Blog Post #1 The Affective Filter and Language Learning
Introduction
Hello and welcome to this page! I am a mother of two young children and have over a year's experience in education, focusing on language saturation. I have taught in Spanish immersion schools for eight years, and for seven years, I taught high school students Spanish as a foreign language. I grew up speaking English and Spanish at home as a simultaneous bilingual and attended a Spanish immersion school from PK3 to 6th grade. I am passionate about learning, language, culture, and how we communicate with one another.
There have been many misunderstandings and curiosity around language acquisition at all the schools I've worked at. I recently had another conversation asking those lines with a parent at the school where I work as an instructional coach and the curriculum coordinator for the Spanish immersion program in DC. In our conversation, I was reminded of parents' common concerns regarding their children's academic success in an immersion program. This parent was so open with me about their concerns regarding their child's learning, their feelings about graduating, and their helplessness regarding ways to support their child in language learning. We talked through some things, and I left the conversation inspired to make a simple sound of information to help clarify the language-accessible processes and the immersion approach and to suggest strategies parents can implement at home to help their children acquire an additional language, especially when the parents might not be gotten in the target language.
My goal in this blog post is to address the following three concerns:
Better understand how language is acquired.
Explain how language immersion programs build intentional language acquisition and academic achievement in a target language.
Ideas that families can do to support their child's language learning at home.
My strategy will be to focus on a specific aspect of the language acquisition process and then on what immersion programs do to target or support that same aspect. Then, what things can be done at home to support this approach?
Today, I focus on one of my favorite topics in language learning, the affective filter.
The Affective Filter and Language Learning
In 1986, Stephen Krashen proposed that our emotional state directly impacts our learning ability. He theorized that negative emotions create an internal psychological barrier that interferes with learning.
Generally, the affective filter impacts our readiness to learn. Krashen’s theory has popularly been applied to the language learning process.
I usually imagine the affective filter as a boundary I hold internally to keep things that are too hard, stressful, different, or uncomfortable out. Technically, an affective filter is a protective strategy we have internally as an impulse for self-preservation. It's not a bad thing! However, it impacts our ability to learn things, especially new languages and cultures. We each, due to our temperament and upbringing have a different natural affective filter determining how often we have it already up in our mind in our day-to-day interactions, how quickly it comes up when we encounter something new, how easily we relax or lower it after it is already up, and how permeable of a filter it is; once it's up what if anything reaches us through it. These mental barriers can be changed like all our boundaries; we can learn to relax or strengthen them uniformly or situationally.
The Affective Filter in the Immersion Classroom
Teachers use multiple daily strategies to lower their students' affective filters.
Warm and welcoming inclusive environment.
Feeling like we are seen for who we are, valued, and welcomed in as we are helps us to feel comfortable and safe in that given space. If students are uncomfortable in a space, feel like they are not welcome to bring all their identities and personal aspects, or see that others are not entirely accepted and included, there is a breach of trust. Seeing others with identities different from ours be excluded or limited in their inclusion presents a threat that I may also be judged, excluded, or unwelcome. Teachers must work to help all feel and know that they are welcome. This warm and inclusive environment is best achieved with lots of intention from the adults and clear communication and practices to involve the children in ownership of the process.
Focus on good connections between the teacher and students. Ensure the students know and feel that their teacher holds them in high regard and has high expectations for them and all other students.
Student-to-student relationships are essential and cannot be characterized by antagonism in a warm and safe environment. Don't get me wrong, there can and will be disagreements, and not everyone will like each other. That's part of being human, but everyone can work together in harmony, be respectful generally, and be in a warm environment.
Create routines and clear expectations.
Most people need clear boundaries to understand what to do and what not to do. This helps them relax their energy around self-preservation since their safety is now clearly guarded by the expectations. It also relaxes their predictive anxiety to focus on what's happening now instead of wondering about what's to come. Routines also help ppl, especially young children, understand pacing and time while they still construct their internal chronometer. A clear daily structure helps the children feel certain their basic needs will be met. They can then spend time in class more relaxed around the most essential things in their life and their survival, and have mental and emotional space freed up for learning.
