Professional Documents
Culture Documents
WHAT IS A THEORY
According to the definition of Oxford Advance Learners Dictionary a theory is
1-A set of properly argued ideas intended to explain facts and events.
2-Ideas, beliefs or claims about something which may or may not be found true in
practice.
According to the definition of Longmans Dictionary Of Contemporary English, a theory
is
1-An idea or a set of ideas that is intended to explain something about life or the world
especially that has not yet been proved to be true.
2-An idea that someone thinks is true but for which they have no proof.
WHAT IS LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
1-Acquisition is a process whereby children become speakers of their native language.
2-Acquisition is a process by which language capabilities of a person increases.
APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Various theories and approaches have been emerged over the years to study and analyze
the process of language acquisition. According to the arguments presented by Allan
Paivio Len Begg {Psychology of Language, p-222}, there exists three main school of
ideas regarding language acquisition
1-Behavioural approaches to language acquisition
2-Linguistic approaches to language acquisition
3-Cognitive approaches to language acquisition
2-Mentalism
BEHAVIORISM
IS BEHAVIOUR WHAT
According to the definition of Oxford Advance Learners Dictionary behavior is
1-One,s attitude or manner
2-Some act or function in a particular situation
WHAT IS BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE
According to Oxford Advance Learners Dictionary Behavioral Science is
The study of human behavior
Since linguistics is also included in behavioral sciences, it purpose as well is the study of
language with respect to human behavior
WHAT IS BEHAVIORISM
According to the definition of Oxford Advance Learners Dictionary, Behaviorism is
1-the theory that all human behavior is learnt to fit in with external conditions and is not
influenced by peoples thoughts and feelings.
According to the definition of Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Behaviorism is
2-The belief the scientific study of the mind should be based only on peoples behavior,
not on what they say about their thoughts and feelings.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO BEHAVIORISM
In 1913, in one of the most famous lectures in the history of psychology, John Broadus
Watson (1878-1958), a 35-year-old "animal behavior man" from Johns Hopkins
University, called for a radical revision of the scope and method of psychological
research.:
POLYGENETIC CONTINUITY
. For early behaviorism, animal and human behavior exist in an "unbroken continuity,"
Animals and humans share both mechanisms and fundamental forms of overt adjustment
to the environment. This view, which originated with Watson's desire to place the study of
animal behavior high on the psychological research agenda, was reinforced by
psychology's early success in extending trial-and-error and conditioning analyses from
animals to humans. As Dashiell summarized the continuity commitment: "The genus and
species Homo sapiens is moved by the same forces without and within as are the lower
animal forms, and expresses them in the same general types of actions and actiontendencies. The differences are differences in degree..."
ANIMAL MODELS
. Behaviorism emphasized the identification of fundamental mechanisms in animal
behavior (e.g., trial and error learning, conditioning) and use of such mechanisms,
without significant theoretical revision, in the explanation of human behavior. This
approach, which followed directly from the commitment to phylogenetic continuity, was
largely unquestioned among early behaviorists. Indeed, as behavioral research began to
develop in the late 1920's and 1930's, many of the most important studies focused on
animals and many core theoretical concepts came to be defined almost entirely in terms
of the procedures of animal behavior research.
HABIT FORMATION
. An emphasis on habit formation defined in terms of mechanisms of trial-and-error
elaboration of response and conditioned stimulus substitution was probably the
characteristic with which early behaviorism was most closely associated. Behaviorism in
the 1920's was first, last, and always a psychology of habit formation. Acquired behavior,
no matter how complex-thinking, talking, even scientific activity itself-could, in the final
analysis, be reduced to habit.
TRIAL AND ERROR MECHANISM
The trial-and-error mechanism (increase in random movement upon confrontation with a
problem situation, accidental success when chance response alters the organism or the
environment in the direction of greater adjustment, and gradual, mechanical selection and
reinforcement of successful movement) was usually employed to explain efferent
modification, the elaboration of the response itself. The conditioned reaction was
typically evoked to explain afferent modification-change in the effectiveness of stimuli,
including those that are purely social and symbolic, in eliciting a given response.
LANGUAGE
. For behaviorists in the 1920's, self-stimulation and response was intimately linked to
language. For both the self in thinking and the social listener in communication, language
responses were conceived as substitute, symbolic stimuli, independent of the sensory
attributes of the original stimulus. In this role, they subserved the related functions of
abstraction and generalization. As Weiss , who pioneered this analysis, asserted:
Thus the dogs learnt a new behavior. It was maintained by the behaviorists that language
as well is a sort of behavior that can be acquired in ideal social conditions. According to
them language is essentially the product of the society.
OPERANT CONDITIONING
Behaviorist theory takes language acquisition as a process of habit-formation through
stimuli-response model, as represented in Skinners Verbal Behavior (1957):
1) The child imitates the sounds and patterns which he hears from around him.
2) People recognize the childs attempts as being similar to the adult models
and reinforce (reward) the sounds, by approval or some other desirable
reaction.
3) In order to obtain more of these rewards, the child repeats the sounds and
patterns, so that these become habits.
4) In this way the childs verbal behavior is conditioned (or shaped) until the
habits coincide with the adult models.
Thus children learn language in the following steps
IMITATION
REPETITION
MEMORIZATION
CONTROLLED DRILLING
REINFORCEMENT
1-IMITATION AND REINFORCEMENT
Children just imitate what they hear. Parents teach them by telling them when
they make mistakes.Children start out as clean slates and through the process of
imitation they get linguistic habits printed on these slates. So we can say that
language acquisition is a process of experience.
2-CONDITIONED RESPONSE/STIMULUS RESPONSE PROCESS
The operant conditioning proposed by skinner is based upon four elements
Stimulus------Response---------Reinforcement----------Repetition
Reinforcement
A{Output}
But this model fails to reflect the true picture of childrens L2 acquisition in which the
output is different from the input:
A (input)
Reinforcement
A+ (output)
A+ is the multiplication resulted from the process of A in the black box. If the childs
linguistic output does not match the input, the explanation must lie in the internal
processing that has taken place, something that induced the Mantalists to go to another
extreme of innatist
.
2-Irregular Grammatical patterns
Behaviorism does not explain how children learn to handle irregular grammatical patterns
3-Languaoge a matter of maturation rather than imitation
Children seem unable to imitate exactly the adults grammatical structure at the
beginning. They learn these structures with the passage of time no matter how much
parents try to teach them. Thus language is a matter of maturation rather than imitation.
4-The most dramatic evidence against behaviorism is the fact that the children who can
not speak at all but who can hear normally acquire normal competence in language
comprehension.
5-Several kinds of evident suggest that imitation , in the sense of a childs attempt to
reproduce the adults actual utterances he hear does not play an important role in the
acquisition of syntax.
5-One of the relatively empirical problem is that relatively few experiments have been
done with infants and that these have typically dealt with general effects on vocalization.
6-According to Chomsky arguments man is superior to animals with respect to language
acquisition so we can never apply the rules and principles to language learning which are
derived from the experiments on animal.
7-For Chomsky the acquisition of incredibly complex language by children can not
simply be explained by imitation. It definitely has something to do with innate
capabilities
CONCLUSION
The above two theories can not give satisfactory answers to SLA, because each goes to a
polar extreme. The debate between behaviourism and mentalism arises the theory of
cognitivism, which agrees with the mentalists that children must make use of innate
knowledge, but disagrees about its nature. Cognitivism, on one hand admits the active
processing by the learner, and on the other hand attaches much importance to the input
and the interaction between internal and external factors.