Learning and teaching

In similar fashion, we can ask questions about constructs like learning and teaching. Consider again some traditional definitions. A search in contem­porary dictionaries reveals that learning is "acquiring or getting of knowl­edge of a subject or a skill by study, experience, or instruction." A more specialized definition might read as follows: "Learning is a relatively perma­nent change in a behavioral tendency and is the result of reinforced prac­tice" (Kimble & Garmezy). Similarly, teaching, which is implied in the first definition of learning, may be defined as "showing or helping someone to learn how to do something, giving instructions, guiding in the study of something, providing with knowledge, causing to know or under­stand." How awkward these definitions are! Isn't it curious that professional lexicographers cannot devise more precise scientific definitions? More than perhaps anything else, such definitions reflect the difficulty of defining com­plex concepts like learning and teaching.

Breaking down the components of the definition of learning, we can extract, as we did with language, domains of research and inquiry. They are presented in Illustration - 1.4

 

 

Illustration 1.4 - Various definitions of “learning”

 

These concepts can also give way to a number of subfields within the dis­cipline of psychology: acquisition processes, perception, memory (storage) systems, recall, conscious and subconscious learning styles and strategies, theories of forgetting, reinforcement, the role of practice. Very quickly the concept of learning becomes every bit as complex as the concept of language. Yet the second language learner brings all these (and more) variables into play in the learning of a second language.

Teaching cannot be defined apart from learning. Teaching is guiding and facilitating learning, enabling the learner to learn, setting the condi­tions for learning. Your understanding of how the learner learns will deter­mine your philosophy of education, your teaching style, your approach, methods, and classroom techniques. If, like B.F. Skinner, you look at learning as a process of operant conditioning through a carefully paced program of reinforcement, you will teach accordingly. If you view second language learning as a deductive rather than an inductive process, you will probably choose to present copious rules and paradigms to your students rather than let them "discover" those rules inductively.

An extended definition—or theory—of teaching will spell out gov­erning principles for choosing certain methods and techniques. A theory of teaching, in harmony with your integrated understanding of the learner and of the subject matter to be learned, will point the way to successful procedures on a given day for given learners under the various constraints of the particular context of learning. In other words, your theory of teaching is your theory of learning "stood on its head."

Schools of thought in second language acquisition

While the general definitions of language, learning, and teaching offered above might meet with the approval of most linguists, psychologists, and educators, points of clear disagreement become apparent after a little probing of the components of each definition. For example, is language a "set of habits" or a "system of internalized rules"? Differing viewpoints emerge from equally knowledgeable scholars.

Yet with all the possible disagreements among applied linguists and SLA researchers, some historical patterns emerge that highlight trends and fashions in the study of second language acquisition. These trends will be described here in the form of three different schools of thought that follow somewhat historically, even though components of each school overlap chronologically to some extent. Bear in mind that such a sketch highlights contrastive ways of thinking, and such contrasts are seldom overtly evident in the study of any one issue in SLA.

Structuralism/Behaviorism

In the 1940s and 1950s, the structural,or descriptive,school of linguis­tics, with its advocates—Leonard Bloomfield, Edward Sapir, Charles Hockett, Charles Fries, and others—prided itself in a rigorous application of the scientific principle of observation of human languages. Only the "pub­licly observable responses" could be subject to investigation. The linguist's task, according to the structuralist, was to describe human languages and to identify the structural characteristics of those languages. An important axiom of structural linguistics was that "languages can differ from each other without limit," and that no preconceptions could apply to the field. Freeman Twaddell (1935) stated this principle in perhaps its most extreme terms:

Whatever our attitude toward mind, spirit, soul, etc., as realities, we must agree that the scientist proceeds as though there were no such things, as though all his information were acquired through processes of his physiological nervous system. Insofar as he occupies himself with psychical, nonmaterial forces, the sci­entist is not a scientist. The scientific method is quite simply the convention that mind does not exist...

The structural linguist examined only the overtly observable data. Such attitudes prevail in B.F. Skinner's thought, particularly in Verbal Behavior (1957), in which he said that any notion of "idea" or "meaning" is explanatory fiction, and that the speaker is merely the locus of verbal behavior, not the cause. Charles Osgood (1957) reinstated meaning in verbal behavior, explaining it as a "representational mediation process," but still did not depart from a generally nonmentalistic view of language.

Of further importance to the structural or descriptive linguist was the notion that language could be dismantled into small pieces or units and that these units could be described scientifically, contrasted, and added up again to form the whole. From this principle emerged an unchecked rush of linguists, in the 1940s and 1950s, to the far reaches of the earth to write the grammars of exotic languages.

Among psychologists, a behavioristic paradigm also focused on pub­licly observable responses—those that can be objectively perceived, recorded, and measured. The "scientific method" was rigorously adhered to, and therefore such concepts as consciousness and intuition were regarded as "mentalistic," illegitimate domains of inquiry. The unreliability of obser­vation of states of consciousness, thinking, concept formation, or the acqui­sition of knowledge made such topics impossible to examine in a behavioristic framework. Typical behavioristic models were classical and operant conditioning, rote verbal learning, instrumental learning, discrimi­nation learning, and other empirical approaches to studying human behavior. You may be familiar with the classical experiments with Pavlov's dog and Skinner's boxes; these too typify the position that organisms can be conditioned to respond in desired ways, given the correct degree and scheduling of reinforcement.

