Definitions of learning and language teaching methods

Relating definitions of learning to the choice of language teaching methods

Your preferred teaching methods are likely to be related to your beliefs about how people learn.

Indicate your level of agreement with each of the following statements on a scale from 5 [AGREE COMPLETELY] to 0 [DISAGREE COMPLETELY].

Give each statement a preliminary rating. Then follow the links to further information about the proposition before deciding on your final level of agreement. The exercise is intended to encourage you to think about how different definitions of learning are related to different approaches to language teaching.

Learning is the acquisition of knowledge through study, usually involving a course of study, syllabus or curriculum. This view underlies the traditional Euro-American curricula of the nineteenth century. It can be contrasted with the ideas associated with progressive education, which emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century and gathered momentum during the twentieth century.
Learning is a permanent change in behaviour brought about by experience. This is associated with behaviourist theory, which argues that behaviour is determined by the environment through processes such as association and reinforcement. See Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. It can be contrasted with the cognitive science approach to learning, which developed out of an intellectual movement in the 1950s associated with Noam Chomsky.
Learning is the sudden or gradual acquisition of insight into the rules governing certain relationships in the environment. This is associated with discovery learning. Jerome Bruner argued that practice in discovering things for oneself helps learners acquire information in ways that make it more readily available for problem-solving. See also Jean Piaget and his ideas about experience-based educational opportunities and the learner-centred approach.
Learning is the discovery of new facts and the process of relating them to facts that are already known. See attention, encoding, storage and retrieval: four cognitive processes involved in learning. See also active learning.
Behaviour involving purposeful motor-muscular activity, such as a skill, cannot be learned without practice. The more successful the practice, the more successfully the skill is learned. This is particularly relevant to pronunciation. See Wilga M. Rivers, Teaching Foreign-Language Skills [1981], especially the discussion of pronunciation and motor-muscular activity.
Using a language is a skill which has to be learned by practising it. See the Direct Method and contrast it with the Grammar-Translation Method. See also the more general concept of experiential learning.
Successful practice is more effective than making mistakes. This raises the question of the role of mistakes in learning. Risk-taking and making mistakes may actually be important features of successful language learning. It is also necessary to distinguish between different kinds of mistakes, including mistakes arising from difficulties with the motor-muscular system.
The amount of practice needed depends upon the complexity of the skills involved. See the Structural Approach and contrast this with ideas about complexity discussed in relation to Second Language Acquisition.
It is better to break down a complex skill into separate components and practise the components separately. This is characteristic of what has been called the atomistic or synthetic approach: breaking learning down into structural units which the learner subsequently assembles. D. A. Wilkins discusses this approach in Notional Syllabuses [Oxford, 1976], where he contrasts it with analytic approaches in the context of notional/functional syllabus design.

In response to Wilkins's ideas, see Robert O'Neill's article on the limits of Notional/Functional syllabuses and the importance of structures or language patterns in the generative use of language. Learners need to be able to use language to express personal messages such as "my guinea pig died with its legs crossed" – an utterance that you would never expect to find in a phrasebook or as an item selected for its high functional frequency by a coursebook writer.
The more difficult what is to be learned appears to be, the less likely it is to be learned. See Alison Mackey's Guardian article [26 June 2014] on why motivation is the key to language learning.

See also English for Specific Purposes by Ronald Mackay and Alan Mountford [1978], p. 138, section 5.2, "Grading of texts (length and complexity)", and p. 140, section 6.1, "Selection and Grading of Structures".
The more pointless what is to be learned appears to be, the less likely it is to be learned. This raises the question of relevance. See English for Specific Purposes by Ronald Mackay and Alan Mountford [1978], Chapter 2, p. 21, "Identifying the Nature of the Learner's Needs".
A syllabus needs to take account of functional as well as structural considerations. See Waystage 1990 at pre-intermediate level and Threshold 1990 at intermediate level, syllabus specifications by J. A. Van Ek and J. L. M. Trim [1979/1980; revised 1998]. These were developed as Council of Europe specifications for modern language courses at pre-intermediate and intermediate levels.

These needs-analysis checklists are probably easier to work with than the more exhaustive procedures contained in John Munby's Communicative Syllabus Design: A Sociolinguistic Model for Designing the Content of Purpose-Specific Language Programmes [Cambridge University Press, 1981].
The more mysterious what is being learned appears to be, the less likely it is to be learned. When dealing with something new, learners tend to relate it to what they are already familiar with. See Piaget's theory of cognitive development. Children construct an understanding of the world around them, encounter discrepancies between what they already know and what they discover, and then adjust their ideas accordingly.

It is important to maintain a balance between applying previous knowledge, or assimilation, and changing behaviour to take account of new knowledge, or accommodation.
The smaller the differences, the less likely they are to be perceived.
Learner English, edited by Michael Swan and Bernard Smith [2001], highlights common mistakes made by learners of English as a second language. Some mistakes are assumed to arise from structural interference from the learner's native language (L1), while others arise from differences between the phonological systems of L1 and L2.

Sometimes distinctions are so small – for example, the quality and length of the vowel sounds in ship and sheep, or the initial consonant sounds in right and light – that learners whose L1 does not contain these precise phonemes may initially be unable to hear the difference.

Contrast and comparison are therefore widely used in teaching pronunciation. See Minimal Pairs. They can also be used in grammar. For the use of contrast and comparison in semantic and grammatical relationships, see Meaning and the English Verb by Geoffrey Leech [2004] and A Communicative Grammar of English by Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik [2003].
A skill has only been properly learned when it can be adapted successfully to unfamiliar situations.
See learning transfer.

In the 1960s and 1970s, some language educators referred to transfer as part of a three-stage teaching process:
1. presentation;
2. practice;
3. transfer.
The implication was often that learners had not fully acquired a skill, such as listening to spoken English, or a particular piece of language, such as the appropriate use of the Present Perfect, until they could use it outside the classroom.

I would question the eagerness to devalue the classroom as a place where good communication skills can be developed and brought to a high level. I can envisage many exchanges between native and non-native speakers in which the intrinsic qualities of the classroom, as opposed to any other room or space, are irrelevant.

A classroom does not have to be an unstimulating learning environment. Perhaps educational systems in previous centuries, in which suffering – including rows of uncomfortable desks – was sometimes assumed to be a necessary condition for learning, have given the classroom an undeservedly bad reputation. Preoccupations with 'classroom English' and 'teacher-talk' perhaps need to be reconsidered. See Robert O'Neill's article on Teacher-talk in the language class.

In my view, it is the quality of the environment, wherever it is, and the quality of the input, whoever is talking, that matter in language learning.

Now that so much learning takes place independently on mobile devices and home computers, opportunities for face-to-face communication in a classroom may sometimes be superior to communication through Skype or similar technology. The classroom has perhaps been unfairly associated with an 'artificial learning environment'. Classrooms are as 'real' and 'authentic' as any other place and can be just as stimulating.

I am indebted to the late Robert O'Neill for giving me permission to use his excellent articles in the next section.

Language Acquisition: (i) current methods and approaches and (ii) the role of the teacher:

Prepare for a series of articles which should prove fascinating to practising teachers for many years to come. Both 'language acquisition' and 'classroom observation' attract extensive research, yet much of the writing on these subjects has a theoretical feel. Robert's articles make sense to people who actually do the job of language teaching.

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