The Hidden Role of Emotion in Language Learning
By: Curtis Kelly
Emotion in the classroom. We are dancing around it all the time. I remember at least a hundred teachers gleefully stating that their students love their class (which means they love them). I remember a teacher trainer who advised us not to smile in the first two weeks in order to make our students scared of us. I remember Dick Day talking about the benefits of extensive reading and adding, almost as an afterthought, “and it is pleasurable too, and that keeps students reading.” (I saw the pleasure as a cause of learning, not an extra.) I remember the joy I felt when one of my students said I was their favorite teacher, and dismay when another teacher said that it is not our job is not to make them like us. I remember a low-spirited high school student whose head was drooped down almost to the desktop the entire class, probably because, somewhere along the line, English study had demolished his self-esteem. And I remember saying to my lackadaisical women’s college students, half in jest: “If you don’t do your homework, you’ll fail the test. If you fail the test you won’t pass this course. If you don’t pass this course, you won’t be able to graduate. If you can’t graduate, you won’t get a decent job, you can’t get married, and your life will be miserable.” And let’s not forget the way we elicit emotion with these six words: “This will be on the test1.”
1 For two more amazing examples of how teachers use emotion in teaching, look at the video and photos following this article.
Indeed, eliciting emotions in our learners, everything from wonder to confidence to fear, is one of our greatest teaching tools. How odd then, that no one teaches us about this tool in our teacher-training courses and it is almost absent from the literature. Instead, we have to grapple with the notion ourselves, mainly guessing. Unfortunately, our profession shines the big light on language, not learner affect, leaving us in the dark. But maybe we can change that. Let’s consider the role of emotion in language learning, and that means we will have to go to two neuroscientists, Antonio Damasio and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang.
What emotion is
Imagine this. You are with a good friend. You both want to meet again. The friend asks you whether getting together next Monday or Tuesday is better. Either works; you have some minor chores to do, like shopping, but nothing serious. Your wheels of reasoning start whirring and through logical deduction, you come up with the best solution in about two seconds. You tell your friend, “Let’s meet Tuesday.”
Deciding was a simple task of logical deduction, right? Not according to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. He says that you reached this decision more through emotion than logic.
What? Aren’t most decisions, like the one above, made on the basis of logical conclusions? And certainly, there was no anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, or surprise (Ekman’s six) involved in the decision-making, so what in the world does he mean?
Damasio would say that you might have used logic to organize the options, but weighing them was done through emotion. He knows. He has patients with damage to the emotional areas of their brains who have extreme difficulty making even the simplest decisions, such as whether to meet again on the following Monday or Tuesday. They make sound logical deductions, listing the merits and demerits of each choice, but still cannot decide.
You see, when Damasio writes about “emotion,” he does not mean the kind described above—anger, disgust, etc.—the way we use that word in our world. He means something much deeper, a cognitive processing that is the brain’s response to external stimuli. You see a spider. Since your brain’s representation of spiders includes memories of biting, the spider is associated with negative affect. Therefore, your right hemisphere (your predator-alert system) becomes active, contacts the left side and instructs your body to react to this threat by increasing your heart rate, making you focus on the spider, and feeling fear. So, this feeling of fear is the body’s reaction to much deeper processing and the resultant downstream “body states” that brains interpret as fear. Emotion, then, is not the feelings; it is the emotional valence included in our representations of the world, the value each thing has to us.
It all has to do with memories and internal models (basically the same thing). Your experiences become your memories, and if these memories repeat enough, they become your representations of things in the world, cartoon-like mental models we construct to identify and react to things like spiders, spaghetti, and Damasio. The affect from the original experiences—feeling good or bad, calm or aroused—are also recorded in the memories, as was danger for spiders.
Why did I say (in Andy Clark’s words) “cartoon-like”? It is because we need flexible, open-ended models that can be applied to a wide range of situations. You see, the purpose of memory is not to record the past, as we tend to think, it is to allow us to understand the present and predict our immediate futures. When we encounter something in the world, we need to match up flexible archetypal models, built on previous experiences, to comprehend what we have encountered, and to figure out what is likely to happen next.
By the way, that is why we are so forgetful: physiologically, our brains could remember everything if that were to our advantage, but it is not. When interpreting a situation, even one we have never encountered before, our brains need simple models they can apply instantly, not a compendium of individual memories to sort through. Memory, then, should not be perfect (and this is shown in the anguish of the people who do have perfect memory, known as HSAM, Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory). Instead, we discard the details and combine related experiences into one simple model that can help us recognize anything similar.
Likewise, it is advantageous that every memory has a situational and emotional component. For the situational component, we need to know the difference between a piece of gum in a shiny new wrapper and the same kind of gum stuck under a chair seat. For the emotional component, we need a mechanism to inform us to eat one and not the other. Emotion does that.
So, there we have it. Emotion is the steering mechanism for our brains (Immordino-Yang). It keeps us away from cliff edges and drives us towards free samples.
So, let’s go back to Damasio’s patients with damage to their emotional system. They could reach logical conclusions but since they could not process the emotional valences behind each option, they could not choose one. They could not evaluate whether shopping on Monday instead of meeting was better than shopping on Tuesday.
