Language between Behaviorism and Rationalism



Language between Behaviorism and Rationalism

Introduction

Language is both a distinct and societal phenomenon. The collective implications in a language enhances worth to the collaboration of individuals in the identical social philosophy. Collective meanings and hums get used to precise collective thoughts and emotions. Linguistics is "the use of the knowledge we have about Language in order to attain specific purpose to unravel communication issues in the real world". A linguistic is the knowledge about a language regarding its following features:

1.How it sounds

2.How it is learned

3.How it is used

The vivid aspect of linguistics is evidently visible in the tactic to pragmatics, which includes various features of context, communication and social factors. Present emphasis on the significance of context, modernizing of contextual conventions, meaning structure, and related connotation reveals the varying propensities in Linguistics schools. According to Herder, “Linguistics is a tool as well as a spirit of sciences”. Language is a productive and the inventive part in science.

Individuals outline their senses and knowledge in the monarchy of their linguistic. The variances between the wisdom positions, environments, conducts, occupations and bents of societies from the same linguistic school get replicated in their linguistic acquirement (Aksan, 1998). This paper describes an Introduction to Behaviorism and Rationalism school and discusses the differences between the two schools. It also defines the conducts, in which rationalism has criticized behaviorism.

Discussion

Linguistics concerns itself with describing and explaining the nature of human language. It encompasses the traditional areas of general or theoretical linguistics: historical and comparative linguistics, morphology, phonetics, phonology, semantics and syntax.

Behaviorism

Behaviorism can be considered as the most outstanding psychologically oriented approach to second language teaching. According to Mangubhai (2004), behaviorism can be traced back to the studies on classical conditioning by Russian psychologist Pavlov followed by Skinner (1957). The behaviorists typically claim that learning to include language learning are a habit formation and the environment, formal or rational, is an essential and determinant factor in learning. Moreover, learning gets realized by getting stimulated, responding to stimulation and receiving feedback to responses.

According to the behaviorist approach, understanding of second language learning studies get based on the assumption that children learn their first language by imitation and reinforcement thus forming a habit of language use (Lightbown and Spada, 2001). According to Skinner (1957), learners get first exposed to linguistic input from other speakers in their environment and then form meaningful associations between the language, objects, and events around them and the repetition of those associations over and over by experiences in the form of reinforcements and corrective feedback, they turn into linguistic habits.

In 20th century, the philosophies regarding behavior was going in parallel with the psychoanalysis phase in the field of psychology. Ivan Pavlov explored the ordinary habits were one of the main inspirations during this period. Also, John B. Watson also played a vital role when he excluded the contemplative procedures and persuaded to limit the psychology to investigative procedures and B.F. Skinner who directed the study on operant ...