Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Human Learning and Cognition

Fall 2003

Answers - Week 7 Terry, Chapter 5

1. How do the contingencies of non-reward, punishment, and avoidance work in instrumental conditioning?

Last week we dealt with instrumental learning which is basically all about trial and error learning in making associations between three different elements; the stimulus, response, and consequence. This week will really looking at us how we can use this information to condition people to behave in the way that we want. This means that we can use this knowledge to reinforce behavior that we like, such as studying and paying attention in class, but we can also use this information to try to alter behavior that we do not like, such as running around in class and not learning. In addition, there also certain linguistic elements or language learning elements which we can also further define based in the type of information contained in theories of instrumental learning. This week in particular we are going to focus on trying to alter unwanted behaviors and reinforce better behaviors after having reprogrammed the unwanted behavior. This is done in response to what we did last week which is basically about reinforcing good or wanted behavior.

The three main contingencies available to us in the theory of instrumental conditioning in order to try to change behavior are non reward, punishment, and avoidance. Starting with the idea of non reward we see that it is actually a very simple idea. All this really entails is simply taking the reward away for a particular type of behavior. The expected effect would be that the behavior would stop. For example, I give you stickers on your homework assignments basically as a type of reward for doing the job. This is a reward because even if you don't do a great job you still get some sort of sticker. If I were to stop giving you stickers and performance on homework would probably change. You might be less motivated and your drive to get sticker would diminish because there was no sticker. This seems very simple and straightforward but in the real world that might not actually be so easy. To start with we would need to know what the specific rewards are as a result of a particular behavior and try to stop them. If the reward is coming from somewhere that's out of our control then there is actually very little we can do. Research on lab animals is also shown that even when the reward is removed they still seem to perform the action because they are used to it. It's a type of habituation where you get used to performing certain actions regardless of whether the reward is there or not.

Punishment is about trying to stop a certain behavior by changing the consequence from a positive one to a decidedly negative one. For example if a child ask up in class is somehow rewarded for this by getting attention from other students, by universal laughter, by a feeling of power then the teacher needs to find a punishment which is stronger than the positive consequences. It is being claimed, most notably by Skinner and Thorndike, that punishment doesn't work, at least not long-term but there have been many studies which show that punishment doesn't work provided it is given immediately, consistently, and brutally. What I mean by brutally is that it has to be a very strong punishment immediately and always. If the punishment starts off small and get stronger then the person will simply habituate to the punishment and it won't have the same effect. Although punishment does seem to work there is also a moral dilemma in punishment. For punishment to work it must be brutal, strong. This often has the effect of causing aggression among the punishment group or person. Only punishment can also be sending mixed signals in that people still might be getting rewards as their punished and to become associated together. This was Skinner's main argument. It is therefore still important in the punishment really does strongly outweigh any kind of possible reward. Since we are not always available and cannot control all the rewards in this become somewhat of a tricky venture.

In avoidance, the third type of contingency, the behavior itself changes in order to avoid any kind of consequence. In order for this to happen it would seem to reason of course that the consequence would have to be negative. So, if we don't want something bad happen we do something in advance which will stop that negative consequence. This mean to the behavior itself which would cause the consequence doesn't exist and is replaced by another type of behavior. As we said in class, the typical type of avoidance behavior that we find in the English language classroom in Korea would simply be silence. Students are silent because they are avoiding the punishment that comes from making mistakes. This punishment could and probably did originally come from the outside but it also comes from the inside with people that are highly sensitized to it. This type of silence in behavior probably is also a very strong result of a feeling of helplessness as we will discuss in the next question.

2. What is learned helplessness and how does it work?

Learned helplessness is simply the idea that a person learns that their actions or behaviors have no real effect on consequences. This means that the matter what they do, no matter how they behave things are going to happen. Things are outside their control. But this results and then is more than just avoidance, because avoidance often involves some kind of behavior, behavior that will stop a negative consequence happening. This type of avoidance still involves some said to believe that actions will change things. In learned helplessness people stop doing anything basically because they feel that it doesn't matter whether they do something or not. This is often what happens in examples of severe depression. People do not want to do something because they don't see any reason for doing something. This prize in with the idea of movement and cognition that we read about in Ratey.

