BEHAVIOURISM

“In this section, we will discuss the impact of behaviourism on our understanding of second
language learning. Later in this chapter, we will discuss some more recent theories based on
cognitive psychology.

Behaviourists account for learning in terms of imitation, practice, reinforcement (or feedback
on success), and habit formation. According to the behaviourists, all learning, whether, verbal
or non-verbal, takes place through the same underlying processes. Learners receive linguistic
input from speakers in their environment and they form 'associations' between words and
objects or events. These associations become stronger as experiences are repeated. Learners
receive encouragement for their correct imitations, and corrective feedback on their errors.
Because language development is viewed as the formation of habits, it is assumed that a
person learning a second language starts off with the habits formed in the first language and
that these habits interfere with the new ones needed for the second language (Lado 1964).
Behaviourism was often linked to the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH) which was
developed by structural linguists in Europe and North America. The CAH predicts that where
there are similarities between the first language and the target language, the learner will
acquire target-language structures with ease; where there are differences, the learner will
have difficulty.

There is little doubt that a learner's first language influences the acquisition of a second
language. However, researchers have found that not all errors predicted by the CAH are
actually made. Furthermore, many of the errors which learners do make are not predictable
on the basis of the CAH. For example, adult beginners use simple structures in the target
language just as children to: "No understand," or "Yesterday I meet my teacher". Such
sentences look more like a child's first language sentences than like translations from another
language. Indeed, many of the sentences produced by second language learners in the early
stages of development would be quite ungrammatical in their first language. What is more,
some characteristics of these simple structures are very similar across learners from a variety
of backgrounds, even if the structures of their respective first languages are different from
each other and different from the target language.
We will see that learners are reluctant to transfer certain features of their first language to the
second language, even when the translation equivalent would be correct. All this suggests
that the influence of the learner's first language may not simply be a matter of the transfer of
habits, but a more subtle and complex process of identifying points of similarity, weighing
the evidence in support of some particular feature, and even reflecting (though not
necessarily consciously) about whether a certain feature seems to "belong" in the structure of
the target language.

For second language acquisition, as for first language acquisition, the behaviourist account
has proven to be at best an incomplete explanation for language learning. Psychologists have
proposed new, more complex theories of learning. Some of these are discussed later in this
chapter.”
P & Spada, N. 2002. How languages are learned, (2nd Ed.) Oxford University Press.