Ⅱ. Theory of Cognitive Psychology

2.1 Concepts
    Chomsky, the famous American linguist, once put forward a well-known point of view that human language is a system of symbols, which is subject to certain rules. As a result, when learning a language, you should not just imitate. More important one should understand the specific rules of the language. Indeed, learning is not just passive imitation and stimulation, but actively forming cognitive structure. Simple imitation is based on memory. According to the effect of the “learning curve”, language established on this basis is extremely unstable, at the same time; it is also time-consuming and strenuous. But if there is a deep understanding of the grammar rules of the language, learners can practice over and over according to the rules, and give full play to creativity to convert and generate, to create a statement in the end, which is an information processing process with strong strategy and activeness.
    In terms of cognitive psychology, people’s cognitive process is regarded as information processing process. The processing results are obtained by means of stored information, that is to say, acquiring knowledge. The famous cognitive psychologist Piaget once said that: Knowledge is the perception construction caused by the exchange of the main body and the environment or the thinking and object. Knowledge is neither the vice of object nor the transcendental sense determined by the subjective. According to Piaget’s thought and contemporary cognitive psychology, the knowledge is defined as the information and organization caused by the interaction between inpiduals and environment. Therefore, language stored inside the inpidual is inpidual’ knowledge and that language stored outside the inpidual is human language.
Generally speaking, cognitive psychology studies people’ high- level psychological processes, which are main cognitive processes, such as attention, perception, image, memory, thinking and language. However, American cognitive psychologists Brunner and AuSubel think that the essence of learning is to form a cognitive structure actively, making the existing cognitive structure differentiated and integrated. Therefore, the process of English learning is a complex psychological process with the organization and reorganization of cognitive structure, such as, mastering language knowledge skills and making it internalize in order to achieve the effect of language outputting automatically. 认知心理学理论在中学英语教学中的应用(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_31082.html