As the setting class, one of the sad things that we can mention in relation to learn helplessness is the children and school often are prey to this. This results often from the type of assessment that children get in class as well as the type feedback they receive. We, therefore, really need to be very careful about letting our children feel at least somewhat empowered in the classroom. This is the whole idea behind learner centeredness and learner autonomy. Not only does learner autonomy allow learner's actually learn a little bit better because they are learning what they want it also lets them feel that their actions actually mean something in the classroom. This might not be the case in a more teacher center class with students simply have to do what the teacher says.

3. What are some of the main applications of these ideas for us as language teachers?

Aside from the very straightforward classroom management applications of which there are many, there are also some applications of the idea of instrument of conditioning to language learning itself. Skinner, for one, is agreed proponent of the idea that instrument of conditioning was a very important basis for language learning. The basic idea is that conditioning allows people to fine-tune the type of language data they have in relation to functions and behavior. Different behavior and different results, provided they occurred in often enough succession would be able to be learned and internalized.

Since the last of our chapters on behaviorism, that's just try to recap how behaviorists would see the language learning process by focusing on the four different chapters we discussed. In the first chapter we learned about habituation and basically the idea that people learn to tune out what is not important over a period of time. For us this is a very important first step as language learners. This basically how we learn to focus attention. The able to decide what's important and what's worst focusing attention on as a very important skill that the brain needs to learn habituation is basically about focusing attention. Once people have gotten some element habituation down they will then soon realize that pieces of language addressed to them are important. Through the simple idea habituation people begin to realize that language is important, but again it is key to the language is focused at them, either directly or indirectly. This of course the strong repercussions for us as language teachers. It means that we need to give our students direct types of input. Rather than have them just read about other people who they really don't care about, we really have to get them into language which is directed at them in which they need to respond to. The next step that we focused on what's simple classical conditioning. What happens in classical conditioning is that two things which really do not occur naturally in the world are basically associated. That is, they do not normally enjoy a cause effect type of relationship. They simply happen to co- occur sometimes in the real world. What happens here is at these things which co-occur become associated. This of course has been demonstrated in laboratories, but we can extend this to the real world by saying that pieces of language which happen to cooccur are associated in the brain. This seems to directly support a lexical hypothesis with says that the basis of language are chunks of language and not individual words themselves, but it also supports a generative type of language system by simply redefining the level and which the occurrences are meaningful. For linguists they might say that sound co-occurrences create patterns for words and possibly morpheme co-occurrences as word construction systems within a grammatical system. By simply looking at classical conditioning we can form an explanation for the basis of our lexical system. Both of these first two types of behaviorists learning that we have talked about really are context depend. A person doesn't really actually have very much to do except to absorb what's in the environment. The actual learner doesn't have very much control. It is in the next two, operant learning and operant conditioning, in which the person begins exercise some control. In often learning we now have a three-way association between two things plus the consequence of the previous associations. This takes the possibilities for language much much higher. We now no longer simply have bits and pieces but we actually have results of those bits and pieces, that is functions. We originally said at an earlier date that part classical conditioning might actually been making associations between certain forms and functions. Here with the advent of opera learning we can fine-tune these basic ideas which is credence to the belief, or the observation that there is a multilevel series of connections between forms and functions. Children might start off with a one-to-one relationship between a form to function but with a little practice and actual exposure this will undoubtedly change. It is also clear that people text these types of connections and associations. They try to find out more about certain consequences, whether their positive or negative. What the result might be. This is where the operant conditioning idea comes in. It is operant conditioning, and of course the real world this would happen as a result of exchanges with people not necessarily the weird kinds of things that they do in laboratories, which allow people to perform complex types of behavior such as avoidance.

Will need is first four elements of behaviors and we can see some sort of ideas which might make sense, at least partially, for the learning of language. What is interesting is that behaviors models seem to agree more with the cognitive models, or models of the brain that we read about in Ratey. Keep on thinking about this because it's going and more and more interesting.