A Common Ground for Teachers of Language and Teachers of Literature: The Same Processes toward Different Goals

Abstract

The of learning has influenced language teachers for many years. The notion that we learn most effectively when stimulated by the promise of reward or punishment (that is, theory) purports that the process of learning language is one of forming habits determined by negative and positive reinforcement. In our language classes, this leads us to manipulate normally natural stimuli by dividing language up into separate teachable subskills. These subskills are then artificially sequenced in the form of texts, syllabi, etc. The sequences chosen are based on imagined levels of difficulty or complexity, or on the notion that certain skills, constructions, or patterns must precede the introduction of other elements for the most efficient learning. Chomsky (26-58) carefully demonstrated the failure of reinforcement techniques as a major avenue toward assimilating a language. Furthermore psycholinguistic research (Slobin) on how children learn first language shows that parents rarely comment on the structures of language the child uses. Attention is focused on content. Chomsky pointed out that language form is extremely complex and still only partially understood. We have not yet reached a point at which we can even subdivide various language skills in order to then teach them. Furthermore, there aren't enough days in a lifetime to learn an entire language by trying systematically to master subskills. These facts, together with the knowledge that virtually all human beings lea n a completely developed language, rompted Chomsky to argue for an innate Language Acquisition Device which governs the language learning process. Therefore his focus is on heredity. His theory, however, is only concerned with explaining the innate facility to acquire language, not the genesis and development of it. Chomsky's generative grammar acknowledged only two alternatives: as Piaget puts it, either an innate scheme that governs with necessity, or acquisition from outside (cultural and therefore variable determination such as cannot account for the limited and necessary character of the schema in question). Piaget, on the other hand, claims there is a third possibility: There is heredity versus acquisition from outside, true, but there is the process of internal equilibration. Piaget's work has demonstrated that the equilibration process, or self-regulation also yields necessities. He claims, their results are more necessary than those determined by heredity, heredity varies much more than do general laws of organization by which the self-regulation of behavior is governed. (p. 90) Piaget's of equilibration and the construction of knowledge has bearing on the gulf between the teaching of literature and language. Where behaviorist theory emphasized the formation of habits and innatist theory isolated language learning from the rest of cognitive development, considering it a distinctly innate process, Piaget's brings together both environmental influences and innate or inherited faculties for learning and language acquisition with a third factor, the internal constructive mechanism which assimilates environmental variables (i.e., experiences) and accommodates existing cognitive structures for continued expansion of knowledge structures. Piaget argues that all learning from the earliest stages of sensory-motor development