Abstract:

My paper introduces the present state of an ongoing research project an earlier stage of which was presented under the title “A New Approach to Language Acquisition and Learning: Beyond Skinner and Chomsky” last year in Italy.

It offers, on the one hand a radical criticism of the entire edifice of language acquisition theories by arguing that the shared basic assumptions and concepts which underlie the premises of all portions of this edifice (including the patently antagonistic ones) are inappropriate for the task of articulating and describing linguistic equipment and development of human individuals in general, and language acquisition process in particular. On the other hand, it puts forward a new strategy for approaching the said complex of phenomena for consideration.
In the first stage of the argument a concise and selective glance is cast at key positions in the historical development of modern theories of language acquisition. Attention is drawn to the differences and parallels among the various approaches – which could be subsumed under a small number of cardinal categories such as ‘behaviourism/empiricism’, ‘nativism’, ‘cognitivism’, and finally ‘social-interactionism’ – and a new classification is ventured. In this first leg, the imperishable ‘Chomsky vs. Skinner dichotomy’ – which was present at the very dawning of the so-called ‘second language’ acquisition studies and which still constitutes the explicit or implicit theoretical axis around which the whole production sector spins – is also briefly dealt with.

In the following stage, concept-pairs which express themselves in dichotomies such as ‘native language vs. foreign language’, ‘first language vs. second language’ etc. and exhibit a more comprehensive and more popular social utility are touched upon, their weaknesses and limits demonstrated and an alternative model of conceptualization proposed.
Subsequent to and in connection with this the phenomena of ‘monolingualism’, ‘bilingualism’ and ‘multilingualism’ are dealt with. The concepts indicating these phenomena are tested against the concrete reality of the social individual – which is thus assigned the function of some sort of touchstone – so demonstrating that monolingualism is not – as is explicitly or implicitly declared by the linguistic theories of Western provenance – the ‘norm’, but, on the contrary, some kind of ‘anomaly’.

In the closing passage practical application of the proposed model is discussed and some elementary considerations and concrete suggestions on how to implement the developed model in the process of language learning and teaching are made.

Keywords:

Language acquisition, language learning, monolingualism, bilingualism, multilingualism, Chomsky.