Behaviorism

Behaviorism

• Considered as a learning theory

• It focuses on observable behaviors

• Acquisition of new behavior based on environmental conditions

Main Representatives

B. F. SkinnerOperant conditioning

1 Verbal behavior

B. F. Skinner

• Language under this view is essentially a system of habits; learning comes by producing a response to a stimulus and receiving either positive or negative reinforcement.

Ivan Pavlov

• Reflex system research

John B. Watson

Psychological Care of Infant and Child

"Twelve infants" quotation

“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.”[Behaviorism (1930), p. 82]

Second Language AcquisitionKrashen, Stephen D. 1981

1. THE ACQUISITION-LEARNING DISCTINCTION

2. THE NATURAL ORDER HYPOTHESIS (grammar structures)

3. THE MONITOR HYPOTHESIS (conscious editor)

4. THE INPUT HYPOTHESIS (level i +1)

5. THE AFFECTIVE FILTER HYPOTHESIS

Krashen, Stephen (1982). Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Pergamon Press. ISBN 0-08-028628-3.

Contrastive Analysis

• Many errors that second language learners make cannot be traced to influence of their L1.

• “Transfer of habits” doesn’t seem to be consistent across languages. Zobl (1980) showed that French learners of English failed to show evidence of a predicted error, but English learners of French did.

Error Analysis

• The idea behind Error Analysis is to look at errors that the students are making to determine the “source” of the error.

• Errors could come either from some kind of interference from the learner’s native language, or simply from an incompletely developed knowledge of the target language.

• This Error analisys leads to the hypothesis that learners have an interlanguage.

Interlanguage

• It is considered as an internal grammar (not the grammatical system of the target language, but a system “on the way” to the TL)

Audiolingual Method

• This approach was applied during the World War II.

• The objective was to attain conversational proficiency in a variety of foreign languages

• It was used the “informant method”

• The goal is to imitate sentences of the target language

• Extensive use of drill.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NMzepSePD4&feature=related

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