90 percent of language learning is psychological

Unlocking the psychology of learning a language for conversational lessons

Most people are surprised when they hear me say that 90% of language learning is psychological.

But the fact is that, over the years teaching English as a foreign language, one of the most consistent things I have witnessed is people struggling with learning English, trying to be better communicators and getting fluent, has little to do with their intellectual ability.

Rather, what I’ve seen is learners hitting road block after road block due to one psychological reason after another.

In this article, I’m going to break down the psychological and cognitive psychological reasons for why 90% of language learning is psychological. Of course, I’m using 90% here in a slightly rhetorical sense, the real proportions are almost unknowable, it could be 76.4% of 93.4% — who knows. But what we do know is that what is psychological in our behaviour has overriding effects on our ability to learn and be fluent in a language.

One of the reasons most of us fail to recognise that learning a language is mostly psychological is the way we have been socialised and acculturated to regard language learning. This is something I explore in much more detail in an upcoming article, Why schools leave us with the wrong idea about learning a language. So I will only mention briefly for now for the purposes of understanding how this contributes to our failure to understand why 90% of learning a language is psychological.

In a nutshell, the nature of our school institutions, the way our classroom learning and curricula are designed, and the implicit socio-economic purposes they all serve, prevent many of us from realising just how psychological learning a language in particular is. This argument may be made for other subjects too. In essence, what is ignored by the inherent culture of language learning in schools is the qualitative experience of the learner, if they enjoy how and what they learn, or really deeply understand the concepts and ideas, and can relate them to other aspects of their knowledge in an holistic and integrated way. I argue that this is for the most part not the case. This is largely what leads to our failure in appreciating just how psychological factors play a crucial role in the learning and acquisition of language.

Understanding the psychological:

how our psycho-emotive states hinder or facilitate learning

When we say psychological, we mean all those things pertaining to our psyche. ‘Psyche’ in Greek means ‘spirit’. Psychology in this sense means the study of the human spirit.

In essence, psychology is the attempt to understand the human psyche, and in turn human behaviour. Our spirit understood in this way, meaning the essence of our psyches, determines much of our behaviour. Learning a language is one such complex behaviour. In my articles Words are like friends, and Never watch Netflix with subtitles, you would have learnt how our language learning ability is an off shoot of our domain-general cognitive abilities. Now let us look at how learning a language is also shaped by fundamental psychological mechanisms too, and how some of these are psycho-cogntive, and what that means.

The first thing I want to consider are how our psycho-emotive state affects our ability to learn a language.

For instance, someone who finds it hard to concentrate for long periods in a classroom, or pick up new information at the first attempts, is likely to get angry and frustrated. There are lots of reasons individuals might be in this situation, due to poor primary schooling, underlying issues in the home environment, being a slow developer. Needless to say, all of these things and more shouldn’t be reasons to punish the learner to a lifetime of uneducated purgatory. Regardless, being angry and frustrated leads to a cascade of stress and stress-inducing hormones that inhibit learning pathways in the brain. Put simply, try learning anything even simple or moderately hard while seething with anger and frustration. Not a pretty picture.

Now imagine, that an angry or frustrated learner falls behind the learners who are not angry and frustrated. On a daily basis that learner will see fellow learners doing better than them. This will only lead to more anger and frustration, and even more negative emotions, such as fear, envy, resentment, guilt, and shame. A classic case of negative feedback, and a negative emotional mindset. Not ingredients that make for a tasty recipe for learning.

Learning happens best when our psycho-emotive state is one of focused relaxation, and our overriding emotions positive ones, or using a David R. Hawkins Maps of Consciousness model, we could say we learn best when our level of consciousness is at that of reason and integrity, and the psycho-emotive states associated with that, namely neutrality, willingness, trust, acceptance, optimism, and so on. These states enable and facilitate learning, in ways negative, survival states simply can’t.

People who have one time or another experienced negative emotions of survival, have been overwhelmed with feelings of stress, anxiety, or impending doom or failure. In such a state, the need to learn, particularly a language that is not our own and we wouldn’t be using for daily survival, unconsciously presents itself as an excessive expenditure of energy. Of course, this mostly happens unconsciously. We have little control over our behaviour when we our overwhelmed with negative emotions in this way.

