LECTURE SEVEN (I)

TEACHING STRATEGIES

AND CLASSROOM TECHNIQUES

By Alec

From the title we understand that the following course consists of two parts—teaching strategies and classroom techniques. The former includes sections 1—2, and the latter, the rest two of the five sections.

1.       THEORIES OF LEARNING

There are two basic theories that concern us as teachers of English language teaching: the cognitive theory and the behaviorist/associative theory. The former is concerned with knowledge and suggests that we learn by insight, interpretation and problem solving. Bruner and Miller are its great exponents. The latter theory is concerned with responses and says we learn by trial and error. Its great exponents are Pavlov and Skinner.

There are several factors that affect the learning process.

a.           Motivation has been described as an internal psychophysiological process, initiated by some need which leads to activity intended—consciously or otherwise—to fulfil that need. What are the factors that motivate? Incentives: reward is preferable to punishment. Success motivates while failure does not—at least, not as a rule. Material learned in small, easy stages is preferable to material taught in long, difficult steps.

b.          An individual’s capacity to learn depends on his native ability, previous training, and so on,

c.           Repetition or practice is essential to learning any sort of skill. Remember: active repetition is better than passive repetition; spaced repetition is better than concentrated repetition; repetition is essential for memorization but rote learning of meaningless material is dangerous.

d.          Cognitive theories of learning lay great stress on understanding but associative theories do not disregard it. Certain skills can be mastered without understanding, e.g. driving a car, but this is not so when learning a language. Unfamiliar, unexpected and meaningless things are difficult to learn and to grasp. The more meaningful the material, the more easily it can be learned.

The theories of learning, generally speaking, can be described as follows:

(1) Conditioned Reflex

Pavlov, who was physiologist, not a psychologist, discovered that after a number of occasions when a certain phenomenon (i.e. the ticking of a metronome) had preceded the placing of food in a dog’s mouth, the salivary reflex, which is a natural reflex in response to food in the mouth, would appear in response to the ticking of the metronome. This learned reflex he called the conditioned reflex (CR) and the abnormal stimulus which aroused it the conditioned stimulus (CS). The food was the unconditioned stimulus, as it would normally arouse the salivary reflex (the unconditioned reflex) and this unconditioned stimulus came to be known as the reinforcement. If the reinforcement were not supplied during a number of trials, the condition would finally cease to appear. This process was called extinction.

In Pavlov’s experiments, the conditioned stimulus did not appear at the same time as the unconditioned stimulus but always shortly before it, thus arousing the conditioned reflex before the unconditioned reflex. Unlike Thorndike’s response, which is strengthened by reinforcement, Pavlov’s conditioned reflex was not instrumental in obtaining reinforcement for the animal, since the reinforcement was given automatically whether the conditioned reflex was given or not. This Pavlovian situation show the pattern of what is called classical conditioning. Thorndike’s learned response was more akin to what has come to be known as instrumental or operant conditioning, this being the main area of research by B. F. Skinner.

(2) Connectionism

Trial-and-error learning or, as Thorndike put it, “selecting and connecting”. The individual tries out various possible responses to a stimulus situation until one proves to be appropriate. It is connected with the law of effect, which is discussed below.

(3) Contiguous Conditioning

Guthrie, whose approach to psychology is behaviouristic, rejected the necessity for reinforcement in favor of contiguity (happening at the same time), stating that a response that occurred in the presence of a combination of stimuli would tend to recur in a situation where these stimuli were reproduced. Reward or a satisfying state of affairs did not increase the possibility of a preceding response being repeated but did reduce the possibility of other responses recurring in the presence of existing stimuli, thus preserving the response in the form in which it occurred. In the development of a habit, according to this theory, movements must be practiced in the precise form which will later be required. In other words, we learn what we do.

