THEORIES OF LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING

THEORIES OF LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING
Due on 15th of December
Name: Marta Domin, Ola Łokutin
2. a) BEHAVIORISTS APPROACH TO FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
child is born with no based on behaviour, talk only about knowledge “tabula rasa”: science;empirical what they see
we are born with empty brain philosophy
stimulus & response
the process is called imitation & talk only about reinforcement
operant conditioning habit formation what they see
operant is the response to
positive negative
stimulus
if the verbal if the verbal
behaviuor is positively behaviour is
reinforced, then it is repeated; negatively
reinforced,then it is
not repeated;
PAVLOV SKINNER
The organism is stimulated The organism emiss some behaviour which is reinforced by the environment to produce a response(by the environment)
IMPORTANT: Organisms can be conditioned to respond in desired ways, given the correct degree and
scheduling reinforcement;
ONE MORE TIME:
Pavlov’s classi cal behaviorism– classical conditioning (Pavlov trained a dog to salivate to the tone of tuning fork using the smell of food). Learning process: formation of associations between stimuli and reflexive responses. By the process of conditioning we build an array of stimulus-response connections, and more complex behaviors are learned by building up series or chains of responses.
Skinner’s operant conditioning– the events or stimuli – the reinforcers – that follow a response and that tend to strengthen behavior or increase the probability of a recurence of that response constitute a powerful force in
the control of human behavior. Reinforcers are far stronger aspects of learning than is a mere association of a prior stimulus with a following response, as in the classical conditioning model.
Operants– classes of responses (crying, sitting down, walking), they are sets of responses that are emitted and governed by the consequences they produce.
Respondents - sets of responses that are elicited by identifiable stimuli (certain physical reflex actions).
In keeping with the above principle, punishment works to the disadvantage of both the punished organism and the punishing agency. Punishment can be either the withdrawal of a positive reinforcer or the presentation of an aversive stimulus.
2. b) Twaddell was right when he claimed that behaviourists do not believe in the existence of mind because typical behaviouristic models were simply classical.
The reason for rejecting behaviorism is connected with Noam Chomsky. Chomsky has been one of behaviorism's most successful and damaging critics. In a review of Skinner's book on verbal behavior (see above), Chomsky (1959) charged that behaviorist models of language learning cannot explain various facts about language acquisition, such as the rapid acquisition of language by young children, which is sometimes referred to as the phenomenon of “lexical explosion.” A child's linguistic abilities appear to be radically underdetermined by the evidence of verbal behavior offered to the child in the short period in which he or she expresses those abilities. By the age of four or five (normal) children have an almost limitless capacity to understand and produce sentences which they have never heard before. Chomsky also argued that it seems just not to be true that language learning depends on the application of reinforcement. A child does not, as an English speaker in the presence of a house, utter “house” repeatedly in the presence of reinforcing elders. Language as such seems to b e learned without, in a sense, being taught, and behaviorism doesn't offer an account of how this could be so. Chomsky's own speculations about the psychological realities underlying language development included the hypothesis that the rules or principles underlying linguisitic behavior are abstract (applying to all human languages) and innate (part of our native psychological endowment as human beings). When put to the test of uttering a grammatical sentence, a person, for Chomsky, has a virtually infinite number of possible responses available, and the only way in which to understand this virtually infinite generative capacity is to suppose that a person possesses a powerful and abstract innate grammar (underlying whatever competence he or she may have in one or more particular natural languages).
1.a) Saussure wants to insist that language is not a thing, a substance, but a form, a
structure, a system. His image is that thought and sound are like the front and back of
a piece of paper (and the paper is the linguistic sign); you can distinguish between the
two, but you can't separate them. Saussure (and other structuralist and post-structuralist theorists) talk about the system of language as a whole as LANGUE (from the French word for language), and any individual unit within that system (such as a word) as a PAROLE. Structuralist linguistics is more interested in the LANGUE than in any PAROLE.
So it is widely known that he introduced two terms that have become common currency in linguistics –“parole,” the speech of the individual person, and “langue,”
the systematic, structured language (such as English) existing at a given time within a given society.
b) according to de Saussure meanings can (and do) vary widely, but only those
meanings which are agreed upon and sanctioned within a particular language will appear to name reality. But there may be some kinds of signs that seem less arbitrary than others. Pantomime, sign language, gestures (what are often called "natural signs") seem to have a logical relation to what they represent. The tomahawk chop used by Atlanta Braves fans, for example, seems to imitate the action of chopping, and thus would be the most "natural" way to designate the idea of chopping. But Saussure insists that ALL SIGNS ARE ARBITRARY; the tomahawk chop only has meaning because a community has agreed upon what the gesture signifies, not because it has some intrinsic meaning-Roy Harris, Reading Saussure, 1987
c) COMPETENCE is underlying knowledge of the system of a language- its rules of
grammar, its vocabulary, all the pieces of a language and how those pieces fit together;
it is not-observable ability to create and understand sentence while PERFORMANCE is actual production (writing & speaking) or the comprehension (listening & reading) of linguistic events so it is observable ability to create and understand sentence:
7. What is the place of imitation in first language aquisition?
“Imitation (echoing) is the main strategy in early language learning and an im portant aspect of early phonological acquisition. It agrees with behaviouristic principles of language acquisition- principles that are relevant to the earlies stages. On the beginning child manifests surface imitation ( does not assign “meaning: to uttera nces) which them , as the child understands the importance of semantic level of language, extends to deep- structure imitation(meaningful semantic level)”
4. According to Chomsky's words Universal Grammar is "the system of
principles, conditions, and rules that are elements or properties of all human
languages." It just says that if we characterize the knowledge that a person has
when he or she knows a possible human language, we find that some things
recur in every case (Italian, Arabic, Russian, etc.) and we call these ubiquitous
things universal grammar. By whatever process we come to know languages,
and whatever different things we come to know depending on whether we
learn Rumanian, Chinese, or Hindi, knowledge of any language includes
universal grammar, for example structure dependence.
Universal grammar, therefore, is part of the knowledge that resides in the human mind of a person who knows a language.
Naom Chomsky was required to believe (1) that this grammar is somehow concealed in the physical workings of the brain itself, and (2) that it is the end-product of a succession of evolutionary accidents (DNA mutations) occurring
in Darwinian fashion over countless millions of years.
Chomsky’s idea of the LAD was the basis for the further researches wh ich gave the concept of Universal Grammar so both of those concepts are strictly connected with one another.
* also look at 2 b)。