Learning is a conscious knowledge of a second language, knowing the rules, being aware of them, and being able to talk about them (nurture). Meanwhile, acquisition is an activity or a process of picking up a language (phonology, morphology, syntactic and semantic rules) from the environment unconsciously (nature).
The controversy of learning and acquisition is raised by two experts, that is Skinner and Chomsky. They have different argument about how human ‘know’ about ‘language’. The question is whether language is a product of nature (acquisition) or due to conscious learning or nurture. According to Skinner, language is solely a kind of behaviour, a set of habits accumulated over the years. All that is necessary is to provide the necessary stimuli that will prompt the speaker. Chomsky attacked that argument and proposed an idea of language as a blueprint built-in to the human mind and the child as a hypothesis maker who ‘has internalized a system of rules that relate sound and meaning in a particular way’ (Aitchison, 1989: 92).
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