Motivation and Emotions in French Language Teaching

‒ 404 ‒ CAPÍTULO 21 MOTIVATION AND EMOTIONS IN FRENCH LANGUAGE TEACHING ADAMANTÍA ZERVA University of Seville 1. INTRODUCTION The members of a society have at their disposal linguistic and extralinguistic resources to communicate and express their feelings. Anthropology studies have highlighted the importance of the emotional part of the human being as well as the relationship between language and society (Besnier, 1990, p. 420). Plato in his work Πολιτεία (Republic) (514a – 521b) refers to the role that education plays in the evolution of the human being and its influence on the sentimental entity of the individual that corresponds to the soul. From this perspective, it can be affirmed that the human being does not only have a cognitive entity but an emotional one as well. Besnier (1990, p. 431) points out that emotion is never absent from an interactional situation despite the fact that some situations can be described as if it were. 2. AIM AND METHODOLOGY In the present study, our aim is to address the problems posed by the teaching of French as a foreign language in the virtual mode and how the online methodology affects students´motivation. In the first place, we will refer to the main difficulties of online teaching of French as a foreign language in the university. Secondly, we will compare the degree of satisfaction of the students concerning motivation in the face-to- face and virtual modes. Our methodology will be based on the ‒ 405 ‒ contrastive analysis between the results of the students who took the French language course in the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 academic years to verify how the health crisis and the online teaching methodology have affected students´ motivation. 3. EMOTION AND AFFECTIVITY IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING It would be convenient at this point to define the concept of 'emotion' that provides the term 'affectivity' with its conceptual content. Besnier (1990, p. 421) points out that there are three categories - feelings, emotion and affect - to which mood and attitude can be added: Psychological and folk models in the West distinguish among feelings, a broad category of person-centred psychophysiological sensations, emotion, a subset of particularly "visible" and "identifiable" feelings, and affect, the subjective states that observers ascribe to a person on the basis of the person's conduct. [Two related categories, mood and attitude, also play an important, if equivocal, role in Western psychological discourse.]. Likewise, the same author highlights that the effect of emotion on the language that is intimately linked to the individual depends on multiple factors, including cultural ones (Besnier, 1990, p. 431). Consequently, it is difficult to bring together all the meanings that the term 'affectivity' represents and relate it to specific contexts given its variability according to different cultures. On the other hand, Damasio (1994: 143) refers to two types that reflect the emotional state: emotion (emotion) and feeling (feeling), pointing out that some feelings are related to emotions but not all. He defines the two concepts as follows: That process of continuous monitoring that experience of what your body is doing while thoughts about specific contents roll by is the essence of what I call a feeling. If an emotion is a collection of changes in body state connected to particular mental images that have activated a specific brain system, the essence of feeling an emotion is the experience of such changes in juxtaposition to the mental images that initiated the cycle. (Damasio, 1994: 145). However, it must be borne in mind that the emotional factor plays a fundamental role in all types of learning and, when it comes to a foreign ‒ 406 ‒ language, it is a decisive factor that fosters the learner's approach to the language and target culture. Arnold and Brown (2000, p. 19) state that the affective dimension of learning completes the cognitive one. Thus, the two coexist since, as LeDoux (1996, p. 39) points out, the mind cannot be perceived without emotions. Traditional teaching methods were based on cognitivist theories focused on the mental processes involved in learning. Therefore, the parameters related to emotions were not taken into account. In the opinion of Carbonero (1996, p. 22), the application of effective strategies in the teaching of languages aims to 'give support and positive stimuli, avoiding bad emotions and disappointments in their learning process'. According to Arnold and Brown (2000, pp. 20-21) the importance of affectivity in teaching lies mainly in two parameters: En primer lugar, la atención a los aspectos afectivos puede lograr una mayor eficacia en el aprendizaje de idiomas. Cuando tratamos la dimensión afectiva de los alumnos de idiomas, nos debemos preocupar tanto de la forma de solucionar problemas originados por las emociones negativas como de crear y utilizar emociones más positivas y facilitadoras. En presencia de emociones excesivamente negativas como la ansiedad, el temor, la tensión, la ira o la depresión, puede peligrar nuestro potencial óptimo de aprendizaje.[…]. Por otro lado, al estimular diferentes factores emocionales positivos como la autoestima, la empatía o la motivación, se facilita extraordinariamente el proceso de aprendizaje de idiomas.[…]. Un segundo motivo para interesarnos por la afectividad en el aula de idiomas va más allá de la enseñanza de idiomas e incluso de lo que tradicionalmente se ha considerado el campo académico. […] Mientras enseñamos el idioma también podemos educar a nuestros alumnos a vivir de forma más satisfactoria y a ser miembros responsables de la sociedad. Para conseguirlo, nos tenemos que interesar por su naturaleza y sus necesidades tanto cognitivas como afectivas. La relación entre afectividad y enseñanza de idiomas es, por tanto, de carácter bidireccional. La preocupación por la afectividad puede mejorar el aprendizaje y la enseñanza de idiomas, pero el aula de idiomas puede, a su vez, contribuir de forma significativa a educar a los alumnos de manera afectiva. As is already known, formal education contributes to the development of linguistic and sociocultural competence. It belongs to the social ‒ 407 ‒ sphere whose educational function helps the person to form their identity. In the first place, the attitude of the teacher who acts as an educator is essential. Their priority must be to establish a good relationship with the students and to know their educational needs and particularities. Learning a language does not consist of a mechanical process and that is why the degree of motivation that characterizes the learners contributes or not to better assimilate the information. It is an unquestionable fact that having a positive attitude towards the target language and culture depends to a large