“A theory is a set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena”.

1. Learning Theories
By Safa EL Akermi( crefoc gafsa 2018/2019)
Elt senior SUPERVISOR/ Mrs Saida jendoubi

2. What is Learning?
“Learning is the acquisition of knowledge or
skills through study, experience, or being
taught.”
What is a theory?
“A theory is a set of statements or principles
devised to explain a group of facts or
phenomena”.

3. Content
General Learning Theories
Second Language Learning
Theories

4. General Learning
Theories
Behaviourism
Constructivism
Cognitivism

5. .

6. Behaviourism
“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed,
and my own specified world to bring them up in
and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and
train him to become any type of specialist I
might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-
chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief,
regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies,
abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.
(1930)”
― John Broadus Watson

7. Behaviourism
Stimulus-
Response
Feedback
Habit
Formation

8. Behaviourism Advocates:
Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936)
Classical conditioning:
 Learning through association.
 Involuntary Reflexive Behaviour.
 Unconditioned stimulus (UCS): A stimulus that naturally elicits a
specific response.
 Unconditioned response (UCR): A response that naturally
follows a specifc stimulus.
 Conditioned stimulus (CS): A stimulus that elicits a response it
naturally has no connection.
 Conditioned Response (CR): A response to a stimulus that does
not occur naturally.

10. Behaviourism Advocates:
B.F.Skinner (1904-1990)
Operant conditioning:
“Through operant conditioning, an individual makes an association between a
particular behavior and a consequence” (Skinner, 1938).
Modify behavior
Positive / Negative
Reinforcement
Positive / Negative
Punishment

12. Constructivism

13. Constructivism
« Knowledge is temporary, developmental,
nonobjective, internally constructed, and socially
and cuturally mediated » Fosnot 1996
“When you teach a child something you take away
forever his chance of discovering it for himself.”
(Jean Piaget)
“Constructivists believe that the mind filters input
from the world to produce its own unique reality”
(Jonassen, 1991a).

14. Constructivism
 Active Learning
 Construct Knowledge
 Personal experiences and hypotheses of the
environment.
 social negotiation.
 different interpretation and construction of
knowledge process.
 The learner is not a blank slate (tabula rasa) but
brings past experiences and cultural factors to a
situation

15. Constructivism Advocates
Jean Piaget (1896-1980)
 A four-stage model of how the mind
processes new information encountered.
 Human development could be described in
stages.
 As we grow, we gradually add new skills to
our cognitive repertoire.

17. Constructivism Advocates
Jean Piaget (1896-1980)
 Schema: Schemas are categories of knowledge that help us
to interpret and understand the world.
 Assimilation: The process of taking in new information into
our already existing schemas.
 Accommodation: Accommodation involves modifying existing
schemas, or ideas, as a result of new information or new
experiences. New schemas may also be developed during this
process
 Equilibration: To maintain a balance between applying
previous knowledge (assimilation) and changing behavior to
account for new knowledge (accommodation).

19. Advocates of Constructivism
Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934).
“Through others we become
ourselves.”
― Lev S. Vygotsky

20. SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT THEORY
(VYGOTSKY)
 Social interaction precedes development.
 Consciousness and cognition are the end
product of socialization and social
behavior.
 Social interaction
 The more knowledgeable other
 The zone of proximal development

21. Social Interaction
“Every function in the child’s cultural development
appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the
individual level; first, between people (interpsychological)
and then inside the child (intrapsychological)”.
The More Knowlegable Other
(MKO)
“The MKO refers to anyone who has a better
understanding or a higher ability level than the
learner, with respect to a particular task, process, or
concept.”

22. THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL
DEVELOPMENT (ZPD)
“The ZPD is the distance between a student’s ability to perform
a task under adult guidance and/or with peer collaboration and
the student’s ability solving the problem independently.
According to Vygotsky, learning occurred in this zone.”
 According to Vygotsky, humans use tools that develop from a
culture, such as speech and writing, to mediate their social
environments. Initially children develop these tools to serve
solely as social functions, ways to communicate needs.
Vygotsky believed that the internalization of these tools led
to higher thinking skills.

23. Cognitivism

24. Cognitivism
 The inner mental activities
 “Black box”
 Mental processes such as thinking, memory, knowing, and
problem-solving need to be explored.
 Knowledge can be seen as schema or symbolic mental
constructions. Learning is defined as change in a
learner’s schemata.
 Cognitivism uses the metaphor of the mind as computer:
information comes in, is being processed, and leads to
certain outcomes.

25. Advocates Of Cognitivism
Howard Gardner 1943

27. Cognitivism
Information Processing Model
Information processing in humans resembles that in computers.

28. Advocates Of Cognitivism
GESTALT THEORY (VON EHRENFELS)
 “Learning takes place as students were able to comprehend a concept
in its entirety, rather than broken up into parts”.
 Gestalt theorists propose that the experiences and perceptions of
learners have a significant impact on the way that they learn.
 One aspect of Gestalt is phenomenology, which is the study of
how people organize learning by looking at their lived experiences and
consciousness.
 Learning happens best when the instruction is related to their real life
experiences. The human brain has the ability to make a map of the
stimuli caused by these life experiences. This process of mapping is
called “isomorphism.”

