Behaviorism in foreign language learning

Behaviorism was, before anything else, a theory of psychology — the claim that all behaviour, including language, is learned from the environment through the association of stimuli, responses and their consequences. That psychological theory, and the figures behind it (Watson, Pavlov, Skinner), is treated in the entry on behaviorism as a theory of learning. This article is about what happened when those ideas were carried into the language classroom. Between roughly 1940 and 1965, behaviorism supplied the theoretical backbone for a whole generation of teaching materials and methods: it told teachers what a language is (a set of habits), how it is acquired (by conditioning), and therefore how it should be taught (by imitation, repetition and reinforcement). The result was one of the most systematic — and most heavily drilled — approaches to language teaching ever devised.

From theory to the classroom: habit and drill

If speaking a language is a bundle of habits, as behaviorism claimed, then teaching a language is a matter of installing the right habits and preventing the wrong ones from taking hold. This single idea reorganised the whole enterprise. The behaviorist mechanism runs stimulus → response → reinforcement: the teacher supplies a prompt, the learner produces a response, and a correct response is immediately reinforced so that it is repeated and, eventually, automatic. An error, on this view, is not a useful window into the learner's developing system but a bad habit — something to be corrected on the spot before it can be practised and fixed.

Three practical commitments followed directly. First, speech before writing: since children learn to talk before they read, the spoken language was treated as primary, and listening and speaking came before reading and writing. Second, the pattern drill became the central classroom activity — a structure practised over and over with small controlled substitutions until the learner could produce it without thinking. Third, error prevention: rather than let learners experiment and make mistakes, materials were engineered so that the learner would almost always produce a correct response and be reinforced for it. Grammar was not explained; it was drilled, on the assumption that conscious rules matter far less than conditioned reflexes. The famous slogan of the era — that language learning is “overlearning” to the point of automatic habit — captured the whole philosophy.

The audio-lingual method and contrastive analysis

The fullest expression of behaviorism in language teaching was the audio-lingual method, sometimes called the “Army Method” after its wartime origins. It grew out of intensive oral courses developed in the United States during the Second World War to train military personnel quickly, and it was given its theoretical shape at the University of Michigan by the linguist Charles C. Fries, director of the country's first English Language Institute. Fries combined the structural linguistics of the day with Skinner's behavioral psychology, and the method that emerged treated language as an inventory of sentence patterns to be memorised and drilled — famously through “mim-mem” (mimicry and memorisation) and the pattern-practice drill.

The drills were of well-defined types: repetition (the learner repeats an utterance immediately), inflection (a word reappears in a changed form, I bought a ticket → I bought two tickets), replacement (one word is swapped for another), and restatement (the learner rephrases the sentence). The classroom aimed for rapid, accurate, choral and individual production, with the teacher reinforcing correct responses and heading off errors. The audio-lingual entry treats the mechanics of these drills — and their limits — in detail.

Behaviorism also shaped how course designers decided what to teach and in what order, through the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis. Its classic statement is Robert Lado's Linguistics Across Cultures (1957). Lado argued that “those elements that are similar to [the learner's] native language will be simple for him, and those elements that are different will be difficult.” Because old habits (the first language) were thought to interfere with new ones, the designer's job was to compare the two languages systematically, predict exactly where the learner's L1 habits would clash with the L2, and concentrate drilling on those points of difficulty. Error was reinterpreted as negative transfer — the intrusion of an established habit — and the cure was more targeted practice. For a while this promised a genuinely scientific basis for syllabus design: analyse the two systems, predict the errors, drill them away.

Teaching machines and programmed instruction

Behaviorism's logic pointed toward something the ordinary classroom could not deliver: immediate, individual reinforcement for every learner on every response. Skinner drew exactly that conclusion. In his 1954 paper The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching he argued that the classroom was a poor reinforcement environment — one teacher cannot reward thirty learners the instant each responds, and delayed reinforcement is weak reinforcement. His remedy was the teaching machine and the method of programmed instruction.

A teaching machine presented material in very small steps (“frames”). At each step the learner produced a response, then immediately saw whether it was correct. Correct responses were reinforced at once and the learner advanced; the steps were engineered to be small enough that the learner almost always succeeded, keeping the stream of reinforcement high. Learners worked at their own pace, and the programme — not a human teacher — carried them gradually through the material. This is behaviorism turned into hardware: contingencies of reinforcement arranged so precisely that learning becomes, in Skinner's view, an engineered outcome. Language-lab tapes, self-correcting workbooks and drill-and-practice software are all descendants of this idea, and the “small step, immediate feedback” architecture survives today in a great deal of educational technology — even where no one any longer accepts the behaviorist psychology that first justified it.

