8

JAMES R. NORD

Behavior as the goal in the study of thought is wrong, and the characteristic emphasis
of the psychological laboratory on the measurable response and the controlling
independent variable is responsible for the sterility of the study of thought. ³⁴
Psychology is the science of behavior only in a trivial sense. To say otherwise is like
asserting that physics is the science of meter reading or that chemistry is a kind of
elaborate cookery. ³⁵
Bandura has also been outspoken in his criticism of an overt response orientation to learning.
Psychological theories have traditionally assumed that learning can occur only by
performing responses and experiencing their effects. ³⁶
According to social learning theory, behavior is learned symbolically through central
processing of response information before it is performed... Observation learning
without performance is amply documented in modelling studies using a
non-response acquisition procedure. ^{3 7}
The basic paradigm shift in instructional psychology from a focus on overt observable behavior to a focus on the internal cognitive structure has recently been acknowledged.
Instructional psychology is now involved in a notable shift of emphasis in
psychological research and theory... The current shift emphasizes the study of central
cognitive and affective associationistic and wholistic processes by which the learner
selects, transforms and encodes the nominal characteristics of experience into
functional meaningful internal representation.³⁸
Beyond the doubt cast by modern psychologists on the efficacy of the performance-based learning paradigm, there is also evidence of some possible detrimental effects created by following the paradigm in language teaching.
The requirement to respond orally, as in the mimicry memorization drills of the "A-L" approach, imposes listening for speaking and it results in impaired listening comprehension. This problem was treated in a short experiment by James Asher which involved the performance of drill movements by command in Russian. Asher found that the students who merely performed the commands did so with a greater degree of reliability than those who first repeated the commands orally before performing the necessary movement. He concluded that:
...the stress of trying to pronounce the alien utterance may retard listening fluency...
The optimal strategy may be serial learning in which one achieves listening fluency
just before one attempts to speak. ³⁹
There is other experimental support for this same position. In a study on the associative reaction time in language acquisition, Ley and Locascio state:
Our research suggests that one must make associations to verbal materials during
learning in order that the material can be later recalled, and that some procedure such
as repeatedly saying the material aloud interferes with the associative process, and
therefore has a detrimental effect on learning.⁴⁰
Part of the explanation for these results may be the role that stress and anxiety play in the learning process. Anxiety, often brought on by task overload, can be a major deterrent to the learning of listening comprehension. The effect of anxiety on learning in general has been widely studied. Eysenck points out that:
...conditionbig is related to anxiety for the simple reason that it has been shown
conclusively that the ease with which a conditioned reflex is formed depends very
much on the anxiety of the person on whom the experiment is being performed.
What is more, there is a good deal of what is called "stimulus generalization " in the
anxious person . ⁴¹

DEVEl.OPlNG LISTENING FLUENCY

9

Any discrimination learning is much more difficult for an anxious person. Therefore, any receptive skill, such as listening and reading, which is primarily discrimination learning, is made more difficult through task overload and the corresponding anxiety which is created. There are numerous studies which indicate that forcing a student to respond orally--to speak before he has a good foundation, before he is ready--is a major cause of poor articulation, accent and grammatical control. This generally results from practicing speaking while task overloaded. Even imitation is a very complex task and can create task overload.
At a minimum, it can be shown that imitation requires perception, storage,
organization of output, and motor output. In addition, before the storage phase there
will be interaction if the material is interpretable.⁴²
In a study which reviewed a large number of experimental reports within the aerospace industry, Greer et al. point out that when a subject is task overloaded, errors increase and there is a tendency to revert to previously learned generalizations rather than make the specific distinctions required at that point.⁴³As Gaier has expressed it:
...it leads to an impairment in the ability to improvise in an unstructured and/or new
situation. This results in stereotyped, habitual and familiar approaches that may be
maladaptive in the situation.⁴⁴
In foreign language learning, this means that as a person becomes task overloaded by trying to speak and say more than he is able to, he will revert back to the habit formations he knows best, those of his native tongue. The results are speaking the words of the new language with sound habits and/or grammatical patterns of the old language. If done often enough in this state of task overload, they become habits transferred to the new language.

What is the new paradigm? The paradigm assumes that language performance, such as speaking, occurs after language competence has been acquired and is guided by that acquired competence. The new paradigm focuses attention on the acquisition of language by the central nervous system as distinguished from the learning of a language as a public communication tool. In other words, it is concerned with acquiring language competence rather than learning a language performance.

How did this change of focus come about? It derives from a paradigm shift in linguistics as well as a paradigm shift in psychology. At about the same time that money began pouring in to support the "A-L" paradigm, Chomsky launched an attack on it.⁴⁵His principle assumptive shift was in the nature of language itself. He did not view language as "talk" or "communication", but as "an internal representation of a system of rules that determine how sentences are to be formed, used and understood."⁴⁶Since the initial shift of focus, transformational grammar proponents have spent a great deal of time formulating new linguistic characterizations of sentence structure which would be compatible with a central nervous .system's capacity to handle information. This has interested cognitive psycholo- gists and some have gone beyond Chomsky's assumption. Bransford and Johnson remind us that language is more than a linguistic set of rules determined by the language community. It is also a symbolic system used by individuals.
Since 1957 (Chomsky, 19S7), the area of language has received increasing attention
from psychologists. Linguistic characterizations of sentence structure have played
important roles in formulating theories of sentence perception, comprehension and
memory. The emphasis on characterization of the linguistic system has tended to
overshadow another problem however, namely that a language is a symbol system
that is used by individuals. A consideration of the individual's contributions to the
processes