Page 21 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom
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The Behaviourist Perspective


             ond language and is similar to the way a child learns the first language, and
             the conscious learned system, which results from classroom instruction. The
             model is based on five hypotheses:

                1. The acquisition-learning hypothesis. Acquisition occurs subconsciously,
                  without formal attention to form and rule learning while learning oc-
                  curs as the result of conscious study of the formal properties of a lan-
                  guageandisdirectlyrelatedto classroominstruction.Appliedto teach-
                  ing practice, this idea suggests that the best way to learn a language
                  wouldbethrough naturalcommunication wherelearnersareexpected
                  to fulfil some real purposes, for example, a learner asking the teacher if
                  she or he may go to the toilet or asking a school friend to lend him or
                  her a pencil-sharpener. This also means that there are clear benefits in
                  maximising learners’ exposure to L2.
               2. The monitor hypothesis. The learnt system plays the role of the monitor
                  of the acquired systems, in other words, it edits the acquired knowl-
                  edge by making changes and refining it according to the rules of the
                  language learnt. Krashen (1982) suggests three types of learners with
                  respect to how much they use the monitor system. First are learners
                  who attempt to monitor all the time, constantly checking the rules in
                  their mind which may result in too much self-correction and reluctance
                  to speak freely. Contrary to these learners, ‘under-users’ of the monitor
                  system rely entirely on the acquired system and are not influenced by
                  error-correction. Finally, ‘optimal-users’ of the monitor system use the
                  ‘monitor’ in a balanced way so that it does not interfere with commu-
                  nication.
               3. The natural order hypothesis. Learners acquire grammatical structures
                  in a predictable order, certain structures are acquired early in the learn-
                  ing process, while others are more difficult to acquire. Lightbown and
                  Spada (2013) point out that some structures, such as the rule of adding
                  -s to verbs in third person singular, are easy to state and understand but
                  difficult to acquire since even advanced learners fail to apply this rule
                  in free conversation.
               4. The input hypothesis. Language acquisition occurs when the input is a
                  little beyond the learner’s level of competence. However, it is also im-
                  portant that we provide as much comprehensible input as possible. In
                  other words, we acquire new language only when we are exposed to
                  language that is just a little beyond our current level of competence,
                  but which we nevertheless understand by relying on the context in


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