Approaches to Language Acquisition

36

2.4.1 Approaches to Language Acquisition

There are three major scientific research traditions that greatly influenced theories and methods of language acquisition. From a historical point of view, these three scientific traditions can be ordered as: 1 Behavioristic Approaches, 2 NativistInnatist Approach, 3 InteractionalFunctional Approaches Brown, 2000; Johnson, 2004; GohSilver, 2004. The first tradition, behaviorism, dominated the field of SLA until the end of the 1960s and found its most visible application in contrastive analysis and the audiolingual method. Behavioural theory is a theory concerned with learning in general. Learning was seen as behaviour change through habit formation, conditioned by the presence of stimuli and strengthened through practices and selective reinforcement. B.F. Skinner 1957 argued in Verbal Behaviour that language acquisition was a form of operant conditioning directly resulting from adult modeling and reinforcement, imitation, practice and habit formation on the part of the child Goh and Silver, 2004. A behaviourist view of language learning considers the environment to be a crucial source of stimuli and reinforcement punishment and reward. The innatist also known as nativist view of language acquisition was situated within a philosophical and linguistic tradition that accorded great importance to the mind and its often unobservable processes. This tradition, known as ‘mentalism’ or ‘rationalism’, was diametrically opposed to behaviourism. Chomsky’s innatist hypothesis introduced a psychological dimension to the discussions about language acquisition. Language is not a behaviour learned through imitation and 37 conditioning. It is rule-based and generative in nature, processed and produced through complicated cognitive processes and mechanisms. An innatist language learning theory has two underlying assumptions. Firstly, human beings possess an innate mental capacity for language. Chomsky initially referred to this innate mechanism as language acquisition device LAD. LAD was pre-programmed with syntactic rules or principles about language that enabled the child to generate and understand sentence. The universal ability was shown in the way that all languages in the world share many common features, which Chomsky called Universal Grammar UG. The second basic assumption is that language development follows a biological and chronological programme. The view about a biological basis for language is often supported by the Critical Period Hypothesis CPH, first put forward by Eric Lenneberg, in which he argued that a critical point for language acquisition occurs around puberty. Beyond this point, people who try to learn a language will not acquire it fully. The primary focus of the interactionist approach is how language and cognitive developments take place within key contexts of interaction. It is because interactionist model of second language acquisition has been influenced by sociolinguistic views of language and by views of language use for communication. The interactionist model of language acquisition takes into consideration the child’s cognitive and social capacities for learning. It also places great emphasis on the role of the linguistic environment vis-à-vis, the way adults use language with children and thus foster gradual development of their communicative competence. The interactionist research has investigated possible 38 roles for input, negotiation, output and interactional feedback in second language learning. This thesis is primarily influenced by functional approach from the beginning. The data analysis of the thesis is put into the point of view of functional approaches either linguistic or acquisition.

2.4.2 Factors Influencing Language Acquisition