Biological Principles As Reflected In Culture And Second Language Acquisition

Meme theory has the biological foundations and it is grounded on Darwinian evolution. It is a new theory explaining cultural evolution. Meme duplicates and propagates itself through imitating with the language as its carriers and in turn, helps language to develop. Similarly, the background of behaviorism is also Darwinian evolution, with the formula of stimulus - response as its foundations. Behaviorism emphasizes the influences of external environment in its language learning theory. Behaviorism extends its sphere of influence to the scope of learning theory, which is characterized by the methods of practice, memory, sentence pattern drill, etc., all of which are based on imitation. Language learning and acquisition is one of the important human behaviors and, it is the common research object of meme theory and the learning theory of behaviorism. However, there is rare attention paid to the comparison of the two theories.In this paper, the author attempts to compare the similarities between the two theories under the premise of distinguishing them. This paper mainly deals with imitation which is emphasized by both meme theory and behaviorism, assuming that imitation has different levels, that is, surface imitation and complex imitation. In addition, the author tends to apply the different categories of imitation into the acquisition of different structures (surface structure and deep structure) of a second language and comes to the conclusion that imitation, surface or complex, involving learner's consciousness and cognition, runs through whole process of second language acquisition (SLA). Therefore, the second language can be considered as a system of memes, so the author treats of the second language learning process from the perspective of meme replication and transmission by means of imitation. Moreover, the function of the specific methods based on imitation which is supported by the learning theory of behaviorism can not be ignored at all. Thus, the behaviorists' views on language learning, which have emphasized the formation of language habits by imitation and reinforcement, should be reconsidered and looked on more objectively. Lately, imitation has been thought of as insufficient to explain the creation of new behaviors (or memes). However, the author tries to explain in memetic terms how new language behaviors occur by imitation in second language learning and the learning theory of behaviorism in order to help provide new theoretical framework for SLA.