Behaviorism Theory

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

He published an article entitled ''Psychology as the behaviorist views it'' in which he had the impression that psychology shouldn't deal with what the people say that they think or feel, in other words, he reduced and dehumanized the human mind and its consciousness. To put it differently, he asserted a claim that the study of the human mind would be concerned only with people's actions and behavior. Watson's work relied upon the experiments of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936), a Russian Nobel laureate psychologist who had worked on animals' responses to conditioning. For instance, in his best-known experiment, Pavlov rang a bell and then gave a dog some food. After repeating this pairing several times, the dog eventually treated the bell as a signal for food and began salivating in expectation of the treat, but having said that the dog still produced saliva, when he rang the bell without bringing any food. At this time, it had been 'conditioned' to salivate well every sound of a bell with the delivery of food, that

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 behavior. Since they usually like praises, there is a likelihood that some people, learners for example, can even perform better and use their ideas more once the teachers appreciate that they have answered quickly and