It's in You!

Feelings of self-efficacy have to do with one’s feeling that one can accomplish a task or project, such as learning a foreign language. It is not quite the same thing as self-confidence, which is more general. You may be generally self-confident in most settings, but you may or may not have a sense of self-efficacy as a language learner, on the playing field, or at cocktail parties, just to take a few examples. Self-efficacy is a close partner with motivation: if you think you can accomplish something, you are likely to want to try it. If you think you are likely to fail or not be very good at something, your motivation may suffer. Needless to say, lack of self-efficacy is likely to involve some anxiety, so the two concepts are related, and so are the ways to cope. A sense of self-efficacy is normally the result of previous successful experience. This is one of the reasons for practicing small tasks, like getting the verb at the end of the sentence in Turkish, and large ones, such as making contact with a customer or client. Once you have practiced it, you know that you have what it takes to do it when you need it. If you are finding something difficult, break it down into parts, and tackle only one part at a time. You do not have to learn all the Arabic plural forms, for example. Instead, set your priorities, and select one or two of the most common categories to learn, listen for, and practice. Not only does self-efficacy vary by domain of activity (such as sports,  political debate, or language learning), it also is influenced by what you are like (your personality and learning style), and by other people. Some important factors

include:

·    personality

·    learning style

·    relationships

Some personality characteristics increase or decrease feelings of self-efficacy, depending on the specific situation. One example is extraversion (tendency to seek stimulation from outside yourself, especially with other people), which is likely to promote a sense of self-efficacy in situations where you need to talk to a lot of people in the foreign language. (This is not to say that introverts, who tend to try to control external stimulation, lack self-efficacy in talking to people, but their strengths are likely to be in deeper discussions with one or two other people, rather than in crowds.) An introvert, on the other hand, might approach a writing task with more confidence than an extravert. Your learning style is likely to play a major role in your sense of self-efficacy in specific situations. Those learners who like dealing with the unpredictable, for example, may enter an unstructured learning situation like an immersion learning program with confidence or even pleasurable anticipation. Learners who prefer overt structure might feel at a loss without it. If being liked is important to you, your self-efficacy will probably be increased if you feel that the people you are talking with are “on your side” and are laughing with you when you make errors rather than at you. Good relationships can help. teaching style or situation will fit you. You may have learned foreign languages as a child just by growing up in a country where more than one language was spoken, so trying to learn a language in a classroom may be new for you. Or the opposite may be true: you may have had years of classroom Japanese, but this is the first time for you to try to speak Japanese in Japan. What can you do to help yourself build more confidence in your ability to learn Japanese? There are a number of strategies. Here a few of them: being self-aware;

ü imaging;

ü making friends;

ü being realistic;

ü checking your progress;

ü improving your weak areas gradually;

ü using positive self-talk; and

ü chunking.

The first step toward building self-confidence is self-awareness. If you know what your learning style and personality preferences are, you will have a better idea of the situations that enhance your self-efficacy and those which will detract from it. If, for example, you learn that the class requires a lot of oral work – which you are not good at – but that there is also a textbook, which is more in keeping with your preferences for visual learning, you can plan on being able to manage the learning situation by reading the chapters before going to class rather than waiting for them to be assigned following oral work. Imaging, or imagining yourself in a situation, is not only a good technique for managing anxiety and enhancing motivation, it can help you with self-efficacy as well. For example, imagine yourself succeeding at speaking Indonesian in Jakarta and making friends with Indonesians or managing the Finnish cases so well that you are understood by Finns. If you are a visual learner, you might close your eyes and visualize future scenes where you are joking with a group of Indonesian friends or making a short presentation to a group of Finns. That feeling of success can carry over to your classroom and, later, even to the actual situation. Making friends who encourage you and help you see your uppermost potential and who “hold your hand” when you are feeling down can boost your feelings of self-efficacy. These friends can be speakers of your own language, but it is even better if they can come from the culture and country whose language you are learning. It may take some time to develop such friendships, but they can be worth a huge amount if you are patient. Language exchange (your language for theirs) is a good way to start. Be realistic, neither too optimistic nor too pessimistic. Everyone has limitations. However, instead of focusing on the limitations, spend your efforts focusing on how you can overcome (and are overcoming) those limitations every day. If you are feeling some discouragement, take a look at material you learned earlier in your course and see how far you’ve come. There will always be a gap between what you are learning now and what you feel you have mastered, so it is a good idea to look at your increasingly solid base from time to time. Look for what you’re good at and emphasize it. For example, if you do well with making yourself understood despite your limitations, find opportunities to do that, and let yourself feel good about your successes at it. Personality is closely intertwined with everything we have discussed already: memory, learning styles, learning strategies, learning aptitude, anxiety, motivation, and self-efficacy. What we pay attention to and remember, how we prefer to learn, what makes us anxious, what motivates us, and what we are confident at, all are linked to our personality preferences. Since personality is such a complex area, the maxim “The map is not the territory” is especially apt. Philosophers and psychologists have been trying to understand human personality since at least the time of the ancient Greeks, and there are a great many maps to explore. No one map completely covers the territory, and it is entirely possible that even if the maps were combined, there would still be unknown territory. They are:

