• Human learning

• Behavioral viewpoint
• Pavlov’s classical behaviorism
• Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov; at the turn of the century conducted a series of
experiments in which he trained a dog to salivate to the tone of a bell through a
procedure that has come to be labeled as classical conditioning
• Learning process: the formation of associations between stimuli and reflexive
responses
• Salivation to the sight or smell of food – unconditioned response
• Salivation to the sound of the bell – conditioned response
• Neutral stimulus (sound of bell) acquired the power to elicit a response (salivation)
• Thorndike's Law of Effect – stimuli that occur after a behavior have an influence on
future behaviors
• Skinner’s operant conditioning
• Neobehaviorist – Skinner added a unique dimension to behavioristic psychology
• Operant behavior is behavior in which one “operates“ on the environment; the
importance of stimuli is deemphasized
• the events or stimuli, i.e. the reinforcers, that follow a response and that tend to
strengthen behavior or increase the probability of a recurrence of that response
constitute a powerful force in the control of human behavior
• reinforcers are far stronger aspects of learning than is mere association of a prior
stimulus with a following response, as in the classical conditioning model
• Operants are classes of responses (crying, sitting down, walking)
• They are emitted and governed by the consequences they produce
• Respondents are sets of responses that are elicited by identifiable stimuli (certain
physical reflex actions)
• Crying can be both an operant and a respondent
• Undesirable behavior is best extinguished if there is no reinforcement whatsoever
• Skinner's Verbal Behavior (1957) described language as a system of verbal operants,
and his understanding of the role of conditioning led to a whole new era in language
teaching around the middle of the twentieth century (e.g. The Audiolingual method)
• Cognitive stance
• Ausubel’s Subsumption theory
• Learning takes place in the human organism through a meaningful process of relating
new events or items to already existing cognitive concepts or propositions – “hanging
new items on existing cognitive pegs“
• Meaning is a clearly articulated and precisely differentiated conscious experience
that emerges when potentially meaningful signs, symbols, concepts, or propositions
are related to and incorporated within a given individual's cognitive structure on a
nonarbitrary and substantive basis
• This relatability accounts for:
• the acquisition of new meanings (knowledge)
• retention
• the psychological organization of knowledge as a hierarchical structure
• the eventual occurrence of forgetting
• Rote vs. meaningful learning
• Rote learning - the mental storage of items having little or no association with
existing cognitive structure
• Meaningful learning, i.e. subsumption – a process of relating and anchoring new
material to relevant established entities in cognitive structures
• As new material enters the cognitive field it interacts with, and is appropriately
subsumed under a more inclusive conceptual system
• Learning situation is meaningful if:
• 1. learners have a meaningful learning set, i.e., a disposition to relate the new
learning task to what they already know
• 2. the learning task itself is potentially meaningful to the learners, i.e., relatable to
the learners' structure of knowledge
• The "secret of good memory" is the secret of forming diverse and multiple
associations with every fact we care to retain
• Memory champion teaches you how to memorize anything
• Systematic forgetting:
• rotely learned materials do not interact with cognitive structure in a
substantive fashion –retention is influenced by the interfering effects of
similar rote materials learned immediately before or after the learning task
(proactive and retroactive inhibition)
• meaningfully learned material – retention is influenced by the properties of
relevant and cumulatively established ideational systems in cognitive
structure with which the learning task interacts; concurrent interfering effects
 have relatively little influence on meaningful learning, and retention is highly
efficient
• Addresses are retained as pan of a meaningful set, while phone numbers,
being self-contained, isolated entities, are easily forgotten
• With meaningfully learned materials forgetting takes place in a much more
intentional and purposeful manner
• Cognitive pruning procedures – the elimination of unnecessary clutter and a clearing
of the way for more material to enter the cognitive field
• Lexical attrition – the loss of second language skills
• Certain aspects of language are more vulnerable to forgetting than others – lexical
items may be more easily lost than idioms, depending on such factors as native
language transfer and interference
• Subtractive bilingualism – learners rely more and more on their L2, which eventually
replaces their L1
• Subsumption theory provides a strong theoretical basis for the rejection of
conditioning models of practice and repetition in language teaching.
• In a meaningful process like second language learning, mindless repetition, imitation
and other rote practices in the language classroom have no place.
• Systematic forgetting has important implications for language learning and teaching:
• In the early stages certain devices (definitions, paradigms, illustrations, or
rules) can facilitate subsumption. They are made initially meaningful by
assigning meaningfulness (low level of subsumption)
• In the process of making language automatic, the devices are systematically
pruned out at later stages of language learning.
• Communicative competence is better achieved by removing unnecessary
barriers to automaticity.
