• Language Acquisition

KEY ISSUES IN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORY & HOW TO EXPLORE THEM

The Scope of Concerns in Language Acquisition Theory

– How do PEOPLE LEARN LANGUAGE?

• “language” (How do people learn language?)

• “learn” (How do people learn language?)

• “people” (How do people learn language?)

Thus correspondingly, our concerns in language acquisition must cover the following areas:

– The Nature of LANGUAGE

– The Nature of the LEARNING process

– The Nature of the LEARNER (people)

Each theory of language acquisition has its own distinct views on each of these three
areas

SCOPE OF CONCERNS

Relationship between Theory and Practice

LANGUAGE THEORY AND PRACTICE

Language theory is concerned with HOW PEOPLE LEARN LANGUAGE while Practice, HOW WE
TEACH LANGUAGE.

We teach according to how we assume the learners learn !!

• Topic 1

Psychologically Oriented Perspectives on the learning Process (1) : Behaviorism & Cognitivism

What can first language acquisition tell us about second language acquisition?

1.2 From First Language Acquisition to Second Language Acquisition

 – Three broad schools of thought: behaviourism, cognitivism and interactionism

THE BEHAVIORIST PERSPECTIVE

Major influences:

– Dominant theory in psychology in the 1940s and 1950s.

– A theory of learning that can be applied to learning anything, from language to

swimming.

– key belief: Behaviors which are rewarded get repeated and become habits.

2.2 Behaviorism and First Language Acquisition

– Learning is equated to acquiring habits, that is, learning something means making
it become a habit. The keys to such learning are imitation and conditioning through
reinforcement. The reinforcement can be positive (in the form of reward) or
negative (in the form of punishment).

The learning process is based on the assumption that when we are born, our minds are
empty: the behaviorist used the Latin term tabula rasa (meaning “blank slate) to describe
a baby’s mind.

Learning results from environmental rather than genetic factors.

Behaviorist accounts of language acquisition assume the American structuralists’ view of

language, that is, that a language is defined by the consistent formal patterns (e.g.
sentence structures) in its users’ speech or writing.

Thus, to have learnt a language is to be able to produce these patterns correctly as a

matter of habit.

Worked mainly with animals believing that human beings operated in similar ways to animals.

The behaviorist view imitation and practice as primary processes in language development.
Children’s imitation are not random; they don’t imitate everything they hear.

In other words, even when the child imitates, the choice of what to imitate seems to be based
on something the child has already begun to understand, not simply on what is ‘available’ ithe
environment.

• A Comparison between First and Second Language Acquisition

• Ervin-Tripp, as early as 1974, directly challenges the widely held idea that it is not logical
to attempt to develop a common theory for first- and second-language acquisition.

• According to her, the idea that first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) acquisition
have little in common theoretically has been based on two common misconceptions:

• 1. The foundation for L2 is built largely from a transfer of the rules of L1, and

• 2. only L2 is constructed from prior conceptual knowledge within the learner.

• 3 Behaviorism and Second Language Acquisition

– Behaviorists believe that people learn a new language according to the very same
principles that they identified for child language acquisition – they imitate small
bits of the new language, are rewarded when people understand what they say
(positive reinforcement) and thus use the same bits of language again and soon,
these bits become “habits” and are therefore learned.

– Conversely, when they use a wrong pattern in the new language, they are
“punished” by others not understanding them, so they do not use the pattern
again.

– However, behaviorists recognize that L2 learning must logically differ from L1

acquisition where one of the most crucial assumptions is the learners are older and
hence no longer tabula rasa. The language patterns learnt from their first language
have already become habits.

Where the new language is very similar to the L1, this is not a problem. But when the
new language is quite different from the L1, this leads to the problem of L1 transfer
and interference.

• WORKSHOP
• In groups, discuss the L1 structures that you think interfere with the L2 (English) learning
of your students or yourselves. The structures may be at the phonological, morphological,
syntactical or rhetorical levels.

• What implications does all this have for teaching or learning a new language?

– In terms of its general principles, behaviorism suggests that in classroom

instruction, learning tasks should be broken down into small, discrete individual
behaviours to be developed into good habits.

– The goal of the lesson is for the learner to make the pattern become a mechanical
habit through imitation and repetition.

– The teacher then provides reinforcement, “rewarding” correct responses by

affirming or praising them, and “punishing” wrong responses by correcting them.

• Evaluation of Behaviorist Views of Language Learning

– The audiolingual approach is very practical. It is an easy methods for any teacher
to learn quickly, because the steps are simple and predictable.

