Affective Filter

What makes an effective teacher? One key ingredient of being a successful teacher is creating a low affective filter in your classroom.  What is an "affective filter”?

The Affective Filter Hypothesis is a theory by linguist, Stephen Krashen, suggesting that there is a psychological wall that affects language acquisition.  The psychological wall is referred to as the “affective filter”.  Krashen’s theory proposes that learning a language is affected by a student’s emotions.  For example, when a student’s affective filter is high (or their psychological wall is high), students feel stress, anxiety, and self-conscious.  They may feel unmotivated to learn the language.  According to Krashen’s theory, these negative emotions hinder, or block, language learning.  When a student’s affective filter is low (or their psychological barrier is low), they feel safe, motivated and self-confident, all of which help language acquisition to flourish.  

Why is it important to know about the Affective Filter?

A goal of an English language learner (ELL) teacher, and any teacher, is creating a classroom atmosphere in which their students’ affective filter is low.  Creating a classroom that is warm, welcoming, respectful, caring and supportive where students feel safe and accepted keeps students’ affective filter low and fosters language acquisition.  The lower the affective filter, the more language development, or any learning for that matter, will occur.    

How do I keep my students’ affective filter low in my classroom?

1. Praise your students!  Frequently smile, high five, or compliment your students.  This will provide a comfortable environment where students take risks. Taking risks helps to foster language learning. 

2. Have fun!  Make learning fun and non-threatening by playing learning games, singing songs, dancing, or incorporating hands-on activities such as arts and crafts into your instruction.

3. Be patient.  Allow your students to speak when they feel ready to do so.  Forcing output too early will increase stress and anxiety within your students.

4. Be compassionate.  Understand that learning a new language and culture can be stressful!  Be supportive while your students are adjusting to a new language and culture.

5. Teach what interests your students.  Get to know your students.  What interests them?  Have students suggest what they want to learn and have their interests guide your instruction.  This gives students a sense of control. It also helps students to be an active part of their language learning journey.  

6. Demonstrate an interest in the topics you are teaching.  Showing students that you are genuinely interested and enjoying the content that you are teaching is motivating to students.

7. Embrace errors and avoid correcting students if this will make the student feel embarrassed.  Promote taking risks while learning English. Teach students that errors are acceptable and are a natural part of language learning.  

8. Teach content that will ensure success.  Make sure your instruction is at the correct level of your students, so that they feel motivated and successful.  Provide comprehensible input to ensure that students understand the content you are teaching.  

9. Activate your students’ prior knowledge.  Get to know your students’ backgrounds and use this to guide your instruction, motivate your students, and to make sure your students’ learning is successful.  Include universal topics in your instruction and avoid topics that students are unfamiliar with like American baseball and football or snow if your students come from a tropical climate.

10. Pair or group work.  If your students enjoy working together, then include activities for group or pair work.  This can build rapport among your students fostering a sense of community while helping students feel less isolated.  Students may feel safer speaking among their peers. In addition, working in pairs or groups gives students more opportunities to practice speaking and understanding skills.

11. Value your students’ first language and culture.  Label your classroom in your students’ first language.  Display pictures or hang flags that represent your students’ native country.  Encourage your students to say some words in their first language.  Greet each other in your students’ first language.  Talk about your students’ native country or culture.  Eat a food from your students’ culture.  If your students come from Asia, have them teach you and their peers how to eat with chopsticks or how to draw characters in their language.  Display the characters around your classroom.    

12. Have your students be the teacher.  Students instructing their peers boost their self-confidence and reinforces their own learning.     

13. Encourage participation.  Encourage students to speak, to share their thoughts, and to take risks.  This helps build students’ self-confidence.

14. Get to know your students. Get to know who your students are beyond the classroom and show genuine interest with who they are as people and not just as students.

15. Respect and care about your students.  The way you talk to your students should reflect respect and concern.  Students know if you genuinely care about them, their language learning, and who they are.  

Zone of Proximal Development

A hindrance to many English language learners is that classroom teachers teach less challenging material compared to their monolingual peers. Classroom teachers may believe that their ELL students do not have enough language proficiency to grasp the content being taught. Often times though, ELL students do in fact have enough English proficiency to understand the same content as their peers.

In my own experience, I have observed ESL students not being pushed enough with their learning by not only classroom teachers, but by ESL teachers as well. For example, kindergartners will learn their letter names and sounds throughout the entire school year instead of moving on to digraphs and magic/silent “e” words. This occurred even when the students mastered all of their letter names and sounds.

