Linguistic education getting emotional

Affect comes into play much earlier and much stronger than most language users imagine. Its salience and dominance have now long been recognised by neuroscientists and psychologists, who have stressed that affect not only accompanies but, most importantly and surprisingly, precedes our decisions, determines our choices, drives our perception, and, as such, constitutes a fundamental component of our identities and personalities. In the light of this central position of affect in what we do, it is rather odd or even detrimental that, as recent ERL studies have shown, linguistic education has remained preoccupied with the spheres of actions and cognition far more than with students’ emotions (and beliefs). Even the times of the COVID-19 pandemic (addressed earlier in the sequence of ERL Journal’s volumes) have not brought about any marked change in this respect, although the educational circumstances created by teachers’ and learners’ remote work did offer an opportunity to accentuate emotions (as well as the approach to education and language which all of them hold). In other words – to put it in terms we have applied under the ERL framework, the teaching of languages has still been focused much more on the questions What can students do with language(s)? and How do students understand (the world through) language(s)? than on the question How do students feel about language(s)? (or What do students think of language(s)?). Whilst questions concerning, for instance, using and understanding words, phrases or texts are commonplace, those relating to feelings or views concerning the language elements learnt (be it How do you feel about this sentence? or What’s your attitude to this word?) are in most educational settings few and far between. Not striking a balance between the former (psychomotor and cognitive) and the latter two (affective and axiological) domains stands in stark contrast to contemporary psychological knowledge and can be argued to bring numerous detrimental effects, with a waste of time caused by the non-observance of students’ emotions being only one example of that.