Student’s Name: Crisaldo H.

Cordura
Subject: ESL 220 – The Development of Language Acquisition
Professor: Dr. Rodita Silva
Activity: Reflection Paper No. 1: Behaviorist Approach

As a teacher, we always look for ways, strategies, and approaches to get the
attention of our learners. As loco parentis, we have the responsibility to take care of our
pupils that may include giving them rewards or a discipline. In addition, back when we
are in college, we were trained to learn different approaches on how to deal with our
pupils especially that we teachers are prohibited to hit them or psychologically and
emotionally hurt them which sometimes we might not be aware. Moreover, as a teacher
we must abide on the ethics and core values of being a teacher, and to do this, the
application of learnings on different approaches is a big help and one of those is the
Behaviorist Approach which in the behaviorist position it was believe the children is born
with the so called tabula rasa which means that this children knows nothing about the
world or even the language that they will speak and so maybe when a child is born they
do not have a particular language but a universal one for all the babies like the “baby
talk”.
However, what is a behaviorist approach in the language? According to the
discussant’s presentation that behavioral psychologists examined that language is one of
the fundamental parts of a human behavior. In addition, that when children start to talk,
they can also start to share their thoughts according to what their senses perceives and
through this we start to determine the personality of a child which is significant if you
are a teacher.
Also, according to the experiment of BF. Skinner on his verbal behavior in
1957, he conducted an observation with animal behavior, which he uses a rat to respond
to a certain stimulus which this theory of verbal behavior was an extension of his
general theory of learning by operant conditioning where operant conditioning tells that
there is a conditioning between an organism and a response or an operant which can be
a person and a verbal or non-verbal utterance. Actually, taking this kind of approach is
an effective way to condition our class for them to also structured themselves on what to
do in a certain situation. I believe that a good basic example of it inside the classroom is
when greeting the pupils inside the classroom or giving them rewards when they
answered correct and a discipline if they have done something wrong, and in line with
this as a teacher we must see to it that we are really guiding our pupils properly because
what we say might affect their entirety.
There are different approaches that helps us teachers in dealing with our pupils
and what we must do is to maximize the knowledge that we can get from it and apply it.
However, we also need to make sure that it is applicable to our learners.