1.

Behaviourism
2. Nativism
3. Cognitivism
4. Affective Factors
5. Learning and Aquisition
A. Ivan Pavlov (1894-1936) Russian
Physiologist :
1. Classical Conditioning :
Stimulus -- Response Learning
Food (Unconditioned Stimulus)
Bell (Conditioned Stimulus)
Saliva ( Conditioned Response)
 During conditioning, the experimenter rings
a bell and then gives food to the dog. The
bell is called the neutral stimulus because it
does not initially produce any salivation
response in the dog. As the experimenter
repeats the bell-food association over and
over again, however, the bell alone
eventually causes the dog to salivate. The
dog has learned to associate the bell with
the food. The bell has become a
conditioned stimulus, and the dog’s
salivation to the sound of the bell is called a
conditioned response.
 Acquisition
The acquisition phase is the initial learning of
the conditioned response—for example, the
dog learning to salivate at the sound of the
bell.
 Extinction
The term extinction is used to describe the
elimination of the conditioned response by
repeatedly presenting the conditioned
stimulus without the unconditioned stimulus. If
a dog has learned to salivate at the sound of
a bell, an experimenter can gradually
extinguish the dog’s response by repeatedly
ringing the bell without presenting food
afterward.
 Generalization
After an animal has learned a conditioned
response to one stimulus, it may also respond
to similar stimuli without further training. If a
child is bitten by a large black dog, the child
may fear not only that dog, but other large
dogs. This phenomenon is called
generalization.
 Discrimination
The opposite of generalization is
discrimination, in which an individual learns to
produce a conditioned response to one
stimulus but not to another stimulus that is
similar. For example, a child may show a fear
response to freely roaming dogs, but may
show no fear when a dog is on a leash or
confined to a pen.
Applications of Classical Conditioning
After studying classical conditioning in dogs
and other animals, psychologists became
interested in how this type of learning might
apply to human behavior. In an infamous
1921 experiment, American psychologist
John B. Watson and his research assistant
Rosalie Rayner conditioned a baby named
Albert to fear a small white rat by pairing the
sight of the rat with a loud noise.
 Operant Conditioning
One of the most widespread and important
types of learning is operant conditioning,
which involves increasing a behavior by
following it with a reward, or decreasing a
behavior by following it with punishment.
 Thorndike’s Law of Effect
Some of the earliest scientific research on
operant conditioning was conducted by
American psychologist Edward L. Thorndike
at the end of the 19th century. Thorndike’s
research subjects included cats, dogs, and
chickens.
To see how animals learn new behaviors,
Thorndike used a small chamber that he
called a puzzle box.
In the late 19th century American
psychologist Edward L. Thorndike conducted
some of the first experiments on animal
learning. Thorndike formulated the law of
effect, which states that behaviors that
are followed by pleasant
consequences will be more likely to
be repeated in the future.
He would place an animal in the puzzle box,
and if it performed the correct response
(such as pulling a rope, pressing a lever, or
stepping on a platform), the door would
swing open and the animal would be
rewarded with some food located just
outside the cage. The first time an animal
entered the puzzle box, it usually took a long
time to make the response required to open
the door.
Eventually, however, it would make the
appropriate response by accident and
receive its reward: escape and food. As
Thorndike placed the same animal in the
puzzle box again and again, it would make
the correct response more and more quickly.
Soon it would take the animal just a few
seconds to earn its reward.
Based on these experiments, Thorndike
developed a principle he called the law of
effect. This law states that behaviors that are
followed by pleasant consequences will be
strengthened, and will be more likely to occur
in the future. Conversely, behaviors that are
followed by unpleasant consequences will
be weakened, and will be less likely to be
repeated in the future. Thorndike’s law of
effect is another way of describing what
modern psychologists now call operant
conditioning.
 American psychologist B. F. Skinner
designed an apparatus, now called a
Skinner box, that allowed him to
formulate important principles of animal
learning. An animal placed inside the box
is rewarded with a small bit of food each
time it makes the desired response, such
as pressing a lever or pecking a key. A
device outside the box records the
animal’s responses.
 Operant Psychologist B.F.
Conditioning Skinner (1957) Verbal
Behaviour

Stimulus Reinforcement
Response

Behaviourist theory of language learning:

Language is a form of verbal behaviour
B. F. Skinner
American psychologist B. F.
Skinner became famous for his
pioneering research on
learning and behavior. During
his 60-year career, Skinner
discovered important principles
of operant conditioning, a type
of learning that involves
reinforcement and punishment.
A strict behaviorist, Skinner
believed that operant
conditioning could explain
even the most complex of
human behaviors.
 Beginning in the 1930s, Skinner spent
several decades studying the behavior of
animals—usually rats or pigeons—in
chambers that became known as Skinner
boxes. Like Thorndike’s puzzle box, the
Skinner box was a barren chamber in
which an animal could earn food by
making simple responses, such as pressing
a lever or a circular response key. A
device attached to the box recorded the
animal’s responses.
The Skinner box differed from the
puzzle box in three main ways:
(1)upon making the desired response,
the animal received food but did
not escape from the chamber;
(2)the box delivered only a small
amount of food for each response,
so that many reinforcers could be
delivered in a single test session;
and
1. Reinforcement
In operant conditioning, reinforcement refers
to any process that strengthens a particular
behavior—that is, increases the chances that
the behavior will occur again. There are two
general categories of reinforcement, positive
and negative. The experiments of Thorndike
and Skinner illustrate positive reinforcement, a
method of strengthening behavior by
following it with a pleasant stimulus.
Positive reinforcement is a powerful method
for controlling the behavior of both animals
and people. For people, positive reinforcers
include basic items such as food, drink, sex,
and physical comfort. Other positive
reinforcers include material possessions,
money, friendship, love, praise, attention, and
success in one’s career.
Depending on the circumstances, positive
reinforcement can strengthen either
desirable or undesirable behaviors. Children
may work hard at home or at school
because of the praise they receive from
parents and teachers for good performance.
However, they may also disrupt a class, try
dangerous stunts, or start smoking because
these behaviors lead to attention and
approval from their peers.
Negative reinforcement is a method of
strengthening a behavior by following it with
the removal or omission of an unpleasant
stimulus. There are two types of negative
reinforcement: escape and avoidance. In
escape, performing a particular behavior
leads to the removal of an unpleasant
stimulus. For example, if a person with a
headache tries a new pain reliever and the
headache quickly disappears, this person will
probably use the medication again the next
time a headache occurs.
In avoidance, people perform a behavior to
avoid unpleasant consequences. For
example, drivers may take side streets to
avoid congested intersections, citizens may
pay their taxes to avoid fines and penalties,
and students may do their homework to
avoid detention.
3. Punishment
Whereas reinforcement strengthens behavior,
punishment weakens it, reducing the
chances that the behavior will occur again.
As with reinforcement, there are two kinds of
punishment, positive and negative. Positive
punishment involves reducing a behavior by
delivering an unpleasant stimulus if the
behavior occurs. Parents use positive
punishment when they spank, scold, or shout
at children for bad behavior. Societies use
positive punishment when they fine or
imprison people who break the law.
Negative punishment, also called omission,
involves reducing a behavior by removing a
pleasant stimulus if the behavior occurs.
Parents’ tactics of grounding teenagers or
taking away various privileges because of
bad behavior are examples of negative
punishment.
Considerable controversy exists about
whether punishment is an effective way of
reducing or eliminating unwanted behaviors.
Careful laboratory experiments have shown
that, when used properly, punishment can be
a powerful and effective method for
reducing behavior. Nevertheless, it has
several disadvantages.
When people are severely punished, they
may become angry, aggressive, or have
other negative emotional reactions. They
may try to hide the evidence of their
misbehavior or escape from the situation, as
when a punished child runs away from home.
In addition, punishment may eliminate
desirable behaviors along with undesirable
ones. For example, a child who is scolded for
making an error in the classroom may not
raise his or her hand again.
 For these and other reasons, many
psychologists recommend that punishment
be used to control behavior only when
there is no realistic alternative.
4. Shaping
Shaping is a reinforcement technique that is
used to teach animals or people behaviors
that they have never performed before. In
this method, the teacher begins by
reinforcing a response the learner can
perform easily, and then gradually requires
more and more difficult responses. For
example, to teach a rat to press a lever that
is over its head, the trainer can first reward
any upward head movement, then an
upward movement of at least one inch, then
two inches, and so on, until the rat reaches
the lever.
Psychologists have used shaping to teach
children with severe mental retardation to
speak by first rewarding any sounds they
make, and then gradually requiring sounds
that more and more closely resemble the
words of the teacher. Animal trainers at
circuses and theme parks use shaping to
teach elephants to stand on one leg, tigers to
balance on a ball, dogs to do backward flips,
and killer whales and dolphins to jump
through hoops.
5. Extinction
As in classical conditioning, responses
learned in operant conditioning are not
always permanent. In operant conditioning,
extinction is the elimination of a learned
behavior by discontinuing the reinforcer of
that behavior. If a rat has learned to press a
lever because it receives food for doing so, its
lever-pressing will decrease and eventually
disappear if food is no longer delivered.
6. Generalization and discrimination
Generalization and discrimination occur in
operant conditioning in much the same way
that they do in classical conditioning. In
generalization, people perform a behavior
learned in one situation in other, similar
situations. For example, a man who is
rewarded with laughter when he tells certain
jokes at a bar may tell the same jokes at
restaurants, parties, or wedding receptions.
Discrimination is learning that a behavior will
be reinforced in one situation but not in
another.
Theoretical Approaches to
L1 Acquisition