In a nutshell, one of the biggest hindrances to learning is the psycho-emotive state of the learner. This state when it’s negative can override our cognitive and intellectual capacities. Our potential is literally inhibited. This is why it is essential that the learning dynamic and environment be conducive to producing a positive psycho-emotive state. Language learning by its very nature can be frustrating and tedious. So even in most language classrooms, language courses, and similar environments, when the dynamic is highly competitive, with little space for making mistakes, or being a growth learner, or having space to ask questions freely without judgment or shame, most learners simply will not tap into their potential. The most able and competitive will survive and flourish, but others will be left thinking they have little or no language learning ability or talent - once again the language-talent myth (see my article Words are like friends).

What we can see from the above, is that our emotional state during learning can be facilitating or inhibiting. The qualitative experience of the learner counts for a lot. If we find learning purposeful, rewarding, and it integrates cohesively and intuitively with our sense of purpose and belonging in the world, our accomplishments as learners will and can be profound and life changing.

The space for emotional toughness

This should not be taken to mean that competition, encouraging mental and intellectual, and emotional toughness are bad things. Certainly not.

I’m a big advocate for all these things. It’s easier put with my favourite analogies to boxing.

As a boxer you need to have a strong will, be mentally tough and resilient, nurture emotional and physical discipline, and embrace a healthy competitive spirit. However, if an individual is slow to pick up moves, sequences, combinations, principles, or draw on their inner toughness and warrior, should they be made to feel they have no ability to box, no spirit to fight, or future learning the art of boxing? Does it mean only the most able boxers should be encouraged and guided to master the art of boxing? Certainly not. The opportunity should be afforded to anyone wiling to put in the work and make the sacrifices. As a boxing trainer, I would much prefer to train a willing student ready to make sacrifices over a gifted but unwilling one, not ready to make sacrifices. In language learning we can see a similar principle.

Fear and anxiety in learners are just as inhibiting as anger and frustration. Coming back to the reality of most learning environments, if there is no space for mistakes, if learners feel pressured into being perfect, it gradually builds an atmosphere of fear and anxiety. Teachers can often do their very best to mitigate such atmospheres, but they can be unintended outcomes of learning dynamics overtime.

This is why I emphasise to language learners, guiding clients, or boxing students, the learning space is where you make a thousand mistakes, so out in the real world you don’t have to. Out there, they will cost you dearly, and they only need to cost you once.

The range of psyhco-emotive states that are, or are potentially, inhibiting to learning would be to long to list here, but suffice to say by now we are getting a better picture of how they affect learning and learning outcomes.

Language is embodied:

How our psycho-cognitive abilities are key to language acquisition

As I have discussed in previous articles language is embodied in a non-trivial sense. This has given rise to the usage-based model of language acquisition. What this means for the nature of language learning is that, for the most part the skills involved in learning a language are psycho-cognitive skills. Learning a language is not simply a question of learning formal structures and rules. Rather, such learning involves learning instances of language coupled with embodied patterns of behaviour.

For example, when learning a language through playing a board game, body language and gestures may serve to demonstrate instructions, actions to be performed, the intentions of players, while being coupled with novel words, and verbal reactions, and their emotional content, which provide contextual learning of appropriate reactions and linguistic responses. It is very hard to learn this by simply trying to interpret written vocabulary and instructions. Learning language through structured play practice is an obvious way in which language is embodied, and by turn the acquisition of language.

Less obviously, what second-generation cognitive science has demonstrated, is the way in which our language capacity is structured on domain-general cognitive abilities, such as our auditory, visual, and spatial pattern finding abilities, and on preexisting cortical structures, such as our motor cortex, and our capacity for joint attentional frames with speakers. When it comes to language acquisition, this is why it is paramount that words and novel language cases, not be divorced from their embodied nature. Thus, learning grammatical constructs is more effective when those constructs are embedded in embodied contexts, say a teacher demonstrating tenses through actual actions and behaviours as relevant to a conversational frame, rather than explaining a grammatical tense in purely abstract terms.