I have been told by ESL teachers that their students were not progressing because they are English language learners! This was not the case! In my opinion, the ESL students in her class were not being pushed enough. In other words, there lacked a zone of proximal development(ZPD) among the students. ZPD is the difference between what a student can achieve independently and what the student can achieve with help. “Proximal” means skills that the learner is “close” to mastering on their own, but cannot master at that point in time. Therefore, the teacher uses scaffolding, which is support that builds on a student’s existing knowledge in order for the student to accomplish the slightly more difficult task being presented. Scaffolding helps the student achieve the skills or tasks that they could not have achieved on their own. Scaffolding only works within a student’s ZPD. This means that the teacher should not stretch the student’s knowledge and abilities too far from what the student currently knows. Scaffolding is effective when the teacher slightly stretches their student’s knowledge and abilities (working within the students’ ZPD) by building on the students’ prior knowledge and by having high expectations of their ELL students. Support is gradually removed as the ESL student is able to complete the task on their own.

As an ELL teacher or classroom teacher who has ELL students, have high expectations for your ESL students! I have often observed that ESL students know much more than they let on! Assess your ELL students, so you are aware of their current knowledge and skills. Share your assessments with the ELL teacher or the classroom teacher. This way, you both know when and how to expand your ELL students’ learning.

Bilingualism/Multilingualism: Theories

The most relevant theory that ESL teachers need to know is called the Developmental Interdependence theory. This theory suggests that a child’s second language acquisition and competence partly depends on the level of competence the child has in their first language. In other words, the more the child knows in their first language, the easier and quicker it will be for the child to develop their second language. The reason for this is that the ESL student transfers their knowledge from the first to the second language. An example of this is vocabulary knowledge. When learning a second language, the ESL student transfers vocabulary knowledge from their first language to their second. Therefore, the more vocabulary words a student knows in their first language, the easier and faster it will be for the student to acquire proficiency in their second language (and the easier it will be for ESL teachers to teach these students!) When a student’s vocabulary knowledge is weak in their first language, then the student must be explicitly taught the meaning of the vocabulary word and the language for that word.This makes learning a second language more difficult and more time consuming.

The Developmental Interdependence theory stresses language in general for the success of learning a second language. As a parent or an ESL teacher, the emphasis on your child's/student’s native language is key. Therefore, as an ESL teacher, it is important to inform parents to teach their children as much of their first language as possible. This will make their first language strong and will therefore result in a strong second language. If parents are able, giving lists of academic vocabulary words for parents to pre-teach to their children may be helpful.  Encouraging parents to read with their child can also help develop their child's vocabulary.  Stressing the importance of your students’ first language could be a topic to discuss during Open House and parent/teacher conferences. The Developmental Interdependence theory challenges the English only policy that is sometimes supported in monolingual schools where the majority language is English. The Developmental Interdependence theory suggests that English is not the key, but a strong first language is.

Supporting the Developmental Interdependence theory is the current theory about bilingualism and the thought system behind learning languages. This theory is called the Common Underlying Proficiency Model (CUP). The CUP suggests that both languages function within the same system. This model also states that humans are able to store two or more languages and there is no limit for learning another language or multiple languages in the brain. The CUP supports the evidence that bilinguals are able to use both languages with ease and can transfer knowledge from one language to their other language. The CUP also supports the Developmental Interdependence theory in that the student is able to transfer their knowledge from their first language to their second. An example of transferring between languages is codeswitching.

An outdated theory about bilingualism states that there is limited room in the brain for learning two or more languages.This false theory is called the Separate Underlying Proficiency (SUP). This theory states that each language acts separately from one another. For example, for a bilingual child learning English and Spanish, one operating system stores and uses English and the other operating system stores and uses Spanish. Each language area is separate from one another and do not interact or work together.

Bilingual Education:

The Thresholds Theory states that cognitive advantages of bilinguals depend on the level of competence in each language. A child must reach a certain level of proficiency to avoid negative consequences of bilingualism. The child must then reach a second threshold, or level of competence, to experience the positive benefits of bilingualism. It is believed that the Thresholds Theory helps to explain why bilingual children in bilingual immersion classes experience a delay at first when learning their second language. The bilingual students’ proficiency in their second language catches up to the proficiency in their first language.  As a result, the students become balanced bilinguals. Once these students’ second language develops to a certain level of proficiency where students are able to comprehend academic language in the classroom, these students begin to benefit from being bilingual.  Research suggests that balanced bilinguals surpass their monolingual peers.