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The Theory Of Behavioral Psychology

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In its most general sense, Behaviorism, also known as behavioral psychology, is a theory of learning developing as a result of the propositions and beliefs shared by a group of people who has influenced educators’ view of learning. The term behavioral psychology refers to a psychological approach which principally concerned with stimulus-response activities and emphasizes the role of environmental factors in a learning process, to the exclusion of own free will. There is a tenet of behavioral psychology that “only observable, measurable, an outward behavior is worth investigating” (Bush, 2006, p. 14). Historically speaking, behaviorism was originated in the 1880s and develops gradually in the twentieth-first century and beyond. Skinner and Watson were categorically the two major behaviorist …show more content…

Instead, humans appear to learn many behaviors -including languages- through repetitions, associations, and positive or negative reinforcement. Scientifically speaking, behaviorism explains how learning takes place. When it is taken into account in the field of language teaching, it shows how languages are learned. Behaviorist psychology had a significant effect on the teaching and learning principles of audio-lingual method. In Audiolingualism known as the Army Method, the underlying theory of learning is behaviorism. Behaviorists contend that stimulus, response, and reinforcement are the main central elements of learning. When we adjust it to language learning; the stimulus is the information about foreign language, the response is student’s reaction on the presented material, and the reinforcement is natural “self-satisfaction of target language use (Richards & Rodgers, 1987). On the one hand, in positive reinforcement, a pleasant stimulus is added to enhance the likelihood of a particular behavior by providing a reward as a consequence of desirable

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