Learning Behaviors: A Literature Review

Learning behaviors have been defined interchangeably by different scholars. For example Fantuzzo, Perry and McDermott (2004) more specifically referred to learning behaviors as apparent mannerisms that facilitate or hinder a child's engagement in the classroom or other learning environments. Moreover, Edmondson (1999) believed that learning behaviors through information seeking and negotiations not only create knowledge, but also are likely to increase performance directly. Learning behaviors lead to performance because dynamic information seeking and discussions promote performance feedback and early error recognition, which are associated with increased structural effectiveness. However, learning is not a typical behavior without

Some researchers look upon learning behaviors like learning and analyze different types of learning behavior the same as different kinds of learning. For instance Politzer and Mcgroarty (1985) reported that there are indeed two different kinds of learning behaviors which can be accounted for rather precisely by the acquisition/learning difference (see Krashen 1981), a distinction which has become popular in second language acquisition theory. In their study, learning, as tested by a monitoring task which measures linguistic competence on a discrete-point, multiple-choice test, is positively associated with behaviors quite different from those related to acquisition and an increase in functional skills, as measured by communicative competence-oriented instruments. In fact, there are some monitoring, learning-oriented behaviors (such as falling back on the native language) which evidently get in the way of acquisition-related

O'Malley and Chamot (1990) categorized them cognitively and metacognitively, and merely touched the surface of social and especially affective strategies. Likewise, affective aspects of language learning were generally left out of the Faerch and Kasper (1983) taxonomy. The situation has improved slightly through the person logical work of some strategy investigators (Ely 1989, Ehrman & Oxford 1990, Galloway & Labarca 1991). But there is need for more routine collection of information on sex, ethnicity, age, degree of language learning experience, world knowledge, motivation, anxiety, beliefs, attitudes, and learning