He added that most of the methods for teaching
languages are based on these assumptions from
behaviourism and emphasize repeated, but spaced,
practice of language material in meaningful situations,
in imitation of a given model, first orally and then
writing. Wilkins [11] argued that “most developments in
foreign language teaching since the second world war
have been based on the assumption that language is a
form of behaviour.”
The second school of language teaching is
“cognitivism”. Brown [18] argued that in the decade of
the 1960s, generative transformational linguistics emerged
through the influence of Noam Chomsky and a number of
his followers. Chomsky tried to show that human
language cannot be scrutinized simply in terms of
observable stimuli and responses or the volumes of raw
data gathered by filed linguists. The generative linguist
was interested not onlyin describing language
(achieving the level of descriptive adequacy ) but also in
arriving at an explanatory level of adequacy in the study
of language, that is, “principled basis, independent of
any particular language, for selection of the descriptively
adequate grammar of each language ” [19]. According to
this idea, he added that cognitive psychologists asserted
that meaning, understanding and knowing were
significant data for psychological study. They tried to
discover psychological principles of organization and
functioning instead of focusing rather mechanistically
on stimulus–response connections. In addition,
“cognitive psychologists, like generative linguists, tried
to discover underlying motivations and deeper structures
of human behavior by using a rational approach” [18].
Eapen [17] examined the stages in learning process based
on the cognitivists as follows: