to their self-efficacy, anxieties, motivations
and other personality variables, since
emotion is a key factor for success in the
classroom.
So, let's think about the interaction in the
classroom between intrinsic and extrinsic
motives.
 INTRINSIC MOTIVATION: is what drives us to
do things for the simple joy of doing them.
The very execution of the task is the reward.
Intrinsic motivation is born in the individual
himself.

EXTRINSIC MOTIVATION is based on

receiving money, rewards and punishments,
or external pressure.
As a teacher, how are you going to handle these
extrinsic motives? One attitude that would be helpful
is to recognize that such impulses are not "bad" or
harmful, and thus capitalize on those factors by
innovating. A second way to apply intrinsic motivation
is to consider your own variety of techniques in the
classroom to achieve an additional dimension of
intrinsic motivation.