一语习得和教案.docVIP

I. First language acquisition 1. First language acquisition and behaviourism Before the 1960s, the study of child language was dominated mainly by the “behaviourist” approach to language and learning. The best-known proponent of this approach was B. F. Skinner. The title of one of Skinner’s major books, Verbal Behaviour (1957), captures the essence of the behaviourist approach to language. Language is not a mental phenomenon: it is behaviour. Like other forms of human behaviour, it is learnt by a process of habit-formation, in which the main components are: 1) The child imitates the sounds and patterns which he hears around him; 2) People recognize the child’s attempts as being similar to the adult models and reinforce (reward) the sounds, by approval of some other desirable reaction; 3) In order to obtain more of these rewards, the child repeats the sounds and patterns, so that these become habits; 4) In this way the child’s verbal behaviour is conditioned (or “shaped”) until the habits coincide with the adult models. The habit-formation process is essentially the same as when a pigeon’s behaviour is shaped, so that it pecks at the correct discs in order to obtain food. Within this framework, the child’s own utterances were not seen as possessing a system in their own right. They were seen as a faulty version of adult speech. The “mistakes” were simply the result of imperfect learning: the process of habit-formation had not yet had time to run its full course. 2. Inadequacies of the behaviourist approach The behaviourist view of first language acquisition was strongly challenged from the 1960s onwards, especially under the influence of Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theories and cognitive psychology. 1) The basic view of language is no longer acceptable. Language is not merely “verbal behaviour”. Underlying the actual behaviour that we observe, there is a complex system of rules. These enable speakers to create and understand an infinite number of sentences, most