The Dialogue Approach
Dialogue and the Four Language Learning Thresholds

The Psychological Threshold

1. How to Instill Self-Confidence?

In it essential to learn how the particular student best learns. Learning style depends on life-style, but also on interpersonal needs.

As Jung has discovered, people juggle four fundamental interpersonal needs: the needs for validation, acceptance, achievement and security.

Persona Technique training lets the teacher quickly ascertain the fundamental need of the student, the unconscious objective the student himself, as much as the teacher, will seek to attain. In interpersonal relations, according to Charles Osgood, one reveals oneself as either dominant, or compliant, and, on the emotional level one is either expansive or reserved. It is believed, according to the table below, that the dominant expansive learner is primarily pushed by a need for validation (showing his own worth), the non-dominant expansive by the need to be accepted. The dominant reserved personality needs to reach a level of quick results, while the reserved non-dominant needs to reach a feeling of security (learn by the best method, be assured that the method is working and is covering all the important bases).

By responding to the learner’s fundamental need the method avoids learner frustration. In cases where learners are given the opportunity to show that they have improved (validation), or are collaborating (inclusion), or are quickly getting through difficult tasks (achievement), or seeing that they are covering all the steps (security), learners become quickly frustrated and de-motivated, regardless of their attitude toward the target language. The same result applies when the teacher misreads the learner’s needs, for example slowly covering step-by-step detail when the real need is for the student to show progress.