LECTURE FOUR

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION,

LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING

By Alec

So far we know little about the linguistic competence of human beings. How does a child learn its own language? We come to believe that the infant has an instinct for language—not for any particular language or grammatical category so much as an inborn set of general-purpose capacities used in language but also available for other skilled activities.

1.     Language acquisition

Acquiring a language calls for three things:

a.         predispositions, as well as physical capacities, developed through countless centuries of natural selection;

b.        a preexisting language system, any one of the many produced by the cultures of the world;

c.         a competence that comes from applying the predispositions and capacities to the systems through the relatively long period during which the child learns both to manipulate the physical elements of the system, such as sounds and words and grammatical rules, and to permeate with meaning.

Observing that every child, whatever his linguistic milieu, learns to speak spontaneously—except children who are deaf or who live exclusively with mute parents—people once concluded a bit hastily that the child acquires his mother tongue by simple imitation of the adult. It was once supposed that among the sounds that that he produces spontaneously, the child recognizes those produced by the adult and is thus led in the end to produce only the latter. Language learning was thus represented as a series of attempts at imitation that were reinforced when they were similar to adult productions and eliminated when they were different. Through successive discriminations and through associations between sound patterns and situations or objects, then by associations among sound patterns, language learning found an explanation in conformity with the first psychological theories of behavior based on the notion of habit. These habits, which can be more or less complex, had as a general representative schema that of the conditioned reflex.

More refined analyses of vocalic productions necessary for language acquisitions at different ages, and of the conditions necessary for language acquisition and especially the fact that psychologists began to take into consideration linguistic studies on the structures of language all have led to a complete revision of the problematic embracing the development of intralinguistic coordinations such as the relationships between thought and language. Researchers are now asking how speakers acquire the capacity to produce sentences, both as encoders and as decoders.

Another interesting idea is the idea of language universality, which in T-G is believed that the basic constituent of syntax must be identical for all languages (its rules constitute formal universals) and that syntactic differences arise only under the influence of transformations. This idea leads to the attempts to the theories of general grammars. But whereas some other grammarians deduced the universality of grammar from the prior postulate according to which language is a representation of logical thought, the unversalism of the Chomskyans presents itself as an empirical conclusion drawn from the study of languages and is thus not based on postulated identification of deep syntax and logical reality.

Finally, LAD is the unknown and also the most important part of the whole linguistic process,

Input ------------ LAD ----------- output

but it is as problematic as the originality of language itself.

2.   Language Learning

Learning is a more or less permanent change in a behavioral tendency as a result of experience, either produced or through institutional learning through teaching, includes concepts such as conditioning and includes theories by people like Skinner, Thorndike and Tolman. It is important to realize that learning need not be correct, deliberate, or overt. Numerous examples of learning can be given. We learn to talk, write, swim, play cards, and so forth. In fact the acquired aspect of any behavior is its learned aspect. So pervasive is learning that some psychologists have made it their primary concern in the study of behavior. Ivan Pavlov, B. F. Skinner, E. L. Thorndike, and John Watson all identified learning as the most important single process in the explanation of human behavior.

There are two basic theories that concern us as teachers of English language teaching: the cognitive theory and the behaviorist/associative theory. The former is concerned with knowledge and suggests that we learn by insight, interpretation and problem solving. Bruner and Miller are its great exponents. The latter theory is concerned with responses and says we learn by trial and error. Its great exponents are Pavlov and Skinner.

The learning of one language in childhood is an inevitable process; the learning of another in adulthood is an accomplishment. Why do so few people succeed in mastering it? The first and most obvious difference is that the child who learns his mother tongue is at the same time discovering the possibility of his own organs and exploring his environment. So, for the infant, physical maturation, the formation of concepts and the development of the forms of speech of his community are taking place at the same time. It is obvious that for him hearing must precede speaking. It is equally obvious that he is dependent on what he hears, as he has not yet learned to read or write.

The adult or adolescent student, on the one hand, has learnt to control his speech organs in a certain way and has great difficulty in learning new habits. He has already formed concepts about his environment, which are embodied in the language he has learnt to speak and which comes automatically to his lips, but interferes with his efforts to learn a new language. He is not surrounded continually by people speaking the foreign language, so he does not hear it as he does his mother tongue. The adult student has learnt to read, to study, to write, to extract much information from books and from his experiences in life. The infant has many hours a day for many years in which to learn his mother tongue, while the grown student has only a few hours a week to make rapid progress.

The learning of the mother tongue follows the same pattern for all of us; the learning of a foreign language can take on a variety of patterns. Dozens of factors are involved, each highly variable, and each related to other factors. The main factors which determine the type and degree of learning of the target language are linguistic, social and psychological.

Close links can be seen between theories of language and theories of learning. Behaviorist theories of learning (Pavlov, Skinner) are closely linked with structural linguistics (Bloomfield, Fries, Lado) and with the audio-lingual method. Cognitive theories (Bruner, Miller) are the basis of transformational-generative grammar (as developed principally by Chomsky). The setting up of associations in order to categorize and store new experiences is the basic process of memorization. The behaviorists would say that those associations could only be learnt after a period in which they are repeatedly paired and rehearsed with reinforcement following each trial. T-G construction of a vivid association accomplished by a simple trial, which will ensure storage in the memory.

3. Language Teaching   

We have different approaches to language teaching, which we have a separate course. Generally speaking, we can infer:

(1)                   Descriptive Language teaching is the demonstration of how a language works—talking about skills already acquired, without trying to alter them, but showing how they are used.

(2)                 Prescriptive  Interfering with existing skills for the purpose of replacing one pattern of activity, already successfully acquired, by another; it is thus restricted to the native language. Prescriptive here includes proscriptive, since each command to do something implies not doing something else.

(3)                 Productive   The teaching of new skills; this includes the greater part of language teaching.

These teaching approaches are not, of course, mutually exclusive. In the classroom, effective procedures may be based on the following approaches:

(1)        Choral recitation by the class before individuals are asked to recite;

(2)       Drills and exercises in which the student’s response involves, for the most part, repetition of the materials contained in the question;

(3)       The use of the memorized dialog material in recreations of everyday situations.

Such an approach is likely to ensure that the students repeat aloud a great deal of foreign language material with a low probability of error. For further classroom techniques, I’ll leave them to the other separate course that comes later.