Psychological factors inhibiting the learning process
Anxiety
Anxiety can be of two kinds – a permanent character trait or a trait anxiety (as in a person who is predisposed to be fearful of many things) and a situational, or state anxiety (the way most learners react to certain aspects of the language learning situation)/
Can anxiety ever be helpful?
The good kind of anxiety, called facilitating anxiety, can be helpful in keeping students ‘on their toes’. The ‘bad’ kind of anxiety is known as debilitating anxiety, because it harms learners’ performance in many ways, both indirectly through worry and self-doubt and directly by reducing participation and creating over avoidance of the language. Facilitating anxiety is only helpful for very simple learning tasks, but not for more complicated learning, such as language learning. Within our course we will be using the term anxiety in its negative meaning. We believe that any degree of true anxiety is detrimental in the language classroom.
What can be the source of anxiety?
Many kinds of language activities can generate performance anxiety, depending on the student:
- Speaking in front of others;
- Using new language in oral reports, skits, role-plays;
- Doing tests;
- Interacting with others (introverts);
- Speaking without a visual prompt (visual learners);
- Reading (with students who have difficulty of reading well in their native language);
- Listening (with the students with low level of listening skill);
- In a traditional, teacher-centered classroom;
- When students are not interested in the language and do not want to study it.
What are the symptoms of anxiety?
Here are some clear sign of anxiety in the language classroom:
- General avoidance: ‘forgetting’ the answer, showing carelessness, cutting class, coming late, arriving unprepared.
- Physical actions: fidgeting, playing with hair or clothing, nervously touching objects, stuttering or stammering, displaying jittery behavior, being unable to reproduce the sounds or intonation of the target language even after repeated practice.
- Physical symptoms: complaining about a headache, experiencing tight muscles, feeling unexplained pain or tension in any part of the body.
What can the teacher do to reduce anxiety?
Oxford, Lavine and Horwitz list a number of ways to reduce anxiety in the language classroom:
1.Awareness. Be aware of the possibility of language learning anxiety. Don’t be impatient with nervous students who seem unwilling or unable to participate freely. Consider their anxiety level and try to lower it, rather than raising it through criticism.
2. Positive climate: create a positive learning environment by not disparaging students in front of others, by learning students’ names, by using an encouraging rather than threatening style of questioning, by avoiding overcorrection, sarcasm and intimidation, by testing fairly what the students know rather than giving ‘trick questions’, and by addressing the learning styles of all students in the class.
3. Self-talk: teach students to help themselves through positive self-talk as opposed to negative self-talk in order to reprogram their thinking. For instance, if you hear a student saying, ‘I am sure I’m going to fail this test’, you can encourage the student to say, ‘If I study hard, I know I will pass the test”.
4. Cooperative or group learning: use pair work, group work or cooperative learning activities, which allow greater student-student interaction.
5. Diaries and dialogue journals: Use language leaning diaries, which allow students to express their fears and anxieties freely and to obtain the emotional support of their peers and teachers in an interactional format. In a dialogue journal teachers respond supportively.
6. Rewards: Reward students for the job well done through verbal praise. Let successful students, as a reward, the opportunity to choose the next activity. Assist them in developing their own intrinsic reward system.
7. Behavioral contracting: have the students sign the contract with the teacher outlining very specific performance expectations in a step-by-step way, so that the students know what to do and how to do it. (Oxford – formats of personal short-term and long-term learning objectives).
8. Relaxation: Teach students how to use relaxation techniques, such as progressive tensing and relaxing each of the major muscle groups or imagining a calm, beautiful vista.
9. Student support groups: create language learning support groups outside of the class. These can serve as places to share learning strategies, practice the language together, prepare for tests and projects, concerts and theatre performances and provide emotional support.
Low Self-Esteem.
We define self-esteem as a self-judgment of worth or value, based on feeling of efficacy – a sense of interacting effectively with one’s own environment.
Low self-esteem is obvious in statements like “I sure feel stupid!”
Just like anxiety, self-esteem can be a trait (a global personality characteristic) or a state (related to a particular situation). We, as teachers, should be particularly concerned with situational self-esteem, when a student is not doing well in a language class that is especially stressful or failure inducing, or in a specific skill he is not good at. Not surprisingly, unsuccessful language learners –those who have particular problems in the language learning situation – have lower self-esteem than successful language learners.
Teachers can help students develop higher self-esteem by training them to set reasonable goals in the first place and to assess their own progress towards these goals realistically and positively. One major problem is that students are often unrealistic in what they believe they can and should accomplish in a given period of time, so their self-esteem suffers.
