Alal Maria de los Angeles

Psycholinguistics
Final test 2016
INDIVIDUAL CHARACTERISTICS IN L2
Personality factors
The affective domain is the emotional side of human behaviour, and it may be
put together with the cognitive side. The development of affective states or
feelings involves a variety of personality factors.

Self-esteem is self confidence, knowledge of yourself, and belief in your own

capabilities for that activity. It is the evaluation which the individual makes and
habitually maintains with regards himself; it expresses an attitude of approval
or disapproval, and indicates the extent to which an individual believes himself
to be capable, significant, successful and worthy. It is a subjective experience.

General or global self-esteem is thought to be relatively stable in a mature

adult, and resistant to change except by active and extended therapy.
Situational or specific self-esteem is a second level of self-esteem, referring
to ones judgments of oneself in certain life situations. Specific self-esteem may
refer to second language acquisition in general and task self-esteem might
appropriately refer to ones self-evaluation of: speaking, writing, a particular
class in a second language, or even a special kind of classroom exercise.

Inhibition/ the language Ego is the very personal, egoistic nature of second
language acquisition. An adaptive language ego enables learners to lower the
inhibitions that may impede success.

Risk-taking: 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. A person with
high global self-esteem is not intimidated by the possible consequences of
being laugh at. A lack of willingness to take risks may cause fossilization.

Anxiety is associated with the feeling of uneasiness, frustration, self-doubt,

apprehension, or worry. Any complex task we undertake can have elements of
anxiety in it. Anxiety can be experienced at various levels. It is important in a
classroom for a teacher to try to determine whether a students anxiety stems
from a more global trait or whether it comes from a particular situation at the
moment.

Transaction is the process of reaching out beyond the self to others. A variety
of transactional variables comes to bear on second language learning:
empathy, extroversion, styles of communication and others. In order to
communicate effectively you need to be able to understand the other persons
affective and cognitive states, transcending your own ego boundaries, so that
communication does not break down.
Extroversion and introversion are also potentially important in the
acquisition of a second language. 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. Extroverts actually need other people in order to feel good. However,
extroverts are not necessarily loud-mouthed and talkative. They may be
relatively shy but still need the affirmation of others. Introversion is the extent
to which a person derives a sense of wholeness and fulfilment apart from a
reflection of this self from other people. Introverts can have an inner strength
of character that extroverts dont have.

Motivation is commonly thought of as an inner driver, impulse, emotion or

desire that moves one to particular action, the choice people make as to what
experiences or goals they will approach or avoid, and the degree of effort they
will exert in that respect.
Instrumental motivation refers to motivation to acquire a language as
means for attaining instrumental goals: furthering a career, reading technical
material, translation, and so forth.
Integrative motivation is the desire on the part of a language learner to
learn the second language in order to communicate with or find out about
members of the second language culture, and does not necessarily imply direct
contact with the second language group.
Assimilative motivation is the drive to become an indistinguishable member
of a speech community, and it usually requires prolonged contact with the
second language culture.
The three types of motivation are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Intrinsic and extrinsic orientation

Intrinsically motivated activities are ones for which there is no apparent reward
except the activity itself. Extrinsically motivated behaviours, on the other hand,
are carried out in anticipation of a reward from outside and beyond the self.

STYLES AND STRATEGIES

Learners bring to the task of learning different characteristics. All learners will
use or be taught the same strategies in the same way. Individuals construct
their own meaning from their learning, they make their own personal sense of
the skills and strategies they are taught, and the way in which they do this will
depend on the other influences that surround them.

Styles

Style refers to consistent and rather enduring tendencies or preferences within

an individual.
The way we learn things in general and the particular attack we make on a
problem seem to hinge on a rather amorphous link between personality and
cognition. When cognitive styles are specifically related to an educational
context, where affective and psychological factors are intermingled, there are
usually more referred to as learning styles.

Learning styles might be thought of as a cognitive, affective and psychological

traits that are relatively stable indicators of how learners perceive, interact
with, and respond to the learner environment, a general predisposition,
voluntary or not, towards processing information in a particular way. It would
appear that individuals show general tendencies toward one style or another,
but that differing contexts will evoke differing styles in one individual.

Field independent style enables you to distinguish parts from a whole, to

concentrate on something, to analyze separate variables without the
contamination of neighbouring variables. On the other hand, too much field
independence can force you to see only the part and fail to see their
relationship to a whole.

Field dependence is the tendency to be dependent on the total field so that

the parts embedded within the field are not easily perceived, though that total
field is perceived more clearly as a unified whole. Field dependence style has
positive effects: you perceive the whole picture, the larger view, the general
configuration of a problem, idea or event.

Left and Right brain functioning

As the childs brain matures, various functions become lateralized to the left
or right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is associated with logical,
analytical thoughts, with mathematical and lineal processing of information.
The right hemisphere perceives and remembers visual, tactile, and auditory
images; it is more efficient in processing holistic, integrative and emotional
information.
LEFT BRAIN DOMINANCE RIGHT BRAIN DOMINANCE
Intellectual Intuitive
Remembers names Remember faces
Responds to verbal instructions and Respond to demonstrated, illustrated or symbolic
explanations instructions
Experiments systematically and with Experiments randomly and with less restraint
control Makes subjective judgments
Makes objective judgements Fluid and spontaneous
Planned and structured Prefers elusive, uncertain information
Prefers established, certain information Synthesizing reading
Analytic reader Reliance on images in thinking and remembering
Reliance on lang. thinking and Prefers drawing and manipulating objects
remembering Prefers open-ended questions
Prefers talking and writing More free with feelings
Prefers multiple choice tests Good at interpreting body language
Control feelings Frequently uses metaphors
Not good at interpreting body language Favours intuitive problem solving
Rarely uses metaphors
Favours logical problem solving

Strategies

Strategies are specific methods of approaching a problem or task, modes of

operating for achieving a particular end, planned designs for controlling and
manipulating certain information. These strategies vary individually. The field of
second language acquisition has distinguished between three types of
strategies: learning strategies, communication strategies, and social strategies.

Learning strategies are divided into three main categories.

Metacognitive is the term used in information- processing theory for
strategies that involve planning and learning, thinking about the learning
process as it is taking place, monitoring of ones production and
comprehension, and evaluating learning after an activity is completed, in other
words knowing about ones knowing.
Cognitive strategies are directly concerned with the processing of information
in order to learn, more limited to specific learning tasks and involve more direct
manipulation of the learning material itself.
Socioaffective strategies have to do with social-mediating activities and
transacting with others. Co-operating, questioning for clarification, self-talk.

Visual learners tend to remember things that are written down. They learn
better by watching things. The use of charts, pictures is really helpful for them.
Auditory learners retain information through hearing and speaking. They
prefer to be told how to do things and then repeat them out loud to help
memorizing.
Kinesthetic learners learn information while doing something. For example
chewing gum while studying, working while standing, etc.

Communication strategies are those used by a learner to promote

comunication with others. They are strategies used by speakers when they
come across a difficulty in their comunication because of a lack of adequate
knowledge about the language. Negotiation of meaning, uses of gestures,
mimes, etc.

Social strategies refer to the activities that learners use in an attempt to

increase their exposure to the language. Like communication strategies, they
contribute indirectly to learning. Strategies in this category include initiating
conversations in the foreign language, watching films and reading books.