Educational

Psychology
for TFL students
Lecture 1.

Personality Factors Contributing to

Second Language Acquisition:
Self-esteem
Anxiety
Inhibition vs. risk-taking
 What is personality?

 Distinctive patterns of behavior/cognition that

characterize a person’s adaptation to life:
• public behaviors
• private motives
• thoughts
• emotions
• interactions
 Personality characteristics
affecting L2 learning

Self-esteem
Anxiety
Inhibition vs. risk-
taking
Empathy
Introversion vs.
extroversion
 A sense of :
Competence
what Being valued
Being loved
?
Self esteem
3 levels of self-esteem
 Problem solving 1

Can teachers let self-esteem

take care of itself?
Self-esteem improvement

Strategic techniques
1. Let your students hear or guess that you do
believe in them.
2. Let them know and make lists of their
strengths.
3. Let them exploit their strengths practically in
class.
4. Let them feel certain progress (at least ‘a
little’) but at every single lesson.
anxiety
 Anxiety

Trait Anxiety vs. State Anxiety:

a) Trait anxiety: a more permanent predisposition to be anxious
b) State anxiety: a type of anxiety experienced in relation to some
particular event or act; temporary and context-specific

Foreign language :
 communication anxiety –apprehension, fear of negative social
evaluation
 test anxiety - over academic evaluation
 Learner Anxiety
 Debilitative (harmful) Anxiety vs. Facilitative (helpful)
Anxiety: Not all anxiety is bad and a certain amount of
tension can have a positive effect and facilitate learning.
 A learner’s willingness to communicate has also been related
to anxiety. It is often affected by the number of people
present, the topic of conversation, and the formality of the
circumstances.
 Willingness to communicate or state anxiety can also be
affected by learners’ prior language learning & use of
experience, self-confidence, and communicative
competence.
Promoting facilitating anxiety
strategic techniques:
 Inhibition vs. risk-taking

 The process of building defenses to

protect the ego
 It has been suggested that inhibition
discourages risk-taking, which is
necessary for progress in language
learning.
 Inhibition is a negative force, at least
for second language pronunciation
performance.
 Be aware that inhibition may have
more influence in language
performance than in language
learning.
12
 Problem solving 2

When can mistakes be viewed

as threats
to one’s ego?
Strategic techniques to reduce
inhibition:
Teaching approach: meaningful classroom
communication to lower interpersonal ego-barriers.

• Singing songs
• Playing guessing and
Lower your communication games
students
inhibition • Doing role-plays
through • Laughing with them
• Plenty of group work
• Sharing fears in small group
 Risk-taking
Characteristics:
- Affects creativity and success both in oral and written
language
- Closely connected with self-esteem
 Problem solving 3

Are language achievers high/

moderate/ low risk takers
and why?
Risk-taking encouragement:
 Educational Video
Students’ anxiety in the classroom
 1. How does anxiety affect learning?
 2. If math anxiety deals with numbers , what does language
anxiety deal with- content or form ?
 3. How can you reach anxious students?
 4. How can teachers use information, confirmation and
extension in order to help students learn effectively without
anxiety?
 5. Complete the statement:
 The more FL students __________, the less anxious they are.
Home assignment for the test portfolio
Self-esteem test