Tag Archives: approach

COGNITIVE APPROACH TO LEARNING

16.1.2026 Raimo J Leave a comment

Learning is directly linked to the amount of thinking in our own brains. If we are feeling good doing that, success will follow.

Let’s face the reality. No-one who really wants to learn a foreign language wants to learn it in a behavioristic environment if they have observed any modern lessons. What I am trying to do in these articles is to give language teachers a practical window to communicative language teaching (CLT) by combining the cognitive and constructive approach to teaching. I have a separate article on behaviourism for those who wish to look at those ideas.

Once again using CLT is a question of beliefs. Not just any beliefs, but beliefs which have been verified in practice over many decades.If the teacher believes the principles below are valid and puts them in practice, the lessons are bound to appeal to the students. But we teachers need to justify why we are using a particular method and what the beliefs behind it are.

If the students see that you are devoted to teaching and helping them, they will realize you really have thought the things through and they rely on you guiding them or at least give you a chance to show where the new method is taking you.

Cognitive approach of learning

In applying the cognitive approach of learning we believe that every student has to develop any new idea in their own minds and connect it with the knowledge they already have. Nobody really knows how learning takes place but we agree on the idea that the brains have to be activated properly. Listening to the teacher talking to the whole class does not necessarily lead to learning and memorization. Learning is a complicated intellectual process where each individual has to be active.

Well, how do we activate the brains then?

Traditionally the activation has been done by the teacher’s presentation followed by questions. This is still valid with young pupils and in some other subjects than languages.

The older the students get and the more they master the language, the more should we rely on giving them problems to solve or questions to be answered in groups. The answers they give do not matter that much. The process in discussing the question in the target language and finding possible answers to it is what matters.

The process is more important than the outcome. Learning takes place during the process, as a by-product of all the activities.

“But, … my students are not able to do any of that”, you might say. You may be right but all the things suggested below are possible AFTER you have dealt with the textbook chapter with its vocabulary and ideas first.

My basic philosophy in CLT is based on three premises:

Insist on your students working on textbook chapters very hard, go through the chapters systematically using mainly student-centered approaches. Get them talking! See my articles on how to do it.
Aim at having free discussion sessions at the end of lessons or unit and apply modern pair and group work techniques teaching all language skills.
Teach the students how they can learn better, justify your views and suggestions and rely on the fact that language and life skills will be a by-product of this approach.

In some classes following Point 1 will work miracles and Point 2 may succeed with a little bit of differentiation. To sound convincing in Point 3 you have to have your own ideas clear in your mind. Very many of my articles touch upon Point 3, too. Be patient at first and be pleased with modest progress and presentations. You will see the difference in a few months. Rome was not built in a day. Neither can you change your teaching over night.

“Ok, but where do I find the time to do all that?”, you ask me. By doing three things:

Make the students study the chapter at home in advance so that they understand the content. This will speed up the activities in the lesson.
Most activities should be oral with very little writing. Instead of silencing the students let them talk and ignore the mistakes they make at this point.
Be brave and skip the chapters in the textbook you or the students do not find stimulating. It is a blessing, in most countries, that we teachers are allowed to choose the materials for teaching.

IN a few weeks or months it may be interesting for you to test how capable your students are in doing a more challenging CLT task in groups.

After the ‘compulsory’ orientation engage the students in doing one of tasks below. Or use a task of your own. In a couple of minutes they are working in groups learning more than you could ever do using some other method. Smiling, forgetting they are at school at all. Believe me, I have experienced it thousands of times.

The influence of positive emotions and attitudes to learning is overwhelming.

The students will learn …

through a process of observation; they are given sample sentences and they have to figure out the grammatical rule on the basis of them instead of the rule be given to them
by linking old memories and experiences to new ones; we link the formulation of comparative forms of adverbs to that of advjectives and make conclusions OR collect all information we have on Australia so far and then make questions that we want to find an answer to
by using creative critical thinking; how can we develop public transport in our town and which obstacles we might encounter (having first studied texts about the topic)
by working on concepts and categorization; developing mind-maps is ideal; central word, for example, energy and the mind-map is developed in groups and presented to others later on
by filling in information gaps; a story is divided in two and your pair asks you questions to find out what is missing in his/her part of the story
through problem solving; how can we save energy in ordinary households or how can we improve recycling in our town

One of the big changes in my teaching in the ‘revelation days’ in the 1990s was to observe the time I spend talking to the whole class, which little by little led to a situation where I restricted my speaking only to maybe 10 minutes in a 75-minute lesson. How? By re-organizing the lesson the way I explain in the articles under ‘The structure of a textbook-based lesson’.

