As has been stated previously in this text, the student's affective side exerts a tremendous influence on the cognitive and vice versa. Positive feelings and attitudes can compensate to a certain extent for a certain lack of cognitive capabilities, just as negative attitudes and feelings can diminish the most gifted academic potential. Otherwise, the nation's classes would not be filled with vast numbers of so-called overachievers and underachievers. (Actually, given what is known at the present time, one is led to the conclusion that there, is no such animal. Everyone achieves in accord with his cognitive, affective-social, and psychomotor capabilities. The problem is to free the cognitive and psychomotor potential from the debilitating effects of any negative affective- social factors.) The influential role played by affective-social characteristics on academic achievement is especially important in second-language classes. In these classes the student is taken into new and unfamiliar territory in which positive student attitudes—confidence, cooperation, participation, and perseverance—are of critical importance.
Some students come to the second-language class replete with a negative predisposition toward the class itself. This attitude is especially prevalent among those students who are forced by one means or another into taking the class. Add to this the hesitation and misgivings many people have about treading new waters as they move into a different linguistic and cultural world, and it is clear that the first task of the second-language teacher is to try to make
the students feel comfortable. She will encourage them as they attempt to comprehend new linguistic structures, and she will support them in their initial and subsequent halting, stumbling attempts to create sentences to. express themselves. Second, she has an obligation to make the content of the course interesting to the students. Third, she should seek ways to make the material intellectually stimulating to the students. That is, the content should be such that the students feel there is something in the course that is worth the time and effort to learn. And last, the students should feel a sense of accomplishment as they proceed through the materials.
A positive attitude toward the course is especially important in acquiring the productive skills. In the performance of the productive skills (speaking and writing), language is generated internally. Thus, achievement of a functional level of proficiency in these two skills is dependent upon student incentive as well as cognitive ability. (In this author's opinion, the fact that some students learn to speak a second language while others do not can be explained by a lack of the needed internal incentives required to generate creative language utterances.) In dealing with the productive skills, the teacher is obligated to pay as much attention to affective-social factors as to cognitive factors.
Vigotsky (1961) points out that productive skills originate out of the individual's feelings, needs, and emotions. One can well postulate that communication in the receptive skills is also influenced by affective-social factors. The point being made is that communication divorced from the students' feelings and attitudes is in all likelihood not very meaningful to them. Since the purpose of language is to communicate, and since communication seems to involve affective as well as cognitive aspects, teaching-learning activities that incorporate both aspects appear to be the most promising in the second-language class.
LISTENING COMPREHENSION