Name : Alifa C.

Arqitasari
Class : PBI A
NIM : 16202241001

Summary of Book Chapter

Principles of Language Learning and Teaching

Author : H. Douglas Brown

Correspondence : Pearson Education, 10 Bank Street, White Plains, NY 10606
Published : 2007
Chapter : Sixth: Personality Factors

This chapter is about the intrinsic side of affectivity: personality factors within a person that
contribute in some way to the success of language learning. The affective domain is difficult to describe
scientifically. On a problem in striving for affective explanations of language, success is presented by the
task of subdividing and categorizing the factors of the affective domain.

THE AFFECTIVE DOMAIN

Affect refers to emotion or feeling. The affective domain is the emotional side of human
behavior and it may be juxtaposed to the cognitive side. Benjamin Bloom provided a useful extended
definition of the affective domain that:

1. The first and fundamental is receiving. Persons must be aware of the environment surrounding
them and be conscious of situations: be willing to receive and give a stimulus their controlled or
selected attention.
2. People must go beyond receiving to responding, committing themselves in at least some small
measure to a phenomenon or a person.

3. The third level is valuing: placing worth on a thing a behavior or a person. Valuing takes on the
characteristics of beliefs or attitudes as values are internalized.

4. The fourth level is an organization of values into a system of beliefs, determining

interrelationships among them and establishing a hierarchy of values within the system.

5. Finally, individuals become characterized by and understand themselves in terms of their value
system.

The fundamental notions of receiving, responding, and valuing are universal. Second language
learners need to be receptive both to those with whom they are communicating and to the language
itself, responsive to persons and to the context of communication, and willing and able to place a certain
value on the communicative act of interpersonal exchange.

AFFECTIVE FACTORS IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Self-Esteem

Self-esteem is probably the most pervasive aspect of any human behavior. Three general levels
of self-esteem have been described in the literature to capture its multidimensionality.

1. General or global self-esteem is the general or prevailing assessment one makes of one’s own
worth over time and across a number of situations.
2. Situational or specific self-esteem refers to one’s self-appraisals in particular life situations. The
degree of specific self-esteem a person has may vary depending upon the situation or the trait in
question.

3. Task self-esteem relates to particular tasks within specific situations. Task self-esteem might
appropriately refer to one’s self-evaluation of a particular aspect of the process, speaking,
writing, a particular class in a second-language, or even a special kind of classroom exercise.

Attribution Theory and Self-Efficacy

Attribution theory focuses on how people explain the causes of their own successes and
failures. Weiner and others describe attribution theory in terms of four explanations for success and/or
failure in achieving a personal objective: ability, effort, perceived difficulty of a task, and luck. Two of
those four factors are internal to the learner: ability and effort; and two are attributable to external
circumstances outside of the learner: task difficulty and luck.

This is where self-efficacy comes in. if a learner feels he or she is capable of carrying out a given
task, in other words, a high sense of self-efficacy, an appropriate degree of effort may be devoted to
achieving success. Conversely, a learner with low self-efficacy may quite easily attribute failure to
external factors, a relatively unhealthy psychological attitude to bring any task.

Willingness to Communicate

Willingness to communicate may be defined as “an underlying continuum representing the

predisposition toward or away from communicating, given the choice.” The first level resembles what
has already been described as situational self-esteem, or “state communicative self-confidence”, and the
second, an overall global level simply labeled “L2 self-confidence.” Both self-confidence factors assume
important roles in determining one’s willingness to communicate.
Inhibition

Yet another variable that is closely related to, and in some cases subsumed under, the notion of
self-esteem and self-efficacy is the concept of inhibition. The human ego encompasses what Alexander
and Ehrman referred to as language ego or the very personal, egoistic nature of second language
acquisition. An adaptive language ego enables learners to lower the inhibitions that may impede
success. Ehrman provided the importance of language ego in studies of learners with thin (permeable)
and thick (not as permeable) ego boundaries.

Risk Taking

Impulsivity was described as a style that could have positive effects on language success.
Inhibitions or building defenses around people egos can be a detriment. These factors suggest that 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.

