Further schools of thought in psychology: humanism and social interactionism Humanistic approaches emphasize the importance of the inside

world of the learner and place the individuals thoughts, feelings and emotions at the forefront of all human development. The most well-known proponent of the psychic viewpoint was Sigmund Freud whose theories about human emotional development have had a powerful influence on the development of clinical psychology and psychiatry across the world, but less influence on educational psychology. Erik Erikson made an attempt to draw together Freuds views on human psycho sexual development into a theory based on stages of development throughout a humans life with important implications for personal, social and emotional development. Erik Erikson claimed that human psychological development depends on the way in which individuals pass through predetermined maturational stages from birth to old age. Early infancy is a stage where basic trust in the world, in parents and other characters are established. By the time children reach about four years of age, they can begin to formulate a plan of action and carry it through. Erikson describes the early school years as a stage in which children will establish a sense of industry as basic educational skills and learning competence are developed. Competitive situations in which children are compared with each other generate feelings of inferiority. Adolescence is considered by Erikson as a stage in which the search of identity provides the key challenge. There we can find adolescents of two kinds: adolescents with a personal identity not established yet so their behavior tends to be anti social. On the other side we find adolescents with a strong sense of self identity so they might be less susceptible to peer pressure, having a high level of self acceptance, optimistic and firm in their belief that they are in control of their own destinies. In middle age the challenge is to maintain a sense of generativy, to continue to see oneself as a person capable of generating new interests and insights and have something to offer to others. In old age, the last psychological stage appears a conflict between integrity and despair. If all the previous stages have been passed successfully old people should be able to look back on a life of self- fulfillment and personal accomplishment. On the contrary, a life of unsolved conflicts and perceived missed opportunities will leave a person with a sense of failure and even despair.

Abraham Maslow Abraham Maslow argued for two distinct categories of needs, deficiency needs, and being needs. The first four layers represent deficiency needs. These are related to a persons psychological or biological balance, and include physiological requirements as food, water, sleep and the absence of pain; they also include the needs for security, belonging, and self-esteem. Maslow said if these needs were not met it could be almost impossible for a person to fulfill needs further up.

Beings needs are represented by the top three levels in Maslows system. These are related to the fulfillment of individual potential, in terms of cognitive and aesthetic development and the attainment of self-actualization. Being needs require a particular kind of educational environment in which people can express themselves and explore.

Carl Rogers Rogers (1969) identified a number of the humanistic approach to education. Human beings have a natural potential for learning, he suggested that significant learning will only take place when the subject matter is perceived to be of personal relevance to the learner and when it involves active participation by the learner, e.g. experiential learning. The most useful kind of learning to prepare learners to deal with the demands of the modern world is learning about the process of learning itself. Rogers suggests that this kind of learning best takes place in an atmosphere of unconditional positive regard. Implications of the humanistic approach The following examples show us clearly what the educational implications of humanistic approach are: Every learning experience should be seen within the context of helping learners to develop a sense of personal identity and relating that to future goals, learning should be personalized as far as possible; Learners should be helped and encouraged to make choices for themselves in what and how they learn; It is important for teachers to empathize with their learners by getting to know them as individuals and seeking to understand the ways in which they make sense of the world, rather than always seeking to impose their own point of view. Humanism in ELT A great variety of teaching methodologies have appeared. The main ones are the silent way, suggestopaedia, and community language learning. These three methodologies are based on psychology and they all consider affective aspects of learning and language as important. They are all concerned with treating the learner as a whole person and with whole-person involvement in the learning process. The silent way was originated from Gattengo (1972), and involves the teacher remaining as silent as possible while learners are involved in learning. Communicative language learning was developed by Curran (1972), based on principles of counseling. In this method, the learners sit in a circle, as a community, and decide what they want to say.

Suggestopaedia (Lozanov 1979) is founded on the principle that people are capable of learning more if their minds are clear of other things and also free of anxiety. Humanism has a number of messages for the language teacher: Create a sense of belonging; Make the subject relevant to the learner; Involve the whole person; Encourage a knowledge of self; Develop personal identity; Encourage self-esteem; Involve the feelings and emotions; Minimize criticism; Encourage creativity; Develop a knowledge of the process of learning; Encourage self-initiation; Allow for choice; Encourage self-evaluation.

Social interactionism For social interactionists, children are born into a social world, and learning occurs through interaction with other people. From the time we are born we interact with others in our day-today lives, and through these interactions we make our own sense of the world. Lev vygotsky Vygotsky emphasized the importance of language in interacting with people; not just signs and symbols as well. He argued that meaning should constitute the central aspect of any unit of study. Moreover, any unit of study should be presented in all its complexity, rather than skills and knowledge being presented in isolation. Basically, the secret of effective learning lies in the nature of the social interaction between two or more people with different levels of skill and knowledge. Vygotsky most known concept is probably the zone of proximal development, which is the term, used to refer to the layer of skill or knowledge which is just beyond that with which the learner is currently capable of copying. Working together with another person, either peer an adult or a more competent at a level that is just above a learners present capabilities is the best way for the learner to move into the next layer. Reuven Feuerstein Feuersteins theory says that anyone can become a fully effective learner. Another component of his theory is the notion of structural cognitive modifiable, e.g. no one ever achieves the full extent

