Scientific fields related to learning

• Psychology: a diverse area of study which involves, amongst other things, the study of how humans learn and how they make sense of the world.

• Psycholinguistics: involves the study of a) the mental processes that a person uses in producing and understanding language and b) how humans learn language (the study of speech perception, the role of memory, concepts and other processes of language use).

• First language acquisition is an area of psycholinguistics which focuses on how children learn their mother tongue.

• Second language acquisition is an area of applied linguistics and studies the processes by which people develop proficiency in a second or foreign language. These processes are investigated with the expectation that this information may be of use to language teaching.

Behaviourism: Main Principles

• Main protagonists: Ivan Pavlov, John Watson, Edward Thorndike, B.F. Skinner.

• Learning happens when a correct response is demonstrated following the presentation of a specific environmental stimulus.

• Learning is changed behaviour.

• Conditioning: Learning is seen as a process of developing connections between a stimulus and a response. This process is called conditioning.

• Habit formation: An individual responds to a stimulus by behaving in a particular way. If the behaviour is reinforced (i.e. rewards or punishment) then the likelihood of that behaviour occurring on a subsequent occasion will be increased or decreased. As the behaviour is reinforced, habits are formed.

• Importance of environment: Learning is a result of environmental rather than genetic factors. The child is born as a clean slate and the environment writes its messages on this clean slate.

Behaviourism and foreign language teaching

• It had a powerful influence on second and foreign language teaching between the 1940s and the 1970s.

• Influenced the development of the audiolingual method.

• Instruction is to elicit the desired response from the learner who is presented with a target stimulus.

• Student as passive receiver of information memorized dialogues and sentence patterns by heart.

• Based on rewards and punishments.

• Responsibility for student learning rests squarely with the teacher.

• Lecture-based, highly structured.

• Primacy of speech: considers speech as primary partly because it is the first medium that the child masters. Skills are taught in a specific order: Listening and speaking then reading/writing.

• Stimulus-response-reinforcement: Learners are taught the language in small, sequential steps (structures and then sentence patterns). A small part of the language is presented as a stimulus, to which the learner responds by repeating or by substituting. This is followed by reinforcement by the teacher. By repeating the learner develops habits Learning a language is seen as acquiring a set of appropriate mechanical habits and errors are frowned upon because they lead to the development of “bad” habits. The role of the teacher is to develop in learners good language habits.

• Inductive learning: Because learning is a question of habit formation rather than problem solving, any type of explanation is consistently avoided. It is a last resort and always occurs in the final stage, when the language item has been well practiced and the appropriate habit acquired.

Mentalism and Chomsky

• Mentalism is the belief that the mind is important for determining human behaviour.

• Chomsky argued that what was missing from the behaviourist concept of learning was a theory of mind - a mentalist perspective, in other words. The mind was seen to possess a set of deep-seated ways of processing language data that lead to the unconscious discovery of the grammar of the language - learning as a rule-governed activity.

• He argued that behaviourists failed to recognise the logical problem of language acquisition: children learn more about the language than they could reasonably be expected to learn on the basis of the language samples they hear. They can produce language that they have never heard of.

• Children’s minds are not blank slates to be filled in by imitating the language they hear from the environment. Children are born with an innate capacity for language learning which allows them to discover for themselves the rules underlying the language.

• This innate ability is called language acquisition device (LAD) or black box; later on Chomsky referred to this as innate knowledge of the principles of Universal Grammar (UG).

How does the language acquisition device work?

• The language acquisition device contains all the principles which are universal to all languages.

• For language acquisition device to work the child needs samples of natural language which activate the device.

• Once activated, the child is able to discover the structure of the language by matching the innate knowledge of grammatical principles with the structures of the particular language.

Language Acquisition Device = Universal Grammar