Collections of Professor Dr David Ngin Sian Pau

2.2. Philosophical And Psychological Approach

Assimilation is the process of using or transforming the environment so that it can be placed in preexisting cognitive structures. Accommodation is the process of changing cognitive structures in order to accept something from the environment. Both processes are used simultaneously and alternately throughout life. A major problem is that making connections between thinking (in terms of knowledge, intellectual skills, attitudes, etc.) and behavior has proven very illusive. One reason is that other factors, such as situational variables, emotions, and consequences, all play an important role in the production of overt, adaptive behavior.

At this point, without a unifying theory as to how the different learning theories interact within a single individual to produce behavior, we have to study these different viewpoints independently and then piecemeal them together into a school curriculum. However, acceptance of a particular viewpoint provides a different starting point for curriculum development. There is a difference between a behaviorally-oriented curriculum in which knowledge and skills are taught discretely and then inductively connected versus the constructivistically-oriented classroom in which students acquire content while carrying out tasks requiring higher-order thinking.

The Constructivistic Approach to teaching and learning is based on a combination of a subset of research within cognitive psychology and a subset of research within social psychology, just as behavior modification techniques are based on operant conditioning theory within behavioral psychology. The basic premise is that an individual learner must actively "build" knowledge and skills and that information exists within these built constructs rather than in the external environment. However, all advocates of constructivism agree that it is the individual's processing of stimuli from the environment and the resulting cognitive structures, that produce adaptive behavior, rather than the stimuli themselves.

2.3. Ideology of Teaching Academic English

The ideology of teaching academic English has been implemented for the purpose of equipping the English language learner to be able to pursue the study of a specific subject and to be successful in a particular learning environment and classroom.

“Academic ideology" in a sense classroom decorum and the balance between the "rule" that students are not to speak to one another during class and the fact that a certain amount of inter-student conversation is permitted during any class meeting except examinations.

The "code of student silence" as belonging to that category found in many social situations where the rules are largely pro forma, yet nevertheless honored as the rules. I propose that they operate as part of an ideology; that is, as a system of beliefs that systematically hides its own true social functions. If the rules were strictly enforced, the ideology would be exposed as such because we would have to question the basis of a rule whose enforcement made our lives impossible. But by permitting a rule to be broken as often as necessary to avoid this, this maintenance continues to serve its hidden function.