In coming articles, I shall map out in increasing detail the ways in which embodied cognitive insights can inform language learning frames, approaches, and methods, that are at once practical, and implementable with learners and students.

Self-awareness: observing ourselves as the learner — quietening the ego

Being self-aware as a language learner, or the tool of self-awareness, is predominantly a psychological skill. It is also, in my view, one of the most vital tools to learning and becoming fluent in another language.

Self-awareness here means the ability to be aware of how we engage with learning something, to hear our articulations and the way we say and pronounce something, and to observe ourselves engaging with an interlocutor. Too often learners, be it through fear, anxiety, impatience, a simple lack of discipline, race ahead while expressing themselves with little regard for how they are saying what they are saying, or for how they sound, or come across while they are speaking. This isn’t a great approach.

As I love to say, English for many foreign speakers is their calling card — we can only make a first impression once, so our first impression better be our best one.

The first step to nurturing our self-awareness, is an understanding of the role of our ego. Jung has been my guide and teacher in learning about the psyche, more so than any other psychology, simply for the reasons that his knowledge coheres so well with experience and knowledge from other domains. Jung passes the converging-evidence test pretty well in my view. His exposition of our psyche, is for me the most convincing and consistent. Simply applying his principles to everyday practice and experience uncovers a wealth of insights into human behaviour.

Coming back to the point, our ego, as I like to say, is that conscious voice in our head that convinces us about our behaviour in one way or another. The voice may tell us we’re very good or bad at something, the voice may tell us, I don’t care about something, or I really do. The voice may convince us that something is a good idea, when it really isn’t and vice versa. Our self on the other hand, a mostly unconscious part of our psyches, may not agree with what our ego says. This is a form of disintegrity between the self and ego. And it's important, as how we think we may see ourselves, may not actually be how others see us.

By learning to quieten our ego, we make it possible to sense and observe what we are actually doing, rather than what our ego convinces us we may be doing. In the context of speaking another language, our ego may convince us we are speaking more fluently, without errors, and in a way others understand us with ease, when none of these things maybe true, or at least not to the extent we think.

Quietening the ego, as with many things in the psychological realm begins with awareness and acceptance. We first need to be aware of that we are doing something and accept it. The next step is become an observer, a ‘sense-r’. We need to sense what is happening in our environment and how we are behaving and being present in that environment. These are skills that need to be practiced. It’s reinforced by one of my favourite sayings — we are what we practice. It will not come overnight through one moment of trying to quieten the ego. Before we know it, we lapse into our old ways.

Becoming self-aware takes patience and practice, and skilful steps — it shouldn’t become a form of neuroticism.

To avoid this we should practice focusing on presence and sensing, simply sensing our behaviour, and visualising our behaviour, and visualising that behaviour as being different. This creates a new map for our mind and ego to begin to follow. What we don’t want to start doing is allowing our ego to take over with an obsessive, analytical voice, that constantly reproaches our attempts and efforts, and sets in motion a state of never being content with our behaviour and performance. Being present by contrast, allows us to observe our actions and behaviour without judgement, permitting incremental and on-going adjustments, while not becoming neurotic.

Attention: attending to patterns in language and behaviour

Another thing that we should consider along with the fact that language is mostly embodied and the need for self-awareness as a learner, is the role of attention in conversational language learning.

At the most basic level attention is our ability to attend to perceptual stimuli. For instance if I am speaking to someone, I attend to that person, to their speech, way of speaking, facial expressions, body language, while attending less to the surroundings. If I then whip out my phone while attending to that person, as my attention shifts to what is happening on the phone screen, and the need to manipulate buttons there, my ability to attend to my interlocutor diminishes or completely deteriorates. The simple message here is how destructive distractions are to learning. Whenever I am working or writing, I completely remove distractions so that I may fully attend to the task at hand.

Shifting up the gears of attention, our attention should also be regarded as a tool we can hone with practice. We should become better at attending to patterns of speech, or the way words appear in use. Being focused enables us to attend better, and distinguish more detailed, complex patterns in language use. This is a vital skill to making connections between words, phrases, and meanings. It is also a solid basis for building a sophisticated cross-referencing system for language. The less we attend, the fewer references we make, and the harder it is for us to construct a complex picture of language, contextuality, references, and senses.

