THE AFFECTIVE FILTER AND THE SENSE OF HUMOUR

“What we learn with pleasure we never forget.”

― Alfred Mercier

In pairs, choose any of these articles to have a better idea about The Affective Filter Hypothesis by Krashen* and maintain a little discussion about his idea, up to which point you relate to it, you agree with it, or have taken it into account along your career.

An Affective Filter in Language Learning

The Affective Filter and Language Learning

Is the Affective Filter Blocking Instruction?

Lowering the Affective Filter with Communicative Tasks

Then, try to seriously be in the shoes of a student that has no choice in deciding whether to learn a new language or not. L2 classes distress him considerably: he feels embarrassed at being the center of attention when asking for clarification or when making mistakes. So, he steps back from collaborative tasks. Imagine this person is also not good at maths, EP, arts or whichever the integrated content is.

We are going to pick one of the activities of our CLIL lesson and "soften it" thinking of this student.

So, in this case our mission has not to do with general guidelines about our lessons or our attitude to prevent the affective filter from blocking our students.

We are going to focus on one with specific activity and re-do it being HUMOUR the only criteria to take into account. 

After one looks into Krashen's work a bit deeper, they find different ways to interpret his ideas or to implement them in the classroom. However, there is always a "leitmotif": humour brings laughter, laughter relieves stress.

So, we are going to experience this together to discuss about the  extra-value that this single action can mean. 

Bring your proposal to the classroom and let magic happen!

For this and many other reasons, even though Krashen has been seriously criticized since he presented his five Hypothesis regarding language acquisition, he is a pedagogue who I deeply respect. His legacy has been critical for the Communicative Approach to become the language teaching's core. 

Among all his wise observations and suggestions, the one to be honoured most is precisely his ability to take learners inner processes so seriously and yet come up with the simplest solution ever: Laughter as a pedagogic tool.

Pay attention to the fact that this is a subtle but refined skill. I assume that if you chose this job, you have seen that laughter is the best medicine.

 Let's be in charge of stop making schools the place where they hold their laughter.

Might CLIL be eventually the way to get there? A revolution to actually deliver the kind of lessons that children deserve and teachers would love to implement? 

Shouldn't we all enjoy this precious ability that we have -to learn together-? We need to stop struggling and making learners struggle.

Does anyone forget those moments in life when they burst out laughing?

I'll let you reflect.

* Here is a link to a complete work by Krashen for those interested in going still deeper: Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition