DEVELOPING l lSTENING Fl UENCY

7

What is the new paradigm? At another level of explanation, it asserts that language acquisition can and does take place without any overt performance and, therefore, the primary methodology of language teaching is to create the stimulus conditions which facilitate the attentive and retentive transformation of sound information into an internal cognitive structure. It sees the performance as an indicator of learning, not as a necessary prerequisite. It even views performance before learning as a possible detriment to learning. This is contrary to some basic assumptions of some leading learning theorists. Most conditioning theorists have generally agreed that arranging for the learner to make an appropriate response so that it can be reinforced, is central to the problem of teaching. Kendler, for example, stated "once the characteristics of the to-be-learned response are specified, the task becomes one of getting the student to make it, explicitly or implicitly, in the presence of the appropriate stimulus."²⁷Similarly, Glaser's view that "response is the primary object of manipulation in instructional technology" ²⁸seems to call for such an emphasis.

This learning paradigm follows from certain basic assumptions about the "nature of man" and the nature of mind." In its "purest" form, metaphysical behaviorism, from which these learning principles derived, was based on the following postulates or assumptions:
1.the existence of "mind" and "mental states" is denied;
2. all experience can be reduced to glandular secretions and muscle movements;
3. human behavior is almost exclusively determined by environmental
(learning) influences (primarily along the principles of classical
conditioning) rather than by hereditary or biological factors, and
4. conscious processes (covert phenomena), if they exist, are beyond the realm of
scientific inquiry ^{2 9}
From these assumptions, from this "view of the world" came the response-oriented learning paradigm, the "learn by doing" paradigm. Few people using the "learn by doing" philosophy looked deeply into the basic assumptions. Many scientists who were forced to face the assumptions explicitly felt uncomfortable with them but, recognizing their own "successes" using the paradigm, refined and expanded it. Learning principles based on empirical evidence from research using the S-R paradigm became widely accepted by the public.

But this learning paradigm, while very popular, has not been held by all learning theorists. Mowrer in 1960 cast doubt upon the response-oriented conectionist position.
According to Thorndike's view, an organism can only learn what it does, i.e., a
particular stimulus-response connection has to "occur" before it can be strengthened
(or weakened); but experiments on latent learning and extinction, insight, and other
mediated forms of behavior modification (see Chapter 2) have shown that learning
can occur wilhout "doing", thus impugning the generality of the connectionist
position.³⁰
Gagne also questioned the assumption that "the best way to learn a performance is to practice that performance."³¹This assumption was challenged by Gagne on the ground that in the kind of training he was analyzing, "the responses required (turning switches, inserting plugs, moving handles) do not have to be learned at all--they are already there in the human's repertoire."³²He found that major improvement in gunnery came not from practicing the response, but from"informing the learners of the correct picture to be achieved in ranging,"³³i.e., by teaching the perceptual aspects of the task.

James Deese threw down the gauntlet when he challenged experimental psychologists to come up with new metho(is of studying the important aspects of human thought.

8

JAMES R. NORD

Behavior as the goal in the study of thought is wrong, and the characteristic emphasis
of the psychological laboratory on the measurable response and the controlling
independent variable is responsible for the sterility of the study of thought. ³⁴
Psychology is the science of behavior only in a trivial sense. To say otherwise is like
asserting that physics is the science of meter reading or that chemistry is a kind of
elaborate cookery. ³⁵
Bandura has also been outspoken in his criticism of an overt response orientation to learning.
Psychological theories have traditionally assumed that learning can occur only by
performing responses and experiencing their effects. ³⁶
According to social learning theory, behavior is learned symbolically through central
processing of response information before it is performed... Observation learning
without performance is amply documented in modelling studies using a
non-response acquisition procedure. ^{3 7}
The basic paradigm shift in instructional psychology from a focus on overt observable behavior to a focus on the internal cognitive structure has recently been acknowledged.
Instructional psychology is now involved in a notable shift of emphasis in
psychological research and theory... The current shift emphasizes the study of central
cognitive and affective associationistic and wholistic processes by which the learner
selects, transforms and encodes the nominal characteristics of experience into
functional meaningful internal representation.³⁸
Beyond the doubt cast by modern psychologists on the efficacy of the performance-based learning paradigm, there is also evidence of some possible detrimental effects created by following the paradigm in language teaching.
The requirement to respond orally, as in the mimicry memorization drills of the "A-L" approach, imposes listening for speaking and it results in impaired listening comprehension. This problem was treated in a short experiment by James Asher which involved the performance of drill movements by command in Russian. Asher found that the students who merely performed the commands did so with a greater degree of reliability than those who first repeated the commands orally before performing the necessary movement. He concluded that:
...the stress of trying to pronounce the alien utterance may retard listening fluency...
The optimal strategy may be serial learning in which one achieves listening fluency
just before one attempts to speak. ³⁹
There is other experimental support for this same position. In a study on the associative reaction time in language acquisition, Ley and Locascio state:
Our research suggests that one must make associations to verbal materials during
learning in order that the material can be later recalled, and that some procedure such
as repeatedly saying the material aloud interferes with the associative process, and
therefore has a detrimental effect on learning.⁴⁰
Part of the explanation for these results may be the role that stress and anxiety play in the learning process. Anxiety, often brought on by task overload, can be a major deterrent to the learning of listening comprehension. The effect of anxiety on learning in general has been widely studied. Eysenck points out that:
...conditionbig is related to anxiety for the simple reason that it has been shown
conclusively that the ease with which a conditioned reflex is formed depends very
much on the anxiety of the person on whom the experiment is being performed.
What is more, there is a good deal of what is called "stimulus generalization " in the
anxious person . ⁴¹