November 10, 2008

Poster Work

Posted in Blogs at 8:34 pm by maximilianmogk

Not only because it´s visually the best of all, in my opinion, I think that the “drill and practice”-poster is most relevant to me. During my time in school, I experienced both the behavioristic and the cognitivistic approach by teachers. Especially older teachers did a lot of drill and practice (behaviorism) exercises whereas younger teachers tried to be more modern and thus, tried to passively moderate a lecture in which students worked almost solemnly on their own. As the poster shows, some things have to be learned by heart, i. e. dates or vocabulary. In contrast to that, students cannot simply learn grammar by heart, but highly dependent on the teacher´s explanations. There is no definite rule for grammatical constructions, so that demands a good teacher. I can also mainly agree with what the group came up with, why drill and practice is still distributed today:

-it´s an effective way to learn something by heart.

-it´s less time extensive than explorative learning.

-it´s less preparation for the teacher.

To sum up, I believe that future teachers will tend to use the cognitivist approach much more, but still have to include the behaviorist method in order to achieve their learner´s goal, which is using English in an appropriate way to be able to communicate.

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