So, if emotional processing, completely subconscious, is included in every representation and steers us through life, what role does it play in language learning? I am sure your mind is already spewing out ideas, but I would like to focus on just two: the role of emotion in the experience of language learning, and the necessity of emotion in learning virtually anything.
Emotion in the experience of language learning
I cannot tell you how many times I have met students who were really interested in English as children, usually because of some positive experience, such as making a foreign friend, but lost that interest in the painful language-learning experiences of high school, and then gained it back in college, where again, they had good experiences, such as your class. Naturally, the positive-negative emotions associated with the language classroom are bound to influence their attitudes and motivations. Fear of failure might make them study for a test, or it might also make them skip class. Severe scolding might cause a student to change behavior, but it might ruin everyone else’s experience, too. At what point does the benefit of classroom control reap less than giving learners positive experiences?
Likewise, we have to stop making moral judgments based on student attitudes—“He is a serious student; she is lazy”—and deconstruct those behaviors in other ways: “He sees English study positively; she has bad associations with it, probably from discomfort in the past.”
I had a personal experience once that helped me understand this. I had a student in my class, Ayumi, who’d missed one third of the classes, the university limit for getting the credit. I told her I had to fail her. She pleaded with me not to; I mean, literally begged, and she told me she’d never miss another class. I said I’d give her another chance if she came to class. The next week she was there and the next week too. But in the third class after her plea, she was absent. I thought, as we all do: “I was duped again…she was just another student who makes a promise and then fails to live up to it.”
However, that very weekend, something odd happened to me that threw a different light on that experience. I had set aside four days to prepare a JALT featured speaker workshop on Adult Education, my doctoral field. I knew what I was going to do, so writing the presentation up should have been easy. It wasn’t. I sat down at least five times the first day and, to my bewilderment, couldn’t write a word. Nor on the second day. Nor on the third.
Then, I figured out why. The last time I was a featured speaker, giving a workshop many big names attended, I was challenged by a participant in the first couple minutes, and then, many times after. He was British and educational criticism is common in his academic system, but as an American, I was totally unprepared for that kind of reproach and it bothered me greatly. I lost track of my presentation and later felt I had failed. That painful memory was what made it impossible for me to write up the next featured speaker presentation. But once I realized the problem, the words just flowed out, and my presentation ended up being a fairly good one.
Then, suddenly, I understood Ayumi. She wasn’t trying to dupe me and she didn’t take her promise lightly. She probably had some serious hurts in English class in the past, and these negative associations were all part of her representations of English study. I then understood that she truly did want to come to class and was probably trying hard, but fighting strong anxiety and avoidance instincts every time. Then, on that third class day, the avoidance-steering mechanism won. Maybe she got up a little late, or she had trouble getting her eyebrows right (caused by the avoidance), and she missed the train. So, she again sank into despair and self-loathing and gave up on her efforts to be there.
The takeaway here is not to change your policies on attendance, but to understand that what students do is driven more by the hidden emotional residue of past experiences than just discipline and maturity. Helping them overcome those emotions is part of your job too, even though there is no simple formula for doing so.
Showing understanding, tolerance, and acceptance almost always works better than punishment. In fact, many studies show that while punishment is good at stopping a behavior it is counterproductive in promoting one. Failing students is the least effective way to get them to try harder. Use reward and incentive instead. And, of course, try to make your class the one that replaces any negative emotional residue connected to English study with a positive one.
The necessity of emotion in learning
An even greater role emotion plays in the classroom is with learning itself. Once you realize that emotional valences steer us through life, then it makes sense that it also controls what we pay attention to and subconsciously decide to learn. Emotion does not play a critical role, it plays the critical role. Unless something has an emotional value to you, you will not notice it and you virtually cannot learn it. In other words, no emotion, no learning. Or as Immordino-Yang puts it, it is “literally neurologically impossible to build memories, engage complex thoughts or make meaningful decisions without emotion.”
Once you think about it, this makes sense. We are bombarded with thousands of bits of information every minute. We cannot pay attention to everything, so we have to sort out what is most important to us, the job of the reticular activating system. To do this, the Reticular Activating System (RAS) at the bottom of our brain accesses our memories as part of predictive processing and the related emotional valences. If something we encounter is meaningful to us, we pay attention to it, the first step of learning. And then the second step, remembering, it takes place if the new information has a high degree of personal relevance. That is how we learn.
Unfortunately, a second language, unless you are living in a country where we must use it, has little immediate value to us, and so it is not important enough for the brain to remember. Therefore, as teachers, we have to artificially attach emotion to language in other ways. The aforementioned “This will be on the test” is our favorite, but that loses value as soon as the test is over. Personalization, moving stories and content, games, and taking advantage of socializing needs through pairwork are much better ways to attach personal relevance.
This means that we should pay less attention to vocabulary and language rules in our teaching, and pay more to the learner experience we create. By eliciting emotion, learning the associated language forms will come naturally. In short, language should be the conduit, not the target.2
2 I confess. I tried to write a completely new article, but ended up borrowing heavily from a better one I had written for our 2018 Think Tank on emotion.
Curtis Kelly (EDD), the first coordinator of the JALT Mind, Brain, and Education SIG, is professor emeritus of Kansai University in Japan. He has written over 30 books and 100 articles, and given over 500 presentations. His life mission is “to relieve the suffering of the classroom.