PLLT Chapter.6 summary

CHAPTER6. Personality Factors

We will talk about the intrinsic side of affectivity : personality factors within a person that contribute in some way to the success of language learning.

The Affective Domain
Affect refers to emotion or feeling. It involves a variety of personality factors, feelings both about ourselves and about others with whom we come into contact.
Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues provided a useful extended definition of the affective domain.
1. Receiving: must be aware of the environment surrounding and situations, phenomena, people, object.; be willing to receive, not avoid it
2. Responding: be willing to respond voluntarily without coercion, and then to receive satisfaction from that response.
3. Valuing: Placing worth on a thing, a behavior, or a person
4. The organization of values into a system of beliefs
5. Value system
Language is inextricably woven into the fabric of virtually every aspect of haman behavior. Language is so pervasive that it cannot be separated from the whole persons that live, breath, think and feel. Understanding how human beings feel, respond, believe and value is an exceedingly important aspect of a theory of second language acquisition.

1) Self-Esteem
Self-esteem is probably the most pervasive aspect of any human behavior. Malinowski noted that all human beings have a need for phatic communion—defining oneself and finding acceptance in expressing that self in relation to valued others. Well-accepted definition of self-esteem is a personal judgment of worthiness that is expressed in the attitudes that individuals hold toward themselves.
Three general levels of self-esteem
1. General, or global, self-esteem is said to be relatively stable in a mature adult and is resistant to change except by active and extended therapy.
2. Situational or specific self-esteem refers to one’s self-appraisals is particular life situations on certain relatively discretely defined traits or personality traits.
3. Task self-esteem relates to particular tasks within specific situations.
Adelaide Heyde found that all three levels of self-esteem correlated positively with performance on the oral production measure. MacIntyre, Dornyei, Clement, and Noels saw the significance of self-confidence in their model of “willingness to communicate” in a foreign language. Even if we don’t know which one comes first between high self0esteem and language success, both are clearly interacting factors.

2) Inhibition
Closely related to the notion of self-esteem is the concept of inhibition. All human beings build set of defenses to protect the ego. The human ego encompasses language ego or the very personal, egoistic nature of second language acquisition. The inhibitions, the defenses, that we place between ourselves and others are important factors contributing to second language success. Ehrman has suggested that openness, vulnerability, and ambiguity tolerance of those with thin ego boundaries create different pathways to success from those with hard-driving, systematic, perfectionistic, thick ego boundaries. The alienation arises from the defenses that we build around ourselves. These defenses inhibit learning, and their removal can therefore promote language learning, which involves self-exposure to a degree manifested in few other endeavors.

3) Risk-taking
Risk-taking is an important characteristic of successful learning of a second language. Learners have to be able to gamble a bit, to be willing to try out hunches about the language and take the risk of being wrong. People tend to face negative consequences if they make a mistake inside and outside classroom, and they fear that a lot. One has to create a climate of acceptance that will stimulate self-confidence, and encourage participants to experiment and to discover the target language, allowing themselves to take risks without feeling embarrassed. Successful language learners are moderate, not high, risk takers. They like to be in control and like to depend on skill. They don’t take wild risks or enter into no-win situation. Teachers should encourage students to guess somewhat more willingly than the usual student is prone to do and to value them as persons for those risks that they take.

4) Anxiety
Intricately intertwined with self-esteem and inhibition and risk-taking, the construct of anxiety plays an important affective role in second language acquisition. It is associated with feelings of uneasiness, frustration, self-doubt, apprehension, or worry. At the deepest, or global, level trait anxiety is a more permanent predisposition to be anxious. At a more momentary, or situational level, state anxiety is experienced in relation to some particular event or act. Recent research on language anxiety focuses more specifically on the situational nature of state anxiety. Most of studies conclude that foreign language anxiety can be distinguished from other types of anxiety and that it can have a negative effect on the language learning process. Alpert and Harber differentiated between debilitative and facilitative anxiety. But the notion of facilitative anxiety is that some concern over a task to be accomplished is a positive factor. Without this, a learner can be “wishy-wishy”. Bailey explained the positive effects of competitiveness by means of the construct of facilitative anxiety. That is, both too much and too little anxiety may hinder the process of successful second language learning.

5) Empathy
A variety of transactional variables may apply to second language learning: imitation, modeling, identification, empathy, extroversion, aggression, styles of communication, and others. Empathy is the process of “putting yourself into someone else’s shoes,” of reaching beyond the self to understand what another person is feeling. Language is one of the primarily means of empathizing, but nonverbal communication such as empathy facilitates the process of empathizing and must not be overlooked. Guiora defined empathy as “a process of comprehending in which a temporary fusion of self-object boundaries permits an immediate emotional apprehension of the affective experience od another” and there are two necessary aspects to the development and exercising of empathy: first, an awareness and knowledge of one’s own feelings, and second, identification with another person. In other words, you cannot fully empathize -or know someone else – until you adequately know yourself. Communication requires a sophisticated degree of empathy. In order to communicate effectively, you need to be able to understand the other person’s affective and cognitive states. In a second learning situation, the problem of empathy becomes acute. Not only must learner-speakers correctly identify cognitive and affective sets in the hearer, but they must do so in a language in which they are insecure.

