Summary Of Lightbrown & Spada 's Text And Coelho Chapter Eight Essay

Behaviourist approach has may strengths to its findings, there has a been a vast amount of experiments from other theorists that support the theory. However, many weaknesses can be highlighted. One is how using rewards or other means to shape behaviour can be argued that the individual is only motivated for these rewards which can encourage a shallow and materialistic style. Another limitation that can be mentioned is that that behaviourist research was widely carried out on animals, for instance Skinner’s rats, Watson’s cats and Pavlov’s dogs. We cannot compare human behaviour to that of an animal. We cannot be 100% certain that humans would act the same way as the animals experimented on (McLeod,2017). As well as this, another criticism states how even though you can change someone’s behaviour in one environment, what happens when the individual goes to a different environment where positive behaviour isn’t reinforced. O’Brien gives an example of if a teacher changed a challenging child’s behaviour at school but then the child went home to the same environment as before, the child would find it increasingly hard to stick to the changed behaviour (O’Brien 2016). I feel that I can relate to this with a child I have in my class. I have managed through positive reinforcement to change his behaviour that he showed in previous classes, however when communicating with his carer it is noted that his previous behaviour is still present in his home environment.

Since the Behaviorism doesn’t look for all types of learning, a child that is growing up will make babbling sounds. And speaking of which, many teachers give students the “dictation” where the students are asked to spell the words. Yes they will spell the words. But will they know what it means? No they won’t and will the behaviorism be able to help in this situation? No because these things has to do with the mind. And also behaviorism doesn’t deal with the uniqueness of each and every individual and humans should not be compared with animals. As a result of focusing of externally observable behavior, how can we possibly deal with a preteenager? Because in behaviorism they didn’t look in to biological psychology, where it states that all behavior has a physical or organic

Behaviourists regard behaviour as a response to a stimulus; pioneering the belief that internal cognitive processes are unnecessary when explaining behaviour. This view is supported by the behaviourist John Locke who proposed that children are born as ‘blank slates’ (‘tabula rasa’) whereby children are shaped by experience (Neaum, 2010). The behaviourist approach assumes that the process of learning is the same in all species; therefore concluding that human and animals learn in similar ways. Early behaviourists include Edward Thorndike, Edward Tolman and Edwin Guthrie conducted experiments on animals, under carefully observed conditions (Collin, 2011). However the three theorists, most associated with behaviourism are: Ivan Pavlov, John Watson and B.F. Skinner. These theorists identified two types of associative learning: classical and operant conditioning; these methods underpin the behaviourist perspective.

The behaviorists¡¯ perspectives, which the language is learned like other learned behaviors is much more correct than Chomsky¡¯s language acquisition. For example, Victor, who was deprived child in early stages that had lived with animals and acted like an animal. He found in about 10 years later he was born, and brought to the human world. However, due to the lack of experiences, observations, and nurturing from family,

Deborah Fallows, the author, strives to show her readers that, while everyone does learn to talk, not conversing enough with children could negatively affect the way they learn language. She cites multiple sources, tells of her credentials, appeals to emotion, and ultimately creates an effective argument supporting her

Behaviorism is a theory that is driven off conditioning or repetition of something. The behaviorism theory might be a good theory for the younger grades because they are still trainable per se. Even though this theory might be great for children in the younger grades that react well to color charts and behavior chart it might have the opposite effect on children that have disorders or mental disabilities as these children do not react well to with just repetition and conditioning. In reading the article “My way or the Highway: Beyond Behaviorism” I found some very eye opening things that show how applying this theory alone is unsuccessful, but when applied with other theories it can be beneficial. Let us take a closer look.

Every human being holds a set of inherent behaviors that enables them to thrive and evolve over time. Be it, anger, jealousy, or closing your eyes when exposed to extreme brightness, one of the most unique human instincts is language. Language is the system in which humans can communicate amongst each other, an incredible phenomenon, and yet for many years psychologists and scientists have yet to come up with one set theory as to how we acquire the languages we have. There are two fundamentally different theories on language acquisition that I will be presenting, the first by linguist Noam Chomsky and the second by psychologist B.F Skinner.

