Competencia comunicativa

Language is the most important aspect for human beings. We use language to express inner thoughts and emotions, make sense of complex and abstract thought, to learn to communicate with others, to fulfill our wants and needs, as well as to establish rules and maintain our culture. Language can be defined as verbal, physical, biologically innate, and a basic form of communication. Behaviouristsoften define language as a learned behaviour involving stimulus and response.
When we define language we have to be careful not to exclude symbols, gestures, or motions. This is because if we exclude these from our definition, we will be denying the language of the deaf community. All human languages share basic characteristics, some of which are organizational rules and infinite generativity.Infinite generativity or creativity is the ability to produce an infinite number of sentences using a limited set of rules and words.
Behaviourism
The Learning perspective argues that children imitate what they see and hear, and that children learn from positive and negative reinforcement (Shaffer, Wood and Willoughby, 2002).The main theorist associated with the learning perspective is B.F. Skinner.Skinner argued that adults shape the speech of children by reinforcing the babbling of infants that sound most like words (Skinner,1957, cited in Shaffer et al, 2002).
Language therefore is nothing but behavior and as such, it is learnt by a process of habit-formation, whose main components are imitation, reinforcement, repetition and behaviour conditioning. Thus language learning is theconsequence of imitation, practice, feedback on success (positive reinforcement), and habit formation. In this approach, the main factor, in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), is the linguistic environment. BEHAVIOURISM Stimuli
1.-The child mimics the sounds and grammatical structures, he hears around him. Feedback
2.-People recognize his efforts to imitate the adult model and reinforce it by rewards;3.- In order to get more rewards, the child repeat the sounds and pattern until they become habits.
In other words, learners should be provided with a linguistic stimulus (for example a question to answer, a sentence to put into the negative form, a word to put into the plural form) and be told whether their answer was right (positive reinforcement) or wrong (negative reinforcement). They shouldbe encouraged to repeat correct forms, and, by careful selection and grading of material, possible mistakes should be minimised by the course designer. If mistakes did occur,
Theories of Language Acquisition
Introduction
they were to be immediately corrected by the teacher so that bad habits were not formed. The child’s or learner’s own utterances were seen as faulty versions of adult speechinstead of a system in their own right. The ‘mistakes’ were supposed to be the result of incomplete learning, since the habit formation had not yet had time to attain its target. Particular emphasis was placed on the idea that error was to be avoided at all costs, and the idea that one can learn from one’s mistakes found no place in language teaching theory and practice at this time. In this waychildren learning verbal behaviour is conditioned until it coincides with the adult model. But what Behaviourism does not explain the following facts:
1. -errors such as “I gived my pencil to my sister and she breaked it”; “J´ai prendu mon petit ours”; “No sabo donde está el peluche”;” Yo no cabo en el coche”;
2. -children get to be competent users of a language without having heard enough of it;3. -children exposed to different linguistic environments derive the same basic rules;
4. -the process of acquiring that rules follows basically the same for all children no matter which language they are mastering;
5. -all natural languages share the same structures at some deep level.
The Nativist perspective
The nativist perspective argues that humans are biologically programmed to...