Educational Psychology

This article brings together some information on the field of educational psychology, with questions that concern language teachers. For several years, I have been studying linguistics and applying educational psychology in my classes. The initial result of this work generated a great sense of progress and I began to realize its enormous value in teaching a foreign language.

The education process is one of the most important and complex of all human endeavors. A popular notion is that education is something accomplished by a person, in this case, a teacher, standing in front of a class transmitting information to a group of students who are willing to learn. This view, however, simplifies the learning process, which is highly complex. Learning involves the teacher’s intentions and actions, students’ individual personality, culture, environment, and other variables. This happens for any learning process, be it languages ​​or other subjects.

Educational psychology has been defined in several ways. Kaplan, for example, described the application of psychology to education, focusing on development and learning theories that can improve throughout life. For a few years, I have used a few different tools that today greatly influence my language teaching method.

Learning a foreign language can be very confusing, especially in the early stages. However, a mix of audio-lingual, communicative, and neurolinguistic approaches helped me to develop the right way to teach each student individually according to their different way of learning. Other tools that help me a lot is, first, to develop the skills of memory and intelligence testing application. The most important lesson that memory exercises have taught me is that teachers have a primary obligation to help students learn and research, not simply to give material and correct exercises. Teachers have to give students the ability to be curious and to go further than the book. Intelligence tests helped me measure my students’ strengths, weaknesses, and skills. The main reason for using this second concept is that the results open a door to help teachers discover how to make teaching more efficient. The humanist approach is also fundamental. It emphasizes the importance of the student’s inner world and his thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Considering these aspects, we can have a strong influence on the learning process. According to one of Sigmund Freud’s theories, these balanced aspects directly influence human education.

To summarize the humanist points, the teacher is responsible for:

• Creating a feeling of security
  • Make the subject relevant
  • Involve the person as a whole
  • Stimulate self-esteem
  • Minimize criticism
  • Stimulating creativity
  • Stimulating self-assessment

To provide truly effective learning experiences, the teacher has some essential factors to be measured in the classroom:

• Sense of competence
• Behavior
• Setting goals
• Challenge

There are a large number of books that describe learning strategies and their processes. Here are some examples that have proven to be very effective:

• Working the rules by forming sentences
• Develop mind maps with rules, uses, and examples
• Test new vocabulary after class
• Rehearse mentally before speaking out loud
• Rehearse in front of a mirror
• Watch a video and recognize words and phrases.

Each individual has a different way of learning. “Learning to learn”, also the name of one of my articles is an important issue for creating effective learning. One of my techniques demonstrated that students memorize better when they follow the following routine:

• Answer questions
• Planning
• Review
• Self-evaluation

As an overview of the use of mixed educational psychology in the classroom, there are many factors that affect the success of learning a language. Teacher’s actions and classroom interactions will make students learn better when the importance of individual differences is emphasized.