Low Affective Filter

Federico Riva TEFL Information Teaching Ideas Which methodology uses music to calm us down before learning? It is called Suggestopedia. How does that work? In the 1970’s Georgi Lozanov introduced a new teaching method called Suggestopedia. As psychological theory was developing, one of the ideas that emerged was called the affective filter. The affective filter is a barrier to learning; it's one of the reasons why we are inhibited in our learning of a language. There are two main elements to the affective filter, two sets of factors; these are known as internal and external factors. The external factors to learning may be just simple things such as external noise, people talking to us while we're trying to learn for example. Perhaps more important are the internal factors and for the...  [Read more]

Federico Riva Teaching Ideas This blog post focuses on the theories, methods and techniques of teaching, which are the three elements that make up any methodology and we can start with a statement; Some teachers believe that the intelligence of their own children is due to their genes, whilst the intelligence shown by their students is due to their teaching. This is an interesting statement because it contains within it a philosophical argument and it's a philosophical argument about the way in which we learn. Basically this first part of the sentence is saying that the intelligence of their own children comes about due to a natural process of genetic inheritance, so that it could be said to be due to nature. This is exactly the opposite of the second half of the sentence, which is...  [Read more]

Anna Domiczek Alumni Experiences Teaching Ideas Songs and music are such an important part of an ESL preschool curriculum. Not only are they fun, but they are also very powerful tools to help young students learn English in a fun and entertaining way. Learning a second language at the preschool level needs to be experienced through engaging activities - words and actions need to go in tandem. Songs allow the children to move along and learn in a pleasant, fun way, in accordance with the TPR technique. They also serve as a tool to lower students’ affective filter - according to the famous linguist Stephen Krashen’s theory (1983), students can develop a blockage/filter toward their study because of a negative emotional attitude. When that filter is low, thanks to triggering...  [Read more]