Schools of thought Second Language Acquisition

While the general definitions of language, learning, and teaching offered above may
meet the approval of most linguists, psychologists, and educators, the points of clear
disagreement become apparent after a little investigation of the components of
each definition. For example, is language a “set of habits” or a “system of internalized
rules”? The different points of view emerge from equally informed scholars. We are
describing Schools of thought in second language acquisition
However, with all the possible disagreements between applied linguists and SLA
researchers, some historical patterns emerge that highlight trends and fads in the
study of second language acquisition. These trends will be described here in the form
of three different schools of thought that follow in some way historically, although
the components of each school overlap chronologically to some extent. Note that
such an outline highlights contrasting ways of thinking, and such contrasts are rarely
overtly evident in the study of any subject in SLA.

1-Structuralism/behaviorism
In the 1940s and 1950s, the school of structural or descriptive linguistics, with its
advocates — Leonard Bloomfield, Edward Sapir, Charles Hockett, Charles Fries, and
others — prided itself on a rigorous application of the scientific principle of
observation of human languages. . Only “publicly observable responses” could be
investigated. The linguist’s task, according to the structuralist, was to describe human
languages and identify the structural characteristics of those languages. An important
axiom of structural linguistics was that “languages can differ from one another
without limit” and that no preconceptions can be applied in this field. Freeman
Twaddell affirmed this principle in perhaps its most extreme terms:
Whatever our attitude towards mind, spirit, soul, etc., as realities, we must agree that
the scientist proceeds as if there were no such things as if all his information were
acquired through processes of his physiological nervous system. Insofar as he deals
with psychic, not material forces, the scientist is not a scientist. The scientific
method is simply the convention that the mind does not exist …
The structural linguist examined only openly observable data. Such attitudes prevail in
BF Skinner‘s thinking, particularly in Verbal Behavior, in which he said that any notion
of “idea” or “meaning” is explanatory fiction and that the speaker is simply the locus
of verbal behavior, not the cause. . Charles Osgood reestablished meaning in verbal
behavior, explaining it as a “representational mediation process,” but has not yet
departed from a generally non-mentalistic view of language.
Of greater 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 scientifically described, contrasted, and added back to form the whole. Out
of this principle sprang a rampant rush of linguists, in the 1940s and 1950s, to the
ends of the earth to write the grammars of exotic languages.
Among psychologists, a behavioral paradigm also focused on publicly observable
responses, those that can be objectively perceived, recorded and measured. The
“scientific method” was rigorously followed, and therefore concepts such as
consciousness and intuition were considered “mentalistic” and illegitimate domains
of research. The unreliability of observation of states of consciousness, thinking,
concept formation, or knowledge acquisition made such topics impossible to examine
in a behavioral setting. Typical behavioral models were classical and operant
conditioning, verbal rote learning, instrumental learning, discrimination learning, and
other empirical approaches to studying human behavior. You may be familiar with the
classic experiments with Pavlov’s dog and Skinner‘s boxes; these also typify the
position that organisms can be conditioned to respond in the desired way, given the
correct degree and timing of reinforcement.
2-Rationalism and cognitive psychology
In the 1960s, the generative-transformational linguistics school emerged thanks to 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 collected by field linguists. The generative linguist was interested
not only in describing language (reaching the level of descriptive adequacy) but also
in reaching an explanatory level of adequacy in the study of language, that is, a “basis
of principles, independent of any particular language. , for the selection of the
descriptively adequate grammar of each language.
The first seeds of the generative-transformative revolution were planted at the
beginning of the 20th century. Ferdinand de Saussure claimed that there was a
difference between probation (what Skinner “observes” and what Chomsky called
performance) and langue (similar to the concept of competence, or our underlying
and unobservable linguistic ability). A few decades later, however, descriptive
linguists largely chose to ignore the language and study probation, as noted above.
The revolution brought about by generative linguistics broke with descriptivists’
preoccupation with performance (the external 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 and generate
observable linguistic performance.
Similarly, cognitive psychologists stated that meaning, understanding,
and knowledge were important data for psychological study. Rather than focusing
quite mechanistically on stimulus-response connections, cognitivists attempted to
discover psychological principles of organization and functioning.
From the point of view of cognitive theorists, the attempt to ignore conscious states
or to reduce cognition to mediational processes that reflect implicit behavior not only
removes from the field of psychology what is most worth studying but also simplifies
dangerously complex psychological phenomena.
Cognitive psychologists, like generative linguists, sought to uncover the 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 used the tools of logic, reason, extrapolation, and inference to derive
explanations of human behavior. Going beyond the descriptive power to the
explanatory power acquired the utmost importance. Schools in Second
Language Acquisition
Both the structural linguist and the behavioral psychologist were interested in
description, in answering what questions about human behavior: the objective
measurement of behavior under controlled circumstances. The generative linguist and
the cognitive psychologist were undoubtedly interested in the question of what; but
they were much more interested in a more fundamental question, why: What
underlying reasons, genetic and environmental factors, and circumstances caused a
particular event?
If you see someone enter your home, grab a chair and throw it out the window; and
then go 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, etc. Another set of questions would ask why
the person did what he did: what were the motives and psychological state of the
person, what could have been the cause of the behavior, etc. The first series of
questions is very rigorous and demanding: it does not admit failures or errors in the
measurement; but does it give you the definitive answers? The second group
of questions is richer, but obviously more risky. By daring to ask some
tough questions about the unobserved, we can lose some ground but gain a deeper
understanding of human behavior. Schools in Second Language Acquisition
3-Constructivism
Constructivism is not a new school of thought. Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, names
often associated with constructivism, are by no means new to the language studies
scene. However, constructivism emerged as the prevailing paradigm only in the latter
part of the 20th century. What is constructivism and how is it different from the other
two views described above?
Constructivists, like some cognitive psychologists, argue that all human beings
construct their own version of reality, and thus multiple contrasting ways of knowing
and describing are equally legitimate. This perspective could be described as

an emphasis on active processes of construction [of the meaning], attention

to texts as a means of better understanding those processes, and an interest in the
nature of knowledge and its variations, including the nature of knowledge associated
with belonging to a particular group. Constructivist scholarship can focus on
“individuals engaged in social practices, … in a collaborative group, [or] in a global
community”
A constructivist perspective goes a bit beyond the rationalist/nativist and cognitive
psychological perspective in its emphasis on the primacy of the construction of each
individual’s reality. Piaget and Vygotsky, both commonly described as constructivists
differ in the extent to which each emphasizes social context. Piaget highlighted the
importance of individual cognitive development as a relatively solitary act. Biological
timelines and stages of development were basic; It was claimed that social
interaction only triggered development at the right time. On the other hand,
Vygotsky, described as a “social” constructivist by some, argued that social interaction
was fundamental 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 the cognitivist studies of universal grammar,
information processing, memory, artificial intelligence, and interlanguage
systematics. Schools in Second Language Acquisition
All three positions should be considered important to create balanced descriptions of
human linguistic behavior. Consider for a moment the analogy of a very tall
mountain, seen from a distance. From one direction, the mountain can have a sharp
peak, easily identifiable glaciers, and distinctive rock formations. However, from
another direction, the same mountain could now appear to have two peaks (the
second was previously hidden from view) and different configurations of its slopes.
From yet another direction, even more, features emerge, hitherto unobserved. The
SLA study is very similar to the visualization of our mountain: we need multiple tools
and observation points to know the whole picture.