Dr. Mohammad Hossein Hariri Asl
Empiricism Empiricism Locke, Berkeley and Hume were the founders of empiricism in the 17th century. Knowledge is derived from experience of the outside world. Information is copied by sensations and images, remembered, associated with other stored information. Complex ideas result from associating simple ideas. Infant is born as a ‘tabula rasa’, i.e. a blank or…
Innateness Hypothesis Innateness Hypothesis It must be that the mind/brain provides a way to identify and extract the relevant information by means of mechanism of some sort that are part of its biologically determined resources. In contrast to the behaviorist hypothesis, a second theory, called the ‘innateness hypothesis’ has developed out of generative transformational grammar.…
Language Making Capacity Language Making Capacity Slobin proposes a ‘language making capacity’ (LMC) (1973, 1985). Like Chomsky’s Language Faculty, the LMC contains universal principles. Unlike the principles of Chomsky’s Language Faculty, these are ‘Operating Principles’ (OP), i.e., principles specifically for working inductively on the physical acoustic stimulus for a specific language to which children are…
Functionalism Functionalism proposes that Universal Grammar can ultimately be explained without recourse to a special language organ that takes up where cognition leaves off (Bates & MacWhinney, 1989, p. 7). It attempts to rectify a lack of emphasis on learning in the rationalist perspective. The source of knowledge is proposed to lie in the input,…
Surreptitious 1100 Words You Need Surreptitious 1100 Words You Need /ˌsʌr.əpˈtɪʃ.əs/ (adj) done secretly, without anyone seeing or knowing, secret, secretive, clandestine, furtive, stealthy, sneaky, sly, underhanded, covert: Watch this video on YouTube. She seemed to be listening to what I was saying, but I couldn’t help noticing her surreptitious glances at the clock. When…
Incontrovertible 1100 Words You Need Incontrovertible 1100 Words You Need /ɪnˌkɒn.trəˈvɜː.tɪ.bļ/ (adj) impossible to doubt because of being obviously true, undeniable, unquestionable, certain, inevitable, irrefutable, incontestable, indisputable, indubitable, unarguable, unassailable: Watch this video on YouTube. incontrovertible proof/evidence Her logic is utterly incontrovertible. Further to the incontrovertible evidence that the Jakobusgemeinde vested its central authority to…
Classroom Ethnography Classroom ethnography involves the kind of detailed descriptive work advocated by Johnson (1995). They emphasise the importance of obtaining multiple perspectives through triangulation. Watson-Gegeo (1997) distinguished four approaches to classroom ethnography: Ethnography of communication Micro-ethnography Discourse analysis Critical ethnography The ethnography of communication has its origins in anthropology and, in particular, in the…
Bruner Bruner was an important advocate of Piaget’s ideas. Bruner was a professor of psychology and founder of the Centre for Cognitive Studies at Harvard University. To Bruner, the development of conceptual understanding and of cognitive skills and strategies is a central aim of education, rather than the acquisition of factual information. Bruner worked on…
Child Language Acquisition Child Language Acquisition Cromer concludes that experience stimulates language organisational processes and that these affect other linguistic structures that are internally related. The children appeared to be building their own grammars in their own way, without direct positive or negative evidence as to what was right or wrong. Children are creative, selective…
Skinner Skinner (1953) attempted to extend a classical behaviorist model of learning to language in his famous ‘Verbal Behavior’. His goal was to provide a way to predict and control verbal behavior by observing and manipulating the physical environment of the speaker. In his review of this work, Chomsky (1959) showed that the Skinnerian concepts…