MENTALISM & COGNITIVISM

1. Behaviourist view could not explain how from a finite range of

experience, the human mind was able to cope with an infinite range of
poss. situations.
Set of rules & Vocabulary = finite
Individual utterances = infinite

There are a finite number of grammatical rules in the system and with
knowledge of these rules an infinite of sentences can be produced.

2. A language learner acquires language competence, which enables him to

produce language.
3. A language learner can acquire language competence because he has
mental ability to process what he hears.
4. Children’s minds are not blank slates to be filled in by imitating the
language they hear from the environment.
5. Chomsky theorised that all children are born with some kind of language
processor - a black box or language acquisition device (LAD) - which
allowed them to formulate rules of language based on the input they
received.
6. The mind contains blueprints for grammatical rules.
7. Learning is acquiring rules, i.e individual experiences are used by the mind
to find the underlying pattern or system.
8. In classroom, teachers can help students learn more easily by showing
them rules and let them have a go on their own. Making up their own
sentences is the objective.
9. This cognitivistic view emphasized the active mental processing on the
part of the learner. The cognitive view takes the learner to be an active
processor of information. Learners are NOT mere repeaters, the almost-
robots, that Behaviourist principles would seem to describe.
10. The basic teaching technique associated with a cognitive theory of
language learning is the problem-solving task.
11. Learning & using a rule require learners to think, that is, to apply their
mental power in order to distil a workable rule from the mass of data
presented, and then to analyse the situations where the application of
the rule would be useful or appropriate.
12. Learning is a process in which the learner actively tries to make sense of
data.
13. When students are presented with new information they will come up with
the rules by themselves, which are either correct or incorrect.
14. 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.
15. Learning new information is made possible by connecting it to existing
information and then storing it so it can be retrieved later. (*)