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Up until the 1960's: Field of Language dominated by Environmentalist Ideas
Linguists believe language acquisition is the result of our environment and what we are exposed to (stimulus-response-reinforcement). Theories of the day emphasized constant practice and formation of good habits. From this era came the Audiolingual Approach. -
Leonard Bloomfield (Linguistic)
An American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics. -
B.F. Skinner -(Psychology)
Known for his work in Behaviorism, Skinner was a proponent of Stimulus-Response-Reinforcement. Using his ideas, a behaviorist view of language learning held that people learn through habit formation, imitation and practice, and positive reinforcement. -
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Paradigm Shift in the 1960's from Structual Linguistics to Generative Lingusitics
Up until the end of the 1960's there were many followers of Bloomfield who pioneered Structural Linguistics. This changed in 1957 when Chomsky challenged this model and introduced Generative Linguistics to the field. -
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky coined the phrase Language Acquisition Device (which later evolved into Universal Grammar). He distinguishes between Competence and Performance in his research.
His theory was that language instruction and knowing a language is more than just stringing words together, but rather knowing how language works as a system. -
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Interactionist Ideas and the emergence of new disciplines in the 1970's-80's
Researchers conclude that both internal AND external factors play a key role in Language Acquisition. Researchers begin to focus on examining complex cognitive processes from a dynamic and INTERACTIVE perspective. -
Dell Hymes
Hymes develops a theory of Communicative Competence which is based upon communication within a socially and culturally meaningful context. His model will give way to Canale and Swain in 1980 when they revise his processes. (See Canale and Swain 1980 on the timeline.) -
Brown and de Villiers and de Villiers: "Natural Order" of Morpheme Acquistition
This research realizes a Consistent Order of Acquisition. It seemed to support Chomsky that children are born with a predisposition to Language Acquisition. This rule governed internal behavior and also implied teachers should develop learners mental construction of Language Systems. Their research began as English as a Foreign Language, studying which order English Language Learners pick up the differing morphemes of English. -
"Natural Order" of Morpheme Acquisition for ELL
See Brown and de Villiers and de Villiers for more information. Initially the research was based on English as a Foreign Language Learners. -
M.A.K. Halliday: Language serves a function
Halliday believed that children learned to talk because it serves as a function for them. He placed these functions into seven categories. 1. Instrumental; 2. Regulatory; 3. Interactional; 4. Personal; 5. Heuristic; 6. imaginative; 7. Representational. -
The 1970's see a crossover to discourse theories
By the 1970's, linguistics' attention turn to discourse and language beyond the sentence. Discourse Analysis illustrates how sentences are connected. The Information Processing Approach (the way we take in information, process it, and then act upon it) is contrasted by Piaget's Constructivist Approach (the way we make our personal understandings from experiences around them. Linguists become more concerned with "the how" of SLA rather than "the what", or the product of learning. -
Lev Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)
Although Lev Vygotsky lived from 1896 until 1934, his work was largely unknown to the west until it was published in 1962. His Zone of Proximal Development was well known by 1978The ZPD is the distance between the actual developmental level...and the potential developmental level (under adult guidance and/or through peer collaboration. This lends itself to scaffolding and transformation and in essence becomes both the tool AND result. -
Zone of Proximal Development
See Lev Vygotsky on timeline for description. -
Wagner-Gough and Hatch
They provided a turning point from conversation as reinforcement to conversation as a learning tool itself. They illustrated how learners participation in conversational interaction provided them with opportunities to hear and produce the L2 in ways that were more than just rote practice. This later morphs into Levelt's model of speech production through Context of Culture and Context of Situation (a concept from Malinovski in 1935.) See Levelt 1989 for how this transforms. -
Canale and Swain 1980: Communicative Language Proficiency
Canale and Swain (Swain is pictured) made the primary framework for debate on Communicative Language Proficiency. They took Hymes work and identified four main components. 1. Grammatical Competence; 2. Sociolinguistic Competence; 3. Strategic Competence; 4. Discourse Competence. This is revisited by Savignon in 1983 with an inverted pyramid of the same concepts. -
Communicative Competence
See Canale and Swain 1980 for description. -
Sato's Longtitudinal Study
Sato proposed that the relationship between learners participation in conversational interaction and L2 development was one of selectivity and indirectness. This theme is now central to work on conversational interaction and Second Language Acquisition. -
Sandra Savignon Inverted Pyramid
A revision of Canale and Swain's Model in 1980. (See Canale and Swain 1980 on timeline.) -
Lyle Bachman
Bachman gives us the Model of Communicative Language Ability with three main components. The first is Language Competence divided by organizational (grammatical and textual competence) and pragmatic (illocutionary and sociolinguistic compent. The second and third components are strategic and psychomotor skills, respectively. This later becomes a large part of Alcón's model of Communicative Competence (See Alcón 2000). -
Levelt's Model of "planned" speech production
Levelt's model of speech production indicates that messages were "planned" on four major processes. These are the following...1. Conceptualization; 2. Formulation; 3. Articulation. 4. Monitoring. -
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1990-2010 Re-envisioning and Revising Communicative Competence
According to Usó-Juan and Martinez-Flor, "Our understanding of how languages are learnt and subsequently taught has advanced significantly during the last two decades." The shift has been to take the best of prior models and research and then to refine them to include meaningful input and output, and to make Communicative Competence at the center of SLA. -
Celce-Muria/Dornyei/Thurrell
These researchers divided competence five ways (with the fifth, strategic competence, carrying influence over all the others). These first four included discourse competence; linguistic competence; sociolinguistic competence and actional competence. This also influenced Alcón's version of Communicative Competence. (See Alcón 2000) -
Kira Hall
Hall expanded upon Krashen's i+1 theory. Hall stated that input cannot just occur, but that it has to occur within meaningful contexts. Hall called for "interactive practices" and goal-directed talk. She also has used Conversation Analysis as a technique for analyzing and understanding classroom interactional patterns and classroom discourse. -
Swain's Output Hypothesis
Merrill Swain emphasized that OUTPUT and "pushed output" and collaborative dialogue was key to SLA. The implication of her research is that teachers need to provide opportunities for output that is, 1. Meaningful; 2. Purposeful; 3. Motivational so students can consolidate what they know about the language and what they need to learn. Essential to this, is that students take responsibility for their own learning and become their own critics. -
Alcón's revised Model of Communicative Competence
Alcón's theory is a hybrid of Bachman (1990) and Celce-Muria/Dornyei/Thurrell (1995). Of particular interest, Alcón made Discourse Competence the first and CORE of the model. Alcón also specified in his second component the explicit functions for four psychomotor skills which include speaking, listening, reading and writing. And finally, the third component is that Strategic Competence incorporates both communication AND learning strategies. -
Marianne Celce-Murcia
Celce-Murcia took Canale and Swain's (1980) model of four competences and refined it to include six categories. 1. Sociocultural Competence; 2. Discourse Competence; 3. Linguistic Competence; 4. Formulaic Competence; 5. Interactional Competence; 6. Strategic Competence. Based on this model, "the implication for teachers is that students need more than grammatical or linguistic knowledge alone to function in a communicative setting," (Teacher's Handbook, pg 15)
