among the components of any attitude, changes in the cognitive component
will be reflected in changes in the affective and behavioural components.
(1971,142)
I strongly believe that most of the information that I gave to the participants was useful
more or less, depending on each individual situation, to change certain attitudes towards
self-direction. Moreover, the experience of trying things out in a self-directed mode that
the learners experienced may also enhance the possibilities to change their attitudes. As
Triandis explains, attitudes may also change “through direct experience with the attitude
object” and by behaving “in a way that is inconsistent with his existing attitudes” (ibid.).
In fact, I did not arbitrarily choose the example of anxiety to discuss the issue of
negative attitudes and aversives. I purposely selected it because it connects perfectly with
self-esteem, the last aspect that I want to mention under the heading of authenticity. Self-
esteem has proven to be an issue in learning. It definitively marks a difference in
learning outcomes. The story of E as a language learner and her results in the self task (p.
156) provide an excellent illustration of low self-esteem and its detrimental effect on
learning outcomes. Obviously, this is an important factor to take into account when
working with students with this tendency. However, I think that self-esteem has to be
considered in a broader sense, and here is where we can use anxiety, and its role in the
regulation of language use, again as an example for self-directed learning pursuit.
It is a common practice in education to overcome self-esteem by praising and
encouraging. However, the danger is that for students who have learning problems,
according to Barber, the praise and encouragement goes for any “shoddy work”
(1997,182). In other words, the expectations seem to get lower in order to praise not to
be out of context. However, this treatment for self-esteem seems to go contrary to the
regulation of language use, as stated above. Lowering expectations would certainly not
work for the production in language learning for it is the pressure of trying new
experiences that will force learners to develop their interlanguages and become users of
the target language languages.
The pupil who expects little of her or himself and of whom little is expected
is, very likely, headed for failure (ibid.)
This is certainly true within the particular context of language learning. Let me
reproduce here, Barber’s diagram showing the relation between expectations and self-
esteem (Fig. 8.2):
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