Тақырыбы: Schools and thoughts in second language acquisition

1. Schools of thought in second language acquisition

2. Rationalism and Cognitive Psychology

3. Language teaching methodology

.

Лекция мазмұны: Schools of thought in second language acquisition While the general definitions of language, learning, and teaching offered above might meet with the approval of most linguists, psychologists, and educators, points of clear disagreement become apparent after a little probing of the components of each definition. For example, is language a "set of habits" or a "system of internalized rules"? Differing viewpoints emerge from equally knowledgeable scholars.

Yet with all the possible disagreements among applied linguists and SLA researchers, some historical patterns emerge that highlight trends and fashions in the study of second language acquisition. These trends will be described here in the form of three different schools of thought that follow somewhat historically, even though components of each school overlap chronologically to some extent. Bear in mind that such a sketch highlights contrastive ways of thinking, and such contrasts are seldom overtly evident in the study of any one issue in SLA.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the structural, or descriptive, school of linguis­tics, with its advocates—Leonard Bloomfield, Edward Sapir, Charles Hockett, Charles Fries, and others—prided itself in a rigorous application of the scientific principle of observation of human languages. Only the "pub­licly observable responses" could be subject to investigation. The linguist's task, according to the structuralist, was to describe human languages and to identify the structural characteristics of those languages. An important axiom of structural linguistics was that "languages can differ from each other without limit," and that no preconceptions could apply to the field. Freeman Twaddell (1935) stated this principle in perhaps its most extreme terms:

The structural linguist examined only the overtly observable data. Such attitudes prevail in B.F. Skinner's thought, particularly in Verbal Behavior (1957), in which he said that any notion of "idea" or "meaning" is explanatory fiction, and that the speaker is merely the locus of verbal behavior, not the cause. Charles Osgood (1957) reinstated meaning in verbal behavior, explaining it as a "representational mediation process," but still did not depart from a generally nonmentalistic view of language.

Of further importance to the structural or descriptive linguist was the notion that language could be dismantled into small pieces or units and that these units could be described scientifically, contrasted, and added up again to form the whole. From this principle emerged an unchecked rush of linguists, in the 1940s and 1950s, to the far reaches of the earth to write the grammars of exotic languages.

Among psychologists, a behavioristic paradigm also focused on pub­licly observable responses—those that can be objectively perceived, recorded, and measured. The "scientific method" was rigorously adhered to, and therefore such concepts as consciousness and intuition were regarded as "mentalistic," illegitimate domains of inquiry. The unreliability of obser­vation of states of consciousness, thinking, concept formation, or the acqui­sition of knowledge made such topics impossible to examine in a behavioristic framework. Typical behavioristic models were classical and operant conditioning, rote verbal learning, instrumental learning, discrimi­nation learning, and other empirical approaches to studying human behavior. You may be familiar with the classical experiments with Pavlov's dog and Skinner's boxes; these too typify the position that organisms can be conditioned to respond in desired ways, given the correct degree and scheduling of reinforcement.