Principles of Learning (Unit 4)

     I enjoy volunteering with adult ESL classes.  I've had the honour of working with some very experienced and excellent teachers.  They make it all look so easy. They are organized, fun, energetic and keep the classes attention, all the while effortlessly incorporating the principles of learning into their lesson.
    While I was reading Chapter 4 of Brown and Lee (2015) on Teaching by Principles, I was thinking about all the ways these principles have been incorporated into lessons that I've seen.  The first and foremost principle is agency, which is really the basis for all the others. Brown and Lee (2015) describe agency as "the ability to take action with intention" (p. 88) and encompasses identity, choices, control, self-regulation, goals, transformation and self-actualization.  It's huge!  But really its all these things that allows the learner to learn, or act to learn.
     Brown and Lee (2015) go on to delve into these principles of learning more deeply.

1) Self-regulation requires learners to set goals, and be creative. They must also be self-aware and 'put themselves out there' to be good learners.  I've seen students that don't have goals really founder in classes.  They tend to not apply themselves, or do homework, and often lag behind their classmates in promotion to higher levels.

2) Identity and Investment encompass their imagined community (who they communicate with) and deals with power issues that might exist.  Learners need affirmation and support, but they also need to be able to make choices and invest in their own learning. I've seen many a first year university student do very poorly because they don't know why they are there.  The same applies to ESL students.  They must understand who they are, what they choose to learn, and teachers need to affirm and guide them along the way. If a student is not ready to be there, they will not invest the time or energy in what needs to be done.

3) Interaction is a necessary part of L2 development. This should be socially and culturally mediated. They need to work on collaboration and negotiation, necessary skills in communication. Using scaffolding, learners can build on skills from easy to more difficult. Good teachers seem to do these effortlessly, but I think it takes some experience in knowing how to do this well.

4) Languaculture emphasizes that there are many differences in the culture of language, even within the language.  Learners must first be exposed and orientated to the language culture of English that they will actually use and then integrate and adapt to it.  If you even listened to TV shows from Australian, you'll know that their English pronunciation is very different from Canadian English. And there are differences in pauses and questions etc, between English and other languages. Even our posture, how close we stand, etc is very different.

5) Automaticity deals with what we focus on when we learn a language.  Children focus more on function, whereas adults focus on form.  It is necessary then when teaching adults to ensure that there is also a function focus, so that they will know when and how to use the language they learn, in real life situations.  Functional language learning is extremely important.  I find that students who have learned English in another country often focus more on form and less on function, and find it very difficult to carry on real conversations.

6) Transfer of language to real life skills is very important for adults.  It is important that teachers use authentic and meaningful learning, so that it is easily transferred into their real life. Teachers must remember that students are learning English so they can actually use it in their everyday life, in their job, or in education.  They need to learn the vocabulary and how to incorporate the vocabulary into real conversations and situations.

7) Reward can be either extrinsic or intrinsic motivation.  But intrinsic motivation (from within) is the best for adults, and their reward is to accomplish their own goals, with the help of the teacher to break them down into reasonable goals. Students goals and motivation are highly variable, and we need to understand what they are for each individual and help them attain their goals, and not what we think they need to attain.  Ensuring they see their own rewards along the way is also very important.

As ESL teachers, we must always focus on these learning principles, but I think more experienced teachers intuitively know many of them, and build their lesson on them without consciously thinking about them.  As new teachers, reminding ourselves of them from time to time would be a very good idea!


Brown, D. & Lee, H. (2015). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy
      (4th ed. revised). Chapters 4 and 5 Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education.