Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Human Learning and Cognition

Fall 2003

Questions - Week 13 Terry, Chapter 11 and Fauconnier Chapter 5

Terry (2000) Chapter 11 - Storage and Retrieval

1. What is the Spatial Learning? (Jang, Heejin)

Spatial Learning are considered two different types of knowledge. Route knowledge is based on series of directions or paths through a spatial environment. By contrast, a survey map or a cognitive map is a more abstract representation of an environment, placing specific routes in context with the surrounding area. A cognitive map is a mental image of a place. It was first developed by Edward Tolman in 1948, as an attempt to explain the learning behaviour of rats in mazes. Cognitive maps are formed during purposeful activity, and the process involves integration of images, information and attitudes about the environment. Certain factors are thought to aid in the cognitive mapping process, such as frequency of access to the environment, the distinctiveness of the environment, and the frequency with which certain landmarks are thought about and used in planning of routes. Previous knowledge of environments of the same type can also aid in cognitive mapping, even if one has never been in that particular environment. Certain factors such as gender, subjects like mathematics or science, and age affect spatial abilities.

Schemas in Spatial Memory

Spatial schemas facilitate two prominent effects such as organization and distortion. Cognitive maps exist in psychological space. The mental image reflects distances, locations and other geometrical properties of the psychological space may not have a one to one correspondence with the physical space that is being represented. Distortions are not due to retrieval failures, but to distorted representations. There are many types of distortions such as distance, incompleteness, size, augmentation, and rectilinear normalization that may occur in cognitive maps, and many reasons for each type of distortion. On the other hand, items that are semantically related or which share pre-experimental associations are recalled together during output. It is called organization.

2. What is motor learning and what is an efficient way to learn Motor-Skills? (Dae, Sung-an)

Motor-skills learning can be defined as the acquisition of precisely adjusted movements in which the amount, direction, and duration of responding corresponds to variations in which the regulating stimuli (Adams, 1987). In terms of motor is related to physical movements. There are a lot of motor skills learning in daily life. When people typed the computer keyboard or they learn some sports, they might experience how motor-skills work. For example, playing the piano, it is not just fingers moving. In motor way, eyes and fingers are coordinated each others in playing. Cognitively we read and perceive the composition of music. As much as we practice, fingers move freely, and play the music accurately that means press the right tune of keyboards we perceive. The measure of accuracy and speed are the criterion of the motor-skills learning.

Decades of research on motor-skills learning have emphasized two important factors: practice and feedback. Rescorla-Wagner model show the relationship between practice and one measure of skills, the speed of performance. We plot responses speed on the vertical axis and number of training trials along the horizontal axis. Basically, responses become faster with additional practice, but in one-to-one fashion with the number of practice trials. Plotting speed over the log number of trials produces a nice, straight-line increase in speed over trials. At the start of training, there may be rapid, but performance improves much more slowly as proficiency increases. We need a lot of practice to master the skills.

The spaced-practice is advantageous to motor-skills learning. Baddeley and longman had the experiment of the spacing of practice sessions on learning to type. British postal workers were divided into four different groups (1x1, 2x1, 1x2, and 2x2). The first of number refers to the number of sessions per day, the second of the length of the session. The 1x1 group took 12 weeks to complete 60 hours in 12 weeks, whereas the 2x2 group finished in 3 weeks. The spaced groups were less satisfied, because the training session took long time. The first group who had the spaced practice produced the best performance in the rest of groups. There are certain factors that do favor massed schedules. Forgetting may occur thus spacing one trial a day might be more advantages than one trial per week. Massed trial scan lead to fatigue, loss of motivation and attention.

Outcome information is called knowledge of results, short translation as KR. One form of KR is called feedback. Feedback is important in learning and teaching, because feedback give some information about errors and goal performance. Learners can recognize good and poor performance. In one study, the participants learned tracking responses; they were divided in two groups. One group had the consistent and immediate feedback and the other had the partial and delayed feedback. The group who had the consistent feedback made the smaller errors. However in 10 minutes later, both of groups were almost equivalent, and 2 days later in given test, the group who had the partial and delayed feedback had the best performance. Delayed feedback allows the participants to develop their error detection abilities. Learners may rehearse the responses they made and think how their response was accurate. Spaced practice and delayed feedback are the efficient way of motor-skills learning.

Motor-skills learning is almost like speaking skills. In EFL situation, many students have good reading and listening skills, however they have the difficulties to speak out. They do not have a lot of interactions with foreigners in other words lack of feedback and practice. Reading text out loud and self-talk are one of the way to improve the speaking skills to EFL students. Speaking is the muscle moving all of the face, mouth, lips, and tongue. Practice everyday is very important like a lot of frequency, even though they are frustrated and discouraged.

In class students can have indirect feedback. If a teacher and classmates understand the sentences, those are the positive feedback, and if they do not understand, that is negative feedback. That feedback guides to making right expressions to say. Practice everyday is very important like a lot of frequency helps to have the long-term memory, even though they are frustrated and discouraged. These frequent sentences make the strong route in the brain. In certain situation, we might use these frequent sentences than unfamiliar sentences.

3. Define the implicit learning in your own word and how can we, as a language teacher, facilitate implicit learning? (Kim, Jiyoung)

One of the definitions of learning is that it leads our behavior change. There are two ways of learning, whether we know how we change our behavior or do not know how the change is made. The former is called as an explicit learning and the latter is called as an implicit learning.

