BEHAVIORISTS' THEORY OF LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

    Skinner (remember him?) said that language is behavior, and, just like any other behavior,
it is learned. This learning occurs through "reinforcement of successive approximations".
Supposedly, a child is randomly making sounds, such as hi-hi, a-a-a-a and says "mi" . The
mother, on hearing this, gets very excited, pays attention to the baby, says "Oh, you want
milk!" and gives him a bottle of milk. After a while, the novelty of "mi" wears off and mother
insists that the baby say "milk" before she provides the reinforcement of praise and milk.
After a longer while, milk is not good enough, and the child must say "I want milk" to be
rewarded.

    Many years ago, when I was first studying theories of child development in graduate
school, I was enrolled in a class with a friend who had majored in linguistics. (My
undergraduatre major was business). We had both just read Skinner's explanation of language
development for the first time. She asked me what I thought of it and I said it seemed to make
sense to me.

She laughed and said, "That's funny, I thought it was the stupidest thing I had
ever heard."

I think her sentiment was shared by most linguists, and, as I have learned a
little more about child development, I tend to go more with Paula's initial
reaction than my own.

    Lovaas, a psychologist well known for his work with autistic children,
used Skinner's ideas about reinforcement of successive approximations to teach autistic
children to talk. After thousands of trials, for example, reinforcing a child saying "wa" and
then "wat" and finally "wa-ter", he succeeded in teaching formerly nonverbal children to talk.

    It was Urie Bronfenbrenner (remember him) who challenged the suggestion that Lovaas
had proved anything, saying that, just because a child can learn a certain way in the laboratory
doesn't mean a child does learn that way in his or her own home or school.

    There is also the problem, which has plagued a lot of research in psychology, of
generalizing results from research on abnormal children to normal children. Jay Haley (a
family therapist) gave the analogy of a child with a broken leg. To make him well, we put his
leg in a plaster cast and keep him from moving it. That does not mean that we could improve
the walking and running ability of all children by putting their legs in plaster casts and
immobilizing them.

The behaviorist view of language acquisition is that children learn language by

receiving reinforcement from their parents after speaking correctly (operant conditioning). If
a child's parents become ecstatic when the child says "mama", the child will want to
continue speaking to get the same positive reaction. If a child gets a sip of milk after saying
"milk", the speech is reinforced, and the child learns that it can get what it wants by saying
.so

The Behaviorist View

The behaviorists believe that FLL consists of learners imitating what they hear and develop
habits in the FL by routine practice. In this view, the learners are thought to relate what they
know of their L1 to what they recognize in the L2. "Positive transfer" is a result of similarities
between the L1 and the L2, because habits used in the L1 easily transfer to the L2. On the
other hand, "negative transfer is caused by differences between the L1 and the L2, because
errors result from using habits from the L1 in the L2.
Problems with this view of FLL include the fact that imitation does not help the learner in
real-life situations. Learners are continually required to form sentences they have never
previously seen. A finite number of pre-practiced sentences is not enough to carry on
conversation, not even with an intructor. Another problem with this view is that many of the
errors made by FL learners are not based on the L1. Instead, the problems most often
.encountered by learners resemble errors made by children during the period of L1 acquisition

The Cognitive View

In the cognitive view FL learners are thought to creatively use their skills of cognition in
order to figure out the L2 on their own. The learners notice a pattern and construct their own
rules accordingly, then go back and change the rules if they are faulty. In this approach to L2
acquisition, the learners benefit from their mistakes because they are playing an active role in
the FLL process and learning first-hand how the language works.
One problem with this view is that cognition is not the only factor that learners use to make
assumptions about a language. It has been viewed that some errors learners make are based on
rules of the L1; they are influenced by these rules as opposed to coming to conclusions based
on their cognitive abilities. Another problem is that it is not always possible to deduce what
the FL learner meant to say, and therefore the error cannot be clearly determined.

Cognitive learning is about enabling people to learn by using their reason, intuition and
perception. This technique is often used to change peoples' behaviour. But people's
behaviour is influenced by many factors such as culture, upbringing, education and
motivation. Therefore cognitive learning involves understanding how these factors influence
.behaviour and then using this information to develop learning programmes