Create a cooperative and not competitive environment.
Competition is a big theme in US culture, and although there are some benefits to a culture focused on competition, there are also many drawbacks to this approach. Competition has a clear beginning and end; it pits the competitors against each other, creating animosity and purporting that the work is over once the end goal is reached. Many people feel demotivated by competition and often, especially children, will internalize winning as a judgment of themselves as winners and everything short of winning as a personal judgment of them as deficient humans. Unmotivated students are likelier to have a firm affective filter and a low tolerance for the unknown, new, or different, as these sorts of things are most likely to lead to mistakes. Sometimes, successful people learn to “play it safe” instead of taking risks or trying things that aren't quick and easy, as they now dread losing their wins or being demoted from a winner to a loser. In competitive environments, redirection, feedback, and support often have an added implied layer of “not good enough” that accompanies them.
Additionally, the winners feel they are done once they've reached their goal. This sort of environment creates a dichotomy that isn't helpful in classrooms. The school's primary focus is learning, predicting that stuff is not easy, quick, or something that can be perfected. Instead, much of school is a matter of trying again and again, learning from mistakes, being open to feedback, iterating on what is working, and trying again. For successful learning, it's essential to be open to improving oneself, skills, habits, and thinking. It's also helpful if one is ready to look at all the mistakes and failures they have made to learn from them.
Culture of motivation and interest.
In this sort of environment, students are interested in growing. They know the edge of internal comfort, even if not verbally expressed, and have had enough positive experiences exploring past their comfort to learn new things. They are curious and motivated to continue to grow their learning and comfort zones. When learning is too hard, tedious, easy, frustrating, stressful, pointless, or too far from the student's interests, it is hard for them to sustain the focus and effort necessary in learning. When students have a particularly strong or easily engaged affective filter, they more quickly disengage from the learning or engage in it with their filter up. Thus, they don't internalize learning as effectively, if at all. Teachers must find the balance between making the learning engaging, challenging, and relevant to the students and making it satisfying to help the little ones or those with a stronger affective filter to feel comfortable letting it down and diving into it, investing in the process.
Strategies at Home
Like I said before, the affective filter is something we all have, and it is not necessarily bad.
Foster attitudes of cooperation and ways to separate wins and losses from the child’s personal value or self worth.
When focusing on a student's achievement, a “win,” focus specifically on what was done well. Avoid exaggerated language that emphasizes comparisons.
Child wins a race “You came in first!” avoid saying something like “You were the best!” - words like “best” connote judgment and worth and if one is the best that means others are automatically places in “worst” this sort of dichotomy often make children less charitable to others that didnt win and might lead towards tendencies of anxiety and perfectionism.
Focus on ways to encourage cooperation instead of competition “Everyone dressed and made it to the table in less than 10 minutes! We all get the timer!”
Support your child in growing their comfort with being uncomfortable and making mistakes.
To grow it is helpful to focus on learning from mistakes, being self-reflective, and being self-compassionate. Our culture focuses on competition and perfectionism. We must explicitly teach our young ones that mistakes are helpful because they show where we are still learning. We also need to show patience with the process. If we get frustrated at ourselves or speak to ourselves cruelly when we make mistakes, they will see and learn from this as an intolerance for errors and learning.
A child’s tolerance for different or uncomfortable things in various developmental stages has natural ebbs and flows. Meet them where they are, and be consistent in your support for errors. Be compassionate about mistakes and reflective about what went wrong or didn't go as planned so that learning and improvement can result in learning and improvements.
Research shows that boredom is crucial to innovation and creativity. Help your child learn to feel this uncomfortable feeling, and tolerate it enough to reap the benefits it brings!
When growing their capacity for being uncomfortable, make sure you also make clear to them that not all discomforts are good, and it is essential to be able to tell the difference between what level and kind of discomfort is something to be worried about
Model the desired behaviors/attitudes and outcomes.