29. Advocates Of Cognitivism
GESTALT THEORY (VON EHRENFELS)
 The Factor of Closure: Whenever the brain sees only part of a picture, the
brain automatically attempts to create a complete picture.
 The “factor of proximity” where the human brain maps elements of learning
that are presented close to each other as a whole, instead of separate
parts.
 The “factor of similarity,” : learning is facilitated when groups that are
alike are linked together and contrasted with groups that present differing
ideas. This form of Gestalt learning enables learners to develop and
improve critical thinking skills.
 The “figure-ground effect” : When observing things around us, it is normal
for the eye to ignore space or holes and to see, instead, whole objects.
 The “Trace Theory”: As new thoughts and ideas are learned the brain
tends to make connections, or “traces,” that are representative of the links
that occur between conceptions and ideas, as well as images.

30. Second Language
Learning Theories
Earlier Opproaches to Second
Language Learning
Cognition-Oriented Theories
Context-Oriented Theories

31. Earlier Approaches To Second
Language Learning
 Structuralism: The conviction that language systems consisted of a finite
set of ‘patterns’ or ‘structures’ which acted as models… for the production of
an infinite number of similarly constructed sentences.
 Beahviourism: Repetition and practice resulted in the formation of accurate
and fluent foreign language habits.
 Transfer: The complication is that the old first-language habits interfere
with this process, either helping or inhabiting it.
 Contrastive Analysis: Fries, who in the introduction to his book Teaching
and Learning English as a Foreign Language: “The most effective materials are
those that are based upon a scientific description of the language to be
learned, carefully compared with a parallel description of the native language of
the learner’ (Fries, 1945, cited in Dulay et al.,).
 Error Analysis: the systematic investigation of second language learners’
errors.

32. Cognition-Oriented
Theories
Creative Construction
Hypothesis
Input Hypothesis
Universal Grammar Hypothesis

33. Creative Construction Hypothesis
(Interlangauge Theory)
Larry Selinker (1937)
 Innate mechanisms
 Process language
 Create their own internal grammar
“The grammar that learners construct is often called their
“interlanguage” (i.e., a language located somewhere on a
continuum between their mother tongue and the target
language) (Selinker, 1972) or “transitional competence”
(i.e., a competence which is in a state of transition, as it
develops in the direction of the target language)”

34. The Input Hypothesis
“Monitor Model”
Stephen Krashen (1941)
 Acquisition: subconscious and guided by the learner’s
innate mechanisms along natural developmental
sequences. It occurs as a result of exposure to
comprehensible input, is not accessible to conscious
control or instruction, and occurs best when the
“affective filter” (e.g., level of anxiety) is low.
 Learning: is conscious and often occurs through
instruction or error correction. “Acquired” language is
most important and forms the basis for spontaneous
communication. Language that has been “learnt” plays
only a subsidiary role as a “monitor” of speech or writing
and can never pass through into the acquired system.

35. The Universal Grammar
hypothesis
Naom Chomsky ( 1928)
 “A set of principles which govern all languages
and are already wired into the human brain when
we are born. The principles themselves are
universal, but they allow for variation in the
form of certain parameters that need to be set.”
 “Internal mechanisms which are “triggered” by
input from the environment.

36. Context-oriented theories
The Interaction Hypothesis
The output Hypothesis
The scaffolding Hypothesis
The acculturation model/Social
Identity Theory

37. The interaction hypothesis :
Michael Long
 Situations of social interaction.
 Negotiation of meaning, requests for
clarification, and comprehension checks.
 Input will be tuned to the current level of
competence of the individual learner and thus
become “intake” which is available for learning.

38. The output hypothesis
(Merill Swain, 1995).
« Input is not sufficient and that output too plays a
significant role in acquisition (Swain, 1995). »
 pay attention to aspects of grammar
 notice gaps in their knowledge
 make hypotheses about how the grammatical system
works
 get feedback about whether these hypotheses are
correct.
 It stimulates them to discuss the language with others
and thus “scaffold” each other in their efforts to
understand the language.

39. The scaffolding hypothesis
Vygotsky
 The hypothesis is based on sociocultural theory, which
goes back to the work of Vygotsky in the 1930s and
holds that social interaction is the most important
stimulus for all learning.
 “Scaffolding” refers to the way in which, with support
from others, learners can reach levels of achievement
which they would be unable to reach independently.
 The “zone of proximal development” is the domain of
performance that a learner cannot yet achieve
independently but is capable of achieving with the help
of scaffolding.

40. The acculturation model John Schumann
(1978) and social identity theory (Norton,
2000)
 Language learning involves a process of acculturation
and is therefore heavily dependent on the degree of social
and psychological distance that learners perceive between
themselves and the speakers of the target language.
 The “social identity model” is based on the mutual
influences that link language and identity: language is one
means by which identity is constructed and identity
affects the ways in which we use language. This identity is
seen as dynamic and, as a person consolidates his or her
identity in a new community, so his or her ability to speak
and learn the language increases.

41. Share with us
your Experience
in Learning
English

42. What Kind of
Teacher Are
you?
https://blog.curriculosolutions.com/teaching-styles-quiz-what-kind-of-teacher-
are-you

43. References
 Handbook of Applied Linguistics
 https://www.learning-theories.com/
 https://www.simplypsychology.org/
 https://www.verywell.com/

44. Thank you for your
attention 