Affect and the brain

The Motion of Emotion: Idiodynamic Case Studies of Learners' Foreign Language Anxiety

“…Heart rate is influenced not only by increases in affective arousal, but also by changes in patterns of respiration and movement of the body as participants moved around during their presentations. Likewise, felt emotions are influenced by physiological reactions but also by cognitive appraisals of the meaning of what is happening in a given situation (Mates & Joaquin, ; Schumann, ). Although these processes operate on their own timescales, the correlations in Table suggest that the patterns can be highly coordinated at particular moments in time.…”

“…Emotional triggers are difficult to avoid; they are ingrained in the appraisal process, but teachers can guide students to reinterpret their racing heart in a positive way: “That's not negative anxiety! You are probably just eager to get started!” Schumann () has emphasized the key role of the appraisal process in individual learners' affective reactions which are adapted through experience (Mates & Joaquin, ). Language learners who appraise arousal as “good → approach” rather than “bad → avoid” will be more likely to convert debilitating anxiety into facilitating effort.…”

“…These subtle, often unconscious feelings continually influence language learners' moment‐by‐moment affective processes even if we are not aware of feeling a specific emotion (MacIntyre & Gregersen, ). Events that produce physical reactions feed into the interpretation of the ongoing experience (Mates & Joaquin, ), as when a speaker notices her face turning red and her heart racing. Schumann (, ) describes how an ongoing appraisal process that is the brain's continuous evaluation of the environment around us sets the foundation for emotional responses to language learning.…”

“…Most language‐related traits are measured by questionnaire items that ask about typical experiences. The noticeable experience of emotion can exert potentially powerful effects on the learner in the here‐and‐now (see Mates & Joaquin, , for a discussion and examples). Diane Larsen–Freeman (), in advocating studying dynamic processes in SLA, suggests that we begin “to see that real‐time language processing, developmental change in learner language, and evolutionary change in language are all reflections of the same dynamic process of language usage” (p. 783).…”

Reenvisioning Language Anxiety in the Globalized Classroom Through a Social Imaginary Lens

“…More recently, researchers who investigate language and anxiety have attempted to distinguish different types of anxiety, with MacIntyre () differentiating between trait anxiety (a stable general pattern of behavior), state anxiety (temporarily experienced at a particular moment), and situation‐specific anxiety (a recurring trait manifested at specific situations) . Of the three types of anxiety, Mates and Joaquin () assert that situation‐specific anxiety has been most widely researched in SLA. It has been researched in conjunction with learners’ fears of being less competent than other students, learners’ perceived lack of language and communicative abilities, and the task difficulties that learners encounter.…”