4. 1. 1 self-esteem.
Self-esteem is perhaps the most permeable aspect of any human behavior. We can say that without a certain degree of self-esteem, self-confidence and understanding of ourselves, we can't carry out any successful cognitive and emotional activities. Cooper Smith (1967: 4-5) gave a good definition of "self-esteem":
Self-esteem refers to the evaluation made by individuals and habitually maintained. Self-esteem expresses an attitude of approval or disapproval, indicating the degree of individual's belief in his own ability, significance, success and value. Simply put, self-esteem is an individual's value judgment, which is manifested in the individual's attitude towards himself. Self-esteem is a subjective experience that individuals pass on to others through obvious expression activities such as language.
People's self-esteem comes from the accumulation of experience in dealing with themselves and others, and from the value evaluation of the world around them. The overall self-esteem of adults is relatively stable and generally will not change. However, because no personality or cognitive characteristics remain unchanged at any time and in any situation, self-esteem is divided into three different levels. The first level is overall self-esteem. The second layer is situation or special self-esteem, which refers to a person's self-evaluation in specific occasions, such as social interaction, work, education, family and so on, or self-evaluation of some separately defined characteristics-intelligence, communication ability, sports ability or personality characteristics. The degree of a person's special self-esteem often depends on the specific situation or the characteristics discussed. The third layer is called task self-esteem, which is related to special tasks in special situations. For example, in the field of education, a person's overall self-esteem may refer to his evaluation of his acceptance and diligence, situational self-esteem may refer to his self-evaluation in learning a particular subject (such as a foreign language), and task self-esteem may refer to his self-evaluation in learning a certain aspect of a subject, such as speaking, writing or listening.
Adelaide Heyde (1979) has studied the influence of these three levels of self-esteem on foreign language learning. Her research object is American college students studying French. The results show that the three levels of self-esteem are closely related to oral expression, especially task self-esteem and oral expression. Other researchers have also found that self-esteem is a very important variable in foreign language learning, especially considering the cross-cultural factors in foreign language learning.
4. 1.2 inhibition
As mentioned in the third section, inhibition is a psychological barrier, a protective performance and a resistance to external threats. It is closely related to self-esteem, and people gradually establish a barrier of self-protection in the process of knowing themselves. Newborn babies have no self-concept, but as they get older, they gradually realize their differences. In childhood, with the development of self-awareness, reaction and evaluation, people began to establish an emotional system with individual characteristics. During adolescence, physiological, cognitive and emotional changes lead to the emergence of protective inhibition to protect the fragile self and exclude those views, experiences and feelings that threaten personal values and beliefs. This inhibition reaches its peak in adolescence and continues into adulthood. People with high self-esteem are more able to resist threats to themselves, and the protective psychological barrier is relatively low; People with low self-esteem often build high psychological barriers to protect their fragile self, or make up for their lack of confidence in a certain situation.
So far, the research results show that in the practice of foreign language teaching, we should try our best to reduce students' inhibition in class, such as creating a meaningful classroom communication context to reduce the obstacles for students to communicate freely.
Anyone who has studied a foreign language knows that in fact, learning a foreign language is a mistake. We test our assumptions about language through trial and error. Children who learn the first language and adults who learn foreign languages can only make progress by learning from mistakes. If we never dare to say a sentence before we fully know its correctness, then we can never communicate freely. But mistakes are also regarded as threats to self, which are divided into internal threats and external threats. Internally, learners do wrong things and criticize their own mistakes; Externally, learners feel that others are criticizing their mistakes with self-criticism. Earl Stvik (1976) believes that language learning involves a series of conflicts, which exist between self-criticism and self-operation, between local culture and foreign culture, between "I" and teachers, and between "I" and classmates. The conflict stems from the obstacles we have built around us. These obstacles are not conducive to learning, but hinder learning, so eliminating these obstacles will definitely promote language learning.
4. 1.3 anxiety
In the field of psychology, anxiety, self-esteem and inhibition are intricately intertwined and play an important role in foreign language acquisition. The word anxiety is difficult to define clearly in one sentence, but it is mainly associated with anxiety, depression, self-doubt, fear or worry. What is the relationship between anxiety and our foreign language learning? In fact, there is anxiety in any complex task we are engaged in, that is, we doubt our ability and whether we will succeed. Foreign language learning is no exception. As a complicated matter, it is bound to be affected by anxiety.
