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| A DISCUSSION OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORIES |
| Vedat Kiymazarslan |
PART II
II. THEORIES OF LANGUAGE ACQUSITION
In this part of the article, eight different views of language acquisition will be discussed. Most of the theories may be considered in both L1 (mother tongue) and L2 (second or foreign language) acquisition even though certain theories to be discussed here have been resulted from second language acquisition (SLA) studies. It is important to note once again that language acquisition theories have been influenced especially by linguistic and psychological schools of thought. Thus they have given relatively changing weights on different factors in approaching the acquisition process as can be seen in the following subsections.
2.1 Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development
Vygotsky was a psychologist but his studies on conscious human behavior led him to investigate the role that language plays in human behavior. Vygotsky’s point of view is simply that social interaction plays an important role in the learning process. He places an emphasis on the role of “shared language” in the development of thought and language. The term “shared language” refers to social interaction and can be best elucidated through the notion of “zone of proximal development".
According to Vygotsky (1962:10), two developmental levels determine the learning process: egocentricity and interaction. We can look at what children do on their own and what they can do while working with others. They mostly choose to remain silent or speak less on their own (less egocentric speech) when they are alone. However, they prefer to speak to other children when they play games with them (more egocentric speech). The difference between these two types of development forms has been called “Zone of Proximal Development”. This zone refers to the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in cooperation with more capable friends of the child. The first thing that children do is to develop concepts by talking to adults and then solve the problems they face on their own. In other words, children first need to be exposed to social interaction that will eventually enable them build their inner resources.
As for the drawbacks of the views proposed by Vygotsky, it is not clear what Vygotsky meant by inner resources. Also, his emphasis on the significance of egocentric speech in the development of thought and language is worth discussing. He suggests that egocentric speech is social and helps children interact with others. When a child is alone he uses less egocentric language than he uses it when playing games with other children. This implies that speech is influenced by the presence of other people. It seems that Vygotsky overemphasizes the function of egocentric speech in the development of language. It is true that society and other people are important factors helping children to acquire language. However, Vygotsky fails to account for the role of the self itself in this process, even though he stresses the importance of egocentric speech, which is not the self actually, and see the relative role of inner linguistic and psycholinguistic mechanisms that promote language acquisition.
In conclusion, Vygotsky contends that language is the key to all development and words play a central part not only in the development of thought but in the growth of cognition as a whole. Within this framework, child language development, thus acquisition, can be viewed as the result of social interaction.
2.2. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior
Behavioristic view of language acquisition simply claims that language development is the result of a set of habits. This view has normally been influenced by the general theory of learning described by the psychologist John B. Watson in 1923, and termed behaviorism. Behaviorism denies nativist accounts of innate knowledge as they are viewed as inherently irrational and thus unscientific. Knowledge is the product of interaction with the environment through stimulus-response conditioning.
Broadly speaking, stimulus (ST) – response (RE) learning works as follows. An event in the environment (the unconditioned stimulus, or UST) brings out an unconditioned response (URE) from an organism capable of learning. That response is then followed by another event appealing to the organism. That is, the organism’s response is positively reinforced (PRE). If the sequence UST --> URE --> PRE recurs a sufficient number of times, the organism will learn how to associate its response to the stimulus with the reinforcement (CST). This will consequently cause the organism to give the same response when it confronts with the same stimulus. In this way, the response becomes a conditioned response (CRE).
The most risky part of the behavioristic view is perhaps the idea that all leaning, whether verbal (language) or non-verbal (general learning) takes place by means of the same underlying process, that is via forming habits. In 1957, the psychologist B.F. Skinner produced a behaviorist account of language acquisition in which linguistic utterances served as CST and CRE.
When language acquisition is taken into consideration, the theory claims that both L1 and L2 acquirers receive linguistic input from speakers in their environment, and positive reinforcement for their correct repetitions and imitations. As mentioned above, when language learners’ responses are reinforced positively, they acquire the language relatively easily.
These claims are strictly criticized in Chomsky’s “A Review of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior”. Chomsky (1959) asserts that there is “neither empirical evidence nor any known argument to support any specific claim about the relative importance of feedback from the environment”. Therefore, it would be unwise to claim that the sequence UST --> URE --> PRE and imitation can account for the process of language acquisition. What is more, the theory overlooks the speaker (internal) factors in this process.
The behaviorists see errors as first language habits interfering with the acquisition of second language habits. If there are similarities between the two languages, the language learners will acquire the target structures easily. If there are differences, acquisition will be more difficult. This approach is known as the contrastive analysis hypothesis (CAH). According to the hypothesis, the differences between languages can be used to reveal and predict all errors and the data obtained can be used in foreign/second language teaching for promoting a better acquisition environment. Lightbown and Spada (1993: 25) note that:
“… there is little doubt that a learner’s first language influences the acquisition of second language. [But] … the influence is not simply a matter of habits, but rather a systematic attempt by the learner to use knowledge already acquired in learning a new language.”
This is another way of saying that mother tongue interference cannot entirely explain the difficulties that an L2 learner may face. It is true that there might be some influences resulting from L1, but research (Ellis, 1985:29) has shown that not all errors predicted by CAH are actually made. For example, Turkish learners of English simply use utterances just as “No understand” even though the corresponding structure of Turkish ("Anlamiyorum" literally, “UNDERSTAND-NO-ME”) is thoroughly different.
In brief, Skinner’s view of language acquisition is a popular example of the nurturist ideas. Behaviorism, as known by most of us, was passively accepted by the influential Bloomfieldian structuralist school of linguistics and produced some well-know applications in the field of foreign/second language teaching – for instance, the Audiolingual Method or the Army Method. The theory sees the language learner as a tabula rasa with no built-in knowledge. The theory and the resulting teaching methods failed due to the fact that imitation and simple S-R connections only cannot explain acquisition and provide a sound basis for language teaching methodology.
2.3. Piaget’s View of Language Acquisition
Even though Piaget was a biologist and a psychologist, his ideas have been influential in the field of first and second language acquisition studies. In fact he studied the overall behavioral development in the human infant. But his theory of development in children has striking implications as regards language acquisition.
Ellidokuzoglu (1999:16) notes that “many scientists, especially the psychologists are hesitant to attribute a domain-specific built-in linguistic knowledge to the human infant.” Accordingly, they view the human brain as a homogeneous computational system that examines different types of data via general information processing principles. Piaget was one of those psychologists who view language acquisition as a case of general human learning. He has not suggested, however, that the development is not innate, but only that there is no specific language module. Piaget’s view was then that the development (i.e., language acquisition) results mainly from external factors or social interactions. Piaget (cited in Brown, 1987:47, Eyseneck, 1990:51) outlined the course of intellectual development as follows:
- The sensorimotor stage from ages 0 to 2 (understanding the environment)
- The preoperational stage from ages 2 to 7 (understanding the symbols)
- The concrete operational stage from ages 7 to 11 (mental tasks and language use)
- The formal operational stage from the age 11 onwards (dealing with abstraction)
Piaget observes, for instance, that the pre-linguistic stage (birth to one year) is a determining period in the development of sensory-motor intelligence, when children are forming a sense of their physical identity in relation to the environment. Piaget, unlike Vygotsky, believes that egocentric speech on its own serves no function in language development.
2.4. Cognitive Theory: The Language Acquisition View
Cognitive theory is based on the work of psychologists. Piaget’s work, which dwells on the idea that students can learn things when they are developmentally ready to do so since learning follows development, can be regarded as a starting point of the cognitivist ideas. Cognitive psychologists emphasized the importance of meaning, knowing and understanding. According to them, 'meaning' plays an important role in human learning. ‘Learning’ is a meaningful process of “relating new events or items to already existing cognitive concepts.” (Brown, H.D. 1987:47); and it is thought to involve internal representations that guide performance. In the case of language acquisition, these representations are based on language system and involve procedures for selecting appropriate vocabulary, grammatical rules, and pragmatic conventions governing language use.
