PLLT 6. Personality Factors
: affective domain of second language acquisition
↳ intrinsic side of affectivity, extrinsic factors
: Ernest Hilgard(1963), purely cognitive theories of learning will be rejected unless a role is assigned to affectivity
: emotional side of human behavior
: culture conflict
: motivation
1) The Affective Domain
: Affect refers to emotion or feeling
: the affective domain is the emotional side of human behavior
① receiving-be aware of the environment surrounding them
② responding-is willing to respond voluntarily without coercion
③ valuing-commit themselves to the value to pursue it, seek it out, and want it, finally, to the point of
conviction
④ organization of values into a system of beliefs
⑤ characterized by and understand themselves in terms of their value system
2) Affective Factors in Second Language Acquisition
: understanding how human beings feel and respond and believe and value is an exceedingly important aspect of a theory of second language acquisition
2-1) Self-Esteem
: no successful cognitive or affective activity can be carried out without some degree of self-esteem, self-confidence, knowledge of your self, and self-efficacy
: personality development universally involves the growth of a person's concept of self, acceptance of self, and reflection of self as seen in the interaction between self and others
: (Coopersmith, 1967) self-esteem is a personal judgment of worthiness that is expressed in the attitudes that individuals hold toward themselves
: people derive their sense of self-esteem from the accumulation of experiences
① general or global self-esteem
: relatively stable
② situational or specific self-esteem
: self-appraisals in particular life situations
③ task self-esteem
: particular tasks within specific situations
: specific self-esteem might encompass second language acquisition in general and task self-esteem might appropriately refer to one's self-evaluation of a particular aspect of the process
: Does high self-esteem cause language success, or does language success cause high self-esteem?
2-2) Attribution Theory and Self-Efficacy
: attribution theory focuses on how people explain the causes of their own successes and failures
: internal to the learner-ability, effort
: external circumstances outside of the learner-perceived difficulty of a task, and luck
: self-efficacy (a high sense of self-efficacy, an appropriate degree of effort may be devoted to achieving success)
: a learner with low self-efficacy may quite easily attribute failure to external factors, a relatively unhealthy psychological attitude to bring to any task or an initial lack of ability
: one of the most important roles of successful teachers is to facilitate high levels of self-efficacy in their students
2-3) Willingness to Communicate
: the intention to initiate communication, given a choice
: some learners tend to avoid second language communication
↳ a number of cognitive and affective factors that underlie this tendency
: motivation, personality, intergroup climate, and two levels of self-confidence
: higher levels of WTC were associated with learners' who experienced social support, particularly from friends, offering further evidence of the power of socially constructed conceptions of self
2-4) Inhibition
: sets of defenses to protect the ego
① the new born baby has no concept of its own self
: gradually it learns to identify a self that is distinct from others
② in childhood,
: the growing degrees of awareness, responding, and valuing begin to create a system of affective traits that individuals identify with themselves
③ in adolescence,
: the physical, emotional, and cognitive changes of the preteenager and teenager bring on mounting defensive inhibitions to protect a fragile ego, to ward off ideas, experiences, and feelings that threaten to dismantle the organization of values and beliefs on which appraisals of self-esteem have been founded
: The process of building defenses continues into adulthood
: those with weaker self-esteem maintain walls of inhibition to protect what is self-perceived to be a weak or fragile ego, or a lack of self-confidence in a situation or task
: an adaptive language ego enables learners to lower the inhibitions that may impede success
: empathy and inhibition are closely linked
: the inhibitions, the defenses, that we place between ourselves and others are important factors contributing to second language success
: the 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
: anyone who has learned a foreign language is acutely aware that second language learning actually necessitates the making of mistakes
: Earl Stevick(1976)- language learning as 'alienation'
↳ alienation between the critical me and the performing me, between my native culture and my target culture, between me and my teacher, and between me and my fellow students
↳ this alienation arises from the defenses, which inhibit learning, and their removal can therefore promote language learning
2-5) Risk Takin
: 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
: feel comfortable
: create a climate of acceptance that will stimulate self-confidence
: allowing themselves to take risks without feeling embarrassed
: high risk taking will yield positive results in second language learning; however, such is not usually the case
↳ (Beebe, 1983) person with a high motivation to achieve are... moderate, not high, risk-takers
: (Rubin & Thompson, 1994) successful language learners make willing and accurate guesses
: self-esteem seems to be closely connected to a risk-taking factor
: fossilization, or the relatively permanent incorporation of certain patterns of error may be due to a lack of willingness to take risks
2-6) Anxiety
: at the deepest, or global, level, trait anxiety-predictably and generally anxious
: at the more momentary, or situational level, state anxiety-particular event or act
: recent research on language anxiety focuses more specifically on the situational nature of state anxiety
: foreign language anxiety can be distinguished from other types of anxiety and that it can have a negative effect on the language learning process
: debilitative and facilitative anxiety (harmful and helpful anxiety)
: several studied have suggested the benefit of facilitative anxiety in learning foreign language
: in Bailey's (1983) study, facilitative anxiety was one of the keys to success, closely related to competitiveness
: both too much and too little anxiety may hinder the process of successful second language learning
: anxiety is the cause of poor performance in a second language, or the product of less than satisfactory performance
: anxiety in a foreign language class could be the result of first language deficits, namely, difficulties that students may have with language "codes" (phonological, syntactic, lexical, semantic features)
: Linguistic Coding Deficit Hypothesis (LCDH)
: self-efficacy and attribution are keys to other affective variables, especially to anxiety
2-7) Empathy
: putting yourself into someone else's shoes
: empathy-more possibility of detachment/ sympathy connotes an agreement or harmony bet individuals
: understand the other person's affective and cognitive states
: cognitive empathy
2-8) Extroversion
: a deep-seated need to receive ego enhancement, self-esteem, and a sense of wholeness from other people
: introverts can have an inner strength of character that extroverts do not have
: extroverted person may protect his or her own ego, with extroverted behavior being symptomatic of defensive barriers and high ego boundaries
: introverted, quieter, more reserved person may show high empathy
: introverts were significantly better than extroverts in their pronunciation
: extroverted were likely to make better use of learning strategies
3. Motivation
3-1) Theories of Motivation
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Behavioristic
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Cognitive
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Constructivist
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Anticipation of reward
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Driven by basic human needs (exploration, manipulation, etc.)
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Social context
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Desire to receive positive reinforcement
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Degree of effort expended
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Community
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External, individual forces in control
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Internal, individual forces in control
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Social status
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Security of group
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Internal, interactive forces in control
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3-2) Instrumental and Integrative Orientations
* instrumental
: acquiring a language as a means for attaining instrumental goals-furthering a career, reading technical material, translation, and so forth
* integrative
: wished to integrate themselves into the culture of the second language group and become involved in social interchange in that group
3-3) Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation
: intrinsically motivated activities are ones for which there is no apparent reward except the activity
: intrinsically motivated behaviors-competence and self-determination
: intrinsic orientations, especially for long-term retention
: extrinsic motivation is fueled by the anticipation of a reward from outside and beyond the self
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Intrinsic
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Extrinsic
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Integrative
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L2 learner wishes to integrate with the L2 culture (e.g., for immigration or marriage)
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Someone else wishes the L2 learner to know the L2 for integrative reasons (e.g., Japanese parents send kids to Japanese language school)
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Instrumental
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L2 learner wishes to achieve goals utilizing L2 (e.g., for a career)
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External power wants L2 learner to learn L2 (e.g., corporation sends Japanese businessman to US for language training)
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