Recent research on anxiety shows that the model of "foreign language anxiety" consists of three parts (Horwitz et al. 1986. McIntyre and Gardner 1989): (1) They are afraid of communication, which stems from the fact that learners cannot fully express their mature thoughts and opinions; (2) Fear of negative social evaluation stems from learners' need to give others a positive social impression; (3) test anxiety, or fear of exams. Inspired by MacIntyre and Gardner's research, many other researchers have conducted in-depth research on foreign language anxiety. All these studies come to the conclusion that foreign language anxiety must be distinguished from other types of anxiety, which has a negative impact on the language learning process.
There is another important aspect to understand anxiety, that is, anxiety can be divided into debilitating anxiety and withdrawal anxiety (Alpert & Haber 1960). We tend to regard anxiety as a negative factor, something that must be avoided at all costs, such as exam anxiety before a big exam. But promoting anxiety means that some kind of worry or fear about the task to be completed is a positive factor, otherwise learners will be easily shaken and lack the sense of promoting tension that makes people engaged, alert and not completely relaxed. For example, experienced speakers usually regard the nervousness before public speaking as promoting anxiety, so that they have enough nervousness to complete the task.
According to Bailey's research on competitiveness and anxiety in foreign language learning (1983), promoting anxiety is one of the keys to success, which is closely related to competitiveness. In self-analysis, Bailey found that competition sometimes hindered her progress (for example, trying to surpass the pressure of her classmates caused her to retreat or even skip classes), and sometimes it also urged her to study harder (for example, concentrate on reviewing a certain material so as to practice oral English more freely in class). Bailey explained the positive effects of competition by promoting anxiety patterns. So it's good to be a little nervous in the learning process, and the anxiety pattern is like a continuum. Too much or too little anxiety will hinder the successful foreign language acquisition process.
4. 1.4 Empathy
People are social animals, and the main mechanism to maintain social ties is language. Some highly complicated language teaching methods fail to complete the teaching of communicative competence because they ignore the sociality of language. When we re-recognize the sociality of language, we oversimplify the sociality of language because we don't realize the complex relationship between language and society, or simply regard social problems as "cultural adaptation" in language teaching. In fact, cultural adaptation is not a simple process, and social interaction also requires considerable efforts.
Communication is a process of reaching out to others beyond ourselves, and language can help us learn communication skills. Therefore, foreign language learning should also bear many communicative variables: imitation, identity, empathy, extroverted communication style and so on.
Generally speaking, empathy means putting yourself in others' shoes and caring about others' thoughts and feelings. Empathy is the main factor of individual harmony in society, and language is one of the main means of empathy. However, nonverbal communication also contributes to the process of empathy, which cannot be ignored.
In more complicated terms, empathy is usually described as projecting one's personality onto others in order to better understand him. Empathy is different from sympathy. Empathy means a greater chance of separation, while sympathy means consistency or harmony between individuals. Guiora (1972: 142) defines empathy as "a process of understanding, in which the temporary integration of the self-object boundary enables us to immediately understand the emotional experience of others". Psychologists also basically agree with Giora's definition, and add two conditions necessary for the development and function of empathy: first, they are aware of or understand their feelings; The second is to equate yourself with others. In other words, a person can't complete empathy without fully understanding himself or others.
Human communication needs considerable empathy. In order to talk with people effectively, we must be able to understand each other's emotions and cognitive state. When we make wrong assumptions or judgments about this, communication will be interrupted. Any communication should go deep from the rather mechanical syntactic plane of language to the most abstract meaning plane to guess the other party's knowledge structure and emotional state. In order to make correct assumptions, we must go beyond self-obstacles to send and receive information clearly.
At least from the cognitive point of view, oral communication is more likely to produce empathy, because the speaker can get feedback from the listener immediately. The listener can ask a question about a misunderstood word, phrase or idea, and then the speaker will rephrase it until the other person understands the information accurately. Written communication needs a special kind of empathy-a kind of "cognitive" empathy. Because the author can't take advantage of readers' immediate feedback, he must convey his thoughts with very clear empathy intuition and judgment on readers' psychological state and knowledge structure.