Attending in this manner is akin to focus, but attention by contrast is a question of where we direct our attention, and focus is what we do once our attention is there.

We can’t begin to focus on something before we have begun attending to it. In language learning, if a learner is not aware of what they should be attending to, they won’t even begin focusing on what they should be focusing on.

In conversational language learning, there is a wealth of information and behaviour the learner needs to attend to. From the outset, the learner must attend to the body language of the teacher. They must look for the coherence between what someone is saying and how they are behaving. Positive and welcoming body language with a specific welcoming or introductory phrase should inform learners how in the target language, speakers utilise such a phrase contextually.

In my own teaching, I make a point to always use contextual learning in this manner. My mantra is every interaction is a learning opportunity, and no learning opportunity should be dismiised. It may be the case that we unknowingly glide over such learning opportunities, but like all things, given practice, we should become better and better at not missing these teachable moments.

The better we get at attending, in learning a language, the better we get knowing what we need to foucs on when our attention is there. Without knowing what to focus on, we would be forever blind jouneying as learners.

Memory — remember, words are like friends

Memory, may fall under the umbrella of raw cognitive skills, however there is much about memory that is also psychological. This is to say, depending on our particular psychological state and attitude we can positively or negatively affect our capacity for committing instances of language to memory.

One way to demonstrate this point best is to think of how we regard memory in a language learning setting, specifically a conversational one. We either have an implicit expectation that an encounter with a word should some how magically lead to memorisation. I dispel this expectation in my article Words are like friends, through the idea we should learn words like we make friends. Not only this, but due to lack of self-awareness as we highlighted above, learners very often do not practice diligence and patience to nurture the process of memorisation.

It should be stressed that very often these psychological ways of learning intersect and work in tandem. In practice this means we should consciously slow ourselves down to create space for conscious engagement with a given word as it arises in dialogue. This is often a challenge for most learners, as they are overwhelmingly accustomed to not interrupting their own train of speech and thought. This is simply a poor habit that has been allowed to fester.

Most would agree that it is far more amenable and gratifying to communicate with individuals who are keenly present and diligent, yet neither sloppy or fawning in conversation. This makes for a rich, nurturing experience. And it is fair to say we would preference such experiences over those that are degenerative and deleterious.

Beyond the plea to learners to slow down and be self aware to promote better memory for language learning, there are more dedicated practices to increase our memory gains.

As adults, we are capable in language learning in ways our younger counterparts aren’t. This is something I explore in an upcoming article Busting the myth that kids learn languages better.

Firstly, as adults we have far superior self-control and discipline to enact the above, slowing down and creating space to facilitate memory. Secondly, maturer learners have a developed encyclopaedic knowledge directory that aids language acquisition. This encyclopaedia of knowledge provides structure to our inferential thinking. Often in language learning, maturer learners are simply able to infer meanings based on native language similarity in a way young learners simply aren’t. This mechanism is extended when we include all knowledge, as we are able to infer and relate our knowledge to instances of language, in a way that improves memory.

For instance, adult learners can much more easily recognise root words and etymological patterns in language learning, in ways kids never can. This ability enables an adult learner to quickly make sense of a cluster of words, and knowing that cluster of words and associating a novel word with that cluster.

This principle supports the concept of the knowledge web. The idea that ultimately all knowledge is structured as a web. Once we learn new items of knowledge, or principles, or ideas, they connect in a web, rather in isolation, or linearly, or chronologically as we learn said fact or idea. And it is this web-like behaviour that permits quick and live knowledge integration. In language learning this is demonstrated by the fact of learning a novel language instance and immediately being able to use it contextually with minimum instruction. Again this is a facility kids are mostly incapable of, until they breach a certain phase of maturity.

On a final note, memory practices and rubrics are also a mostly psychological fact. There is overlap here with what we discuss below concerning discipline and organisation, but suffice to say the habit of taking notes for vocabulary can’t be overstated. The act of writing is neurological, and this in itself helps absorb word and language patterns. More to the point, the act of jotting words down, can serve to document and order our language encounters. This creates material we can go back to and reference.

