Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1989. 19/3. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 19)

Kovács, Éva: The History of Teaching Vocabulary

- 134 Skinner's Verbal Behaviour served as a basis for border's contextual method. Skinner describes verbal behaviour by the following three factors: 1. There's a stimulus which evokes a verbal operant 2. The speaker responds to this stimulus 3. This response is reinforced positively or negatively by the listener

. This process is called a context of situation or speech episode. Corder used the following five categories of Skinner's verbal behaviour for his contextual method: 1. 'Mands' This is a shortening of words like demand, command. 1 hey are utterances in which the stimulus is in the speaker himself. This stimulus goes back to a need of the listener. (E

. g. Hey, you, give me that book, or Would you give me that book, please?). Thus mands are utterances which express wishes, requests, questions, warning, etc. In the teaching process it is mainly the teacher who gives the stimulus, e. g. Suppose you are hungry and the pupils give the correct verbal operant provided they are familiar with the structure and the vocabulary. 2. Echoic Behaviour Here a verbal stimulus outside the speaker evokes a response in the speaker. Ttie response is equivalent wi tli the stimulus or very similar to it. In ttie teaching process the point-to-point echoic behaviour is used every day when we get ttie pupils to repeat lexical units and structures. There is, however, another form of echoic behaviour, too which is cjjite common in small talk: T: This is a nice tiouse. It's nice. P^ It's pretty. P

2: It's lovely. P

}: It's beautiful. 3. Textual Behaviour Here the response is also the same or almost the same as the stimulus, but the stimulus is a text which evokes a kind of utterance in the reader. (E. g. the reader's utterances when reading ttie morning paper at