Language Acquisition

The study of affect and personality factors such as self-esteem, inhibition, risk-taking, determination, anxiety, extroversion, character types and motivation is one of the most recent trends in second language acquisition (SLA) research. There is a noticeable shift in research focus from behavioural questions, to the cognitive realm, and, more recently, to the emotional domain. Young (1999) synthesizes the evolution of SLA research as a transition from body to mind to emotions. In the 1950s and 1960s, structural and descriptive linguists were very much concerned with the ‘what ’ question of descriptive and contrastive analysis while behavioural psychologists focused on exterior, visible acts of language learning. Dissatisfied with this focus on the body and surface structures, cognitive psychologists challenged the previous stance, posing the questions ‘why ’ and ‘how’, and shifting the research focus on processes of the mind, on meaning, understanding, and knowing. Chomsky’s (1968) work and generative transformational linguistic theories focused on the mental ability and processes in acquiring foreign languages. Chomsky (1968) argued that the human mind is not ‘tabula rasa’, but a very comple