of their learning potential, but people can continue to develop their cognitive capacity during their lives. A social constructivist model Social interactionism emphasizes the dynamic nature of the interaction between teachers, learners and tasks, and provides a view of learning as arising from interactions with others. Since learning never takes place in isolation, we also recognize the importance of the learning environment or context within which the learning takes place. There are four key sets of factors which influence the learning process-teachers, learners, tasks and contexts. Teachers select tasks which reflect their beliefs about teaching and learning. Learners interpret tasks in ways that are meaningful and personal to them as individuals. The task is therefore the interface between the teacher and learners. Teachers and learners also interact with each other; the way that teachers behave in classrooms reflects their values and beliefs and the way in which learners react to teachers will be affected by the individual characteristics of the learners and the feelings the teacher conveys to them. The context in which the learning takes place will play an important part in shaping what happens within it. This includes the emotional environment, for example, trust and belonging; the physical environment; the whole school values scale, the wider social environment; the political environment and the cultural settings.

Learning strategies Repeating words over and over again; Listening attentively to try to distinguish words; Trying to work out the rules of the language by forming hypothesis about how it works; Trying out these hypothesis to see if they work; Testing yourself to see if you remember words; Guessing the meanings of unknown words; Using your knowledge of language rules to try to make new sentences; Rehearsing in your head what you are about to say; Practicing the sounds of the language to yourself; Asking a speaker to repeat something; Pretending that you understand in order to keep the communication going.

Skills and strategies Learning strategies involve an ability to monitor the learning situation and respond accordingly. This means being able to assess the situation, to plan, to select an appropriate skills, to sequence

them, to monitor, to assess their effectiveness and to revise the plan when necessary. Strategies are purposeful and goal-oriented: Asking questions: defining hypothesis, establishing aims and parameters of task, discovering audience, relating task to previous work ect. Planning: deciding on tactics and timetables, reduction of task or problem into components; Monitoring: continuous attempt to match efforts, answers and discoveries to initial questions or purposes; Checking: preliminary assessment of performance and results; Revising: maybe simple re-drafting or re-calculation or maybe involving setting of revised goals; Self-testing: final self-assessment both results and performance on task. Learning to learn Traditionally, curricula have tended to concentrate on imparting knowledge and skills, and have neglected the teaching of how to learn. In language teaching, for example, we have often tended to focus on teaching the form of the target language by presenting pieces of the language in carefully graded steps, at the cost of teaching people how to learn the language. Metacognitive strategies In these strategies, learners should be able to go a step further in their learning process; they can look at process of learning from outside being aware of what they are doing and the strategies they are employing, as well as knowledge about the current process of learning. They also include an ability to manage and regulate consciously the use of appropriate learning strategies for different situations. Language learning strategies Joan Rubin makes the useful distinction between strategies that contribute directly to learning, and those that contribute indirectly to learning. Thus, operations concerned with memorizing, inducing rules, guessing meaning and rehearsal contribute directly to the learning of the language at a cognitive level; they are the mental processes by which learners acquire knowledge of the language system. However, there is another group of processes that we employ to help us to learn a foreign language more efficiently in an indirect way by bringing us into closer contact with the target language. This serves to give us more input of the language, or an increased opportunity to try out the language with other people. Seeking opportunities to speak to tourists, listening to the radio or writing to a pen friend would be examples of indirect strategies. Rubin identifies six main cognitive strategies contributing directly to language learning: 1. Clarification/ verification refer to strategies used by learners to check whether their understanding of a rule or language item is correct.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

Guessing / inductive inferencing refer to a various strategies concerned with making hypothesis about how language works. In order to make suitable hypothesis, learners need to be able to select appropriate information, attend to what is important, hold a number of pieces of information in the head, and use information from the context and their world knowledge as well as samples of the language. Deductive reasoning is a strategy where the learner uses knowledge of general rules to produce or understand language. Practice is concerned with storage and retrieval of language. This includes such strategies as repetition and rehearsal. Memorization is also concerned with storage and retrieval of information, and ways of organizing the information for storage. Monitoring refers to learners checking of their own performance, including noticing errors and observing how a message is received.

According to Rubins categorization Metacognitive strategies involve such processes as planning, prioritizing, setting goals and self-management. Rebecca Oxford provides a list of twelve features of language learning strategies: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7) 8) 9) 10) 11) 12) They contribute to the main goal, communicative competence; They allow learners to become more self-directed; They expand the role of teachers; They are problem oriented; They are specific actions taken by the learner; They involve many aspects of the learner, not just the cognitive; They support learning both directly and indirectly, They are not always observable; They are often conscious; They can be taught, They are flexible; They are influenced by a variety of factors

In oxfords system, Metacognitive strategies help learners to regulate their learning. Affective strategies are concerned with the learners emotional requirements such as confidence, while social strategies lead to increase interaction with the target language. Cognitive strategies learners use to make sense of their learning, memory strategies are those for storage of information, and compensation strategies help learners to success knowledge gaps to continue the communication. Direct strategies Indirect strategies

Memory Creating mental linkages Applying images and sounds Reviewing well Employing action Cognitive strategies Practicing Receiving and sending messages Analyzing and reasoning Creating structure for input and output Compensation strategies Guessing intelligently Overcoming limitations in speaking and writing

Metacognitive strategies Centring your learning Arranging and planning your learning Evaluating your learning Affective strategies Lowering your anxiety Encouraging yourself Taking your emotional temperature Social strategies Asking questions Cooperating with others Empathizing with others