Implicit learning is defined as an acquisition of knowledge of pattern without consciousness through a lot of input, in which it forms a pattern. Because the target pattern is not given explicitly to the learners, implicit learning needs cognitively deep process of the given materials of learners. The learners should compare and make an association between previous knowledge and given new information and find the pattern behind the given information. In our daily life, there are many examples of implicit learning, and one of them is learning the first language. It is said that first language acquisition happens through setting parameters of the language with least amount of input (Radford et. el, 1999). In real life, it is hard to see that a child just picks up parameter sets after listening to several sentences of her caregivers. Before a child actually produce a speech, she perceives a lot of input and tries to pick up the patterns of the given language implicitly.

There are three factors of facilitating implicit learning. The first factor is frequency/familiarity. The more frequent the learners encounter materials, the easier for the learners to pick the pattern from materials. A lot of various inputs mean a lot of information, which the learners can use for processing, so that it is much easier for them to pick up the underlying pattern. For facilitating implicit learning, frequent input should be given to learners. The second factor is context, in which the pattern is embedded. The context should be various to let learners make more associations. Through exposure to the various contexts in which same pattern exists, the learner can make deeper processing and it can facilitate more implicit learning. Finally, the distinctiveness can be the third factor for facilitating implicit learning. If the pattern of the input is not distinctive enough for the learners to pay attention, learners cannot learn that pattern. Or if the context or input itself is more distinctive than the target pattern, learners remember or learn not the pattern but the context or the input itself. As a result, it is important the degree of distinctiveness between the pattern and the context, in which the input is embedded.

Knowledge about Implicit learning can be applied into the second language teaching. First, it is well matched with the task- based language teaching (TBLT) approach in that it is using various pedagogic or real life task, so that it let the second language learners to process the given information and to make an association between form and function implicitly. The target language forms are embedded in the given task and while learners' doing the given tasks, they are supposed to pick up the language forms. Knowledge about the implicit learning can be another rationale for using extensive reading of authentic materials in the second language teaching. Authentic materials have a lot of natural language. Without teaching explicitly language itself, learners of the second language can pick up the natural target language pattern implicitly.

Thinking that what proportion the implicit learning is taken in our real life learning experiences; we can conclude how mach amount of implicit learning is needed for the second language learners in the classroom. Then, we can think how we can facilitate their implicit learning using three factors of implicit learning.

Radford, A, Atkinson, M., Britain, D., Clahsen, H. and Spencer, A. (1999) Linguistics: An Introduction Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Fauconnier (1997) Chapter 5 - Matching

4. What is projection and why is it important?

In order to understand projection refers to understand matching. Again matching is a type of analogy but is one which is grammatically conditioned. This means certain grammatical items will cause matching. What basically happens when two structures are matched is that they are linked. So in its most basic sense matching is a type of linking and is in this linking relationship that certain structures are allowed to be mapped from one to the other and in this respect we can see it as a type of analogy. Again is important to remember that matching is caused by certain grammatical items which are located in structures. These are called matching operators. Some of the matching operators which company mentions in the book include such items as as if, when, where, or, whenever, supposing that etc. now, in the matching situation the matching operator opens new spaces. These are a foundation space and an expansion space. What basically happens here is that matching allows a foundation space to be opened which then projects structure forward into an expansion space. What is interesting (and this is something you should company already know from having studied the vast majority of this book) is that the entire structure is not projected. Projection, and we have seen this before, is limited. That is one of the ways in which several different meanings can be interpreted from a single surface structure. Will the surface structure might look the same what is done in relation to projection is different depending on the function and intent of the speaker. So really projection is simply an operation which allows certain structures to be pushed forward into an extension space. It is important because it is the amount or the extent of the projection which actually gives an utterance its interpretable meaning.

5. What is domain and how does it operate?

Domain is also very important part of the overall system which Fauconnier is trying to show us. As mentioned above one of the ways in which utterances acquire particular meaning is through different types of expansion, projection, mapping. One of the major forces in this type of selection is domain. Domain works as a limited or restrictor to mapping. We sung a very beginning of the book how presuppositions are somewhat limited or different in how they affect an utterance. More specifically, a presupposition might percolate throughout an utterance affecting all of it. On the other hand a presupposition might be limited in its scope or effect. The domain does this by simply existing. That is, projections occur from specific domains. Only the content in the domain space can be projected forward into an extension space or in other situations be projected backwards into what has already been created. If the domain is limited in its content than that is all that can be pushed forward. It is in this simple way in which domains really potentially limit meaning in utterances.

6. What are meta-metaphorical conditionals?

The idea behind meta metaphorical conditionals is a very important one. Throughout this book and in this system which Fauconnier is trying to introduce us to there is the underlying idea that while there seems to be a lot of freedom in being able to construct pieces of language (in this is really what this book is all about) there is, however, also some powerful restrictions. These restrictions are not come from rules, because as we've said in such a system there are no rules, but there are restrictions nonetheless. Meta metaphorical conditionals provide a good example to show us and how these restrictions work. One of the restricting factors is knowledge. You can't perform analogies between two things you don't know. It was already stated that analogy is based on knowledge. The basic set up here is that we are fine-tuning this idea. What Fauconnier is pointing out here is that one of the main restrictions would come from cultural models and in this case Lakoff's idealized cultural models (ICMs). We can see from the examples which Fauconnier gives us that conditionals which are based on a certain type of analogy can only be created off the based of a pre-existing cultural model. Thus, for us to say, "if Jennifer is a rose then Mary is its thorn." We have given underlying cultural model which allows us to compare women to flowers. The example that I gave above is even more interesting because it underlies what Fauconnier mentions earlier in the chapter about matching. In the example I've not only use the cultural model WOMEN AS FLOWER but I have extended where is not just flower of other parts of the plants upon which the flower is located. So this is a sample of not only a meta metaphorical conditional but also an extension of that space.