4.2 Behaviorist way of learning
Behaviorism played a very important role in psychology during the first half of the 20th century. The typical behaviourist position is that language is speech rather than writing. Within the behaviourist framework, speaking is composed of mimicking and analogizing. When we say or hear something, we analogize from it. Basic to this view is the stimulus-response relationship. Bloomfield illustrated such a relationship with the following situation:
Suppose that Jack and Jill are walking down a lane. Jill is hungry. She sees an apple in a tree. She makes a sound with her larynx, tongue and lips. Jack vaults the fence, climbs the tree, takes the apple, brings it to Jill and places it in her hand. Jill eats the apple.
(Bloomfield, 1933: 22-23)
Bloomfield divides such a situation into three parts:
1) Practical events before the act of speech, e.g., the hungry feeling, sight of apple.
2) Speech event, e.g., producing sound with larynx, tongue, and lips.
3) Hearer’s response, e.g., Jack’s jumping over the fence, fetching the apple, giving it to Jill.
In this situation, the events of feeling hungry and seeing an apple constitute stimulus; making a sound (practical reaction) is the response, which is a new stimulus causing Jack’s response of climbing the tree and getting the apple for Jill.
Behaviourism also had an influence on L2 learning and teaching. Behaviorism was based on the view that all learning – including language learning – takes place through a process of imitation, practice, reinforcement and habit formation. According to behaviorism, environment plays a crucial role in language learning. First, it provides the source of language stimuli that learners need to form associations between the words they hear and the objects or events they represent. Second, environment provides feedback on learners’ performance. It is claimed that when learners correctly produce language that approximates what they are exposed to in the input, and these efforts receive positive reinforcement, habits are formed (Skinner, 1957, see Spada and Lightbown, 2008). For example, a learner hears the sentence ‘Give me a pencil’, uses it himself, and thereby is rewarded by achieving his communication goal. That is, he is given a pencil by the hearer.
Behaviorist ideas have impacts on second language acquisition. One notion was the L1 interference with L2. That is, the L1 habits learners have already established would interfere with the formation of new habits in the L2. And this poses difficulty in second language learning, as was described by Fries:
Learning a second language, therefore, constitutes a very different task from learning the first language. The basic problems arise not out of any essential difficulty in the features of the new language themselves but primarily out of the special “set” created by the first language habits.
(Fries, 1957)
CAH (discussed in Chapter Three) predicted that where similarities existed between L1 and L2 structures, there would be no difficulty for L2 learning. Where there were differences, however, L2 learners would experience problems. When put to test, the notion was not fully supported. It failed to predict errors that learners were observed to make. Besides, the errors which were predicted did not occur. It was also discovered that L2 learners from different backgrounds made similar errors, some of which were not predicted by CAH. A number of SLA researchers argued in the 1970s and 1980s that there was, in fact, very little L1 influence in second language acquisition (Dulay, Burt, and Krashen, 1982). Later research has tended to re-establish the importance of L1 influence, but it has shown that the L1 influence is complex and that it changes as the learners’ competence in the second language develops (Odlin, 1989).
It should be pointed out that behaviorist accounts of L2 acquisition emphasize only what can be directly observed (the input to the learner and the output), and ignores what goes on in the learner’s mind. If we want to see the picture clearer, we have to probe into the learner’s mind to observe the learner’s cognitive process.