• Constructivist school of thought
• Carl Rogers
• Phenomenological perspective – analysis of the "whole person" as a physical and
cognitive, but primarily emotional, being
• Focused on the development of an individual's self-concept and of his or her personal
sense of reality
• In a nonthreatening environment, a person will form a picture of reality that is
congruent with reality and will grow and learn
• Transformative pedagogy – the goal of education is the facilitation of change and
learning
• Learning how to learn is more important than being taught something from the
"superior" vantage point of a teacher who unilaterally decides what shall be taught
• Teachers become facilitators of learning through the establishment of interpersonal
relationships with learners
• Paolo Freire – Pedagogy of the oppressed
• Students should be allowed to negotiate learning outcomes, to cooperate
with teachers and other learners in a process of discovery, to engage in
critical thinking and to relate everything they do in school to their reality
outside the classroom.
• Theories of learning
• Types of learning
• 1. Signal learning – the individual learns to make a general diffuse response to a
signal (classical conditioned response)
• 2. Stimulus-response learning – the learner acquires a precise response to a
discriminated stimulus. What is learned is a connection (a discriminated operant)
• 3. Chaining – what is acquired is a chain of two or more stimulus-response
connections
• 4. Verbal association – the learning of chains that are verbal; internal links may be
selected from the individual's previously learned repertoire of language
• 5. Multiple discrimination – the individual learns to make a number of different
identifying responses to many different stimuli, which may resemble each other in
physical appearance to a greater or lesser degree. The learning of each stimulus-
response connection is a simple occurrence, however the connections tend to
interfere with one another.
• 6. Concept learning – the learner acquires the ability to make a common response to
a class of stimuli even though the individual members of that class may differ widely
from each other. The learner is able to make a response that identifies an entire class
of objects or events.
• 7. Principle learning – a principle is a chain of two or more concepts. It functions to
organize behavior and experience. In Ausubel's terminology, a principle is a
"subsumer" - a cluster of related concepts.
• 8. Problem solving – requires the internal event referred to as "thinking," previously
acquired concepts and principles are combined in a conscious focus on an unresolved
or ambiguous set of events
• Transfer, interference and overgeneralization
• Human beings approach any new problem with an existing set of cognitive
structures – through insight, logical thinking, and various forms of hypothesis testing,
they call upon whatever prior experiences they have had and whatever cognitive
structures they possess to attempt a solution.
• Transfer, interference and overgeneralization are several manifestations of one
principle of learning – the interaction of previously learned material with a present
learning event
• Transfer is the carryover of previous performance or knowledge to subsequent
learning.
• Positive transfer – prior knowledge benefits the learning task (a previous item is
correctly applied to present subject matter)
• Negative transfer – previous performance disrupts the performance of a second
task; also known as interference (previously learned material interferes with
subsequent material in such a way that a previous item is incorrectly transferred or
incorrectly associated with an item to be learned)
• Generalization – important strategy in human learning
• To generalize is to infer or derive a law, rule, conclusion, usually from the observation
of particular instances (c.f. meaningful learning)
• Overgeneralization in FLA – learner acts within the target language, generalizing a
particular rule beyond legitimate bounds (past tense of go is goed, of fly is flied)
• Interference and overgeneralization are negative counterparts of transfer and
generalization
• All generalizing involves transfer, all transfer involves generalizing
• Inductive and deductive reasoning
• Two aspects of the generalization process
• Inductive reasoning: a person stores a number of specific instances and induces a
general law, rule or conclusion that governs or subsumes the specific instances
• Deductive reasoning is a movement from a generalization to specific instances:
specific subsumed facts are inferred or deduced from a general principle
• discussion
• 1. Research Findings: Thorndike's Law of Effect emphasised the importance of stimuli
that occur after a desired behavior. Skinner’s concept of an emitted response also
focused on the power of reinforcement for long-term learning.
• Teaching Implications: Teachers in language classrooms often offer stimuli or
reinforcement after a student performs in the foreign language. What kind of stimuli
have your teachers used to reward your efforts?
• 2. Research Findings: Olshtain described language attrition as a reversal of the
acquisition process, while Obler said that "neurolinguistic blocking" contributes to
long-term forgetting of a language.
• Teaching Implications: What can you do as a learner to help prevent such attrition,
and what kinds of techniques do you think a teacher could use to prolong the
beneficial effects of learning a language in the classroom?
• 3. Research Findings: Both Carl Rogers and Paolo Freire stressed the importance of
learner-centered classrooms where the teacher and learners negotiate learning
outcomes, engage in discovery teaming, and relate the course content to students'
reality outside the classroom.
• Teaching Implications: How have you observed these ideas in action in your own
language learning experience (or teaching experience)?