Criticism and what survived

The behaviorist programme in language teaching came apart from two directions at once. The theoretical blow was Noam Chomsky's 1959 review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior, which argued that reinforcement cannot explain the central fact of language — that every speaker endlessly produces and understands sentences never heard before. If language is generative and rule-governed, it cannot be a stock of drilled habits, and no amount of pattern practice will install it. The practical blow came from the classroom. Wilga Rivers, in The Psychologist and the Foreign Language Teacher (1964), showed that audio-lingual drilling produced learners who could perform in the drill but were strikingly unable to use the language in real, unpredictable communication — mastery of the exercise did not transfer to spontaneous speech. Large empirical studies pointed the same way: the Pennsylvania Project (1965–1969) found the audio-lingual method no better, and on some measures worse, than traditional approaches that used explicit grammar and the mother tongue. The Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis fared no better: many predicted difficulties never materialised, and many real learner errors had nothing to do with the first language, so its predictive claim collapsed.

By the early 1970s behaviorism had lost its authority over language teaching. But — as with the psychological theory — a few of its working tools proved more durable than the doctrine that produced them. Deliberate practice of a pattern until it is automatic remains a real and useful thing, now understood as building fluency and reducing cognitive load rather than as conditioning a reflex. Immediate, specific feedback on a response is a robust aid to learning whatever theory of mind one holds. And the value of reinforcement — of getting something right and knowing it — survives, detached from the behaviorist claim that it is the whole of learning. It is worth being honest about one thing in particular: modern spaced repetition is often mistaken for a behaviorist technique because it, too, involves repeated practice, but it is not. Spaced repetition comes from cognitive research on memory and the forgetting curve — how the mind stores and retrieves information over time — not from stimulus–response conditioning. The overlap is superficial; the underlying theories are opposed.

What this means for learning a language

The behaviorist classroom got one thing lastingly right and one thing badly wrong, and both are useful to a learner today. What it got right is that habits matter: you do not truly know a pattern until you can produce it without stopping to assemble it, and that automaticity is built by repeated, focused practice with feedback — the reasoning behind methods based on active recall and regular practice. Drills, used deliberately, are a legitimate tool for that.

What it got wrong is just as instructive. Because speakers constantly produce new sentences, learning cannot stop at memorised patterns — you have to understand the system well enough to build utterances you were never drilled on, and you have to practise in real, meaningful use, not only in closed exercises. The most balanced reading is that behaviorism identified a genuine ingredient of language learning (practice to automaticity) and then mistook it for the whole recipe. A modern approach keeps the drill and the feedback, drops the claim that they are all there is, and grounds its repetition in cognitive science rather than conditioning. For the full story of the psychology behind all this, see behaviorism as a theory of learning; for the classroom method it produced, see the audio-lingual method.

FAQ

How did behaviorism influence language teaching?

Behaviorism treated a language as a set of habits acquired through conditioning, so it told teachers to build correct habits by imitation, repetition and reinforcement. In practice this meant putting speech before writing, making the pattern drill the central classroom activity, correcting errors immediately, and using contrastive analysis of the learner's two languages to decide what to drill. The audio-lingual method was the fullest expression of this approach.

What is the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis?

Set out in Robert Lado's Linguistics Across Cultures (1957), it held that features of a foreign language similar to the learner's first language would be easy, and features that differed would be hard, because old habits interfere with new ones. Teachers were to compare the two languages systematically, predict the points of difficulty, and concentrate practice there. It was later abandoned as a predictive tool: many predicted errors never occurred, and many real errors had no source in the first language.

Is behaviorist drilling still useful for learning a language?

The tools outlived the theory. Deliberate practice to the point of automaticity, immediate specific feedback, and the value of getting something right are all still sound. What was abandoned is the claim that a language is nothing but conditioned habit — because speakers endlessly produce new sentences, learners also need to understand the system and practise in real communication. Note too that modern spaced repetition is grounded in cognitive research on memory, not in behaviorist conditioning, despite the surface resemblance.

Sources

• Robert Lado, Linguistics Across Cultures: Applied Linguistics for Language Teachers, University of Michigan Press, 1957 — the classic statement of the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis.
• B. F. Skinner, “The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching”, Harvard Educational Review 24 (1954): 86–97 (on reinforcement, teaching machines and programmed instruction).
• “Audio-lingual method”, Wikipedia (Army Method, Charles Fries, mim-mem, drill types).
• Wilga M. Rivers, The Psychologist and the Foreign Language Teacher, University of Chicago Press, 1964 — the classic critique of audio-lingual assumptions.
• Noam Chomsky, “A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior”, Language 35 (1959): 26–58.