Introduction
In the Netflix series ‘The Crown’, Prince Charles is depicted learning Welsh in a language lab in Wales in preparation for becoming the Prince of Wales. He sits in the lab with headphones on, listening to Welsh phrases and merely repeating them, followed by the English translation. His teacher explains, “We learn by imitation. Like anything in life, if we pretend we’re something long enough, we may just become it.” (Season 3, Episode 6). This brought back my own early language learning experience of learning French. We also spent time in a language lab repeating sentences or rehearsing basic interactions. Lessons outside of the lab featured drills and repetition of verb conjugations.
Unfortunately, despite several years of instruction, I am still not fluent in French, perhaps demonstrating the failure, at least for me, of attempting to learn a language by rote. Perhaps as a reaction to this experience, the theory of learning I have chosen to explore in this essay is contructivism.
Learning Theory Highlights
Unlike behaviourism, which seems to have inspired my early language-learning experience, constructivism views learning as an active process in which the learner constructs his or her own meaning. According to Hoover (1996), ‘Constructivism’s central idea is that human learning is constructed, that learners build new knowledge upon the foundation of previous learning.’ This may happen when learners encounter new information or knowledge that does not coincide with their current understanding or experience and so they modify their existing ideas in light of new information. It is an active process in that ‘meaning or understanding is achieved by assimilating new information, relating it to our existing knowledge, and cognitively processing it (in other words, thinking or reflecting on new information)’ (Bates, 2019, p. 54).
Because learners are constructing their own knowledge, learning is a personal process and a subjective one. Since we will all have our own unique blend of experience and background knowledge, each person’s constructed knowledge will be different.
For constructivists, especially social constructivists, ‘learning is seen as essentially a social process, requiring communication between learner, teacher and others. This social process cannot effectively be replaced by technology, although technology may facilitate it.’ (Bates, 2019, p. 54).
The constructivist view of learning it is also a more student-centred process. According to Hoover, ‘teaching cannot be viewed as the transmission of knowledge from enlightened to unenlightened; constructivist teachers do not take the role of the "sage on the stage." Rather, teachers act as "guides on the side" who provide students with opportunities to test the adequacy of their current understandings.’ (Hoover, 1996).
Online learning seems to fit well with the constructivist view of learning. The internet can easily facilitate the social process necessary for learning to take place if courses make use of synchronous learning activities such as class meetings, and asynchronous activities such as discussion boards and group projects where discussion and collaboration are required. It may be even easier to arrange these when participants do not have to be in the same geographical location.
With eLearning there is also a move away from the lecture hall with the ‘sage on the stage’ type of presentation of information. Students are no longer gathered together for a three-hour lecture once a week, and instructors are thereby freer to use a much wider range of inputs and resources of varying types and lengths, so there is a natural move away from the model of the teacher at the front of the room holding forth and towards the role of facilitator who manages the social aspects of the group and makes available a wider range of suitable learning tasks and resources.
Why this theory?
Early language teaching was rooted in behaviourist views of learning, which in my own experience were not very effective. It led to students memorizing often meaningless chunks of language of the ‘My hand is on your nose,’ or ‘The refrigerator of my uncle has three apples in it,’ sort, which might be completely irrelevant to the learner and it was therefore not very conducive to deep learning.
The theory that seems to have held sway in the field of language learning over the past few decades is cognitivism and there seems to be good reason for this, especially if one focuses on Bloom’s Taxonomy, which aligns well with the language learning process. However, the cognitivist view of the mind as a computer processing information has shortcomings as it still undervalues the active role of the learner and his or her social self.
As a result, I decided to explore a different approach, and constructivism resonates for several reasons. In my field, language learning, the social aspects of learning could not be more important. Language is in its essence a means of social communication, so it aligns well with this aspect of constructivism. Most students of a language will not develop the ability to communicate in a language effectively or fluently without developing that ability through social interaction of one sort or another.
In my experience, learning also needs to be an active process. Students who are physically present in class but do not interact with the language, the content, or the other learners will be much less successful at developing their language skills. They need to be interested in what they are learning; otherwise they are less likely to become engaged in the process and take an active role in making sense of the new language. It helps if they feel the language and content they are interacting with is relevant to them or sparks their interest.
