Habit Formation
Habit
is a pattern of behaviour that is regular and which has become almost automatic
as a result of repetition. Linguists and psychologists disagree about how much
habit formation is involved in language learning. The behaviourists hold that
language acquisition is a product of habit formation. Habits are constructed
through the repeated association between some stimulus and some response.
Second language learning, then, is viewed as a process of overcoming the habits
of the native language in order to acquire the new habits of the target
language. This is to be accomplished through the pedagogical practices of
dialogue memorization and pattern practice. Over learning and thus
automatically is the goal. The contrastive analysis hypothesis is important to
this view of language learning.
Role Formation-
Chomsky posits a theory in which he claims that everybody learns a
language not because they are subject to the same conditioning process but
because they possess an inborn capacity which permits then to induce the rules
of the intended language as a normal maturational process. Once acquired, these
rules will allow learners to create and comprehend novel utterances, utterances
they neither have understood nor have produced if they are limited to imitating
input from the environment. Thus the rational for Chomsky’s theory of language
acquisition as a process of role formation lies in what known as “the poverty
of the stimulus(input).”
To justify Chomosky’s theory of language acquisition we will take the
following two errors into account committed by children acquiring English as
their L1.
- She doesn’t wants to go.
- I eated it.
These wrong sentences suggest that these children have internalized rules
for sub-verb agreement and past tense formation in English respectively but
have not yet mastered the limitations of the rules. Thus such original errors
indicate that the children are not simply repeating forms from the input they
encountered.
Again in relation to SLA, SL learners
are found to commit similar “developmental” errors which are not apparently due
to L1 interference.
Thus the process of SLA is also thought
to be one rule formation, in which rules are inculcated through a process of
hypothesis formation and testing. If the learner traces any mismatch between
his own language production and the forms/ functions of the target language to
which he/ she is being exposed, he/ she will modify his/ her hypothesis about
the nature of the TL rules so that his/ her utterances increasingly conformed
to the TL.
