Behaviorism/Strucural Linguistics/ Contrastive Analysis

After reading Chapter 2, I was looking back on how I learned English as a second language. When I was in middle school I started learning the alphabet. Every class, my English teacher would give a dictation test such as, “I am a boy, I am a student, etc."
If I received a perfect score it meant I was good at English even though I did not speak it out loud. The satisfaction with scores did not continue my motivation to study English. I got used to studying the basic words and sentences, but then my English teacher started to teach grammar. OMG.
My history of tortures might start from that moment. I began to really hate studying English. I tried to understand the rules of grammar, but it did not make sense to me.

After I read this article, I thought it seemed like taking this step in learning English was based on behaviorism. Proper compliments from my parents made me study more. It was the first step for my studying. When we look at the way a second language is acquired, it should follow the learning process of one’s L1, mother tongue.

                       

I really didn’t know that was based on behaviorist tradition. When I was a student at the University of Education, I learned about behaviorism in a children’s psychology class as a theory for revising misbehavior which used rewards and punishment.

Johnson explained well how SLA theory was related to behaviorism. Specially, the process of learning L1 based on keeping rapid movements of utterance. These movements could be habits of an utterance's muscles through stimuli and responses. Hence, a mechanism of learning system for L1 is established to acquire from external environments.

Also, Bloomfield's structural linguistics is focused on oral language (speech) being more important than written language. Language structural linguistics has a systemic, bottom-up mechanism that moves from lower level up to the higher level. He mentioned that SLA has the same structure.

A more interesting theory is Error analysis. In accordance with Error analysis, an error is not only a mistake of the leaner, but also can provide significant information to the teacher and language leaner.

When a language leaner makes an error, the learner may not realized it was as an error. If the learner knew the error, he would not say it out loud.

So what?

How can language teachers provide more effective material within a learner's mechanism? Errors should be corrected by teachers. It could also be useful for learners so that they can develop by themselves as errors occur through innate learning mechanism.

This behaviorist approach considers the attention from the learner's external environment more than the learner's internal process.