Affective factors in SLA

FACTORS AFFECTING SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Professor: Dr. Barjeste

Presenter: Sona Harare

Input, Intake, Output

Input: the process of comprehending language.

Intake: what is actually remembered, subsumed, and internalized from various inputs to the learner, especially teacher input.

Output: the corpus of utterances that learners actually produce orally or in writing

Intake Factors

• Intake factors are:(Kumaravadivelu, 1948)

1. Internal: factors related to the inside such as age.

2. External: factors related to the outside such as social context.

• The major of intake factors represented by Kumaravadivelu as an acronym

Individual: age and anxiety

Negotiation: interaction and interpretation

Tactical: learning strategies and communication strategies

Affective: attitudes and motivation

Knowledge: language knowledge and metalanguage knowledge

Environmental: social context and educational context

Individual factors: Age

• It’s generally believed that the age at which learners begin to learn L2 influence the attainment of language knowledge, because it is held that the brain loses its plasticity after the age of puberty.

• In reference to the plasticity of the brain, Penfield and Robert (1959, cited in Marshall, 2000) were the first to introduce the idea of critical period which is later linked to the idea of lateralization up to puberty, that the brain loses its capacity to acquire faster and more efficient.

• In 1967 Lenneberg proposed a Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH), stated that language is best learned before puberty.

CPH: is a biologically determined period of life, when language can be acquired more easily.

CPH and Opposite Findings

• Language learning that occurs after the end of CPH may not be based on innate(biological) structures, but rather depends on more ‘general’ learning abilities.

• The CPH ends somewhere around puberty.

• Patkowski (1982) found that age of acquisition is very important factor in setting limits on the development of native-like mastery of SLA, and this limit does not only apply to accent, but also applies to syntax and morphology.

• He found that learners who started earlier,achieved the highest scores on the grammatical tasks, and those who began later didn’t have native like language abilities.

Opposite findings:

• Studies demonstrate that adults and adolescents learnt faster than children in the first year of SLA development.

(Asher & Price, 1967; Snow & Hoefnagle-Hoechle, 1978 cited in McLaughlin, 1992)

Two strands of thoughts about age

• Those in favor of “younger is better” case (e.g., Krashen, 1981) argued that L2 development of children and adult involve different process. The former, need to utilize innate properties of language acquisition as in L1 acquisition. And the latter, need to employ general problem-solving abilities.

• But, others believed in “older is better”, they think that older learners have cognitive and literacy skills that tend to enhance L2 development. (McLaughlin 1987; Snow 1983)

• A balanced approach suggests a Sensitive rather than a Critical period for L2 development (Lamendella, 1977;Singleton, 1989). In other words, the criticalperiod represents a well-defined “window of opportunity”, whereas the sensitive period represents “a progressive inefficiency of the organism”

Anxiety

• It is an emotional state of tension, nervousness and worry by the arousal of the automatic nervous system.

• Psychologists postulate a positive, facilitating anxiety and negative, debilitating anxiety working in tandem, but second language researchers focused on the effect of the latter on L2 development.

• Gardner and his colleagues found that anxiety has a significant deleterious effect on SLA specially on vocabulary recalling. Anxiety consumes attention and cognitive resources that could otherwise be allocated to developing L2 ability.

• So, anxiety may occur at any level of language development:

At input⤳ it causes attention deficits.

At intake ⤳ by affecting the emotion-related and task-related cognition, it interferes with storage and retrieval of previously learned information, thereby affecting output (Tobias, 1986).

Krashen (1983) stated that high anxiety can impede language acquisition, whereas a low anxiety is “conducive to SLA, whether measured as personal or classroom anxiety”

The Affective Domain

• Affect refers to emotion or feeling. The affective domain is the emotional side of human behavior, and it may be contrasted to the cognitive side.

