Emotion-Based Language Instruction (EBLI) as a new perspective in bilingual education

Behavioristic movement

Building on the work of Pavlov (1927) and Skinner (1957), language development can be seen as the result of a set of habits (Hutchinson and Waters 1987). Beginning in the 1950s, behaviorism moved from the arena of psychology to education. Schooling practices started to center around the notion that if teachers provide the correct stimuli, the learners not only learn but their learning can be measured through observation of their behaviors. This approach considered teachers responsible for students’ learning. That is, if the process of learning was not successful the teachers were required to restructure the environment, identify the most suitable stimuli to obtain the needed behavior, or create negative reinforcement to quench undesirable behaviors (Jones and Brader-Araje 2002).

Cognitive movement

As a new approach to teaching and learning, cognitivism emerged during the 1970s in response to the inability of behaviorism to account for aspects of language learning. Unlike behaviorists, cognitivists deemed language learning a conscious and reasoned thinking process, and language learners as active processors of information (Ausubel et al. 1978). A key notion was that of students’ engagement with instructional materials as a major contributor to their own language learning. The teachers were to provide an effective environment along with a rich context of authentic language for students to negotiate meaning and develop strategies for language discovery (Anderson 1985). In response, students would combine their prior knowledge with the new language input to construct and reconstruct meaning.

Social movement

Towards the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21^st century, socio-cognitive or social approaches toward language education attracted attention. Their main focuses were the concepts of social interaction and learning as an active process involving others and many aspects of society (Atkinson 2002). The basis was the work of Bakhtin (1981), Vygotsky (1986), and Bruner (1983), who underlined the interactive dimension of educational work and its impact on linguistic development. Authentic learning is notably effective since the students are in contact with real world applications of language. A particular revolutionary element of this movement is the role of a teacher, which changes from an information transmitter to a facilitator or a guide (Meyer 2009) as the students engage in cooperative learning activities.

Emotional movement

Since the establishment of psychoanalysis, a number of leading practitioners have highlighted the significance of emotion on learning, thought, and education (Bowlby 1952; Freud 1911; Murphy 1974; Rappaport 1960). Freud (1911) compared emotions to a wayward horse controlled by the rational ego. In contrast, Greenspan and Wieder (1998a) argue that emotions support our actions, experiences, behaviors, and thoughts.

Investigations into the role of emotional factors in second/foreign language learning and teaching are not a novel phenomenon. Several methodologies, such as suggestopedia, have addressed emotional and psychological notions, motivated in some cases by Krashen’s claim of a language monitor and his affective filter hypothesis (Pishghadam 2009). Nevertheless, the emotional aspect is still peripheral in many educational systems (Shanmugasundaram and Mohamad 2011) and cognitive abilities are considered as the sole predictors of academic achievement (Moraru et al. 2011). However, the significance of emotion gained increasing recognition in education during the 1980s and 1990s (Tormey 2005), with the most popular reflection of this trend being Gardner’s (1983) Multiple Intelligences (MI) (shades of the emotional domain represented in his work on intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences). Then, the term Emotional Quotient (EQ) was introduced by Bar-On (1988) as a counterpart to Intelligence Quotient and cognitive ability. According to Bar-On (1988), EQ comprises a set of social and emotional abilities to help individuals with their daily life. Salovey and John (1990) adopted a different perspective and propounded Emotional Intelligence (EI) as the “ability to monitor one’s own and other’s feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and action” (p. 189). In 1995, Goleman published his book “Emotional Intelligence” and popularized the concept (Goleman 1995). He saw EI as arising from a large set of research findings on the role of emotions in life. One of those theories dealing with emotion is Greenspan’s (1992) ideas on the relationship between language and emotion. In the next section, we review this theory, which has been given little attention in language studies.

Functional emotional theory

In 1997, Greenspan set forth a theory of a process through which functional emotional approaches create and organize various aspects of the mind and intelligence. As the term suggests, the theory mainly stems from an amalgam of two common notions of ‘functions’ and ‘emotions’. Several attempts have been made to catalogue the different functions of language found in the growing child’s repertoire. Children are motivated to acquire a language since it serves particular purposes or functions for them. In this realm, Halliday’s (1975) taxonomy focuses on some functions which help children to fulfill their physical, emotional, social, and environmental needs—the emotional dimension of the theory largely originates from the idea of emotional competency and EQ which was discussed earlier.

