By Nur Taslimah



Psychology  is a study of the thought processes and behavior of humans  in their interaction with the environment. Psychologists study processes of perception, thinking, learning, emotions, motivations, personality, abnormal behavior, interactions between individuals, and interactions with the environment.

Understanding the theories of psychology, especially psychology of learning, is very beneficial to all of the educational stakeholders: students, teachers, headmasters, curriculum developers or designers, government, society and educational observers. The theories help them to identify how the learners are and how they participate in and experience  the learning process. Another positive effect of understanding the theories is that the theories assist teachers to design the appropriate techniques of teaching.

This paper will discuss one of the learning psychology, that is behaviorism. In this paper, we attempt to find the answers of the following questions:

  1. What is behaviorism?
  2. What are  the  implications of behavioral theory to the English Language Teaching (ELT)?


In msu site, Behaviorism is defined as “the study of human behavior focusing on one’s observable behavior as a response to the natural stimuli in the world. One common belief in Behaviorism is that one’s behavior, and subsequent learning, is only a response to all of the stimuli one encounters during their life. By studying stimuli one can predict behavior. Behaviorism assumes that the thoughts of a person can not be measured, and only occur as a result of previous stimuli.”

Behaviorists say that learners originally do not own any potentialities. The potentialities that they have are the result or the influence of factors outside themselves or the factors stemming from their environments, for example, their families, schools, society,  nature, culture, and religion.

The Behaviorist Theory was first introduced in 1913 by the American psychologist John B. Watson. Watson’s view was largely influenced by the research of the Russian physiologist Ivan P. Pavlov during the early 1900s. The most influential version of this theory is put forward by B. F. Skinner in 1959. His version of Behaviorism is best known as Radical Behaviorism.(Shameem, 2010).

B.F Skinner is considered to be a Radical Behaviorist because of his belief that we do have such a thing as a mind, but that it is simply more productive to study observable behavior rather than internal mental events. (McLeod, S. A. 2007). Baca lebih lanjut

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