Psychology For Language Teachers

- Williams and Burden. "Psychology for Language Teachers". Ed. Cambridge University Press. 1997

 
UNIT ONE
1. - Explain what is the educational psychology and its uses in classroom
Kaplan describes Educational Psychology as the application of Psychology to the education by focusing on de development, evaluation and application of theories and principles of learning and instruction that canenhance lifelong learning.
Educational psychology provides a coherent psychological framework that help English teachers to make connections between teaching-learning process and to make informed decisions about what to do in their classrooms.
2. -What is the behaviorism?
Behaviorism is an approach to psychology that arouse out of the ideas of early learning theorists who attempted to explainall learning in terms of some form of conditioning.
Classical conditioning postulated that all human behavior could be explained in terms of the way in which simple stimulus-response connections were built up.
With B.F. Skinner, behaviorist theory thus came to explain learning in terms of operant conditioning: an individual responds to a stimulus by behaving in a particular way. Whatever happenssubsequently will affect the like hood of that behavior recurring. If the behavior is reinforced or punished then the like hood of that behavior occurring on a subsequent occasion will be increased or decreased. In this way any range of behavior could be gradually, and even rapidly, increased by reinforcing the behavior required.
Skinner argued that instruction could be improved considerably bythe adoption of four simple procedures. He suggested that:
• Teachers should make explicitly clear what is to be taught;
• Tasks should be broken down into small, sequential steps
• Students should be encouraged to work at their own pace by means of individualized learning programmers’;
• Learning should be programmed by incorporating the above procedures and providing immediate positivereinforcement based as nearly as possible on 100 per cent success
Behaviorist views of learning were a powerful influence on the development of the audio lingual approach of language teaching.
Audio lingualism does have a number of limitations: a) passive role of learners, b) little concern for the cognitive process involved on learning something, c) little attention to the meaning that thelanguage conveys, d) no room for the actual process of interaction and negotiation of meaning, e) with its emphasis en correct responses, does not allow for learning from mistakes.
3. - Explain the cognitive psychology. Make sure to include all the information about memory, information processing and intelligence.
Cognitive psychologists are interested in the mental processes that are involved inlearning.
In cognitive approach, the learner is seen as an active participant in the learning process, using various mental strategies in order to sort out the system of language to be learned.
Information theorists have drawn the analogy of the brain as a highly complex computer and who seek to explain its workings in terms of rules and models of how different aspects of learning take place.Examples: artificial intelligence systems.
Constructivist movement, growing mainly out of the work of Jean Piaget and George Kelly personal construct psychology, concern with ways in which individuals come to make their own sense of the world.
Information processing concerned in the way in which people take in information, process it and act upon it. Factors as attention, perception and memorybecame the focus of the work of information processing theorists. Most usually they construct models or scripts to try to account for the way in which the human mind works.
Attention is one area where an information processing approach has provided valuable insights into the workings of human mind. One view suggests that attention should be seen as a process of filtering out an overwhelming range...