Start with reflection on your affective filter; when you hear native speakers of a language you do not speak, what feelings and thoughts do you get? How comfortable/uncomfortable are you when you don't understand everything someone is saying to you due to their tone, volume, accent, mannerism, or language when you need their help? When you are frustrated with something difficult, how do you proceed when you cannot easily or quickly master that skill/task? How do you wish your child to engage in these same situations in their learning environment?
If you are not fluent in the language they are learning, model your efforts to learn a language, and how hard it can be! What do you do to motivate yourself when you get stuck? How do you persevere when it's not fun or engaging?
Modeling openness to trying new things, and now knowing, being wrong, or messing up
Modeling self-compassion and reflection when making mistakes is a great way to help our children take this approach instead of self-flagellation and perfectionism.
Model doing this yourself. When our children see that we are not perfect, all knowing beings but also human, and that being human means making mistakes and learning from them, they are more open to trying.
Be Honest!
Have a direct conversation about mistakes many times, not just once. Discuss how we learn from them, how and why they might be challenging or unpleasant, and your experience with them.
Also, we can reflect on what went wrong in a situation and learn from it. This is not something people will learn on their own. They often need to be taught how to reflect with self-compassion and compassion for others, focusing on the solution and growth rather than judgment.
The next step is thinking about ways to support their areas of weakness or focus on improving in the future, instead of getting a repetition of the same results.
Routine exposure to new things as a family
Practice regular exposure to the target language and cultural things that are authentic. This is especially important if you are not regularly exposed to the culture and language.
Suppose you are not used to hearing a language, speaking with native speakers of that language, or engaging in cultural events with people who natively speak the language. In that case, the language, accents, culture, and ways of being of the people using the language are all foreign and isolated events that your child only engages with in the artificial school environment. This might create anxiety, displeasure, and discomfort with the language, culture, and native speakers. On the flip side, if they are used to hearing and seeing the language and culture as a whole, people with values that are a part of the world they recognize, there is now value and understanding that is likely leading to interest and curiosity.
When in these situations, take advantage of moments to walk your child through your thinking/feelings when you do get frustrated or uncomfortable because you don't understand or something is very different from what you are used to. Then, together, proceed and brainstorm ways to support each other through the discomfort.
TLDR
The affective filter is a psychological barrier that impacts our learning
Has to do with us feeling stress, scared, upset, uncomfortable, bored, or unmotivated
Our affective filter can be trained!
Teachers can intentionally work to help students be more comfortable in the classroom and with learning so they “lower” their mental barrier and learn more
Making warm and welcoming environments
Creating a culture of cooperation, not competition
Making curiosity and mistakes a normal part of learning
Focusing on learning from mistakes and not perfection
Families can help their young ones get more comfortable lowering their affective filter by
Sources
Bryan Robinson, Ph. D. (2024, February 20). Why neuroscientists say, “boredom is good for your brain’s health.” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2020/09/02/why-neuroscientists-say-boredom-is-good-for-your-brains-health/
Dornyei, Z. (2001). motivational strategies in the language classroom. Cambridge Cambridge University Press. - references - scientific research publishing. (n.d.). https://www.scirp.org/reference/ReferencesPapers?ReferenceID=1690492
Game Thinking TV. (2023, August 28). Why Cooperation beats Competition in Games, Education & Parenting, with Alfie Kohn. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jqcw_0v8ooE
Kohn, A. (2017). No contest: The case against competition. Houghton Mifflin.
Krashen, stephen D. “ch. 1: The input hypothesis”, I. (n.d.-a). https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iln/LING4140/h08/The%20Input%20Hypothesis.pdf
(PDF) principles and practice in Second language acquisition. (n.d.). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242431410_Principles_and_Practice_in_Second_Language_Acquisition
Seidlitz Education. (2020, September 22). What is the affective filter, and why is it important in the classroom? https://seidlitzblog.org/2020/09/22/what-is-the-affective-filter-and-why-is-it-important-in-the-classroom/
