ELT LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 203

EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

What I learnt was educational psychology and some approaches to educational psychology.
We can say that educational psychology is the application of psychology to education. It
focuses on development, evaluation and application of theories and principles of learning.
Education compasses learning. Learning is a part of education process, but it should be
meaningful and give value in one’s life. Motivation should be trough real things. Teachers
themselves should go on doing personal reflection. We always need to update ourselves. By
the way, we need to learn these theories. Our teaching perspective will occur according to
them. We can be perfect teachers with the combination of theories and personal reflection.

Positivist psychology attempted to understand and predict human behaviour; they didn’t try
to understand how human mind works as they thought that feelings and thoughts of human
beings weren’t approachable. Behaviorism has its roots from positivist psychology.
According to it, all human behavior could be explained with stimulus-response connections.
Skinner who is founder of modern behaviorism emphasized the importance of
reinforcement and tried to provide an explanation to learning in terms of operant
conditioning. He suggested four simple procedures about education, instruction. Teachers
should make explicitly clear what is to be taught. I think this can be applicable and useful as
students will be relaxed and motivated when they know what to learn or to do. They will
know their aim. Most of my teachers take into consideration this principle. This make me
feel comfortable as there is no surprise. The second principle is that tasks should be broken
down into small, sequential steps. The applicability of this depends on context. We cannot
apply this to young children since they learn holistically. Third one is students should be
encouraged to work at their own pace. This is also useful as it provides learner autonomy.
The last one is that learning should be programmed by incorporating the other procedures
and providing immediate positive reinforcement. Audiolingualism was developed based on
behaviorism. It has a lot of limitations. Students are passive; functions of language and
meaning are neglected. Since at the very beginning of our methodology lesson, we said
errors are good, but according to ALM, errors are not tolerable. However, it has been
dominant around the world as it is easier for teachers and students or it can be used by
teachers whose target language isn’t good enough.

Cognitive psychology interested in how human mind thinks and learns. In learning process
students are active participant. They need to use their minds to think, observe, synthesize,
analyze. Information processing deals with how people take in information process it and act
upon it. Therefore, this approach focuses on attention, perception and memory. Teachers
should give attention to student’s attention. When students are distracted, teachers can
make use of energizer or cooler activities. Memory is another important issue in language
learning. Memorizing vocabulary items is one of the main problems language learners have.
For learning vocabulary items, creativity has important role as it is more permanent when
students use their creativity. Practice is important. Without practice, it goes away. Another
strategy is categorizing vocabulary such as antonym, synonym. Gardner says that intelligence
cannot be taken as a unity and there are at least seven different kinds of intelligence.
Multiple intelligences are based on problem solving.

What I had difficulty in understanding was how our memories, minds work. It seemed to me
a bit complicated. I need to focus on this subject. By the way, some aspects such as
strategies for teachers to help students’ memorization of information and Skinner’s four
principles of these approaches make sense to me and I want to use them in my teaching.