The affective factors in language learning
Affective factors are emotional factors which influence learning. They can have a negative or positive effect. Negative affective factors are called affective filters and are an important idea in theories about second language acquisition.
Affective filter
Comprehensible input depends upon the students being relaxed, feeling positive and unthreatened. If students feel hostile towards the subject of study, then their affective filter is raised and blocks the input from being absorbed and processed. On the other hand, if the affective filter is lowered - because students are relaxed - then the comprehensible input the students are exposed to will contribute far more effectively to their acquisition of new language.
Motivation
Motivation is essential to success: that we have to want to do something to succeed at it. Without such motivation we will almost certainly fail to make the necessary effort. A cognitve view of motivation includes factors such as the need for exploration, activity, stimulation, new knowledge, and ego enhancement.
Extrinsic motivation is caused by any number of outside factors, for example, the need to pass an exam, the hope of financial reward, or the possibility of future travel. Intrinsic motivation comes from within the individual. Thus a person might be motivated by the enjoyment of the learning process itself or by a desire to make themselves feel better.
Sources of motivation
The society we live in: positive or negative attitude towards learning English from the society students live in;
Significant others: attitude of people who are close to a student;
The teacher: his or her attitude to the language and the task of learning English;
The method: teacher and students confidence in the way teaching and learning take place.
Anxiety
It is not clear how this foreign language anxiety comes into being, yet it proves to be overcoming. It may be caused by either personal factors or learning situation and research evidence shows it is related to the repressed distress in the past - the personal hurt, failure, and others' negative attitudes, etc., especially in the childhood. These unhealed past wounds may influence present situation with language learning. Anxiety makes learners nervous and afraid and thus contributes to poor performance; this, in return, creates more anxiety and even worse performance.
State/situational anxiety appears in responses to a particular situation or event. For example, a student is asked to perform an action or to make an oral speech before the class. At this time, the anxiety is in a passing state. As time goes on, this anxiety will diminish in degree.
Trait anxiety occurs repeatedly. Once the anxiety becomes a trait one, it will hinder language learning.
Self-esteem
Self-esteem is a kind of self-judgment of worth or value. It is a basic requirement for successful cognitive and affective activity. People have this notion of self-esteem from their inner experience and their relationship with the outside world. A student's self-esteem is vitally important if effective learning is to take place. Self-esteem may result partly from teacher approval (especially for children), from a student's peers (especially for adolescents), or as a result of success. Self-esteem has three levels:
• global/general self-esteem
situational self-esteem
task self-esteem.
Empathy
Empathy means putting oneself into someone else's shoes of reaching beyond the self and understanding and feeling what another person understands or feeling. Empathy is thought to contribute to the attitudes people have towards a person or a group with a different language and culture from our own, and it may contribute to the degree of success with which a person learns another language. With empathy, one does not necessarily give up his own way of feeling or totally agree with the position of the other, he is just able to imagine and share the thoughts or feelings.