• Benjamin Bloom and Iris colleagues (Krathwohl, Bloom, & Masia, 1964) provided a useful extended definition of the affective domain:

1. At the first and fundamental level, the development of affectivity begins with receiving. Persons must be aware of the environment surrounding them and be conscious of situations, phenomena, people, objects; be willing to receive and give a stimulus.

2. Next, persons must go beyond receiving to responding, committing themselves in at least some small measure to a phenomenon or a person.

3. The foundations are now in place for valuing: seeing the worth of an object, a behavior, or a person. Beliefs and attitudes are internalized as we commit ourselves and to the point of conviction.

4. Our values are now ready to be organized into a system of beliefs, as we determine interrelationships and establish a hierarchy of values.

5. Finally, we develop a self-identity as we conceptualize ourselves in terms of our value system of values and beliefs.

Affective Factors In SLA

• In the 1970, affective factors were a hot topic in SLA. The “new” dimension of emotion injected some excitement, even to the point of offering hope for the discovery of a set of personality traits that would give us ultimate answer to the causes of success (Guiora, Brannon, & Dull, 1972). Affective factors are emotional factors which influence SLA, such as:

• Self-Esteem

• Inhibition

• Risk Taking

• Anxiety

• Empathy

Self-Esteem

• Self-esteem is at the heart of virtually every aspect of human behavior. Self-esteem refers to a personal evaluation and judgment of worthiness that is expressed in the individual's attitude toward him or herself or toward his or her capabilities. Three levels of self-esteem relevance to SLA are:

1. Global self-esteem (overall): which is relatively stable in a mature adult, quite resistant to change. It is the general assessment one makes of one’s own worth over time and across a number of situations.

2. Situational self-esteem (or specific): refers to one’s self-appraisals in particular life contexts, such as work, play or some certain discretely defined skills such as communication, athletic or musical.

3. Task self-esteem: relates to particular tasks within specific situations. Within the educational domain, it might refer to one subject-matter area.

Situational self-esteem could be said to relate to SLA in general, and task self-esteem might refer to one’s self-evaluation of speaking or writing and particular activity in the second language classroom activity.

Attribution Theory and Self-Efficacy

• Attribution theory focuses on how people explain the causes of their own success and failures (Weiner, seminal work, 1986, 1992, 2000). Weiner and others describe attribution theory in terms of four explanations for success and failure: ability, effort, perceived difficulty of a task, and luck. Learner attributes their success of a task using these four dimensions.

• Ability and effort are internal to the learner; task difficulty and luck are external circumstances outside of the learner.

• Self-efficacy: is the belief in your own capabilities to perform an activity (Brown, 1941).

• If a learner feels capable of carrying out a given task _a high self-efficacy_ some degree of effort is likely to be devoted to achieving success.

• The studies showed that there is a positive relationship between students’ self-efficacy and performance (Mills, Pajares, & Herron, 2006). So, one of the most important roles of successful teachers, is to facilitate high level of self-efficacy in their students.

Willingness to Communicate (WTC)

• A factor related to attribution and self-efficacy that has a surge of interest, is the extent to which learners display a willingness to communicate as they front an L2.

• Willingness to communicate (WTC) may be defined as "an underlying continuum representing the predisposition toward or away from communicating, given the choice" (Maclntyre et al., 2002). Or, more simply put, "the intention to initiate communication, given a choice" (MacIntyre et al., 2001).

• In one interesting finding, Maclntyre et al. (2001) found that higher levels of the WTC were associated with learners' who experienced social support, particularly from friends, offering further evidence of the power of socially constructed conceptions of self.

• WTC is a dynamic system that varies considerably over time.

Inhibition

• Inhibition in a person arises as he/she tries to defend or protect their self-image or ego. Those people with higher self-esteem and ego strength, are more able to withstand threats to their existence, and thus their defenses are lower. Those with weaker self-esteem maintain stronger “wall” of inhibition to protect their fragile ego.

