Essential Cognitive Principles for Enhanced Learning

Cognitive Principles in Learning

Cognitive principles relate to mental and intellectual functions, influencing how we learn and process information.

Automaticity: Developing Fluent Skills

Automaticity is the ability to perform tasks without conscious thought, allowing actions to become automatic response patterns or habits. It typically results from learning, repetition, and practice.

• Overcome the propensity to pay too much focal attention to the bits and pieces of language; move language forms quickly to the periphery by using language in authentic contexts for meaningful purposes.
• Grammatical explanations or exercises dealing with usage have a place in the adult classroom, but avoid overwhelming students with excessive grammar.
• If learning processes become too heavily centered on the formal aspects of language, they can block pathways to fluency.
• Ensure a large proportion of your lessons focus on the use of language for purposes that are as genuine as a classroom context will permit.
• Students will gain more language competence in the long run if the functional purposes of language are the focal point.
• Exercise patience with students as you slowly help them to achieve fluency.

Meaningful Learning vs. Rote Memorization

Meaningful learning, in contrast to rote learning (repetition), involves acquiring new knowledge by relating it to existing knowledge.

• Children are effective meaningful language acquirers because they associate sounds, words, structures, and discourse elements with what is relevant and important for their daily quest for knowledge and survival.
• Some oral drilling is appropriate, especially for selected phonological elements like phonemes, rhythm, stress, and intonation.
• Capitalize on the power of meaningful learning by appealing to students’ interests, academic goals, and career aspirations.
• Whenever a new topic or concept is introduced, attempt to anchor it in students' existing knowledge and background so that it becomes associated with something already known.
• Avoid the pitfalls of rote learning: grammar explanations, principles and theories, drilling or memorization, activities whose purposes aren’t clear, activities that do not accomplish the goals of the lesson, unit, or course, and techniques that are so mechanical or tricky that students focus on the mechanics instead of on the language or meanings.

Anticipation of Reward: Driving Behavior

Human beings are universally driven to act, or “behave,” by the anticipation of some sort of reward that will ensue as a result of the behavior.

Shortcomings: This can lead learners to become dependent on short-term rewards, coax them into a habit of looking to teachers and others for their only rewards, and forestall the development of their own internally administered, intrinsic system of rewards.

• Encourage students to reward each other with compliments and supportive actions.
• Sustaining motivation over time in class can help.
• Display enthusiasm and excitement yourself in the classroom.
• Highlight the importance of English to students.

Intrinsic Motivation: Self-Driven Learning

The most powerful rewards are those that are intrinsically motivated within the learner. Because the behavior stems from needs, wants, or desires within oneself, the behavior itself is self-rewarding; therefore, no externally administered reward is necessary. Learners perform the task because it is fun, interesting, useful, or challenging, and not because they anticipate some cognitive or affective rewards from the teacher.

Strategic Investment: Learner Autonomy

Strategic investment refers to the methods learners employ to internalize and perform language across different areas.

Successful mastery of a second language will be due, to a large extent, to a learner’s own personal “investment” of time, effort, and attention to the second language in the form of an individualized battery of strategies for comprehending and producing the language.

• Recognize and deal with the wide variety of styles and strategies that learners successfully bring to the learning process.
• Emphasize the need for attention to each separate individual in the classroom.
• Learners employ a multiplicity of strategies for sending and receiving language.