Emotion and Language Learning

Genesis in the Bible narrates for us the myth of the Tower of Babel explaining why there are so many languages spoken in the world. After the Great Flood, the Bible tells us, humans were united by a single language, and they agreed to build a city and a tall tower reaching up to the heavens in the land of Shinar. 

Emotion and Language Learning

Emotion and Language Learning

If we are believers, Genesis in the Bible narrates for us the myth of the Tower of Babel explaining why there are so many languages spoken in the world. After the Great Flood, the Bible tells us, humans were united by a single language, and they agreed to build a city and a tall tower reaching up to the heavens in the land of Shinar. Realizing the consequences of the city and the tower, God said, “If as one people all sharing a common language, they have begun to this, then nothing they plan to do will be beyond them. Come let’s go down and confuse their language, so they won’t be able to understand each other.” God decided to confound their speech by corrupting their language. Humans began to speak hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages and were forced to live scattered around the world thereafter. 

Believe the myth of the Tower of Babel or not, the present estimates of the number of human languages spoken in the world lie between a conservative figure of 5000 and a very enthusiastic count of 7000 languages! So is the practice of learning foreign languages as ancient as the beginning of human history. Since some languages become dominant languages for social, political, and economic reasons at a particular point of time in history, people who do not speak that language need to learn to speak it. Akkadian was the language of diplomacy in the Ancient Near East, as was Latin in much of Europe once upon a time till it was displaced by French, Italian, and English at different points of time in history. 

The emergence of globalization in the twentieth century and its efflorescence in the twentieth-first century has created an unprecedented demand for multilingual people. As common languages are used in trade, technology, media, science, international relations, and tourism, multilinguals who can communicate in the right languages increase their chances of employability manifold. Whereas countries with recent colonial histories such as India, Singapore, Malaysia, Pakistan, and the Philippines have benefitted from their colonial legacy of the second language left behind by their oppressors, many other countries such as Korea, Japan, and China had to frame language education policies encouraging the teaching of at least one foreign language at the school level. If we are to believe the reports of the US Government Accountability Office, the Chinese have already begun to spend an enormous amount of renminbi on English language education. 

Despite this spurt of enthusiasm in foreign language teaching, the efforts at successful learning of foreign languages have remained a distant dream for many. There have been so many approaches and methods of teaching a foreign language proposed over the last two hundred years. Yet, the problem remains almost the same. Apart from some very inconclusive hunches and exotic attempts at exciting our interest now and then, we still do not know what the best method to teach a foreign language is. The curse at the Tower of Babel perhaps persists to date!

Research in the field suggests that affect or motivation is a major factor in the successful acquisition or learning of a foreign language, besides the role of intellectual capacity and language aptitude. Affect determines the extent of active personal involvement in foreign language learning and directly influences how often students use foreign language learning strategies, how much they interact with their peers, and how long they persevere and maintain their language skills. Studies suggest that, without sufficient motivation, even individuals with the most remarkable abilities cannot accomplish long-term goals. Neither appropriate curricula nor good teaching alone is enough on its own to ensure students’ achievement in foreign language learning.

The possible neurobiological substrate of affect of foreign language learners has also been explained in recent times. As per these explanations, an individual's development of preferences and aversions constitutes a sub-form of experiential selection. Every individual is born with innate homeostatic and socio-static values. Maintaining stability in bodily systems, regulating hunger, thirst, warmth, etc, are homeostatic values. The tendency for all human beings to seek out facial, vocal, and tactile interaction with other humans, on the other hand, is an example of a socio-static value. These innate survival-enhancing tendencies lead to the formation of preferences and aversions. The socio-static bias prepares human infants to acquire language by making the voices and faces of a caregiver target of automatic attention. 

Unlike the behaviours governed by the homeostatic values, these socio-static preferences and aversions are not innate but are acquired during the lifetime of the individual. They function as a value system or stimulus appraisal system and assess the internal and environmental stimuli based on five criteria: novelty, pleasantness, goal significance, self and social image, and coping potential. This appraisal system is now understood to be processed specifically in the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex of the human brain. An individual remembers affective reactions to agents, events, and objects, and can use that information to evaluate future stimuli. The unique trajectory of each person's experience may lead to highly variable neural preference systems across individuals. 

Emotion, thus, is the basis of any learning or absence of learning. The affective appraisal is at the core of cognition, and it drives the decision-making processes. Long-term cognitive effort in sustained deep learning required to gain excellence is guided by these appraisals. As foreign language learning involves sustained deep learning, patterns of stimulus appraisal must also underlie the affect or motivation in foreign language learning. A foreign language classroom may be interpreted as a sample environment of socio-static regulation. Multidimensional relation dynamics actuating between the teacher and the language learners and amongst the learners themselves may affect their life in the classroom. 

A positively apprised foreign language classroom may encourage the learners to create and preserve social affiliations for enhanced efforts and better performance. The difficulty and uncertainty hovering around the teaching of a foreign language may, thus, be eased and cleared under the light of this new understanding of human learning. So, the ray of hope is that the curse of confusion at the Tower of Babel may well be ended by a spirit of passion and soulful grit. 

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