Based on experiments performed in the early part of the 20th century, many people believed that animals AND

PEOPLE learned through a process of conditioning. For example, there were laboratory studies where rats were trained to push a button when a light came on. Each time the rat did this, it was given a piece of food. After a while, the rat would push the button every time the light came on. The rat had learned to associate pushing the button with getting food. This theory became known as behaviorism.

STIMULUS > RESPONSE > REINFORCEMENT In Behaviorist learning theory, conditioning is the result of a three-stage process: Stimulus > Response > Reinforcement. In the rat experiment, the light coming on would be the stimulus, the rat pushing the button would be the response and the food would be the reinforcement. Researchers spoke of positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. For example, if you pet your dog and say Good boy! when it does a trick correctly, this would be positive reinforcement. If you say hityour dogon its nose and yell Bad dog! when it does something bad, this would be negative reinforcement.

In 1957, psychologist Bernard Skinner wrote a book called Verbal Behavior in which he argued that children learn (their first) language the same way. In the early 1960s this theory of language learning became popular among people interested in language teaching. The result was the Audio-Lingual Method (ALM) which stressed repetition and pattern practice: Behaviourism gave birth to a stimulus-response (S-R) theory which sees language as a set of structures and acquisition as a matter of habit formation. Ignoring any internal mechanisms, it takes into account the linguistic environment and the stimuli it produces. Learning is an observable behaviour which is automatically acquired by means of stimulus and response in the form of mechanical repetition. Thus, to acquire a language is to acquire automatic linguistic habits. According to Johnson (2004:18), [B]ehaviorism undermined the role of mental processes and viewed learning as the ability to inductively discover patterns of rule-governed behavior from the examples provided to the learner by his or her environment. Larsen-Freeman and Long (1991:266) consider that S-R models offer little promises as explanations of SLA, except for perhaps pronunciation and the rote-memorization of formulae. This view of language learning gave birth to research on contrastive

analysis, especially error analysis, the main focus of which is the interference of ones first language in the target language. An important reaction to behaviourism was the interlanguage studies, as the simple comparison between first and second language neither explained nor described the language produced by SL learners. Interlanguage studies will be present in other SLA perspectives, as the concern of the area has been mainly with the acquisition of grammatical morphemes or specific language structures.