Psychological factors contributing to language learning

Associate Professor Yevgeniya Shishova offered her take on the matter in XLinguae.

The problem of language acquisition is one of the complicated psychological topics. Teacher education experts are always seeking new ways of improving the efficiency of language learning.

Shishova comments, “In our previous publications we have tackled various factors influencing the success of language learning. Among them are such groups as broadly-pedagogical, methodological, broadly-psychological and individual psychological factors. The first two are external determinants of learning, and the latter two are internal.”

The author conducted an empirical study on the structure of language aptitude and offered her view of language acquisition as a system of interrelated components.

“There are several factors which can be called key components of language acquisition,” she says. “It's important to take account of a student's emotional and evaluative attitude towards language learning and their emotional experience in this process. We mustn't also forget about cognitive components, such as attention, perception, thinking, and memory. Effective language learning is determined by specifics of thought process and completeness of such qualities of this process as depth, flexibility, evidence-based nature, prospective thinking, analytical and conscientious nature. Personal traits, of course, are also important – self-esteem, success and failure experience, extraversion or introversion, anxiety levels, etc.”

Thus, motivation for language learning is a system of cognitive, emotional, and personality-related characteristics.

Psychological factors of successful foreign language acquisition

 http://www.xlinguae.eu/files/XLinguae4_2020_10.pdf

Source text: Galina Khasanova

Translation: Yury Nurmeev