Behaviorism

 

The Behaviorist theory was developed during the 1940s and the 1970s, especially in North America. This theory visualizes learning (and not only language learning) under the concepts of imitation, practice, reinforcement and habit formation (Lightbown & Spada, 2006).

In this sense, the repetition of patterns takes a fundamental role in the acquisition of structures.

It is expected that learners would learn these sentence patterns by heart through classroom activities based on mimicry and memorization.

One of the most important accounts within this theory is the one proposed by Skinner in 1957. From his point of view, language was learnt through verbal operants that are controlled by the situation, which includes the social context, the individual’s past history and the complex stimuli in the actual situation. One type of operant is the mand (equivalent to a command) that is reinforced by someone carrying it out. Another is the tact (equivalent to a declarative) which is reinforced by social approval (Cook, 2008b). However, Chomsky (1959) argues that Skinner does not acknowledge the internal structure of the learner or how they process input information. In that regard, this theory fails to explain why children still make mistakes in the first stages of acquisition of the language even though they have been receiving the correct input. Therefore, Behaviorism does not explain the mental processes involved in language learning, distancing itself, for instance, from the Sociocultural perspective which accounts both: the external stimuli and the internal mental structure.

An additional concept related to this theory is the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH). According to this concept, learners of a second language would start the acquisition process using the habits formed in their L1 and, eventually, these habits would interfere with the new ones needed for the L2. However, it is assumed that learners may be reluctant to transfer or apply their previous knowledge to the L2. This use of L1 properties in the L2 should be a process of identifying similarities, thus making connections between the two languages, rather than a process of mere transference (Myles, 2002).

One of the most representative teaching methods related to the Behaviorist theory is the Audio-lingual Method. This methodology was very popular in the 1960s and 1970s, and it is based on the premise of learning through habit-formation. Thus, the classroom activity takes the following procedure: students listen to an audio which contains particular structures and patterns that they must repeat in order to drill grammatical points, such as verb forms and sentence structures. Therefore, students are first taught to listen and speak, and then to read and write based on the assumption that this is the natural sequence in first language acquisition. In this teaching style, students are not expected to draw their own conclusions and take the initiative. Furthermore, the responsibility lies on the teacher who is in charge of the learning process as a source of knowledge (Cook, 2008c).

Along these lines, Total Physical Response (TPR), which is a method which merges speech and actions, follows a similar premise. In the words of Richards and Rodgers (2001) “. .

. it attempts to teach languages through physical (motor) activity” (p.73). Under this view, L1 speech directed to children consists of commands that are responded to physically before verbal responses. Thus, the main tenet of this method is that adults learning an L2 should perform similarly as when children acquire their L1.

Finally, it is important to point out that this theory was not able to answer some basic questions about SLA; for instance, why learners produce wrong sentences and make mistakes that they have never heard before. If this occurs, imitation cannot be the explanation for SLA.

Then, another theory was proposed in order to answer this kind of questions: Chomsky’s Universal Grammar.

https://repositorio.uchile.cl/bitstream/handle/2250/130555/Second-language-acquisition-theories.pdf