A Short Review of Douglas Brown’s Principles The 12 Principles Automaticity: The main concept underlying this principle is the automatic processing of infinite language forms after learners’ exposure to a few controlled comprehensible forms. This way, automaticity leads to fluency. Meaningful Learning: It’s focused on long-term retention rather than rote retention, appealing to student interests, schemata-based and connects prior knowledge to new one.
Cognitive Principles
Meaningless Learning: consists of non-rationalized purposeless activities, and is focused off meaning with too much grammar explanation. There might be some abstract teaching as well The anticipation of Reward: Human beings are biologically to act with the anticipation of a reward – tangible (marks or presents…) or intangible (feedback, encouragement…). Rewards/recognitions boost confidence Teachers aren’t the only providers of feedback; let’s encourage peer-feedback as well!!!!!!! Reward should be granted with enthusiasm and excitement. The intrinsic Motivation: It’s the most powerful and long-lasting type of rewards because it finds its roots within learners. While extrinsic motivation is about gaining an award or avoiding punishment(stick and carrot), intrinsic motivation fuels competence, self-actualization and selfdetermination Strategic Investment: It’s all about maximizing learning moments. Learning is highly a personal experience that runs better when the investment of students’ time, effort and attention is PERSONALIZED. Diversity of learning styles and strategies means multiplicity of instruction techniques.
Affective Principles
Ex: individual, pair or individual work; oral, written, maps, graphics, VAs,puzzles… Language Ego: As students are learning L2, another process of 2 nd identity-building is taking place simultaneously. Students develop a new thinking mode, and sometimes think in L2 while using L2. It’s a part of making room for the target language culture. During this process, teachers should be supportive because learners might feel stupid! Self-confidence: No matter how small the task is, students need to sense accomplishment to gain self-confidence. Self- Confidence starts with the teacher 1 st. Planning lessons/activities should be sequenced in an encouraging way. Teachers are required to believe in and remind learners of their potential Risk Taking: Leaners should develop a risk-taking attitude towards language. This means trying and trying, venturing responses and experimenting with language forms. NEVER fear mistakes
In their turn, teachers must encourage students attempts, tolerate mistakes and deals with them As learning opportunities. The Language-culture Connection: language is carrier of culture. Culture is indispensable part of language. TC should be explored non-judgmentally non-offensively. Instead, teachers should raise cross-cultural awareness.
Linguistic Principles
The native Language Effect: learners tend to predict the Target language system based on their own language’s system. This is why teachers must probe into some errors that might be sources of interlanguage. On the other hand, they should help students to hold onto the helpful aspects of their NL but avoid regular translations. Interlanguage: “2nd language learners tend to go through a systematic or quasi-systematic developmental process as they progress to full competence in the TL.� Distinguish between interlanguage errors and other errors Tolerate interlanguage forms that make sense and show learning Encourage self-correction Communicative Competence: CC is the ultimate goal of a language class. It embraces four dimensions: grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic competences. To cater for the four aspects/goals of communicative competence, we should dwell on language use and not just usage, fluency and not just accuracy, teach authentic language and contexts. Application: students eventually need to transfer classroom learning to unrehearsed contexts in the real world