Psychology for Language Teachers: A Social Constructivist Approach (Cambridge Language Teaching Library)_ Marion Williams Chapter 4_ What can teachers do to promote learning? Introduction Feuerstein’s theory of mediation Conclusion The learning process starts as an inter-mental activity, by the more skilled individual sharing through talk, and ends as an intra-mental activity, with the shared knowledge taken in by the unskilled individual. According to Vygotsky, learning includes two stages: shared understanding in a social context through symbolic mediation (mainly in the form of dialogue) and internalization of the shared knowledge by an individual. The learning process is described as “new concepts continue to be acquired through social/interactional means” (Mitchell & Myles, 2004).

1. PSYCHOLOGY FOR LANGUAGE
TEACHERS:
A SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVIST
APPROACH
(CAMBRIDGE LANGUAGE TEACHING LIBRARY)
MARION WILLIAMS
Present by Zahra Farajnezhad
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2. Chapter 4_ What can teachers do to
promote learning?
• Introduction
• Feuerstein’s theory of mediation
• Conclusion
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3. Introduction
•Teachers can affect learning in a range of
ways that go far beyond the transmission of
knowledge. Some of these ways would be
likely to include teaching learners how to
learn, boosting their confidence, motivating,
displaying a personal interest, enhancing
self-esteem and organizing an appropriate
learning environment.
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4. Definition
•The concept of Mediation:
The central role in all social interactionists theories.
For Vygotsky and his followers, mediation refers to the
use of ‘tools’. Tools in this sense refer to anything that
is used in order to help solve a problem or achieve a
goal. The most important of these tools is ‘Symbolic
language’.
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5. •The mediated mind: The role of artifacts (tools and activities) and other people in
learning.
•The importance of tools: Humans use tools to understand and mediate their social
and physical environments. Tools are socially generated and transmitted within
cultures through joint activity.
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6. Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)
(the zone of potential/ next development)
‘The distance between the actual developmental level as determined by
independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined
through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more
capable peers.’ (Vygotsky, 1978: 86).
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7. symbolic tools
_________________________________________________
•To mediate between their mind and the abstract world, and modern
societies have transformed and updated these tools. The result of the
upgrade of some of these tools is known as "symbolic tools" and among
them there are numbers, arithmetic systems, music, art, and language
(Lantolf, 2000). Symbolic tools belong to what Vygostsky (1978) called "higher
intellectual processes", and are strictly human.
________________________________________________
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8. Symbolic mediation, internalization, learning process
•The symbolic mediation refers to the external process via
symbolic signs or tools in social context through which
learner can control mental process after internalization
(Lightbown & Spada, 2006). Lantolf (2000) regards language, among all
the symbolic tools, as “the most powerful psychological
tool”. Through the mediation of language, the child or
learner learns how to perform a task or solve a problem
with the help from a more skilled individual.
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9. Symbolic mediation, internalization, learning process
• The learning process starts as an inter-mental activity, by the more skilled individual
sharing through talk, and ends as an intra-mental activity, with the shared knowledge
taken in by the unskilled individual. According to Vygotsky, learning includes two stages:
shared understanding in social context through symbolic mediation (mainly in the form
of dialogue) and internalization of the shared knowledge by individual. The learning
process is described as “new concepts continue to be acquired through
social/interactional means” (Mitchell & Myles, 2004).
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10. Teacher as a mediator
•The role of the teacher has always been of that as a mediator between the learner and
the knowledge to be acquired. The teacher is responsible for introducing the learner
to new concepts and help him/her walk through this new knowledge until the
learners appropriates it.
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11. •With Communicative Language Teaching in the field of SLA, the roles of the teacher
and students came into examination. In CLT the teacher is not the person who
knows-it-all and transmits knowledge, but rather a facilitator that helps students to
construct their own knowledge and invite them to be active participants in their
learning process.
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12. Feuerstein’s theory of mediation
• Reuven Feuerstein, an Israeli psychologist, began his work in the late 1940s and
was at one time a student of Jean Piaget. Feuerstein's work was popularized only
in the 1990s. Feuerstein's work addressed those issues of utmost concern to
parents, teachers and psychologists: What goes on in the mind of the learner?
What goes on in the mind of the teacher? How can the interaction between them
result in effective learning?
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13. Feuerstein’s theory of mediation
• The first mediators are our parents. What are the differences between a mediator and a
teacher as a disseminator of information?
• 1. Knowledge + skills = progress and be independent
• 2. Mediation = interaction between teacher and students
• 3. Reciprocation
• 4. Materials + learners = interaction to become a great learner.
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14. Theory of Mediated Learning Experience
•Mediated learning experience (MLE) states that the quality of interaction between
the individual and the environment via an intentional human being (the teacher)
plays a pivotal role in the cognitive development of the individual. According to
Feuerstein (1991) without mediation, a learner has limited opportunity to benefit
from either formal or informal learning. Feuerstein (1991) identified a list of
parameters that characterize MLE:
•(i) intentionality and reciprocity,
•(ii) mediation of meaning, and
•(iii) transcendence.
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15. 1) Intentionality and Reciprocity (IR)
•In the MLE, the teacher not only has a clear intention of what to teach, but also
shares his/her intentions to the learner.
•Reciprocity refers to the teacher's alertness and awareness of how the learner
responds to the intention.
•The "IR parameter implies that a purposeful outcome results from the interaction.