 Behaviorism: Say what I say

 Innatism: It’s all in your mind

 Interactionist/Developmental
perspectives: Learning from inside and
out

37
Behaviorism: Say what I say

 Skinner: language behavior is the production of correct

responses to stimuli through reinforcement.
 Language learning is the result of 1) imitation (word-for-
word repetition), 2) practice (repetitive manipulation of
form), 3) feedback on success (positive reinforcement),
and 4) habit formation.
 The quality and quantity of the language that the child
hears, as well as the consistency of the reinforcement
offered by others in the environment, would shape the
child’s language behavior.
(*Do the activity on p. 10 – imitation and practice)

38
 Behaviorism: Say what I say
 Children’s imitations are not random:
Their imitation is selective and based on what they are
currently learning. They choose to imitate something they
have already begun to understand, rather than simply
imitating what is available in the environment.
(see example on p. 11, Peter’s & Cindy’s case)

 Children’s practice of new language forms

 The way they practice new forms is very similar to the
way foreign language students do substitution drills.
 Their practice of language forms is also selective and
reflects what they would like to learn. They are often in
charge of the conversation with adults.
(see example on p. 12, Kathryn’s case)
39
 Behaviorism: Say what I say
 However, children do use language creatively, not just repeat what
they have heard. (see examples on pp. 13-14)
 Patterns in language
• Mother: Maybe we need to take you to the doctor.
Randall (36 months): Why? So he can doc my little bump?”
(showing the understanding of the suffix ‘er/or’)
• Son: I putted the plates on the table!
Mother: You mean, I put the plates on the table.
Son: No, I putted them on all by myself.
(showing the understanding of using ‘ed’ to make the past
tense for a verb” and the focus on the meaning, not form)
 Unfamiliar formulas
• Father: I’d like to propose a toast.
Child: I’d like to propose a piece of bread.
• Mother: I love you to pieces.
Child: I love you three pieces.
40
Behaviorism: Say what I say
 Question formation
• Are dogs can wiggle their tails?
• Are those are my boots?
• Are this is hot?

 Order of events
• You took all the towels away because I can’t dry my
hands.

Imitation and practice alone cannot explain some of

the forms created by children. Children appear to pick
out patterns and then generalize or overgeneralize
them to new contexts. They create new forms or new
uses of words.
Learning by Observation
Although classical and operant conditioning
are important types of learning, people learn
a large portion of what they know through
observation. Learning by observation differs
from classical and operant conditioning
because it does not require direct personal
experience with stimuli, reinforcers, or
punishers. Learning by observation involves
simply watching the behavior of another
person, called a model, and later imitating
the model’s behavior.
People learn much
of what they know
simply by observing
others. Here a child
learns to use a
lawnmower by
observing his
father’s behavior
and imitating it with
a toy lawnmower.
Both children and adults learn a great deal
through observation and imitation. Young
children learn language, social skills, habits,
fears, and many other everyday behaviors by
observing their parents and older children.
Many people learn academic, athletic, and
musical skills by observing and then imitating
a teacher. According to Canadian-American
psychologist Albert Bandura, a pioneer in the
study of observational learning, this type of
learning plays an important role in a child’s
personality development.
Bandura found evidence that children learn
traits such as industriousness, honesty, self-
control, aggressiveness, and impulsiveness in
part by imitating parents, other family
members, and friends.
Psychologists once thought that only human
beings could learn by observation. They now
know that many kinds of animals—including
birds, cats, dogs, rodents, and primates—can
learn by observing other members of their
species.
 Reinforcer :
 Positive
Imitation Habit  Negativ
Formation e

Behaviourist psychology set out to explain

behaviour by observing the responses that
took place when particular stimuli were
present.
Responses

 Different stimuli produced different

responses from a learner.