– It is easy to write course books that teachers can use in a fairly mechanical way.

– Because each lesson spells out very specifically the language item or pattern to be
taught, even teachers who do not know or use the target language very well can
use the method.

– In short, behaviorist theory has offered language teachers a systematic and

practical approach to teaching based (perhaps for the first time) on a coherent
psychological explanation of how people learn, unlike previous teaching practices
based mainly on intuition and experience.

– The focus on what is observable emphasizes the important role that parents and
teachers play in setting appropriate learning conditions and ensuring that desirable
behaviours are developed.
 – Behaviorism has introduced the important notion that motivation and feedback
play very crucial roles in learning.

– However, behaviorist theory and the audiolingual approach to language teaching

that is based on it are highly questionable for a number of reasons:

Questionable:

– Assumptions:
• The belief that we begin life as tabula rasa.
• Its emphasis that human beings are like animals.
• Its description of language in terms only of its observable patterns and forms
fails to account for how meaning is related to language.

• Implications:

– The implications of behaviorist theory for learning and other practices have some
rather negative consequences. A pure audiolingual approach to language teaching,
for instance, may be criticized for the following reasons:

• It produces passive learners who merely respond to the teacher’s leading.

They are not encouraged to engage actively in thinking about the language,
develop their own strategies to learn more effectively, and take responsibility
for their own learning.

– It does not encourage any creative use of language, since learners only focus on
reproducing teacher-controlled language.

– Because there is little attention to meaning, the learner is not helped to use the
language in real communication, where meaning is important. Thus, he is further
inhibited.

– There is no room for actual interaction and exchange of meanings among learners
and between learners and the teacher, and this is unlike real communication in a
language. Thus, again, the learners are not helped to use the language.

• Differences between L1 Acquisition and SLA

• There are five fundamental differences:

• Consider the amount of time young children spend on language compared to the time set
aside for the ESL/EFL in schools or language courses. They can listen to the speech stream
even before birth.

• Three-year olds devote as much as 70 hours a week to using a new language. L1

acquisition takes several years in which children hear millions of utterances.

• Now think of students who spend a mere 3-5 hours a week in a conventional class over a
year. Classrooms can never provide enough exposure for the learners to sort out the many
complexities of a language all by themselves. Mere exposure to the FL cannot lead to
learning, simply because there’s never enough of it.

• Infants engage in a kind of learning where they (1) detect patterns in language input and
(2) exploit the statistical qualities of the input (Kuhl 2000).

• But for this to work, they need massive amounts of input tied to recurring situations and
pragmatically grounded, input of the kind parents provide in the daily business caring for
the child.

• In order for a construction to become productive, learners must hear many different
instances and then generalize on the basis of common patterns among them.

• Apart from the time handicap teachers have to cope with, classrooms radically differ from
L1 acquisition situations in other aspects:

1. The new language cannot be really lived: it cannot be used while eating, cooking, going
shopping or quite generally doing things where the meaning clearly springs from the
situation at hand.
• 2. Fifteen to thirty learners have to share one mature, accomplished speaker, whereas in
families communication with the infant is usually one-to-one.

• 3. Motivation: There is no urgency behind FL use because there is always another to

language to fall back on to satisfy immediate and compelling communication needs.

• Cognitivist Perspectives

• Major influences

In the late 1950s and 1960s, many scholars and researchers began pointing out the
limitations and controversial aspects of behaviourism. This led to interest in
exploring the inner workings of the mind, because these scholars believed that
internal factors might be as important or even more important than external factors
in the learning process. Thus arose cognitivist theories of learning, which have had
a profound impact in changing educators’ ideas of what teaching involves.

• cognitivist are so-called because they studied cognition, another term for “thinking”. For
these scholars, generalizing about patterns of behavior based on observation was not
good enough.

• As with behaviorism, cognitivist psychology in the constructivist tradition influenced and

was influenced by a very important development in linguistics.

• The key figure here is the great linguist Noam Chomsky, whose transformational-
generative grammar (often referred to as TG in short) is one of the most important
linguistic theories of all time.

• Chomsky noted that speakers of a language often produced utterances no one had
spoken before (for example, new sentences). This would not be possible if the language
consisted only of patterns that had been observed.

• Nativism in First Language Acquisition

• The cognitivists in general reject the behaviorists’ ideas and believe that what humans
do and say result from mental processes –from thinking or cognition.
• learning, therefore, is about processing information (in the case of the information
theorists) or making sense of things (in the case of constructivists).