Language learning also depends on learners building on what they already know. When learning vocabulary items, they may initially learn one basic meaning of a word, say the word ‘plant’, and they later encounter the word again in a different context. They may enrich and refine their knowledge of this word if they realize that it has a different meaning in this new context, or perhaps that they misunderstood it on the first encounter. They may now realize that it is a verb as well as a noun, for example. They will start to build up knowledge as they come to understand that it may have particular connotations or might have a more figurative meaning in addition to its literal meaning.
Role of the Learner
Constructivism places the learner at the centre of the learning process. The learner is seen as an active participant in their learning process, building on their prior knowledge. They need to actively take an interest in and make sense of new information and to reflect on new information.
An online course can provide some information that the learner needs to engage with and that he or she can use as a launching pad, but they can build on this if they are given the leeway to select their own inputs for some of the learning tasks. In online learning, where resources are endless, the learner can take advantage of access to information that they are particularly interested in, which may facilitate them being active learners.
Role of the Instructor
As noted above, the instructor becomes a guide and facilitator. The instructor’s role is to put conditions into place to facilitate learning. He or she will need to find information that will interest students and allow them to become actively engaged in the process and will also need to select information to focus on which is new to the students but is within their zone of proximal development. This may be challenging in an online course since feedback on whether the selection of resources is appropriate is not as immediate as it might be in a face-to-face class, so careful planning and selection is necessary.
If we focus on a Vygotskian view of learning and the zone of proximal development, one role of the instructor may be to provide scaffolding for learners to allow them to stretch their abilities. This is something that is particularly relevant in language teaching. In an online course this might mean that activities and tasks build on what has come previously in the course so that there is gradual process of moving towards mastery that is manageable for the learner.
The instructor will need to set up and foster an environment in which learners feel comfortable interacting with each other and provide both the need and the means for them to do so. This is especially important for language learners as social interaction is a vital part of their learning process.
Three eLearning Examples
Checking for prior knowledge
Before reading an article, students work in pairs or groups to brainstorm what they already know about the topic of the reading and what they would like to know. This helps to bring forward what their prior knowledge of the subject is and can also be a good way of creating interest in the topic. This part could be done in a synchronous meeting of the class and the reading could be done for homework. The next meeting of the group could involve discussion of the ideas in the text they have read.
Information gap
For homework, learners are assigned one part of an article to read (for example on surprising things that research suggests are healthy for us) and another group reads the other half of the article (for example on surprising things that are bad for our health). In a synchronous meeting of the class, they are then paired with someone who read the other part of the article and explain the information in their part of the article to their partner or group. Once they’ve made sure they adequately understand all of the information, including that that was explained by their classmate, they talk about discussion questions related to the topic of the article.
Pre-listening activity
In a language class where students are focusing on developing listening skills, the instructor can choose a video clip of a scene from a movie or television series. It should be something that would be somewhat challenging for the learners to understand. He or she would have them watch it without any sound and then work in groups (meeting in breakout rooms) to speculate on what is happening and what people are saying in the clip. The students will be able to get a lot of information about what is happening by doing this. They can share their ideas with the whole class before watching the clip again with the sound either in class or for homework. Afterwards, they would do some sort of comprehension activity to check comprehension. This kind of support can help learners understand video that they would not have understood easily without this kind of support.
Conclusion
Various theories and approaches have been invaluable in the field of language learning and a constructivist view of learning has a lot to contribute in recognizing the active role of the learner.
References
Atkinson, D. (2012). Cognitivism, adaptive intelligence, and second language acquisition. Applied Linguistics Review. 3. 10.1515/applirev-2012-0010.
Bates, A.W. (2019). Teaching in a Digital Age – Second Edition. Vancouver, B.C.: Tony Bates Associates Ltd. Retrieved from https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/teachinginadigitalagev2/
Boettcher, J. V. & Conrad, R. (2016). The Online Teaching Survival Guide: Simple and Practical Pedagogical Tips, Jossey-Bass.
Hoover, W. A. (1996). The practice implications of constructivism. SEDL letter 9, (3). Retrieved November 8, 2020 from https://sedl.org/pubs/sedletter/v09n03/practice.html
McLeod, S. (2019). Constructivism as a theory for teaching and learning, Retrieved November 07, 2020, from https://www.simplypsychology.org/constructivism.html
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