Language learning in practice

Language learning in practice

1. 10 commandments to motivate language learners (from Dornyei & Csizér, 1998)

   • Set a personal example with your own behavior
     • Create a pleasant, relaxed atmosphere in the classroom
       • Present the tasks properly.
         • Develop a good relationship with the learners.
           • . Increase the learners’ linguistic self-confidence.
             • . Make the language classes interesting.
               • Promote learner autonomy
                 • Personalize the learning process
                   • Increase the learners’ goal-orientedness
                     • Familiarize learners with the target language culture.

2. Personality

   • Xia Mei, the immersion student of English in Hong Kong, has an exuberant personality.
     • She was often the first to volunteer for class presentations and as a result she gained increasing practice in speaking English in front of groups
       • Her teachers considered her to have an extraverted personality and some of them thought that her personality contributed to her relatively rapid acquisition of oral fluency
         • On the other hand, Mila, the immigrant from Bosnia, has a reflective, introverted personality.
           • She rarely volunteered answers in her ESL classes during the months following her immigration to the US. She was quick to explain that her shy personality made it more difficult for her to acquire fluency in English, but in contrast she was often the best in her language class when it came to written grammar and reading comprehension exercises.
   • Another factor that has been examined for possible links with L2 learning outcomes is personality. It is not unusual for people to suggest that a given language learner’s personality plays a role in his or her success, as exemplified by the connections teachers made between Xia Mei’s outgoing personality and her English fluency
     • Personality variables are sometimes poorly defined, and overlap with other variables, but there are increasingly more precise descriptive models along with more specific measurement instruments being developed. Some of the aspects of personality that have been studied include: inhibition, risk-taking, anxiety, empathy, and extraversion/introversion
       • The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) questionnaire is often used to measure personality. It includes 16 personality types, and based on the test, individuals score on four dimensions:
         • Introversion vs Extraversion
         • Intuition vs Sensing
         • Thinking vs Feeling
         • . Judging vs. Perceiving
         • There are two main models that propose an examination of personality through the identification of basic personality components, referred to as “traits,” i.e., personality features that are relatively stable and perhaps innately determined.
           • A second model grew out of the research of the German psychologist Hans Eysenck who ultimately proposed three bi-polar dimensions representing possible extremes for each dimension: 1) psychoticism (P); 2) extraversion (E); 3) neuroticism (N).
             • Eysenck (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1985) proposed further links between these different degrees of arousal and memory. Because of the introvert’s ongoing higher state of nervous system arousal, although the arousal interferes with short-term memory (STM), it is presumed to be facilitative for long-term memory (LTM) since high arousal allows a memory trace to last longer, allowing introverts to encode for long-term retention. L2 researchers (Dewaele & Furnham, 1999) have proposed specific repercussions of this view for L2 performance.
               • Other studies have also examined aspects of personality in relation to L2 abilities. In a small-scale study of the social styles of 13 Spanish-speaking kindergarten children, Strong (1983) found that a social style such as “talkativeness” observed in the L1 was associated with L2 oral proficiency.
                 • While there are intriguing findings linking aspects of personality with L2 performance, in particular with regard to the hypothesized relation between nervous system arousal and the extraversion/introversion personality dimension, there are many other background variables that need to be taken into consideration in interpreting research, including the learner’s age, the type of learning context, and the linguistic aspect of L2 performance. All of these factors are likely to influence the role of personality in L2 acquisition.

3. Do. en F. Crespo Hernández Ixchel