Behaviorist Theory

 Behaviorism was introduced by the American psychologist John B. Watson in 1913. Though he was considered the originator of the theory, two other researchers Pavlov (1927) and Skinner (1938) contributed greatly to it by their research and theories.

B.F. Skinner was an American Psychologist, behaviorist, inventor and social philosopher. He was the professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 to 1974. His behaviorist theory of learning is based on the idea that people learn through the consequences of their actions and that reinforcement and punishment are key to shaping behavior.

Behaviorism states that children learn from environments and develop skills through stimulus-response-reinforcement process. Behaviorist theorists believe that children are born with tabula rasa ’or a blank slate. They learn from parents, neighbors and the environment.  This theory does not consider biological backgrounds, individual personality characteristics and personal thinking process or ideas. They only believe in right conditioning. In terms of language acquisition, the behaviorist theorists argue that learners can develop proficiency if they are put in a situation when they repeatedly respond to positive stimuli. They can perform well through repetition.

In behaviorist theory, reinforcement is very important factor to acquire language. Through positive reinforcement, learners feel encouraged and develop skills. On the contrary, if learners are negatively reinforced, they will no feel interested in the learning process and will not reach the desired goals.

However, the behaviorist theory has some limitations:

•  It doesn’t address the thinking process of actions or productions. Human beings are not machines or robots; they have feeling of anger, sadness, happiness and so forth. There are studies that demonstrate children learn through mistakes and can produce sentences they never heard before.
• People have independent thinking and planning ability. They do not only learn by following others; they develop proficiency, by incorporating their own ways of learning.

• Stimulus response may not always work. Some people may not learn through this process. Though there are some similarities between human and animal behavior, humans appear to have higher order thinking. It might be true that they would not respond to the repeated stimuli the same way every time.
• Though positive reinforcement work for some children negative reinforcement may also work at different contexts. There are numerous examples in Asian countries where students have performed well after negative reinforcement from parents and teachers. It seems to be problematic that students would always perform well if they were positively reinforced. There seem to be many other reasons that contribute to acquire knowledge.
•  It deals with objective or scientific interpretation of behavior; it doesn’t consider subjective or imaginative look at the internal thinking process.