APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
🦋🌻🎄🌹👇
1) #Behavioural (learning) approach
Behaviourism, is an approach to language acquisition, found its theoretical background in psychology and linguistics. It owes its psychological background to B.F skinner, whose book VERBAL BEHAVIOUR gave rise to teaching method most popular in the 1960s : the audiolingual method. The linguistic foundations of behaviourism were provided by structuralism of the 1960s.
MAJOR CLAIM: language is acquired according to the general laws of learning  and is similar to any other learnt behaviour.  Learning was viewed as a process of habit formation. This process consists of three steps:
A) stimulus  (a signal from the environment that evokes a reaction)
B ) response  (the learner's reaction to the stimulus)
C) reinforcement  ( a reward for an appropriate response: reinforced behaviour gets internalised, a behaviour that is not reinforced is extinguished)

Ratner (1997) enumerates three kinds of learning based on the behavioural approach:
1) classical conditioning
Learning is supposed to be similar to the famous experiment with dogs described by Pavlov.  The first stage of learning is based on unconditined stimulus and unconditioned response.  E.g. a child responds with anticipation to choclate. The second stage of learning is based on the conditioned stimulus and conditioned response: when showing chocolate, the mother repeats the word 'chocolate' . Afterwards the child associates the word with the object and responds to the word itself, anticipating the experience from the forst stage of learning.
2) operant conditioning  ( instrumental learning)
The main principle is that the rewarded behaviour will be strengthened.  The learner will repeat the behaviour not as a result of stable positive association  ( as classical conditioning) but in hope to obtain a reward: learning new skills is for the learner an instrument that leads to rewarfs. The selective reinforcement  ( rewarding appropriate, correct language forms) leads to the gradual development of language at first just syllables pronounced by a child evoke a positive reaction from the parents, but with time it is not enough to get the parents' attention, so the child is forced to produce the first word, but again, with time the parents' expect more, and the reward only more complex forms, which makes the child more and more selective in the choice of language forms.
3) social learning
The basic principle is that a learner doesnot need rewards but he/she learns imitating the people he/she admires. "Little boys learn to talk like their fathers, and little girls imitate the speech (and other behaviours , of course) of their mothers." (  ratner 1997) . The process of becoming similar to an admired person functions as a reward itself.