Skinner’s Behaviorist Model proposes that individuals learn language by imitation and as a direct response to positive or negative stimuli. Bruner’s Interactionist Theory, states that children can only acquire language by interacting with other people. Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development Theory also parallels the previous theories and refers that what one knows and could know is influenced by the assistance of others. ‘Bronfenbrenner believed that a person 's development was affected by everything in their surrounding environment” ("Study.com", 2016). A commonality in the all of these theories is that input is a key factor for the development of

Esmeralda Santiago is a Puerto Rican girl that moved to Brooklyn, New York, when she was about to entered eight grades. She was the oldest from her eleven siblings, and the support of her mom because her dad did not want to move to New York. She did not know English and she didn’t have any idea of the American culture.

The debate between many researchers is the argument of whether nature or nurture play a more important role in development. In this essay I will be looking into both aspects of nature and nurture focusing specifically on their influence towards language development in children. A main controversial question I will be looking into is the question of whether are we born already equipped with mechanisms which help us to learn language, or is language learned throughout a child’s environment by, for example, imitation and repetition? Studies done by some opposing researchers claim to show that nature and nurture promote language development

Ernesto Rosado is a 7 year old Peruvian-American male who is an only child. He is in second grade and was brought to counseling by his adoptive parents. He appears to be his stated age. He is approximately 4’ tall and weighs 55 lbs., and he appears to be in good health. He is a handsome, bright-eyed, young male with two front teeth missing. He lives with his adoptive parents (John and Grace), which includes the original adoptive father and his new wife from remarrying. There is little known about Ernesto’s biological parents and his first adoptive mother (Lynn), who was married to John, passed away from Leukemia.

Although the article proved some of the mains points, it does not back up its point from the evidence shown in the Actual paper “Born to Learn: What Infants Learn from Watching Us “ by Dr. Meltzoff. The whole idea behind this article was to confirm the idea that Babies learn from imitating others, which perhaps to parents is a common sense for the reasons that they spend numerous amount of time with their new born babies and until they are socially independent or fully grown. Anyone who is raising kids or perhaps working with kids acknowledges that kids are going to imitate whatever they are going to see. There are many research papers and experiments that provide the evidence that infants learn from watching us. For example one of the experiment’s by Dr.Meltzoff where A 14-month-old where infants were imitating a novel action of touching a panel with the forehead, and then they often react with a smile. The Article ““For Babies, Copy-Cat Games Provide a Social Compass” provides two other experiments run by Dr. Meltzoff to support the evidence but it fails to explain as how a new born who does not even know how he or she looks like, learns to the trick to know that it’s body have matching moving parts to someone’s

Behaviourists believe that learning a language is no different from learning anything else. It becomes a habit by the stimulus-response-reinforcement-repetition process (Cook, 2001). The behaviourists also claim that we learn by imitation and by association (Lightbown & Spada, 2006). However, psycholinguists argue that imitation is not enough because it is not only the mechanical repetition but also natural exposure that children acquire language (Cook, 2001).

These data also indicate that imitation may not be as strong of a mechanism for the development of infant vocalization but positive reinforcement may act as a mechanism to increase babbling. The mothers responded to the infants vocalizations by simply smiling, moving closer and touching them which acted as a positive reinforcement. Thus, the increase in their babbling was not a means of imitating the mother (Goldstein et al, 2003, 8034). Instead, they were receiving positive feedback each time they vocalized which was a positive reinforcement for the child to want to continue producing

At 18 months, the virtual child had over 50 words at her command that she was able to use to make two-word sentences such as “Mama up” and “Doggie outside.” In their effort to further encourage the child’s development of her language skills, the parents applied B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning theory (Berk, 2012). They would respond, using slightly longer sentences such as “Yes, the doggie is outside” before introducing descriptive and useful new words. The parents would encourage imitation and respond with positive reinforcement, which would further enthuse the child to develop her language skills (Berk, 2012). When the child was 2 years old, the parents would converse with the child at any given opportunity and would read books of her choice which further influenced her language development. Research has found that when mothers are more responsive during the first few years of a child’s life enable their children to achieve language development milestones at an earlier stage than children whose mothers were less responsive (Leigh, Nathans & Nievar, 2011). The mother had a more influential role in the virtual child’s language development as she would allow the child to explore the surrounding environment through daily walks and teach the child new words as they did. It was due to parental involvement and an encouraging, safe environment, the virtual child developed her language skills not only due to influence but to a desire to learn new