My own experiences of learning languages

By now you must have realized that the Cognitive Approach is much more student-oriented than the Behavioristic one. It also gives the teacher a lot of freedom to try out creatively what works in his/her classes and adapt the style of teaching accordingly.

Teachers who use this philosophy also understand that language lessons are not the only places where languages can be learnt. So, we need to encourage our students to make use of all media in the target language, speak English fearlessly to strangers, read magazines and books in English or do anything else that improves their language skills.

My first memory and source of motivation of learning English properly was when an American choir visited my home town Oulu in the 1960s. I had been studying English for a couple of years but understood only a few words in the songs. However, the songs sounded so beautiful that I started to find English songs myself and finally ended up recording pop songs from Radio Luxemburg, writing down the lyrics and singing along with the tape.

By the time I went to senior high school at the age of 16 I knew hundreds of English songs and I had even learnt most of the English grammar subconsciously thanks to the songs. Somehow I knew how to write unknown words even if I had never seen them. This ‘voluntary project’ also increased my English vocabulary drastically.

After one grammar exam I was terribly disapponted with myself because I had changed the active sentences differently from the others and I thought I had made a mistake. I was surprised when the teacher pointed out that my way of doing it was also right even if it had never been taught to us. Some other teacher in those days might have marked my version wrong because it had not been taught.

It was something like this: My aunt sent us Christmas presents. >> We were sent Christmas presents by our aunt. (taught at school) / Christmas presents were sent (to) us by our aunt. (my version). What I am trying to say is taht some of your students know much more English than you know thanks to their hobbies or interests.

Unfortunately I had no chance to enjoy the benefits of the Cognitive Approach in English lessons over the twelve years I studied it. We never spoke freely in class and I wrote only one ‘essay’ which had to be a joke. It took more than two weeks to get them back marked because other teachers kept on reading them. Frankly speaking, now that I look back my own English lessons were a joke in itself.

Yleinen

VOCABULARY

31.10.2025 Raimo J 2 Comments

We are all different and learn words in a different way. That is why we need to let our students experiment and find their own style or strategy of learning words. Here the term ‘strategy’ simply means a certain way or approach to enhance learning new words.

Miniature N.Y. Brooklyn Bridge in a Bangkok mall. I am a very visual learner and therefore I love to use photos and pictures in my teaching

It is sometimes argued that new words should be learnt in a sentence/context first and I agree. Still, I believe they should be practiced in isolation as well since there are many things to learn about every word. In the approach I recommend below most of the learning takes place at sentence/utterance level:

The other articles under Vocabulary heading are

Knowing a word, What does it really mean?
Identify 22 strategies to learn new words
Getting students to design vocab tasks, Points 1-10
Getting students to design vocab tasks, Points 11-22

A summary of my philosophy on learning new words

At home: in advance before the new lesson: New words are preferably first encountered in the sentences of new texts/chapters at home (as part of homework).
At home: The students automatically try to guess/figure out the meanings of the new words. If they fail, they consult the workbook word lists or a dictionary. An excellent learning situation because a lot of thought is involved in the silent mental process.
At home: If the student doubts he/she will not remember the words, I advise them to write the translation on top of the textbook line or in their notebooks. Still, occasionally we learn new words without knowing the exact meaning because the words are constantly repeated in a context.
At school the words are repeated after the teacher to learn how they are pronounced and at the same time the meanings of the words are revised.
The use of words is practised orally in pairs, preferrably by making sentences or even stories of one’s own using as many of these new words as possible.
The chapter is listened to, read aloud and reading comprehension checked in many ways, all of it at sentence level.
Invisible differentiation (the students choose freely from options what to do, no stigma attached on tasks) is involved all the time and the final stage for the best students is to produce ideas of their own making use of the new words under the topic in question. Even the weakest students learn new words in a relaxed atmosphere answering questions on the text in pairs.
We all learn new words differently depending on our style and personal characteristics. That is why we teachers need to offer our students a set of options / strategies and then they can start using the strategies that appeal to them.

