- There are various different approaches in contemporary psychology. An approach is a perspective, that involves certain assumptions about human behavior: the way they function, which aspects of them are worthy of study and what research methods are appropriate for undertaking this study. There may be several different theories within an approach, but they all share these common assumptions.
- You may wonder why there are so many different psychology approaches and whether one approach is correct and others wrong. Most psychologists would agree that no one approach is correct, although in the past, in the early days of psychology, the behaviourist would have said their approach was the only truly scientific one.
How much cognitive theory do English language teachers need to know?
•Step 1: make your trainees supply examples of all types of "meaningful" and "meaningless" pattern drills exploiting various relationships.
•Step 2: allow your trainees to experience what it is like to be in a beginners class in a language outside their current knowledge. The "Novish" simulation makes this possible if time is at a premium.
Trainers of English language teachers can achieve practical coverage of cognitive learning theory by reviewing the history of language teaching, especially the period in the mid 20th century when "meaningful drills" were being advocated and the shortcomings of "meaningless drills" were being highlighted. Although drilling and rote learning became subject to considerable prejudice in some educational circles in the late 20th century, no language learner will proceed very far without recognition of language structure and nobody will succeed in learning much without practice and repetition. Knowledge of the "types of drill" which the accomplished language teacher or informed computer learning program can employ provide a full toolkit for anybody responsible for learning and teaching. A fuller examination of drills is therefore contained below.
Another ploy often used by teacher trainers is to put trainee teachers into the situations encountered by language learners. This is often done through demonstrations where new languages (of which trainees have no knowledge) are presented. As homework (especially on MA Courses where "Reflective Learning" features as a component) students are often required to learn new languages (and alphabets!) to a basic level. It is hoped that they will be reminded of the problems, especially the conceptual ones. Often, there is not enough time to do this on short teacher training courses. However, there is a famous chapter which trainees can read where the experience of learning a new language is simulated. This is Julian Dakin's introduction to "Novish" [ a fictitious language designed especially to simulate conditions experienced in real language learning situations ]. The chapter appears in "The Language Laboratory and Language Learning". This is possibly the best book ever written on language learning - the reference in the title to the language laboratory reflects a technology in fashion in the 1960s and 1970s and does not detract from the book's main treatise on language learning. The chapter on Novish is also reproduced in The Edinburgh Course of Applied Linguistics [ a four volume publication which may be easier to find than Dakin's book in second hand bookshops].
The drawbacks of meaningless drills:
1.lack of context
2.failure to offer learner an element of discrimination or choice
3.failure to give rise to naturalistic speech
4.they fail grammatically in many instances.
Track record and variety of exercise-type
1.Substitution drills merely require the learner to substitute in the previous response the word provided or embedded in the next prompt. The stimulus to which the response is trained is therefore the prompt taken in conjunction with the previous response. The prompts signal the internal changes and the series of responses set the pattern. For the teacher who sees the need for isolation and practice of mechanical production of sentences to improve learners' command of structure or pronunciation.
2.Mutation drills require systematic changes in the form of words provided in the prompt before a substitution is made. They may therefore be useful in practising inflection of verbs or nouns, agreements between such constituents in the sentence as subject and verb, adjective and noun (in French & Spanish) and case endings.
3.Transformation drills may embody the changes outlined above but also require at least the option of a change in word order, the addition or deletion of grammatical constituents and may exact the alternation of grammatical pairs. They can accordingly practise changes from affirmative to negative, changes in voice from active to passive, changes in mood, from indicative to interrogative to imperative to subjunctive and changes in sentence-type from simple to compound or complex. A further use of Transformation Drills is in the process of word derivation.
4.Application relationships (relationships of reference) prompted by pictures, sound effects or knowledge of the world.
5.Collocation relationships between vocabulary items in a sentence (involving any or all of its constituents) prompted by cue words or whole sentences. The relationship is exclusively verbal and responses depend on a knowledge of lexical inter-dependencies.
6.Implication relationships between sentences prompted by whole sentences and requiring the substitution of synonyms, hyponyms, antonyms, converse terms or consequences in place of their antecedents. S a word or words R its/their counterpart.
7.Consequence, Hypnonmy and Antonym Drills - S: This is a wonderful book. R: Good, I'd like to read it. S: This is a fantastic record. S: Good, I'd like to hear it. R: Felicity is a very nice girl S: Good I'd like to meet her.
8.Synonymy Drills
INTERESTING VIDEO
FOR LEARNING LANGUAGES
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXFy6GMdLcQ
COGNITIVE APPROACH IN FOCUS TO LINGUISTIC DATA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dtI16yifrY
CROSSWORD
E:\ \cruzigrama cognitivo.html
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