Week 2 Language Acquisition Theories and Teaching Methodologies PDF

Teaching Pedagogy Ines Kayel
Language Acquisition theories

In the fields of Teaching English a Second or Foreign/International Languages, there are several basic
foundations of teaching Methodologies. Before the noteworthy methodologies are introduced, three schools
of how human acquire their language proficiencies need to be studied.
The field of language acquisition centers its research question on how the language learners attain their
language proficiency. Based on different perspectives many scholars had revealed their findings how an
individual is able to build up the capability of language production and comprehend what others
communicate with them. There are three schools: Behaviorism, Cognitivism, and Constructivism, which are
evaluated as the most crucial in the academic history of Teaching English as ESL and EFL.
1. Behaviorism:
Behaviorism is a worldview that operates on a principle of “stimulus-response.” All behavior caused by external
stimuli. All behavior can be explained without the need to consider internal mental states or consciousness.
Behaviorism is a worldview that assumes a learner is essentially passive, responding to environmental stimuli.
The learner starts off as a clean slate (i.e. tabula rasa) and behavior is shaped through positive reinforcement or
negative reinforcement. Learning is therefore defined as a change in behavior in the learner. Lots of (early)
behaviorist work was done with animals (e.g. Pavlov’s dogs) and generalized to humans.
From a behaviorist perspective, the transmission of information from teacher to learner is essentially the
transmission of the response appropriate to a certain stimulus. Thus, the point of education is to present the
student with the appropriate repertoire of behavioral responses to specific stimuli and to reinforce those
responses through an effective reinforcement schedule. An effective reinforcement schedule requires consistent
repetition of the material; small, progressive sequences of tasks; and continuous positive reinforcement.
Behaviorist teaching methods tend to rely on so-called “skill and drill” exercises to provide the consistent
repetition necessary for effective reinforcement of response patterns. Other methods include question (stimulus)
and answer (response) frameworks in which questions are of gradually increasing difficulty; guided practice;
and regular reviews of material. The goal of instruction for the behaviorist is to elicit the desired response from
the learner who is presented with a target stimulus.
The behaviorist paradigm also focused on publicly observable responses to explain how humans can acquire
and apply languages. This school of behaviorism tends to explain that through human’s typical behaviors the
content of the language application can be evolved during a type of behavior taking place. According to Skinner
(1957), Behaviorism is an important influence on psychology, education, and language teaching, especially in
explaining how language is automatically produced by an individual through his/her need to react to a stimulus
in daily life. This school argues that there is no need to have an intention or a purpose of creating language, but
the language will be naturally evolved through human nature. That is, the language talent should be displayed
after a person is born without too much training.
2. Cognitivism:
Chomsky (1964) states that it is not possible human language can be scrutinized merely through stimuli or
responses to the others. Different from reasons of automatic reaction, experiences, observation or merely
accumulation of language in mind, cognitive psychology schools argue that humans develop their ability of
language through thinking and cognitive ability. Chomsky (1964) emphasizes that sufficiency and self-
cognitive development of language is a principle based on how an individual can select and produce language.
According to Brown (2000), this school of cognitive psychologist, attempts to find out underlying enthusiasm
and deeper structures of human activities.
Cognitivism is a learning theory that focuses on the processes involved in learning rather than on the observed
behavior. As opposed to Behaviorists, Cognitivists do not require an outward exhibition of learning, but focus
more on the internal processes and connections that take place during learning. Cognitivism contends that
“the black box” of the mind should be opened and understood. The learner is viewed as an information
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processor. Some important classroom principles from cognitive psychology include meaningful learning,
organization, and elaboration.
Cognitivist theory developed as a reaction to Behaviorism. One of the most famous criticisms addressed to
Behaviorism was Chomsky’s argument that language could not be acquired purely through conditioning, and must
be at least partly explained by the existence of some inner abilities. Behaviorism for example falls short to explain
how children can learn an infinite number of utterance that they have never heard of. The learners according to
cognitivists are active participants in the learning process. They use various strategies to process and construct
their personal understanding of the content to which they are exposed. Students are not considered anymore as
recipients that teachers fill with knowledge, but as active participants in the learning.
Psychologists and educators began to de-emphasize a concern with overt, observable behavior and stressed instead
more complex cognitive processes such as thinking, problem solving, language, concept formation and information
processing. Cognitive theories focus on the conceptualization of students’ learning processes and address the issues
of how information is received, organized, stored, and retrieved by the mind. The learner is viewed as a very active
participant in the learning process. Instruction must be based on a student’s existing mental structures, or schema,
to be effective. It should organize information in such a manner that learners are able to connect new information
with existing knowledge in some meaningful way.
3. Constructivism:
Constructivism is a theory that equates learning with creating meaning from experience. Even though
constructivism is considered to be a branch of cognitivism (both conceive of learning as a mental activity), it
distinguishes itself from traditional cognitive theories in a number of ways. Most cognitive psychologists think of
the mind as a reference tool to the real world; constructivists believe that the mind filters input from the world to
produce its own unique reality. The philosophical assumptions underlying both the behavioral and cognitive
theories are primarily objectivistic; that is: the world is real, external to the learner. The goal of instruction is to
map the structure of the world onto the learner. Whereas the constructivist approach to learning stresses that
knowledge “is a function of how the individual creates meaning from his or her own experiences”.
According to Brown (2000), scholars studying first and second language acquisition have demonstrated
constructivist perspectives through studies of conversational discourse, socio-cultural factors in learning, and
integrationist theories. Therefore, the emphasis for practical language application is obvious in this school. The
typical themes of the language teaching in this school are mainly interactive discourse, social-cultural variables,
cooperative group learning, and Interlanguage variability.
The goal of instruction is not to ensure that individuals know particular facts but rather that they elaborate on and
interpret information. “Understanding is developed through continued, situated use … and does not crystallize into
a categorical definition” that can be called up from memory (Brown et al., 1989). As mentioned earlier, a concept
will continue to evolve with each new use as new situations, negotiations, and activities recast it in a different,
more densely textured form. Representations of experiences are not formalized or structured into a single piece of
declarative knowledge and then stored in the head. The emphasis is not on retrieving intact knowledge structures,
but on providing learners with the means to create novel and situation-specific understandings by “assembling”
prior knowledge from diverse sources appropriate to the problem at hand.
Some of the specific strategies utilized by constructivists include situating tasks in real-world contexts, use of
cognitive apprenticeships, presentation of multiple perspectives (collaborative learning to develop and share
alternative views), social negotiation (debate, discussion, evidence-giving), use of examples as real “slices of life,”
reflective awareness, and providing considerable guidance on the use of constructive processes.
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Conclusion
As one moves along the behaviorist-cognitivist-constructivist continuum, the focus of instruction shifts from
teaching to learning, from the passive transfer of facts and routines to the active application of ideas to problems.
Both cognitivists and constructivists view the learner as being actively involved in the learning process, yet the
constructivists look at the learner as more than just an active processor of information; the learner elaborates upon
and interprets the given information (Duffy & Jonassen, 1991).

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Teaching Pedagogy Ines Kayel

Language Acquisition theories

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