Human Learning

Nowadays, exist different theories how the humans learn, how they get knowledge, but first of all, it is necessary to know what is learning? Learning is acquiring something new, but this is involved with behaviors in each person, it says when a person have acquired knowledge, he or she has changed something in their behavior, because knowledge it is not just to have something in mind or only saving something, in this I want to analyze some theories that have explained how human beings get learning, and even if the cognitive process is involved in it, I am going to talk about Classical Behaviorism (Ivan Pavlov), Operant Conditioning (Skinner) Meaningful Learning ( Ausubel) and Humanistic Psychology (Carl Rogers). According Ivan Pavlov: he developed a Classical Behaviorism theory in this, he explained that someone can learn in a conditional and unconditional way, how was this? He used a pet for doing this experiment that was a pet dog, and this was in this form: when the dog looked at the food he began to salivate that was unconditional behavior, but Pavlov planned to do something different when the dog came to eat, he used a sound bell for each time when the dog was eating and after that, every time when he used a sound of bell, the dog began to salivate without food just hearing the bell, he conditioned a dog to do this and he called this classical conditioning, of one unconditional behavior he created a conditional behavior. But now can this occur in human learning? If we think about it, this theory exist nowadays in many places, for instance we can think in different schools they use a bell when is time to go out or come in, they are conditioned to this process, but not just in school occurs this, it could be in different jobs, college and even we use this in the street; who does not know that when a cars bell sounds, it is close one and can crush you, in simple words that I did not mention here, it is stimulus and responses. In other hand, Skinner developed another theory that is Operant Conditioning he gave an example about Classical behaviorism, this is good but can we use this with babies? If

we sound a bell or another thing, the children will want to know what is making that sound, and they are going to find it. Skinner thought that which one learns on the environment, and they respond according what they learn, some examples of classes of responses are: crying, sitting down, and walking and so on, but one important is the reinforcement, for example if you want to extinguish one behavior you have to be careful how you are going to use a reinforcement it could be someone playing in the kitchen and you dont want that behavior, you dont need to punish him, just tell him to play out and give active reinforcement and you will extinguish another behavior that was in the kitchen. In contrast, here we have Ausubel's meaningful learning theory, this is so different than we analyzed before, and this learning process has to do with the knowledge that you got before of something new, in other words: learning of new knowledge is depending on what is already known, we know that every person is inside in a learning process, it can be in the school, in our house and so on, in any topic, the only thing we need to do is to relate new knowledge with prior knowledge, and this is much better which rote learning and even this is more difficult for every one because we have to take time in memorizing thing, new ideas, new concepts and this is easier to forget than meaningful learning, because this is not relevant at all in our mind. Another, significant factor in this analysis is the theory of Rogers's Humanistic Psychology: in this every human takes another point in the learning process, because he sees to humans as physical and cognitive, but first of all emotion and not forgetting the learning process, but one important point in this is the teacher, he or she has to see everyone in a different way not just someone that gets knowledge because inside of them exist feeling, emotions and so on, so the teacher takes an important place in the learning, the first thing the teacher has to be a facilitator of learning, as we have been discussing in classes, this can be through communication, where we can interact with student and teacher and this have to be focused in one important thing: teaching how to learn.

As we have seen, there are some theories about how human beings learn, but what about when humans interrupt the learning process, concerning to our subject that is language learning, this does not mean that there is not more learning, that is not possible because humans never stop to learn this is a process that lasts a lifetime, but we can make slower our learning for example: when we are learning a second language exist an interference between our mother tongue with the new one, all the time we are thinking in our language and when we want to express something, we confuse the words, or it can be in another case when we read, we need to read and sometimes we read as it was in Spanish I mean using the Spanish alphabet. Furthermore there is also overgeneralization this means that we relate what we have been learning, with other thing, I am not saying that interferences and Overgeneralization are bad, because this is included in meaningful learning, but we must be careful about it, we can confuse, for example when I learned how to use the auxiliary verb do in negative way and I thought that do not was using with all person, and that was not right, now I know that has a change because we need to add es in this ve rb when we talk about third person, and this can happen with all people that learn a second language, in simple words exist negative and positive ways using this. (Brown, 2007) By: Jos Gustavo Espinoza Morales

Reference:
Brown, D. (2007). Human Learning. En D. Brown, Principles of language learning and teaching. (pgs. 78-102). N.Y: Longman.