Ch. 4: Teaching By Principles (Douglas Brown)

By: Fuziyeh Abbasi

Teaching Principles From H. Douglas Brown’s Point Of View:

Cognitive

Affective

Linguistic

• Automaticity• Meaningful Learning• The Anticipation of Reward• Intrinsic motivation• Strategic Investment

• Language Ego• Self-Confidence• Risk-Taking• Language-Culture Connection

• The Native Language Effect• Interlanguage• Communicative Competence

Cognitive principles relate mainly to mental and intellectual functions.

1. Automaticity: Efficient L2 learning involves a timely movement of the control of a few language forms into the automatic processing of a relatively unlimited number of language forms. Overanalyzing, thinking too much about its form, and consciously lingering on rules of language all tend to impede this graduation to automaticity. According to Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, it is the ability to use a language using automatic processing.

• Automatic processing: It’s the performance of a task without conscious or deliberate processing and is involved when the learner carries out the task without awareness or attention, making more use of information in long-term memory (like, driving a bicycle).

• Controlled processing: It is involved when conscious effort and attention is required to perform a task and makes more use of short-term memory (e.g. a learner driver).

Automaticity includes: Subconscious absorption of language through meaningful use, Efficient and rapid movement away from a focus on the forms of language

to a focus on the purpose to which language is used, Resistance to the temptation to analyze language forms.

Some possible application of the principle to adult instruction:

Make sure that your lessons are focused on the “use” of language for purposes that are as genuine as a classroom context will permit.

You need to exercise patience wit students as you slowly help them to achieve fluency.

2. Meaningful Learning: It subsumes new information into existing structures and memory systems; and the resulting associative links create stronger retention. In other words, it refers to a learning way where the new knowledge to acquire is related with the previous knowledge.

Rote Learning: Taking in isolated bits and pieces of information (by repeating the materials over and over again) that are not connected with one’s existing cognitive structure which has little chance of creating long term memory.

Some classroom implication of the principle:

1. Capitalize on the power of meaningful learning by appealing to students’ interests, academic goals, and career goals.

2. When a new topic is introduced, help your students to associate this topic with what they already know.

3. Avoid the pitfalls of rote learning:

o Too much grammar explanation,o Too many abstract principles and theories,o Activities without clear purposes,o Activities unrelated to the goals of the lesson or course,o Techniques that are too mechanical or tricky

3. The Anticipation of Reward: Human beings are universally driven to act or “behave”, by the anticipation of some sort of reward-tangible or intangible, short term or long term- that will happen as a result of the behavior. According to Douglas Brown, the conversion of declarative knowledge to

procedural knowledge is facilitated by anticipation of reward (not the reward itself), so it functions like a catalyzer.

Constructive classroom implication: Provide an optimal degree of immediate verbal praise and encouragement

to students as a form of short-term reward.Display enthusiasm and excitement yourself in the classroom. If you are

dull, lifeless, bored and have low energy, you can be almost sure that it will be contagious.

Encourage students to reward each other with compliments and supportive action.

4. Intrinsic Motivation: The most powerful rewards are those that are intrinsically motivated (those that come from inside of an individual rather than outside rewards, such as money or grades). Because the behavior stems from needs, wants, or desires within oneself, the behavior is self-rewarding; therefore, no externally controlled reward is necessary.Learners perform task because it is fun, useful, or challenging, and not because they anticipate some cognitive or affective rewards from the teacher.

Why intrinsic motivation is listed among “cognitive” principles?Reward-directed behavior in all organisms is complex to the point that cognitive, physical, and affective processing are involved but in the case of L2 acquisition, mental functions may occupy a greater proportion.

5. Strategic Investment: A learner’s personal investment of time, effort, and attention to the second language which helps comprehending and producing the language.

Major pedagogical implications of the principle:a. The importance of recognizing and dealing with the wide variety

of styles and strategies that learners successfully bring to the learning processing,

b. The need for attention to each separate individual in the classroom.

Affective principles are characterized by a large proportion of emotional involvement.

6. Language ego (the warm and fuzzy principle): As human being learn to use a second language, they also develop a new mode of thinking, feeling, acting-a second identity. The new “language ego,” intertwined with the second language, can easily create within the learner a sense of fragility, a defensiveness, and a rising of inhibition.:Longman Dictionary of …: Language ego is the relation between people’s feelings of personal identity, individual uniqueness, and value (i.e. their ego) and aspects of their first language.Guiora: “A person’s self-identity develops as she or he is learning the first language, that some aspects of language, especially pronunciation, may be closely linked to one’s ego, and that this may hinder some aspects of second or foreign language learning.

Possibilities of bringing relief to the situation and providing affective support:1. Overly display a supportive attitude to your students. Your “warm and

fuzzy” patience and empathy need to be openly and clearly communicated, for fragile language egos have a way of misinterpreting intended input.

2. On a more mechanical, lesson planning level, your choice of techniques needs to be cognitively at an affective level.

3. Considering learners’ language ego states will help you to determine: Who call on,Who to ask to volunteer information,How much to explain something,How structured and planned an activity should be,How to place in which small groups and pairs,How tough you can be with a student.

