Lydia Mitits
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Sampson, 2005). They asked for an explanation of the language acquisition process that would not rely on those innate categories and language specific mechanism, but rather on general cognitive and learning processes. The Generativists, Chomsky in particular, stated that for the UG to be activated, the individual must be exposed to linguistic input, that is, natural language of the child’s environment. Although the Generativists are still trying to convince that language is a task too demanding to acquire without specific innate equipment, while the constructivists are fiercely arguing for the importance of linguistic input, those attempts to discover psychological correlates to language learning have yielded very interesting interpretations of language comprehension and production according to Stern (1983). He points out that conscious processes and language learning strategies have now been made implicit in the use of language.
2.3. Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theories Not surprisingly, the theoretical positions on the first language acquisition, such as Behaviorist and Innatist share many similarities with those on second language acquisition. The Creative Constructivist view of SLA (the proponents of which were i.e. Dulay & Burt, 1974) reflects Chomsky’s concepts on first language learning. According to Lightbown and Spada (1993) this view holds that learners ‘construct’ internal representations of the language they are learning, which can be described as ‘mental pictures’ of the language. Those internal representations are believed to systematically develop towards a full second language acquisition. The most significant version of this theoretical approach to SLA has been that of Krashen (1981; 1982). Although his work has been heavily criticized, its intuitive appeal is probably what makes it as influential as O’Brien (2000) so aptly notices. Krashen’s Monitor model comprises five central hypotheses: the acquisition-leaning