extent on the teacher's ability to influence their students and establish an affective relationship (Poromanska, 2003, p. 122). A fundamental principle is a respect that you have to instil towards the culture of others. As mentioned above, the speakers of a language interpret reality in a certain way that does not always coincide with that of other people who speak different languages. As a result, foreign language learners need to be tolerant and more receptive to foreign cultures. Then, it is essential to arouse interest and love towards the target language. It is not learned with the same ease when said process is carried out with satisfaction and desire to learn. The student comes to class happy, and he is very receptive to new information. So, affectivity in learning must be present in the strategies and objectives that are set but, above all, in the relationship between the teacher and the student. When you learn a foreign language, you are taught a different way of thinking and acting. Following this, one of the objectives of teaching is to broaden the experiences of the individual. Damasio (1994, p. 104) points out that these are ´dispositional representations´ that encompass both innate experiences - if it can be said - as well as acquired throughout life. Stevick (2000, p. 65) considers that teaching is ´simply the act of helping someone to make the necessary changes in their internal resources´. And, he adds that it is a long-lasting but variable process so that he distinguishes between learning, which is a resource of 'variable aspect', while memory represents the lasting aspect (Stevick, 2000, p. 65). It is difficult to convey this new perspective on life if the relationship between student and teacher is not good. Reciprocal respect and good predisposition are necessary. A good teacher makes his students aware ‒ 408 ‒ of their way of being and seeing things. Part of their experiences guides them to obtain new ones and evolve as people. Damasio (1994, p. 132- 134) mentions the internal mechanisms that make the different structures that usually come together according to experience come together. For this reason, Damasio (1994, p. 100) formulates the theory that every time we remember something, what we are doing is reconstructing something new based on experience. Likewise, the teacher's job is to create a good dynamic in the group because it has been shown that the influence exerted by the questions and comments of classmates is greater than that of the teacher. All these factors are intrinsic drives that motivate behaviour. As is to be understood, the affective factor in learning depends largely on the teacher and the relationship established between him and the students. In our view, this factor is absent in virtual learning and is one of the drawbacks of the teaching of this type. The student who attends this type of learning must be highly motivated and be very aware of their responsibilities. In this sense, we believe that the teacher's attitude influences the way of assimilating the didactic contents. He adapts the didactic strategies to each student and a dialogue is created between them that results in the learner's participation in the new information. Not only the content is important but also the method of learning varies according to the students. Often, the teaching of a foreign language focuses on transmitting the theoretical aspects of the phenomena (differences between ser/estar, verb tenses, use of the subjunctive and others) without contextualizing the different uses and their function in the discourse. Language is indeed an abstract notion and many concepts are difficult to determine. The role of every teacher is to transform abstract ideas into functions and make learners know how and when to use them. Language is much more than a structure; it is the means to express ideas and feelings. Each form carries a meaning explicitly or implicitly. And we must teach students how to decipher this information. Therein lies the difference between learning with a computer as a teacher or a natural person. Therefore, it can be said that the teacher's attitude is very important. In this work, we have focused on interpersonal relationships and the first ‒ 409 ‒ relationship that affects learning is the one established between the teacher and the students. We must not forget that student-centred teaching forces the teacher to make a deep reflection on himself and his teaching method. Affectivity is an important parameter in all human behaviour. Bearing in mind that in the human organism, all functions are linked to the emotional factor, it is possible to understand why in situations of stress, learning is blocked, and it is even impossible to remember the most basic notions. 4. RESULTS To detect the level of French language acquisition, we compared the results of the exams that are reflected in the following figure (Figure 1). FIGURE 1. Levels of French language acquisition according to the type of learning. Three levels are distinguished according to the degree of acquisition of the sociolinguistic competence that corresponds to the act of denying a reservation: Level 1 (basic competence)/ Level 2 (inter-mediate ‒ 410 ‒ competence) / Level 3 (advanced competence). As we can see, according to the results of face-to-face learning the vast majority of the students (96.7%) have assimilated the sociolinguistic content and have developed an adequate competence to the situational context, while only 3.3% developed an inadequate competence. Moreover, we emphasize that it is very positive that, according to the final evaluation, no student is at level 1, which reflects that the acquisition level is insufficient. 6. CONCLUSION We could therefore conclude that the online methodology has been very successful concerning the results obtained but it didn´t stimulate motivation. The objective of learning a foreign language is usually to acquire the communicative competence that will allow adequate interaction in the target language to convey concepts and feelings as well as interpret them properly. Finally, we would like to confirm that, in our opinion, the educational system does not promote emotional development in learning. The reasons are attributed to the educational tradition that lacks effective objectives related to affectivity. It focuses on the cognitive aspects of learning without taking into account the fact that the person feels before thinking. As we have seen in teaching practice, in cases in which the emotional world has been stimulated at the same time as cognition, we have obtained the best results. However, there is a need to develop French teacher training programs because the training and preparation of teachers are important in this regard to enable them to better perform their teaching activity. 8. REFERENCES Arnold, J. & Brown, D. H. 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