Children acquire their native language fluently from birth through exposure and practice, not formal instruction. There are significant cognitive and affective differences between learning a first and second language, especially as an adult. By age 3, children can understand large amounts of linguistic input and know what is and is not appropriate to say based on social context. Theories of language acquisition range from behaviorism, which posits that language is learned through conditioning and reinforcement, to constructivism, which emphasizes children's innate predispositions and social interaction. B.F. Skinner proposed a behaviorist theory of language that viewed it as controlled by consequences, but this view has been widely criticized for failing to explain language capacity and development.
Children acquire their native language fluently from birth through exposure and practice, not formal instruction. There are significant cognitive and affective differences between learning a first and second language, especially as an adult. By age 3, children can understand large amounts of linguistic input and know what is and is not appropriate to say based on social context. Theories of language acquisition range from behaviorism, which posits that language is learned through conditioning and reinforcement, to constructivism, which emphasizes children's innate predispositions and social interaction. B.F. Skinner proposed a behaviorist theory of language that viewed it as controlled by consequences, but this view has been widely criticized for failing to explain language capacity and development.
Children acquire their native language fluently from birth through exposure and practice, not formal instruction. There are significant cognitive and affective differences between learning a first and second language, especially as an adult. By age 3, children can understand large amounts of linguistic input and know what is and is not appropriate to say based on social context. Theories of language acquisition range from behaviorism, which posits that language is learned through conditioning and reinforcement, to constructivism, which emphasizes children's innate predispositions and social interaction. B.F. Skinner proposed a behaviorist theory of language that viewed it as controlled by consequences, but this view has been widely criticized for failing to explain language capacity and development.
Children acquire their native language fluently from birth through exposure and practice, not formal instruction. There are significant cognitive and affective differences between learning a first and second language, especially as an adult. By age 3, children can understand large amounts of linguistic input and know what is and is not appropriate to say based on social context. Theories of language acquisition range from behaviorism, which posits that language is learned through conditioning and reinforcement, to constructivism, which emphasizes children's innate predispositions and social interaction. B.F. Skinner proposed a behaviorist theory of language that viewed it as controlled by consequences, but this view has been widely criticized for failing to explain language capacity and development.
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Chapter 2
All children, given a normal developmental environment,
acquire their native languages fluently and efficiently; moreover, they acquire them "naturally," without special instruction, although not without significant effort and attention to language. There are dozens of salient differences between first and second language learning; the most obvious difference, in the case of adult second language learning, is the tremendous cognitive and affective contrast between adults and children. By about 18 months of age, these words have multiplied considerably and are beginning to appear in two-word and three-word "sentences" commonly referred to as "telegraphic" utterances such as "allgone milk," "bye-bye Daddy," "gimme toy," and so forth. By about age three, children can comprehend an incredible quantity of linguistic input. At school age, children not only learn what to say but what not to say as they learn the social functions of their language. An extreme behavioristic position would claim that children come into the world with a tabula rasa, a clean slate bearing no preconceived notions about the world or about language, and that these children are then shaped by their environment and slowly conditioned through various schedules of reinforcement. At the other constructivist extreme is the position that makes not only the rationalist/cognitivist claim that children come into this world with very specific innate knowledge, predispositions, and biological timetables, but that children learn to function in a language chiefly through interaction and discourse. Behavioristic Approaches The behavioristic approach focused on the immediately perceptible aspects of linguistic behavior the publicly observable responses and the relationships or associations
between those responses and events in the world surrounding
them. A behaviorist might consider effective language behavior to be the production of correct responses to stimuli. If a particular response is reinforced, it then becomes habitual, or conditioned. One learns to comprehend an utterance by responding appropriately to it and by being reinforced for that response. One of the best-known attempts to construct a behavioristic model of linguistic behavior was embodied in B.F. Skinner's classic, Verbal Behavior (1957). Skinner was commonly known for his experiments with animal behavior, but he also gained recognition for his contributions to education through teaching machines and programmed learning (Skinner 1968). Skinner's theory of verbal behavior was an extension of his general theory of learning by operant conditioning. Operant conditioning refers to conditioning in which the organism (in this case, a human being) emits a response, or operant (a sentence or utterance), without necessarily observable stimuli; that operant is maintained (learned) by reinforcement (for example, a positive verbal or nonverbal response from another person). According to Skinner, verbal behavior, like other behavior, is controlled by its consequences. Skinner's theories attracted a number of critics, not the least among them Noam Chomsky (1959), who penned a highly critical review of Verbal Behavior. Today virtually no one would agree that Skinner's model of verbal behavior adequately accounts for the capacity to acquire language, for language development itself, for the abstract nature of language, or for a theory of meaning.
I've Made This Response A Little Bit Longer Than Needed To Demonstrate Additional Vocabulary and Grammatical Structures. Your IELTS Essay Would Not Need To Be This Long.