Harmer’s 2007 How to Teach English

When I firstly met the book, I thought that this book would only talk about the same things as the other books on similar topic have done. At first, I noticed that the only innovation in this book is the accompanying DVD. Moreover, I know that Jeremy Harmer is the author of “The Practice of English Language Teaching”, a book that became the compulsory book for my TEFL class when I was an S1 student in 1999. Therefore, I didn’t really expect that this book will be quite different from the others “how to teach English” books I have read in my S1 study.

Skinner, Behaviorism, and My Lecturer

This is a rather interesting model of teaching, especially when applied in the field of English language teaching. B.F Skinner, an American psychologist who is mostly responsible for this model, argues that the possibility of a certain behavior to occur will increase if it is directly followed by reinforcement.
Given the fact that reinforcement can be both Positive and negative, Skinner argues that the implication of both reinforcement can be used in educational context.In his famous article “Verbal Behavior“, Skinner argues that language is adopted through habit formation. Students gives respond to a certain stimulus and the respond should be followed either by positive or negative reinforcement. With this process, students will finally internalized the language and in the long run it will be a habit for him.