Behind the Curtain: Mozart of Psychology

According to the basic parameters of Second Language Acquisition theories based on this week’s articles; “Second Language Acquisition: A socio-cognitive Perspective” by Fahim and Mehrgan (2012), and “In search of a nativist theory of second language acquisition” by Walt (1991), I could state my insight explicitly from one of the favorite sayings of Aristotle  “Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach”. In both articles, I could summarize my basic understanding of the aforementioned Nativist theory and Socio-cognitive perspectives in SLA upon the reflection of the quote that I have internalized. All of the theories put forward by researchers, linguists have been discussed or criticized on the light of their own discipline so far. However, there is a certain sound on the shed of SLA theories which is called practice and utilization of applied linguistics in teaching-learning process.  Notwithstanding, if we try to illustrate social formation of mind, Lev Vygotsky would be the Mozart of psychology with his fundamental role of social interaction in the development of cognition. He believed that society plays a critical role in the process of making meaning and wrote numerous articles and ten books before he passed away in his late 30s in 1934 (Vygotsky,1978). There were few differences between Piaget and Vygotsky and those were based on internal influences that stressed by Piaget’s cognitive development and external influences that was the focus of social interaction by Vygotsky. To Piaget, the power engine of cognitive development was the mismatch between prior knowledge and current experiences or the tension between one’s beliefs in one’s experiences. Whereas, Vygotsky emphasized that all children and humans experience continuing development and there are no set stages for this development; it starts with birth and ends with death. In addition, learning is possible before a true set of development and it is a collaborative process with social interaction between two people bur not one sided. That was one of the commonalities between Piaget and Vygotsky since they both strived to characterize cognitive development. The term “cognition” is defined by just thinking or rational thoughts, in other words; it is the manipulation of ideas inside our brain. Those ideas are reflected by spoken language as a part of social process both formally and informally.

More specifically, children are sponges so they can take every input surrounding them both socially and environmentally, then they can internalize that input into cognition with their way of thinking. Once cognition has been achieved the next goal starts with higher order thinking that includes more complex cognition and it is based on prior knowledge with a set of lower order skills. That performance of cognition becomes possible with cerebral cortex however, ability to engage that capability is learned through social experiences or the culture around us. Furthermore, it is crucial to define the standard way of assessing a child’s mental age since we can only find out what abilities have developed but there is no clue for what will develop next. Hence, there is a gap between child’s actual developmental level and higher level of potential development through problem solving with the help of a more knowledgeable other (MKO) or an adult guidance. That development refers to learning and processing information as well as acquiring abilities for thinking (Vygotsky, 1978, p.83). It can be argued further, of course, that while a child is scaffolding capacity may be involved in understanding the input, and all learning is through active construction of knowledge in its social borders; this view can be referred to  Kantian perspective of constructivism. Applying this view to education, the role of MKO or an adult support in learning is highly effective unless learning is accepted on trust or checked its validity by differing from Radical Constructivism (Olssen, 1996).

On the other hand, there is another crucial perspective on SLA which concerns behavioral, cognitive and environmental factors effecting learners in socio-cultural contexts. As it is defined in Fahim and Mehrgan (2012), “Socio-cognitive theory considers how people think and how their thinking affects their behavior and their performance in the environment.”  Therefore, teachers of second languages need to analyse the perspectives of SLA approaches on real teaching environment: “classroom” with the guidance of linguistics and language pedagogy.  Importantly, the nurture of a learner is more considerable than his/her nature as it is explained via Nativist and Environmentalist Theories (Walt, 1991, p. 4).

Within the harmony of Behaviorism and Nativism, I have series of observations from my classes reflecting the reality of innate biological endowment and response behavior. Referring to Chomsky’s Universal Theory, human beings have an innate capacity of learning or acquiring the language they exposed to as well as encoding syntactic rules and principals. Personally, I have experienced in one of my classes; the child said: “Teacher drink water go” instead of uttering “Teacher, may I go to drink water”. This led me to ponder about set of unconscious constraints of English comparing my example with the other child, whose father is English, saying “Teacher, may I go to the water fountain to fill up my bottle” with her British accent.  This stance clearly goes in the same line with Chomskys’ UG framework; “The acquisition of grammar is only possible if it is guided by some kind of innate structure…” (as cited in Walt,1991, p. 5) In addition to this point of view, it is a kind of complex work for adult learners I comparison with an adult speaker of English. To set an example, one of my college friend from “State University of New York” was having trouble in usage of spoken English “wanna”  “I want to go to Wallmart” > “I wanna to go to Wallmart” as a clear example of fossilization instead of the generalization from the language she heard even though most adults internalize this knowledge automatically and subconsciously.

Supportively, as Fahim and Mehrgan enumerated the pros and cons of behaviorism in their article, it is hard to employ behavioristic ideas for adult learning. (Fahim & Mehrgan, 2012, p. 160) Atkins’s term which is used in socio-cognitive perspective “In the head and in the world” ( cited in Fahim&Mehrgan, 2012, p. 160) outstandingly clear our minds on  how social and cognitive characteristics  has an effect on acquisition. We could refer that our methodologies in teaching is commonly based on rule memorization and translation rather than applying communicative needs. It basically relies upon awareness in language learning more than memorizing rules. I strongly believe that as teachers we can do trendy theories based on SLA, but we need to teach how our students could construct their own reality of learning based on cognitivist constructivism by crystallizing impacts of their social and cultural contexts different from classrooms to worldly conditions.

According to Jordan, Carlile, and Stack (2008), “Social learning theory proposes that social life and psychological life interact as part of learning. (Fahim & Mehrgan, 2012, p. 163) This perspective supports my following stance from grade four: a nine- year -old student whose family divorced wanted to choose his topic “my family” for the speaking assessment which will be recorded, and there is no doubt that he wants to confront his reality in this psychological frame and I believe that he is going to present his family with a fluent flow and correctness by creating his identity and self-esteem. Linguistically, this stance goes through ZPD which identifies his engagement in social behavior thanks to his mother’s support in solving his problems creating him a learning environment as well.  The last but not least is that a teacher needs to structure learning environments by orienting and facilitating the process of teaching within generative learning (Osborne& Wittrock, 1983,1985). All in all, those different perspectives illuminate our views on SLA as teachers and lesson planners based upon social learning theory and ideologies.

References

Driscoll, M. P., (2005). Interactional theories of cognitive development (pp.245-261).

Fahim, M., & Mehrgan, K. (2012). Second language acquisition: A Sociocognitive

  perspective. World Science Publisher, 1(3), 159-165. Retrieved from

  http://worldsciencepublisher.org/

Olssen, M., (1996) Radical constructivism and its failings: anti realism and individualism. British Journal of Educational Studies,  44 (3),  275-295. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3122456

Walt, L. J., (1991). In search of a nativist theory of second language acquisition. Perlinguam,

               7(2),  Retrieved from http://perlinguam.journals.ac.za/pub