Teach English in Panshidian Zhen - Yantai Shi

Language acquisition is a process with a number of stages most children go through. Similarities or differences between acquiring L1 and L2 have been subject to many different perspectives, the main being: behaviourist, innatist and interactional / developmental perspectives. The Behaviourist Perspective The Behaviourist theory is a psychological theory which analyses the human behaviour by observing the stimulus-response interaction and the association between them. According to this perspective children obtain language habits due to positive reinforcement (Demirezen, 1988). When a child reproduces correctly the words he hears, he is always rewarded (by being understood or being able to take part in a productive conversation). This perspective consider the L2 learning process similar to the L1 acquisition process. Proponents of this perspective Nelson Brooks and Robert Lado believed that since language development was a formation of habits and considering that the students would have already acquired their first language through various habits, these habits would interfere with the new ones needed for the second language (Lightbown & Spada, 2013). Thus, they proposed mimicry and memorization as two means of learning an L2. The Innatist Perspective The innatist theory came as a challenge to the behaviourist theory and its main pioneer was Noam Chomsky. According to Chomsky people are born with some special built-in ability called Language Acquisition Device (LAD) containing the main common rules, which he called Universal Grammar (UG), for all possible human languages. Chomsky argued that children create sentences by using rules or hypothesis at the earliest age. They learn that the past tense, for instance, is formed with -ed, and will naturally add -ed to all verbs. If they learned by merely repeating, they would not try to change all verbs into past by adding -ed but would rather just repeat the patterns. Moreover, Chomsky even considers the fact that children are exposed to very little correctly formed language considering that the environment is full of confusing information due to constant interruption, change of mind while speaking, slips of the tongue and so on, but would come up with correct structures even though they are by no means systematically corrected or instructed on language by their parents (Shameem, 2010). Although Chomsky never made any direct claims that UG played a role also in L2 learning, other researches after him did. The Interactionist / Developmental Perspectives This perspective focuses on the theory that language is learned by interacting with others. Vygotsky, as one of the earliest proponents of this view, believed that children first observe the interaction between other people and then develop the ability to communicate and while interacting with others they learn best (Henschel, 2012). This perspective does not exclude the behaviourist or the innatist theories, instead it does believe that people are born with some special built-in ability to learn languages (innatist theory), they do respond to stimuli (behaviourist theory) but they just do not rely entirely on their biological ability and do not respond passively to stimuli, rather they actively perceive certain aspects of their environment and then represent those perceptions. The Cognitive Perspective As far as L2 learning is concerned, the cognitive perspective has managed to bring about some key insights. This perspective argues that there are some more general learning theories than those claimed by Chomsky or Krashen. Some of the hypothesis that arose from this perspective are: - The interaction hypothesis which claims that mere input, such as listening to a dialogue, could not get through to the learner as would a real interaction i.e. student participating in that dialogue be it in real life or in a classroom simulation. - The noticing hypothesis claims that language features are learned when they are noticed which means that unless the -ed ending in past is noticed, it cannot be learnt. - The processability theory argues that the difficulty of certain aspects such as morphology or syntax affects the development of the second language on those aspects which basically means that learners learn certain aspects easier than others. For example, features that typically occur at the beginning or end of a sentence are easier to process than those in the middle (Lightbown & Spada, 2013). The Sociocultural Perspective Sociocultural theory considers learners as active agents in the learning process and as individuals who become part of the L2 community (Baleghizadeh, Memar, & Memar, 2011) which means that as an individual they need their cognitive skills and as a part of a society they need their social skill. Combining the two skills, that is thinking as well as speaking, in the target language are the key factors to learning an L2 according to this theory (Aimin, 2013). Considering the key facts of the above mentioned perspectives but never excluding the factor of individuality, one may conclude that each and every one of these perspectives may be necessary in different stages of language acquisition.