•The "IR parameter helps to highlight the fact that the quality of interaction is not
accidental or coincidental in nature.
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16. 2) Mediation of Meaning (ME)
•In MLE, the awareness of meaning constitutes a major component of the motivation
system. Meaning involves the individual's cultural background, value system,
aspirations and needs. According to Feuerstein (1991), the effective mediator
(teacher) makes known to the learner the significance of the interaction, for
example, by asking: "Why are we learning this?" and "What is it for"?
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17. 3) Mediation of Transcendence (T)
•Transcendence (T) is about going beyond the "here and now" of the learning situation.
It refers to the transfer of learning across contexts and situations. The effective
mediator enables the learner to take a life-wide approach to learning so that the
learner actually learns how to learn.
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18. 4. Mediation of feeling competent
•Feeling of competence (FC) relates to the need to provide "successful experiences" for
students and to remove the unwarranted fear of failure. FC is important as the fear of
making mistakes often results in the student's lack of investment in time and effort
to try again.
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19. 5. Mediation of regulation and control of behavior
•It relates to self-regulatory and metacognitive behaviors, is important for classroom
learning situations. It is important for students given the demands of school life and
the challenges confronting their personal and social development.
•Drawing attention to specific points, accentuating, accelerating or decelerating
progression through activities, explaining causal relationships and giving instructions
are among the most frequent aspects to be encountered in language teaching.
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20. 6. Mediation of sharing behavior
• The mediation of interdependence and sharing (IS) refers to a "sense of belonging" and
sharing behavior. There is a need to encourage students to appreciate their being an integral
part of the community and institution. Furthermore, teamwork, interdependence and
knowledge sharing are attributes emphasized in today's world.
• It is a means of sharing one’s inner life with others. For example, when teachers stand in the
hall smoking with their students during the break, when they go for a drink together on a
Friday after class or even when they have a meal together. The affective links set up by such
behavior are seen to have positive effects in the more formal pedagogical context.
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21. 7. Mediation of individual and psychological differentiation
•It is the need to assert oneself as a separate individual who shares certain aspects of
his existence with the community. Individual and psychological differentiation is
the process by which the individual becomes separate. So, the learner who is
capable of genuine autonomy is the one who, through the process of mediation,
has been prepared for the situation in an environment close to a more traditional
mode of teaching / learning.
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22. 8. Mediation of goal-seeking, goal-setting
and goal-achieving behavior
•Goal seeking is a means of enriching the learning process. It requires organizational
skills to be brought into play and creates the necessity to develop the tools to achieve
the goal. In the absence of genuine learning goals, motivation can be no more than
instrumental and, therefore, lacking in efficacy. This, of course, does not mean to say
that learning does not take place.
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23. 9. Mediation of challenge
•Preparing learners to take up that sort of challenge should be the goal of all education.
Functioning in a foreign language continually presents the individual with all sorts of
new and unexpected situations. Learning to confront these in the language classroom
implies on the one hand assigning tasks that can be solved after reasonable effort. In
other words, such tasks gratify the learner who takes up the challenge. At the same
time, the teacher must avoid “mothering” the learners as he so often does without
realizing it.
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24. 10. Mediation of the awareness of
the human being as a changing entity
•Once a person is labelled, particularly if that label happens to be a negative one, it is
extremely difficult to change other people’s opinions. It may be true that an individual’s
educational development is predictable but only within the limits of the institute’s
approach to teaching and what it recognizes as a valid route to a specific goal. Non-
achievement of a goal is frequently interpreted as a lack of intelligence. So learners who
cannot, or who refuse to conform to the institute’s view of problem-solving are labelled
as irretrievable and, consequently, excluded either physically or psychologically.
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25. 11. Mediation of the search for an optimistic alternative
•Most language teachers have come up against the “can’t-learn-won’t learn” attitude.
This pessimistic attitude in itself is sufficient to trigger the passive approach that
undermines any possibility of commitment to a solution. Learners who succeed do
so because by nature they anticipate a positive outcome and, as a result, bring into
play the personal cognitive strategies that are conducive to finding solutions.
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26. 12. Mediation of the feeling of belonging
•The most difficult of Feuerstein’s parameters to adapt to the area of language
learning. The feeling of belonging is linked to society, the extended family, the
problems incurred by the isolated nuclear family and, ultimately, alienation. The fact
remains that a learner who is isolated from the rest of the learning group within the
institute, for whatever reason, has the odds stacked against him. For example,
problems caused by the lack of integration of foreign students in French universities
are enough to illustrate this. When this lack of integration is brought to the fore, it is
frequently at a time when the semester’s grades are being exposed under the harsh
scrutiny of faculty juries.
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27. Conclusion
•First, an emphasis on mediation suggests a strong theme of metacognition and
mindfulness for every learning environment. The teacher's role may significantly
shift from that of information provider to learning facilitator, but, the student
can become self-regulated, independent, and creative. Secondly, mediation
provides a useful link between thinking processes and the concepts of content.
And finally, mediated learning legitimizes thinking at school, as well as learning
at home and in the full community.
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28. •Through the use of the MLE model teachers may be helped to re-examine their roles.
MLE helps empower roles, such as being:
•(i) facilitators of the learning of heuristics,
•(ii) mediators of knowledge sources (helping learners learn to access information
sources,
•(iii) mediators of lifelong learning (helping learners develop dispositions and
mindsets for learning to learn), and
•(iv) designers of the learning environment.
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