There is so much more we can do to learn new words than doing exercises in the workbook.

22 strategies to learn new words

Which ones have you already been teaching? Which one have you never thought about? Choose the 5 best ways YOU learn new words best!

I hope to be able to add some videos on these strategies later on.

Link the new word with a picture or photo.
Link the new word to your mother tongue.
Write the unknown words of the chapter on a paper and make up a mindmap or a story.
Associate the new word with another (funny) word, story or setting. Explain to your pair how the association works for you.
Record a word list on your phone ( word in mother tongue – 1 sec pause– English word). Listen to it many times. (The favourite of my wife!)
Make word lists (mother tongue – English), cover up the other side and say the words aloud or write them down before checking. (My favourite if followed by oral practice)
Make or have a look at a word list (mother tongue – English). Then make an exam for yourself or others.
Say or write a sentence where you use the new word.
Tell a story in your group where you use the new words. (Humour is the best medicine!)
Make two-sided word cards and use them in a game.
Learn words in groups (linked with a topic, nouns, adjectives etc.). Write them down in a grid or an excel file.
Use word formation technique. One word leads to a family of words.
Find synonyms or opposites for the word.
Make a gap exercise of the lyrics of a song.
Consult a dictionary (online or hard copy).
By doing various exercises (crossword puzzles, gap filling, hidden grid odd one out, etc.)
Guess the meaning of new words on the basis of the context.
Make use of free computer vocab exercises provided by publishers.
Give a definition of a word and your pair has to guess which it is (e.g. it is an adjective which means the same as ‘adequate’ – well ‘enough’ or ‘sufficient’)
Your say a word and your pair has to give a definition for it or explain it in another way (a vaccination – well, it is a shot given with a needle so that you do not get a disease)
Make use of the free vocab learning computer programmes in the internet.
When reading extra English materials such as magazines or books, take out your notebook and write down new words and phrases that you find interesting and useful.

N.B. I will give detailed advice what to when you ask your students to make exercises like the ones above. Here are the links Exercise types / Strategies 1 – 10 and Exercise types / Strategies 11 – 22

Let the students do a lot of vocab exercises orally. And – open up the vocab learning strategies, teach them how to write exercises of their own for themselves and others. Use free computer programmes. LEARNING BY DOING – WORKS HERE AS WELL!

Students learning new words by designing exercises

As you can see above many of the exercise types can be done orally and if the students move from word level to making sentences or stories of their own, we are beautifully applying CLT and differentiation principles. Instead of asking your students to do ready-made vocab exercises you can also teach them how to design vocab exercises for others.

As a result you, the teacher, do not have to come up with all the exercises if you notice workbook exercises do not work well. Start by going through the list of strategies little by little in your lessons and let the students then make the written exercises.

I don’t have the time, you say! Yes, you do. Leave out some of the workbook exercises and do these ones instead. The students enjoy these ones more than the workbook exercises. Or ask them to write the exercises at home and exchange them with each other in lessons. If you take copies of these student-produced exercises, you can use them in work stations, for example. Especially if you are rehearsing for an exam. It is simply a matter of organization.

There is no need to check all the tasks made by the students since learning takes place when they are writing the task. If there are problems, others will point them out. You, the teacher, just move about and offer help if needed. If needed, you can always take copies of the tasks or show them on the screen.

Students subconsciously learn the words they are working on while talking or writing vocab exercises. Why? Since they need to think a lot and make reasonable decisions.

Still, even if they never make any exercises themselves, knowledge of the vocab learning strategies will help them a lot.

The next article deals with what is meant by knowing a word and some other basic ideas on vocab learning
Then you will have a chance to practise identifying the strategies in real vocab exercises in my 3rd article.
In the following two articles I will demonstrate what you need to take into account when you make you students write vocabulary tasks themselves. (See the links above)