What to do with Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Theory

Last week, we had to read about Chomsky’s theory of Language Acquisition and I totally agree with him. His theory talks about a lot of aspects which had been left aside in the Behaviorist Theory.  

Behaviorism had been the explanation for Language Acquisition for a very long time. In fact, this theory also had been applied in Education. This theory is absolutely based on observable results. There were several important names associated to Behaviorism like Pavlov, Skinner and Thorndike. This idea of knowledge appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century and it reigned until the “Cognitive Revolution”. 

At the beginning, Chomsky’s ideas were assumed to be crazy talk, but by the early 1980s the cognitive approach had become the dominant research line of inquiry in most psychology research fields.   

The way in which Chomsky’s theory explains the development of language is totally convincing because it supports one of the most important characteristic of Language which is its creativity. The main idea behind Behaviorism regarding language is repetition and this process is not compatible with the concept of creativity.  

When I was a kid, I was taught English with pure behaviorist techniques. I had to do lots of repetitions, translations, etc. Now that I have more information about this theory I can think of different ways of teaching, and of different techniques and activities. The best way of taking advantage of this information is applying it into our daily practice though it is hard to change the way in which we have been taught. That is to say, we tend to repeat the same system used in our process of learning. We ,teachers, should be critics of our way of teaching all the time.