 These responses could be haphazard

(could not be predicted) or they could be
regular.
 The association of a particular
response with a particular stimulus
constitute a habit.
 Characteristics
of Habits

Observable Automatic

They were performed spontaneously without

awareness and were difficult to eradicate unless
environmental changes led to the extinction of
the stimuli upon which they were built
 Practice Drill:
› Repetition Drill
› Comprehension Drill
› Substitution Drill
› Pattern Practice
The focus was on the occuracy
rather than approriateness
 Old habits get in the way of learning
new habits.
 Where SLA is concerned, therefore,
‘the grammatical apparatus
programmed into the mind as the
first language interferes with the
smooth acquisition of the second’
(Bright and McGregor (1970).
 Interference was the result of what
was called proactive inhibition. That
is the way in which previous learning
prevents or inhibits the learning of
new habits.
 Behaviourist learning theory predicts that
transfer will take place from the first to
the second language.
 Transfer will be negative when there is
proactive inhibition. In this case errors will
result.
 Transfer will be positive when the first and
second language habits are the same.
In this case no error will occur
 The simplicity and directness of this
theory (stimulus response)
had an enourmous impact on
learning psychology and on
language teaching. It provided the
theoritical underpinning of the widely
used Audiolingual Method of the
1950s and 1960s.
 Methodological principles :
› Firstly, on the behaviouris stimulus-response
concept and
› Secondly, on an assumption that L2 learning
should reflect and imitate the perceived
process of mother tongue learning
 The Percept were:
› Never translate.
› New language should always be dealt in the
sequence: hear, speak, read, write.
› Frequent repetition is essential to effective
learning.
› All errors must be immediately concerned.
The basic exercise technique of
a behaviourist methodology is
pattern practice
 Noam Chomsky (1957)
› Language Learning /Acquisition
depends on Innate Learning (It’s an
internalize process where Language
Acquisition Device (LAD) is becoming a
prime important role
› Chomsky claimed that the child’s
knowledge of his mother tongue was
derived from a Universal Grammar
which specified the essential form that
any natural language could take.
(McNeil : 1970).
 Language is learned. We are born with the
capacity to make forty sounds and our
genetics allows our brains to make
associations between sounds and objects,
actions, or ideas. The combination of these
capabilities allows the creation of
language. Sounds come to have meaning.
 Chomsky (1957) originally believes that the
LAD is a series of syntactic Universals,
structural properties universally found in all
languages.
 These syntactic structure are inborn.
Only the words are learned. These
allow infinite creativity based on a
limited number of patterns.
 Children thus generate sentences
based on learned words and innate
syntactic patrterns. This is why
children make grammatical mistakes
that they could not be repeating.
 Innateness Hypothesis in Language Acquisition
 Universal Grammar, then, existed as a set of
innate linguistic principles which comprised the
‘initial state’ and which controlled the form
which the sentences of any given language could
take
 Notes: Universal Grammar : rules
applicable to all human languages:
the set of actual or possible rules that
form the grammatical description of all
human languages.
 Also part of the Universal Grammar was
a set of discovery procedures for relating
the universal principles to the data
provided by exposure to a natural
language
 Procedure