• the learner perceives the mistakes that he/she makes in the L2 as a threat to their emotional well-being and self perception, then acquisition will not occur or will occur much more slowly.

• Ehrman (1993, 1999) suggested the significance of thin ego boundaries (permeable) and thick ego boundaries.

• The openness, vulnerability, and ambiguity tolerance of those with thin ego boundaries create different pathways to success from those with hard-driving, systematic, perfectionist, thick ego boundaries.

• Pedagogical approaches quickly seized the opportunity to reduce inhibition in L2 classrooms by creating a “safe” atmosphere for students to take risks, communicate willingly and try out their budding language competence.

Risk Taking

• One of the characteristics that has been found to exist in "good" language learners is the willingness to make intelligent guesses.

• Beebe (1983) described some negative ramifications that foster fear of risk taking in the classroom: a bad grade, a fail on the exam, a reproach from the teacher, a smirk from a classmate. Outside the classroom, L2 learners fear looking ridiculous, failure to communicate, alienation, and loss of identity. He found that successful L2 learners are usually moderate risk-takers. “They don’t take wild risks or enter into no-win situations”.

• If the learner is less inhibited, he/she is more willing to take a chance on producing a "correct" utterance in the second language.

Empathy

• Language is a social, and the social transactions that L2 learners must navigate are complex endeavors. Transaction is the process of reaching out beyond the self to others, and language is a major tool used to accomplish that process.

• Empathy is the process of “putting yourself into someone else’s shoes”, of reaching beyond the self to understand what another person is feeling.

• Psychologists agree that there are two necessary aspects to the development and exercising of empathy: first, an awarenessand knowledge of one's own feelings, and second, identification with another person (Hogan, 1969). In other words, you cannot fully empathize—or know someone else—until you adequately know yourself.

• When a learner is acquiring a second language, he or she is also acquiring, in a sense, a new personality, and a new culture. It is the ability of a learner to open him or herself to new cultural experiences and adapt these experiences as their own is essential in the language acquisition process.

Extroversion and Introversion

• There is a myth that we think of an extroverted person as a “life of the party” person, and introverts as quiet, reserved, and reclusive. But, this view of E/I is misleading.

• Extroversion: 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. They need other people in order to feel “good”, and energized by interaction with others.

• Introversion: the extent to which a person derives a sense of wholeness and fulfillment from “within”, apart from a reflection of this self from other people. They are “energized by concentration on the inner world” (Wakamoto, 2009).

• It is not clear that extroversion or introversion helps or hinders the process of second language acquisition. It is also readily apparent that cross-cultural norms of nonverbal and verbal interaction vary widely, and what in one culture (say. The United States) may appear as introversion is, in another culture (say, Japan), respect and politeness.

Motivation

From the historical schools of thought there are three perspectives about Motivation:

1. From a behavioral perspective, motivation is seen in a very matter of fact terms. It is quite simply the anticipation of reward. Driven to acquire positive reinforcement, and driven by previous experiences of reward for behavior, we act accordingly to achieve further reinforcement. Skinner, Pavlov, and Thorndike put motivation at the center of their theories of human behavior.

2. In cognitive terms, motivation places much more emphasis on the individual's decisions, "the choices people make as to what experiences or goals they will approach or avoid, and the degree of effort they will exert in the respect" (Keller, 1983).

3. A constructivist view of motivation places even further emphasis on social context as well as individual personal choices (Williams & Burden, 1997. p. 120). Each person is motivated differently, and will therefore act on his or her environment in ways that are unique. But these unique acts are always carried out within a cultural and social milieu and cannot be completely separated from that context. Several decades ago, Abraham Maslow (1970) viewed motivation as a construct in which ultimate attainment of the goals was possible only by passing through a hierarchy of needs, three of which were solidly grounded in community, belonging, and social status. Motivation, in a constructivist view, is derived as much from our interactions with others as it is from ones self-determination.

All three perspectives can be amalgamated into an integrated understanding of SLA.

