Role of Teacher in Acquisition-Learning Debate

Anand, Chetan (2025) Role of Teacher in Acquisition-Learning Debate. In: Exploring Interactions Between Linguistic Theories, Language Learning and Pedagogy. Second Language Learning and Teaching . Springer Nature, pp. 263-280. ISBN 9783031929373

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Abstract

This paper problematizes the role of learning and the positioning of teachers in the dominant matrix that has privileged ‘acquisition’ in language teaching. The movement from the paradigm of Behaviorism to Cognitivism, spearheaded by Chomsky’s generative grammar, has pushed the scales in the favour of acquisition in language teaching. The two major development that emerged in language teaching, influenced by Behaviourism, firstly, emphasizing linguistic creativity (i.e. any competent user of language can speak infinitely many sentences) and secondly, how learning a language presupposes a prior knowledge, such as Universal Grammar (UG). As critiqued by Christopher Winch (1997), this shift has made learning an individual centric and autonomous process that has if on the one hand has brought the learner to the center, then on the other hand, this has come at the cost of the role of the teacher in a classroom. Scholars have navigated this transition to cognitivism through the split between theory and practice that it brings in teaching. Winch, critiques this ‘representationalism’ in the broader representational paradigm in philosophy of education , as learning in the cognitivist paradigm becomes automated and isolated process, devoid of its social and shared character. Learning in these theories are characterized by the process through which internal representations become more accurate as they get closer to the object being represented but their accounts of this process remain post-facto accounts which never completely overlaps with the concerns of practice; forgetting that practice has to account for creation of the object while it undergoes transformation (of both the representation as well as of the represented object). In the wider social science literature, Wittgenstein presents this as a gap between expression and representation. In this context, the works of Vygotsky and Wittgenstein become important. This paper is an attempt to show how our excessive focus on acquisition amounts to disproportionate emphasis on the representationalist account of learning, and by incorporating an internal critique of representationalism, the possibility of finding newer ways of relating learning to acquisition and vice-versa can be explored. This critique of representationalism is important as not to replace one theory by another but to see representationalism as a slippage in the theory building exercise itself to account for the world; thus creating newer possibilities of incorporating our existing literature with our practice in language teaching.

Item Type:	Book Section
Authors:	Anand, Chetan
Editors:	Editors Email ORCID Panda, Minati UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED Mishra, Suneeta UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED Kóczy, Judit Baranyiné UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED
Document Language:	Language English
Subjects:	Social sciences > Education Social sciences > Education > Schools & their activities; special education
Divisions:	Azim Premji University - Bengaluru > School of Education
Full Text Status:	None
URI:	http://publications.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/id/eprint/6749
Publisher URL:	https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-...

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