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Behaviorism

The document discusses the processes of language acquisition and learning, highlighting the difference between implicit acquisition of first languages and explicit learning of additional languages. It outlines three main theoretical perspectives on language development: behaviorism, cognitive learning theory, and developmental perspectives. Additionally, it categorizes languages into seven types based on their nature and learning context in India.

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Baac, Marie Bernardine
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9 views2 pages

Behaviorism

The document discusses the processes of language acquisition and learning, highlighting the difference between implicit acquisition of first languages and explicit learning of additional languages. It outlines three main theoretical perspectives on language development: behaviorism, cognitive learning theory, and developmental perspectives. Additionally, it categorizes languages into seven types based on their nature and learning context in India.

Uploaded by

Baac, Marie Bernardine
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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the conscious process of knowing about language and being able to talk about it, that occurs

in a more formal situation where the properties or rules of a language are taught. Language
learning has traditionally involved grammar and vocabulary learning.
Children may acquire one or more first languages. For example, children who grow up in an
environment in which only English is spoken and heard will acquire only English as their first
language. However, children who grew up in an environment in which both Telgu and English
are spoken and heard equally will acquire both Telgu and English as their first languages.
Acquisition occurs passively and unconsciously through implicit learning. In other words,
children do not need explicit instruction to learn their first languages but rather seem to juts
“pick up” language in the same way they learn to roll over, crawl, and walk. Language in
children seems to happen.
All humans have the ability to learn additional languages although, just as with other areas of
study like Math or Science, some people are better at learning second languages than others.
For example, a woman who acquired Marathi as a child and learned English as an adult would
have one first language (Marathi) and one second language (English)
Nobody knows where the bounds between the two are but the two should go hand in hand
with slight emphasis on acquisition.
Explaining first language (L1) acquisition
These descriptions of language development from infancy through the early school years
show that we have considerable knowledge of what children learn in their early language
development. Over the past fifty years, three main theoretical positions have been advanced
to explain it: behaviorist, innatist, and developmental perspectives.
1. Behaviorism was a theory of learning that was influential in the 1940s and 1950s,
especially in the United States. With regard to language learning, the best-known
proponent of this psychological theory was B.F. Skinner. Traditional behaviorist
hypothesized that when children imitated the language produced by those around
them, their attempts to reproduce what they heard received ‘positive reinforcement’.
This could take form of praise or just successful communication.

The behaviorists claim that the three crucial elements of learning are: a stimulus,
which serves to elicit behavior; a response triggered by the stimulus, and
reinforcement, which serves to mark the response as being appropriate (or
inappropriate) and encourages the repetition (or suppression) of the response.
2. Cognitive learning theory. Chomsky argues that language is not acquired by children
by sheer imitation and through a form of conditioning on reinforcement and reward.
He believes that all normal human beings have an inborn biological internal
mechanism that makes language learning possible. Cognitivists/ innatists claim that
the child is born with an ‘initial’ state’ about language which predisposes him/her to
acquire a grammar of that language. They maintain that the language acquisition
device (LAD) is what the child brings to the task of language acquisition, giving
him/her an active role in language learning. One important feature of the mentalist
account of second language acquisition is hypothesis testing, a process of formulating
rules and testing the same with competent speakers of the target language.
3. Developmental perspectives. Developmental psychologists and psycholinguists
have focused on the interplay between the innate learning ability of children and the
environment in which they develop. In their view, language acquisition is but one
example of the human child’s remarkable ability to learn from experience, and they
see no need to assume that there are specific brain structures devoted to language
acquisition. They hypothesize that what children need to know is essentially available
in the language they are exposed to as they hear it in thousands of hours of
interactions with the people and objects around them.

Proponents of this view are Swiss psychologist/epistemologist, Jean Piaget, and


influential student of child development, psychologist, Lev Vigotsky.

Types of Languages
According to Paliwal (1998:3) there are seven types of languages as follows that are designed
based on their nature, the ways in which they are learnt in Indian context.
1. First Language (L1) -Mother tongue
2. Second Language (L2)- English (in India)
3. Third Language (L3) - Hindi (in India but not the case in Tamilnadu)
4. Foreign Language (FL)- French, German, Chinese, etc.
5. Dead Language (DL)- Sanskrit
6. Classical Language (CL)- Tamil, Latin, etc.
7. Modem Language (ML)- English

Discovery Task
Write T on the blank if the statement is True and F if the statement is False.
____ 1. Learning a language is highly unnatural and purely conscious process.
____ 2. Imminent use of a language paves way to acquisition.
____ 3. A language is first learned then acquired.
____ 4. L1 is acquired through interaction with parents and the environment.
____ 5. A child acquires the mother tongue naturally and unknowingly.
____ 6. Rote memorization is a good advice in language acquisition.
____ 7. Language acquisition can happen overnight.
____ 8. Formal activity is observed in language learning.
____ 9. Language acquisition depends on the aptitude of a child.
____ 10. L1 acquisition is uniformly successful across children and languages.

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