Anxiety

Spielberger defined anxiety as “the subjective feeling of tension, apprehension, nervousness,

and worry associated with an arousal of the autonomic nervous system.” More simply, anxiety is
associated with feelings of uneasiness, frustration, self-doubt, apprehension, or worry. At the deepest
level, trait anxiety is a more permanent predisposition to be anxious. At a more momentary level, state
anxiety is experienced in relation to some particular event or act. Three components of foreign language
anxiety have been identified in order to break down the construct into researchable issues:

1. Communication apprehension, arising from learners’ inability to adequately express mature

thoughts and ideas.
2. Fear of negative social evaluation, arising from a learner’s need to make a positive social
impression on others.

3. Test anxiety or apprehension over academic evaluation.

Yet another important insight to be applied to our understanding of anxiety lies in the distinction
between debilitative and facilitative anxiety or what Oxford called “harmful” and “helpful” anxiety.
More recently, Speilmann and Radnofsky preferred to identify tension as more neutral concept to
describe the possibility of both “dysphoric” (detrimental) and “euphoric” (beneficial) effects in learning a
foreign language.
Empathy

In common terminology, empathy is the process of “putting yourself into someone else’s shoes,”
of reaching beyond the self to understand what another person is feeling. Language is one of the
primary means of empathizing, but nonverbal communication facilitates the process of empathizing and
must not be overlooked. Empathy is not synonymous with sympathy. Empathy implies more possibility
of detachment; sympathy connotes an agreement or harmony between individuals. Communication
requires a sophisticated degree of empathy. In order to communicate effectively, we need to be able to
understand the person’s affective and cognitive states.

Oral communication is a case in which it is easy to achieve empathetic communication because

there is immediate feedback from the hearer. Written communication requires a special kind of empathy
—a “cognitive” empathy in which the writer, without the benefit of immediate feedback from the reader,
must communicate ideas by means of a very clear empathetic intuition and judgment of the reader’s
state of mind and structure of knowledge.

Extroversion

Extroversion is 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 as opposed to receiving that
affirmation within oneself. Introversion, on the other hand, is the extent to which a person derives a
sense of wholeness and fulfillment apart from a reflection of this self from other people. The extroverted
person may actually behave in an extroverted manner in order to protect his or her own ego, with
extroverted behavior being symptomatic of defensive barriers and high ego boundaries. At the same
time the introverted, quieter, more reserved person may show high empathy—an intuitive
understanding and apprehension of others—and simply be more reserved in the outward and overt
expression of empathy.

MOTIVATION

Motivation is yet another affective variable to consider, but one that is so central and with
research foundations that are so pervasive a separate category here.

Theory of Motivation

1. From a behavioral perspective, motivation is seen in 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. In a
behavioral view, performance in tasks—and motivation to do so—is likely to be at the mercy of
external forces: parents, teachers, peers, educational requirements, job specifications, and so
forth.
 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 that respect.” There are six needs undergirding the construct of
motivation:

a. The need for exploration, for seeing “the other side of the mountain,” for probing the unknown.

b. The need for manipulation, for operating—on the environment and causing change.

c. The need for activity, for movement and exercise, both physical and mental.

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

e. 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.

f. The need for ego enhancement, for the self to be known and to be accepted and approved of by
others or calls the “self-system.”

3. A constructivist view of motivation places even further emphasis on social context as well as
individual personal choices. Motivation, in a constructivist view, is derived as much from our
interactions with others as it is from one’s self-determination.

Motivation is something that can, like self-esteem, be global, situational, or task oriented.
Learning a foreign language requires some of all three levels of motivation. Motivation is also typically
examined in terms of the intrinsic and extrinsic motives of the learner. Those who learn for their own
self-perceived needs and goals are intrinsically motivated, and those who pursue a goal only to receive
an external reward from someone else are extrinsically motivated.
Instrumental and Integrative Orientations

Motivation was examined as a factor of a number of different kinds of attitude. Two different
clusters of attitudes divided two basic types of what Gardner and Lambert identified as instrumental and
integrative orientations to motivation. The instrumental side of the dichotomy referred to acquiring a
language as a means for attaining instrumental goals. The integrative side described learners who wished
to integrate themselves into the culture of the second language group and become involved in social
interchange in that group.

