Vocabulary and affective filters

It seems that I've been making a return to previous topics recently, both here and at work, but that's OK: we all need to revisit things from time to time, to re-evaluate and appraise.
I'm returning to a subject that I covered ages ago - namely, is there a linguistic hierarchy of needs?

You've probably heard of Maslow's Hierarchy, and how it relates to things like esteem and self-actualization - here's a diagram:

source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

Anyway, it got me thinking about how some students just never seem to get past the intermediate level, and how some learners seem to resent their learning - that they have a high affective filter.

Now, some of this is understandable from the simple fact that English has a relatively small common core vocabulary, meaning that it's possible to reach a B1 level of use quite quickly. However, progressing beyond this, in particular with stepping beyond the confines of using our basic lemmas (e.g. changing use into useful, useless, usability, or swim to swam, swum, swimming etc) is tougher. However, there is also the fact that some learners simply find it hard to progress because, for them, there is a seeming limitation on them as people caused by the lack of language ability. In particular, I'm thinking of ESOL learners, who have to live, function and work within an English-speaking environment.

Here are three questions to ask your learners: Do you feel 'different' when you speak English? Do you sometimes feel like a child, or disabled? Why?

I think part of the issue is the kind of vocabulary we use to express ourselves. If we were to map the 100 most common English verbs on to Maslow's hierarchy, where would they go? Clearly, verbs such as 'eat', 'drink' and 'sleep' would be in the Physiological category. What about modals? Where would we put those? What about verbs of perception, feeling, and opinion? What happens when we map the entire Common Core against this hierarchy?

It strikes me that as a part of course design, we should consider the psychological effects of teaching certain lexical items and chunks. Put simply, if we can elicit words and phrases that we associate with the 'esteem' and 'self-actualisation' categories, we may well find that we have more contented, more fulfilled and more confident language learners. 

Having said that, we all know that the key to learning any language is a)using it and b) practising it. If a learner is unwilling to do this, he or she will never make much headway. But if a learner is not practising/using simply because he/she believes that they'll never get it, then focusing on the kind of language that makes them feel as if they can talk about anything surely will get them to have greater confidence in their abilities.

We should also, of course, consider what kind of topics students need to be able to discuss - for an adult ESOL learner, for example, he/she may need to handle things such as work and employment (possibly with a specialised vocabulary for their field of work), dealing with their children's schools and so on, so delivering content that allows them to deal confidently with these issues is crucial to making them feel better about language learning.