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Hoodlums, hussies and Thunk 5 : the Affective Filter
Date: Sat, 06 Nov 1999 10:31:38 +0100 From: Timothy Mason To: Foreign Language Teaching Forum
Which brings us, by hook and crook, to the Affective Filter. Stephen Krashen (BTW, I'll just repeat here that I believe that the impact of his work on the language teaching profession has been positive - I have even defended it on SLART, where the majority opinion, lead by Kevin Gregg, was more than a little frosty) introduces this idea in his fifth hypothesis. It is a fully integral part of the whole theory, and is of some importance in its maintenance ; he needs to tell us why it is, if an adequate amount of CI is sufficient for acquisition to take place, people who have been exposed to similar amounts of CI do not always achieve similar levels of competence, and why some people who have been exposed to a great deal of CI nevertheless fossilize at relatively low levels of language mastery.
Stephen Krashen's answer to this conundrum is the Affective Filter ; the concept is drawn from Dulay and Burt. People whose attitudes towards language-learning are, for one reason or another, negative, will acquire less than those whose attitudes are positive - they have high Affective Filters, which keep the input out of the part of your mind responsible for acquisition. Here, there are two points we can note : first is that the effects of attitude factors are most marked on acquisition, rather than on learning. Second, while a positive attitude is a necessary pre-condition for acquisition to take place, it does not play a direct role in the process, which remains entirely driven by CI.
Stephen Krashen offers three ‘affective variables' that have been identified as being related to language-acquisition : these are ‘motivation', ‘self-confidence' and ‘anxiety'. It's worth noting that none of these can be considered as totally independent variables : success in learning may heighten motivation and self-confidence while lowering anxiety. Moreover, it is arguable that a certain level of anxiety is actually conducive to learning/acquisition, and recent research on ‘self-image' indicates that it is not as important for learning as the philosophers of happiness would have us believe - humiliation may, as any Zen master will tell you, be an excellent pedagogical technique under certain conditions, and the humble and the self-disbeliever are not forever condemned to unenlightenment (I personally think of myself as disgusting, repellent and incompetent, but I know quite a lot of stuff, and master at least one foreign language).
To some SLA people, this fifth hypothesis is simply a cop-out ; it makes the whole set of hypotheses virtually untestable, for it offers a quick getaway whenever the cops arrive on the scene armed with contrary data. Moreover, it is a simple and rather childish metaphor, rather than a sternly scientific attempt to tell the world as it is. I'm pretty sure Krashen will reject the first criticism, and that he will feel unhappy about the second : for my part, I'm not convinced that all scientific statements either are or need to be falsifiable, and I am fairly certain that they are all, at the core, metaphoric. What bothers me about this hypothesis is that it shares with much American psychology - Jerome Bruner has quite recently made a similar observation in the pages of the NYRB - a kind of shallowness that betokens an inability to speak of mysteries.
Which brings me back to Dick Russell's cheeky schoolchildren. We have created a world from which Desire has been evacuated. In our schools, we try to pretend that children between the ages of ten and fifteen - when any biologist will tell you that they are going through enormous changes, both wonderful and frightening - do not have bodies, except when they take to the sports field. We are then peeved when when they put far more energy into the school football match than they ever will do into learning maths or Spanish (one of the reasons TPR works is that it puts bodies back into the classroom - as Asher was fully aware). The mother who is more interested in getting her son back on the sports field than in encouraging him to get high grades - and what idiot ever dreamt up the idea of punishing poor school-work by banning children from physical activity? - is a wise woman who knows what her son really needs.
Desire - which Freud erroneously equated with sexuality - does not have a filter effect upon acquisition or learning, but is constitutive. Motivation, which is a kind of card-board cut-out representation of desire, may get you good grades, but without desire nothing will be traced upon your soul. And if desire is denied then it will most likely seep back at the edges, and a schoolgirl make an ugly remark to her teacher*.
I am not saying that schools should be places where children are simply let off the reins ; on the contrary. Any society needs to shape and channel Desire. But our societies seem almost to have given up on the shaping and the chanelling, and to believe that if you ignore it steadily enough, it will go away. It needs to be put at the centre of the educational process. Where it belongs. And where, one way or another, it will out in any case.
Best wishes
Timothy Mason
iufm de versailles
tmason@timothyjpmason.com
*This is a reference to a post by another member of the list which I had taken up at the beginning of the present Thunk. I have left out the part where I address it directly, as it adds nothing of interest to the argument at hand.
Université de Paris 8
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