As Greenspan (1997) states, affective signals are the primary concepts we use to experience the world, and they emerge prior to the sensorimotor patterns presented by Piaget (1962). Moreover, he showed that intellect, academic abilities, consciousness, and morality are rooted in our earliest emotional experiences (Greenspan and Shanker 2004). The crux of this approach to language development is that language skills evolve from a sequence of affective transformations, which make the child initially self-regulate and get interested in the world, and subsequently, following a series of further transformations, take part in the social interactions, become involved in shared attention, recognize social, communicative patterns, figure out other people’s intentions, imitate complex actions, form a sense of ‘self’, and create meaningful symbols (Greenspan and Lewis 2005). Basically, the child nourishes these underlying capacities and gradually moves from the pre-symbolic stage to language.

When the ability to form symbols evolves in children, they are required to harness their inner affects to symbols to produce meaningful notions such as language, imagination, and logical thought. In other words, the affect-mediated interactions enable children to perceive the patterns of the world through symbols, and eventually transform these patterns to thought and conversation (Greenspan 2001). Gestural and social interactions provide the context for the meaning of verbal symbols. The necessity of this fundamental level of knowing through doing is highly emphasized in the gradual process of meaning formation. Children move from global affective schemes to reciprocal ones. Long chains of affective interactions enable children to further explore the world based on the received feedback and to organize gestural or verbal communication. In essence, affect assists children to go through the simple interest in the world toward social problem-solving, and advance through procedural knowledge to symbolic knowledge. It gives meaning to what children hear, how they process the visual-spatial information, and arrange motor activities (Greenspan 2001).

As children begin to imitate words (mom, dad, go), those words have to be flavored with affect to hold meaning. The word “juice” has meaning to the extent the child can combine it with different feeling experiences including the pleasure and image of drinking juice (Greenspan 2001). In truth, to feel an emotion, it is necessary to experience that emotion in a consistent relationship; that is to say, it is not possible to experience the emotions which we have never had (Greenspan and Lewis 2005).

However, emotional experiences are not restricted to semantics only; they can likewise be applied to children’s learning of grammar. For instance, the word “more” might not denote quantity for children, but rather remind them of something tasty; whereas, “no more” could remind them of a dose of bitter medicine. “Big” is an older child who is walking around and “little” is a baby of his own age and size (Shanker and Greenspan 2005). During speech language therapy sessions, the therapists may attempt to teach preliminary grammatical forms by repeatedly drilling the child on some particular structures that may turn to be exhausting for both the child and therapist. Here, the main issue is that the structure has been emphasized with no regard to the emotional aspect. Unlike the therapist, the caregivers act more effectively and teach that same structure by using affect gestures and slightly varying their tone of voice, by uttering “gentleeee” (Greenspan and Shanker 2004; Shanker 2002) for instance.

DIR

In order to facilitate the reciprocal affective processes, a social pragmatic approach was proposed by Greenspan (1997). DIR, a theoretical and applied framework for comprehensive, individually-determined intervention, integrates the child’s isolated functional developmental capacities (social, motor, cognitive, language, and sensory) that lay the foundation for higher order thinking and purposeful communicating (Greenspan 1992; Greenspan and Wieder 1998a). This treatment technique was initially designed to help disturbed children suffering from autism. To define the core components of this multidisciplinary approach, the “D” represents the developmental capacities including mutual attention and engagement, back and forth interactions, affective reciprocity, problem-solving, creating play ideas, and abstract thinking which appear during the child’s early years. This component indicates six functional developmental features: 1) self-regulating and processing environmental information, 2) involvement in a relationship, 3) maintaining and responding to a mutual purposeful communication, 4) making complex gestures and directing the communication toward problem-solving, 5) creating and deploying ideas, and 6) making a link between ideas, reality, and thought. There is a plenty of evidence which shows that emotional processes including engagement, joint attention, affective reciprocity, and creative play are related to healthy social, language, and intellectual functioning (Greenspan 2004; Siller and Sigman 2002).

The “I” represents the child’s individual differences in sensory motor processing and regulation which support development. The “R” represents the relationships and environment required for the interactions through which the development of emotional, social, and cognitive capacities is fostered (Greenspan and Wieder 2006).

