Human beings – maybe as an internal tendency – tend to model the natural phenomena occurring around them. They have always been showing great enthusiasm in adopting models to explain natural events with which – sometimes – no thorough scientific justifications are associated. To highlight my academic background – maybe in order to show off a little- I would like to depict an example which may help me find a better way to elaborate on what I am trying to convey.
In mechanical engineering one of the major issues you have to deal with is Heat Transfer. Heat Transfer is a branch of fluid mechanics which mainly talks about how heat is transferred from a warmer place to colder place. Though it may seem too funny a case to be an issue to be discussed, but actually, it appears to be highly complicated. One of the major problems is that the only fundamental formulations available is set of very basic equations which, unfortunately, can not cover the vast world of Heat Transfer problems. But what do we have instead? There are too many correlations available each of them covering a very limited area of the problem. What causes this limitation and consequently the confusion? We simply do not know much about the nature of this phenomenon. To make the long story short, scientists try to model this phenomenon using different algorithms. They assign some variables as input and via the model they have established they try to reach reasonable outputs. But is it possible to employ such an approach in human sciences especially TEFL? It seems there have been numerous efforts made by various scholars to model the learning process. Each individual student brings some very personal variables into the teaching environment. Age, sex, intelligence, aptitude, learning strategies, affective factors, etc are among the so called personal inputs. But how these non-mathematical factors are modeled?
First it seems quite reasonable if we take a very quick glance at the methodology adopted by researchers in doing such kind of studies. The steps taken in the way of modeling may be best summarized under the title Psychometric Approach in Psychology and are as follow:
1- A hypothesis is made that a particular characteristic is likely to influence success in language learning
2- A means of assessing that characteristic is selected or constructed
3- Aspects of that characteristic and success in language learning are both measured
4- The results of the two measures are submitted to statistical and analysis and statistically significant relationships are sought
5- Conclusions are drawn about the contribution of the particular characteristic to learning a language
Before proceeding with this issue, I would like to clarify that I am not going to make a list of learner's variables and talk about each of them. A very thorough understanding of this may be obtained by studying various books cited in the syllabus which fortunately – or maybe unfortunately – leaves us quite handful of materials to read. What I am trying to bring into consideration is my own interpretation of such a trend.
Having been mentioned, this methodology inevitably leads to some certain results of which success in language learning is the most crucial one. For example, motivation as an important factor has been studied by Oxford and Ehram. Or in another study by Horwitz and Young (1991) anxiety has been studied. Aptitude is also one of the variables which has undergone researches by Skehan (1989). Regardless of the results obtained, there are some inadequacies associated with these studies and other similar researches. One is that traditional research on individual differences has been mainly concerned with measuring, labeling and grouping people. The other problem is that the purpose of such research is usually not to identify how individuals differ but to group them according to perceived similarities. It is also worth mentioning that the findings have had limited practical value because they do not provide us with hints to help any learner as an individual to become a better learner.
As we can see, though the main aim of such studies might have been to provide us with information about how different levels of personal factors can affect teaching, it has appeared to have little practical value. Researches have been aimed at identifying different personality factors, but what they left us with is just statistical information over a group of learners. What here has not been mentioned is that how each individual learner is different from the others and how teachers can help each individual to be an effective learner. This is exactly what has been done within the framework of social constructivism by Williams and Burden.
They have suggested several starting points. They believe that each researcher must start with a powerful theory of learning which in turn, enables us to focus on the uniqueness of individuals as well as helping us to see the commonalities.
Insisting upon uniqueness is the major shift in approaches already existed. it seems quite clear that by emergence of such terms as learner-centeredness, individuality has gained an extra importance.
According to constructivism, there are some very crucial questions which must be answered. What are the ways in which each individual tries to perceive the world around him? How do they construct their own personal views on meaning from the world around them? Answering to these questions will inevitably lead to this conclusion that information about how learners view the world and also view themselves within the world is of high importance.
Three areas concerning the ways in which individuals perceive themselves are going to be mentioned.
1- Self-concept: this is a general term referring to the collection of our beliefs about ourselves which play a very important role in establishing our personal identity.
2- Locus of control: having been derived from Rotter (1954), this concept mainly talks about beliefs about the control people have over the life events. The two extremes of the continuum of this are internalisers who believe that they, themselves are in charge of everything that happens to them and externalisers who believe that events in their lives are all determined by uncontrollable forces.
3- Attribution theory: proposed by Hieder (1944, 1953), this theory makes an attempt to clarify that how people explain the causes of their own successes and failures. This theory has four main elements: ability, effort, task difficulty and luck among which ability is stable and internal, effort is unstable and internal, task difficulty is stable and external and luck is unstable and external.
A quick glance at the abovementioned areas will simply show us that all of these areas are trying to shed more light on individuality of each learner. This view puts too much of a burden on the shoulders of teachers. Teachers not also have to present the knowledge and facilitate learning but also they are responsible for each individual learner. So in contrast to traditional views, the role of the teacher is not to be happy because of having a good average of the results any more. He should oblige himself to try his best to discover and understand the very personal worlds of students and provide them with facilitative mediation in order for them to be successful learners.
This is a matter which will be discussed much more in details in the next diary.
But still a very important question to me remains. Is it possible to model the learning process by employing different methods of modeling? The one by which each individual learner can, by defining personal factors to the model, predict his or her own success.
Is it really possible?
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