This document discusses the development of psychological perspectives in language teaching from the late 19th century to the 1970s. It describes how early views emphasized habit formation and memorization. In the 1960s, Chomsky and others questioned assumptions of audiolingualism. The 1970s saw new research and theories, including Krashen's Monitor Model which distinguished conscious and unconscious language learning processes. Overall, the document argues that psychology and psycholinguistics have increasingly informed language teaching by focusing on the individual learner.

1. Development of a Psychological Perspective
in Language Teaching :
A selective review
Masrurin Lailiyah, S.S

2. 1. Early associationism
2. Educational psychology enters the scene
3. The post-war years : turning to
psychology of answers
4. The sixties : questioning psychological
assumptions
5. The attack on the psychology of
audiolingualism
6. The seventies : fresh theorizing and
empirical research
7. Conclusion

3. 1. Early Associationism
Sweet (1889/1964)
• emphasized the need for repetition and memorization
• the whole process of learning a language is one of
forming associations. When we learn our language we
associate words and sentences with thoughts, ideas,
actions, events
Palmer
• considered the learner factor as as the learning process
• focus on the importance of age, temperament, the
student’s motivation, and academic background

4. 2. Educational psychology enters the scene
Huse (1931)
• the task of language learning rather narrowly as essentially
a memory problem
• the learning of recognition or recall of a fixed list of units of
expression
Findlay (1932)
• the learner’s emotional resistance to abandoning the first
language frame of reference and his refusal to ‘grasp the
foreigner’s mind by entering into his mode of thought
• language learning is psychologically an imitative task in
which the learner ‘has to copy the behavior of the native
by conscious attention, practicing again and again,
establishing a multitude of new habits.

5. 2. Educational psychology enters the scene
Simmins (1930)
• conducted an experiment that was designed to study the
mental processes involved in learning a foreign language.
• a general conclusion that the technique of Modern
Language Teaching might be modified on a basis of
psychological analysis and experimental investigation.
Brachfeld (1936)
• ‘When I learn a language … it is not my ‘linguistic talent’,
nor my “intelligence”, nor my reasoning which does
learning: It is I who am learning, i.e., the entire person

6. 3. The post-war years : turning to psychology
of answers
Stott (1946)
 cognitive and active approach:
• The learner is encouraged to think for himself about
language
• He is guided to make linguistic observation
• He is given an opportunity to participate actively in
language games.
 memorization and habituation in language learning.

7. 4. The sixties : questioning psychological
assumptions
Rivers(1960s)
• four basic psychological assumptions of the audiolingualism
method
Assumption 1 : Foreign-language learning is basically a
mechanical process of habit formation.
Assumption 2 : Language skills are learned more effectively if
items of the foreign language are presented in
spoken form before written form.
Assumption 3 : Analogy provides a better foundation for foreign
language learning than analysis.
Assumption 4 : The meaning which the words of a language
have for the native speaker can be learned only
in a matrix of allusions to the culture of the
people who speak that language.

8. 5. The attack on the psychology of
audiolingualism
Chomsky
rejected the psychology of language learning prevailing
among language teachers and condemned as ‘not merely
inadequate but probably misconceived’.
Anisfeld (1966)
• attempt to reconcile behaviouristic psychology with the
new view of language use and language acquisition
• advanced the theory that language can be divided into
two components: specific habit and general rules.

9. 5. The attack on the psychology of
audiolingualism
Jakobovits
• language learning involved some habit formation and
automatization, but it was only a secondary factor in a
two-factor theory
• The first factor was ‘the discovery of the underlying
structure of the language by means of inductive and
deductive inferences.

10. 6. The seventies : fresh theorizing and
empirical research
• In the early seventies,
a further radical change took place
• Rivers (1972)
‘the need for us as teachers to know as much as we
possibly can about the way the student learn and learns
the language’
• Stern (1972)
language teachers ‘should press for such sorely needed
direct research on the psychology of second language
learning

11. 6. The seventies : fresh theorizing and
empirical research
• The upsurge of research and theorizing between 1972 and
1978 on the psychology of second language learning was
astonishing
• North American investigators and applied linguists met
regularly at the annual TESOL convention and other
meetings
• TESOL Quarterly and the other annual proceedings of
TESOL convention gave expressions to the growing interest
of the TESOL Association in the psycholinguistic study of
language learning

12. 6. The seventies : fresh theorizing and
empirical research
• Krashen’s Monitor Model
 conscious processes of language learning
 the less conscious
• Krashen postulated a Monitor as a construct to refer to
the editing and controlling function that can be
exercised during the study of a language or when
writing or reading.

13. 7. Conclusion
• Language teaching theory has been in contact with
psychology, and more recently with psycholinguistics.
• Like linguistics and social science, psychology and
psycholinguistics are growing field of study.
• Psychology in language teaching directs our attention
to the individual person:
1. as a language user
2. as a language learner.