#1 Feelings and Personality Preferences in Relationship with Language Learning

Learning process is often associated with foreign language anxiety is the fears and uncertainties that arise when you think about studying a foreign language, There are useful coping strategies for it. Performance anxiety is closely related to foreign language anxiety and refers to completing acts in the foreign language, such as using it in front of others in class or in the society. Test anxiety is the nervousness that accompanies test preparation and test taking. Motivation is reflected in the reasons you study a foreign language and the reasons you do (or do not) work hard in class. Self-efficacy is your feeling of competence, that you can do something. Personality can have a strong effect on how you approach language-learning situations, in-class work, peer interactions, and interaction with the culture. Ego boundaries refers to receptivity to external input. There are thin and thick boundaries and their significance for language learning. Defense mechanisms are the things we do to protect our self-esteem. Sometimes, these things get in the way of learning. Many learners are intuitively aware of the cognitive factors. The truth is that the line between the cognitive and the affective (feelings) factors in language study situations is not as firm as one may imagine. There is considerable overlap. For example, if you are usually optimistic, your thinking, as well as your feelings, will tend toward the positive, and this will have an influence on the efficiency and success of your cognitive processes. If you think you can learn a language, then, usually, you more likely to be able to. So, what your feelings are and how you deal with them will make a great deal of difference to your learning success. Here we talk about anxiety (related to fear), motivation (desire to do something), and self-efficacy (the feeling that you can do something). If you tend to have a strong need for orderliness in your life, for instance, you may find the open-endedness of language learning “messy,” and this may cause you irritation, as well as make it more difficult for you to deal with the new material. It is important, then, to understand these preferences, mental filters, and habits. Anxiety is a kind of nervous-system arousal that is very functional when there is danger, but it can get in the way when we have a task to do, like learning a language. The key is that anxiety uses up cognitive and emotional resources that then are not available for learning. A small amount of anxiety can be helpful when we need to get going on a project, but when there is too much, it gets in the way. Many learners feel a special kind of anxiety when they are learning a foreign language. There are several reasons for this, each of which is described below:

1.  the amount to learn;

2.  the difficulty in communicating at lower levels;

3.  self-consciousness about mistakes; and

4.  the foreignness of foreign language.

There is a vast body of information to learn. A language takes years to master to near-native ability. There will always be something you do not know. Thinking about this, especially if you want everything immediately, can create immense amounts of anxiety. However, if you make a long-term learning plan and start to see how your daily steps add up to larger and larger gains in foreign language proficiency, you will probably reduce that anxiety to a great extent. Sometimes you may find yourself approaching burnout (inability to work or focus). Under these circumstances, the best thing you can do for yourself is often to give yourself a break from study and any further input. Do something completely different for a while. If you forget a little bit, do not worry, you will have many chances to relearn it even more solidly afterward. For adults in particular, the early and intermediate learning stages can be very frustrating because they want to express adult concepts but do not yet have the necessary foreign expressions. This lack of language results in a feeling of being tongue-tied and can, of course, create anxiety, as well as frustration, especially if you are in an immersion program. Some people can accept this situation as a natural step in the language-learning process. For others, however, just accepting the fact that beginning language learners can appear tongue-tied does not help. In this case, there are ways to handle it, for instance:

Ø Simplification. One way is to learn strategies for simplification. Instead of trying to say, “The obfuscation in the writer’s text organization confuses me,” or, in a different register, which you may also not yet possess, “This author’s writing is so messed up that it is impossible to understand it,” you could use a couple of short phrases to make yourself fully understand and get your message fully across: “The author writes poorly, and I cannot understand the text.”

Ø Islands. Another way to handle this situation/reality is to work out and learn some more advanced ways of speaking about several of the topics that you know you will be speaking about frequently. These are sometimes called “islands” and they can give you moments of fluency at a level higher than your typical proficiency. (Your teacher or any native speaker can help you work these out, but you will have to practice them so that they will be under your full control and available to you when you need them.) Knowing how to simplify and having a set of islands at your beck and call can do much to allay anxiety.

Ø Focus on the known. Perhaps the most powerful tool at your disposal is to focus on what you can do. For example, you might give yourself a good pat on the back for finding roundabout ways to get your meaning across when you do not have the right words for getting yourself to a popular landmark from a hotel or getting a shopkeeper to sell you what you need. You may have had to work hard and have been less than precise, but you used the language and made it work for you. It is not only common to all learners to make mistakes, it is also necessary, or you are probably playing it too safe. Nevertheless, many of us come to learning experiences expecting perfect performance. When we can’t achieve 100 per cent, we can get anxious, yet it is rarely possible to achieve 100 per cent accuracy when speaking a foreign language. (Full accuracy does not occur in our native language, either; we just do not notice mistakes there in the same way that we do with foreign languages.) Mistakes can be your friend. This changed attitude will not only help reduce your anxiety, it will encourage you to speak and write more so that, in the long run, you actually will make fewer mistakes, thanks to all the practice. Inside the classroom, mistakes can be more threatening to your sense of self-esteem than outside of it. You may feel judged by your teacher and classmates for your performance, and of course in some ways everything is a test, not only formally named tests. A good way to deal with the inevitable anxiety of feeling judged is to focus on your performance, not that of others.

Summing up - Outside the classroom, remember that the native speakers with whom you speak are not interested in judging your performance. They are interested in communicating with you. If it is not too much work for them to understand you and make themselves understood, your mistakes will not matter much and are in fact expected in a non-native speaker.

Bibliography:

1.            Brown, H.D. (2000): Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. White Plains, NY: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. Gass,

2.            S.M. I L. Selinker. (2008): Second Language Acquisition. An Introductory Course. New York: Routledge. VanPatten,

3.            Leaver, B.L; Ehrman, M; Shekhtman, B. (2005): Achieving Success in Second Language Acquisition. CUP

4.            B. i J. Williams. (red.) 2007: Theories in Second Language Acquisition. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.

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