Page No 394-398
P. Bhaskaran Nair
Pondicherry University, Puducherry
The cannon of second language instruction has never been static, thanks to the
research and studies in second language acquisition (SLA) and the intervention
of other related disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, theoretical linguistics,
and psychology. This paper is an attempt to have a bird’s eye view on the
implications of psychology as an independent discipline and psycholinguistics
as a sub-discipline in second language pedagogy. The history of SLA theory
records a corresponding development, equally strong as far as the pedagogy of
second languages are concerned, namely sociolinguistics which gave new
dimensions to language teaching especially adult second language learning.
However, this paper tries to confine itself to the contributions of psycholinguistic
studies and research of the last half century— to be precise, since the 1960s
ever since Noam Chomsky’s cognitive code learning theory started gaining
prominence in the discipline and popularity in second language pedagogy. During
this half a century, even an Indian village classroom witnessed certain remarkable
changes in the teaching and learning of English as s second language (ESL).
The impact of the Behaviorist School of Psychology in language learning may
continue, as in the case of learning content subjects; but teaching community
in general has started making a clear distinction between learning to use a
language and learning the content of a subject using that language. Moreover,
the role of cognition in language learning has now been established for ever, as
a result