(4) Field Theory

Kurt Lewin with whom this theory is associated began his career with the Berlin gestalt group, but branched out into his own areas of special interest. Like Kofka, he took his concept from physics of a dynamic field, like a magnetic field, where all particles interact with each other and each particle is therefore subject to forces determined by patterns in the field at a particular movement. He concentrated his research on motivation, which he conceived as energy related to psychological tension systems. His most important concept was that of “life space” within which behavior takes place. Much of his research was in the area of social psychology. With relation to the law of effect, he drew attention to many features of the “behavioral environment” and the social environment which determine what will be rewarding and what will be punishing (success or failure to the individual).

(5) Functionalism

Avery old school of psychology, functionalism is eclectic and its tenets are experimental rather than theoretical. Functionalists ask how and why as well as what, seeking the functional relationship between variables in the study of human behavior. They draw on the findings and vocabulary of various theoretical positions, always experimenting to fill in the gaps and to explain the difficult cases which do not fit into other theories. They experiment with humans as well as animals and are inclined to research what has some practical use and application. Functionalists have carried out valuable research on problems of human learning and motivation. Workers in this school include Woodworth, Irion, Hilgard, Melton, and Underwood.

(6) Gestalt Theory

From the German, gestalt, meaning shape or pattern. Gestalt psychology is quite distinct from behaviorism. It dates from the early 20^th century and it has devoted a great deal of attention to perceptual processes, producing a body of experimentation different from that of behaviorists (Pavlov, Thorndike) who prefers to limit themselves to the physically observable. Unlike the behaviorists, the gestalt group did not reject the method of introspection as a source of information. To them, a whole act has a significance which gives meaning to its parts, as it is from this emphasis that the school developed its name. A gestalt is a form, and there is a form which is present in a whole which is lost when the parts are examined in detail without reference to their relationship to the whole. Rearranged, the parts make up a different whole which has a different form or gestalt. This is clearly illustrated in the notes which make up a musical tune. Eherenfels in Austria first called attention to this gestalt. Wertheimer, in association with Kofka and Kohler, founded this important school of psychology.

(7) Habit Formation

Habit is the facility to use the units and patterns of a language at conversational speed with attention on the message and not on the language units or patterns as such. To some psychologist, habit is response facilitation, and it is the secondary reinforcement which constitutes the habit. This is why the response occurs, not automatically but selectively when hope is aroused by the response-correlated and environmental stimuli. Basic to the Skinnerian theory of habit formation, reinforcement is essential if habits are to be strengthened and Politzer affirms that the skill of a teacher lies not in punishing and correcting wrong responses, but in producing situations where the students is induced to respond correctly. Therefore, habit strengthening is a strengthening of associations between stimulus and response.

According to Skinner, reinforcement is essential if habits are to be strengthened and the probability of their recurrence increased. This concept is basic to behavioristic psychological theories.

(8) Law of Associative Shifting

Thorndike propounded the law of associated shifting, by which a response that continues through a number of fundamental changes in the stimulating situation may eventually be elicited by a completely different stimulus. These ideas are not unlike the notions of reinforcement and the conditioned stimulus which were to grow out of interest in the work of the Russian physiologist, Pavlov.

(9) Law of Effect

Thorndike’s law of effect states that “when a modifiable connection is made and is accompanied by or followed by a satisfying state of affairs, the strength of the connection is increased.”

(10) Law of Pregnanz

A law formulated by gestalt psychologists. As Rivers explains, in perceiving an object, our senses tend to organize it so that its gestalt has regularity, symmetry and simplicity. Irregularities are leveled out and normalized. This process is aided by familiarity or a set to see it in a certain way.

(11) Mediation

Neo-behaviorists like Osgood are interested in inferred mediating processes and refer to them in terms of stimulus and response. According to the formula Osgood proposes, a stimulus has a number of internal stimuli which impinge upon the organism simultaneously. These become conditioned to the complex of reactions which the object itself arouses. Later, they continue to elicit part of the total reaction to that object and thus become signs of the object. Part of this reaction becomes a stable mediation process. When these mediating reactions are aroused, they cause self-stimulation which sets in motion certain sequences which may be aroused by the object itself or associated stimuli. The same formula is used by Osgood to explain “meaning” in language usage, the word as a sign arousing some part of the total reaction which would have been aroused by the reaction or the event itself.

