ABSTRACT
Learning to speak a foreign language is a demanding undertaking that means coping with unfamiliar sounds and sound combinations, mastering grammatical rules different from those of one's native language, and learning a new vocabulary containing thousands of words. For the most part, children are not taught to speak their native language. They learn it by exposure to people who talk to them. Behaviorism is a school of psychology popular in the mid-twentieth century that made a major impact on learning theory. Among the most influential approaches to language development is innatism. Language acquisition was treated as if it were unaffected by sociocultural factors; correspondingly, the process of children's learning their culture was usually studied without giving attention to the role language plays in the process. Probably all speakers of every language have a variety of linguistic resources available to them.
