Language Performance
Language performance and language acquisition are the two principal concerns of the psychology of language, or to use the more recent term for these studies, psycholinguistics. The much intensified study of psycholinguistics in recent years has produced a considerable amount of literature and some significant advances in our understanding of language acquisition. The same cannot be said about the study of language learning. Surprisingly little fundamental research has been conducted into the processes of learning a second language. The consequence has been that most theories in these fields are still extrapolations from general theories of human learning and behavior or from the recent work in language performance and acquisition. This is not to say that there has been no valuable research on Replica Cartier language teaching. But this has been concerned with the evaluation of different teaching methods and materials, for example, the use of language laboratories, the use of language drills, the teaching of grammar by different methods. Now, such research is difficult to evaluate for two reasons.
First of all, experiments in language teaching suffer from the same set of problems that all comparative educational experiments suffer from. It is virtually impossible to control all the factors involved even if we know how to identify them in the first place, particularly such factors as motivation, previous knowledge, aptitude, learning outside the class-room, teacher performance. Consequently the conclusions to be drawn from such experiments cannot, with confidence, be generalized to other teaching situations. The results are, strictly speaking, only valid for the learners, teachers and schools in which the experiment took place.
Secondly, it is not possible to draw any general conclusions about the psychology of language learning from “operational” research into language teaching. The discovery that learners do or do not learn, or learn better or worse, under certain conditions, does not tell us directly about the process of learning itself. It is true it may give us “hunches” which could be followed up by experiments in learning. For example, we might note that a teaching method which included practice in translation produced learners who were better at translation than a method which did not. But the result of such an experiment in teaching would tell us that “practice”, something which could be rigorously defined and described as a teaching procedure, is relevant to teaching translation. It would not tell us, however, what is meant by “practice” as a learning process. Similarly, we might find that drills involving “imitation” promoted learning. Imitation can be rigorously described as a teaching procedure. But this does not tell us what this sort of behavior is in the learning process. Is it just a question of Cartier Roadster Replica repeating the physical movements which produce the same set of sounds — a sort of “parroting”, or is it some much more complex process going on “inside the learner?”
Ultimately, of course, we need to correlate teaching procedures with learning processes; we need to be able to say what procedures are a necessary condition for certain learning processes to take place. We can; however, never say that certain procedures are a sufficient condition for certain processes to take place. You can take a horse to water, but what are chain concerns of the psychology of linguistics?
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