Acquisiti
Primary
on
Data Grammar Rule
Device
 Language is human specific-faculty,
 Language exists as an independent
faculty in the human mind i.e. although
it is part of the learner’s total cognitive
apparatus, it is separate from the
general cognitive mechanism
responsible for intellectual development.
 The primary determinant of L1 acquisition
is the child’s acquisition device, which is
genetically endowed and provides the
child with a set of principles about
grammar.
 The acquisition device’ atrophies with
age.
 The process of acquisition consists of
hypothesis-testing, by which means the
grammar of the learner’s mother tongue
is related to the principles of the
‘universal grammar’
 Chomsky (1964). tackled Behaviourism
on the question of how the mind was
able to transfer what was learnt in one
stimulus-response sequence to other
novel situations.
 Acquisition must certainly be more than
mere imitation; it also doesn’t seem to
depend on levels of general intelligence,
 since even a severely retarded child will
acquire a native language wiout special
training.
 Some innate feature of the mind must be
responsible for the universally rapid and
natural acquisition of language by any
young child exposed to speech.
 Language is a rule-governed behaviour:
a finite, fairly small, set of rules enables
the mind to deal with the potentially
infinite range of experiences it may
encounter.
 So that learning consists not of forming
habits but of acquiring rules - a process
in which individual experiences are used
by the mind to formulate a hypothesis
 Chomsky maintains that children couldn’t
simply figure out language structure by
repetition and analogy becuse the
language they hear is highly irregular.
 Language spoken around the child
extremely fragmantery, random
simplification of adult speech.
 Such imcomplete sentences must serve
as clues to something already in the mind
 The mind, in other words, does not just
respond to a stimulus or system. It can then
use this knowledge of the system in a novel
situation to predict what is likely to happen,
what is an appropriate response or
whatever.
 The mentalist view of the mind as a rule-
seeker led naturally to the next important
stage - the cognitive theory of learning.
1. And yet, so far, no properties have been
discovered that are truly universal in
languages. It seems that the syntactic
structures differ from language to
language and couldn’t be innate.
2. All attempts to construct a universal
grammar that would underlie all structures
in all languages have come to failure. So,
Chomsky’s theory of transformational
grammar being a case in point.
Innatism: It’s all in your mind
 Chomsky’s viewpoints:
 Children are biologically programmed for language and
language develops in the child in just the same way
that other biological functions develop.
 The environment makes only a basic contribution, that
is, the availability of people who speak to the child.
Therefore, the child’s biological endowment (LAD) will
do the rest.
 Children are born with a specific innate ability to
discover for themselves the underlying rules of a
language system on the basis of the samples of a
natural language they are exposed to.
 Innatism: It’s all in your mind
 Chomsky argues that behaviorism cannot provide sufficient
explanations for children’s language acquisition for the
following reasons:

1. Children come to know more about the structure of

their language than they could be expected to learn on
the basis of the samples of language they hear.
2. The language children are exposed to includes false
starts, incomplete sentences and slips of the tongue,
and yet they learn to distinguish between grammatical
and ungrammatical sentences.
3. Children are by no means systematically corrected or
instructed on language by parents.

73
Innatism: It’s all in your mind
 LAD (an imaginary “black box” existing
somewhere in the brain):
 LAD contains the principles which are universal to all
human languages (i.e.. Universal Grammar – UG).
 For the LAD to work, children need access only to
samples of a natural language, which serve as a trigger
to activate the device.
 Once the LAD is activated, children are able to discover
the structure of the language to be learned by matching
the innate knowledge of basic grammatical principles
(UG) to the structures of the particular language in the
environment.

74
 Innatism: It’s all in your mind
 Evidence used to support Chomsky’s innatist position:
1. Virtually all children successfully learn their native language at
a time in life when they would not be expected to learn
anything else so complicated (i.e. biologically programmed).
2. Language is separate from other aspects of cognitive
developments (e.g., creativity and social grace) and may be
located in a different “module" of the brain.
3. The language children are exposed to does not contain
examples of all the linguistic rules and patterns.
4. Animals cannot learn to manipulate a symbol system as
complicated as the natural language of a 3- or 4-year-old child.
5. Children acquire grammatical rules without getting explicit
instruction. Therefore, children’s acquisition of grammatical
rules is probably guided by principle of an innate UG which
could apply to all languages.

75
Innatism: It’s all in your mind
 The biological basis for the innatist
position:
 The Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH) –
Lenneberg: There is a specific and limited
time period (i.e., “critical period”) for the
LAD to work successfully.
The best evidence for the CPH is that
virtually every child learns language on a
similar schedule in spite of different
environments.

76
Innatism: It’s all in your mind
 Three case studies of abnormal language
development - evidence of the CPH
(Read the case studies on pp. 19-21).