The way I guide students to prompt memory is using one of my favourite mimetic techniques for language memorisation. This technique involves visualising conversations. With my learners I ask them to visualise and recall the conversational interaction from the beginning, using significant topics or points of interest along the way, or clear shifts in discussion. By visualising the conversation, learners can then associate different circumstances and cues with novel words, phrases, or idioms that were invoked. In this way, I encourage learners to go through a whole interaction picking out words, phrases, and idioms. Students often surprise themselves how well they do in this exercise.

As mentioned before, we are what we practice, and this habit if nurtured well can make all the difference to how we memorise and and recall words in a way that greatly enhances our working vocabularies — we make friends for life.

Motivation, organisation, discipline: in the foundation of the psyche

What could be more psychological than our motivation and purpose.

One of the road blocks I see most frequently is learners falling by the wayside due to their lack of consistent motivation. This is often due to a lack of clearsighted purpose. A reading of Viktor Frankel’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and learning about his logotherapy, was enough to convince me how substantial the role of meaning is to a person’s existence, and thus purpose, in doing anything.

Without a sense of meaning, we can’t sustain ourselves, especially when circumstances, emotions, and physical hardship are all against us. Only a bigger picture perspective and purpose can be our saving grace in such cases.

Knowing why we are putting ourselves through the gruelling task of acquiring a language can mitigate the moments when our motivation can and will be overwhelmed by negativity, despondency, and resignation. The latter not only derail our efforts, but setback our learning in insurmountable ways. We might lose weeks, months, even years, to cycles of motivation, followed by long periods of complete lack of motivation. The outcome is consistent and obvious: a failure to produce progress and further our language competency. An unmonitored spiral of lack of motivation, essentially becomes a vicious circle of entrenched incompetence. It doesn’t have to be that way though.

Here we see an intersection between self-awareness and the ego once again. Self-awareness and ego quietening, as I like to call it in my guiding practice, are both to be regarded as psycho-cognitive tools that we must master. This is not a form of modern mumbo-jumbo to sell a method or technique for self-development, rather this is a conscious tapping into ancient wisdom. Humans have had these psycho-cognitive abilities for millenia, but they haven’t had to beat the drum about them. They were ingrained, preserved, transmitted in customs, rituals, and traditions. Something as modern humans we are often woefully disconnected from, for complex reasons. Suffice to say, these psycho-cognitive abilities had been nurtured over millennia, and passed down generation by generation, as they consisted of abilities and skills indispensable to survival.

Since much of our survival needs have been outsourced, we take less and less personal accountability for our own survival. This has dire consequences for our personal, mental, and physical well-being. It results in the fragmentation or the self, identity, and the holism of well-being.

Once more getting back to the point (I learnt from my philosophy teacher that learning happens in the digressions), self-awareness and the quietening of the ego are essential to getting to grips with motivation and organisation. In fact, I like to think of both as facets of discipline.

Discipline is grounded in having the right motivation to do something, which is itself grounded in meaning and identity. Deeper still is the question of will power. If the will is not willing, things just don’t happen. Most often our ability to do anything will stem from the degree to which our will is willing (I will address the question of will power separately in an upcoming guiding article). Organisation can’t happen if we aren’t even motivated. Organisation can happen once motivation is present, backed by our will, as now we have the right impetus to put things in such an order to direct our motivation to a given destination. In language learning, if we do not get organised, make the appropriate time to watch things, document words, phrases, idioms, revise them, read grammar (you will learn more about this in my article The way you never learnt how to learn grammar), then you’ll forever be chasing after a mirage.

Again, I can only emphasise that the above has nothing to do with your language learning ability, unique  abilities for learning languages for those lucky few who have them, or intellectual capacities. But simple psychological hygiene.

On a final note, before I bow out, I return to the words of Epictetus:

— "It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows."  —

These are words that consistently guide me not only in teaching and guiding others, but in my own learning.

These words also show another way for us to see why the quietening of the ego is one of our most important endeavours on the path to accomplishing anything deeply, and integrating things neurologically.

It also settles beyond doubt learning by its very nature, and thus learning a language, is very much a question of our psyche.