6) Extroversion
Extroversion and introversion are potentially important factors in the acquisition of a second language. Extroversion is the extent to which a person has a deep-seated need to receive ego enhancement, self-esteem, and a sense of wholeness from other people not from oneself. On the other hand, introversion is the extent to which a drives a sense of wholeness and fulfillment apart from a reflection of this self from other people. Educators have warned against prejudging students on the basis of perceived extroversion. Teachers need to consider cultural norms in their assessment of a student’s presumed “passivity” in the classroom, because of the difference between American society and other societies. It’s not clear that extroversion or introversion helps or hinders the process of second language acquisition. The Toronto study found no significant effect for extroversion in characterizing the good language learner. There’s no evidence that extroverted students are better. In fact, introverts were significantly better than extroverts in their pronunciation. It suggested that introverts may have the patience and focus to attend to clear articulation in a foreign language. Nevertheless, it is conceivable that extroversion may be a factor in the development of general oral communicative competence, but not in listening, reading, and writing. Teachers should encourage students to speak out in class for their speaking ability despite cultural difference.

Myers-Briggs Character Types
Jung said that people are in fundamental ways, and that an individual has preferences for “functioning” in ways that are characteristic, or “typical,” of that particular individual. Borrowing from some of Jung’s “types,” the Myers-Briggs test: (1) introversion vs. extroversion (2) sensing vs. intuition (3) thinking vs. feeling (4) judging vs. perceiving. The Extroversion-Introversion category relates to an aspect of personality. The sensing-Intuition category has to do with the way we perceive the world around us. The Thinking-Feeling category describes ways of arriving at conclusions and of storing reality in memory. The Judging-Perceiving has to do with one’s attitude toward the outer world. 16personality combinations are possible with four two-dimensional categories. Laurence stressed the importance of a teacher’s understanding the individual differences of learners in a classroom. We should not be too quick to conclude that psychological type can predict successful and unsuccessful learning. Successful learners know their preferences, their strengths, and their weaknesses, and effectively utilize strengths and compensate for weaknesses regardless of their natural preferences.

Motivation
Countless studies and experiments in human learning have shown that motivation is a key to learning, but we should think about the meaning of motivation more.
1) Behavioristic
l anticipation of reward
l desire to receive positive reinforcement
l external, individual forces in control
2) Cognitive
l driven by basic human needs
l degree of effort expended
l internal, individual forces in control
3) Constructive
l social context
l community
l social status
l security of group
l internal, interactive forces in control
The fulfillment of needs is rewarding, requires choices, and in many cases must be interpreted in a social context.

1) Instrumental and Integrative Orientations
The instrumental side referred to acquiring a language as a means for attaining instrumental goals. The Integrative side described learners who wished to integrate themselves into the culture of the second language group and become involved in social interchange in that group. It is important to think of instrumentality and integrativeness as a case of orientation rather than as types of motivation. Gardner and Lambert and Spolsky found that integrativeness was an important requirement for successful language learning. But which one is more important can’t be said because there are lots of variable finings. Second language learning is rarely taken up in contexts that are exclusively instrumental or exclusively integrative. Most situations involve a mixture of each orientation. We should regard the two orientations simply as two out of a number of possible orientations to understand the integrative-instrumental construct better.

2) Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation
Intrinsically motivated behaviors are aimed at bringing about certain internally rewarding consequences, namely, feeling of competence and self-determination. On the other hand, Extrinsically motivated behaviors are carried out in anticipation of a reward from outside and beyond the self. Typical extrinsic rewards are money, prizes, and even certain types of positive feedback. Intrinsic is superior to extrinsic for long-term retention. Maslow also agreed that intrinsic motivation is clearly superior to extrinsic. We are ultimately motivated to achieve “self-actualization” once our basic physical, safety, and community needs are met. It is important to distinguish the intrinsic-extrinsic construct from Gardner’s integrative-instrumental orientation. While many instances of intrinsic motivation may indeed turn out to be integrative, some may not.

The Neurobiology of Affect
John Schumann found out the amygdala plays an important role in the relationship of affect to language learning. The amygdale is instrumental in our ability to make an appraisal of a stimulus. Schumann concluded that positive appraisals of the language learning situation enhance language learning and negative appraisals inhibit second language learning.

Measuring Affective Factors
The measurement of affective factors has for many decades posed a perplexing problem. Tests present three problems.
1. The most important issue in measuring affectivity is the problem of validity.
2. A second related problem in the measurement of affective variables lies in what has been called the “self-flattery” syndrome.
3. Finally, tests of self-esteem, empathy, motivation and other factors can be quite culturally ethnocentric, using concepts and references that are difficult to interpret cross-culturally.