It is important to note that instrumentally and integrativeness are not actually types of
motivation and other have noted, are more appropriately termed orientations. That is depending on
whether a learner’s context or orientation is (1) academic or career related (instrumental), or (2) socially
or culturally oriented (integrative), different needs might be fulfilled in learning a foreign language. The
importance of distinguishing orientation from motivation is that within either high or low motivational
intensity. Assimilative orientations may describe a more profound need to identify almost exclusively
with the target language culture, possibly over a long-term period.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation

Edward Deci defined intrinsic motivation: intrinsically motivated activities are ones for which
there is no apparent reward except the activity itself. Intrinsically motivated behaviors are aimed at
bringing about certain internally rewarding consequences, namely, feelings of competences and self-
determination. On the other hand, extrinsic motivation is fueled by anticipation of a reward from
outside and beyond the self. Typical extrinsic rewards are money, prizes, grades, and even certain types
of positive feedback. Flow theory, as it has come to be called, highlights the importance of “an
experiential state characterized by intense focus and involvement that leads to improved performance
on a task. Flow theory claims that as a result of the intrinsically rewarding experience associated with
flow, people push themselves to higher levels of performance.”

Intrinsic
L2 learner wishes to integrate
with the L2 culture (e.g., for
Integrative immigration on marriage).
L2 learner wishes to achieve
goals utilizing L2 (e.g., for
Instrumental
career).
Extrinsic
Someone else wishes the L2
learner to know the L2 for
integrative reasons (e.g.,
Japanese parents send kids to
Japanese language).
External power wants L2 learner
to learn L2 (e.g., corporation
sends Japanese businessman to
U.S for language training).
THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF AFFECT

Using such techniques, some connections have been made between affectivity and
mental/emotional processing in general, as well as second language acquisition in particular.
“Neurobiology, including neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, and neurophysiology, informs several areas of
interest for language acquisition studies, for example, plasticity, affect, memory, and learning.”

John Schumann’s work in this area has singled out one section of the temporal; lobes of the
human brain, the amygdala, as a major player in the relationship of affect to language learning. The
amygdala is instrumental in our ability to make an appraisal of a stimulus. Schumann and Wood provided
further explanation of the neurobiological bases of motivation as sustained deep learning (SDL), the
kind of learning that requires an extended period of time to achieve. SDI not unlike intrinsic motivation is
rooted in the biological concept of value. Value is bias that leads humans to certain preferences and to
choosing among alternatives.

PERSONALITY TYPES AND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

The Myers-Briggs team tested four dichotomous styles functioning in the Myers-Briggs test: (1)
introversion vs. extroversion, (2) sensing vs. intuition, (3) thinking vs. feeling, and (4) judging vs.
perceiving. It would appear that success in a second language depends on the “mobilization of (a) the
strategies associated with one’s native learning style preferences and (b) the strategies associated with
the less preferred functions that are the opposites of the four letters of a person’s type.”

MEASURING AFFECTIVE FACTORS

Horwitz and Cope to measure the construct of language anxiety as distinct from anxieties
associated with other non-language performance. It, too, poses situations and descriptions representing
potential anxiety to which the student must respond across a scale of agreement to disagreement. First,
the most important issue in measuring affectivity is the problem of validity. A second related problem in
the measurement of affective variables lies in what has been called the “self-flattery” syndrome. Finally,
tests of extroversion, anxiety, motivation, and other factors can be quite culturally ethnocentric, using
concepts and references that are difficult to interpret cross-culturally.

INTRINSIC MOTIVATION IN THE CLASSROOM

First, think about the interplay in the classroom between intrinsic and extrinsic motives. Every
educational institution brings with it certain extrinsically driven factors: a prescribed school curriculum, a
teacher’s course goals, and objectives, parental expectations, institutional assessment requirements, and
perhaps even messages from society at large that tell us to compete against others, and to avoid failure.
A second way to apply issues of intrinsic is to consider how your own design of classroom techniques can
have an added dimension of intrinsic motivation. A third and final suggestion is to consider the “10
commandments” for motivating learners that Dornyei and Csizer offered.