David Ausubel (cited in Brown, 1987:80), who criticized the popular Audiolingual method for its theory based on reinforcement and conditioning, stated that adults learning a second language could profit from certain grammatical explanations. Whether adults do really profit from such explanations depends on (1) the suitability and efficiency of the explanation, (2) the teacher, (3) the context, and (4) other pedagogical variables. Though children do not use deductive presentations of grammar and they do not have superior cognitive capacities, they acquire their mother tongue quite successfully.
Cognitive psychologists see second language acquisition, on the other hand, as the “building up of knowledge systems that can eventually be called automatically for speaking and understanding” (Lightbown and Spada, 1993:25). Language learning, in this sense, has some Gestalt characteristics in that language learning is a wholistic process and not analysable as stimulus-response associations. Language learners pay attention to any aspect of the language that they are attempting to understand and produce. Then, step by step, they become able to use certain parts of their knowledge through experience and practice.
In short, the cognitivists claim that language acquisition can be automatically attained. However it is not clear how it will be automatized. And what L1 structures can be automatized through practice in L2 and what structures can be transferred to L2 are not clearly accounted for.
2.5. The Discourse Theory
The Discourse Theory has resulted from a theory of language use. The theory emphasizes that language development should be viewed within the framework of how the learner discover the meaning capacity of language by taking part in communication. Del Hymes’ description of communicative competence (Brown, 1987: 200, 201; Ellis, 1986:259), for instance, reflects the principles of the Discourse Theory. Communicative competence includes knowledge of the grammar and vocabulary, knowledge of rules of speaking, knowledge of how to use and respond to different types of speech acts and social conventions, and knowledge of how to use language appropriately.
It is believed, according to discourse theorists, that language acquisition will successfully take place when language learners “know” how and when to use the language in various settings and when they have successfully “cognized” various forms of competence such as grammatical competence (lexis, morphology, syntax and phonology) and pragmatic competence (e.g., speech acts). A language learner needs to “know” conversational strategies to acquire the language. Halliday (cited in Ellis, 1985: 259), for example, conducted a study on his own son’s first language acquisition experience and asserted that basic language functions arise out of interpersonal uses and social interaction.
Dwelling on the ideas above, first language acquisition notion of the theory is that children accomplish actions in the world and develop rules of language structure and use. Accordingly, in the case of L2 acquisition, language learners are encouraged to deal with accomplishing actions, which are thought to help them acquire the target language. The Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is the best known example of such a theory. In the communicative classes, students are expected to learn by doing (discovery learning) and expected to acquire the language through the PPP (presentation, practice and production) principle. It is another issue whether or not the CLT techniques promote L2 acquisition.
The Discourse Theory has a number of drawbacks. It overemphasizes the role of external factors in the process of language acquisition and gives little importance to internal learner strategies (i.e., innate processes). The Discourse Theory is similar to the behavioristic view of language acquisition in that environmental factors and input (or positive stimulus) are at the very center in attempting to explicate the acquisition process. The Discourse Theory is of course more sophisticated than the Skinner’s views in accounting for the complex structure of communication. Yet it overstresses the role of “knowledge of competence and functions” in acquiring a language, and hence fails to notice universal principles that guide language acquisition.
2.6. The Speech Act Theory
This theory holds that saying something is a way of doing something. In speech act theory, two kinds of meaning are seen in utterances. The fist is the prepositional meaning and the second is the illocutionary meaning. The former refers to the basic literal meaning of the utterance conveyed by the particular words or structures. The latter refers to the “effect” the spoken or written text has on the listener or reader. For instance the utterances including “threatening” or “apologizing” might have “presupposition” or “implicature” effects that listeners strive to figure out. It is, of course, normal for someone to use these utterances in his native language. The problem is how propositions and implicatures are acquired in first and second language. Does a formal instruction environment help the learners acquire them? Or will it create an environment where learners know only “about” them. Can it be labeled “acquisition”?
GO TO PART 1 2 3 4 OR USE THE TABLE OF CONTENTS BELOW:
Language Acquisition Theories:
Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development
Skinner’s Verbal Behavior
Piaget’s View of Language Acquisition
Cognitive Theory: The Language Acquisition View
The Discourse Theory
The Speech Act Theory
The Universal Grammar Theory
The Monitor Model
Conclusion
Bibliography
Appendix
The NA HOME
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