MILE5000 Chap.3 Learner Psychology: Personality, Emotion and Motivation
Learner Psychology: Personality, Emotion and Motivation
From personality profiles to emotion
The core reading for the learner-perspective weeks traces the psychology of language learning from early attempts to find the personality profile of the good language learner to a field centred on emotion and on the learner as a complex dynamic system.
It is candid about the early work: applied linguists lacked training in psychological theory, method and statistics, the effect sizes linking personality to performance were very small, and higher-order traits are too stable for teaching to change.
What an emotion is, in this research
The reading prefers a constructionist view, in which an emotion is built by the mind through socialisation from general perceptions of the environment and the body, and in which core affect, pleasantness and activation, is the only universal part.
It also presents control-value theory, which sorts classroom emotions by whether they concern an activity or an outcome, whether they are positive or negative, and whether they activate or deactivate. Enjoyment is positive and activating; boredom is negative and deactivating.
The positive turn
Anxiety was the first emotion studied systematically, and it dominated for decades.
Positive psychology, introduced to the field in 2012, redirected attention to how learners thrive, drawing on the idea that positive emotions broaden attention and build resources. Enjoyment became the most studied positive emotion.
Research on its sources found that enjoyment depends heavily on the teacher, while anxiety comes more from learners themselves.
Causes that run in several directions
The reading's conclusion is that no single higher-order trait predicts success.
Traits interact with lower-order traits such as trait emotional intelligence, which shape emotions, which sustain motivation, and success in turn feeds back into emotion and even openness. The question it leaves for teachers is how to break a loop of negative reinforcement and replace it with a positive one.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Why the search for a good-learner personality disappointed
- 02
Higher-order traits and trait emotional intelligence
- 03
Constructed emotion and core affect
- 04
Control-value theory of achievement emotions
- 05
Anxiety as the first emotion studied
- 06
Positive psychology and broaden-and-build
- 07
Teacher-dependent enjoyment and learner-internal anxiety
- 08
Multi-directional causality
Worked example · free
Diagnose a claim about introverted learners
- 2State what the reading says about personality and performance.
- 2Explain why a trait label is a weak basis for a teaching decision.
- 2Propose an alternative focus the teacher can influence.
Key terms
- Higher-order Trait
- A broad, stable personality dimension, such as extraversion or conscientiousness, at the top of a trait hierarchy.
- Trait Emotional Intelligence
- A lower-order trait describing how people perceive their own emotions, which the reading presents as shaping emotions and responsive to training.
- Core Affect
- The combination of how pleasant or unpleasant and how activated or calm a person feels, treated as the universal element of emotion.
- Control-value Theory
- A framework that classifies achievement emotions by object focus, valence and activation.
- Broaden-and-build
- The theory that positive emotions widen what learners notice and take in and help them recover from negative emotions.
Learner Psychology: Personality, Emotion and Motivation FAQ
Does personality predict success in learning a language?
Only weakly. The reading reports that the effect sizes found for personality traits are so small that listing them is hardly worthwhile, and that no single higher-order trait predicts success. Traits work through lower-order traits and emotions, so they are better treated as background than as predictors a teacher should act on.
Why did anxiety dominate early research on emotion?
It was the first emotion in the field to be investigated systematically, beginning with a pioneering proposal of classroom anxiety as a distinct negative emotion measured by its own instrument. The motivation model that followed also gave negative emotions more weight, and positive emotions stayed peripheral until positive psychology entered the field.
Can teachers change how much learners enjoy a class?
The reading suggests they can more readily than they can reduce anxiety. Research on sources found enjoyment more strongly predicted by teacher characteristics, such as attitudes towards the teacher and the teacher's use of the language, while anxiety was more likely to come from the learners themselves.
Assessment move
Draw the two reinforcement loops from this chapter on a card and, for each empirical study in Chapters 5 to 8, mark which link in the loop it actually measured. You will find that most measure one link at one time, which is the most useful single observation to carry into a critique.
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