SOME AFFECTIVE, PSYCHOLINGUISTIC, AND NEUROLINGUISTIC FACTORS IN ESL ACQUISITION
There is an interesting relationship in English between the various connotations of the word affect. As a transitive verb, it may mean to produce an effect (a change) in something or somebody, or it may mean to give the appearance of, to pretend, to feign. As a noun, it stands for the experience of feelings or emotions, "ranging from the utmost pain to the utmost pleasure, from the simplest to the most complex sensations, and from the most normal to the most pathological reactions. Affect, or 'feeling tone', colors our entire psychic life and is experienced on both a conscious and an unconscious level" (Goldenson, 1984, p. 21). The formal relationship between these various connotations implies that an emotional or feeling state produces an effect on the environments (external and internal) while giving an appearance which may or may not betray the inner feelings, depending on the interlocutor's perception. Perhaps the most important aspects of this multiconnotative situation to remember are Ferdinand de Saussure's concept of "the arbitrariness of the sign" and Wilhelm von Humboldt's remark that "Language makes infinite use of finite media", from a cognitive perspective, and that affects permeate all communication, from a sensory perspective.
Affective information is "an integral part of real-world communication" (Morley, 1991, p. 88). Therefore, instructional activities and materials must "consider the affective dimension which encompasses attitudes, emotions, and feelings" (Ibid, p. 88).
It is to be noted that linguistic, paralinguistic, and extralinguistic cues are used in communication. Because of the affective dimension of all human communication, messages are infused with linguistic, paralinguistic, and extralinguistic connotations. Words, intrasentential, and intersentential structures map an "affect" dimension onto the linguistic informati...