Tuesday's Tip for Language Learning: Avoid Emotional Reasoning
Excerpt from Think Yourself into Becoming a Language Learning Super Star Avoid Emotional Reasoning If you are an emotional reasoner, you may get completely derailed on your journey to good language proficiency because you let your emotions rule your reason. Emotional reasoning, often lumped in with cognitive distortions (Beck, 1979), lets your emotional state, which can be a result of your academic experiences or a result of the events in your life or both, color your attitude, whether that is toward your course, your studying, your homework, your teacher, your textbook, your assignments, your classmates, or any other aspect of your academic life. Definition of emotional reasoning Emotional reasoning feels like you are riding a roller coaster. Your performance chugs upward, then speeds downward, over and over. Under these conditions, your performance is tracking with these emotional peaks and valleys, ups and downs, and not with your study. Here are some examples: •