The students’ thoughts are a source of power when they are used correctly in
the EFL classroom, but, on the contrary, they may be an obstacle to learning
and cause emotional instability if the students do not use them well.
According to general studies of psychology, thoughts can be classified as
relevant and irrelevant. A relevant thought takes place when a person
dedicates his thinking to a specific task. For instance, a student is doing a
multiple-choice exercise about phrasal verbs, and makes hypothesis and
deductions from his knowledge of phrasal verbs in order to do the exercise.
Then, as those relevant thoughts take place, other thoughts that are not
related directly to that exercise emerge. Those can be irrelevant thoughts
when they do not help in doing the task, and interfere with relevant thoughts.
They refer to intrapersonal matters, as self-efficacy, motivation, self-esteem,
etc. For instance, the student thinks: “I won’t be able to do the exercise” or
“I should have studied harder”, etc. However, these irrelevant thoughts can
be facilitating to the task if the student is able to analyze those thoughts and
change them into positive ones: “I will do my best” or “Although I have not
studied hard, I will give it a chance” .This paper shows how cognition and
emotion relate to each other and how relevant and irrelevant thoughts are
created. It will also explain how the language learner employs self-defense
mechanisms as s/he finds difficulties or aversion in doing learning tasks. As
a general consideration, irrelevant thoughts can be as important as relevant
thoughts in learning a language. Moreover, many researchers claim that
they are responsible for determining success or failure in ordinary
classroom learning tasks.