BEHAVIORIST THEORY

Application of Behaviorist Theory in Language Learning

Limits of Behaviorism

There are some basic theories advanced to

describe how language is acquired and

taught. The behaviorist theory, Mentalist

theory, Cognitive theory, Empiricist theory

(Audiolingualism), and Cognitive –code

theory are some of these theories.

The behaviorist theory (behaviorism) is one

of the mainly applicable to the acquisition of

native languages.

Behaviorist theory, which is basically a

psychological theory in its essence, founded

by J.B. Watson, is actually a theory of native

language learning, advanced in part as a

reaction to traditional grammar.

The supporters of this theory are Leonard

Bloomfield, O.N. Mowrer, B.F. Skinner, and

A.W. Staats, etc.

Behaviorism was advanced in America

as a new approach to psychology in the

early decades of the 20th-century by

making a particular emphasis on the

importance of verbal behavior, and

received a considerable trust from the

educational world in 1950s.

Basically, the behaviorist theory of stimulus-response learning, particularly as developed in the operant conditioning model of Skinner, considers all learning to be the establishment of habits as a result of reinforcement and reward.

This is very reminiscent of Pavlov’s experiment which indicates that stimulusand response work together.

According to this category, the babies obtain

native language habits via varied babblings

which resemble the appropriate words

repeated by a person or object near them.

Since for their babblings and mutterings

they are rewarded, this reward reinforces

further articulations of the same sort into

grouping of syllables and words in a similar

situation.

In this way, they go on emitting (producing) sounds,

groups of sounds, and as they grow up, they

combine the sentences via generalizations and

analogy (as in *goed for went, *doed for did, and

so on), which in some complicated cases, condition

them to commit errors by articulating in permissible

structures in speech.

By the age of five or six, babblings and

mutterings grow into socialized speech but little by

little they are internalized as implicit speech (the

speech which is not communicated directly).

A• Babblings

• Mutterings

B• Grouping of Syllables

• Grouping of Words

C

• Emitting Sounds or Group of Sounds

• Combine Sentences via Generalization & Analogy

D• Socialized Speech

• Implicit Speech

Through a trial-and-error process, in which acceptable utterances are reinforced by comprehension and approval, and unacceptable utterances are inhibited by the lack of reward.

Children gradually learn to make better discriminations until their utterances approximate to the speech of the community in which they are growing up.

In other words, children develop a natural interest in learning a language of their social surroundings whose importance both over language learning and teaching must never be underestimated.

The Basic Principles of

Behaviorist Theory

The following principles illustrate the summary of

the operating principles of behaviorism:

1 Behaviorist theory dwells on spoken language.

That is, primary medium of language is oral: speech is language because there are many languages without written forms, because we learn to speak before we learn to read and write.

Then, language is primarily what is spoken and secondarily what is written. That is why spoken language must have a priority in language teaching.

2 Behaviorist theory is the habit formation theory

of language teaching and learning, reminding

us the learning of structural grammar.

In other words, language learning is a

mechanical process leading the learners to habit

formation whose underlying scheme is the

conditioned reflex. Thus, it is definitely true that

language is controlled by the consequences of

behavior.

3 The stimulus-response chain (S →R), is a pure

case of conditioning. Behaviorist learning theory emphasizes conditioning and building from the simplest conditioned responses to more and more complex behaviors.

This comes to mean that clauses and sentences are learned linearly as longer and longer stimulus-response chains, produced in a left-to right series of sequence like S1 → S2 → S3 → S4 …, as probabilistic incidents, which are basically Markov’s processes. Each stimulus is thus the case of a response, and each response becomes the initiator of a stimulus, and this process goes on and on in this way.

4 All learning is the establishment of habits as the

result of reinforcement and reward.

The result will yield conditioning. When

responses to stimuli are coherently reinforced,

then habit information is established. It is

because of this fact, that this theory is termed

habit-formation-by-reinforcement theory.

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The learning, due to its socially-conditioned

nature, can be the same for each individual.

In other words, each person can learn equally

if the condition in which the learning takes

place is the same for each person.

The Main Limitations of Behaviorism

Ignorance of Genetics

Generalization

Cognitive Issues

Psychopathology

1. IGNORANCE

GENETICS:

Behavioral theories completely reject the idea of

genetics having an influence on human behavior.

Psychology in its modern form, on the other hand,

accepts genetics influence on human behavior as

a fact. One of the most popular social

psychologists, Kurt Lewin, tried to resolve the

limitation of behavioral theories by giving his

famous statement: behavior is a function of the

person (genetic nature) and the environment.

Behavioral theories lack one of

the vital factors in Lewin’s

statement, and cannot completely

describe human behavior.

2. GENERALIZATION

Psychologist that developed behavioral theories backed these theories on experiments containing stimuli that are not easily relatable.

In these experiments artificial environments are constructed to condition subjects to associating these normally unrelatable stimuli, such as food and electric shock.

The psychologists then generalized their results to all sets of stimuli, no matter how easily the relationships between these stimuli are made. The experiments showed that, no Stimulus-Response chain happened.

The limitation in this case is that such a

generalization cannot scientifically follow

such experiments.

In short, this generalization by behavioral

theories are not completely perfect

(containing mistakes).

Behavioral theories also ignore the cognitive

aspects of human psychology.

Because behavioral theories explain everything in

terms of the “outside” (behavior) and discard the

“inside” (mental processes, genetic influences,

emotions) ideas like memory and those

processes cannot enter the behavioral

explanations of human actions.

3. COGNITIVE

ISSUES

However, much research in psychometrics (the

field of psychological measurements), has shown

that these mental aspects predict much of human

behavior. One example is how personality tests

correlate to human decisions such as job and

mate selection.

In this respect, behavioral theories see humans

as no different creatures than animals: mental

processes are not important.

Behavioral theories are useless in explaining mental problems. Because behavioral theories treat the human mind as a “black box”, they have no place in explaining diseases that are associated with abnormal thought processes such as schizophrenia and pedophilia

It then follows that behavioral theories cannot assist those with mental diseases in their treatment processes.

4.

PSYCHOPATHOLOG

Y