Behaviorist Theory

Behaviorist theory views language as a set of habits acquired through conditioning. Developed from the stimulus-response psychology of Watson and Skinner, it held that language learning — like all learning — could be explained without reference to internal mental states. The theory dominated language teaching from the 1940s through the 1960s and, despite its eventual rejection as a comprehensive account of acquisition, left deep marks on classroom practice.

Core Mechanism

The behaviorist account of language learning follows a simple chain:

Stimulus (model utterance) -> Response (learner's attempt) -> Reinforcement (positive feedback or correction) -> Habit (automatised behaviour through repetition)

B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior (1957) applied operant conditioning to language. Skinner argued that verbal behaviour is shaped by its consequences: utterances that produce desired results are reinforced and repeated; those that fail are extinguished. Language is not rule-governed creativity but a repertoire of conditioned responses to environmental stimuli. There is no need to posit mental grammar, innate knowledge, or internal representations.

Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis

Robert Lado's Linguistics Across Cultures (1957) extended behaviorism to second language learning through the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH). The logic was straightforward:

• Language learning is habit formation
• Existing L1 habits either facilitate or interfere with L2 habit formation
• Where L1 and L2 are similar, positive transfer occurs (easy learning)
• Where L1 and L2 are different, negative transfer / interference occurs (errors and difficulty)
• Therefore, a systematic comparison of L1 and L2 structures can predict learner errors

The CAH had a strong form (contrastive analysis predicts all errors) and a weak form (contrastive analysis explains errors after the fact). The strong form was quickly disproven: learners made errors where no difficulty was predicted, and failed to make errors where difficulty was predicted. Developmental errors like "I goed" appeared across learners regardless of L1, suggesting internal processes that behaviorism could not explain.

Classroom Legacy: The Audiolingual Method

The Audiolingual Method (ALM) was behaviorism's primary classroom application, combining structural linguistics with conditioning principles:

• Dialogue memorisation — learn conversations by heart before analysing them
• Pattern drills — substitution, transformation, and repetition exercises to build automatic habits
• Oral primacy — speaking and listening before reading and writing
• Immediate error correction — prevent bad habits from forming
• Native speaker models — provide the "correct" stimulus

Drill type	Example
Repetition	T: "She works in a hospital." Ss: "She works in a hospital."
Substitution	"She works in a hospital." -> "She works in a school."
Transformation	"She works in a hospital." -> "Does she work in a hospital?"

Why Behaviorism Failed

Chomsky's 1959 review of Verbal Behavior is widely regarded as the most influential critique in the history of psychology. His arguments:

1. Creativity. Speakers produce and understand sentences they have never encountered. Language use is not reproduction of trained responses but rule-governed generation of novel utterances.
2. Developmental errors. Children say "I goed" and "two mouses" — forms they have never heard in the input. These show internalised rule application, not imitation.
3. Poverty of the stimulus. The input children receive is too impoverished (incomplete, fragmentary, lacking negative evidence) to account for the richness of the grammar they acquire.
4. Structure dependence. Grammatical rules operate on hierarchical structure, not linear sequences. No amount of stimulus-response conditioning explains how children know this.

Empirical research on the ALM confirmed the problem: students who drilled patterns in the lab could not transfer them to spontaneous communication. Habit formation produced fluent repetition but not communicative competence.

What Survived

Behaviorism was rejected as a theory of acquisition but not as a source of useful techniques:

Still valuable:

• Pronunciation drilling for automaticity of difficult sounds
• Memorisation of high-frequency chunks and formulaic sequences
• Controlled practice to build procedural knowledge after conceptual understanding
• Corrective Feedback — the idea that errors need attention, though the mechanism is cognitive, not conditioning

Abandoned:

• Error prevention as the primary goal (errors are now seen as developmental and informative)
• Mechanical drilling without communicative purpose
• Avoidance of rule explanation (explicit knowledge has a facilitative role)
• The claim that all language learning is conditioning

Key References

• Skinner, B.F. (1957). Verbal Behavior. Appleton-Century-Crofts.
• Lado, R. (1957). Linguistics Across Cultures. University of Michigan Press.
• Chomsky, N. (1959). Review of Verbal Behavior by B.F. Skinner. Language, 35(1), 26-58.
• Richards, J.C. & Rodgers, T.S. (2014). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. 3rd ed. Cambridge University Press.