Lecture 3. Тақырыбы: Research methods in pedagogical psychology and psychology of teaching foreign languages

1. Psychology of Teaching Foreign Languages.

2. Methods.

Лекция мазмұны: We pointed out the part in which we are interested – Psychology of Teaching Foreign Languages (PTFL)

If we want to compare this two disciplines, Psychology of Teaching Foreign Languages and Pedagogical Psychology, first of all we must delimit two notions the research subject and object.

Pedagogical Psychology and Age Psychology have common research objects – growing, developing and forming person (child, teenager, young man).

The research subject of Pedagogical Psychology is psychological laws of education and upbringing. So Pedagogical Psychology studies laws in mastering knowledge and skills and individual peculiarities in these processes.

As any other branch of scientific knowledge PTFL has not defined at once complexity and versatility of the research subject. At first times the research subject of PTFL were process of memorizing and mastering. Gradually expanding area of study PTFL includes a problem of the psychological analysis of general didactic signs, e.g. consciousness and problem of accounting specificity of foreign language in comparison with native language. At that time the necessity of studying person’s motivation sphere was noted.

The research methods used in educational or pedagogical psychology tend to be drawn from psychology and other social sciences. There is also a history of significant methodological innovation by educational psychologists, and psychologists investigating educational problems. Research methods address problems in both research design and data analysis. Research design informs the planning of experiments and observational studies to ensure that their results have internal, external and ecological validity. Data analysis encompasses methods for processing both quantitive (numerical) and qualitative (non-numerical) research data. Although, historically, the use of quantitative methods was often considered an essential mark of scholarship, modern educational psychology research uses both quantitative  and qualitative  methods.