1.Victor – a boy of about 12 years old (1799)

2.Genie – a girl of 13 years old (1970)
3.Deaf signers (native signers, early learners,
vs. late learners)

77
 “A child first becomes aware of a
concept, such as relative size, and
only afterward do they acquire the
words and patterns to convey that
concept.”
 There is a consistent order of mastery
of the most common function
morphemes in a language. There is
some link between cognitive
development and language
acquisition.
 Piaget’s theory helps explain the order in
which certain aspects of language are
acquired.
 Learners as thinking beings
1. Learning and using a rule require
learners to think, that is to apply their
mental powers in order to distil a
workable generative rule from the mass
of data presented, and then to analyze
the situations where the application of
the rule would be useful or appropriate
2. Learning, then, is a process in which the
learner actively tries to make sense of
data, and learning can be said to have
taken place when the learner has
managed to impose some sort of
meaningful interpretation or pattern on
the data.
 This may sound complex, but in simple
terms what it means is that we learn by
thinking about and trying to make sense
of what we see, feel and hear.
 The cognitive code view of learning
seems to answer many of the theoretical
and practical problems raised by
behaviourism. It treats the learners as
thinking beings and puts them firmly at
the centre of the learning process, by
stressing that learning will only take place
when the matter to be learnt is
meaningful to the learners. But in itself a
cognitive view is not sufficient.
 The basic teaching technique
associated with a cognitive theory of
language learning is the problem-solving
task. In ESP such exercises have often
been modelled on activities associated
with the learners’ subject specialism.
 Learners as Emotional Beings
 People think, but they also have feelings.
It is one of the paradoxes of human
nature that, although we are all aware
of our feelings and their effects on our
actions, we invariably seek answers to
our problems in rational terms.
 Learning, particularly the learning of a
language, is an emotional experience,
and the feelings that the learning
process evokes will have a crucial
bearing on the success or failure of the
learning.
 Learners are people. Even ESP learners
are people. They may be learning about
machines and systems, but they still learn
as human beings.
 The importance of the emotional factor
is easily seen if we consider the
relationship between the cognitive and
the affective aspects of the learner.
 The cognitive theory tells us that learners
will learn when they actively think about
what they are learning. But this cognitive
factor presupposes the affective factor
of motivation.
 Before the learners can actively think
about something, they must want to
think about it. The emotional reaction to
the learning experience is the essential
foundation for the initiation of the
cognitive process.
 How the learning is perceived by the
learner will affect what learning, if any,
will take place.
 The relationship between the cognitive
and emotional aspects of learning is,
therefore, one of vital importance to the
success or otherwise of a language
learning experience.
 This bring us to a matter which has been
one of the most important elements in
the development of ESP - motivation.
 Much debate has recently centred
around the distinction made by Stephen
Krashen (1981) between learning and
acquisition. Learning is sees as a
conscious process, while acquisition
proceeds unconsciously.
 Acquisition is used to refer to picking up
a second language through exposure.
 Learning is used to refer to the conscious
study of a second language.
 The term Second Language Acquisition
refers to the subconscious or conscious
process by which a language other than
the mother tongue is learnt in a natural
or a tutored setting. It covers the
development of phonology, lexis,
grammar and pragmatic knowledge,
but has been largely confined to
morphosyntax
Language acquisition, the
process by which children and
adults learn a language or
languages, is a major field of
linguistic study.
Interactionist/developmental Perspectives:
Learning from inside and out

 Problems of Innatism:
 The innatists placed too much emphasis on the
“final state” (i.e. the linguistic competence of adult
native speakers), but not enough on the
developmental aspects of language acquisition.
 Language acquisition is an example of children’s
ability to learn from experience. What children
need to know is essentially available in the
language they are exposed to.

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Interactionist/developmental Perspectives:
Learning from inside and out
 This position views that language develops as a result of
the interplay between the innate learning ability of
children and the environment in which they develop.
 Developmental psychologists attribute more importance to
the environment than the innatists, though they also
recognize a powerful learning mechanism in the human
brain.
 They see language acquisition as similar to and influenced
by the acquisition of other kinds of skill and knowledge,
rather than as something that is largely independent of
the child’s experience and cognitive development.

