Three perspectives on second language acquisition

Three perspectives on second language acquisition

1. Structural linguistics and behavioral psychology

   • its begginings were on 1940-1950
   • The lingüists task was to descrive human languages and to indentify their structural characteristics
   • Freeeman Twadell (1935) underscored the mandate for structural lingüist to examine only overly observable data and to ignore any mentalistic theorizing that might entertain unobservable guesses
   • The language could be dismantled into small pieces or units and these units could be described scientifically, contrasted and added up again from the whole
   • Similar perspectives were shared by psychologists of this era, for example B.F Skinner(1957), charles osgood(1957), they affirmed that the only legitimate "responses" were those that could be objectively pereived, recorded and measured.

2. Generative lingüistics and cognitive psychology

   • in the 1960's, emerged through the influence of Noam Chomsky, he was trying to show that human language cannot be structuralized simply in terms of observable stimuli and responses or the volumes of raw data gathered by field lingüists
   • the generative lingüist was not only interested only in describing language, but also in arriving at an explanatory level of adequacy in the study of language
   • Cognitive psycholingüists asserted that meaning, understanding and knowing were significant data for psichological study
   • Instead of focusing mechanistically on stimulus-response connections cognitivists tried to discover psychological principles of organization and functioning
   • Cognitive psychologists, like generative lingüists, sought to discover underlying motivations and deeper structures of human behavior by using a rational approach, that is they freed themselves from the stictly empirical study typical of behaviorists and employed the tools of logic, reason, extrapolation and inference in order to derive explanations for human behavior.
   • Going beyond merely descriptive adequacy to explanatory power took on the utmost importance

3. Constructivism: a multidiciplinary approach

   • Closely related names:
     • Piaget
     • Vygotsky
   • Emerged as a paradigm of intense interest in the last part of the twentieth century
   • A refreshing characteristic of constructivism is its integration of lingüistic psychological and sociological paradigms in contrast to the professional chasms that divided those disiplines in the past
   • There are two types of constructivism
     • Cognitive
       • emphasis is placed on the importance of learners constructing their own representation of reality
       • Piaget"learning is a develop-mental process that involves change, self generation and construction, each building on prior learning experiences
     • Social
       • emphasizes the importance of social interaction and cooperative learning in ultimate attament
       • Constructivism research tends to focus on individualsengaged in social practices on a collaborative group or on a global comunity
       • Lev Vigotsky affirmed that children's thinking and meaning making is socially constructed and emerges out of their social interactions with their envirioment