4 language is arbitrary there is no inherent relation

4. Language is arbitrary
 There is no inherent relation between the words of a language and their
meanings or the ideas conveyed by them.

 There is no one to one correspondence between the structure of a word and
the thing it stands for.
 The relationship between the words and the ‘things’ they denote is merely
conventional.
Activity I. Write the following views of language in its appropriate column.
Structuralist Interactionalist Functionalist
ACTIVITIES
Language is a system of structures.
Language is a system of systems
Learners learned a language by using it.
Language is a reflection of cultures.
Language is a communicative tool to maintain relationship.
Language is arbitrary
Learning a language is to know its phonological system.
Emphasizes the meaning and function
Language is universal
Language is creative
Language is a mental phenomenon

Activity II. Discuss comprehensively (10 points each).
1.
Structuralist view about language
2.
Contrast the Interactionalist and Functionalist views about language
1. PROCESS –ORIENTED THEORIES. Concerned with how the mind
process new information, such as habit formation, induction, making
inference, hypothesis testing, and generalizations.
2. CONDITIONED-ORIENTED THEORIES. Emphasized the nature of human
and physical context in which language learning takes place, such as the
number of students, what kind of input learners received, and the learning
atmosphere.
A. BEHAVIORIST LEARNING THEORY. States that the language behavior of the
individual is conditioned by sequences of differential rewards in his/ her
environment.
1. Learned by a process of habit formation – mechanistic and human activity.
2. Learning is achieved by building up habits on the basis of stimulus-response
chains
Views about Language Learning
Process –Oriented Conditioned-Oriented
Behaviorism
Cognitivism
Constructivism
Social-constructivism
TOPIC 2: VIEWS ABOUT LANGUAGE
LEARNING

3. Emphasizes the consequences of the response and argues that it is the
behavior that follows a response which reinforces it and thus helps to
strengthen the association.
4. Process of habit formation.
B. COGNITIVE LEARNING THEORY. Chomsky argues that language is not
acquired by children by sheer imitation and through a form of conditioning on
reinforcement and reward.
a. Believes that all normal human beings have an inborn biological internal
mechanism that makes the language learning possible.
b. Claim that the child is born with an ‘initial state’ about language which
predisposes him/her to acquire a grammar of that language.
c. LAD is what the child brings to the task of language acquisition.
d. Mentalist account of SLA:
1. Hypothesis testing – process of formulating rules and testing the same
with competent speakers of the target language.
C. KRASHEN’S MONITOR MODEL (1981). Most often cited theory of SLA,
considered most comprehensive, if not the most ambitious, consisting of five
central hypotheses:
ACQUISITION / LEARNING HYPOTHESIS : two ways of developing competence
in L2:
1. Acquisition – the subconscious process that results from informal, natural
communication between people where language is a means, not a focus nor
an end in itself.