I.

HUMAN LEARNING

What is learning?

"Learning is the process of

developing new knowledge,
skills or attitudes"

Heinich, Molenda, Russel, and Smaldino

Psychological Perspectives
There are three main psychological
perspectives on how human beings learn and
another one as a complement of one of them.
These illustrate not only the history of learning
theory but also the diversity of the foundations
of the different language teaching approaches
and methods.

The Behaviouristic perspective

Its origin dates back to the beginning of the
20th century in the experiments of the Russian
psychologist Pavlov through a procedure that
has come to be labelled as "classical
conditioning".
Pavlov's conclusion was that the learning
process consisted of the formation of
associations between stimuli and reflexive
responses.

Classical Behaviourism
Pavlov trained a dog by repeated occurrences to
associate the sound of a tuning fork with
salivation until the dog acquired a conditioned
response: to salivate at the sound of a tuning
fork.
In 1993, Pavlov's classical conditioning theory
was adopted as the explanation of all learning. By
the process of which we build an orderly
succession of stimulus-response connections and
more complex behaviours are learnt by building
up series or chains of responses.

Skinner's Reinforcement Theory

Later in the fifties, a psychologist at Harvard
University, B.H. Skinner raised as a proponent
of behaviourism.
According to him, there were 'reinforces', i.e.
events or positive stimuli that follow a response
as a consequence of it, that tend to strengthen
behaviour or increase the probability of a
recurrence of that response.