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| Behavioursm Learning Theory |
Behaviorism is a learning theory which considers anything an organism do as a behavior. According to the behaviorist, these behaviors can be scientifically studied regardless of what happens in the mind (psychological constructs such as thoughts, feelings…) As a theory behaviorism focuses on observable behaviors and contends that there are no philosophical differences between publicly observable processes (such as actions) and privately observable processes (such as thinking and feeling.)
Behaviorism main figures were:
- Ivan Pavlov, who investigated classical conditioning,
- Edward Lee Thorndike,
- John B. Watson who rejected introspective methods and sought to restrict psychology to experimental methods,
- and B.F. Skinner who conducted research on operant conditioning
Behaviorists believe in three basic assumptions:
- Learning is manifested by a change in behavior.
- The environment shapes behavior.
- The principles of contiguity (how close in time two events must be for a bond to be formed) and reinforcement (any means of increasing the likelihood that an event will be repeated) are central to explaining the learning process.
For behaviorists, learning is the acquisition of new behavior through conditioning.
I get some red lines in this part, the behaviourist approach to language learning grew out of the belief that students could learn a second language by being taught to produce the correct “response” to the appropriate “stimulus”. The student would then receive either instant positive or instant negative “reinforcement” in the shape of either correction or praise from the teacher.
The resulting methodology, audio-lingualism, was a very heavily teacher-centred approach consisting of a lot of “mimicry and memorization”. The linguist Leonard Bloomfield claimed that “language learning is over-learning” and this, in effect, was what audio-lingualism was based on.
The proponents of the audio-lingualism believed that language learning was a process of habit formation in which the student over-learned carefully sequenced lists of set phrases or “base sentences”. The method was extremely successful and enjoyed considerable popularity.