Questões Militares

Implications of the humanistic approach

        Hamachek (1977) provides some useful examples of the kind of educational implications that follow from taking a humanistic approach. First, every learning experience should be seen within the context of helping learners to develop a sense of personal identity. This is in keeping with the view that one important task for the teacher is differentiation, i.e. identifying and seeking to meet the individual learner’s needs within the context of the classroom group. Second, learners should be encouraged to make choices for themselves in what and how they learn. This again is in sharp contrast to the view that the curriculum content for every learner of a similar age should be set in ‘tablets of stone’. Third, it is important for teachers to empathise with their learners by seeking to understand the ways in which they make sense of the world, rather than always seeking to impose their own viewpoints. Fourth, it is important to provide optimum conditions for individualised and group learning of an authentic nature to take place.Thus, from a humanistic perspective, a learning experience of personal consequence occurs when the learner assumes the responsibility of evaluating the degree to which he or she is personally moving toward knowledge rather than looking to an external source for such evaluation.

(Williams, M.; Burden, R.L. Psychology for Language Teachers: A Social Constructivist Approach. Cambridge:CUP, 1999. Adaptado)

        If styles are general characteristics that differentiate one individual from another, then strategies are those specific “attacks” that we make on a given problem, and that vary considerably within each individual. They are the momentby-moment techniques that we employ to solve “problems” posed by second language input and output. Chamot (2005, p. 112) defines strategies quite broadly as “procedures that facilitate a learning task.”

        Second language acquisition has distinguished between two types of strategy: learning strategies and communication strategies. The former relate to input — to processing, storage, and retrieval, that is, to taking in messages from others. The latter pertain to output, how we productively express meaning, how we deliver messages to others.

(Brown, H.D. Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. 5th ed. White Plains, NY: Addison Wesley Longman, 2006. Adaptado)