4. If your students are learning English as a second language (in the culture milieu of an English- speaking country), they are likely to experience a moderate identity crisis as they develop a second self.

7. Self-Confidence: Learners’ believe that they are fully capable of accomplishing a task is at least partially a factor in their eventual success in attaining the task.8. Risk-Taking: Successful language learner, in their realistic judgment of themselves as vulnerable beings yet capable of accomplishing tasks, must be willing to become “gamblers” in the game of language, to attempt to produce and interpret language that is a bit beyond their absolute certainty.Longman Dictionary of …: a personality factor which concerns the degree to which a person is willing to undertake actions that involve a significant degree of risk. Risk-taking is said to be an important characteristic of successful second language learning, since learners have to be willing to try out hunches about the new language and take the risk of being wrong.

How can your classroom reflect the principle of Risk-Taking?1. Create an atmosphere in the classroom that encourages students

to try out language, to venture a response, and not to wait for someone else to volunteer language.

2. Provide reasonable challenges in your techniques-make neither easy nor too hard.

3. Help your students to understand what calculated risk-taking is, in case some feel that they might blurt out any old response.

4. Respond to students’ risky attempts with positive affirmation, praising them for trying while at the same time warmly bet firmly attending to their language.

9. The Language-Culture Connection: whenever you teach a language, you also teach a complex system of cultural customs, values, and ways of thinking, feeling, and acting.Some classroom applications: Discuss cross-cultural differences wit your students, emphasizing

that no culture is “better” than another, but that cross-cultural understanding is an important face of learning a language.

Teach your students the culture connotations, especially the sociolinguistics, of language.

Screen your techniques for materials that may be culturally offensive.

The second aspect of the language-culture connection is the extent to which your students will themselves be affected by the process of acculturation, which will vary with the context and goals of learning.Acculturation: a process in which changes in the language, culture, and system of values of a group happen through interaction with another group with a different language, culture, and system of values.

In another word:Especially in second language-learning contexts, the success with which learners adapt to a new cultural milieu will affect their language acquisition success, and vice versa, in some possibly significant ways.

Linguistic Principles center on language itself and on howlearners deal with complex linguistic system.10. Native Language Effect: The native language of learnersexerts a strong influence on the acquisition of the target languagesystem. While that native system will exercise both facilitating andinterfering effects in the production and comprehension of thenew language, the interfering effects are likely to be the mostsalient.The majority of learner’s errors in producing the second language,especially in the beginning levels, stem from the learner’sassumption that the target language operate like the nativelanguage.

Some classroom suggestions:

1. Regard learners’ errors as important windows to their understanding system and provide appropriate feedback on them. Errors of native language interference may be repaired by making students aware of the native language cause of the error.

2. Ideally every successful learner will hold on to the facilitating effects of the native language and discards the interference.

3. Thinking directly in target language usually helps to minimize interference errors. Try to persuade students to think in the second language.

11. Interlanguage: Second language learners tend to go through asystematic or quasi-systematic developmental process as they progress tofull competence in the target language. Successful interlanguagedevelopment is partially result of utilizing feedback from others.Classroom implication that deserve the teachers’ attention: Try to distinguish between the students’ systematic interlanguage

errors and another errors; the former probably has a logical source that the student can become aware of.

Teachers need to exercise some tolerance for certain interlanguage forms that may arise out of students’ logical development process.

Don’t make a student feel stupid because of an interlanguage error, quietly point out the logic of the erroneous form.

Give the students the message that mistakes are not “bad” but they are often indicators of developing aspects of the new language.

Longman Dictionary of …: the type of language produced by second-and foreign-language learners who are in the process of learning a language.In language learning, learner language is influenced by several different processes. These include:a. borrowing patterns from the mother tongue (language transfer)b. extending patterns from the target language, e.g. by analogy

(overgeneralization)c. expressing meanings using the words and grammar which are

already known (communication strategy).Since the language which the learner produces using these processes differs from both the mother tongue and the target language, it is called an interlanguage.

12. The Communicative Competence: (the most important principle) organizational competence (grammatical and discourse) Pragmatic competence (functional and sociolinguistic) Strategic competence psychomotor skills

Principle:Given that communicative competence in the goal of a language classroom , instruction needs to point toward all its competence: organizational, pragmatic, strategic, and psychomotor. Communicative goals are best achieved by giving due attention to language use and not just usage, to fluency and not just accuracy, to authentic language and contexts, and to students’ eventual need to apply classroom learning to previously unrehearsed contexts in the real world.

Some classroom teaching rules:1. Give grammar some attention, but don’t neglect the other important

components (e.g., functional, sociolinguistic, psychomotor, and strategic) of CC.

2. Some of pragmatic aspects of language are subtle and very difficult. Make sure to teach such subtlety.

3. Don’t forget that psychomotor skills (pronunciation) are an important component of functional and sociolinguistic aspects of language.

4. Make sure that your students have opportunity to gain some fluency in English without having to be constantly wary of little mistakes.

5. Try to keep every teaching technique as authentic as possible and provide genuine, not rote, techniques for actual conveyance of information.

6. Make sure you are preparing the students to be independent learners and manipulators of language “out there.”