The Meaning of Learning
Empiricists maintained that all knowledge derives from experience. Thus John Locke, a late seventeenth-century English philosopher, believed children
were born with a blank slate for a mind and all learning and experiences filled it up. He advocated individualized instruction and control of self through reward
and punishment. In addition, Watson claimed that he could teach a child anything. It can be said that you can teach a child to be what you want. Pavlov and Watson
used the concept of classical co nditioning to explain children’s behavior. Thus,
According to them that classical conditioning, where new signals are acquired for existing responses, could be managed to create associations or learning. For
example teacher instructs pupils to work quietly while putting his finger to her lips unconditioned stimulus, pupils work quietly on task unconditioned response, in
other times the teacher puts her finger on her lips without say anything conditioned stimulus, and the pupils work quietly conditioned response. It can
be concluded that when conditioning is already built, the pupil can directly associate the signal with the instruction in the previous event.
24
According to Pavlov, “learning is seen as a question of developing connections known as stimulus response bonds between events. The process of
developing connection is called conditioning process”
25
. “...all behavior is viewed as a response to stimuli...Behavior happens in associative chains; all learning is
thus characterized as associative learning, or habit formation, brought about by the repeated association of a stimulus with a response”.
26
Skinner used operant conditioning that focused on the impact of the consequences of behavior. According to him, behavior is modified by the type of
rewarding or punishing event that follow it. Positive reinforcement, such as friendly smile, praise, or special treat, can increase the likelihood that a behavior
will occur again, while punishment, such as frown, criticisms, withdrawal privileges etc, tents to decrease the chance that the behavior will recur.
27
“Skinner
24
Bartlett, op. cit., pp. 97-100.
25
Johnson, op. cit., p. 42.
26
Alice Omaggio Hadley, Teaching Language In Context, Boston: Heinle, Cangage Learning, 2001, p. 55.
27
Hetheringthon, loc. cit.
has looked upon learning as a series of experiences, each of which influences behavior in the same way that conditioning does. Thus, in his view, each learning
experience is a stimu lus that produces a behavioral response”.
28
He offered three stage procedure; stimulus, response, and reinforcement. According to him, human
baby learn a language through stimulus, response, and reinforcement. Baby feels hungry as a stimulus; it causes baby crying as a response; milk as a reinforcement
to fulfill his hunger.
29
He stated, “When the behavior to be learned was complex, it was developed by process called shaping. To shape a behavior, you break it
down into small parts, and teach each one at a time, until eventually the whole complex behavior is built up”.
30
Behaviorism viewed “language as a product of experience, they believed that
children entered life with a tabula rasa blank slate, and learn language only after being exposed to it.”
31
In addition as Hadley quoted from Chastain 1976: 142, that:
Skinner used the term operant conditioning to describe verbal learning. In this view, language is characterized as a sophisticated response system that human
acquire through automatic conditioning process. Some patterns of language are reinforced and others are not. Only those pattern reinforced by the community
of language users will persist. In Skinnerian pshychology, the human being is likened to a machine with multiple working parts. The mind is thought to be a
tabula rasa upon which are stamped associations between various stimuli in the environment and responses chosen from outside the organism for
reinforcement.
32
It can be concluded that behaviorist theories of language learning were based on the assumption that the child’s mind is a tabula rasa. All behavior is viewed as
a response to stimuli. Conditioning involves the straitening of association between a stimulus and response through reinforcement. Language is acquired through
conditioning process. The baby was born with nothing in his mind or he does not
28
Farrant, op. cit., p. 108.
29
Jeremy Harmer, The practice of English Language Teaching, New Edition, London and New York: Longman, 1991, p. 32.
30
Johnson, loc.cit.
31
Charles F. Meyer, English Linguistics, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 16.
32
Hadley, op. cit., p. 56.
know anything yet, and then he get little by little knowledge and skills naturally from the environment around till he can adjust with it. A child hears the words,
utterances, and sentences and how those are used in daily life by the people around him. In certain times he can use and understand those patterns as well as
people around him use to communicate. The way the child acquires the language can be applied to learn second or foreign language through drills as the child hears
those patterns over the times.