• For Chomsky in particular, child language acquisition or learning is a very specific

cognitive process. Chomsky proposed the existence of a Language Acquisition Device
(LAD), or Universal Grammar (UG) as it has been more recently called, as the key to
language learning.

• According to him, nature has endowed all human beings with special mechanism in the
brain, and it is this which helps children know the rules of a language. In other words,
language learning is innate or native to human beings. Thus, his theory is often described
as innatist or nativist.

• The Chomskyan or nativist position diametrically opposes the behaviorist assumptions

and beliefs.

– It rejects behaviorism’s premise that man merely responds to stimulus in the

environment like other animals. Instead, like other cognitivists, it emphasizes how
man is distinct from other animals in being able to think: he possesses an active
mind that governs his words and actions.

• The nativists’ claim that an LAD or UG exists is based clearly on the beliefs that babies
minds are NOT tabula rasa: they are born with the ability to learn language. Other
cognitive psychologists have extended this notion far beyond language to all other areas
of learning.

• Unlike the behaviorists who saw language-learning process as the same as any other kind
of learning, the nativists saw it as a unique process distinct from other types of learning,
with the LAD or UG being one of the many specialized subsystems or modules in the mind
for learning different things. In other words, they saw the mind’s cognitive structure as
modular in nature.

• Many have FOUND EVIDENCE OF CHILDREN PRODUCING LANGUAGE WHICH THEY HAVE
NEVER HEARD BEFORE, BUT WHICH APPEAR TO BE BASED ON AN INTUITIVE
UNDERSTANDING OF BASIC RULES OF THE LANGUAGE. Example:
 – English-speaking children often go through a stage when they produce irregular
past-tense verbs incorrectly, such as “buyed” instead of “bought”, or “goed” instead
of “went”.

• This happens even though they may never have been to school for grammar lessons or
been taught by their parents to add “-ed” to verbs when they want to talk about
something happening in the past.

• The nativists point out that this could not have been due to imitation, since the adult
“experts” would have been very unlikely to use the wrong irregular past-tense form. The
only explanation for this phenomenon thus has to be that somehow, internally, the
children know the general past-tense “rule” of adding “-ed” and have overgeneralized it
to create their own past-tense forms for all verbs.

TOPIC 2
PSYCHOLOGICALLY ORIENTED PERSPECTIVES ON THE LEARNING PROCESS (II): COGNITIVISM &
SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

• COGNITIVIST DIRECTIONS IN SLA

• Cognitivist approaches to understanding second language acquisition have taken many

rich and diverse directions, unlike the singular direction in which the behaviorist account
of L1 learning was applied to L2 learning.

• The Critical Period Hypothesis

Lenneberg observed that this ability to develop normal behaviors and knowledge in a
variety of environments does not continue indefinitely and that children who have never
learned language (because of deafness or extreme isolation) cannot do so if these
deprivations go on for too long.

• He argued that the language acquisition device, like other biological functions, works
successfully only when it is stimulated at the right time—a time called the ‘critical period’.
This notion that there is a specific and limited time period for language acquisition is
referred to as the Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH).

• The CPH proposes that, like other aspects of biological development, the natural ability
to develop language through the LAD or UG is available only for a limited period,or up to
a certain age.

This period is the “critical period”, after which the LAD or UG is no longer available, and
the language learner has to rely on other sources.
• There are three major schools of thought in SLA theory that have arisen from attempting
to apply nativist theories of L1 acquisition. They also incorporate other explanations, and
are distinguished from each other by their response to the CPH:

– The first group, whose most influential figure is Stephen Krashen, rejects the CPH..

• It believes that SLA happens in almost exactly the same way as L1 acquisition – that is, the
L2 learner possesses the same internal resources (i.e. the LAD or UG) as a child learning
his mother tongue.

• The second group, of whom Michael Long is one of the leading figures, accepts a weak
form of the CPH. It believes that the LAD or UG operates less strongly as a person gets
older.

• Thus, learners of a new language, being typically older, would not be able to learn an L2
in an exactly the same way as their L1, and would need to supplement the internal work
of the LAD or UG with external sources of learning, such as classroom instruction on
grammar rules.

• A large third group of scholars subscribe to a strong form of the CPH, believing that
especially for older L2 learners, the UG or LAD no longer operates. Thus they draw on
more general learning theories in psychology, rather than those specific to language
learning.