International Multilingual Journal of Contemporary Research

Constructivism: Fundamental Concepts and a Comparative Study of Piaget and Vygotsky's View points on Language Acquisition
Dr Abdolmajid Tabatabaee Lotfi, Dr. Farid Parvaneh

Abstract
There are several major views about the process of language acquisition. The first one is the behaviorist view, which considers language as a verbal behavior and therefore believes it is learned through conditioning. In this view environments plays a crucial role but the learner is passive and controlled by environment. The second approach states that, language acquisition is a mental rather than behavioral process; furthermore human is innately equipped with Language Acquisition Device (LAD). In this view, LAD plays the main role and the environment is just like a trigger to activate it. Eventually, the third view, like the second one, considers language acquisition process a mental process, however it does not believe in any peculiar device as LAD. Rather, it believes in a general process for learning on which language acquisition is based, as well. This third group, called interactionalists or constructivists, consider the language acquisition as a process resulted from the interaction between man and the environment. Therefore, they consider a more crucial role for the environment in learning; however, there are different ideas about the features and the extent of the role of the environment within this very third group. This paper has tried to deal with the basic characteristics of the constructivist views and then it makes a comparative discussion on two outstanding figures in this group, that is, Piaget and Vygotsky.

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