14. When did Behaviorist and Innatist perspectives rise, respectively?

The psychological theoretical perspective known as behaviourism was particularly influential in the 1940s and 1950s, predominantly in the United States, and formed a strong basis for understanding how effective learning might be constructed and developed. It owed much to the work of Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904–1990), a well-known American psychologist, although the concept and its advocates predated Skinner’s work.

The 1960s witnessed a move away from behaviourism towards a more cognitive approach that took into account learners’ ability to work things out for themselves, leading to a contrasting theoretical framework for language acquisition – innatism.

The innatist (or nativist) perspective owed a great deal to the work of the American theoretical linguist Noam Chomsky (1928–date), who became “one of behaviorism’s most successful and damaging critics” (Graham, 2019, §7, para. 12).

Reference: 

East, M. (2021). Foundational principles of task-based language teaching (p. 214). Taylor & Francis.

Graham, G. (2019). Behaviorism. Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/behaviorism.

Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. Copley Publishing Group.