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The Interactionist Position
 Piaget: Language is dependent upon and springs from
cognitive development. That is, children’s cognitive
development determines their language development.
(e.g., the use of words as “bigger” or “more” depends on
children’s understanding of the concepts they represent.)
 He argued that the developing cognitive understanding is
built on the interaction between the child and the things
which can be observed, touched, and manipulated.
 For him, language was one of a number of symbol
systems developed in childhood, rather than a separate
module of the mind. Language can be used to represent
knowledge that children have acquired through physical
interaction with the environment.
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 The Interactionist Position
 Vygotsky: sociocultural theory of human mental
processing. He argued that language develops primarily
from social interaction.
 Zone of proximal development (ZPD): a level that a child is
able to do when there is support from interaction with a
more advanced interlocutor. That is, a supportive interactive
environment enables children to advance to a higher level of
knowledge and performance than s/he would be able to do
independently.
 He observed the importance of conversations which children
have with adults and with other children and saw in these
conversations the origins of both language and thought.

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The Interactionist Position

 How Piaget’s view differs from Vygotsky’s:

 Piaget hypothesized that language developed as a

symbol system to express knowledge acquired
through interaction with the physical world.

 Vygotsky hypothesized that thought was

essentially internalized speech, and speech
emerged in social interaction.

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The Interactionist Position
 Language socialization framework: observed from
childrearing patterns (parent-child interaction)

 Child-directed Speech (modified language interaction):

 Phonological modification: a slower rate of delivery,
higher pitch, more varied intonation
 Syntactical modification: shorter, simpler sentence
patterns, frequent repetition, and paraphrase.
 Limited conversation topics: e.g., the ‘here and now’
and topics related to the child’s experiences.
 More important than modification is the conversational
give-and-take.

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The Interactionist Position
 The interaction between a language-learning child and
an interlocutor who responds in some way to the child
is important (Jim’s case).
 Exposure to impersonal sources of language such as
television or radio alone are not sufficient for children
to learn the structure of a particular language.
 One-on-one interaction gives children access to
language that is adjusted to their level of
comprehension.
 Once children have acquired some language, however,
television can be a source of language and cultural
information.

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 Connectionism
 Though both innatism and connectionism look at the
cognitive aspect of language acquisition, yet they differ
in the following:
• Connectionists hypothesize that language acquisition
dose not require a separate “module of the mind” but
can be explained in terms of learning in general.
• Connectionists argue that what children need to know
is essentially available in the language they are
exposed to. They attribute greater importance to the
role of the environment than to any innate knowledge
in the learner.

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Connectionism
 Connectionism views language as a complex system of
units which become interconnected in the mind as they
are encountered together. The more often units are
heard or seen together, the more likely it is that the
presence of one will lead to the activation of the other.
 Language acquisition is not just a process of
associating words with elements of external reality. It
is also a process of associating words and phrases with
the other words and phrases that occur with them, or
words with grammatical morphemes that occur with
them.

102
The Interactionist Position
 Watch the video clip “Baby Talk” from the Interactionist
position. Read the following questions first:
1. According to Bruner, in what ways do children learn syntax,
semantics, and pragmatics?
2. Why do many researchers think Chomsky’s innatism is not sufficient?
3. According to Berko-Gleason, how do parents or caretakers help
children with their verbal development?
4. What is the purpose for parents to play the ‘thank-you’ game with
children?
5. Interactionists stress that language use is not only referential but it
can be used for social purposes. Can you give examples for these two
types of purposes?
6. Why is it too simplistic to think children either memorize or analyze
things they hear and then they produce language? What example did
Berko-Gleason give to support her points?
7. How do children learn ‘routinized’ phrases?

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Childhood bilingualism

 “Simultaneous bilinguals”
 Children who learn more than one language
from birth.

 “Sequential bilinguals”
 Children who begin to learn a second
language after they have acquired the first
language.

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Constructivism
The learning theories of Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner,
Lev Vygotsky and John Dewey serve as the
foundation of constructivist learning theory.
Constructivism views learning as a process in which
the learner actively constructs or builds new ideas or
concepts based upon current and past knowledge or
experience. In other words, "learning involves
constructing one's own knowledge from one's own
experiences."
Constructivist learning, therefore, is a very personal
endeavor, whereby internalized concepts, rules, and
general principles may consequently be applied in a
practical real-world context. This is also known as
social constructivism.
Social constructivists posit that knowledge is
constructed when individuals engage socially in talk
and activity about shared problems or tasks.
Learning is seen as the process by which
individuals are introduced to a culture by
more skilled members". Constructivism itself
has many variations, such as Active learning,
discovery learning, and knowledge building.
Regardless of the variety, constructivism
promotes a student's free exploration within a
given framework or structure.