Ausubel list of needs

Ausubel categorizes a list of needs underlying our decisions:

• The need for exploration, for seeing "the other side of the mountain," for probing the unknown

• The need for manipulation, for operating—to use Skinner's term—on the environment and causing change

• The need for activity, for movement and exercise, both physical and mental

• The need for stimulation, the need to be stimulated by the environment, by other people, or by ideas, thoughts, and feelings

• The need for knowledge, the need to process and internalize the results of exploration, manipulation, activity, and stimulation, to resolve contradictions, to quest for solutions to problems and for self consistent systems of knowledge.

• Finally, the need for ego enhancement, for the self to be known and to be accepted and approved of by others, or, what Dornyei (2005) calls the "self-system“.

Consider those who are said to be “motivated” to learn L2. they are motivated because they perceived the value(reward) of knowing a language. They choose to meet the needs of exploration, stimulation, knowledge, self-esteem, and autonomy. And they do so in widely differing individual pathways and in the context of a social milieu that values being able to “speak” L2.

Intrinsic, Extrinsic and Achievement 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 rewards”.Intrinsically motivated behaviors are aimed at bringing about certain internally rewarding consequences, namely, feelings of competence and self-determination and are , like Skinner’s (1957) emitted response. In contrast, extrinsic motivation is fueled by the anticipation of a reward from outside and beyond the self, such as money, prize, grade, and even a positive feedback.

• Cognitive psychologists added another type of motivation as achievement motivation. It is involved whenever there is competition with internal or external standards. It is a specific motive that leads one to utilize one’s fullest potential.

• The general trend of the experimental studies has been to suggest that motivation "involves all the affects and cognitions that initiate language learning, determine the language choice, and energize the language learning process" (Dornyei, 2000)

Environmental Factors

• Environmental factors refer to the wider milieu in which language learning and teaching take place. These include the global, national, social, cultural, political, economic, educational, and family contexts. The impact of these overlapping factors on L2 development is not fully know, partly because as Siegel (2003) pointed out, "one shortcoming of the field of SLA is that generalizations have been made on the basis of research carried out in only a limited range of sociolinguistic and involving only standard varieties of language". However, even the limited knowledge we have suggests that environmental factors contribute to shape L2 development. Two closely connected factors are:

1. Social

2. Educational

Social and Educational context

• Social context: it refers to a range of language – learning environments such as the home, the neighborhood, the classroom, and the society at large. Recently, scholars such as Pavlenko (2002), Hall (2002) and Siegel (2003) suggested that the movement from the L1 to the L2 involves more than psycholinguistic abilities. Because it depends on historical, political, and social forces as well. Specific social settings such as the neighborhood and the classroom, in which learners come into contact with new language have also been found to influence L2 development. Studies conducted by Wong-Fillmore (1989) revealed that social settings create and shape opportunities for both learners and competent speakers of the L2 to communicate with each other, thereby maximizing learning potential.

• Educational context: Closely related to the social context is the educational context. In the context of L2 development, it is the educational context that shapes language policy, language planning, and most importantly, the learning opportunities available to the L2 learner. It is impossible to insulate classroom life from the dynamics of political, educational, and societal institutions, because, as Kumaravadivelu(2001) have argued, the experiences participants bring to the classroom are shaped not only by the learning and teaching episodes they have encountered in the classroom, but also by a broader social, economic, educational, and political environment in which they grow up.

References

1. Brown, H. Douglas. (2014). Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. 6th edition.

2. Kumaravadivelu, B. (1948). Understanding Language Teaching.

3. Dornyei, Zoltan. (2009) The Psychology of Second Language Acquisition

4. Nejadansari, D. , Nasrollahzadeh, J. (2011). Effects of Age on Second Language Acquisition.

5. Shakouri, Nima. (2012). Revisiting Age and Gender Influence in Second Language Acquisition.

Thanks for your attention