Tolerance of Ambiguity
There are a lot of things that take place in our students’ minds when they are learning a new language, and what is more, they have to deal with the four skills: reading, writing, speaking and listening. For instance, we could see in a group of students of any level how some students easily grasp any explanation or application of a point but it happens too, that there are some students who could not grasp what the explanation was or what the use of a specific point was. However, these students are desperately trying to learn a new language; they always find lots of inexplicable things that interfere with their acquisition and therefore we see how they lose interest and end failing exams and simply dropping out of courses.
Eherman says “Language learning is an extremely demanding whole-person engagement. It requires the learner to cope with information gaps, unexpected language and situations, new cultural norms, and substantial uncertainty. It is highly interpersonal, which is in itself fraught with ambiguities and unpredictabilities. Concepts and expressions in any two languages do not relate one-to-one” (Ehrman, 1996). Given these complexities, it makes sense that tolerance of ambiguity is crucial to success in language learning aimed at a real communicative use. Students who lack tolerance of ambiguity tend to have a great deal of trouble in language learning, both formal and informal.
Teachers can be of service by helping students learn to accept the ambiguity involved in learning a language and the students’ own incomplete knowledge. This acceptance often requires overt discussion with the whole class, or else with individual students who experience severe problems caused by their intolerance of ambiguity.
Risk Taking
Students who fear the frequent ambiguities of language learning often suffers reduced risk-taking ability. They frequently ‘freeze up’, become emotionally paralyzed and unwilling to take even moderate risks in practicing the language communicatively in the language classroom or outside it. These students are stalled by actual or anticipated criticism from others or by self-criticism that they themselves supply.
We, as language teachers, can aid students in determining when it is safe and necessary to take a risk. For instance, in conversations it is almost always essential to take risks (for example, paraphrasing, talking around a missing word, using gestures, guessing meanings). We can give students the tools, such as compensation strategies (see R.Oxford 1990), to take risks in appropriate ways.
Recommended Literature
1.Alessia Occhipinti “ Foreign Language Anxiety in in-Class Speaking Activities” https://www.duo.uio.no/bitstream/handle/10852/25584/Daxstamparexoggixultima.pdf
2. 20 Tips to Reduce Student Anxietyhttp://www.teachthought.com/teaching/20-tips-to-reduce-student-anxiety/
3. Positive Behavior Support: Learning to Prevent or Manage Anxiety in the School Setting / Academic Anxiety http://www.sbbh.pitt.edu/files/other/anxiety_lng_newsletter.pdf
4. Sample Accomodations for Anxious Kids http://www.worrywisekids.org/node/40
5. Dr Karen Shore The Student with Low Self-Esteem http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/shore/shore059.shtml
6. How to Promote Student Self-Confidence http://uk.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/9781_036609CHAP6.pdf
7. R.Brooks How can teachers foster self-esteem in children?
http://www.greatschools.org/gk/articles/teachers-foster-self-esteem-in-children/
Seminar 2
Teachers and Learners
Warming-up.Roles of a Teacher (matching activity) – Learning to Teach English, pp16-17, 20-21.
1. Reading: Read one of the recommended articles and be prepared to discuss in small groups the following issues a) what activities cause the most/least anxiety with students (article 1 -parts (2.2.2.9) (4.1) (4.2);
b) ways of reducing anxiety in the classroom (art.2-4);
b) ways of dealing with low self-esteem in students (art.4-6);
c) anxiety-reducing characteristics of the instructor (article 1 – section 4.6)
2. GROUP DISCUSSION. Why is anxiety such a big issue in language learning? For what kind of students is it a major problem? Which of the anxiety reduction techniques shown in this lecture and in the article by Occhipanti do you believe would work the most effectively? Why? Try some of these techniques on yourself next time you become anxious about anything. What makes these techniques work? Will you need to adapt them to make them work better in your particular situation?
3. ESSAY WRITING.Take the Foreign Language Clasroom Anxiety Scale (Horwitz 1990). http://www.studyabroad.purdue.edu/Resource/InterculturalLearning/ForeignLanguageAnxietyScale.pdf What is your own level of language learning anxiety? What are the underlying reasons? Write a two-paragraph essay about your foreign language anxiety.
Paragr.1. What activities cause the most/least anxiety with you? What are the reasons?
Paragraph 2. What can you do to reduce the level of anxiety?
Lecture 3.