Therefore, the problem of empathy is very prominent in foreign language learning. Foreign language learners should not only understand the listener's cognitive and emotional state, but also use their unfamiliar language to achieve the purpose of empathy. When expressing ideas, it is common for learners to make wrong judgments and misunderstandings because of language barriers. In this case, students especially need teachers' empathy. Teachers sometimes forget their own experience in learning a foreign language and ask too much of students' mistakes, which leads to emotional crisis in classroom learning and aggravates the role of psychological inhibition, thus affecting the teaching effect.
Guiora and his colleagues conducted an experiment to study the relationship between empathy and foreign language learning. They used a test method called microscopic transient expression device (MME). This test is used to monitor the reaction ability of subjects and judge the emotional state between people. Guiora found in an experiment that learners' pronunciation accuracy is significantly related to the measured empathy. After that, a series of empathy experiments using microscopic instantaneous expression test were carried out, but the experimental results were inconsistent. Some experiments have not found any connection between measured empathy and pronunciation quality. Until 1972, Guiora and his colleagues developed a microscopic instantaneous expression test, saying that this improved formula can successfully predict the pronunciation accuracy of foreign language learners. But Brown (1994: 144) and Schumann (1980) pointed out that if this view holds, do people with poor foreign language pronunciation lack empathy? This reasoning has not been proved. In fact, it is really easy for children to learn foreign language pronunciation well, and it is really difficult for adults to overcome the influence of mother tongue pronunciation. Although the empathy experiment has not reached a final conclusion and Guiora's hypothesis has not been proved by enough experiments, in any case, this hypothesis is psychologically realistic and reasonable, so it has also been highly valued by foreign language teaching researchers.
4. 1.5 extroversion
Extroversion and introversion are also important factors in foreign language learning. However, these two terms are often misunderstood because of our preconceptions about the outside world. We tend to think that extroverts are sociable and open-minded, while introverts are considered conservative. Western society pays more attention to typical extroverts, especially in the classroom. Teachers like students who are talkative and cheerful, and they can freely participate in classroom discussions. On the other hand, introverts are sometimes considered to be less intelligent than extroverts.
This external view is misleading. Extroversion actually refers to the degree to which a person accepts the deep-rooted need for self-improvement, self-esteem and overall feeling from others rather than from himself. Extroverts actually need others to feel comfortable. However, they are not necessarily talkative. They are even shy, but they still need others' affirmation. On the other hand, introversion refers to the degree to which a person gains a sense of integrity and accomplishment from others' reflection on himself. Contrary to our preconceptions, introverts have stronger internal character strength than extroverts.
Therefore, it is not clear whether introversion or extroversion will help or hinder the process of foreign language learning. Researchers in Toronto (Naiman et al., 1978) have not found the meaningful influence of extroversion when summarizing excellent language learners. Busch( 1982) explored the relationship between Japanese adult English learners' extroversion and English proficiency in the most comprehensive study of extroversion. She assumed that extroverted students were more skilled than introverted students, but her assumption was not supported. In fact, introverted students have more standard pronunciation than extroverted students, which shattered our prejudice that foreign language learners may be more active in classroom activities. However, Busch's discussion is only a kind of research, and it is conducted among a group of learners in a culture. We need more research to reach a conclusion.
Researchers also tend to think that the characteristics of foreign language classes themselves may determine which personality characteristics play a role. It is precisely because of these characteristics that teachers associate personality with foreign language learning. (Wang Chuming 1990: 107) Oral English is both a skill and a "decoration". In the process of foreign language teaching, what teachers value most is students' oral ability. Outgoing students talk a lot, like to show their faces, appear confident and generous in communication situations, are willing to express their ideas, and are not afraid of making mistakes when practicing oral English. These characteristics often attract the attention of teachers. If listening, reading comprehension and writing abilities are considered comprehensively, extroverted students may not be better than introverts in learning foreign languages. Teaching methods themselves can also promote or interfere with learning. The relationship between extroversion and extroversion of personality and foreign language learning achievement is related to teaching methods. Teachers sometimes organize group discussions in class, so that students can play drama, dialogue, games and so on. In a foreign language. To what extent do these language exercises promote foreign language learning? Which personality students benefit more? Teachers should be aware of these problems.