THEORIES OF LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING

THEORIES OF LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING

Due on 15th of December

Name: Marta Domin, Ola Łokutin

2. a) BEHAVIORISTS APPROACH TO FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

child is born with no based on behaviour, talk only about

knowledge “tabula rasa”: science;empirical what they see

we are born with empty brain philosophy

stimulus & response

the process is called imitation & talk only about reinforcement

operant conditioning habit formation what they see

operant is the response to

positive negative

stimulus

if the verbal if the verbal

behaviuor is positively behaviour is

reinforced, then it is repeated; negatively

reinforced,then it is

not repeated;

PAVLOV SKINNER

The organism is stimulated The organism emiss some behaviour which is reinforced

by the environment to produce a response (by the environment)

IMPORTANT: Organisms can be conditioned to respond in desired ways, given the correct degree and

scheduling reinforcement;

ONE MORE TIME:

Pavlov’s classical behaviorism – classical conditioning (Pavlov trained a dog to salivate to the tone of tuning

fork using the smell of food). Learning process: formation of associations between stimuli and reflexive

responses. By the process of conditioning we build an array of stimulus-response connections, and more

complex behaviors are learned by building up series or chains of responses.

Skinner’s operant conditioning – the events or stimuli – the reinforcers – that follow a response and that tend

to strengthen behavior or increase the probability of a recurence of that response constitute a powerful force in the control of human behavior. Reinforcers are far stronger aspects of learning than is a mere association of a

prior stimulus with a following response, as in the classical conditioning model.

Operants – classes of responses (crying, sitting down, walking), they are sets of responses that are emitted and

governed by the consequences they produce.

Respondents - sets of responses that are elicited by identifiable stimuli (certain physical reflex actions).

In keeping with the above principle, punishment works to the disadvantage of both the punished organism and

the punishing agency. Punishment can be either the withdrawal of a positive reinforcer or the presentation of an

aversive stimulus.

2. b) Twaddell was right when he claimed that behaviourists do not believe in the existence of mind because

typical behaviouristic models were simply classical.

The reason for rejecting behaviorism is connected with Noam Chomsky. Chomsky has been one of

behaviorism's most successful and damaging critics. In a review of Skinner's book on verbal behavior (see

above), Chomsky (1959) charged that behaviorist models of language learning cannot explain various facts about

language acquisition, such as the rapid acquisition of language by young children, which is sometimes referred

to as the phenomenon of “lexical explosion.” A child's linguistic abilities appear to be radically underdetermined

by the evidence of verbal behavior offered to the child in the short period in which he or she expresses those

abilities. By the age of four or five (normal) children have an almost limitless capacity to understand and

produce sentences which they have never heard before. Chomsky also argued that it seems just not to be true that

language learning depends on the application of reinforcement. A child does not, as an English speaker in the

presence of a house, utter “house” repeatedly in the presence of reinforcing elders. Language as such seems to be

learned without, in a sense, being taught, and behaviorism doesn't offer an account of how this could be so.

Chomsky's own speculations about the psychological realities underlying language development included the

hypothesis that the rules or principles underlying linguisitic behavior are abstract (applying to all human

languages) and innate (part of our native psychological endowment as human beings). When put to the test of

uttering a grammatical sentence, a person, for Chomsky, has a virtually infinite number of possible responses

available, and the only way in which to understand this virtually infinite generative capacity is to suppose that a