Rationalism and Cognitive Psychology

In the decade of the 1960s, the generative-transformational school of linguistics emerged through the influence of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky was trying to show that human language cannot be scrutinized simply in terms of observable stimuli and responses or the volumes of raw data gath­ered by field linguists. The generative linguist was interested not only in describing language (achieving the level of descriptive adequacy) but also in arriving at an explanatory level of adequacy in the study of language, that is, a "principled basis, independent of any particular language, for the selection of the descriptively adequate grammar of each language" (Chomsky 1964).

Early seeds of the generative-transformational revolution were planted near the beginning of the twentieth century. Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) claimed that there was a difference between parole (what Skinner "observes," and what Chomsky called performance) and langue (akin to the concept of competence,or our underlying and unobservable language ability). A few decades later, however, descriptive linguists chose largely to ignore langue and to study parole, as was noted above. The revolution brought about by generative linguistics broke with the descriptivists' preoc­cupation with performance—the outward manifestation of language—and capitalized on the important distinction between the overtly observable aspects of language and the hidden levels of meaning and thought that give birth to and generate observable linguistic performance.

Similarly, cognitive psychologists asserted that meaning, under­standing, and knowing were significant data for psychological study. Instead of focusing rather mechanistically on stimulus-response connec­tions, cognitivists tried to discover psychological principles of organization and functioning. David Ausubel (1965) noted:

From the standpoint of cognitive theorists, the attempt to ignore conscious states or to reduce cognition to mediational processes reflective of implicit behavior not only removes from the field of psychology what is most worth studying but also dangerously oversimplifies highly complex psychological phenomena.

Cognitive psychologists, like generative linguists, sought to discover underlying motivations and deeper structures of human behavior by using a rational approach. That is, they freed themselves from the strictly 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 descriptive to explanatory power took on utmost importance.

Both the structural linguist and the behavioral psychologist were inter­ested in description, in answering what questions about human behavior: objective measurement of behavior in controlled circumstances. The gen­erative linguist and cognitive psychologist were, to be sure, interested in the what question; but they were far more interested in a more ultimate question, why: What underlying reasons, genetic and environmental fac­tors, and circumstances caused a particular event?

If you were to observe someone walk into your house, pick up a chair and fling it through your window, and then walk out, different kinds of ques­tions could be asked. One set of questions would relate to what happened:

the physical description of the person, the time of day, the size of the chair, the impact of the chair, and so forth. Another set of questions would ask why the person did what he did: What were the person's motives and psycho­logical state, what might have been the cause of the behavior, and so on. The first set of questions is very rigorous and exacting: it allows no flaw, no mis­take in measurement; but does it give you ultimate answers? The second set of questions is richer, but obviously riskier. By daring to ask some difficult questions about the unobserved, we may lose some ground but gain more profound insight about human behavior.

Constructivism

Constructivism is hardly a new school of thought. Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, names often associated with constructivism, are not by any means new to the scene of language studies. Yet constructivism emerged as a pre­vailing paradigm only in the last part of the twentieth century. What is con­structivism, and how does it differ from the other two viewpoints described above?

Constructivists, not unlike some cognitive psychologists, argue that all human beings construct their own version of reality, and therefore multiple contrasting ways of knowing and describing are equally legitimate. This perspective might be described as

an emphasis on active processes of construction [of meaning], attention to texts as a means of gaining insights into those processes, and an interest in the nature of knowledge and its vari­ations, including the nature of knowledge associated with mem­bership in a particular group. (Spivey 1997)

Constructivist scholarship can focus on "individuals engaged in social prac­tices.... on a collaborative group, [or] on a global community" (Spivey 1997).

A constructivist perspective goes a little beyond the rationalist/innatist and the cognitive psychological perspective in its emphasis on the primacy of each individual's construction of reality. Piaget and Vygotsky, both com­monly described as constructivists (in Nyikos & Hashimoto 1997), differ in the extent to which each emphasizes social context. Piaget (1972) stressed the importance of individual cognitive development as a relatively solitary act. Biological timetables and stages of development were basic; social-interaction was claimed only to trigger development at the right moment in time. On the other hand, Vygotsky (1978), described as a "social" con­structivist by some, maintained that social interaction was foundational in cognitive development and rejected the notion of predetermined stages.

Researchers studying first and second language acquisition have demonstrated constructivist perspectives through studies of conversa­tional discourse, sociocultural factors in learning, and interactionist theo­ries. In many ways, constructivist perspectives are a natural successor to cognitivist studies of universal grammar, information processing, memory, artificial intelligence, and interlanguage systematicity.

All three positions must be seen as important in creating balanced descriptions of human linguistic behavior. Consider for a moment the analogy of a very high mountain, viewed from a distance. From one direc­tion the mountain may have a sharp peak, easily identified glaciers, and dis­tinctive rock formations. From another direction, however, the same mountain might now appear to have two peaks (the second formerly hidden from view) and different configurations of its slopes. From still another direction, yet further characteristics emerge, heretofore unob­served. The study of SLA is very much like the viewing of our mountain: we need multiple tools and vantage points in order to ascertain the whole picture.

 

Table 1.1 - A summarize of concepts and approaches described in the three perspectives above. The table may help to pinpoint certain broad ideas that are associated with the respective positions

 

Time frame	Schools of thought	Typical themes
Early 1900s & 1940s & 1950s	Structuralism & Behaviorism	Description, observable performance scientific method, empiricism surface structure, conditioning, reinforcement
1960s & 1970s	Rationalism & Cognitive Psychology	generative linguistics acquisition, innateness interlanguage systematicity universal grammar competence deep structure
1980s & 1990s Early 2000s	Constructivism	interactive discourse socio-cultural variables cooperative group learning interlanguage variability interactionist hypotheses