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Donne as a Metaphysical Poet

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Donne as a Metaphysical Poet
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORIES

Introduction During the past forty years there have been two major theories of language learning by children. But there are two major schools of thought known as, 'Behaviorists' and 'Mentalists'. One school is of the view that language learning is entirely the product of experience and that our environment affects all of us. Others have suggested that everybody has an innate language learning mechanism. Let us discovery with the help of these two schools of thought that how do children acquire their mother tongue. How do they grow up linguistically and learn to handle the stylistics varieties of their mother tongue? How much of the linguistics system they are born with and how much do they discover from their exposure to language?

a) The Behaviorist School B.F. Skinner and his followers are known as behaviorist. According to them language learning is process known as operant conditioning. Conditioned Behavior is behavior which is the result of repeated training. Operant means that it is voluntary behavior, it is result of learner's own free will, and it is not forced by any outside person or thing. The learner demonstrates the new behavior first as a response to a system of reward or punishment, and finally as an automatic response. In order to prove their theory they conducted an experiment. EXPERIMENT They put a rat in a box containing a bar. If it presses a bar, it is rewarded with a pellet of food. Nothing forces it to press the bar. The first time it probably does so accidentally. When the rat finds that the food arrives, it presses the bar again. Eventually it finds that if it is hungry it can obtain food by pressing the bar. Then task is made more difficult. The rat only gets rewarded if it presses the bar while a light is flashing. At first rat is puzzled. Eventually it learns the trick. Then the task is made more difficult again. This time the rat only

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