Central to the DIR model is the secure relationship which promotes spontaneous sequences of back-and-forth affect cues between the parent and child to help the child expand and elaborate upon ideas, thoughts, and feelings and overcome the probable developmental challenges of linking up emotions to motor planning and verbal communication (Seskin et al. 2010; Wieder and Greenspan 2003). The very intention is to empower every single developmental capacity, which jointly can set the basis for higher order abilities (Greenspan and Wieder 2006). The intervention approach, which is built on the child’s and family’s unique developmental profile, involves parents, caregivers, or teachers in developing a better understanding of their child using the complex verbal or gestural interactions between biology and experience. In fact, it enables them to enter the child’s world, bring the child into a joint world, make a communication bridge, and interact with the child in ways that nurture emotional, social, and intellectual development (Greenspan 2001). Thus, more and more emotions must be injected into the interactions. Once the interactions become more captivating and meaningful, the child progresses much faster and easier. As a result, the adult’s emotional interest, that is brought to the context, must rise as the task gets harder (Greenspan and Lewis 2005).

Overall, the model highlights the necessity of unifying family support, school programs, home programs, biomedical mediation, and other required therapies tailored to meet children’s entire needs and goals, into their intervention schedule (Greenspan 2001). To this end, Greenspan and Wieder (2006) recommend running various types of interactions in multiple different settings and environments to help the children progress through the developmental stages more purposefully.

Emotionalizing language

The major objective of this paper is to stress emotional capital and to suggest a different outlook toward L2 learning. Most children have the capacity and facility to learn more than one language. Largely inspired by Greenspan and his model of DIR, our hypothesis is based upon a pair of underlying premises: a) that effective emotional interaction of a learner with his teacher, and b) emotionalizing language (Pishghadam et al. 2013) lead to better L2 learning. The former premise mainly revolves around humanistic psychology and EI, while the latter premise hinges on building emotions toward L2 lexical items. As the premise implies, children acquire their mother tongue while interacting emotionally with their parents. To be specific, words have meanings and meanings are conveyed through the emotional context (world) in which the word is utilized (Greenspan 2001). That is to say, throughout first language acquisition, “word” (semantic aspect of language) and “world” (pragmatic aspect of language) are acquired simultaneously. The newly-acquired word takes on additional meaning from the context and further emotional experience with it (Greenspan 2001). In contrast, during the process of L2 learning the child already owns the “world” information transferred from L1 and only lacks the pertinent “word”. Thus, in the first place, children are likely to learn the words which are equivalent to their L1 vocabulary list. The groundwork of this stage is to draw linkage between L1 and L2 lexical words. When the learners are able to connect emotionally with the information, it produces deeper meanings and stronger ties to previous knowledge (LeDoux 1996). Simply put, if a child encounters a word which has little or no emotional association, then language learning procedure becomes cumbersome (Pishghadam et al. 2013).

Emotioncy

To better illustrate our hypothesis, we proceed with an example of an eight-year-old child learning a number of English words (Figure 1). He learned the words in the following order:

1. 1.

   Banana

    
2. 2.

   Knife

    
3. 3.

   Cook

    
4. 4.

   Chopsticks

    

As the order suggests, the child has learned the words toward which he had more emotion and afterwards the ones holding less emotion. Based on the EBLI, each entity carries a degree of emotion for individuals, which we refer to as emotioncy. It means that, the words with higher degree of emotion are learned faster and easier compared to the ones with a lower degree of emotion. The following figure illustrates the emotioncy of the aforementioned words.

Based on the figure, in the above example, the boy has stronger emotions for the word “banana”, since he has tasted, smelled, and touched that fruit. Besides, he has seen and touched a “knife” but has not used that himself. That’s why this word is located second in the learning order. Concerning the word “cook”, the child has only observed the action without experiencing it; and in terms of “chopsticks” the child has neither seen nor used these tools, and therefore has no emotion toward the word.

Emotionalization

Throughout the years, L2 practitioners have presented several criteria for vocabulary teaching. For example, Widdowson (2004) deemed frequency, coverage, and prototype as noteworthy features. According to him, frequency information is strongly beneficial in helping to prioritize what to teach. Coverage relies on its degree of semantic resemblance upon which a word can be used to replace other words. And prototypes are words and structures that are likely to be included as pedagogically core or nuclear at a specific stage with respect to their actual occurrence in contexts of use.

We believe that, emotioncy is equally able to determine the salience of a word and serve the purpose of a worthwhile benchmark for vocabulary teaching (Pishghadam et al. 2013). In this vein, what gains importance is the matter of localization. Emotions vary between cultures, regions, and languages. To be specific, individuals coming from different regions, social classes, and cultural backgrounds are probably acquainted with certain types of words and hold stronger emotions for them. For instance, within the Iranian context, on account of geographical diversities, a child coming from the northern regions of the country is more profoundly and emotionally familiar with the word “jungle” than a child living in southern regions. Also, a child from the upper social class is better familiar with the word “Xbox” than a friend from the lower social class.

Our argument is that, it is effective if we advance beyond pure and conventional contextualization, magnify the role of lexical emotions, and move toward emotionalization in the second language teaching domain. Meanwhile, it is recommended to employ the words toward which the learner has little or low emotion with more consideration and in proper situations (Pishghadam et al. 2013). According to Pishghadam et al. (2013) it seems that, de-emotionalization surpasses de-contextualization; given that as long as the learner does not establish an emotional relationship with the text, one is not able to reach a full understanding. Imagine a girl who was born in Iran. Based on the Islamic ambiance of the country she is not emotionally informed of words such as “bar”, “drink”, and “wine”. Accordingly, she probably learns the words of this type with difficulty.

Furthermore, emotionalization goes beyond Piaget’s (1926) schema theory, which argues that human beings own categorical rules or scripts to interpret and predict the world. Therefore, information is analyzed and comprehended based on how it accords with these rules. The most indispensable aspect of schema theory is the role of prior knowledge in information processing; while emotionalization shifts the focus and underscores the crucial role of prior emotion.

Furthermore, contrary to Krashen’s (i + 1) hypothesis (1982) that second language acquirers grasp input which is one step beyond their current stage of linguistic competence, Pishghadam et al. (2013) firmly believe that learners best understand the input which is a little beyond their level of emotioncy. This implies that, in order to facilitate the process of language learning, learners need to be emotionally familiar with the input that is slightly above their existing level of emotioncy; at advanced levels of learning, words and the environment need to relink. Moreover, with a very few essential exceptions, the majority of the input should be words with which the learners have already established an emotional relationships in their L1.

The ultimate issue that may spark a further debate is the concept of motivation, grounded in the Piagetian hypothesis of equilibration. As cognition develops from the state of doubt and uncertainty (disequilibrium), the child remains eager and motivated to acquire the necessary language and reach the final stages of cognitive certainty and resolution (equilibrium) (Brown 2007). That is to say, disequilibrium is likely to maintain significant motivation for language acquisition. Quite the opposite holds for our word-learning theory of EBLI. As it was noted earlier, this approach demands strong emotional linkage with learners’ environmental information in their L1. Consequently, due to the absence of disequilibrium the learner may not be able to perceive the knowledge gap and be motivated enough to fill it in. Thus, additional research is called for to show whether the lack of this type of motivation may hinder language acquisition, or if other sources of motivation are likely to compensate for this deficiency.

Inter-emotionality

Bilingual learners’ L1 plays a significant role in the learning of L2 in terms of cognitive, linguistic, and cultural influences (Peal and Lambert 1962). There has always existed a flow between first and second language acquisition with regards to their lexicon and grammatical rules. However, we believe that emotions, similarly, move between the two languages—a phenomenon which we refer to as inter-emotionality.

As Figure 2 depicts, when the flow moves from L1 to L2, the learners already own the germane emotion and merely lack the language, which they then acquire. On the other hand, when the flow moves from L2 to L1, the learners lack both the language and emotion, which may hinder the acquisition process. The following examples demonstrate the issue with respect to lexical and grammatical aspects.

Example 1: Lexical

A teacher intends to teach the words “Halloween” and “Christmas” to a boy with Farsi as his L1. The question is how it is possible to create emotion for the mentioned words since the child is not familiar with these two events in his own culture. We strongly believe that, if emotion creation happens pragmatically while the child is doing something outside the academic setting such as surfing the internet, playing video games, or watching movies, learning will be more successful.

Example 2: Grammatical

A teacher intends to teach the sentence “I go to school” to a girl with Farsi as her L1. The problem that the child may encounter is that, unlike English, Farsi is a pro-drop language. Therefore, the grammatical emotion needs to be engendered for the child to realize that the pronoun is non-removable in the English language.