3rd Post: Psychological theories experienced as a language learner

It is hard to get through if, in the end of the road, what counts are your certificates, there is still a hard behaviourist component underling the rest of psychological theories. you get a 9? Good, you get the best choices. Maybe I have always had a 9. No improvement, no reflection. No thinking. No critical thinking and positive feedback. Stuck. Non-dynamic. Kaput. this is very detrimental, since education is still subordinated (it has to, in some way), to economic needs and employment, focused on the “result” rather than “the process”, the changes from one stage to another (evolution). Although meaningful learning and rot learning are not diametrical (Ausbel, 1968), most of my compulsory education language classes (not to mention other compulsory curricula) focused on rot learning failing to successfully combining both learning approaches ignoring reconstruction of knowledge, which stores knew knowledge in the short term memory, cancelling the proper integration of new ideas, thoughts, etc. This is to me the major flaw across the theories underling compulsory education (from primary school to, and especially, high-school). Still there is a great focus on behaviourism (evaluation focuses on results, not processes) and conductivism. I probably overgeneralized here and didn't really focus on the language learning curriculum, but to me this pattern is still the same in the language learning courses. 

Graphic description of that "bulimic" studying pattern

I have found other psychological theories being more central in non-compulsory education, which doesn’t need to focus on final results, as much as the other theories. Besides, I have encountered people (teachers, educators), rather than schools or institutions, which are truly designing and teaching languages according to Humanistic and Constructivist approaches. This I have experienced in small language academies (French academies) and language tutors (preferably native speakers of the language being tutored). 

The image with the dog is a silly paralellism with how I have been studying many languages across my compulsory education years: if you match PISA requirements in the end, you are supposed to be a good learner... Nevertheless, I have managed to sort out my psychologial modus to get to languages in a more Humanistic way: based on discussion with other classmates, which lead to information exchange and so, to deep learning. Luckily, cognitivist and humanist theories are more present today (little by little) and in higher levels of education. I would say I now enjoy language lessons: I am starting to really understand langugages as a whole, how they work, and how to keep on track with the details and differences that make every language unique. 

This video is encouraging and shows how learning should be, specifically language learning from the day you discover a new language to the day where you can say you master it (no matter what level of interlanguage you are at):

The textbooks I used in school include a little of all psychological theories, from behaviourism to constructivism, and present all kinds of activities. However, they are form and content based, with less emphasis on active learning or cooperative learning.

During primary school we didn't really use textbooks, we used to read a lot of books at the school library and materials where taken from several text books or designed by the teacher. 5th and 6th grade were hard years because the teacher was very demanding, but at the same time, we constructed a strong base in grammar and reading comprehension working with books such as The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint Éxupery, 1943) and El Hombre que plantaba árboles (Jean Giono, 1953). 

Here is a list of the books I used during my highschool years, a Joan Pelegrí:

For Catalan and Spanish we used the complet series of Cruïlla projecte 3.16: http://www.cruilla.cat/cataleg/text

For English (during primary) we used all of the BugsWorld textbooks:

The songs and the stories in the books were absolutely great. We prepared the songs and sung them all together, as well as the stories, which we represented, as a theater show for the rest of the class. 

The materials I used in "batxillerat" where prepared by the language teachers in a dossier way. It is one of the best materials I have ever used for language learning and I still keep them at home as a reference.