HUMAN LEARNING ANALYSIS

Learning is a very important part of our life, some people do not know how essential is to learn, and they underestimate it. But, while some people ignore the real importance of learning, some people study how learning behaves; Ivan Pavlov (a Russian psychologist), for him, the learning process consisted in formation of association between stimuli and reflexive response; for example, he found a way to relate sound (stimuli) with a reaction (response), he trained a dog to salivate when it hears a tuning fork, the repetition of the sound until the dog gets use to salivate when hears it, was the prove that learning can be well developed by training or repetition.

Skinner, a neobehaviorist, called respondent conditioning and operant conditioning to a series of reactions after a stimulus, first, lets checks what Skinner calls an operant; operants are classes of response, (crying, sitting down and walking), they are sets of responses that are emitted and governed by the consequences they produce. Now, lets contrast it with respondent, which are sets of responses that are elicited by identifiable stimuli. For example, when a baby cries, is because he or she, is hungry, and when their parents listen to the baby, they give the baby some food, thus the action has a result or consequence which is to get something to it, it is an action that has an stimulus as a result; while in the respondents, the stimulus is given before the action is done.

That can be considered as learning under a set of rules or conditions. But there is another way to learn in a better way, according to David Ausubel, we can have a meaningful learning, but, what is that? It is to learn new things and relate them with our previous knowledge in order to understand something in a better way; but, we have to be careful and do not confuse meaningful learning and rote learning, because they are different concepts, while meaningful learning is, as we read above, to relate the previous knowledge that we have with the new knowledge that we are getting, rote knowledge is to have ideas, thoughts and no relate them, those thoughts are floating into our mind and they do not stick together in order to have a complete idea about something.

Rote learning helps to forget things that we do not relate to another, because retention is not stimulated into our brain, because the ideas that we have, are not sticking together, and in light of this, our brain deletes that information because it does not have sense to keep it. While in the other hand, meaningful learning helps to retention, because the ideas are sticking together and have sense to join the new knowledge with the previous
By Milton Orlando Martinez USLI025910

knowledge that we have. But we do not have to worry because some knowledge is being forgotten, because if our brain deletes it is because that information is useless, and also for getting more space to meaningful knowledge that we can learn.

The meaningful learning is important, and for Carl Rogers, it important to learn how to learn, it sounds a little confuse, but that means that the learning process is not only about getting theorical knowledge to students, it important to show them that a person needs to have the appropriate environment to learn, it has to be a confidence, natural and friendly environment to develop a good teaching-learning process; in a good learning environment, a student will realize what means that phrase (learn how to learn), and it is a responsibility of teachers and students to create a good environment to learn how to learn. It is important to feel comfortable in this process, because in that way, students will be motivated to learn.

There are eight kind of learning that we should develop, they are: Signal learning Stimulus learning Chaining Verbal association Multiple discrimination Concept learning Principle learning Problem solving

The first five types are into a behavioristic framework, while the last three are better explained by Ausubel and Rogers theory of learning. But if you are wondering what kind of learning should I develop? The answer is easy, all of them, because in the second language learning process we have to be prepare to any situation and have the cognitive competences to develop a good performance of the language that we have learnt.

Into the entire learning process, we have some terms that a lot of people think that are individual or separated terms, but they are wrong, these three terms work together in order to complete the learning process, these terms are: Transfer Interference Overgeneralization

By Milton Orlando Martinez USLI025910

The first item is when we are learning new things, knowledge is being transferred to our brain and we apply it correctly. The second one is when our mother tongue interrupts or affect the learning of a second language, as we know, when we are learning a new language, there are some things that sound illogical for us because they have no sense in our mother tongue, therefore we have to be open minded to learn another language, because it is different to our native language. And the third one occurs when we generalize a concept, for example, a person who is learning a second language and has cognitive problems, can easily get confuse with the term people, that person could refer to his/her son and call him people instead of son, child or kid, the person generalizes the term and use it with one single person, when we know that the term people is used to refer two or more human beings.

Within the learning process, we have the inductive and deductive reasoning, the inductive reasoning is when a person is learning a second language in a natural and untutored way, and he/she has to create rules and meanings with everything around them and without receiving help. And the deductive reasoning consists in the learning process into the classroom in a traditional way. Both of them can be useful, but it depends of the context and also of what your goals are.

There are two factors that determine the quality of the knowledge that the student will have, they are aptitude and intelligence. Aptitude is not more than the abilities that a student has for learning a second language, and how this student uses them, if the student has the aptitudes for learning the language that he/she has chosen, the student will success, but if the student does not have the correct aptitudes, he/she will fail (the learning will not be as good as the student wish). And intelligence is a barrier that a lot of people who want to learn another language has to reach, because the more intelligent you are, the more probabilities to learn another language you have, it is well known that we need to have a certain mental capacity to learn, and if we do not have the cognitive level, we will not learn a second language.

To finish, I just have to remark that human learning is process that we just have seen the tip of the iceberg, concerning to this topic, is a huge process that has a lot of steps, and we just have to be careful to make them correctly, or we could have rote knowledge which will be deleted automatically by our brain. Remember, the more practicing and reading that we do, the better results that we will secure.

By Milton Orlando Martinez USLI025910