ü the Jungian Myers–Briggs type indicator (MBTI),

ü other Jungian personality models, and

ü other personality models.

The Myers–Briggs type indicator (MBTI) has become widespread. It is used in companies, schools, by counselors, and in research. While it is not the only personality typology in existence, it is the one that has been the most researched, especially for educational settings. The MBTI is based on and adapted from the work of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung who described three aspects of psychological activity which  are:

ü extraversion and introversion (direction of energy flow),

ü sensing and intuition (mental function for taking in data), and

ü thinking and feeling (mental function for coming to conclusions and

making decisions).

One from each of these pairs is preferred and used most of the time in your conscious activity. The other member of each pair stays with you too, but it affects your unconscious functioning more. Most people think of extraverts as outgoing and talkative, and introverts as reserved and quiet. These stereotypes are partially true, but not always. Introverts can be very outgoing and assertive situations); extraverts also need “down time” and quiet to restore their balance. What Jung meant by extraversion is not the same as what is usually meant by the popular term: instead, he meant that the external world is attractive to the extravert and at the same time energizes him or her. Some of the traits like gregariousness and so on are often characteristic of extraverts, but they are not extraversion. The same is true of introverts: the internal world is attractive and energizing; introverts may be quiet and reserved, but those traits are not introversion. Introversion appears to relate to a higher level of internal neural arousal and activity. As a result, it is easy for an introvert to get too much stimulation from the outside world and thus need to withdraw from stimulation to restore balance. On the other hand, extraverts appear to bring less neural arousal to their interactions with the outside world and thus may seek external stimulation. As a result, extraverts and introverts tend to behave differently. One good example is that extraverts tend to be impulsive and jump right into situations, whereas introverts need more time to process before acting. “Let me think about it” is a key phrase for introverts. If you are an extravert, you are more likely to talk a lot in the classroom and seek new acquaintance in non-classroom language-learning settings. If you are an introvert, you will also want to talk (some more than others – remember the “noisy introvert”) in class but will probably want to think about it first, even if briefly. Outside the classroom, you, too, will make friends, but you will probably do it one person at a time and take more time to get to know native speakers.

If you prefer sensing, you probably like factual information more than speculation and more interested in the present than the future. You would rather focus on “what is” than on “what might be.” On the other hand, if you prefer intuition, you are likely more interested in what the facts mean than in the facts themselves and are future oriented, interested in possibilities. Sensing and intuition play a major role in interests and choices of subjects for study. Sensing types are likely to choose to concentrate in areas like accounting, surgery, and business. Intuitives are more likely to be interested in areas like literature, psychology, and philosophy. sensing types are more likely to prefer ectenic learning, and intuitives tend to prefer synoptic approaches. If you are in a language class that does not approach language learning in this way, you can buy yourself a grammar reference book or a textbook with rules and read through the explanations as you come to the various grammar features in the classroom. Conversely, if you are an intuitive type in a classroom where you basically learn grammar rules and then practice applying them, you might do a lot of supplemental reading of literature of all sorts from the target culture.

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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