(12) Operant Conditioning

B. F. Skinner has consistently espoused the strict behaviorist position of drawing psychological conclusions only from the physically observable. He divides behavior into respondent behavior, where a known stimulus elicits a response, and operant behavior, where a spontaneous response is emitted for which the stimulus is not known or under the control of the experimenter. Parallel to this, he speaks of two types of conditioning, type S and type R. Type S represents the conditioning of response behavior, where the reinforcement is natural and correlated with the stimuli and it follows the classical conditioning (Pavlovian) paradigm. According to Skinner, type S is rarely found; type R, where the response is correlated with reinforcement, is what Skinner calls “operant” or “instrumental” conditioning. This, he says, produces the commonest form of behavior.

(13) Purposive Behaviorism or Expectancy Theory

A different behaviorism from Skinner’s concept of reinforcement or reward as an essential element in learning or habit formation emerged with Tolman, who called himself a “purposive behaviorist”. To him, behavior was not adequately described in terms of its strict physical and psychological details, but he believed each component of behavior must be viewed as part of a large picture of behavior, which is goal-directed or purposive. To Tolman, what an animal learns is a means to an objectively determinable end. By what appears to be trial-and-error behavior, the animal explores the situation until it finds a way that will lead it to its goal. The animal thus has goal expectancy that influences its behavior. Tolman introduced the concept of intervening variables between stimulus and response (S-R). These are not mentalistic, but may be such things as appetite, physical needs, motor skills, or such cognitive elements as hypotheses about means to a goal. Success is considered by Tolman not to reinforce behavior but to confirm the expectancy of the animal. In this way, an attraction is established between the initial drive and the goal-object. Tolman also introduced the concept of VTE (vicarious trial-and-error behavior) and maintained that it indicated perceptual and cognitive processes controlling behavior, which draws near to gestalt thinking.

(14) Revised Two Factor Theory

Some neo-behaviorists, like Mowrer, have been interested in fear or anxiety as an intervening variables. Mowrer believes the emotions of hope and fear are central to the learning process. His revised two factor theory is an attempt to demonstrate that Pavlovian or classical conditioning and Thorndikian trial-and-error learning are fundamentally a single type, which he calls “sign learning”, the organism learning to react to signals or signs as well as to the things signalized. According to Mowrer’s distinctive theory, it is emotions which are conditionable, not behavior, and so any conditioned response is an emotional response (part of the mediating reaction) which acts as a drive excites the individual to action. These mediating reactions constitute habit, not the specific behavior they produce.

(15) Systematic Drive Reduction Theory

Hull set out to develop a theory of behavior based on Pavlov’s laws of conditioning. He wished to establish a system with definite laws which could be tested by experiment, so that it would be possible to predict behavior as well as describe it. Among other things, he included in his system Tolman’s concept of intervening variable (IV). Hull was primarily interested in habit formation and accepted the idea that reinforcement is of basic importance. The most important IV is drive, and reinforcement is considered to be effective in forming habits because it reduces drive. Under the influence of Miller, Hull moved to the position that reduction of the intensity of the stimuli associated with the drive is as reinforcing as the actual reduction of the drive, i.e. food in the mouth does not reduce hunger, but it is reinforcing as it reduces the drive-stimulus or craving for food. This leads to the concept of secondary reinforcement, in that things that are not actually drive-or-need-reducing are consistently associated with the things that reduce drive-stimuli. Similarly, thing which are consistently associated with drive-stimuli can acquire power to arouse a secondary drive, such as anxiety or fear.

(16) Trial-and-Error Learning

Thorndike’s “selecting and connecting” trial and error behavior is the basis of operant conditioning or instrumental learning and many incorrect responses may occur before the response which brings the reinforcement. Osgood has pointed out that it is a mistake to regard trial-and-error behavior as random behavior; it is rather a narrow selection from the individual’s potential activity.