Viewing English Learning In Behaviorist Perspective

Created by John Broadus Watson in the early 20 century, behaviorism was a school of psychology in the United States and one of the main branches of psychology of the world. Before the advent of behaviorism, experimental psychologists focused their attention on consciousness. Such representatives as W. Wundt and E. B. Tichener are hence titled "mindists", who mainly studied the mind through introspection. In Watson's eyes, however, consciousness is invisible and unfathomable and introspection is far from scientific. As a science of behavior, psychology should have the observable behaviors, rather than consciousness, as its subject of study. Psychology must study objective behaviors, formation of habits, integration of habits, etc. In behaviorist perspective, the purpose of psychology, a purely objective experimental science branch, is to predict and control behaviors. Behaviorism replaces introspection with the stimulus-response mechanism as its study method. Through objective studies of behaviors, behaviorism can both predict the responses to the known stimuli and trace out stimuli that generated the responses. Hence, by reducing behaviors to the level of stimulus-response, both human and animal behaviors can be effectively understood, predicted and controlled.Behaviorist analysis, explanation and controlling of behaviors have achieved obvious success in many aspects. However, some loopholes in Watson's theory such as flat denial of the existence of a "human mind", personal responsibility and any type of "inner personality" lead it to a blind alley in explaining many human behaviors. Humans, as animals, indeed follow the behavioral regularities of all animals, but, as intelligent animals, humans are different from other animals in their possession of conscious self-control from a conscious mind which is never to be ignored. Human behavioral habits can be subconsciously formed by responding to stimuli from the outside environment, but in the meantime, they can also be consciously established through initiative responses to self-directed stimuli. In spite of the mistakes engendered by Watson's personal limits, the strength and power of the theory are still in effect whether we like, believe, act upon it or not. With the mistakes corrected, behaviorism remains a powerful tool to help us understand human behaviors.Language, as a human behavior, also follows the behavioral rules that behaviorism has revealed. Any language has its characteristic rules. Any native speaker, when speaking or writing or listening or reading in his native language, follows the same language rules. As he grows in the language environment, the rules are intensified and fossilized in his brain as his mother tongue throughmultitudes of stimulus-response practices. For example, any native English speaker, when describing the current action of a third person singular, will put an "s" at the end of the verb. Although the "s" does not have any specific lexical meaning, all native speakers simply have acquired this language habit from constant stimulus-response processes in the English language environment. Any inconformity with the habit has been repressed, again by the stimulus-response mechanism, such as being laughed at for speaking weirdly or being corrected by parents or teachers. For another example, in China, "上商店" "上学","上课" "上班" are our common phrases of everyday use, but no one ever says "上工作", although "上工作" literally means "上班". But simply because we never have that stimulus in the Chinese language, the response never exists. Therefore, language acquisition, in its nature, is to establish in the learner's brain the same language habit system as that in a native speaker's brain. And an effective method for this purpose is the stimulus-mechanism process.From the above analysis we can see two factors affecting language acquisition: (1) age; age is the indicator of the maturity of the human brain. Researchers from Cornell University have confirmed through MRI that the language that is input to the immature brain is fossilized...